EDGELL RICKWORD, ROY CAMPBELL, WILLIAM EMPSON, W. H. AUDEN, JOHN BETJEMAN, LOUIS MACNEICE, THOMAS KINSELLA, JAMES FENTON
“It was on New Year’s Day 1929, or thereabout, that I met Hart Crane for the first time,” Edgell Rickword remembers. “He had been in England a couple of weeks, and had met Paul Robeson and eaten Christmas pudding with Robert Graves and Laura Riding and he was rather miserable. The damp raw London cold ‘was like a knife in the throat,’ he said.” Rickword had published a few of Crane’s “elegant, elusive poems” in the Calendar of Modern Letters two years earlier. He had tried to persuade the Communist publishers Wishart to distribute White Buildings and Crane wrote to thank him, adding that “a couple of years ago I found so much in your Rimbaud volume which was sympathetic and critically stimulating.” In his quiet, vigorous way Edgell Rickword was at the center of things critical and poetic. And then, suddenly, he wasn’t.
And we, too, with as little fuss
might thus ignore the world’s dark edge,
but those dead rays of coatless us
augur the thin end of time’s wedge.
Poetry all but abandoned him in 1930. One major satire (his most famous poem) came later, and a few frail lyrics in the 1970s, but his poetic career spans fourteen years, between the end of the First World War and the depths of the Great Depression. In that time he said what he had to say, without repetition and with singular skill. Then he turned his attention to Marxism.
He wrote savage poems from the war, love poems, symbolist work and poems in the manner of Donne. The marriage of Metaphysical and French symbolist disciplines provides a resource comparable to what Crane laboriously devised, but less opaque. Because Rickword was self-effacing, political and without personal ambition, his radical work in prose and verse has fallen into deep neglect. Graves, Blunden, Empson and many others knew his value as a poet, and the radical critics of the 1930s and 1940s valued him as a critic.
He was born in Colchester, Essex, in 1898, into a “moderate Tory,” mildly literary household. In 1916 he enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles. He became an officer in the Royal Berkshire Regiment, and after the Armistice was invalided out, having lost an eye and been awarded the Military Cross. He wrote his war poems after the war, not in the trenches. Having taught himself French while on active service in France, he went up to Oxford to read French at Doctor Johnson’s college, Pembroke. Like Johnson, he found the place unpalatable. The Oxford course only went up to Victor Hugo, while the young Rickword’s interests were in Rimbaud and Verlaine. After four terms he left, married and destitute, and began reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman.
His literary criticism made a considerable if generally unacknowledged mark. It remains a touchstone for readers interested in poetry and in a critical approach that is coherent, open and “theoretical” without becoming categorical. F. R. Leavis’s first published book was a selection from Rickword’s magazine, Calendar of Modern Letters. Leavis subtitled it “Towards Standards of Criticism.” David Holbrook called it “the first critical prose in English written this century, apart from the greater essays of T. S. Eliot.” Unlike Eliot’s essays, hungry for stability and resolution, Rickword’s are all “directed towards the possibilities of creation,” opening out the canon, reappraising, and bringing to bear on English poetry the contrasting rigors of the French and unassimilable voices of writers from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
His first critical book, Rimbaud: The Boy and the Poet (1924), was the seminal study of the French poet. He edited the Calendar of Modern Letters (1925–27) and two volumes of Scrutinies (1928, 1931), revising inflated reputations and revaluating underrated writers. Leavis takes up where Rickword left off, but with an academic bias and in a less generous spirit, and without creative inwardness as critic or editor.
After poetry left him, Rickword continued to review and write essays. He edited the Left Review (1934–38) and Our Time (1944–47). From a primary concern with literature, he moved to social commitments. A Marxist by 1930, he assumed the only activist role available to him in England at the time: his foes called him a propagandist for editing magazines aimed at a wide, political readership. He was more than a propagandist: serving a cause did not necessarily entail falsification of the evidence or attenuation of the critical imagination. Seeking to address the many rather than a select few is not an unnatural act.
He denied that Marxism killed his Muse. The best of the poems are latently political: there is no ideological gap between poet and critic. It is likely that poetry abandoned him, as it did others of his generation, for personal reasons, a series of crises, enthusiasms, passions and disappointments. The prolonged failure of his marriage destroyed a fundamental creative impulse. Marxism, looking away from the single self toward common ends, provided a sense of purpose and engagement.
Early on he differentiates between critical and creative intelligence: one is analytical, seeking objective judgments, the other intuitive, its associations subjective. Marxism simplified and intensified critical intelligence. In a conversation in the 1970s, with perhaps a touch of revisionism, he described himself as “a Marxist in the sense that I try to relate public happenings to the tissue of cause and effect which Marx divined in the interplay of material and economic forces.” In the 1930s he expressed himself more vehemently: later, what had been a living cause becomes merely a critical approach.
In the poems Rickword writes intuitively with or even as the “common man,” not didactically for him the way the poets of Auden’s generation do. Rickword writes as one acquainted intimately with the trenches, with poverty and failure. He disliked cliques and the elitism that writers like Eliot and Wyndham Lewis came to stand for, though he was among the first critics to appreciate the quality and significance of Eliot’s work. “One condemned modern civilisation,” he said, “for its uniformity and mass-mediocrity. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis had a wrong sort of élitism, believing themselves cut off from common humanity.” Is there, then, a right sort of elite? For a Marxist it is perhaps the party; for Rickword in his later years it is the writers who had made common cause without sacrificing their art. He was most alienated from the middle classes, those who could buy what should be provided by right: education, health care, housing. In “Ode to a Train-deluxe,” subtitled “Written on a railway embankment near London and inscribed to our public idealists,” his aversion is laid bare:
Far from the city, grossly real,
through Nature’s absolute they stroll,
and nimbly chase the untamed Ideal
through palm-courts at the Metropole.
Rapt in familiar unison
with God, whose face must now appear,
they show their wife and eldest son
the fat-cheeked moon rise, from the Pier.
The “fat-cheeked moon,” distantly echoing Hulme’s ruddy farmer, ironizes the sentimentality of the comfortably off. It does not twit, it bites those who ignore “the world’s dark edge.” The moon frequents Rickword’s poems, but never the usual poet’s moon. She comes as a courtesan wooing over the corpse-littered battlefield, and when she emblematizes fickleness it is with precise attributes.
The satire of “Ode to a Train-deluxe” is gentle, compared with “Twittingpan” and “To the Wife of a Non-Interventionist Statesman.” In the latter poem, Rickword’s last major excursion into verse, written in 1938, the prophecy proved all too accurate. A poet climbs into the bedroom of a statesman’s wife, evokes for her in sharp rhymed tetrameter couplets the case against the Spanish fascists, and urges her to use her power to deny her spouse sexual satisfaction until he abandons his noninterventionist stance toward Franco’s Spain. He warns:
Euzkadi’s mines supply the ore
to feed the Nazi dogs of war:
Guernica’s thermite rain transpires
in doom on Oxford’s dreaming spires:
in Hitler’s frantic mental haze
already Hull and Cardiff blaze,
and Paul’s grey dome rocks to the blast
of air-torpedoes screaming past.
From small beginnings mighty ends:
from calling rebel generals friends,
from being taught at public schools
to think the common people fools,
Spain bleeds, and England wildly gambles
to bribe the butcher in the shambles.
Beside a brilliant, rough-cast rhetoric, there is raging compassion in the poem as well:
On Barcelona slums he rains
German bombs from Fiat planes.
Five hundred dead at ten a second
is the world record so far reckoned;
a hundred children in one street,
their little hands and guts and feet,
like offal round a butcher’s stall,
scattered where they were playing ball—
The satire had its occasion, yet it retains contemporary resonance, just as the great eighteenth-century satires do, because of its urgency, its tone and dark humor.
Rickword’s original program was to remake poetry by a use of “negative emotions,” including anger. “The poetry of my contemporaries was kind and nice and sweet,” he said (Blunden being among his closest associates). But “there was no need to confine poetry to the expression of such feelings.” Instead, the effect sought was “something like the cubists, perhaps, who wanted to paint all sides of an object, to show an object in full... to synthesise the various facets of an emotional experience.” Since that time, modern poetry may, he conceded, have gone rather too far with “negative emotions.” There may indeed have emerged a vein of negative sentimentality, a sentimentality of violence, as vacuous as the facile optimism of Christmas-card Georgians and imperial apologists. But at the time, the territory he was mapping was inhabited only by the Eliot of the Sweeney poems.
The attempt to “paint all sides of an object” led to a study of the “negative emotions” as revealed in literature, history, myth, science and psychology. The best examples Rickword could find were Rimbaud, Baudelaire, the English Metaphysical poets (particularly Donne), Charles Churchill and Swift. With these poets he felt a temperamental and programmatic affinity. Swift was “the most vigorous hater we’ve ever had in our literature.”
Rickword’s early love poems express a sense of reciprocity in sexual relations rare in English love poetry. The beloved is desired, evoked, addressed, respected, but not refined. He composed under the spell of Donne:
Since I have seen you do those intimate things
that other men but dream of; lull asleep
the sinister dark forest of your hair
and tie the bows that stir on your calm breast
faintly as leaves that shudder in their sleep;
since I have seen your stocking swallow up,
a swift black wind, the flame of your pale foot,
and feigned your slender limbs so meshed in silk
twin mermaid sisters drowned in their sleek hair;
I have not troubled overmuch with food,
and wine has seemed like water from a well;
pavements are built of fire, grass of thin flames;
all other girls grow dull as painted flowers
or flutter harmlessly like coloured flies
whose wings are tangled in the net of leaves
spread by thin boughs that grow behind your eyes.
The poem unfolds—a single sentence, with his always curious punctuation jolting us at semicolons, with rhythmic reversals—into a series of evolving perspectives whose progression is by inference. The nineteenth century is alive in hyperbolic figures that come steaming out of Rossetti’s studio, yet they are also figures of this man’s century: an actual woman, and what her presence evokes and represents in his turbulent, articulate heart. Extrovert wit, not introvert irony, fuels the poem.
Satires and love poems are opposite poles in Rickword’s poetry. When he began his model was Donne; he fell silent after achieving something of the power of Swift. The early poems celebrate physical passion, but gradually revulsion overtakes the lover, who moves from celebration to a sense of the instability of relationships, uncertainty about even the most natural recurrences. “Dawn is a miracle each night debates, / which faith may prophesy but luck dictates.” Unable to ignore “the world’s dark edge,” the poet confronts the negative emotions that leave experience raw, the heart wincing with hope and disappointment.
“Terminology,” about fancy and the limits of language, shows how words, like time, engage and then disengage reality. The poet uses language to break the bounds of language, to contain meanings in an ordering of connotations, so that a sentence, verse or stanza reaches well beyond what it actually declares. In poetry the language begins to work only after the denotative meanings have “had their say.” In his best poems thought is so complete and so completely contained in the images that selective quotation falsifies the statement. Thought in a poem functions consistently at various levels. This abundance of sense is remote from the limitations and chastenings that poets like Blunden and Sassoon imposed on themselves. The savage beauty of vision in “Birthday Ruminations” culminates in a stanza where man’s disintegration is contrasted with the integrating world of the sea, with a diction as strange and wonderful as it is precise:
The crepitation of the restless grains
and the soft integration of fresh worlds
and the vermiculation of the flesh,
is the procession of the pastoral soul;
a piscene epic, mammal tragedy.
The use in the fourth line of the verb “is” where one would expect “are” reverses the dynamic of the sentence.
Desire, time, pity, shame, solicitude and other Augustan abstractions regain authority in Rickword’s poems. His work foreshadows—not just politically—the Auden generation. In “Divagations (ii),” for example, he experiments with Anglo-Saxon forms and finds them as sterile as Auden, at greater length, was to do. In “Incompatible Worlds,” a poem dedicated to Swift, he uses a meter and indeed a diction so closely reminiscent of the third section of Auden’s elegy on Yeats that we wonder if there is a direct debt. In his attempt to integrate the thought of Freud and Marx, Rickword fights in advance a 1930s battle, but where they discern a choice to be made, he sees a paradox to be confronted.
Beside the cool passion of Rickword, his early friend and eventual political foe the South African Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell—Roy Campbell—is like a volcano. Born in Natal in 1902, he came to England in 1918, made himself known, then returned home to stir up literature in South Africa with an energetic assault on all things Afrikaans, working together with William Plomer and Laurens van der Post, with both of whom he later fell out. But then he fell out with everyone. He returned to Britain, where Adamastor was published, and then The Georgiad, in which he laid into Bloomsbury with a fierce contempt exacerbated by his resentment at Vita Sackville-West’s interest in his wife. He wrote autobiographies, but while Rickword veered to the left (sharing Campbell’s distaste for Bloomsbury), Campbell went right, became a Roman Catholic and an apologist for Franco, whom he eulogized in Flowering Rifle (1939). He did not, as he claimed, fight for Franco; it is possible that he did, however, engage in fisticuffs with Stephen Spender—a far less perilous undertaking. Campbell wrote some extraordinary poems and translations, including “Luis de Camões,” about Portugal’s national poet and adventurer, with whom he identified, and his versions of St. John of the Cross. His Baudelaire translations are less astonishing, his Lorca quite thin, though the irony of his advocacy of a homosexual Communist poet, he himself being adamantly heterosexual, Francoist and Catholic, should not surprise us: he did have a remarkably clear sense of what poetry is, as apart from politics. He is in his best poems decidedly South African, with all that this implies of Zulu, Afrikaans, Portuguese and British. His poetry and translations are marked by an unreflecting energy: like Wyndham Lewis, he was devoted to his art, generous in expectation and naïve in his response to disappointment. He died in a car accident in 1957.
A more critical player than Campbell on Rickword’s side, the greatest critical imagination of the day and a man who, like Rickword, wrote brilliant poetry and then stopped, is William Empson. As a Cambridge student Empson admired Rickword, sought him out at the Fitzroy Tavern, and struggled to hear what the Sage might have to say: “He was the real one, if you happened to know.” Rickword and Empson were the truest Sons of John Donne this century. Empson writes:
Imagine, then, by miracle, with me,
(Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)
What could not possibly be there,
And learn a style from a despair.
Eleven years after Donne died, a neglected Spanish cleric, satirist and critic Baltasar Gracián wrote his Agudeza y arte de ingenio, a treatise on the Baroque elements in literature. Verbal duplicity, puns and ambiguity are at the heart of the verse he examines. With less clarity than Empson he defines sixty types of ambiguity. There is more than a casual connection between Agudeza and Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). In his great critical book, published when he was twenty-four years old—the book that changed our way of reading—Empson transposes into our century the principles of Baroque and Metaphysical thought and technique. Empson’s poems and criticism have given us an understanding of Donne, Rochester, Dryden and Pope. He has reopened a huge space that the Romantics had left soiled under dust sheets.
Born into the local gentry in Yorkshire, Empson, whose politics were to the left, retained a poise and civility one associates with his class and education. He went to Winchester and to Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and later, under I. A. Richards, literature. He was Richards’s most brilliant student. Richards insisted that it was acceptable to ask what a poem meant, and therefore how it meant. Empson, due to someone finding condoms in his possession, was ejected from Cambridge, but he published his unexamined dissertation with Richards’s blessing, and it was Seven Types. His later critical books are variously wonderful. Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) pursues ambiguity from diction and syntax into form. In some respects it is more important than his first book, but as with Einstein, whatever followed the law of relativity was rather an anticlimax to his public.
He was not a scholar and his critical work, like Graves’s, is marred by willfulness and, unlike Graves’s, by misquotation and inaccuracy. It is a small price to pay for the brilliance he treats us to. Five years after his critical debut he published Poems, in which he deployed ambiguities relentlessly, as though he had written the texts to which Seven Types might be the casebook. In 1940 another thin collection, The Gathering Storm, was published, a politically sophisticated and even prophetic volume, less obscure than the earlier book. In 1955 the Collected Poems appeared, and poetry was over for him. Indeed he claimed it had finished in 1941—a shorter creative span than Rickword’s, and ended for much the same reason.
Are his intellectuality and obscurity the result of emotional intensity, personal and political, or are they, as his enemies have suggested, mere literary passion? Is he no more than a puzzle maker? There is a certain monotony in even so small a body of work: the language is too evenly awake to all its meanings, there is no repose, no base note, as though the language is more important than the poetry. In his erudition, Empson is an “academic poet,” but not in a pejorative sense. There is in his verse the pressure of an entire individual intelligence and culture. Empson’s expression is as authentic and individual as Wordsworth’s very different language was to him. We would not call Donne “academic” but “witty.” The same term can be applied to Empson, not least to make the historical connection.
The poems are accumulations of specific, local effects. There is a fascination with minuteness, with insect life, ants, maggots and the like, with scientific fact and speculation. The small becomes emblematic or correlative. The fruits of scientific analysis become points of synthesis. He once remarked that his poems “turned out to be love poems about boy being too afraid of girl to tell her anything.” A girl receiving his coded messages would have been perplexed and might understandably have run toward the nearest rugby player. There is facetiousness in the remark, but perhaps some truth, since the poetry ground to a halt shortly after boy told her something and Empson married. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Empson explains his drying up in another way. His experiences multiplied, the very wealth of experience dissipated the poetic impulse. In “Let It Go” he writes, “The more things happen to you the more you can’t / Tell or remember even what they were.”
Christopher Ricks, his outstanding critical heir, sees the “enabling tension” in the verse as that between a desire to beget life and a sense that “life is too dark and bleak a gift.” Misgiving is central to the love poems. Images of evolution, development, building, accretion and sequence are balanced by a sense of their inherent perils. Darwin is at his elbow; fear and endurance are the fuels he burns. A casual tone, polite evasiveness and understatement: they are parts of his defenses. He protects himself by wit and the poems respect him.
In “Rolling the Lawn,” one of his most famous sonnets, he writes: “You can’t beat English lawns. Our final hope / Is flat despair.” He draws into the poem a variety of references: Milton, contemporary advertisements, natural history, classical allusion, “true” and “false” religions, and a subliminal eroticism coexist. The word “roll” appears with, appropriately, seven meanings.
Beneath the serious current of his concerns there is playfulness. The poems can be tenderly precise, but sentimentality is excluded from his range by the very techniques he adopts. Most of his lines are end-stopped, the rhythms holding in suspension a cluster of words, holding them up in both senses. When longer cadences occur they are forcefully arrested at the end. The poems are built of finished rhythmic units, not around a dominant cadence, even in “Villanelle” (“It is the pain, it is the pain, endures”), where the units of rhythm are longer and affecting, but held parallel to one another, as in the early verse of Dylan Thomas.
Ezra Pound talks of “making it new.” Empson uses the word “rebegetting” in much the same sense in “Letter II”:
Searching the cave gallery of your face
My torch meets fresco after fresco ravishes
Rebegets me.
The world, language and passion are full of fossil perceptions and expressions which the poet reanimates or which reanimate him. His best poems are like verse epistles. “Autumn in Nan-Yueh,” for example, is intimate and public at the same time. This quality is sensed in many of the quietly spoken poems that are conscious, always, of the listener close by. His verse is civilized and yet his civility does not exclude passion.
Empson’s editor and biographer John Haffenden writes, “So many of his early poems deal with what he called the ‘neurotic (uncaused) fear’ of individual isolation, the wish to escape that fear through love, and the wish also to transcend the oppressive facts of the known physical world, that the challenge of new knowledge about the universe puts him in a position of remarkable affinity with Donne,” about whom he had said, “I imitated Donne only.” He made his mark, if not on the Auden of early dialectics, then on Auden’s publisher T. S. Eliot; on the Fugitive poets and Tate in particular, who admired his packing of language; on the poets of the Movement; and through his criticism on anyone educated in English in America or in Britain after the war and before theory dismantled the syllabus and the canon.
In 1937 the Marxist Rickword took the measure of the Marxist Auden in a short essay, “Auden and Politics.” “The subject of his poetry is the struggle, but the struggle seen, as it were, by someone who whilst living in one camp, sympathises with the other; a struggle in fact which while existing externally is also taking place within the mind of the poet himself, who remains a bourgeois.” It is the poet’s aloofness and isolation which make his poem “Spain 1937” powerful and ideologically treacherous.
In 1937 W. H. Auden was thirty. He was firmly established as the great poet of his generation, as the great young poet in English, a reputation that had already spread to America. He was the voice of youth, the voice of the radical left, well traveled and universally celebrated; to such an extent that a double issue of the magazine New Verse was dedicated exclusively to celebrating his work. It was there that Rickword voiced his doubts. Allen Tate noted Auden’s and his friends’ “juvenile” and “provincial” perspectives, and the conspiratorial nature of his early canonization. And Dylan Thomas contributed an ambiguous tribute. “I think of Mr Auden’s poetry as a hygiene, a knowledge and practice, based on a brilliantly prejudiced analysis of contemporary disorders, relating to the preservation and promotion of health, a sanitary science and a flusher of melancholia. I sometimes think of his poetry as a great war, admire intensely the mature, religious, and logical fighter, and deprecate the boy bushranger.” Thomas is prescient: Auden was soon to abandon the party, and England, altogether.
The terms are interesting. Hygiene: imagery of disease and cure, the body and the body politic, a personified landscape; but a hygiene also in that the poet scrapes his language clean to use it with precision. Brilliantly prejudiced analysis: the prejudice is political; Auden was a Communist who wrote reviews and articles for the Communist press; but prejudice went deeper, into a sentimentalism about industrial landscape and industry, even broken industry; also, what none of Auden’s group ever quite got beyond, a prejudice of education and class, expressing itself in a distinct tone of voice and in the patterning of the verse. Contemporary disorders: these too are political, the failure to square up to fascism and Nazism, the failure to alter the social structure after the huge reversals of the Depression, the failure to end Empire; but also, within the moral structure of his own 1930s generation, a disorder, an intolerance of things dear to him, not least his sexual nature. Flusher of melancholia: the undercurrent of wit and irony makes even his most serious poems witty. The boy bushranger: it is at this point that many part company with Auden, a public school boy who went to Christ Church, Oxford. Among friends he retained the schoolboy/undergraduate patois, the pranksterishness of it all; world events seemed in exaggerated form continuous with the struggles of the factional schoolboy: secret romances, plotting, scoring points, delicious conspiracy. The “mature, religious, and logical fighter” indulges in shadow boxing.
Like Eliot, Auden believed he could find stability, even when truth eluded his grasp. He affronts his youth, the more engaging man, with his age, the cantankerous, opinionated and revered poet. Each is an aspect of a decisive integrity—but it would be misleading to call that integrity “moral.”
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York in 1907. His father was a doctor, and the son retained cordial relations with him. His father’s vocation interested Auden as a source of imagery. In “The Art of Healing” his father says, “Healing... / is not a science / but the intuitive art / of wooing nature.” In 1908 the family removed to Birmingham. The landscape of the industrial Midlands fascinated Auden. Mining and geology (with its time scales dwarfing those of human history) provided another imaginative dimension.
His mother, meanwhile, a musical woman, encouraged her son. While his father was away at war, she and young Wystan sang together at the piano—Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, with the boy taking Isolde’s part. In later life Auden wrote for music, notably an awful anthem for the United Nations and the incomparable libretto for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. Libretti were a form in which he could collaborate not only with the composer but, when appropriate, with other writers, including his partner Chester Kallman.
He spent the years from six to twelve fabricating “a private secondary world” of limestone landscapes, lead mines and workings. “In Praise of Limestone” touches on those structured fantasies, which, in retrospect, the poet saw as crucial formative acts. He learned from his secondary worlds “certain principles” that applied “to all artistic fabrication.” Every work of art was a secondary world derived from and answerable to the primary world. Each work of art had meaning. Consistent, even if arbitrary, rules were necessary in the “game” of making. Within those rules the poet “must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.” A poet does not express himself but conveys “a view of reality common to all, seen from a unique perspective.” That “unique perspective” becomes in his later work so eccentric as to transform the common reality into an exclusive, excluding enclave.
The “secondary world” is often expressed in images of state and city. A poem is “an attempt to present an analogy to the paradisal state in which Freedom and Law, System and Order are united.” A good poem is “very nearly a utopia.” Images that flow from this core include maps, networks, telegraph lines, railways, streets, strata, veins, postal routes—images of connection and pattern. The prepositions “between” and “among” gain almost the force of verbs. The modern hero is “the builder, who renews the ruined walls of the city.”
He was sent to preparatory school in Surrey, and then to Holt School in Norfolk, where he studied biology. At fifteen he discovered by accident his poetic vocation: “One Sunday afternoon in March 1922, a friend suggested that I should [write poetry]: the thought had never occurred to me.” How unlike Keats: instead of “vows were then made for me” it was a vague suggestion one boring afternoon. Nevertheless a seed was sown. The stable childhood determined many of his poetic concerns and prejudices. In “Profile,” an unflattering self-portrait, he asks:
A childhood full of love
and good things to eat:
why should he not hate change?
Gastronomical images obsess the mature, comfortable and somewhat jaded Auden. Rather proud of his class origins later in life, he writes in one of his verse “shorts,” or fragments:
The class whose vices
he pilloried was his own,
now extinct, except
for lone survivors like him
who remember its virtues.
Wise after the event with what Roy Fuller calls “his honesty of self-characterisation,” he atones for his early radicalism. Rickword was right after all. The political reversal is encapsulated in the late poem “The Garrison”: “Whoever rules, our duty to the City / is loyal opposition.”
The year after he started being a poet he came across Walter de la Mare’s anthology Come Hither and found there the work of Frost and Hardy. Hardy immediately attracted him: “For more than a year I read no one else.” He retained a respect for Hardy as a formal writer, as a wise poet who viewed the world with clarity and from a certain moral height.
In 1925 he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, to read English. He was drawn to Old English poetry and his early technical experiments in stress and alliterative forms developed from there. He edited a magazine, and the first booklet of his poems was hand set and printed by his friend Stephen Spender. Lennox Berkeley set some of the poems to music and Cecil Day-Lewis sang them. The group came together: Louis MacNeice and Christopher Isherwood were waiting in the wings.
Soon his books began to appear: 1930, Poems and Paid on Both Sides: A Charade (enthusiastically received); 1932, The Orators; 1933, The Dance of Death; 1936, Look Stranger.
Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.
Also in 1936, Letter to Lord Byron; in 1937 Spain and Letters from Iceland (with MacNeice). It was the year of his New Verse double-issue apotheosis. That was not all. With Isherwood he’d collaborated in writing Brechtian topical plays with songs and choruses, including The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936) and then, after New Verse: On the Frontier (1938), Journey to a War (with Isherwood, 1939). He had traveled all over the place: Japan, China, Iceland, Spain for the civil war, where he was (briefly) an ambulance driver trying to catch a glimpse of history being made.
In 1939 he and Isherwood emigrated to the United States, leaving their admirers and their politics behind. It was time, they decided, to find themselves. Another Time (1940) contained the last of Auden’s English poems. In 1946 he became an American citizen. Reflecting on the two Audens, the English and the American, the radical and the conservative, Philip Larkin tries to imagine a conversation between two readers acquainted exclusively with one part of his oeuvre. “After an initial agreement by adjective—‘Versatile,’ ‘Fluent,’ ‘Too smart sometimes’—a mystifying gap would open between them, as one spoke of a tremendously exciting English social poet full of energetic unliterary knock-about and unique lucidity of phrase, and the other of an engaging, bookish, American talent, too verbose to be memorable and too intellectual to be moving.” The unity of his early work—its concern with technique, political commitment, didactic strains, openness to science and psychology—suggests that the poems are facets of a complex single statement of personal and social moment. The statement is not easy to isolate: it is a trajectory, Oxford Marxism giving way to Freudian concerns; attention to the collective becoming a concern with the individual. He could not connect Marx and Freud. They represented alternatives, and he plumped in the end for Freud. He elegized him in 1939, the year Freud died and Auden left England.
When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
To the critique of a whole epoch
The frailty of our conscience and anguish,
Of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
Among us, those who were doing us some good,
And knew it was never enough but
Hoped to improve a little by living.
The poem ends on a high note which is perhaps disingenuous in the use of the word “rational,” a residue of the Marxism out of which Auden was wriggling with less difficulty than one might have expected:
One rational voice is dumb; over a grave
The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved.
Sad is Eros, builder of cities,
And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
His very early poems, included in The English Auden, skirt around themes that he was never able to address directly. The obscurity of those early poems is an eloquent and fascinating form of encodement. In 1930 he said in a letter to a friend, “Never write from your head, write from your cock.” This is the man rather than the poet speaking, a gap that never closes. He masked the origins of his verse, his different desire, his libidinal priorities. He refused in later years to let his poems appear in gay anthologies. Thus to his main audience he remained a high priest, to his friends an impossible and wonderful queen. He needed Freud; but so too did his poetry.
Clive James writes, “The need to find an expression for his homosexuality was the first technical obstacle to check the torrential course of Auden’s unprecedented facility. A born master of directness was obliged straightaway to find a language for indirection, thus becoming immediately involved with the drama that was to continue for the rest of his life—a drama in which the living presence of technique is the antagonist.” A poet of the particular, of the material world, he could not finally, for political and temperamental reasons, particularize or politicize a key concern. Many of the poems answer to a gay reading, indeed seem to answer only to a gay reading, yet their desire, their occasion, is densely encoded in them. In each case a reader is free to say, “but perhaps he meant,” and this is the freedom he wanted us to have. Eliot speaks of “impersonality,” but Auden, informal and at your elbow, discloses less in his most seemingly candid poem than Eliot does in The Waste Land, in which he makes no bones about desire.
Auden’s politics were “genitally coloured”: class, cross tribal attractions; public school structures, repressions, passions—these remained most real to him. He had ascended from mini- to macro-logic; hero worship, subjugation, desire and its concealment: these are a big part of Auden, unstated but implied. He became his own case study; he resists affirmation because he will not accept the moral rightness of what he is. He accepts that he is but will not say it is right. This might steer us to the center of his work, his chief instrument of withholding and disclosure, that great English tool of obliquity: irony. What sort of irony? Stylistic, creating a didactic distance between the saying and the thing said.
I suspect that without some undertones of the comic,
genuine serious verse cannot be written today.
The first line of Auden’s aphorism is not a problem, but it sets the scene for the second line, which gives pause: “genuine serious verse cannot be written today.” What does he mean by genuine, what by serious? His “today” is the postwar, to which most of his American poetry belongs. Is he writing off a range of writers still active, and not noted for comedy, even undertonally: Eliot and Pound for starters, David Jones, Hugh MacDiarmid, H.D., Robert Graves and Laura Riding?
It may be true of his immediate, disillusioned generation: MacNeice, Spender, Betjeman, Roy Fuller are ironists in one way or another. But the next generation—Dylan Thomas, George Barker, C. H. Sisson, R. S. Thomas, Keith Douglas, W. S. Graham—are they preempted by his “rule”? He is a great one for rules.
His generation was disillusioned because it had had illusions. A Marxizing generation in its youth, in love with the Soviet experiment, championing from its point of privilege the English proletariat, supporting the Republican cause in Spain, believing in the possibility of social transformation: many were members of the Communist party and partook like believers of its dialectical sacraments. The pact between Stalin and Hitler was their road to Damascus, if the Communist subversion of the Republican cause in Spain had not been. They had to take measure of error, their intellectual error, or (a few of them) to think themselves into a deeper Stalinism. In Auden’s case penance went to extraordinary lengths. He rewrote poems and then discarded them and refused to let them be reproduced. His sense of truth was stronger—as far as the 1930s poems are concerned—than his sense of poetry.
He helps us draw a distinction between proper and improper liberties that poets take to control their work. “The Platonic Blow” is a poem that, printed piratically from time to time, is described as “generally attributed to W. H. Auden.” If he wrote this piece of compelling homosexual pornography (he never denied it), he did not intend it for general consumption but for the amusement of close friends. A writer should be free to write privately in this way. If those friends are less intimate than he imagines, or less careful, and the work escapes, it then belongs to the “secret record,” along with letters, diaries and other bits and pieces that biographers eagerly stumble upon, and becomes (our good fortune) a part of the “parallel record.”
The case is different with “Spain 1937.” Auden in middle life, repelled by phrases and the cold delineation of its subject (“wicked doctrine,” he called it), refused to allow it to be reprinted in the Collected Shorter Poems, though it was one of his most celebrated pieces. He revised it substantially in 1939, even before George Orwell’s objections to it in Inside the Whale. But it still stuck in his moral craw. Revision could not make it palatable to the new Auden, who was by now rather old. He censored it along with other poems that he famously declared were “dishonest, or bad-mannered, or boring.” (He never censored the appalling ballad “Miss Gee” or “Victor,” both effective and bad-mannered.) “Spain 1937” could not be printed or quoted by critics. This gave the poem celebrity and cast a parodic light on the carpet-slippered poet. The lines that repelled him were about justifiable murder in the service of a cause, and from the end of the poem the lines in which, a good Marxist, he deifies history, making it into an Old Testament god.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.
He crossed the lines out in Cyril Connolly’s copy of the poem in the 1950s, scribbling in the margin, “This is a lie.” The poem has been restored to the record, and in The English Auden we are given access to the 1937 and the 1939 versions. But for many years it was hard to get hold of.
In 1936 he wrote his celebrated Letter to Lord Byron. In Part III, as if talking about his own critical reception and the fatuity of critics in general, he addresses Byron, using his demanding stanza form, a way of paying tribute and saying to readers that he can stand beside even a great nineteenth-century poet and master Byronic irony, an instrument for extracting and focusing the satanic instinct:
By all means let us touch our humble caps to
La poésie pure, the epic narrative;
But comedy shall get its round of claps, too.
According to his powers, each may give;
Only on varied diet can we live.
The pious fable and the dirty story
Share in the total literary glory.
There’s every mode of singing robe in stock
From Shakespeare’s gorgeous fur coat, Spenser’s muff,
Or Dryden’s lounge suit to my cotton frock,
And Wordsworth’s Harris tweed with leathern cuff.
Firbank, I think, wore just a just-enough;
I fancy Whitman in a reach-me-down,
But you, like Sherlock, in a dressing-gown.
Later in the poem, he says
“I hate a pupil-teacher,” Milton said,
Who also hated bureaucratic fools;
Milton may thank his stars that he is dead,
Although he’s learnt by heart in public schools,
Along with Wordsworth and the list of rules;
For many a don while looking down his nose
Calls Pope and Dryden classics of our prose.
In Part IV he pays a compliment that does not ring quite true: T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber was his publisher, as he was MacNeice’s and Spender’s.
But Eliot spoke the still unspoken word;
For gasworks and dried tubers I forsook
The clock at Grantchester, the English rook.
Yet, early and late, what marks Auden is a refusal to conform, to come down from his linguistic and cultural perch, to “trim.” “What is a highbrow?” he asks in an early piece. “Someone who is not passive to his experience but who tries to organise, explain and alter it, someone in fact, who tries to influence his history: a man struggling for life in the water is for the time being a highbrow. The decisive factor is a conflict between the person and his environment; most of the people who are usually called highbrows had either an unhappy childhood and adolescence or suffer from physical defects.” True or not, implicit in such vigorous “eccentric” views is the nonconforming Auden who fell out with the causes he espoused not only because they were compromised, but because they seemed to exalt coarseness and in the end had no space for the kinds of excellence he valued.
What Arnold in Essays in Criticism says of the poets of the first part of the nineteenth century might be applied to the poets of the English 1930s. Perhaps Auden and Spender would have agreed. Arnold speaks of the great energy of the period, but it went off prematurely: “And this prematureness comes from its having proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient material to work with. In other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and variety.” Arnold’s verdict applies to Auden’s early poetry, which is his most compelling. He had the self-awareness and skill to reinvent himself in a different land. There is a continuity of technique, manner and tone between the earlier and later Auden; but also an entirely different thematics. “Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral choice.” Poetry is still instrumental; and that “rational” is there, virtually synonymous with “moral.” The word “rational” subverts him every time.
New Year Letter (1941) is his first American collection. Several further notable collections followed. Auden kept busy, dividing his life between America and Austria, between Austria and Oxford, adjudicating, editing, translating, eating and drinking. He gave numerous public readings, usually reciting his poems (amazingly) from memory and, when he forgot a line, coughing into the microphone. He acted doddery long before he had a right to, settling a little complacently into his fame. His best account of himself, candid and precise, is “Prologue at Sixty,” a remarkable technical achievement. His ethic of “honesty” is finally subjective and self-forgiving. Irony eases him out of many a crucial paradox.
In 1971 Auden published A Certain World, his “commonplace book” of favorite excerpts, and it tells us a great deal about where he had got to. The entries on “Commitment” make his early admirers despair. There are several entries for hell, none for heaven; many for war, none for peace; many for sin, none for virtue. The devil has all the best tunes. He is a great elegist—of Freud, Yeats, and others—but also of himself. Edgell Rickword characterized his change: “apostate humanitarian.”
“He had become a reader rather than a writer,” Larkin says; “literature was replacing experience as material for his verse.” In his later years advocacy became one of his great services: he discovered new writers and criticized their work, befriended them and to some extent lived through them. He was interested in translation and memorably championed the work of Joseph Brodsky, helping to extract him from the Soviet Union. His sense of the divided world persisted, and he did what he could for writers behind the Iron Curtain. He acknowledged his early debts, to Hardy, Edward Thomas, Eliot, Empson and Owen; and his later debts to Marianne Moore, Laura Riding and others. He learned from the poets of the New York School, as they had learned from him. Until 1939 he was the guiding light of British poetry; until his death in 1973 he was one of the guiding lights of American metropolitan poetry, one of the pricks against which the rural, provincial and radically experimental writers were content to kick. In 1972 he published Epistle to a Godson and it includes a poem called “A New Year Greeting,” which exemplifies the quality of the later Auden, fusing many serious themes with a Swiftean humor. His body is at the center of the poem, a planet on which nations of bacteria live and breed. He considers their natural calamities when he bathes, dresses and undresses, and foretells the crisis they face when he dies. It is an expertly made secondary world:
Then, sooner or later, will dawn
a day of Apocalypse,
when my mantle suddenly turns
too cold, too rancid for you,
appetising to predators
of a fiercer sort, and I
am stripped of excuse and nimbus,
a Past, subject to Judgment.
Auden: great poet or great representative poet? A poet or a “classic of our prose”? He overshadows the poets of his generation. He is Chaucer to the Gower of Betjeman and the Langland of MacNeice.
John Betjeman was a year older than Auden. They coincided at Oxford in all sorts of ways, but Auden was setting off for the world while Betjeman was setting off for England. He was to develop in Britain (over time) a larger and more durable popular readership than Auden’s: his 1958 Collected Poems was a runaway best-seller, published by Murray, who had experienced, a century and a quarter earlier, the runaway success of Byron’s verse. But his work does not export as well as Auden’s. He had a decisive political impact: his television programs describing the imperiled architectural treasures of the island, and raising awareness of heritage, adjusted attitudes to the past and present.
Though he is formally conventional, his verse is almost always recognizably his. It’s more than the recurrent allusions to North Oxford, churches, suburbia and gym-slips. Landscape is evoked in terms of comfort, there is throughout a nice sense of class and propriety. In “Love in a Valley” there is no Lawrentian nakedness. The word “homestead” appears twice, there’s “woodland,” a “lieutenant,” the statutory “tennis-court,” cushioned rhododendrons, “summer-house,” “welcome”; we hear “the tiny patter, sandalled footsteps.” The poem breathes a static well-being. The satires are less accommodating but they too have his hallmark. It is a matter of irony and tone as well as detail. And the rhythm in couplets, quatrains and blank verse is lightly controlled. Vulgarity is chastised, traditional values are celebrated. There is a lot of humor, some of it dark, but lightly administered. This is light verse of a high order, and light verse need not be unserious. It is written to entertain, like the plays of Shakespeare.
I SIT DOWN
In St Botolph Bishopsgate Churchyard
And wait for the spirit of my grandfather
Toddling along from the Barbican.
Silly? Perhaps, but it is hard not to read on. He creates a mild suspense in narrative and rhythm, a curiosity that we follow through. The elegies and poems like “Before the Anaesthetic” show another poet, terrified of death, lonely, hungry like Hardy for religious faith and sometimes believing he has got it. But he never expresses a cogent metaphysic. He takes Anglicanism as it comes. He abhors death and he abhors the destruction of beautiful things, old habits of courtesy, old buildings, the Downs, poetic discipline. Satire is as much his duty as elegy and celebration. “Come friendly bombs, and fall on Slough.”
A sense of place (“a topographical predilection”) is conveyed in each poem (he knew all of England and parts of Ireland very well). In the love poems he sends up the speaker whose feelings of physical inferiority translate his substantial women into Amazons. “Little, alas, to you I mean, / For I am bald, and old, and green.” He wants to be crushed in smooth strong arms or pressed like a tennis racket to a glowing bosom. “Pam, I adore you, you great big mountainous sportsgirl,” he declares in “Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden.” Going down market from Surrey to “The Licorice Fields of Pontefract” he writes:
Red hair she had and golden skin,
Her sulky lips were shaped for sin,
Her sturdy legs were flannel-slack’d,
The strongest legs in Pontefract.
The poet is “held in brown arms strong and bare / And wound with flaming ropes of hair.” Rossetti’s muscular graces have nothing on Betjeman’s girls. With great economy Betjeman evokes them, evokes whole scenes and the society and value systems that underpin them. In 1969 he was knighted and in 1973 he became poet laureate, a post he merited. He replied generously, by hand, to every poem a member of the public sent him. He died in 1984.
Louis MacNeice was a friend of Betjeman’s at Marlborough School, where among their contemporaries were Bernard Spencer and the art historian and spy Anthony Blunt. Betjeman failed his divinity exams at Oxford, where he found his tutor, C. S. Lewis, obstructive and unsympathetic. He bitterly dropped out while MacNeice stayed and distinguished himself as a scholar and classicist, becoming an important translator of the Greek and German classics (his is one of the few compelling translations of Goethe).
The American poet Conrad Aiken admired him: “For sheer readability, for speed, lightness, and easy intellectual range [the verse] is in a class by itself.” But—there is always a “but” with Aiken—the poetry doesn’t stick, “it is too topical, too transitory, too reportorial” and (a wonderful phrase) “it has very little residual magic.” If the residual magic of poetry were the durable relevance of subject matter, Aiken would be right. Residual magic is, however, in rhythm, and in this respect MacNeice is better endowed even than Auden, as readers of “Happy Families,” “The Hebrides,” “Troll’s Courtship,” “Neutrality,” “The Accident,” and the more obvious of his rhythmic tours de force can prove. Aiken may mistake subject matter for subject, something that critics close to their subjects tend to do.
MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907. His father was a Church of Ireland clergyman who later became a bishop. MacNeice acknowledged the impact of his Ulster background on the formation of his imagination, and Ireland could always rouse him to satire. Nostalgia and passion, the nature of his father’s work, which set the boy apart, his mother’s early death, his shyness, clumsiness, social ineptness, late puberty, were ineradicable elements in his past. Oxford was a release. Unlike Auden, Spender and Day-Lewis, MacNeice was not attracted to communism. From Oxford he went on to teach classics at Birmingham, Greek at the University of London, and then to the BBC, where he was a feature writer and producer. He wrote radio plays that suggested new possibilities for drama in that most exacting medium.
Temperamentally he was engaged by facts rather than programs; solving orthodoxies made no sense to him. Auden moved across the political spectrum, but MacNeice stayed politically “between,” not passionately, like George Orwell, but quizzically. “Between” is a favorite word and stance in the early poems, different from Auden’s connective “between.” In MacNeice it signifies suspension: “In a between world, a world of amber” one poem begins. In “Epitaph for Liberal Poets” it is clear that he is not even able to conform to liberal humanism. He acknowledges the approach of the “tight-lipped technocratic Conquistadors”; his stance is Mark Antony’s, lamenting in acceptance the inevitable triumph of Caesar, hoping the poems will survive to thaw out in another age.
Riddles and nursery rhymes attracted him early on. And hymns. Later, the sagas, medieval allegory and the Horatian odes. He chooses two different styles, one vivid, documentary, engagingly particular and linguistically inventive, the other argumentative and analytical. The poet he sees, like the broadcaster and journalist, as an extension of the common man, engaging his problems, renewing his language, but not necessarily offering answers. He is unusual in accepting the challenge of creating a journalistic poetry that is poetry, yet there is a reticence about the poems: it’s never quite clear how committed he is to what he says. He is autobiographical at times but not confessional. Presenting his past in various forms—in the extended Autumn Journal, the transitional poem that follows the public events of Autumn 1939 and connects them with a personal world; in the disastrous Autumn Sequel; in “Carickfergus” and many late poems—he uses it to recreate and generalize but not to analyze himself. A Hardyesque sense of individual isolation recurs, with images of glass barriers, shells, crusts, the journey of separation. The “I” is no more continuous or consistent for him than it is for Eliot. Early on he weds himself to the “I” of the moment, and later in life, in “The Cromlech,” he affirmed his governing conviction: that the fact of the moment (being in love, for instance) is in its time and space as true and durable a fact, even if it changes later, as “The cromlech in the clover field.” His aesthetic is rooted in this relativistic conviction:
For essence is not merely core
And each event implies the world,
A centre needs periphery.
Attention to the periphery may help in determining the location of the center. And this tendency is present even in his earliest poems, “Train to Dublin,” for example:
All over the world people are toasting the King,
Red lozenges of light as each one lifts his glass,
But I will not give you any idol or idea, creed or king,
I give you the incidental things which pass
Outward through space exactly as each was.
The second line recalls the more concentrated image, “The moment cradled like a brandy glass.” The moment, not the connection between moments and things. The dialogue poem and eclogue, where voices and impulses are balanced and unresolved, were natural forms for him to choose. Indecision is powerful, and in the first half of the 1930s it produced some of his best poems, “Snow” and “The Hebrides” among them. The syntax unfolds unexpectedly, like the landscape.
On those islands
Where no train runs on rails and the tyrant time
Has no clock-towers to signal people to doom
With semaphore ultimatums tick by tick,
There is still peace but not for me and not
Perhaps for long—still peace on the bevel hills
For those who still can live as their fathers lived
On those islands.
These are the clichés critics object to, reenergized in their contexts; this is a language like Auden’s but subtly different, a language not authoritatively set down but winding out like the guy-line strand of a web uncertain what it will attach to or whether it will hold. “Bagpipe Music,” “Les neiges d’antan” and “Dans Macabre” each deploy a quite different kind of rhetoric, each works out from a different source, but the verse is seldom finger-waggingly didactic. It is experiential, with the sudden changes of tone and of key, which take us deep into feeling, a sense of the inviolability of individual isolation. Yeats can breach the isolation by love; MacNeice, who borrows certain energies from Yeats, cannot. “Prayer Before Birth” was written in 1944, in a spondaic-seeming evenness of rhythm, with a thematic burden bleaker than any he had expressed before.
After 1948 MacNeice went for answers in his poetry. Answers had to be contrived, and the poetry suffers from contrivance. What had been measured skill becomes facility; the poetry becomes, as Auden’s later poetry does, “literary,” in Larkin’s damning sense. It tries too hard, it moves off from the particulars of lived experience.
The middle stretch
Of life is bad for poets; a sombre view
Where neither works nor days look innocent
And both seem now too many, now too few.
Autumn Sequel is an exemplary failure. He deploys terza rima and the verse flows and flows without resistance. Even John Drinkwater would have avoided lines like “But in a game, as in life, we are under Starter’s Orders.” MacNeice knew it didn’t work and in his last books reverted to his earlier manner, the heartbreaking whimsy, the “between” world now complicated by advancing years. In “House on a Cliff” he moves away from “between” and surrenders to paradox, the drama worked out in the images—a poem that had its impact on the poets of the Movement and on Ted Hughes:
Indoors the tang of a tiny oil lamp. Outdoors
The winking signal on the waste of sea.
Indoors the sound of the wind. Outdoors the wind.
Indoors the locked heart and the lost key.
He died in 1963—of pneumonia, which he contracted recording a radio program in a damp cave. His admirers hardly expected that what we now read as late poems were to be his last (he himself thought he had reached only the midpoint—or just beyond). In them his poetic recovery is complete: “Dark Age Glosses,” “Vistas,” “The Wiper,” “Selva Oscura” are direct, spoken. And the cluster of poems that includes “After the Crash,” “Charm” and “The Introduction” shows the direction in which he might have gone—toward that evanescent truth, the core of the “residual magic.”
Young poets might learn more from MacNeice than from Auden: he is the Kavanagh to Auden’s Clarke. But in this instance it is the deliberate formal master, not the popular voice, who has the eloquent progeny, though writers in Northern Ireland reclaim MacNeice—some of them too passionately and improbably—and group him with his contemporaries John Hewitt and W. R. Rodgers as a progenitor of the Ulster school.
When I first came to Britain in the late 1960s, the best-known Irish poet of the newer generation was Thomas Kinsella, whose volume Nightwalker and Other Poems (1968) was widely admired, if not understood. In 1972 Butcher’s Dozen: A Lesson for the Octave of Widgery appeared, a response to Bloody Sunday (the killings in Derry by British troops) and to the Widgery Inquiry, which tried to settle the matter. The far from conciliatory poem—eighteenth-century in its mode—began Kinsella’s gradual eclipse in Britain. Besides, Seamus Heaney, a poet from the north of Ireland, had emerged in 1965 and was gathering momentum; his verse was less taxing than Kinsella’s, he dealt more tactfully with explosive issues.
Kinsella knew his Auden well when he began his writing career. Even the poems he wrote in the 1950s, when in some ways he resembled the poets of the English Movement, were enlarged by his understanding of the ambitious forms and themes of the by-now American poet. It was never a question of imitation, rather of transposition. Besides, it was not only Auden who informed his work. Kinsella is an Irish poet through and through. His translations from the Irish tradition are celebrated as our chief access to an enormous, and for many years suppressed, resource. Ireland for him implies Swift and Goldsmith, Mangan, Davis and Fergusson, and preeminently Yeats. “There is an excess of performance in the earliest poems of William Butler Yeats,” he writes, “a special narrative tone, with a dominant verbal melody. He quickly found a more direct poetic speech; always retaining the special tone, but giving sensual access to the facts and matching ‘music’ organically to content.”
Kinsella swims naturally against tides of fashion. He does not go in fear of abstractions, he gives them body and valency. He is also alive to place, to character and voice, to direct and oblique narrative. Like early Auden, but in quite a different world, and like Yeats in an equally separate realm, he is alive to politics. It is not strange that he is less read than John Montague, perhaps than Richard Murphy and others of his contemporaries: he makes larger demands of himself and consequently of his reader, in ways similar to Austin Clarke.
Donald Davie quotes “The Laundress,” a relatively early poem, to demonstrate the elegance of his early lyrics:
Her chair drawn to the door,
A basket at her feet,
She sat against the sun
And stitched a linen sheet.
Over harrowed Flanders
August moved the wheat.
Poplars sharing the wind
With Saxony and France
Dreamed at her gate,
Soared in a summer trance.
A cluck on the cobbled yard:
A shadow changed its stance.
“Soared in a summer trance” is Yeatsian. But there is something other, an ease in making connection between the particular and the historical, a tremendous precision and thrift of image, an impersonality. Such verse puts much of early Larkin, apart from “MCMXIV,” in perspective. There is also in these early poems a coarse vigor that did not appeal to the poets of the Movement but spoke instead to the writers who were emerging after them.
Kinsella moved on to allegory (or “emblematic” or “heraldic” verse, Davie suggests) in Nightwalker; and he had begun to read Ezra Pound. Audenesque habits of eloquent closure are fused with a prosody learned from Pound, making the mature poems of Thomas Kinsella some of the most remarkable, though still neglected, in modern English-language poetry.
Born in 1928 in modest circumstances in Dublin, Kinsella like Clarke is not a child of the fields or the suburbs but of the city. He abandoned a science degree at University College, Dublin, and was a civil servant until 1965. He became a professor at universities in the United States, a director of the Cuala and Dolmen presses, and founded his own Peppercanister Press, through which his poems and sequences are first published, before they are gathered together and issued commercially in longer volumes. The Peppercanister books build together toward a major single work, and we are put in mind, though Kinsella does not invite us to do so, of Pound’s Cantos. The patterns we begin to discern and the geographies that build and build on Dublin in its different phases are difficult and fascinating. The poems are a gathering together, with history, personal candor, polemic, argument: a fusion of styles from strong and continuous recollections of eighteenth-century satire (the architecture of Dublin) to free and metered verse.
Kinsella describes a Dual Tradition in Irish literature, attempting to bring back fully into play the Irish linguistic tradition and the poets of Ireland neglected during the centuries of English rule. Austin Clarke is a linchpin in his argument. It is not a nationalist argument but something more fundamental, about recoveries of voice and resource that will speak more deeply to Irish writers than the off-the-peg forms and strategies of international modernism, postmodernism and antimodernism. The liberating resources are not only Irish. Pound teaches us to discern our own voice through the static of convention, just as Proust helps us to uncover the lineaments of our own biographies as he traces the miasmic ebb and flow of Marcel’s. The task is to recover rather than invent a language, to live rather than exist a life.
Better is an handful with quietness
than both hands full
with travail and vexation of spirit.
Better to leave now, and no more of this loving upset,
hate staining the door-jamb from a head possessed
—all things settled sour in their place,
my blind fingers forsaking your face.
Yet worst is the fool that foldeth his hands
and eateth his own flesh.
Twenty-one years Kinsella’s junior, and much more narrowly a disciple of Auden, James Fenton emerged as an undergraduate at Oxford as a potentially formidable poet, winning the Newdigate Prize with a sonnet sequence plus haikus called Our Western Furniture, about the opening of Japan to the West. It was a prescient poem since Fenton was to become a journalist, the last Western reporter to leave Saigon after it fell to the Viet Cong, a lively reporter from Cambodia, Korea, the Philippines (from which, when he lived there, he published his Manila Envelope, an A-4 envelope full of poems on cards, posters and foldouts).
Born in Lincoln in 1949, Fenton emerged from a background that was emphatically English: Church of England, Repton School, Magdalen College, Oxford, to read psychology and philosophy (friend of John Fuller, son of the poet Roy Fuller and himself a poet and interpreter of Auden). His first book, Terminal Moraine (1972), suggested a geological time scale in keeping with Auden’s. It is full of formal experiment and invention. His restlessness translated into journalistic action.
From Auden, whom he admired along with Marianne Moore, Roy Fuller, Wallace Stevens (briefly to the point of idolatry) and (at the time) John Ashbery, he learned about the delights of form and formal invention; he also found out how to combine adjectives with abstract nouns to give valency to general ideas, and how to recite his poems from memory in public. This tells us something about the nature of his poems: they are either metrical or highly rhythmical with built-in mnemonics. That helps make them popular.
At Oxford he was a radical, but he did not put his poems to the service of the Cowley workers. He preferred to march and distribute leaflets, and to write his poems elsewhere, to engage his whole mind. He became a theater critic, then a foreign correspondent. In A German Requiem (1981) he made a major poem, the first to come out of my generation of British poets, from the postwar German experience of forgetting and remembering selectively. The poem, in part based on his reports from Germany, is in a kind of free verse, sparing in metaphor, powerfully repetitive, to which he has never returned. His next large-scale poem, “Children of Exile,” in alternating metrical and free-verse lines, explored the condition of Vietnamese children adopted by Americans living in Italy, a complex political and human drama that he treats with tact and a degree of sentimentality. He returned to England, was elected professor of poetry at Oxford, publishing a further collection in which he plays, with skill, to the gallery: songs, wry social comment, AIDS elegies, love poems. “The Ballad of the Imam” reveals the virtues and the limitations of his specifically public voice. The puzzling candor—if it was candor—of poems like “Nest of Vampires” and “A Staffordshire Murderer,” the broad and subtle wit of “The Skip” and “The Kingfisher’s Boxing Gloves,” give way to something thinner, more balladic and accessible. He remains in posse the most substantive poet of my generation, not because he has subject matter but because he has natural skills. He has a developed sense of audience, which now seems—as it did not when he composed A German Requiem—stronger than his sense of subject. His is a journey back, from remote lands to England, from the temptation of modernism to something alarmingly close to New Formalism.