Reinvention

HUGH MACDIARMID, AUSTIN CLARKE, PATRICK KAVANAGH, DAVID JONES, EDITH SITWELL, MINA LOY, ROBINSON JEFFERS, E. E. CUMMINGS, LANGSTON HUGHES

A poet whose ambition is to reinvent a literature can begin by reinventing himself. That’s what Christopher Murray Grieve did in 1922, at the age of thirty, becoming the brilliant, monstrous and ineradicable Hugh MacDiarmid, his “nom de plume (et de guerre).” When he died in 1978, he had redrawn the map of Scottish poetry and affected the whole configuration of English literature. Like the great modernists, he was dazzled by the resources available and profoundly discontented with the culture he had to hand.

For ilka thing a man can be or think or dae

Aye leaves a million mair unbeen, unthocht, undune,

Till his puir warped performance is,

To a’ that micht ha’ been, a thistle to the mune.

He is incontestably the greatest Scottish poet since Burns, if we exclude the wonderful Scots Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean, whom MacDiarmid acknowledged as his peer.

Because many of MacDiarmid’s best poems are in a language heightened by his own invention (called Lallans, Synthetic Scots, or Vernacular Scots) based on the vernacular of the Borders and Scottish Lowlands, not on standard English, he seems at first as linguistically difficult as his forebears Dunbar and Douglas (he lacks the repose of Henryson). He fell into this idiom rather abruptly in 1922. Reading a scholarly volume entitled Lowland Scotch as Spoken in the Lower Strathearn District of Perthshire, he found himself producing a poem in something like that language. It remains one of his best-known poems. Had it been written in English, the tonalities and cadence would seem to set it comfortably among Hardy’s Poems 1912–1913:

Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle

I saw yon antrin thing,

A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht

Ayont the on-ding;

An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied

Afore ye deed!

The sole novelty here is the language: it is a lovely poem in an unmodernist elegiac tradition. Most of the words in the poem come from two pages in the scholarly book he was reading, as though he challenged himself to assemble a poem from this limited if resonant lexical resource. Alan Bold quotes the original volume to unravel the obscurities: “yow-trummle” is “cold weather in July after sheering”; “watergaw” is “indistinct rainbow”; “on-ding” is “beating rain or snow”—all from a single page of Sir James Wilson’s book. Heaney sees the moment in these terms: “The recorded words and expressions... stretch[ed] a trip wire in the path of Grieve’s auditory imagination so that he was pitched headlong into his linguistic unconscious, into a network of emotional and linguistic systems that had been in place since childhood.” He found his tongue, or rather Hugh MacDiarmid’s. Other fine lyrics followed, and on these rests the unshakable, popular, “Burnsian” foundation of MacDiarmid’s reputation.

The real difficulty as the work develops is less in the language, which is generally no more remote than Middle English, to which a reader can adjust, but in the huge lexicon he exploits, in English as well as Lallans. His best verse—and there is much in his vast opus, especially in the first half—is supple and various. A huge curate’s egg: “My job, as I see it, has never been to lay a tit’s egg, but to erupt like a volcano, emitting not only flame, but a lot of rubbish.” Outside Scotland he has begun to gain an audience. It is no longer thought eccentric to mention him in the same breath with the other modern innovators.

Like them he was unwilling to compromise with the English literary and political establishments, which he evokes in In Memoriam James Joyce. He adhered to doubtful political causes of right and left, coming to rest upon a Marxism disfigured by an unalloyed respect for Stalin. There is too the problem of the immense, Siberian tundra of some of the later works, their dogged pursuit of themes better left to prose. He was impatient with those who dismissed him, but encouraged hostility from those he despised. In Lucky Poet, his autobiography, he characterizes the “whole gang of high mucky-mucks, famous fatheads, old wives of both sexes, stuffed shirts, hollow men with headpieces stuffed with straw, bird wits, lookers under beds, trained seals, creeping Jesuses, Scots Wha Ha’ers... commercial Calvinists, makers of ‘noises like a turnip,’ and all the touts and toadies and lickspittles of the English Ascendancy.” Hardly surprising that his progress south of the border has been less rapid than in Scotland itself.

He was born in 1892 and raised in Langholm, Dumfriesshire. Among his early teachers was the Scottish composer F. G. Scott, an important shaper of his imagination. From Langholm he went to Edinburgh and began teacher’s training, but changed his mind and took up a career in journalism instead. He worked for the Fabian Research Department and contributed to A. R. Orage’s New Age. He served in the Royal Artillery Medical Corps (1915–19), returning to journalism after the war and working in Montrose, Liverpool and London. He was a Scottish Nationalist and a Communist, expelled by the Nationalists for his membership in the Communist party, and vice versa.

Poverty and a breakdown in health followed his second marriage, and he withdrew (1933–41) to a croft on Whalsay in the Shetlands. During the Second World War he worked in a munitions factory on the Clyde and eventually settled in Biggar, Lanarkshire, where he lived until his death in 1978. He was awarded a Civil List pension in 1950. The experiences he gathered in his alternately retiring and hectically active life, and the breadth of his reading, make him a rare, encyclopedically informed writer like Pound and James Joyce, though they were less encumbered by their learning than MacDiarmid.

Distressed in the first decades of the century by his people’s cultural submission to England and their ignorance of the distinctive heritage and common traditions that could make them a nation again, he made it his mission to revitalize Scottish culture. His program involved reviving—or reinventing—a Scottish language. He also adapted modernist techniques. Relentlessly he attacked the Scottish culture heroes of the day, in order to replace them with what he regarded as authentic models. Though he loved Burns’s poetry, he saw in him the worst conceivable model for a modern Scottish literature. As Seamus Heaney has noted, “He prepared the ground for a Scottish literature that would be self-critical and experimental in relation to its own inherited forms and idioms, but one that would also be stimulated by developments elsewhere in world literature.”

After the language, the most striking aspect of MacDiarmid’s poetry is that his imagery draws on the industrial as well as the rural world. Accommodating this content in Scots broadened its expressiveness. An early influence on his language was John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808), from which he borrowed words to plant in the context of the current dialect, effecting a synthesis in an idiom no one spoke, or had ever spoken. Gregory Smith’s Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (1919) defined for him a particular Scottish quality: establishing contrasts or contradictions between the real and the fantastic, then resolving them.

In MacDiarmid’s poems the sublime and the ridiculous are next-door neighbors. He stresses thematic antinomies and apparent contradictions which are poetically, or literally, complementary and necessary to each other. Coleridge is MacDiarmid’s authority for his belief in imagination as “the balance or reconciliation of opposites or discordant qualities.” But MacDiarmid is less intellectually contained than Coleridge. The discordances occur in the public arena quite as much as in the stanza or the individual human heart.

John Davidson, too, showed MacDiarmid a way. Davidson, the most threadbare member of the Rhymers’ Club, proposed a Darwinian and wholly materialist explanation of reality. His social concerns were transmuted through a relentless egotism into a form of “representative” autobiography. He had an almost sentimental regard for the unity of nature through the elements. His was a poetry of fact, of the tangible, a radicalization of the Gradgrind ideology. In his expository poems MacDiarmid, like Davidson, pretends to be accurate and full in detail. A poem grows out of fact, fact is its occasion and object; it should be a language of detection rather than imposition on its subject. This might seem, in essence, a modification of crucial modernist arguments, not least in its wariness of the metaphysical and its reliance on the concrete. As an aesthetic, however, it requires a degree of reticence and self-effacement far beyond the profoundly romantic impulse of MacDiarmid’s nature.

His Scots poetry is his major achievement, but he was a considerable, if uneven, poet in English as well. His long poems, like Davidson’s, are cumulative, though the motivating passion can be derailed by willful obscurity, or deadened by a freight of detail, or vitiated by propagandistic aphorism and occasional plagiarism. The Second Hymn to Lenin (1935) and In Memoriam James Joyce (1955) abound in good as well as overweight verse. His great poem—for each poem he wrote is part of a total and totalizing ‘’work in progress”—is destined to remain open-ended, like the Cantos, Paterson and Maximus.

His verse devours trivial matter and important ideas, facts, images, feelings, petty resentments and large passions, thoughts, memories, insatiably. It swallows other men’s words whole. MacDiarmid lacked the selectivity that makes Pound’s and Eliot’s erudition compelling. Prolixity and lack of concentration, those worst vices for the modernists, mark his writing; some say that they mar it, others that this approach traces an alternative aesthetic to Pound’s, an aesthetic that demands a verse plain and sturdy enough to deal in depth with any subject. In a jumbled way MacDiarmid is the most patently learned poet of his age, at once magpie and textbookish sage. The poem is not an end: it is for the use of a newer age.

The early poems are intriguing in conception and execution. “The Innumerable Christ” was inspired by Professor J. Y. Simpson’s comment “Other stars may have their Bethlehem, and their Calvary too.” In his poem MacDiarmid concludes:

Earth is continually set in a cosmic perspective, historical time contrasted with geological time. Thus a new significance emerges from humanity’s insignificance. In another poem he writes:

His greatest poem—one of the great modernist poems—is A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926). The speaker is resolutely Scots, highly literate, very drunk. As he tumbles into a half-dream stupor beside the thistle in the moonlight, a flood of thoughts, jostling one another for precedence, tumbles out of him. The suppleness of the language is astonishing, its abrupt changes of tone and mood, sometimes within a single stanza or a single line, its natural fusion of reality and fantasy. Edwin Morgan suggests that in the Scottish language, there is a rhetoric absent from modern English, a facility to harness opposing impulses in a balanced, single statement. He might have added that the kinds of irony that restrain the southern English writer have never troubled an emancipated Scot.

In parts the poem is bitingly satirical, particularly at the expense of his pseudo-Scottish sentimental expatriates, the desecrators of Burns, and of the small-minded bourgeoisie who “ca’ their obstinacy ‘Hame.’ ” The satire on intellectuals and factionalists is shrewd. The poem moves toward a defiant credo pertinent to all MacDiarmid’s work:

I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur

Extremes meet—it’s the only way I ken

To dodge the curst conceit o’ bein’ richt

That damns the vast majority o’ men.

For I’ve nae faith in ocht I can explain,

And stert whaur the philosophers leave aff...

He stands at the point of dialectic synthesis, impossible to paraphrase.

The poem is written in quatrains, sestets, triplets, couplets and verse paragraphs, varying form with virtuosity to suit the content, incorporating in the flow translations and imitations of other work, including verse by Alexander Blok and Zinaida Hippius. It is sad that MacDiarmid did not devote more time to translations into Scots. He was not a patient man or—as translators have to be—a serving man. He takes what he wants, but he gives very little.

Platonic and physical love (the latter graphically evoked, the former given more body than one might expect) are another double theme. But the dominant theme, here and elsewhere, is the limits imposed by choice, by having to choose. In a later poem, “Light & Shadow,” he writes, “On every thought I have the countless shadows fall / Of other thoughts as valid that I cannot have.” To choose is to exclude: the person who chooses communism cannot be a nationalist, and vice versa. MacDiarmid does not willingly accept the exclusion that choice entails. He would prefer to contain opposites. This explains his refusal to be selective in his long English poems, his attempt to foreground everything and to make an all-encompassing poem, with disastrous structural strains on the poem (and many a reader’s staying power).

The thistle in A Drunk Man modulates from meaning to meaning, altered in the bleary dream. At one moment moonlight metamorphoses it into a skeleton—his own. Then it stands, more conventionally, for Scotland. Later it sprouts a great red rose—not the Virgin Mary but the General Strike—which deflates like a balloon and the thistle stalk is left literal and poor. As the symbols transform before his eyes, the drunk man ruminates:

The vices that defeat the dream

Are in the plant itsel’,

And till they’re purged its virtues maun

In pain and misery dwell.

This poem comprehensively evokes life’s antinomies—political, religious, emotional—but with a specific inflection and a location in space and historical time. Centered as it is on the fact of the thistle and the drunk man, the monologue works by accretion of suggestions and associations. It can in one breath lament the high price and low quality of Scotch, in the next expose the positive and negative tensions of sex, zero in on the possibility of revolution, the future of the Scottish language and nation, then range back over history. He manages to “Exteriorise things in a thistle,” “The grisly form in which I’m caught.” He conjures a number of ghosts, principally (and with weird appropriateness) Dostoevsky’s (the poem is stalked by Russian writers and Soviet themes), but also Herman Melville’s, for Melville alone in recent English-language literature achieved the scope MacDiarmid tried for, without forfeiting detailed accuracy. The thistle, like the white whale, is “A symbol o’ the puzzle o’ man’s soul.” The precision of detail is unforgettable; for example, we hear “God passin’ wi a bobby’s feet / Ootby in the lang coffin o’ the street.”

After A Drunk Man he wrote many more poems in Scots, though none to equal this early tour de force. He began to lament poverty and drudgery; his Scots approximated English more and more as he loaded its vocabulary with technical terms, until he began to write principally in English. One of the best Scots poems from the transition is “North of the Tweed”; another is a memorable elegy for his father:

We look upon each ither noo like hills

Across a valley, I’m nae mair your son.

It is my mind, nae son o’ yours, that looks,

And the great darkness o’ your death comes up

And equals it across the way.

In “The Seamless Garment,” using the image of the weavers of the local textile industry, he speaks of Rilke’s “seamless garment o’ music and thought.” This describes, in effect, the kind of poetry MacDiarmid tried to write—a poetry of inclusive wholeness, a poetry not complete in its grasp, but in its reach. “On a Raised Beach” is a fine example of his achievement, a major celebration and an examination of the pertinence of geology, the expressiveness of facts, with a rhetoric as powerful as Pablo Neruda’s, yet more controlled, more insistently circumstantial. In the Second Hymn to Lenin he agrees with Joyce:

...the principal question

Aboot a work o’ art is frae hoo deep

A life it springs—

and how high, from that depth, it can rise and how much it can raise with it. He sought a poetry “full of erudition, expertise, and ecstasy,” as he says in “The Kind of Poetry I Want.” He tried to achieve a multifaceted “fly-like vision.” His was an inclusive talent like Lawrence’s or Whitman’s, only more austere and particular, more Presbyterian, less subjective. It is intellectual, satirical, deliberately inelegant, yet at the same time prophetic. In one poem he writes:

So I am delivered from the microcosmic human chaos

And given the perspective of a writer who can draw

The wild disorder of a ship in a gale

Against the vaster natural order of sea and sky.

Perspective, distance are essential to his inclusive vision. “Crystals like Blood,” his best elegy, maybe his best short English poem, begins with the matter-of-fact, arresting lines “I remember how, long ago, I found / Crystals like blood in a broken stone.” It examines the memory; the elegiac note is sounded as a celebration.

Like another great Scot, Thomas Carlyle, he knew his own arrogance and could make fun of it. Hard on others, he could be hard on himself. The romantic and mystical impulses that trip up his materialist mission are part and parcel of his achievement and his shortcomings, all of which he exposed in In Memoriam James Joyce, particularly in the section that in extract is called “The Task.” The poem is filled with hostages to fortune. It calls his paradoxical, antinomian structures to account and finds them wonderfully wanting. Paradoxical choices are evident throughout, even in the choice of Scots, an act at once reactionary and revolutionary, articulating as it does against the broad complacent nationalism of Britain a narrow, redefining and positive nationalism of Scotland. MacDiarmid’s nationalism is not triumphalist or at any point complacent. Its intention is recuperative; he is wresting something out of the past and out of the present, an area of distinct identity, independent value. He explores this theme inexhaustibly in prose, not least in his richly eccentric study Scottish Eccentrics. Scots is not a regional dialect but the reconstruction of a national language. The project may be doomed, but it is heroic, and in making the new—or remaking the old—language, he creates some of the greatest poetry of the century.

T. S. Eliot, no stranger to constructing a home in an alien culture, wrote: “It will eventually be admitted that he has done... more for English poetry by committing some of his finest verse to Scots, than if he had elected to write exclusively in the Southern dialect.” In serving Scotland best, he served English literature as well.

Austin Clarke’s task of reinvention in Ireland was more difficult than MacDiarmid’s. Irish poetry had already been reinvented by Yeats, and his achievement eclipsed other writers and the Ireland they might write. When Robert Frost asked Clarke what sort of poetry he wrote, he replied, “I load myself with chains and then try to get out of them.” The “chains” are formal and thematic; even in his simplest poems he is a poeta doctus. A close look at the exacting forms he devises, some based on Irish models, with rime riche, internal rhyme, assonantal and alliterative patterns and difficult stanza forms, shows how his poems at their best achieve resonance without showing off their formal complexities.

He loaded himself with chains; but he was loaded, too, with unchosen burdens. Yeats cast a long shadow. The endless debate about what constitutes Irishness in art and literature continued, as it had for Joyce in his self-imposed exile, and for Samuel Beckett. Readers were reluctant, given the achievement of Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh’s accessibility, to accept Clarke on his own terms. It can’t have been easy, as he emerged, to reconcile personal vocation, deep learning, a time of historic change, and an indifferent or hostile milieu. His great advocate, Thomas Kinsella, seems to occupy an almost analogous position in Ireland today. But Clarke is so encumbered and bound that his verse resists exporting.

John Montague called him “the first completely Irish poet to write in English.” There is nothing of the stage Irish about him. In his autobiography, Twice Round the Black Church (1962), Clarke evokes his Irishness—subject matter, versification, way of speaking. Charles Tomlinson compares him with MacDiarmid, remarking that “a sense of nationality can deepen a comparatively narrow talent.” It may be that it is narrowed rather than deepened and enabled by a sense of nationality. He gains much from being rooted in Ireland in ways Yeats was unable to be. Impoverishment comes from having to acknowledge and define that rootedness, to manifest it in prose and verse. History would not allow him to take his country of origin for granted. Tomlinson insists that Clarke’s nationalism is not “the inertia of chauvinism, but a labour of recovery.” Clarke adapted elements from a tradition alien to the English, working toward a separate Irish, not Anglo-Irish, poetry. It was for him a project, a required labor added on to his primary vocation, and it is responsible for peaks and troughs in his work. Yeats assimilates the Irish struggle into a preexistent rhetorical tradition. Clarke introduces the struggle, preserved in a language long suppressed, into the rhetoric itself, to forge a new poetic idiom.

He was born in Dublin in 1896. Educated at the Jesuit Belvedere College and the University of Dublin, where he later lectured in English, he traveled in England, worked as a journalist for a time, and returned to Dublin in 1937 to found the Dublin Verse Speaking Society and the Lyric Theatre Company for his own and others’ plays. His verse dramas are, with Padraic Fallon’s, as important as Yeats’s. He was a founding member of the Irish Academy of Letters and acted as its president (1952–53). In his later years he traveled widely, reading and lecturing, and after a long period of eclipse, due largely to neglect in Ireland, he reemerged in the 1960s as an important voice. The publication of The Collected Poems, edited by Liam Miller, in 1974, weeks after the poet died, was an overlooked literary event. Darkness settled on a writer responsible for three novels, two books of memoirs, over twenty-eight verse plays, literary criticism, and some eighteen books of poetry, a darkness into which poets like Thomas Kinsella and Donald Davie shone their torches. Clarke will remain a poets’ poet, a resource, giving pleasure to those of an Augustan temperament who value his inventive prosodies. He is not a poet a reader can relax with. He makes too many demands. As Kinsella remarks, “The diction of his last poems is a vivid, particular voice, rich and supple; nothing is unsayable. But it is no natural voice.”

Clarke’s sense of time is insistently historical, unlike Yeats’s. The early poems attempt to realize legend: the story of Finn (his first book, The Vengeance of Fionn, 1917), the struggles between Ulster and the rest of Ireland, of Cuchulain, and the cast of characters made familiar, in a wholly different spirit, by Yeats. Clarke set out not to remember but to revive them. His approach in the early poems, romantic and in some ways conventionally rhetorical, is psychological—his characters are flimsy but more real than Yeats’s—and historical, too, for Clarke sees in the early struggles analogies with the struggles of his day.

For almost two decades (1938–55) he wrote little poetry, devoting his attentions to the Lyric Theatre Company. When he returned to verse his approach, like Yeats’s after the Abbey years, was more directly concerned with the daily affairs of Ireland, and he had mastered satirical modes. Later still the poems risked autobiography, becoming “confessional,” not in the manner of Lowell’s Life Studies but in ways he justified from his tradition: “The Confession poem was a recognised form in Gaelic and lasted until the eighteenth century.” He made the form available once more.

“The Fires of Baal” and later narrative poems, on Celtic and biblical themes, develop plots familiar to most readers. They provide him with a dramatic shape which he develops, attending to the telling, to time perspectives and locations. They are composed with bardic impersonality. He could write in this way, he later commented, because at the time “the future of our new State seemed so hopeful... Irish writers could delay for a while in the past.” The hope was illusory: the state soon demanded his satirical attention.

He had begun to work with short, interrelated poems, exchanging the epic panorama for something more condensed and immediate in effect, less defined in overall contour: the sequence. He retained an impersonal voice, but the poems were no longer bardic. “A Curse” exemplifies both the indignation Clarke could express outside satire and—more important for his later work—the development of those exacting chains of rhythm, cross-rhyme, assonance and alliteration with which he loaded himself. “Assonance,” Clarke said, “takes the clapper from the bell of rhyme. In simple patterns the tonic word at the end of the line is supported by a vowel rhyme in the middle of the next line.” Donald Davie sees this as a manifestation of the impulse to intricate patterning that we see in Celtic carving and graphic art.

Pilgrimage and Other Poems (1929) is his first major collection. He begins to develop a favorite role, that of the erring priest. “Celibacy” proposes the image of ribs, with biblical associations; the “self” climbs upon itself. The cross-rhymes “briar”/“fire,” “nettle”/“fell,” “hunger/rung,” are used with characteristic subtlety:

Bedraggled in the briar

And grey fire of the nettle,

Three nights, I fell, I groaned

On the flagstone of help

To pluck her from my body;

For servant ribbed with hunger

May climb his rungs to God.

Each poem has its incident, rendered dramatically in “The Cardplayer” or—at its most intense—in “The Young Woman of Beare,” which like many of his poems has an erotic current, even in the chaste diction and sparse imagery. “Although the clergy pray, / I triumph in a dream.” What is the triumph?

See! See, as from a lathe

My polished body turning!

He bares me at the waist

And now blue clothes uncurl

Upon white haunch. I let

The last bright stitch fall down

For him as I lean back,

Straining with longer arms

Above my head to snap

The silver knots of sleep.

Irish models served him well, astonishingly so in the short-lined stanzas, though it must be said that his eros, like Basil Bunting’s, is “hot with a cold passion.”

Clarke’s transition to the present, his achievement of an individual voice, is complete in Night and Morning (1938). Public themes—which in the Irish context include the religious—develop, with a hankering after eighteenth-century qualities of mind, clarity and purpose, as though an Anglo-Irish strain is being admitted to temper and extend the hard-earned, re-earned Irish idiom. He works toward satire, and the echo of Yeats grows fainter, at last inaudible.

Images of the Church’s power, temporal and psychological, recur. Each Irish coin has at some stage passed through the collection. Orgy, grim antithesis to grim repressiveness, fills dreams with a poisonous, denying dialectic, is whispered in confessional. Natural impulse, guiltless sensuality, have little place. Clarke’s anger intensifies: anger against the Church in particular, its patterns of alienation. In “The Straying Student” he characterizes Ireland:

...this land, where every woman’s son

Must carry his own coffin and believe,

In dread, all that the clergy teach the young.

Yet anger is ambivalent. If, in “The Jewels,” he says, “The misery of common faith / Was ours before the age of reason,” he cannot deny an impulse of nostalgia:

O to think, when I was younger

And could not tell the difference

God lay upon my tongue.

The Eucharist he took before puberty has left him with a different hunger, not of the body or the mind; reason and flesh lack the whole nourishment of innocent faith.

In the years between these poems and Ancient Lights: Poems and Satires, First Series (1955), the satirist came into his own. Ireland, with its unreflective religious consensus and pressing political problems, was a land where popular satire might have impact. The Church’s attitude to birth control was one of Clarke’s butts even then. In “Three Poems About Children” he recounts a fatal fire in an ill-equipped orphanage and the bishop’s consolatory platitudes. Such poems have aged badly: the targets, hard as granite at the time, have become soft or vanished.

The poem “Ancient Lights” is “confessional,” recalling childhood and the anguish of religious confession. Other poems are occasioned by newspaper articles, conversations, observations—small recollections taking shape in a changed present, often humorously clarifying it. His characters, though simplified, are rounded, not archetypal or emblematic, nor characters in a private myth, as in Yeats.

A second and third series of Poems and Satires, Too Great a Vine (1957) and The Horse Eaters (1960), appeared. In the first of these, “The Loss of Strength” carries autobiography further than before. The rhythm, advancing in irregular, condensed phrases, and using the enjambement dramatically, catches the movement of a voice under pressure. The poet finds a stream that, unlike the others, “had never come to town”—is pure, unfished and undefiled. The rhythm follows too the eddying progression of the “lost water.” The word “monklike” is especially telling:

...Now engineering

Machinery destroys the weirs,

Directs, monk-like, our natural flow:

Yet it is pleasant at Castleconnell

To watch the salmon brighten their raincoats.

The reeds wade out for what is gone...

In a single statement he stigmatizes values held by the Church and the cash values of industrial society. He can reject what he perceives as expressions of analogous forces, both motivated by material profit, both preying on human vulnerability and impoverishing human life.

“Hippophagi” in The Horse Eaters is a satire on a corrupted Ireland, epitomized in the eager export of horse-flesh to the Continent for human consumption: “Horse-eating helps this ill-fare state.” He revisits the theme in Forget Me Not (1962), in which he evokes with autobiographical detail the part the horse played in Irish life. Celebration, elegy and satire, it is more varied and vivid than the romantic epics. Epic gesture has resolved itself in particularity, moments of definition that make up for uncertainties of tone and the occasional absurdities or disproportions of sentiment:

...Too much historied

Land, wrong in policies, armings, hope in prelates

At courts abroad! Rags were your retribution,

Hedge schools, a visionary knowledge in verse

That hid itself.

His most original poem is “Mnemosyne Lay in Dust” (1966), praised by non-Irish critics as the culmination of his “confessional” mode. It recounts a nervous breakdown, hospitalization, and eventual return to the world. Maurice, the central character, obsessed with memories of places, past pleasures, past fulfillments, and debilitated in breakdown, lets associations flow freely, until “Terror repeals the mind.” Through the eyes of madness he evokes the delusions and agonies of other inmates. His particular loss of memory is a metaphor for a cultural loss, a failure of connection with the past and therefore with the future. Maurice, having articulated the loss, emerges “rememorised,” “his future in every vein.”

There are further books, celebrations of writers whose work he valued, laments of the aging man suffering the indignity of failed sensuality in a manner different in tone and intensity from Yeats’s. Among the later work Thomas Kinsella praises the “series of wickedly glittering narratives culminating in Tiresias: poetry as pure entertainment, serious and successful.” His last major poem was “A Sermon on Swift,” anecdotal, wry and cutting, addressing a crucial antecedent.

Irish poets with Irish inflections, subjects and themes have existed for centuries, but here is something new not in accent but in kind, a poetry drawing on Celtic modes, laden with the personal “chains” he described to Frost and the historical chains of circumstance. The uncompromising force of his best satires, the vividness of his love lyrics and visions, and the cool candor of his “confessions” set him apart. He cleared a non-Yeatsian space in which an Irish poet might build a confident poetry in English for which the term “Anglo-Irish” is meaningless.

Nevertheless many contemporary Irish poets turn back not to Clarke but to Patrick Kavanagh. The rich measured achievement of his early poems is betrayed by the prolixity and unbridled anger of his later satires. Beginning with rural poems about real peasants (he was a countryman), Kavanagh left this world for Dublin, rejected much of his early verse and prose, and in indignation and self-pity marked his exclusion from a world that at once attracted and repelled him. A heavy drinker, he concedes that his excesses marred his later career. And yet at the end of it, he produced some of his best work.

Kavanagh was born in 1905 in County Monaghan, son of a local cobbler. He pretty much educated himself and became a small farmer and a shoemaker. His first book of poems, Ploughman and Other Poems, appeared in 1936, and two years later The Green Fool, an autobiography which he later rejected with the poems as “stage-Irish rubbish.”

We are a dark people,

Our eyes are ever turned

Inward

Watching the liar who twists

The hill-paths awry

Whatever the faults of the early poems, there were virtues too. In “Tinker’s Wife”: “Her face had streaks of care / Like wires across it...” Most of the poems have distinctive rhythms, and it was on these that he was to build. Dublin beckoned and in 1939 he went, becoming a journalist, film reviewer, gossip columnist. It was a hand-to-mouth existence (“the big tragedy for the poet is poverty”) until in 1955 he joined the Board of Extra-Mural Studies at University College. He had a steady income. His final years were troubled by difficulty and scandal. He died in 1967.

Yeats became his bête noire: there was jealousy that Yeats defined the space within which Irish poetry might be recognized. Yet time after time in his prose and verse there are echoes—phrases, cadences, grandiloquent attitudes—of Yeats. Satire was not to be Kavanagh’s effective vehicle, as it was Clarke’s. Too much the romantic, too much the countryman, the city was not properly in his blood, and satire is an urban genre. It is the ragged Muse he serves best, and against which he turned in Dublin, trying to shed his peasant identity. Yet his greatest poem—which he came to dislike—was about the peasantry, tackling a subject more serious and abiding than any the city could provide him. The Great Hunger appeared in 1942.

It is in fourteen sections, with remarkable variety of rhythm and pace. Some lines run to twenty syllables, others to three, with a free-playing rhyme scheme. The protagonist, Patrick Maguire, is a farmer who lives with his cruelly possessive invalid mother and his sister. The face he turns to the world is wholesome, dependable. In himself he becomes hollower and hollower—for lack of love, the great hunger of the title. His mother and his religion constrain him to unfulfillment.

His dream changes again like the cloud-swung wind

And he is not so sure now if his mother was right

When she praised the man who made a field his bride.

His life story is one of the tension between impulse and inhibition, informed by a false sense of duty. The tourists who see Maguire idealize him: they too are hungry for another order of life. Few poems conjure so mercilessly and accurately a saga of unfulfillment such as this, subtly generalizing it so that it is in the end more potent than satire. The sexual hunger is the more potent for being undirected, like a storm impulse in search of clouds. The stage Irishman has vanished. God becomes difficult, but there is still a hunger for Him in the later poems.

One in particular, “The Long Garden,” characterizes the virtues of Kavanagh’s later writing.

It was the garden of the golden apples,

A long garden between a railway and a road

In the sow’s rooting where the hen scratches

We dipped our fingers in the pockets of God.

The immanent God, perceived always in the most earthy places, in the new leaves, in the ploughed soil. His is an easier poetry to get hold of, more conventional in its forms and in what it expects of readers than Clarke’s verse. It is not surprising that from Kavanagh stems much of the popular Irish poetry of recent decades. But not necessarily from The Great Hunger, which is inimitable, an invention, like a sturdy plough at the edge of an abandoned field.

Scotland, Ireland and—Wales, always neglected. It too needed invention, and the first substantive twentieth-century inventor was a Londoner whose task was, in some ways, to invent the country itself. David Jones was a convert to Roman Catholicism. He celebrates immanence in his poetry, the presence of Christ in a world revived by the Incarnation, its permanence celebrated in the Mass. Hopkins, whose inspiration is felt in every corner of Jones’s imagination and spiritual vision, and who also celebrated Wales during his years there, described how the Christian faith transforms the way we see the world. The world suffused with the sacrifice of Christ is a world wholly meaningful, purposed, hopeful even when most bleak. Jones looks no further than that: the Incarnation and its momentous consequences. It is not heaven that commands his attention but the earth redeemed. Modernism is transposed, against itself, into a minor key. “The Mass makes sense of everything,” he wrote.

He was born in Brockley, Kent, in 1895. His father was Welsh—and a Welsh speaker—who worked as a printer’s overseer. Jones seemed to know all about typography, platemaking, and the processes of printing from birth. One lesson he forgot: the difficulty and cost of correcting monotype and linotype setting. The marked galley proofs and then the page proofs of his own poems, when he returned them to the publisher, were always extensively reworked, as though the typescript he submitted, already patched and stained with late corrections, was a further draft of a poem striving for a final form it could never achieve. He was almost as serious a nightmare for the old-fashioned compositor as the impossible Balzac, the absolute proof monster.

From his father Jones acquired a deep if twilit love of Wales, its legends and landscape. Wales gave him myths, London provided his literal world. His mother came of Cockney stock. Her father was a mast and block maker, and Jones learned about the river, the subtleties of ships and sailing, and the richly metaphorical dialect of the docks. He studied art at the Camberwell, later at the Westminster School of Art, pursuing an enthusiasm for William Blake and the English watercolorists and, one suspects, the work of El Greco with its emblematic and dramatic distortions. Drawing and painting occupied most of his time. His first book, In Parenthesis (1937), was not published until he was forty-two, already a mature graphic artist.

Four principal experiences shaped Jones’s creative life. First and most devastating was the Great War. He enlisted in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and was involved in active service for three years. The image of war, its devastation and also the camaraderie it engendered, dominates his prose and verse. It remained terribly real to him, and he never entirely recovered from shell shock. A friend, visiting him in 1970, offered to light his cigarette and the burst of flame from the lighter sent the poet into a brief panic.

The second momentous event was his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1921. Devotion to a faith that had at its heart a vital sign—the host—rather than a formal symbol, is significant. Jones insists that he does not deal with symbols. The signs, the “anathemata” he retrieves and displays, do not stand for something other: they contain in themselves the nature of the larger thing they signify.

The peculiar visionary Eric Gill (1882–1940) also changed Jones’s life. Gill was a great lettering artist, typographer (designer of Perpetua and Gill typefaces), illustrator, sculptor and eccentric, the closest thing to William Blake England had to offer at the time. In a technological age he preached the value of traditional craftsmanship and individual artistry. At Ditchling he founded the Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic, a community of artists and craftsmen, with ideals of service and dedication that made it a kind of secular order. Later the guild moved to Wales. Discussions with Gill and the example of his work, industry and eccentric spirituality clarified Jones’s thought. His artistic maturity dates from their association.

Though it seemed of little importance at the time, the final formative experience was Jones’s visit to the Holy Land in 1934. Suffering from a nervous disorder, he went to Palestine a convalescent, without energy or enthusiasm. He stayed there some months and was intrigued by the historical remains, especially the inscribed stones from the time of the Passion. Remembering this years later, his response came powerfully, after the event. Much of his writing is set in Palestine, much of his imagery relates to his stay there. His delayed responses to experience were a result of the war. The relentless hardship of the trenches made it necessary for him to cultivate a surface indifference, to hold experience at a distance, in order to survive. In Parenthesis, the last major literary account by a combatant of the war, was published almost two decades after that war ended, and two years before the war cycle started once again.

Jones’s poetry can be difficult and obscure, to a degree more pronounced than Eliot’s or Pound’s. Eccentricity of reference, an apparent eclecticism, is combined with formal strategies that produce a suggestive but not always functional discontinuity. The image of the Roman border guard, pacing remote battlements at the fringes of civilization, gazing into the dark marches beyond empire and faith, is a figure for the poet as well. The violence at the heart of the chief sacrament—the Crucifixion—and the violence implied in the extension of Roman civilization become the governing facts of his poetry. Continual tension exists between the functional prose of Rome and the evocative poetry of the signs. Verse and prose are mixed in a single work: different experiences and intensities of experience require different modes and registers for expression. There is tension, too, between the dialects he uses: a rustic colloquial (not unlike Kipling’s Cockney), a Middle English thread (more Langland than Chaucer), an Elizabethan strain, and a more formal standard prose and verse language. There are echoes too of folk song, ballad, old saws, allusions to the work of others—Smart, Hopkins, Pound, Eliot, Joyce. Further, he introduces Latin phrases from the Church fathers, the Roman Mass and the Latin Bible. He introduces Welsh and other words into the texture of the verse, larding some passages with place names and references which he glosses at great length in entertaining but distracting footnotes.

“Nothing can permanently please,” wrote Coleridge, “which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.” The truth of this poetic law can be tested in much of Jones’s poetry, where poetic effect is suddenly dissipated by a sequence of footnoted obscurities. It is a language of disorientation. Despite obscurities, it achieves a range of effects beyond that of a more conventional style. Because he draws on an abundance of social and historical registers, and because the rhythms are of a subtle nature, his poetry is meant to be read, as he says, aloud and “with deliberation.” The footnotes can be read quietly, afterward.

Welsh elements have a special significance for him, however arbitrary they may at times appear to the reader. Wales is for him the cradle of British Christianity, and he evokes Christ and the Passion in a Welsh setting more than once. It is one of the places the Irish monks and saints chose for the “white martyrdom” of exile. And it is a place Rome never subdued. Its language still miraculously lives, its landscapes retain a ruggedness and beauty that possess the quality of a sign.

Jones is a contemplative rather than meditative writer. He does not analyze and appraise the mysteries but accepts and embodies them. He quotes Picasso: “I do not seek, I find.” To understand his work, which is not descriptive or expository but evocative, a poetry of experience, not after experience, the fact of his faith and his purpose as a specifically religious writer must be accepted. Indeed, for the poetry to work at all, Jones must be believed, at least for the duration of the reading. He provides a possible way, a bridge, should we wish to cross it, to what he considered to be our cultural common ground—in history and in a shared faith whose signs can still be made vital and operative.

Readers who find the verse forbidding should not give up on Jones before reading his essays in Epoch and Artist (1973). Here he evokes an aesthetic so lucid and compelling that it colors one’s reading not only of his work, but of much poetry this century. Art is, by its nature, “gratuitous,” he tells us; it is not instrumental, it has no material purpose. If a beaver placed one gratuitous twig on its dam, the dam would become a font, the creature would enter the “sign world”: “A culture is nothing but a sign, and the anathemata of a culture, ‘the things set up,’ can be set up only to the gods.” Such a strict and liberating statement, if we accept it, questions the value of poetry mired in a world of contingency, what today passes for “main stream.”

Jones sees himself as a contemplative craftsman, a “joiner” of song. He relates everything in a poem, as in his graphic work, to the object of contemplation, the sacrament. René Hague, an early and devoted critic, notes his preference for the past participle form (whited, darked, etc.), which implies that an actor, a creator, has been involved in imparting the quality to the object. The “whited” wave has been made white.

He tries to be scrupulous, though those who have handled the plates he made for his engravings comment on the careless quality of the cutting, suggesting poor preparation and maintenance of his tools. Certainly in the poetry there is accuracy in his detail. The terms of the crafts he writes of are correct—shipbuilding, soldiery or armory. When he tampers with historical fact, it is to emphasize a larger truth; he draws attention to anachronisms in footnotes. By putting Greek, Roman and Celtic soldiers anachronistically together in a single legion, for example, he expresses the universal nature of the Roman empire and universal complicity in the Crucifixion.

“Our making is dependent on a remembering of some sort.” Poetry is the “song of deeds,” and to Jones the two great deeds, war and Incarnation, are most worthy of poetry. His task is “making the signs available for today,” providing a text to re-present the deeds as they continue to signify in this world, “at the turn of a civilisation.” Remembering and revalidating the signs is the meaning of “sacrament,” seeing the universal in the very nature of the particular or, as Coleridge wrote (translating Bacon), seeing “the latency of all in each.” This is why Jones’s precise materialism and localized imagery aspire to a self-transcending or mystical quality. “Art is the sole intransitive activity of man,” he wrote. The poem is there, available.

Jones’s poem often invokes prehistory, the Ice Age; “deposits” and “stratifications” recur. The geological time scale intensifies the historical, layers of alluvial time overlay one another much as the layers of history do in a tel, new cities built upon the old, the present rising on the rubble of its own antecedents. Time preserves, in this sense, and there is an analogy between the processes of nature and of history.

Jones regarded Anathemata (1952) as his most important work, and many poets agree with him. Eliot thought it required three readings before it became clear, but when it did it was rewarding (he must have sensed Jones’s prosodic debt to him). For David Wright it is one of the “major poetic efforts of our era.” One would not describe Paradise Lost or The Prelude in quite those terms: an “effort” it must have been, to hold it together conceptually, to make the parts, and the parts of parts, into coherent wholes without benefit of consecutive narrative or prescribed formal structure. Auden, drawn as much by the religious as the poetic project Jones undertook, pronounced it “probably the finest long poem written in English this century.” That hedging “probably” implies the reservation of a man not quite able to give himself over to the kinds of demand Jones’s forms make.

In his “Preface” Jones writes: “The action of the Mass was meant to be the central theme,” with the implications of sacrament and representing the signs. He observes that “the workman must be dead to himself while engaged upon the work, otherwise we have the sort of ‘self-expression’ which is as undesirable in the painter or writer as in the carpenter, the cantor, the half-back, the cook.” His admirers tend to take him at his word, yet it is difficult to imagine a writer less “dead to himself,” more alive to the extremely personal nature of his quest, the material of his poem (which often draws on the particulars of his own life), and the recurrent poetic process that determines it. As he revises his poems, making them over the years denser, more allusive, they become more personal and intricately difficult. When he lets them go it is only on the understanding that they are still subject to revision, incomplete. Anathemata is subtitled Fragments of an Attempted Writing.

In eight sections, it begins and ends with the “action of the Mass.” There is no center of interest, no plot, but a repeated process of representing the signs using various material. To read one section with understanding is to have read the whole work, for it proceeds by variation rather than extension. Salvaging material from oblivion, he is also “trying to make a shape out of the very things of which one is oneself made.” Hardly “dead to himself,” then; as the poem declares, “(For men can but proceed from what they know, nor is it / the mind of this flesh to practise poiesis, ex nihilo).” “What I have written has no plan,” he remarked later, “or at least is not planned. If it has a shape it is chiefly that it returns to its beginning. It has themes and a theme even if it wanders far. If it has a unity it is that, what goes before conditions what comes after and vice versa.” This attempt to describe the poem’s unity defines the unity of Jones’s vision, the interpenetration of past, present and future through sacramental reenactment.

Early in the opening section of Anathemata occurs an example of Jones at his most intense. He describes the making of a table. It becomes the making of an altar, a ship and a cross, all at once. The act of carpentry and the thing made become signs for the Mass, the pilgrimage and the sacrifice, central themes of the poem. These confluences or conflations of meaning are a key to his approach, epitomized too in the vertiginously shifting perspectives, which can seem almost oxymoronic until we realize that the perspective is Christ’s—“the high room” is “the high cave,” and the haunting phrase “down / among the altitudes” seems to propose a divine cinematography.

He celebrates presence without a sense of transience, with no shadow of elegy. Under the moraines of the Ice Age, the temporal point de repère of the first section, he finds vital traces. The ice had been like the shrouding of a dead body, “the sea-borne sheet.” Thaw enabled the miracle of new life. The natural process is analogous to the historical: the Incarnation released the frozen inner landscape. While insisting on distance, repeating “long, long, long before,” Jones also insists on presence. The Ice Age is wonderfully realized in a verse congealing into prose:

As though the sea itself were sea-born

and under weigh

as if the whole Ivernian mare

directed from hyperboreal control-points by strategi of the axis were

one complex of formations in depth, moving on a frontage widening with

each lesser degree of latitude.

The second section, opening with Troy and Hector’s death, moves to the first legendary journey to England, the notion that Trojan Brutus colonized these islands. Powerful inner rhyme, assonance, alliteration: Jones makes verbs from nouns and adjectives, to strange effect. We read “diaphanes” and “saliva’d,” for instance. In the third section, he presents the ship’s arrival in a series of (unanswered) questions, not wishing to assert what he cannot know. Yet the questions, without committing a direct description, give a detailed account of the ship’s arrival:

Did he shelter in the Small Downs?

Keeping close in, did he feel his way

Between the Flats and the Brake?

A series of possibilities builds out, suggesting the perils that might have prevented the arrival and stopped history before it could begin. In the grace of that survival is evidence of design (and designer).

Sections four and five center specifically on his grandparents’ experiences: “Redriff” is said to evoke his maternal grandfather, speaking a slow, strange Cockney slang. He insists on his own strict craftsmanship, refusing to change his schedule or cheapen his craft for reward. The poem takes the form of an oblique dialogue and could be read as a tribute to Gill. Part V is indebted, Jones tells us, to the Anna Livia Plurabelle passage in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, beginning and ending with the cry of the lavender sellers in London streets. It is spoken for the most part by a woman, addressing a sea captain—the same captain who demanded in Part IV a speedy repair job on his ship and was rebuffed. The woman does not tell the story of her life; rather, she is part of the process of naming, of sacralizing—an ignorant but receptive transmitter of signs. She has belief without understanding, the most potent (and perilous) kind. In an amusing passage she recalls her lover, a man burdened with signs, continually distracted from the business of lovemaking:

And then, as if he perceive a body—coming

as if he hails a personage

where was but insentience

and baulk of stone

he sings out clear

REDDITOR LUCIS ÆTERNÆ

These, captain, were his precise words—what sentiments I

can’t construe—but at which, captain, I cried: Enough!

Let’s to terrestrial flesh, or

bid goodnight, I thought.

We can’t but wonder that her patience lasted so long, for he has been patting the wall and speaking Sybilline phrases for several pages.

The woman’s character combines elements of Ophelia, Molly Bloom, Mary Magdalene, woman and matriarch. A long tale of shipwreck, drawing on Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (for which Jones made memorable illustrations) becomes a sign of the Passion; and as in the first section the ship (as it were in reverse) becomes a cross, an altar and a table. Finally the woman becomes Mary, and one is tempted to conjecture that, in Jones’s original scheme, this was designed to be the last part of the poem, since it reaches a poetic climax, in a passage that combines allusions to Chaucer and Eliot, nursery rhyme and Anglo-Saxon custom, among other things:

On the ste’lyard on the Hill

weighed against our man-geld

between March and April

when bough begins to yield

and west wood springs new.

Such was his counting house

whose queen was in her silent parlour

on that same hill of dolour

about the virid month of Averil

that the poet will call cruel.

Such was her bread and honey

when with his darling body (of her body)

he won Tartary.

After Anathemata Jones published one further book, The Sleeping Lord (1974). This, read with Epoch and Artist, provides the best introduction to his work. The pieces it includes were written and revised over a period of thirty years. They are shorter than the major works and though they relate to one another they can be read separately. They are ordered so as to lead into his idiom, themes and style—a sort of primer for Anathemata. The first poem in the book, “A, a, a, Domine Deus,” clarifies his mission as a poet. Open-minded, unprejudiced, he seeks signs of Him in “his manifold lurking places.” The poems that follow, especially “The Wall,” “The Dream of Private Clitus,” “The Fatigue” and “The Tribune’s Visitation,” find signs in a kind of short-story form, and largely in the ancient world, since the modern, mechanized world seems almost devoid of signs: “it is easy to miss Him / at the turn of a civilisation.”

Though he insists on craft and the seriousness of his vocation, Jones belongs to the Romantic as much as to the modernist tradition. His at times almost parodic formal debts to Pound, Eliot and Joyce do not set him quite in their league. His is a localized, contingent modernism. He’s not compelled to abandon latent narrative or his instinct for organic forms. The poems are a rapt pursuit of a single theme and a similar poetic process practiced on a wide range of material. There is also his dogmatic reticence, a quality that becomes, in the letters to four correspondents collected in Dai Greatcoat: A Self-portrait of David Jones in His Letters, edited by René Hague (1981), agonizingly clear to the reader. Jones in his finished writings appears wise, subtle, even serene in his mission; in the letters he is by turns naïve, foolish, petulant, undecided, vulnerable to an alarming degree. In political terms, he fails to read the signs time after time: he is only truly at home in the world of images and imagination. The dailiness of life threatened, bored and disoriented him. The First World War left an unhealable wound, the source and limit of his originality.

The poems erect a palisade of rich allusion and obscurity (or opacity) that a devoted and well-armed reader can breach, though the fainthearted will turn elsewhere. Jones is embattled—an unusual stance for a giver, as though he would like to give but at the same time to retain the gift. He unobtrusively reinvents religious poetry in a secular age, Welsh culture, the sweeping continuities of British and human history. When he died in 1974 many readers were surprised to learn he had still been alive.

In England reinvention took many forms, but none quite so eccentric as Edith Sitwell’s. She exerts a fascination—not the fascination of Poe, whose wild music and tragic life are part of the birth of something substantial, but the fascination of a languid social and cultural tradition coming to an end in a falling chandelier of metrical sententiousness. The surprise here is that the social type she represents survived so long, that her writing can be so funny when it least means to be, so flat when humor is her intention. She might seem to embody, more than Wilde ever did, what we now know as camp. But camp involves self-conscious projection. There is no reason to believe that the heavily ringed, heavily rouged poet ever took herself anything less than seriously.

Man must say farewells

To parents now,

And to William Tell

And Mrs Cow...

She was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, in 1887, the eldest child and only daughter of the eccentric Sir George Sitwell, a baronet of long pedigree, and Lady Ida. Sir George was an awkward papa, Lady Ida an unenthusiastic mama, repelled by her daughter’s curious looks and unconventionality. Edith inherited her father’s eccentricity. One of her sustained prose books is about The English Eccentrics (1933). From her mother she inherited pride and a sense of her large presence in the world. For one who flouted convention, she surrounded herself in later years with rituals that required strict observance: a monster of whim and self-importance, she also sometimes had a magical way with words.

She and her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell relished childhood holidays at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire. “Colonel Fantock” celebrates those occasions. The poem is “beautiful” in her precious early manner, careful in sound organization, absurd in delineation of character. She confesses, “I always was a little outside life.” How separate, chosen and unique she and her brothers were! “We all have the remote air of legend.” Those Derbyshire holidays gave her “a taste for the grand and picturesque,” though the stones and trees she writes about acquire a gauzy flimsiness.

Educated, in her words, “in secrecy,” she fortunately had a governess with unconventional taste for Arthur Rimbaud and the French symbolists. She read them closely, through an excruciating accent, adopting the idea of “synesthesia” or “transmutation” in poetic imagery—presenting things seen in terms of smell or taste, sounds in terms of color, interchanging the senses. These bearings are taken—without subtlety but with energy—from Baudelaire’s sonnet “Correspondances,” which in Walter Martin’s classic translation in part reads:

Like echoes from infinity drawn out

Into a dappled unison of light,

Beyond the dawn of day or dead of night,

All scents, all sounds and colours correlate.

Some fragrances resemble infants’ skin

Sweeter than woodwinds, green as meadow grass—

Others expand to fill the space they’re in,

Endlessly rich, corrupt, imperious;

Amber and musk, incense and benjamin,

In sense and spirit raptures sing as one.

Baudelaire uses synesthesia to explore subjects; Edith Sitwell uses it for display.

In 1914 Edith, aged twenty-seven, descended on London. There she spent much of the remainder of her life, until she died in 1964, queen of a court of admirers and aspiring writers. There, in 1916, while war distracted Europe, she edited Wheels, an avant-garde periodical whose aim was to startle the bourgeoisie, and more generally to prompt a reconsideration of the diction and scope of poetry. Her assault on philistinism and conservatism was implicitly revolutionary, but a revolution from the palace rather than the tenements. She had little truck with the Imagists. She was then, and she remained, a thoroughbred Bolshevik.

In 1924 The Sleeping Beauty, an autobiographical poem sequence, appeared. It was in this year too that Edith Sitwell’s most popular work, the Façade sequence (1922), was set to music by William Walton. With Gold Coast Customs (1929) she moved away from playful aestheticism and, in satirical terms, commenced her denunciation of the corrupt, frivolous Mayfair life (not a difficult target), juxtaposing it with the savage rites of West African tribes. Her extended interweaving of polite society’s and cannibals’ customs, with Lady Bamburgher as her satirical butt, is impressionistic and imprecise. There are moments of near felicity, but the rhythms, reversing into rhymes, are forced. The “virtuosity” she calls attention to in her self-criticism is here in abeyance. This is poetry of large pretensions, in a grand manner, lacking technical and intellectual distinction. Anthropological naïveté is one of its more pardonable faults. The poem culminates in revolutionary prognostication:

Yet the time will come

To the heart’s dark slum

When the rich man’s gold and the rich man’s wheat

Will grow in the street, that the starved may eat;—

And the sea of the rich will give up its dead—

And the last blood and fire from my side will be shed.

For the fires of God go marching on.

John Brown’s body is wrenched into servitude. The Christlike pose the speaker assumes in the penultimate line, with the banality of the last, deliver the coup de grace to the poem. Ronald Firbank hits the Mayfair target nail on the head in Prancing Nigger and other wily “experimental” prose works. Edith Sitwell is not in that league. This poem marks (not a minute too soon) the end of her experimental period.

It was followed by a decade’s poetic silence. Financial hardship, the need to write prose and care for a dying friend, kept her off the Muse’s back. She wrote a study of Pope that marked the beginning of a reappraisal of his work. Her prose is rapid, engaging, careless, and she draws unashamedly—sometimes word for word—from the work of other writers. In this and in her interest in eccentrics (if in little else) she resembles Hugh MacDiarmid.

At last she returned to verse. The later poems are not experimental. Some—notably “Invocation”—are elegant: the themes of age (a little early) and waiting are developed, and the theme of the suffering that results from “evil.” The battle between good and evil is developed schematically; when the Second World War came she was poetically at the ready. She captured in “Still Falls the Rain” anguish and the recurrence of anguish, man’s suffering at the hand of man, in a framework of religious images and in a solemn liturgical cadence. The poem is condensed, a quality rare in her later verse. But it is marred by mannerism. She pinches a line from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: its intrusion wrecks the rhythm. In “Serenade: Any Man to Any Woman” she brings Ralegh’s and Marlowe’s most famous poems into play in a superficially developed Second World War setting: “Then die with me and be my love: / The grave shall be our shady grove.” Literary influences show through baldly. “The Swans” and “A Bird’s Song” vie with Yeats, unfortunately, as it happens, since the end of “Among School Children” knocks her into a cocked hat; “The Poet Laments the Coming of Age” leans upon Yeats’s “Byzantium,” without a hint of his subtlety—and without acknowledgment.

When the first atomic bomb was dropped, she became an apocalyptic poet par excellence. With “Three Poems of the Atomic Bomb,” human apocalypse unites with her religious vision. She becomes prophetic, a prophecy lacking in particulars, chilly, inhuman. Dust, sun and wind, three elements in all her verse, come triumphantly into sway. What is missing from her later verse is the humor that tempered the experimental aestheticism of the early poems. Of Façade Louis Untermeyer says, “There has rarely been so brilliant an exhibition of verbal legerdemain.”

A particularizing eye and specific emotion give the quality—if not of what they observe—of the experience of observation. And the Façade rhythms, based often on dance beats, are novel. In “Some Notes on My Poetry”—more defense than essay—she tells us she rebelled against the “rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns.” Rhythm was, she declared, “one of the principal translators between dream and reality.” The Façade poems are “abstract poems—that is, they are patterns of sound.” Using a phrase of Jean Cocteau’s, she describes Façade as “the poetry of childhood overtaken by the technician.”

Façade is made for music. It’s difficult to read it without hearing Walton’s settings. Some of the poems are unsentimentally tender—“Jodelling Song” is one, with a wide range of reference, about the end of childhood, heroism, fantasy. The unity of Façade is not logical or thematic but rhythmic, in a strict sense musical. Some poems enter the realm of irresistible nonsense:

Don Pasquito, the road is eloping

With your luggage, though heavy and large;

You must follow and leave your moping

Bride to my guidance and charge!

She came of poetic age in her thirties, a brief and intense maturity that stiffened into mannerism. She rejected what must have seemed to her the irresponsibility of her early poems. Yet their delight was not without conscience and commitment; often they have a disturbing burden, a message more ambiguous and—therefore?—durable than that of her rhetorical style.

In his remarkable essay “Three Hard Women” Thom Gunn tries to recover from the fat harvest of Collected Poems the early books of H.D., Marianne Moore and Mina Loy, to demonstrate that they were in revolt against a Victorian burden of conventions we can no longer conceive, and that their canonicity was, at the time, unthinkable. Of course they were women as well.

Who is this Mina Loy? Not a Hollywood actress, but a poet and iconoclast, born five years before Edith Sitwell, in London, to a prosperous middle-class family of middle-European Jewish and English Protestant extraction. She started as an artist, trained in Europe and England, was a natural decadent who became a fine artist and whose portraits of Joyce, Freud, Marinetti and Gertrude Stein (among others) gained their subjects’ approval. She married, lived in Florence, became a Christian Scientist (and remained so for the rest of her life), had affairs with the Futurists, notably Marinetti and Papini, and divorced. Then, in 1918 she married the enigmatic and magnetic Arthur Cravan, nephew of Oscar Wilde (via Wilde’s wife), a chunky boxer, an amazing independent spirit, con man and survivor. But the next year he failed to survive; he was murdered (or vanished) in Mexico in 1919. It was a loss from which she never recovered, to which her verse obliquely returns time after time, as though the poems she wrote in her increasing privacy were addressed in some way to him. When The Little Review subjected her to the question “What was your happiest moment?” she replied, “Every moment spent with Arthur Cravan.” Unhappiest? “The rest of the time.”

Loy’s life was scattered. She returned to Paris, where she knew Guillaume Apollinaire, Djuna Barnes, Mabel Dodge, William Carlos Williams and many of the leading painters. The magazine Contact published her poem “O Hell,” a declaration of intent:

To clear the drifts of spring

Of our forebears’ excrements

And bury the subconscious archives

Under unaffected flowers

Not vindictive, but emphatic: adolescence and youth have their season to be divine. Her editor was publicizing her as an American. A British writer was unlikely to be radical in quite her ways. But she was English, which makes the emphases of her verse and the achievement of her pictures the more remarkable. And she became American, a focal figure in the wild Bohemia of New York, a key contributor to Other and a focus for the avant-garde. She moved to New York.

In 1923 her free-verse poems were gathered in Lunar Baedeker, published in Paris in an edition of 500 copies. Many were seized by American customs officers when the book was sent across: immoral. Few copies survive. It was an unsettling book, angry and savage in some of its compressed language, but celebrating Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Brancusi, Stein: the modern with its new license and vision. She had flirted (and slept) with Futurism: its politics related to the vagrants and the maimed who drew her attention and to the unequal relations between men and women. For her the human body and the erotic exist and are crucial to the imagination—to the imagination in language. The erotic exists for a woman as for a man, but in terms that are more explosive, for cultural reasons, and that must elicit new kinds of response. “Love Songs to Joannes” is a poem unprecedented in English for its compressed eroticism and its mystical blasphemy. The second of the 34 “Songs” is:

We might have coupled

In the bedridden monopoly of a moment

Or broken flesh with one another

At the profane communion table

Where wine is spilled on promiscuous lips

We might have given birth to a butterfly

With the daily news

Printed in blood on its wings

Ezra Pound was no lover of adjectives, but he tolerated Loy’s because they were doing important work. They brought into the objective clinic of the poem the bacillus of irony. Largely because of Loy, Pound developed a third category of poetry. He had defined melopoeia, a poetry that moves by rhythm and music, and phanopoeia, an image-based verse. There was now a new thing, logopoeia, which “is akin to nothing but language, which is a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas and modifications of ideas and characters.” There is, in retrospect, rather more melopoeia in Loy than Pound registered. She is sometimes so succinct as to be telegraphic.

The volatility of her writing throughout the teens of the century, and in Lunar Baedeker, was indeed real; what other women have written since may diminish the shock of her poems, but not the originality of her project. Her fascination with vagrants led to several poems about them, in “Ignoramus,” for example, and famously in “Der Blinde Junge,” about a young man blinded in the war whom she sees on the streets of Vienna. Gunn, admiring the poems’ compression, observes that “pity may be evoked by the poem, and it inevitably is, but it isn’t in it. Loy is a tough writer, and sentiment in the usual sense is seldom present in her work.” Her language is invariably concentrated, not with the refinements of artifice but with the boiled-down residue of meaning. Each word is considered, each satiric inconsiderateness is barbed. Vagrants (as, before, the intractable and lucid artists that she praised) are lenses that diffract the world in ways more real than it can comfortably accept. The poet herself becomes like a vagrant in Europe and, memorably, in the Bowery, “a lurid lane / leading misfortune’s monsters,” where she lives for years, finds the materials for her art where the vagrants find their food and clothing—in the ash cans and gutters—and shares their presence as if they are fallen angels. The dispossessed are her people. She tries, for years, to hold the curious yapping literary world at bay, to vanish from it, almost, it seems, to extricate herself from its literature. And yet she cannot stop writing. In “The Widow’s Jazz” she tries to re-conjure her ghost:

Cravan

colossal absentee

the substitute dark

rolls to the incandescent memory

of love’s survivor

on this rich suttee...

She hears “your murdered laughter.” He cuckolded her with death.

When in 1958 she at last allowed some of her work to be published, William Carlos Williams, invited to write a preface to a writer he had hardly heard of in thirty years, declared: “Mina Loy was endowed from birth with a first-rate intelligence and a sensibility which has plagued her all her life facing a shoddy world. When she puts a word down on paper it is clean; that forces her fellows to shy away from it because they are not clean and will be contaminated by her cleanliness. Therefore she has not been a successful writer and couldn’t care less.” Here is a reinventor indeed.

In Paris in the 1920s she was not reclusive. She introduced Americans to Dada and Surrealism, she was a presence at readings and soirées, at parties and concerts, a friend of many, desired by many. Pound and Eliot, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce admired her. She was the life of any party she attended because she was in every way, according to reports, brilliant. In America no less a critic than Yvor Winters laid upon her shoulders and Williams’s the extraordinary burden of parenting a new poetry. He spoke of her “images that have been frozen into epigrams.” When the small magazines became less inventive or closed their doors to radical experimentalism, she had no further use for them or they for her. Having shone brightly, she allowed her light to fade. She even pretended that it had gone out.

In 1936 she moved to New York, then eighteen years later to Aspen, Colorado, to be near one of her daughters. Her last poem is “Letters of the Unliving”:

The one I was with you:

inhumed in chasms.

No creator

reconstrues scar-tissue

to shine as birth-star.

But to my sub-cerebral surprise

at last on blasé sorrow

dawns an iota of disgust

for life’s intemperance:

“As once you were”

Withhold your ghostly reference

to the sweet once were we.

Leave me

my final illiteracy

of memory’s languor—

my preference

to drift in lenient coma

an older Ophelia

in Lethe.

She died there in 1966. Much of her work remains unpublished. She will rise in due course from what her friend Wyndham Lewis called “the impalpable dark prison of neglect” and like him, as an artist, as a poet, help redefine our notion of modernism. In her salad days she was compared with Marianne Moore; she belongs more comfortably with Lewis, Pound and Gertrude Stein, a mold-breaking artist working in steel and stone rather than clay.

Beside the Bohemian lives of the modernists, the life of Robinson Jeffers is austere in the extreme. His reinvention is America, a vigorous, male and decidedly natural world, hostile to the softening and coarsening seductions of the city, especially the metropolitan city, and to any artistic or political stance that is not independent. He was born in the same year as Marianne Moore, 1887, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, a professor of Old Testament literature and a Presbyterian minister, set his child to learning Greek when he was five (eventually the poet magnificently translated Euripides’ Medea). In 1903 the family moved to California, where he studied medicine, and then forestry, at Occidental College. In 1912, after receiving a legacy, he became a man of independent means, married in 1913 his “hawk-like” wife Una, and began quarrying and gathering from the beach the granite for his legendary house and tower at a rugged site at Carmel on the Monterey, California, coast. Such Emersonian efforts went beyond the call of duty. Having built his castle, he seldom left it. In a world of war, depressions and violent dislocations, it was his point of permanence and his recurrent subject. “Inhumanism” he called his approach, anticipating (rather eagerly it sometimes seemed) mankind’s extinction. Whitman’s hugely peopled poetry is emptied out by Jeffers, whose long lines recall Whitman and share with him certain biblical sources. The Old Testament has in Jeffers its modern Savonarola. The long narrative poems enact man’s vexed and uncomprehending relationship with nature.

Jeffers has staunch partisans who present him as a prototypical eco-poet. Certainly the politics that follow from his vision accentuate some of the human risks of green ideology. Others see him as the poet of individualism and the far right. His publishers in the Second World War dissociated themselves from his spectacularly incorrect politics in the blurb to his collected poems.

Some readers admire him not for his politics or his ideas but for the compelling power of his narrative, its brisk movement and direct, unapologetic expressions of human desire. That it moves with melodramatic insistence through recurrent themes of incest, lust and cursed heredity dulls some of the Lawrentian frisson. The natural world of Ted Hughes is not far from Jeffers’s.

“I decided not to tell lies in verse. Not to feign any emotion that I did not feel.” This sounds wholesome. It is also terribly privileged. A man with a private income builds himself a handsome house and climbs his tower in order to stand above and judge his nation and his fellow men. It is arrant escapism, more repugnant than MacDiarmid’s wildly engaged Stalinism and Pound’s fascism because it needn’t get its hands dirty; if apocalypse does not come now, it will come later. There is that assurance. It is a prophesy which may come true; the prophet can never be disproved. Jeffers’s heirs—James Dickey at his most rhetorical, even Robert Bly with his very different politics—do not go as far as he does.

What is he doing here, in a history of poetry in English? Well, whatever his politics, he does have original skills and represents one of several culminations or closings down of Whitman’s line; he is one of the reactionary, antimodernist poles of American poetry. “The poets lie too much,” he says, which is as much as to say that he tells the truth. He doesn’t, he’s as much a liar as the rest of them. And he wrote some fine poems—the shorter poems, not too many of them—which evoke a primeval nature that he engages in body and mind, or which level a savage, prophetic, elegiac beam of language at America, as in his most famous poem:

While this America settles in the mold of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,

And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth

Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly

A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption

Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.

There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—they say—God, when he walked on earth.

The relishing of pain, of storm, of suffering; the celebration of death and of the nature that survives it: “You and I, Cassandra,” he says with his towering virtue. Had Mina Loy led him down “a lurid lane / leading misfortune’s monsters,” he would have looked neither left nor right: the sound of the sea and the smell of his mountains were his only elements. Like one of his hawks he had a singular nature—and a private income.

In “Reasons for Music,” a tribute to Wallace Stevens, Archibald MacLeish wrote:

Hölderlin’s question. Why be a poet

Now when the meanings do not mean?—

When the stone shape is shaped stone?—

Dürftiger Zeit?—time without inwardness?

Why lie upon our beds at night

Holding a mouthful of words, exhausted

Most by the absence of the adversary?

The reinventors reinvented the adversary: certainly Jeffers knew what it was, his nation and its culture. And, in a more generous spirit, because man is his subject and not the rugged coastline at Carmel, e. e. cummings came up with the same sort of adversary, political, corrupt and corrupting, “manunkind,” the collective “busy monster” that consumes, betrays and destroys the joyfully anarchic individual. At the time of the Hungarian uprising cummings wrote:

so rah-rah-rah democracy

let’s all be as thankful as hell

and bury the statue of liberty

(because it begins to smell)

The lyrical cummings remains the more popular, but the satirical cummings may prove the more durable poet, anger traveling more confidently through time than amorous-linguistic whimsy and the sometimes appalling sentimentality it masks.

Edward Estlin Cummings was born with capital letters in 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, an English teacher at Harvard, dropped out to become a Unitarian minister in Boston, eventually at the famous Old South Church, and through his father cummings was rooted in New England Transcendentalism. The boy took a BA and an MA at Harvard, served in the First World War as an ambulance driver and soldier, and spent some months in a French detention camp on a trumped-up charge (the censor had not liked his letters home), which gave him material for his American-Kafkaesque memoir-novel The Enormous Room (1922), where his inventiveness with language is already evident, though the adjustments are not Joycean but of the surface only. His first volume of poems, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), also played with the surface and the lowercase “I,” but the Tudor lyric was his underlying music.

“sweet spring is your

time is my time is our

time for springtime is lovetime

and viva sweet love”

Later came the experiments with typography, learned perhaps from Apollinaire, an attempt to bring into the text the qualities of vocalization he required, by gaps, spaces, drop margins; and to indicate how many other words a word contains by laying it out in revealing ways. The mimesis is aural and visual at once, and our whole attention is required less for the flow of language than the dance and counterdance of words. The poetry is, in a very constricted sense, on the page. A small autumnal instance:

l(a

le

af

fa

ll

s)

one

l

iness

Introducing Poems 1924–1954 he wrote, “Life, for eternal us, is now.” The “eternal us” are the poet and his select readers, not “mostpeople” who don’t like poetry and don’t have lives. The complicity into which we are invited, the arrogance we are required to tolerate and applaud, at first beguiling, comes to seem inconsequential.

He split himself between Paris and Greenwich Village, and later in life between the Village and his New Hampshire farm. He died in 1962. Never happy in a single form, cummings dabbled in painting and drawing, based a satirical ballet on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, wrote plays, and a travel diary about his trip to the Soviet Union, Eimi (1933), because he was fascinated with the human experiment of communism. Poems were his primary activity, but set against those of Moore and Loy, Williams and Stevens, his verse is soft-centered. It is often said that dialect poetry, translated into standard English, can prove standard-sentimental, the charm imparted only by the distortions of language: cummings is a dialect poet in this sense. His belief in the Individual, the sacred unit, the anarchic “I” in tension or conflict with the world and its institutions, issues in inventive distortions of language, but not the radical vision of a Loy or the bleakness of Jeffers. The experimentalist and iconoclast takes his place in the Elysian Fields among the conservatives.

Buffalo Bill’s

defunct

who used to

ride a watersmooth-silver

stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

Jesus

he was a handsome man

and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueyed boy

Mister Death

There is a poetry of local speech, a poetry that tries to transcribe the improvisations of a dialect or accent peculiar to a place or a culture, and that finds release in the popular forms of that speech.

During the Harlem Renaissance, which centered on the vital musical culture, the novelists wrote some powerful, though conventional novels that included dialogue, but the narrative was generally in a standard form. What Langston Hughes set out to do was to use the cadences, the natural metaphors and dialect elements as the primary material for his verse and for his famous Jesse B. Semple letters. “Speak that I may see thee,” said Ben Jonson. In Hughes’s work a whole community is made visible.

Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up with his maternal grandmother, his parents being separated. But he stayed some of the time with his mother in Detroit and Cleveland, where he completed high school and began writing verse, encouraged by her. His father, tired of racism, had gone to Mexico, and the budding poet visited him there. Theirs was not a happy relationship. Hughes attended Columbia for one year, dropped out, traveled and did a variety of jobs: merchant seaman, nightclub work in Paris, busboy in Washington. He wrote and wrote and in 1925 some of his poems were published in The New Negro. The writer Carl Van Vechten, instrumental in advancing the work of Mina Loy, took up his cause and arranged for his first book to be published. The Weary Blues appeared in 1926. Other white champions of the Harlem Renaissance also took an interest in him; he finished his studies at Lincoln University and settled in New York. By 1930 he was able to live from his writings and had been dubbed “the bard of Harlem.” He became a public figure, helping to develop black theater in Los Angeles, Chicago and in Harlem. He published in many genres. But poetry was his chief vocation, even though it did not butter bread the way his prose writings did. He works principally in two modes, one drawing rhythms from jazz and the blues, a poetry that with ironies and radical reversals generally avoids staginess; and poems of racial protest and definition. The jazz and blues poems have weathered rather less well than the protest poems. They were written with white readers as well as black in mind; there is something missing from them, tonalities withheld, a lack of candor about his sexuality, a guardedness in relation to his own as well as the white “culture of reception.” The signals are there, the celebration of Whitman, “Pleasured equally / In seeking as in finding”; the sailors, the ungendered poems and poems where deliberate stereotypes and personifications displace persons.

The vignettes—“Mother to Son,” for example, and “Song for a Dark Girl”—use a Harlem dialect which brings character and circumstance alive. These are protest poems, but the more general, “public” protest poems and some of the lyrics exploit a standard English when necessary, appropriate to the dignity of the occasion; there is also power in using a language associated with repression to draw attention to the repressed. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is a magnificent early poem, and “Mulatto,” from 1927, an angry and subtly erotic piece in which a mulatto confronts the white man, its parent. But the most famous and resonant of the protest poems is the affirmative “I, too”: “I, too, sing America. / I am the darker brother,” in which the black speaker, sent to the kitchen to eat among the servants, sees a future:

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America

Time has moved on, and Hughes’s poems of protest, while they are still resonant, belong, as much protest poetry does, primarily to their moment in history. What makes them durable is their voice.