YVOR WINTERS, ELIZABETH DARYUSH, WENDY COPE, DONALD DAVIE, THOM GUNN
People who don’t read modern poetry will tell you that they like rhyme and meter and modern poetry has abandoned both. “It’s just chopped-up prose” or “It doesn’t sing.” In recent years, when the great and the good are asked to select poems, for the most part they turn to formal verse—what they remember from school. New Formalist polemic depends on this prejudice: traditional forms are embattled against the forces of unmetered modernism. In fact, though modernism and the postmodern have generated more critical and theoretical debate than “received” forms in recent times, it is they that have to justify themselves again and again, in practice and theory. And so they should, whether they intend to “make it new” or “make it real.” Received forms should be understood afresh too, each time they are used. “I think a sonnet, for example, isn’t fourteen lines that rhyme,” says Seamus Heaney. “A sonnet is muscles and enjambements and eight and six, and it’s got a waist and a middle—it is a form. In a lot of the writing that’s going the rounds in the United States”—and throughout the English-speaking world—“there’s a lot of talk about return to form—there are indeed fourteen lines [in a sonnet] and there are indeed rhyme words at the end, but the actual movement of the stanza, the movement of the sonnet isn’t there. I would make a distinction between form which is an act of living principle, and shape which is discernible on the page, but inaudible, and kinetically, muscularly, unavailable. Poetry is a muscular response.”
As a young man, Yvor Winters understood the “living principle” of unmetered verse, then apprehended on the quick the perils it implied for him and found the “living principle” in accentual-syllabic or metered verse. In “Time and the Garden,” written in his formal maturity, he hankers after the large gesture, the Lawrentian moment, a pressure which he resists:
And this is like that other restlessness
To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,
One which the tougher poets have discerned—
Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labour, which no men retract.
The poet earns the poem, not only from language but from life. For Winters there is no poetic license, no given right. In this respect he is among the most self-demanding of the modernists. His reputation is as a strict and conservative critic and poet, most of the poems composed after 1930 being in accentual-syllabic form.
It may be useful to sketch four different kinds of formal choice a poet can make, either deliberately or intuitively, in relation to a subject. Accentual verse will have a regular number of stressed or accented syllables in a line, with a variable number of unaccented syllables. Much of the verse of Hopkins is accentual, as is the dominant mode in Eliot, Hughes and others. Syllabic verse is a product of this century, a device for eluding the tyranny of the iambic foot. The poet elects a stanza form in which equivalent lines stanza by stanza have the same number of syllables but an insistently variable number and positioning of accents. At its best the form rhymes, but it rhymes an accented with an unaccented syllable (so that rhyme, too, is “pushed back” and its emphases muted) or slant rhyme is chosen. This form was invented in the same year, unbeknownst to one another, by Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Daryush. It is used by Auden, Roy Fuller, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn and others as a way out of what has been, historically, the dominant mode in English verse since the great success of Gower and Chaucer in the fourteenth century, accentual-syllabic verse, in which lines have a predetermined number of syllables and a predetermined number of accents, usually deployed in a repetitive pattern, with appropriate variations. Finally, there is what we have called vers libre or free verse, a mode that Donald Davie prefers to call unmetered verse on the grounds that the word “free” has political and aesthetic implications quite inappropriate to this, the most difficult poetic mode to “earn.” A poet who abandons syllabic and accentual regularity must create linguistic patterning in some other way: lineation, and that most subtle and treacherous poetic resource, enjambement, are chief instruments, but also patterning and pacing of syntax. Unmetered verse serves the poet who writes close to the subject, whose intention is to mime the very process that a poem enacts.
Winters was a teacher and his instruction was, like Leavis’s, corrective; but unlike Leavis’s, the secular moralist, his main concern is poetry and the dynamic of his criticism is creative: he is inward with the process, as it were. In “On Teaching the Young” he writes:
The young are quick of speech.
Grown middle-aged, I teach
Corrosion and distrust.
Hostile to Romanticism and to “excess,” he favors a spoken poetry, logical in development and structure, though that logic is not the linear logic of prose. He rejects “pseudo-reference” and “nuance” and has no truck with what he calls the “fallacy of imitative form.” Within the work of Eliot, Stevens, Williams or Moore he discriminates sharply between the poems that work at a formal and moral level and those that blur, that reach too far or sell themselves short.
Born in 1900 in Chicago, Winters moved with his family to California in 1904. He returned to study in Chicago but withdrew after a year, suffering from tuberculosis. He received his MA from the University of Colorado. In 1926 he married the novelist Janet Lewis and moved to Stanford, California, where he was a graduate student and later professor of English, a post he held until his death in 1968. The titles of his illuminating and provocative critical books alert us to his priorities: In Defense of Reason (1947) incorporated Primitivism and Decadence, Maule’s Curse and Anatomy of Nonsense and includes important essays on fiction and poetry; then came The Function of Criticism (1957) and Forms of Discovery (1968). His Collected Poems appeared in 1958 and 1960, with a definitive version published in 1978, incorporating his early work, which he disowned, and his later formal poems.
The early poems reveal how close he was at the outset to Williams, how he appreciated Pound and was alert to the writings of Moore, Loy and other modern writers on the East Coast. He is an Imagist arriving late at the feast, an Imagist with tendencies toward a kind of expressionism; the image put under severe pressure by his experiences as a teacher in remote villages in New Mexico, his solitude and other tensions. He insists, however, “My shift from the methods of those early poems to the methods of my later was not a shift from formlessness to form; it was a shift from certain kinds of form to others... Form is something that one perceives or does not perceive; theory in itself is insufficient.” His unmetered poems “are rhythmical, not merely from line to line, but in total movement from beginning to end, and... the relations between the meanings of the parts is an element in the rhythm, along with the sound.” He moved on because he felt restricted: abstract categories, moral reflection, intellectual exploration, seemed to be excluded from his strained Imagist manner. And his contemporaries—Stevens in particular—were doing things he wanted to do, in a different way, on a different scale.
The early poems may have rhythm, but they do not move very much in either sense, perhaps because the images are strange and too pared back; the “I” speaks but will not let us know him, the voice is cold. His move to accentual-syllabic forms was as experimental as his earlier choice of Imagism. He was looking for a more complex form of discovery. In the later poems it is the syntax that moves us, a syntax that is patterned in terms of accent and syllable but earns a degree of freedom and variation in its assiduous balance. How much can a poet say and mean responsibly? Just so much, he seems to answer, biting the poem off with an irony or a reversal if it goes beyond its proper measure. A poem risks not only incoherence but evil, and “The basis of Evil is an emotion,” while “Good rests in the power of rational selection in action.” Emotion must be “eliminated, and, in so far as it cannot be eliminated, understood.” In a sonnet like “The Realisation” he sets himself the hardest of tasks:
Death. Nothing is simpler. One is dead.
The set face now will fade out; the bare fact,
Related movement, regular, intact,
Is reabsorbed, the clay is on the bed.
The soul is mortal, nothing: the dim head
On the dim pillow, less. But thought clings flat
To this, since it can never follow that
Where no precision of the mind is bred.
Nothing to think of between you and All!
Screaming processionals of infinite
Logic are grinding down receding cold!
O fool! Madness again! Turn not, for it
Lurks in each paintless cranny, and you sprawl
Blurring a definition. Quick! You are old.
Mannered, rather archaizing, rather Jonsonian? No: wrested, candid, the poem does not console so much as clarify. This is a harsh discipline which poets as different in temperament as J. V. Cunningham and Edgar Bowers, his first generation of students, accepted. The best minds of his generation, Eliot and Pound and others, he believed, let their ideas go slippery with emotion. The challenge he set himself was to understand and then control: poetry as the instrument of stoicism, the language that restores balance.
Many of his mature poems are short and aphoristic. The best, including “Time and the Garden,” “The Slow Pacific Swell” and “The California Oaks,” deploy abstractions with a harsh precision—harsh in what they exclude. Is “On a View of Pasadena from the Hills” a kind of answer to Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West”? Stevens’s poem moves into night, Winters’s from dawn into the day.
Three poets have made substantial claims for Elizabeth Daryush: Winters, Roy Fuller and Donald Davie. Others are bemused. Winters refers to her as “one of the few distinguished poets of our century and a poet who can take her place without apology in the company of Campion and Herrick.” Fuller describes her as “a pioneer technical innovator, whose work demands study by poets and readers on this account alone. Further... she is a poet of the highest dedication and seriousness.” The poems “grapple with life’s intensest issues.” With such testimonials, we turn to Daryush’s tight and slender oeuvre and wonder if we have come to the wrong party. The poems strike us as conventional in diction, in tight (usually rhymed) form. But the challenge they offer is “from the inside”: they compel a reconsideration of prosody. It is only when we get to Geoffrey Hill that we encounter a comparable scrupulousness, and again he works from within the tradition.
Daryush was born in 1887. Her father, Robert Bridges, was later poet laureate and one of the outstanding prosodists in the English tradition, though now even less read than she is. Her first home was in the Berkshire village of Yattenden, and most of her early life was spent in rural Berkshire. In 1907 her father built Chilswell House, Boar’s Hill, Oxford, where she lived until her marriage in 1923. With her father and mother (daughter of the great Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse) she maintained a continual dialogue about poetry and poetics. She disagreed with her father’s theories, and disagreements extended to his apprehension of meter and syllabic verse, as well as her own. Milton, she told me, was an especial bone of contention; her attention to Milton had a marked impact on her later innovations.
In 1923 she married a Persian and moved to Persia, where she lived for four years. She studied Persian poetry and produced a fine syllabic “translation,” or imitation, of Jalàl ad Din Rùmi in “I am your mother, your mother’s mother.” After her return to Britain she moved in 1929 to Stockwell, Boar’s Hill, near her father’s house, where she lived until her death in 1977. All of her collections of verse, apart from three early volumes, which she suppressed, were written at Stockwell.
She wrote poems on three rhythmic models: accentual-syllabic, accentual and syllabic. Her experiments in the latter modes are radical. Her accentual verse is in effect “sprung rhythm” in the manner of Hopkins, her father’s friend; and she imitates the actual form of Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland” in her most ambitious poem, “Air and Variations,” written over many years. She asked me to transcribe it from her manuscript in 1970. She was virtually blind and wrote in a wide felt-tip pen on lined paper in large letters. When the poem was typeset, she read the proofs with the aid of a strong magnifying glass.
It was surprising to see her using Hopkins’s meter but not his dense diction nor his assonance. The rhapsodic form does not trick her into rhapsody: there is a phrased pacing as in her tautest lyric poems. “Air and Variations” is constructed on a mathematical and logical progression, which she explained to me without effecting comprehension on my part. A stanza will illustrate the technique, especially in the dramatic line endings, which underpin image content and the argument:
I said: I have seen
The wall of a mountainous wave
Foam into spheres, then sink through green
Of fields to a human grave;
I have followed a sky-filled river, whose flickering throe
Leapt from its actual nodes, to a moon-tide gave
Its might... nor forward urged nor backward formed that flow.
Each was the older twin...
The logic of line indentation is simple. In accentual poems, lines with most accents are ranged farthest left; in syllabic poems, those with most syllables are ranged farthest left. Shorter lines are indented correspondingly.
In syllabic verse, the predetermined number of syllables is usually odd, since an even number is more likely to fall into iambics. In 1934 she published a classic definition of syllabic writing: “Metres governed only by the number of syllables to the line, and in which the number and position of stresses may be varied at will.” She should have said “must be varied.” Her syllabic verse is printed without capital letters at the beginnings of lines “as a reminder to the reader to follow strictly the natural speech-rhythms, and not to look for stresses where none are intended.” She adds, “I have long thought that on some such system as this for a base, it should be possible to build up subtler and more freely-followed accentual patterns than can be obtained either by stress-verse proper, or by the traditional so-called syllabic metres. The bulk of English ‘syllabic’ verse is, of course, not really syllabic in the strict sense, but more truly accentual.”
In a note to the Collected Poems (1976) she qualified her earlier description. Syllable count is “merely the lifeless shell” of “more vital requirements.” In accentual verse, the constant is “time,” or stress, the variable is “number,” or syllable count. In syllabic poems this is reversed—the constant is number, the variable stress. Unexpectedness, a dramatic variety of rhythm can be achieved, but a far closer artistry must be observed. A syllabic poem which closely approaches speech rhythm and avoids the easier tension of metrical verse without forfeiting the discipline of rhyme is an unusual war poem:
Plant no poppy (he said)
no frail lily sublime,
for in war’s famine time
thou’lt need but corn for bread.
Hoard no jewel (he said)
no dazzling laboured gem:
thou’lt be forced to sell them
for steel, so now decide.
Set no flower in thy word
(he besought, but none heard)
cut no flash to thy wit,
if thou must disown it
when see’st thou sorrow’s sword.
Archaisms of diction were purged from her later poems. Yet I doubt they mar this poem seriously: its sense is terse and precise.
For her it is as though the nineteenth century (apart from Landor) had never happened. Her work owes debts to seventeenth-century models. Her use of the first person, even in the elegies, is unencumbered by autobiography. She writes dramatic poems, but without a plot, tending toward allegory. One begins “Anger lay by me all night long, / His breath was hot upon my brow.” She dramatizes ideas. Her prosody controls to an unusual degree our course through the poem. A poem’s source is chancy, dark. Its execution and unexpected growth take place in the light: she is in control, but the poem brings its darkness with it.
Some poets use syllabics as a sort of sausage slicer, replacing the discipline of meter with an arbitrary discipline of counting on fingers and toes. Daryush makes of them a measure more, not less, exacting and precise than traditional modes. Syllabics lead not toward a greater but toward a different freedom, where rhythm obeys speech, form and content strive for a more complete integration.
One of her accentual-syllabic poems progresses in a single sentence through four seasons, the line endings measured, not calculated:
I will hold out my arms
To Spring who clothes me
(Says the beech),
To kind summer who warms
My room and soothes me;
I will reach
For rich Autumn’s robe, red
With pride and grieving;
I will hold
Out my worn dress for dread
Winter’s unweaving
In the cold.
As in an Imagist poem, woman and tree merge; yet these taut triplets are a world away from the loose, colloquial triplets of Williams, and from the watercolor intensities of the early imagiste H.D.
Donald Davie succeeded Yvor Winters as professor of English at Stanford. He shared Winters’s interest in diction and something like his sense of poetic responsibility, but he brought with him a more capacious sense of formal possibility and very different social and cultural roots. He was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, in 1922, and the landscapes and the accent of his formative years were audible at the back of his voice. In his autobiography, These the Companions, he recalls a Baptist boyhood and ingredients that went into the making of a distinct Englishness, as remote from the southern rural and patrician as from the Lawrentian, yet rich in possibilities. The formal language of the psalter and the very different formality of the hymns stayed with him. So did his sense of belonging to a radical dissenting tradition whose history and literature he explored with interested rather than disinterested scholarship. To his love of the hymns of Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley and others he kept adding understanding, even when he became an Anglican later in life. At this time the groundwork for his later aesthetic and moral character began to be defined, his sense of appropriate measure, his distrust of the disorderly and bohemian. A grammar-school boy, he earned a scholarship to Cambridge, his career interrupted by service during the war in the Royal Navy in Arctic Russia, where he roughly taught himself the language. Later he translated Pasternak and wrote on Russian, Polish and Hungarian literature, including his adaptation of Adam Mickiewicz’s epic (a touch of Romanticism here), Pan Tadeusz, which he called The Forests of Lithuania (1959). Pasternak and Mickiewicz, as much as Ezra Pound, helped to broaden his sense of what poetry might do, beyond the early limited range he allowed himself as “a pasticheur of late Augustan styles.”
In the last year of the war, in Devon, he married Doreen John. They returned to Cambridge together, where he read English. Dr. Leavis was one of the ingredients in those formative years, and Davie regarded himself as of the same party. He began his contacts with Yvor Winters, another severe taskmaster. His earliest poems were published alongside those of the 1940s poets in the wildly catholic Tambimuttu’s Poetry London, but by the beginning of the 1950s, disaffected with the excesses of Dylan Thomas’s generation, he had begun to define the constituents of a responsible art. He went on to lecture at Trinity College, Dublin. His early critical books, Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952) and Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (1955), and his first collection of poems, Brides of Reason (1955), appeared, an unnaturally orderly beginning, defining for himself and his generation a stance against the excesses of the 1940s: “There is no necessary connection between the poetic vocation on the one hand, and on the other exhibitionism, egoism, and licence,” he wrote. In 1992 he declared that at the time “essay and poem were equivalent and almost interchangeable attempts to grapple with the one same reality.” The reality of diction and of syntax, the essential instruments of a certain kind of poet’s art, are singled out, examined and defined.
He discriminates between “the diction of verse” and “the language of poetry.” Shakespeare and Hopkins use a language: one feels that any word might eventually find a place in their verse. But there is another kind of poet, “with whom I feel the other thing—that a selection has been made and is continually being made, that words are thrusting at the poem and being fended off from it, that however many poems these poets wrote certain words would never be allowed into the poems, except as a disastrous oversight.” The discrimination comes from the century of strict decorum, the eighteenth, with which Davie has such a firm affinity. He traces the idea of diction and its implications through its century and appraises what is entailed and what lost when it declines, always with an eye on contemporary practice. Purity of Diction in hindsight came to be regarded as a manifesto of the Movement, that loose grouping of writers that emerged in the 1950s, using traditional forms and setting its cap against the verbal excesses of the 1940s and the ideological excesses of the 1930s—indeed, looking to Empson and the specifics of language which he had isolated and highlighted.
The notion of a responsible diction is nowhere better defined than in the poem “Epistle. To Enrique Caracciolo Trejo,” from Davie’s troubled and angry More Essex Poems, written when student difficulties at the new University of Essex threatened to destroy the radical experiment he had created there, in which writers from different languages, students and teachers were to live in a single intellectual community. Trejo was a writer invited to stay for a year. He proposed that Davie translate poems from the Spanish. But, Davie ruefully declares, his language is under siege; it cannot responsibly take the rhetorical risks the poems require:
A shrunken world
Stares from my pages.
What a pellet the authentic is!
My world of poetry,
Enrique, is not large.
Day by day it is smaller.
These poems that you have
Given me, I might
Have made them English once.
Now they are inessential.
The English that I feel in
Fears the inauthentic
Which invades it on all sides
Mortally. The style may die of it,
Die of the fear of it,
Confounding authenticity with essence.
Diction is a choice that, at times of political and emotional pressure, can become a hard necessity. Winters would have understood this argument; he might even have approved the unmetered verse in which it is written.
Articulate Energy is an inquiry, not a polemic. It examines several theories of syntax in poetry and finds them incomplete. It then looks closely at modern and past poetry and singles out various kinds of syntax and considers the thematic and prosodic implications of divergent strategies. “It will be apparent,” Davie concludes, “that the impulse behind all this writing is conservative. But it is, I hope, a rational conservatism.” It was the beginning of a step away from the Movement: it does not include Pound and Anglo-American modernism, but it leaves open the door through which, in due course, the poet and the critic was to pass. The break with the past that is modernism, Davie argues, is a break with past understandings and applications of syntax, a break that occurs with the symbolists and has to do with the conflation rather than the discrimination and arrangement of elements in experience. A modernism that closes off resources impoverishes us and itself. It is against impoverishments that result from theoretical or polemical approaches that Davie helps the poet and the reader. His book was read as antimodernist, so that when he began to write on Pound, and later on the Projectivists and experimental American writing, those who wanted to use Articulate Energy as part of an antimodern argument were frustrated.
The Movement’s “rules” were to begin with restrictive, curtailing poetic ambition and scope. For Larkin and for Kingsley Amis, the rules became a kind of dogma. John Wain, the most Empsonian of the early Movementeers, broke with the rules and became a poet of rhetorical waffle, of the kind the Movement had pitted itself against. D. J. Enright teased out the strong ironic line and has followed it in many directions to great effect. For Elizabeth Jennings the rules were never sensed as rules: her forms she justified instinctively. Thom Gunn, like Davie, starts as he means to go on, refining and experimenting: for both, the Movement is a point of departure. The rules have been transposed into an abiding discipline, in Davie’s case Augustan. His work is ranging and ambitious but always controlled and almost always, one way or another, didactic.
The Movement—such a drab name, after Imagism and Vorticism, Fugitives, Apocalyptics. Intentionally drab, antirhetorical. Davie may be its defining critic, but he became as he moved on much more, the defining poet-critic of his generation. The trajectory of his development makes him exemplary.
He returned from Dublin to Cambridge in 1958, and in 1964 was made the first professor of English at Essex, beginning in brilliant and radical experiment, ending his time there in acute disappointment. In 1968 he emigrated to America, becoming Winters’s successor at Stanford and then, in 1978, moving to the birthplace of the Fugitive movement, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he remained until his retirement in 1987. He settled in Devon where he continued writing. He died in 1995.
The importance of his critical writing—particularly in Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (1964) and his later books on Pound, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1972), Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric (1986) and Under Briggflatts: A History of Poetry in Great Britain 1960–1988 (1989)—is inestimable. Like so much of his growth as a writer, many of the books are written against the grain. It was hard for him to come to terms with Pound, with his huge project, his numerous prosodies, his politics and his legacy. Always a skeptical admirer, in the end he conceded a higher estimation to Eliot, but Pound, whom he approached and reapproached in books and essays, was the angel with whom he was destined to wrestle and who named him. In the Hardy book (he loved Hardy with more rigor than Auden, more breadth than Ransom) he is compelled to set down a fact that troubles him: that Hardy may be responsible, in the poets whose work he has affected, for the failure of nerve in modern British poetry. “Hardy appears to have mistrusted, and certainly leads other poets to mistrust, the claims of poetry to transcend the linear unrolling of recorded time.” This strength and weakness sets him at odds with Yeats, and when Philip Larkin famously abandons Yeats for Hardy he is making a commitment to the “world of contingencies” to which Hardy condemns the poets that he touches. It is a failure of transcendence: history displaces God, the poet forever “outside, prayer denied.” Davie traces this legacy through a range of British writers, ruefully. Hardy’s influence is “for good or ill,” and in the longer term it came to seem “for ill” to Davie, though it never lessened his appreciation of Hardy’s verse. Writing on Hardy, he made his distinction between thematic and stylistic irony, which is also a distinction between premodern and modernist writing.
The Milosz book is one of his most challenging to English poets. When he speaks of the “insufficiency of lyric” he has in mind the stable, lyric “I” which has dominated English poems from the time of Chaucer. He questions its authenticity and its continuing viability. Taking as a paradigm Milosz’s major poems, written in a time of extreme disruption in his native Lithuania and Poland, Davie looks at the ways the poet finds to speak of experience on which he has no stable purchase, how he multiplies voices and perspectives to tell the complex truth. He contrasts this with the unaltered and apparently unaltering situation of the English poet. The lyric depends upon a stable “I,” whether “actual” or a persona. In the face of complex or extreme experience it is no longer a serviceable instrument and the lyric itself is in jeopardy from history, that very contingent world into which Hardy binds poets who have neither the energy nor the formal resources to “transcend” the circumstantial. I simplify his subtle, detailed arguments. They are important if poetry is to speak to and of experience in more than anecdote and platitude.
In his own verse, writing as a troubled Christian unwilling to reside within the limits of contingency, unwilling at the same time to fly off into the circumambient gas of Dylan Thomas, Peter Redgrove and other writers for whom rhetorical gesture stands in for poetic sense, there is a deliberate and difficult development. In an unpublished interview from the 1960s he says, “It seems to me now that the eighteenth-century enthusiasms in which I started and the eighteenth-century effects that I tried to reproduce in my early poems, are in fact motivated very romantically; that is to say, for a twentieth-century person to yearn towards the rigidity of the couplet and the rigidity of the Johnsonian vocabulary and the rigidity of those steady civilisations which they held in mind, is very different from an eighteenth-century man wanting it.” He “came to suspect” this romantic impulse, to qualify it, and without mitigating his disciplines shrugged off the merely Augustan affectation and its rhetorics, no longer a romantic Augustan but a modern one, with reason, receptivity, optimism and a tempering skepticism. In 1957 he confided to his journal that he was “not naturally” a poet; that hitherto his poems had used metaphor to decorate rather than to carry argument, and he determines (a very Davie word) deliberately to redirect his verse: in future his poems will be “if not naturally, at all events truly poems throughout.” This he does, with assistance from Pasternak, and eventually Pound, “winning to the concrete through the abstract.” In A Sequence for Francis Parkman (1961) the change decisively occurs. He makes the poem of phrases and expressions from the great historian: an Alexandrian experiment, a “cento.” The juxtaposition of passages, the creation of historical figures, the drama played out against the background of a new continent and a recollected Europe: this experiment prefigures his own exile from England. Before he left he wrote the Essex Poems (1969) which without confessional self-importance but with appalling humility and candor (“Epistle,” “July 1964,” “Or, Solitude” and others) present a situation and a response.
Ireland stayed with him, a formative experience, revealing the ways in which a different literature in English handled itself, the deadening legacy of Yeats for later poets, the neglect of Clarke, Padraic Fallon and others. As an outsider he got a distinctive purchase on Irish poetry and helped through his essays to develop new critical perspectives. Later he did a similar service in English letters with his advocacies of Bunting, Ivor Gurney, Jack Clemo and, at a dangerous time, Pound.
America was a different kind of experience. All the time he was there he remained aware, in verse and prose, of England. He wrote The Shires (1974), his rediscovery of England part by part, in personal memory, literary history, mere topography. Shortly after his departure, in 1970, he published his six verse Epistles to Eva Hesse (1970). Hesse was Pound’s German translator, and his tetrameter couplets attempt to explain, in Augustan tones but modern terms, an English tradition different in kind from Pound’s. He imagines and seems to address a new consensus. He read the Epistles on BBC Radio 3: despite their complexity they were instantly comprehensible, his reading voice concentrating on syntax, prosody and tone: not works of a “performance poet” but poems written for the voice. “The main objective was to show that... as much variety of time, space and action can be encompassed in one of the traditional forms of English verse as in the much vaunted ‘free forms’ of the American tradition originating in Pound’s Cantos.” The proof of his case is not in what is said but in how it is said; this is his tour de force in traditional form. Satirical, essayistic, forthright, it is one of his most original works, incorporating into verse, directly and unapologetically, the arguments of his critical prose.
In the Stopping Train (1977) was his most vulnerable book and the one on which he built the later poems. At last he is able, in a verse that is candid, wry and stringent, to consider in depth themes he had touched upon in Essex Poems, but now without the inhibitions that stopped him short then. There is a correspondence of failure: within him, within his culture and his society. In Three for Water-Music (1981) he was able to move forward, paying homage to three landscapes, to Pound and Bunting, writers of whom he was made, and in his choice of forms to the Eliot of Four Quartets, whose themes and strategies he was approaching. To Scorch or Freeze (1988) is his most original and challenging volume. It revisits the Psalms with the concerns and in the mixed idioms of a man well on his way in life.
“In all but what seems inchoate,” he wrote earlier, “we quiz the past, to see it straight / Requires a form just out of reach.” He believed that he had achieved transcendence in his language, penetrating beyond irony with irony; he had overcome the heritage of Hardy, to speak in his own way, with and even as King David. In the process he had exhausted his Muse. He would write no more. But a couple of months before his death he sent me a verse meditation on “Our Father,” a ten-part meditation, one of his most ambitious poems. The second section reads:
Tragedian of an Italy unborn,
He cudgelled himself for having prostituted
The buskin to the tiara; that’s to say,
His play to the scrutiny of the Holy Father.
Later he learned how much more tolerant an
Unpolished pontiff was, than a godless State
That asked a theatre for Everyman,
The man first dulled, then frivolously diverted.
Later again (we look beyond him now)
The buskin throve by dirtying—the tiara
And then the Cross; which lives by seeing how
Unwearyingly the Father’s sons revile him.
Clearly the Muse had not entirely abandoned him.
His impact as critic is durable; his poems live in formal diversity, intellectual rigor and candor. None of this came easy: his candor, Christian in the strictest sense, had consequences for his art. I am reminded of James Baldwin: “The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilisations, and the only hope for ours.”
Davie is a lucid dissenter: engagement with literature and language is the crucial engagement with culture; he finds himself out of sympathy with cultural and political reaction quite as much as he does with those who think the art of writing is a doddle. He’s as impatient with overselling as with selling short. The self-conscious modesty of purpose of many of his contemporaries makes him furious. The art of poetry is ambitious, big-hearted. If our culture is infected with irony, the writer must develop strategies to transcend, to subvert it. He strives as a teacher to bring the reader close to the text, the writer close to the core experience of the poem that’s being written. “Needing to know is always how to learn, / Needing to see brings sightings.”
Thom Gunn resists the notion that he is a poet of the Movement, but he appeared in the New Lines anthology, which first defined the group, and critics like to insist his beginning was there: those strict accentual-syllabic rhymed forms of his early work, the vigorous ironies. He was roughly contemporary with Davie at Cambridge. They have rather a different inflection from the Oxford Movementeers, more astringent, didactic; for both there was Leavis, then Winters and California, then modernism. But they found very different routes through to their mature work.
Thomson William Gunn was born in 1929 in Gravesend, Kent, son of a Fleet Street journalist. He went to school in London, living in Hampstead in a home full of books. “I was mad about Keats and Marlowe when I was fourteen,” he says and in Hampstead he was in Keats’s landscape. His parents divorced when he was ten, and his mother (with whom he lived) died by her own hand when he was fifteen. He began reading novels voraciously, days at a time lost in books. In his late teens he started on Auden, who “seemed so available.” After two years’ National Service in the army, he went up to Cambridge. He had read Eliot and just after National Service read Baudelaire, whose impact was decisive. At university he discovered Yeats. Leavis’s impact on the early poems is evident in their moral tone and concern. Leavis’s pronounced homophobia may have retarded (if the surrounding culture was not enough to do so) Gunn’s coming to terms with his homosexuality in his poems. “Tamer and Hawk” is powerful, but the conceit does not require to be read as gay.
The New Criticism was in the ascendant: “I really do think of Herbert as a kind of contemporary of mine. I don’t think of him as being separated from me by an impossible four hundred years of history.” Donne was in his mind as well. The adaptation of the forms and styles of other writers, other periods, seemed possible; he could invest in their lines and lives, but in a rigorously modern idiom. The anxiety of influence was not especially anxious. Unlike Eliot, Gunn does not use allusions to the past in order “to judge the tawdry present” (Davie’s phrase). He says, “I don’t regret the present.” His poetry belongs in and to it. He published his first pamphlet with the legendary Fantasy Press.
He fell in love, by his own account, at Cambridge, with an American student. To stay with him he applied for American scholarships. In 1954 he went to Stanford on a writing fellowship. Fighting Terms, his first book, was published—it was the period of the “angry young men,” and Gunn was the first poet among them. At Stanford he studied with Winters and began experimenting with syllabics in order to ease himself away from the exclusive tyranny of accentual-syllabic verse. For him the experiments were a way of finding a serviceable free verse: he had to work toward it. Poets who leap into what they think is free verse are often still under the sway of the pentameter and kid themselves into thinking they have achieved something radical when they are merely masking the underlying measure. His syllabic poems appeared in The Sense of Movement (1957) and My Sad Captains (1961). In Touch (1967) he achieves a serviceable unmetered verse for the first time: movement, choice, risk and—finally—touch. Possessing a new formal resource, he did not use it exclusively: certain kinds of statement (elegiac, celebratory, reflective) required a more conventional accentual-syllabic and stanzaic form; it is close-up poems, poems that don’t wish to stand back from experience, poems of process, which require unmetered verse. He has grown technically by addition.
Winters provided a very definite creative as well as critical point of reference. In “To Yvor Winters, 1955” he evokes the teacher-poet, his home, his garden and the Airedale dogs he bred.
And in the house there rest, piled shelf on shelf,
The accumulations that compose the self—
Poem and history: for if we use
Words to maintain the actions that we choose,
Our words, with slow defining influence,
Stay to mark out our chosen lineaments.
In the same poem he summarizes Winters’s exemplary aesthetic, one that Gunn transposes in his later work: “You keep both Rule and Energy in view, / Much power in each, most in the balanced two.” “Rule” and “energy” Gunn later recasts as definition and flow. Rule, or definition, provides a structure or system in or through which the energy can flow, like Wordsworth’s “stationary blasts of waterfalls.” In the LSD poems in Moly (1971), the dark unsettling poems of Jack Straw’s Castle (1976), the AIDS elegies in The Man with Night Sweats (1992) quite as much as in the early verse, you can’t have one without the other. What is invigorating in Gunn is the inventiveness of definition and the intensity of flow. “In Santa Maria del Popolo” is an early paradigm in which the form, the image and the argument work astonishingly well together, as Gunn, who once wanted to be a novelist, builds into a single poem the lives of St. Paul, Caravaggio and the young poet, with a supporting cast of old women and shadows.
Winters pointed him toward Marianne Moore; he discovered Williams, Pound and Lawrence. The “Sartrean Existentialism” of the early poems gave people something other than the language and form to talk about: man is regarded as self-creating: by his choices, some of them unconscious and arbitrary, he makes himself, without foreknowledge, advancing in the belief that he may find. What he may find, how he may find, and where, are unknown. Martin Dodsworth called it a “voluntary commitment to the irrational” in a world without intrinsic meanings. Certainly in the early poems plots and symbols have an arbitrary air. From Baudelaire he had learned about obliquity.
Gunn settled in San Francisco in 1961. The relationship which transported him there, which informs his first substantial unmetered verse poem “Touch,” informs too a poem in his 1992 collection, “The Hug.” Underlying the flow, celebrated in various forms, there is a human stability. The unmetered form of “Touch” demonstrates certain qualities of “free verse.” A poem must create a pattern of expectation, so that it can deliver whatever it has to deliver, by accumulation or variation. The unexpected will work only against a background of created expectation. Meter provides a ready-made constant; in unmetered verse the “measure” or “unit”—for Gunn—is the line: each line unit is seen as having equal weight, regardless of syllable count or number of stresses, and the line ending, punctuated or not, entails a discernible pause.
Early in Gunn’s career G. S. Fraser contrasted Larkin’s emotional economy and Gunn’s emotional profligacy: heroisms were not out of place for Gunn, despite the scaled-down age—heroic or excessive action, expression through the body, its beauty, the risks it takes. Charles Tomlinson says Gunn “resolved to seek out the heroic in the experience of nihilism,” as in “A Mirror for Poets,” perhaps. The early poems express isolation: the watcher, the watched, the historically singled out and, in “Misanthropos,” the survivor. Posing, acting, enacting; a sense of role-play; assuming an attitude if not a voice: these are things the subjects of the poems do. Gunn either celebrates wholeness, self-sufficiency, or laments separation. Isolation becomes a burden, as in Yeats and Hardy. The poems move, through drug experiences, through love, comradeship and community, beyond the singular self. The occasions of his poetry have become more diverse and, in his last book, more somber. “I have invented roots,” he says. The fighting terms he has come to terms with. Advancing in the belief that he may find, he has found points of positive commitment and places of repose.
Winters’s impact differed generation by generation. Those who studied with him toward the end of his life, and then with Donald Davie at Stanford, came away with strict disciplines but minds more open to the formal resources they might need; Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass have become significant critics, translators and poets. The most difficult and powerful poet of their generation is John Peck, who, like Thomas Kinsella, has learned from Pound and Auden, and who demands unusual qualities of attention from his readers. In Britain, through Gunn and Davie and tempered by them, Winters has a kind of progeny less formally radical than their American contemporaries. Notable among them are Robert Wells, whose roots run deep in the pastoral eighteenth century, in the classics (he has translated Theocritus and Virgil) and in the poetries and landscapes of the Mediterranean; Dick Davis, a Persian scholar and translator and an acerbic formalist who comes closest to Winters’s poetic desiderata, even in the sometimes excessive refinement of his diction; Clive Wilmer, of the same Cambridge generation, also a translator and critic, who has built on foundations similar to Gunn’s but created a very different poetry, sententious in the good sense, reflective, Ruskinian. Neil Powell, one of Gunn’s best interpreters, a poet whose insistently—excessively?—English verse does not seem to register the fact of modernism at any point, belongs in this company.
It distorts the picture to set the witty and adroit Wendy Cope in the same frame, but her focus on accentual-syllabic forms and her impatience with modernism are illuminating here. Her experience has been the reverse of Gunn’s. She began writing in free verse in 1972, imagining that nowadays rhyming forms are appropriate primarily for comic verse. In creative writing courses she discovered forms she knew nothing about—the villanelle for instance—and that work she liked, including “Do Not Go Gentle” by Dylan Thomas, might use them. She wrote a villanelle, began her formal career and lost touch with, or confidence in, unmetered verse. Gunn’s collections in which the majority of the poems are in accentual-syllabic forms outsell his books dominated by unmetered verse; Cope’s popular success has something to do with the same issue: an English readership likes a recognizable, well-made poem, Betjeman rather than Bunting. It likes everyday experiences and social tones. The influences she adduces among her contemporaries affected her more as catalysts than models. Dismissed as a writer of “light verse,” she has been critically undervalued. The poems are funny at times, skillful always, and formally resourceful. If we regard Skelton and Gascoigne as “light,” then she is “light,” but in the sense of illumination rather than of weight. A poet who in an almost systematic way is misvalued, whatever sales her books achieve, is damaged by a literary environment that benefits from her popularity and might benefit from attention to her skills. More pertinently, a healthy critical environment would encourage growth and change in a way that an appreciative market, hungry for more of the same, never can.