KEITH DOUGLAS, F. T. PRINCE, A. D. HOPE, RANDALL JARRELL, NORMAN MACCAIG, EDWIN MORGAN
Keith Douglas is younger than the Apocalyptics. Had he lived longer, he would have altered our sense of their generation. He is an older type of poet, a man whose love of country and intelligent hunger for experience impelled him to enlist when the Second World War began, to fight, and to try to make sense of history from within its turbulence. Dylan Thomas, Barker, Graham and others who stayed away had reason to do so. Douglas had reason to go. Like the major British poets of the First World War, his art was tried and tempered by the experience, and then cruelly curtailed.
The poets of the Second World War are overshadowed by the Apocalyptics. They died incomplete. No Benjamin Britten set their words—Britten in the War Requiem used writers of the First World War. But they are substantial, comparable in authenticity to the best of the First World War poets. Sidney Keyes is only partly formed, Alun Lewis wonderful in patches, Donald Davie, Alan Ross and Roy Fuller had wars that were slow-moving and generally remote from action, and besides, they wrote most of their work after the war. War poets of this war are, like those of the First, those who died.
So in conjecture stands
my starlit body; the mind
mobile as a fox sneaks round
the sleepers waiting for their wounds.
When Douglas was killed in action in 1944, he was twenty-four, a year younger than Owen at his death. His poems have not dated: they share a quality with the work of Edward Thomas and, to a larger extent, Isaac Rosenberg. This has to do with the spoken tone of his verse, the nonprogrammatic nature of his vision, and his individual attitude to form, which he never uses prescriptively. Douglas, though young, had a wide range of interests and of nonmilitary experience. War and soldiering attracted him from childhood, but so did music, dance and literature. His earliest poems explore themes of war and conflict, but always in a wider context.
Keith Castellain Douglas was born in Tunbridge Wells in 1920, the only child of an English father and a mother of French extraction. When he was eight, his father sloped off, and Douglas never saw him again. His childhood was often solitary; he spent time drawing, beginning at the age of two to cover scraps of paper, floors, walls, and any flat surface with his illustrations. One of his favorite childhood books was The History of the Boer War.
The chief ingredients in his character were a sense of “the manly” and a love of creative activity. There was unusual variety in his activities: the rugby player, the Officer Training Corps trainee, the fine poet at the age of fourteen. He attended Christ’s Hospital School in Sussex, following in the footsteps of Coleridge and Lamb, where both aspects of his character were encouraged, and went up to Oxford in 1938. His tutor there was the poet Edmund Blunden, another Christ’s Hospital veteran, whose poems influenced the young Douglas. At Oxford he edited Cherwell and was active in amateur theatricals, usually backstage as designer. In his memoir of Douglas, Blunden describes the undergraduate’s essays: “Brevity—but nothing impecunious about it... He did not care about novelty when he was feeling his way.” The description fits his poems, for only seldom, as in “I Experiment,” does Douglas strive for novelty, and even there his ambition is to achieve a greater fluency of style. What is startling is the rightness with which, in the early poems, he deploys a received idiom.
When war was declared, Douglas enlisted. He served first in England, then in North Africa, where he courted action in the Desert Campaign. His prose book, Alamein to Zem-Zem, is an outstanding account of his experience. He was injured by a land mine and hospitalized briefly in Palestine, but soon returned to active service. He was killed in the Allied invasion of Normandy.
Small successes came early. At the age of sixteen one of his poems was accepted for New Verse. Later his poems appeared in Poetry London and in minor anthologies. But he did little to advance his career and may have undervalued his talents. His Collected Poems (1951) appeared seven years after his death, but general recognition came only after Ted Hughes edited a Selected Poems (1964) and provided an introduction whose measured enthusiasm was well gauged. In 1966 a revised Collected Poems appeared, and since then Douglas’s audience has grown. Hughes summarizes his achievement: “He has invented a style that seems to be able to deal poetically with whatever it comes up against... It is a language for the whole mind, at its most wakeful, and in all situations.”
The poets of the 1930s turned to Owen as a suitable model. Douglas, involved in real war, adopted Rosenberg. His subjects are not so much the documentary aspects—the immediate physical horror—of war; these facts take their place in a larger context of concern. Both poets know the choicelessness in their situations, which determines patterns of conduct, regardless of conscience. In Douglas’s “How to Kill,” a sniper is reduced by the process that involves him, under orders, under coercion.
Impending death, which Douglas sensed as soon as he enlisted, is felt everywhere, but always subtly, never rhetorically. Charles Tomlinson writes, “Death may be the chief factor behind his verse, but it focuses rather than blurs the vision. Sensuous detail grows compact in its presence; life takes on an edge.” Douglas’s best poems envisage death as a force within the object. In “The Prisoner,” a love poem invaded not by melancholy but by the apprehension of inherent death, the syntax is undecided until the last moment; and the enjambements add to the drama. Touching the beloved’s face, he says:
But alas, Cheng, I cannot tell why,
today I touched a mask stretched on the stone
person of death. There was the urge
to break the bright flesh and emerge
of the ambitious cruel bone.
Syntax suggests that the speaker’s urge will be violent; but the violence is in the object itself.
The poem “Leukothea” resembles Rosenberg too, a resemblance we also encounter in Geoffrey Hill’s early work. “So all these years I have lived securely,” Douglas writes of the fantasy of unperishing beauty. But the poem is decimated by the dream: “Last night I dreamed and found my trust betrayed / only the little bones and the great bones disarrayed.” The same element of Rosenberg is felt in “The Creator.” In “Desert Flowers” he addresses Rosenberg directly.
Unlike the other war poets, Douglas does not exploit the elegiac mode. He accommodates subject matter on its own terms, not blurring it by sentiment or forcing extreme experience into an alien framework or tempering it with a poetic predisposition. A violent experience in the foreground is placed in a time context, where it occurs but is limited as experience by its context. There is no facile nihilism; love and beauty are not idealized out of the context of relationship. An aspect of the balanced quality of the poems (so unlike Blunden’s balance) is that Douglas identifies himself with all his characters and themes, with the poets of the First World War, with the Jews, with the European predicament, with enemies and comrades. His poetry contains, without resolving, the paradoxes of commitment. A polemical letter to J. C. Hall, written in 1943, declares: “My rhythms... are chosen to enable the poems to be read as significant speech: I see no reason to be either musical or sonorous about things at present... I suppose I reflect the cynicism and the careful absence of expectation (it is not quite the same as apathy) with which I view the world.” The attitude is passive only to a degree; for in Douglas, the state of mind he describes is one of intense critical receptivity, too. “To be sentimental and emotional now is dangerous to oneself and others.” An attitude of distrust, of no expectation of a better world, yet a commitment to work for one, to work without hope (“it doesn’t mean working hopelessly”) is the closest he comes to a program. “The soldiers have not found anything new to say. Their experience they will not forget easily and it seems to me that the whole body of English war poetry of this war, civil and military, will be created after the war is over.” He seems to foresee Randall Jarrell, Edwin Morgan, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill...
He dismissed his early poems as “long metrical similes and galleries of images.” The description is hardly fair. “Mummers,” written when he was fourteen, shows a remarkable sense, in the use of “light,” of the completed or circular image as practiced by Keats and Clare, and—if not with much authority—a reliance on difficult forms, two-syllable rhymes and a strong irregular rhythm. Even so early, the line endings are well turned. The image of conflict is already present. Another early poem, “Famous Men,” introduces underwater images and the image of bones which the later poems develop. In “Caravan” we first encounter his desert. There is exoticism even at the outset, an unwillingness to be confined to the given English landscape. At the age of fifteen he wrote “.303,” about guns and soldiers. Though the poem relies on rhetorical effects, the last two lines foreshadow “How to Kill”:
Through a machine-gun’s sights
I saw men curse, weep, cough, sprawl in their entrails;
You did not know the gardener in the vales,
Only efficiency delights you.
The early achievement was considerable. His writing underwent no radical change at Oxford, though it developed sureness and variety of tone. “Forgotten the Red Leaves” catalogues things forgotten, with an echo of Hart Crane’s “I can remember much forgetfulness.” It would be hard to find another poet who, at the age of eighteen, could write with such unemphatic originality:
These and the hazy tropic where I lived
In tall seas where the bright fish go like footmen
Down the blue corridors about their business,
The jewelled skulls are down there.
Too many adjectives? Perhaps. But the poem develops that underwater geography where “The Marvel” and later poems are enacted. Several fine lyrics followed in the next year, and “Invaders,” a poem that seems to owe an obscure debt to MacNeice (as does the later “Villanelle of Sunlight”), though the idiom is Douglas’s own.
Intelligences like black birds
come on their dire wings from Europe. Sorrows
fall like the rooks’ clatter on house and garden.
And who will drive them back before we harden?
You will find, after a few tomorrows
like this, nothing will matter but the black birds.
His black birds in this poem (written before he began active service) foreshadow the bête noire of the later work. He intended his first collection to be entitled Bête Noire, the “beast on my back,” about which he wrote an unfinished poem in jazz rhythm. It was an obsessive presence he could not identify, like Edward Thomas’s “The Other.” The Oxford poems are about music, costume, dance, formal relationships, deceit on a literal level, enactment on a creative level, truth through disguise. He is the watcher, “in the wings” of the stage at Oxford, later “in the wings of Europe.” The drama finds a wider sphere.
In the Oxford poems, punctuation and syntax, often unresolved, become ambiguous. Punctuation is used—as in “Farewell Poem”—more as a pause notation than a formal system. He retreats from conventional literary language to a clear speaking voice. His rhythms are original in the way they advance speaking and are not betrayed into singing cadences. In the best poems he seldom generalizes. The power is in particulars. In the original version of “Cairo Jag,” a poem written in Egypt, he drew out the moral effectively. But in revision he cut the poem short, so that it resolved as unexplained experience. Five canceled lines describe his way of seeing. War—as in Blunden’s poems—changes everything:
You do not gradually appreciate such qualities
but your mind will extend new hands. In a moment
will fall down like St Paul in a blinding light
the soul suffers a miraculous change
you become a true inheritor of this altered planet.
Though the poems written during and after service in the Western Desert are less polished, they suggest what might have come. Variety of subject matter and the intensity of the poet’s experience made him move further away from literary models, though the influence of “Report on Experience” and others of Blunden’s poems is felt in the organization of poems such as “Negative Information.” The world of appearances and a real world, the betrayal inherent in experience, are expressed:
the girls who met us at one place
were not whores, but women old and young at once
whom accidents had turned to pretty stones,
to images slight with deceptive grace.
The living perceive their own and one another’s ghosts, hideous inherent presences. He comes to recognize not only the presence of death in living things, but the identity of the living and the dead. In “The Sea Bird” the terrible conclusion comes in a rare generalization: “All our successes and failures are similar.”
The love poems of this period—“I Listen to the Desert Wind,” “The Knife,” “Song” and others—are by turns erotic and chilling. The influence of Rimbaud, three of whose sonnets Douglas translated, can be felt in “Christodoulos,” “Egypt” and others of the desert poems. In “Egypt” there is a compelling dissonance, a seeming marriage between themes from Blunden and Rimbaud. The beggar women—beggar girls, in fact—are evoked:
And in fifteen years of living
found nothing different from death
but the difference of moving
and the nuisance of breath.
Tragic vision informs a fatalistic poem, “Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian Tea Garden.” An attractive woman is like a white stone at the bottom of a pool, drawing the fish down, but destined, herself, to be a chattel.
In “Cairo Jag” the vision of two coexisting worlds, apparently dissimilar but profoundly similar beneath appearances, broadens out further. The sour, rank city with its violent but resolving pleasures is set beside the landscape of war: “But by a day’s travelling you reach a new world / The vegetation is of iron.” The world is new only in that it is recent. It expresses aspects of the same humanity as the city. It too has its resolving experiences. In “Dead Men” the “sanitary earth” cleans and neutralizes the rotting dead. The dogs dig them up, and “All that is good of them, the dog consumes.” The pointedly materialistic use of “good” intensifies the theme. The poem ends, “The prudent mind resolves / on the lover’s or the dog’s attitude forever.” Douglas is not prudent. He perceives a possible choice, but cannot make it. It is characteristic that his irony is positive, serving to expand, not to limit, the themes. It is an aspect of his caution—he is not willing to overstate, but his irony, rather than reducing the theme, leaves it open.
“Vergissmeinicht” is his set piece about war, with “How to Kill,” undoubtedly the most searing of poems. Neutrality of tone makes it a more potent indictment of war than a journalistic or rhetorical effort could be. Child’s play becomes sniper’s play. “How easy it is to make a ghost,” Douglas writes, as though killing were playfully creative. The sangfroid of “Aristocrats,” too, and of the early “satire,” “Russians,” convinces us that here the poetry is in the pitilessness, accurate and chilling.
To value Douglas properly we must remind ourselves of the poets he chose to name. He revalues poetry, giving weight to writers who found new language, new forms for an experience that was in some senses unprecedented, and who gave themselves not to patriotism or pacifism but to direct witness, in which English poetry is poor. Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney (whose work is still being “excavated” in the recesses of Gloucestershire), and more particularly Isaac Rosenberg are poets by whom we should measure him. Rosenberg’s language belongs to the moment of experience: Rosenberg seldom stands at a distance or draws a moral; poems sit uneasily in a present tense that will not resolve its immediacy or release us in a concluding cadence. He won’t trust poetic convention to let him, or the reader, off that hook. He does not make us weep as Owen does, or stir anger as Sassoon can do. He brings individual human situations up close, he exposes us by evoking his own exposure as calmly as dawn will allow. This is what Douglas does, too, different though his poems sound. Hughes speaks of the “air of improvisation” as “a vital part” of Douglas’s “purity.” The only serving poet comparable in magnitude to Douglas is Sorley Maclean, who fought in the Western Desert and survived, but wrote in Gaelic.
The South African poet Frank Templeton Prince survived as well. Born in 1912, he was educated in his native country and then at Oxford and Princeton. He served during the war in Army Intelligence at Bletchley Park and then in the Middle East, later becoming professor of English at Southampton (1957–74). Subsequently he has taught in Jamaica and the United States. As a subtle scholar-critic of Milton (The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse, 1954) and other major English—and latterly French—writers, he is unusually successful, aware of how much can be wrung from juxtaposition and transposition.
His first book, Poems, appeared in 1938 and opened magnificently with “An Epistle to a Patron.” Here was a poet uncommonly himself, untouched by the Apocalypse, writing in a period voice with a decorous and mannerly syntax. The long, tactful lines of the epistle suggest the prosody of Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, developed without fuss. Here is a classicist without marmoreal ambitions, whose poems work with an austere efficiency, with long syntax and a diction stripped of nuance. This insistent cleanliness is both aesthetic and religious. He is a Roman Catholic of the wide-awake variety; his most famous poem, “Soldiers Bathing,” as well as the meditations from the mind of Michelangelo, Edmund Burke, and Strafford, whose execution is coolly and devastatingly evoked, have a historical and spiritual dimension.
All’s pathos now. The body that was gross,
Rank, ravenous, disgusting in the act or in repose,
All fever, filth and sweat, its bestial strength
And bestial decay, by pain and labour grows at length
Fragile and luminous.
The couplets are made vague by rhythmic variation, long lines, short lines, no constant except speech checked by rhyme. When Soldiers Bathing appeared in 1954 the war was over, and few picked up on the brilliant, quiet talent revealed there or, in 1963, in the new and selected poems, The Doors of Stone. Lack of popularity has left Prince free to experiment with long poems, to explore ideas of England, of Judaism; not to polemicize but to find. His free verse is astringent, paced as if by a tightrope walker so as not to allow a single slip into ambiguity. His syllabics, too, move with a tense balance. The experience of the war and of his religion color much of what he writes. He has incompatible advocates. On the one hand, John Ashbery has singled him out because of the sounds he makes and the ways he makes complex sense with minimal means. Donald Davie praises him as a poet who has quietly learned from Pound and not found it necessary to polemicize: “From as long ago as 1938, with his ‘Epistle to a Patron,’ through the relatively famous war-poem ‘Soldiers Bathing,’ to Walks in Rome as recently as 1987, Prince has quietly assumed the liberties, and reached for the ambitious objectives that we associate with modernism.” In his revised Collected Poems (1993) he adds recent work, what he calls “Senilia,” poetry very much of the return journey, aphoristic, stoical, elegiac. He has written his poems one at a time and each is fully invested. A subject detains him, for however long the poem takes, and if the readers come they do so on his terms. He will insist on the Italians, on the poets of the English Renaissance, on Judaic wisdom. The poems belong with wisdom, not play. There is an ethical and spiritual dimension: the truths they try to tell are true. A few unusual poets seem to follow him: the Canadian Marius Kociejowski and, at a greater distance, Norm Sibum, another Canadian. Geoffrey Hill has worked with comparable integrity, if less calm generosity of spirit, in the wake of the same world war.
Classicist too is the Australian Alec Derwent Hope, born in Cooma, New South Wales, in 1907. He studied in Sydney and at Oxford, returned to Australia and became a practicing psychologist and lecturer in English at Canberra, where he was subsequently professor for many years. Though he wrote from his earliest years, his first book appeared in 1955, and he was probably the first substantial Australian poet heard abroad. In formal preferences he can seem to resemble Frost, Yeats or Graves, with an insistent maleness about his work, a charged sexuality. Judith Wright demonstrates how Hope imposes order on chaotic experience through rigorous traditional form. The chaos is not only in the world out there but within the poet himself: his fears, his powerful desires, his violent faith. “Easter Hymn” opens with the lines “Make no mistake; there will be no forgiveness; / No voice can harm you and no hand will save.” He is cruel when he wants to be, resorting to caricature, retreating behind his anger. He plucks his narratives from the Bible, from classical legend, playing tricks on them and us. That furious wit—Wright calls it “defence-by-attack,” but he created his attackers—gives way in later poems to moral vision. It may have thematic connections with Robinson Jeffers, but it regards the small creatures, it considers their suffering, it begins to dwell on natural detail, to long for stability and peace. Swift does not become Goldsmith, exactly, but he ceases to be so obsessed with the physiology of man and woman, the smells that go with mortality; he finds the open air and is finally able to praise. It is probably the earlier poems, because they are cruel like Swift’s (without Swift’s justice, but justice matters less in this age), that will abide. The bitterness of his “Inscription for a War” is worthy of Kipling. It ends in a translation from the Greek: “Go tell those old men, safe in bed, / We took their orders and are dead.” In Australian poetry he looks a little out of place. He shouldn’t: he is a late antecedent, no less rooted in Australia than Kenneth Slessor, Francis Webb and the even more severe James McAuley, but—by his choice of forms and his expert handling of familiar registers—a poet of the turbulent “main stream,” a main stream into which the poems of Eliot and Pound have never flowed, or flowed only as effluent. Yet Mandelstam and Pasternak and Akhmatova he seems to hear, even through the static of translation, and Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry. In 1959 McAuley wrote The End of Modernity; his friend Hope was not quite so ready, having tasted its fruits, to declare all the new currency counterfeit. What made him permanently controversial and for many years unpopular in Australia was his refusal to privilege Australian poetry, insisting that it should be appraised and valued in the same way that an Australian reader would praise and value the work of an English, an American or an Indian poet. This was not the music that literary nationalists wished to hear. And internationalists like Les Murray seem to find him rebarbative, too: Is he “academic,” “traditionalist,” “misogynist”? Unflattering adjectives flock to him, and some stick. In the light of the poems (and of the better essays) one can only say: So what?
Much has been made of Hope’s Australian “vernacular.” Is it or isn’t it? Another poet whose work and life were colored by the war is Randall Jarrell, an American for whom the vernacular is air itself. Beside Hope he speaks without affectation. In “To Any Poet,” Hope’s contemporary McAuley wrote:
Take salt upon your tongue.
And do not feed the heart
With sorrow, darkness or lies:
These are the death of art.
By such a token Jarrell is a no-hoper (“It is terrible to be alive”), and yet in fact he is the best critic and one of the most eloquent poets of his generation, a sad “real one” along with Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman and Robert Lowell. At public readings Lowell often read poems by Jarrell, calling him “the most heartbreaking English poet of his generation.” Poetry, for Lowell, strives for heartbreak: it issues not from subject matter but from tone. “Behind everything there is always / The unknown unwanted life,” Jarrell says. He identified with the defeated and spoke through them, often lonely women in middle age with no strategy for growing old. Sentimental? Sometimes, maybe. At his best he is rueful, with only the memory of hope. Having almost completed his finest book, The Lost World, he died violently in 1965 in an accident. He was fifty-one.
Although born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1914, Jarrell spent much of his childhood in California. The year he lived in Hollywood with his paternal grandparents when his parents were divorcing he evokes at length in “The Lost World.” He left school during the Depression and went to work for his uncle. He attended Vanderbilt and became acquainted with the Fugitives, drawn in by Ransom and Warren. Tate became a friend. He was never really one of them, though he made common cause in his early work. He followed Ransom when he moved to Kenyon, but went on shortly to the University of Texas. In 1940 his poems were published in Five Young American Poets, and in 1942 his own collection, Blood for a Stranger, appeared: “nothing comes from nothing, / The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom. It is pain.”
He joined the Army Air Corps and wrote his best early work there, some of the best American poetry of the Second World War, though he never saw active service. His most anthologized poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” uses actual language heard in training in the last line, its cold matter-of-factness cruel alongside images of mother, womb, vulnerability. The innocence of the unborn contrasts with the cold innocence of the gunner, hunched in the belly of the ball turret beneath the plane: “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, / And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.” The death of the gunner parodies birth: “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” In “Losses” he wrote,
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school—
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
It is invention, but of the most affecting kind. He becomes the “other people” whose experiences he explores. Little Friend, Little Friend (1945), Losses (1948) and, also on the war, The Seven-League Crutches (1951) followed. The Selected Poems (1955) includes the best of the early volumes.
He became a teacher, for twenty years at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he offered English and Imaginative Writing. Two further collections appeared, The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960) and The Lost World (1965). His Complete Poems (1969) included a number of poems and translations omitted from earlier volumes.
“He had a deadly hand for killing what he despised,” Lowell remarked of his criticism. He was also a firm advocate. Collections of his critical work include Poetry and the Age (1953) and A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962). He wrote a satirical novel, Pictures from an Institution (1954), about life on a minor American campus.
Innocence and its loss were his perennial subjects. “Loss,” “lost,” “child”: words overused in titles. There is a once-upon-a-time feel, poems begin “When” and a memory is rebuilt; but no one ever lives happily ever after. His fairy tale belongs to the forces of time, which are evil.
Listening, listening; it is never still.
This is the forest: long ago the lives
Edged armed into its tides (the axes were its stone
Lashed with the skins of dwellers to its boughs);
We felled our islands there, at last, with iron.
The sunlight fell to them, according to our wish,
And we believed, till nightfall, in that wish;
And we believed, till nightfall, in our lives.
Nostalgia is no release: it puts loss in italics. War was a mighty process of loss, betrayed innocence, enforced complicity. The world is more fantastic than the fictions we use to interpret it. Experience can’t be rationally understood. The poems are formal but open-ended. There is always the danger of waking up. The poet does not understand in a paraphrasable way; he understands through tone and modulation; interpreting dreams, he comes to apprehend the real:
You look at the people who look back at you, at home,
And it is different—you have understood
Your world at last: you have tasted your own blood.
His strategy recalls Wordsworth, whom he loved, and Rilke, whom he loved even more, and who provides some of his last lines. Their sense of childhood is like his: innocence is embodied in the child who understands, when he must, intuitively. There are always dreams to hand: they transport us between past and present. “In the Ward: The Sacred Wood” has a dream dynamic. He suggests, then interrogates the suggestion. “All this I dreamed in my great ragged bed... / Or so I dreamed,” he says in “The Island.” The poems question but never provide an answer. Jarrell is compassionate and never clever (how clever he could be when he wanted!) at the expense of his voices, his “others.” He exploits the everyday language—including brand names—to create a quotidian world that highlights authentic emotion. “What can be more tedious,” he asks, “than a man whose every sentence is a balanced epigram without wit, profundity, or taste?” Schwartz, who of that generation flowered exuberantly earliest and faded fastest, meeting his tragic end the year after Jarrell, in eclipse, reviewed his friend in 1945 and noted “the motives of honesty, courage, and inconsolable love of life... here submitted to the conditions of poetry and fulfilled in them. If, as one poem declares, this life is a dream from which no one wakes, the dreamer has refused to deceive himself, to let himself go, and to forget what he believes and loves.” Berryman outlived Jarrell and wrote in his 121st Dream Song:
Peace to the bearded corpse.
His last book was his best. His wives loved him.
He saw in the forest something coming, grim,
but did not change his purpose.
Few have written better than Jarrell on Frost and on Whitman, on Auden, Hardy, Stevens and Moore. The modern (though not Pound and only obliquely Eliot) is real to him, but his heart of hearts is invested in meter, rhyme and familiar forms of closure, in Frost more than Williams, whom he feels it his duty to love.
The war weighed upon the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig rather differently. It sent him to prison. Born in Edinburgh in 1910, he read classics at the University of Edinburgh. He became a primary school teacher and was already a committed pacifist in the late 1920s. Called up in 1941, he refused and was held in the guardhouse at Edinburgh Castle. He then went to Winchester Prison and Wormwood Scrubs, but only for ninety-three days. Then he found congenial land work in Edinburgh. After the war he returned to teaching, until, in 1970, he became a lecturer and then reader in poetry at the University of Stirling. It was an appropriate place for him, both Scottish and academic, with a creative bias. There is about MacCaig’s verse a cleverness that prefigures the excesses of the 1970s “metaphor school” of so-called Martians. He is an heir of Dunbar rather than Henryson.
His first two books belong with Graham’s, Apocalyptic, but with considerable formal inventiveness. They were taken to be riddles, and MacCaig—aware of their excess—did what Graham was doing, fought toward his own style. His first major collection, Riding Lights, came out in 1955, the same year as Graham’s The Nightfishing, and fell, as that book did, on ears attuned to more continuous logic. From his Collected Poems (1985) he excludes all the early work.
Perhaps in response to the length of his friend Hugh MacDiarmid’s poems, his are for the most part short. They are also, many of them, quite formal. In each there is a play of intelligence and wit. MacCaig is a child of the (late) sixteenth century who has also read his Stevens, Ransom, and the poets of the 1930s, against whom his early work rebelled. He frees up the later poems, but never lets them become unruly. Baroque rather than expressionist, he will arrest an image, decorate it, and then set it back in motion. There is a touch of anarchy about his vision, an intolerance of unquestioned habit and of authority; he could follow MacDiarmid into dissent, but not into alternative orthodoxies. When he died in 1997 he had become, not by design, Scotland’s unofficial laureate. His relative neglect outside Scotland—like the neglect of the wonderful Edinburgh dialect poet Robert Garioch—is an impoverishment. His language is not hard like MacDiarmid’s or Garioch’s, but his work is bulky, the way Herrick’s is, hundreds of small poems, constituting in Douglas Dunn’s words “a poetry of detailed resemblances that cumulate into a glimpse of ‘the whole world’s shape.’ ” More, surely, than a glimpse? Dunn insists that MacCaig’s later free verse, which is in fact irregularly iambic and not as free as he would have us believe, is less “literary” in feel than the crafted, rhymed and metered earlier poems. It is a doubtful observation. A poet’s freedom is often a reader’s constraint: each free-verse poem has to earn our confidence, while a metrical poem is innocent until proved guilty by the general reader. It is possible to find the metrical MacCaig more natural and, for all his complexity, easier than the deliberately unbuttoned poet of the later pieces. He makes of his debt to Wallace Stevens and Frost an echoing music that hangs uneasily in the air:
First snow is never all the snows there were
Come back again, but novel in the sun
As though a newness had but just begun.
It does not fall as rain does from nowhere
Or from that cloud spinnakered on the blue,
But from a place we feel we could not go to.
Such ventriloquism in a poet already into his forties is unsettling. The only word that is his in those six lines is “spinnakered.” But what a good word it is, and it defines what is best about his metaphorical language, its unexpected rightness for a single purpose, be it shape, color, sound, taste or touch. At his best we see the sea and in it the huge structure of the human and the natural world with its lovely and aggressive reciprocities:
The sea pursued
Its beastlike amours, rolling in its sweat
And beautiful under the moon; and a leaf was
A lively architecture in the light.
It is beautifully large, expanding over a few stanzas from the small history of the observer with his erotic concerns projected on the moonlit waves to the large world that contains it, and at the end he reels the poem in by an “Or so he thought,” returning home: “The door was near, the supper, the small lamplight.”
MacCaig is reassuringly domestic, his closures often upbeat; his refusal to go the way of MacDiarmid and (in Davie’s phrase) to “engage history” means that his work excludes more than it can include; for it cannot—or will not—connect except at an individual level. Davie is the one English critic to give MacCaig his due, in proportion, to understand where he comes from and the unusual purity (and scale) of his best achievements.
Poetry, Edwin Morgan says, should “acknowledge its environment,” and unlike MacCaig, Morgan engages with history. He was not a prosecuted conscientious objector in the war: he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps (1940–46), he experienced Palestine; on his own terms he was part of that large moment in history. He was born in Glasgow in 1920, and the war broke his university education in two. He completed his degree in 1947, then taught in the English department of the University of Glasgow until 1980.
Morgan is hugely versatile, with a relatively sure control of traditional metrical and rhymed forms. His sonnets are the best to come out of Scotland this century, not least because of what they are compelled to carry and to dignify:
A shilpit dog fucks grimly by the close.
Late shadows lengthen slowly, slogans fade.
The YY PARTICK TOI grins from its shade
like the last strains of some lost libera nos
a malo. No deliverer ever rose
from these stone tombs to get the hell they made
unmade.
He writes ballads and elegies, dramatic monologues and epistles. Had he restricted himself to conventional forms he would be a considerable poet. But he has added a further dimension: he is the arch-experimenter. Eccentric and derivative talents like Ian Hamilton Finlay gain credit for having ploughed (with help from artist-collaborators) a single experimental field in which a number of related plants are grown for sale as artifacts. Morgan is his own experimental team. Translation from a dozen languages, ancient and modern, has opened his ears and eyes. He has been a concrete poet, a sound poet, a “sci-fi” and “video” poet; he has worked together with writers, artists and musicians on joint projects. Although his academic career provided him with resources, his verse is not academic. He entertains, and as he does so he extends the realm of the poetic. It is poetry written in such a way as to make it performable, but not performance poetry as such. The text rewards the reader in one way, the audience in another.
The case against him is that he is too versatile. The real Edwin Morgan never stands up. He is the Auden of Scotland, able to turn his hand to any challenge: but which are the challenges that matter? The documentary poems? The intense and vulnerable love poems? The oblique autobiography contained in The New Divan sequence? Or is the experimental voice the true one? Is his poetry merely in and about language, the strange philological experiments, the transformational poems? Such a case is based on a prejudice: that a poet has a definable center, an “I” that can be held responsible. The notion that a poet can have many identities, in response to occasions, is not quite accepted. Even theorists, finding so pure a proof of their theories, shy away: Morgan’s multiplicity is too good to be true. “The Second Life” asks the question, “Is it true that we come alive / not once, but many times?” The answer in his case must be “yes”; even within a single book there are a dozen Morgans to deal with.
There is, I believe, an “I,” autobiographical, candid, strong and vulnerable, who articulates those poems which seem most durable. That “I” lives in a Glasgow whose geography it has brought alive (in “Glasgow Sonnets,” for example), whose dialect it has used for poetry and for translation (notably of Mayakovsky). Glasgow is to Morgan what New York is to Whitman, a world that connects with other worlds, European for the most part rather than English. He has evolved a prosody based on the verse paragraph rather than the line. He has learned certain lessons from Ginsberg, though unlike Ginsberg he does not let his poetry flow out of control.
At university before the war he read Eliot, Rimbaud (in French) and Mayakovsky (in Russian) and poetry opened before him. What he learned later from the Beats, from Williams and the Black Mountain poets was superadded, along with the work of the Brazilian Concrete Poets and the sound poems of Ernst Jandl. “The Loch Ness Monster’s Song” is Morgan’s best-known sound piece.
Insistently secular, at home in the present and hungry for the future, he finds occasions for poetry in the newspaper, on the radio, small incidents, “what time barely kept.” He writes “instamatic” poems, video poems, to capture and explore “what actually happens.” A lecturer in English, he takes the social world as a text and analyzes the clauses, structures and conceits of life as people live it. Poetry is an act of selection, epitomization, criticism. The problem with the instamatic and close-up poems is a certain semantic poverty: verse documentary and verse history are not the same. Language is not a dependable lens unless it is burnished and made utterly clear.
His first substantial book, The Second Life, appeared in 1968. Each poem was dated because it belonged—as Adrienne Rich’s do—to a specific time. The elegies were written soon after their subjects’ deaths (Hemingway, Marilyn Monroe, Edith Piaf), the love poems soon after the incidents they evoke. A poem should keep its anchor in its occasion. The most salutary development in his work is the way in which he comes to internalize his moralizing. In the early poems he draws attention to what he means; in the later work he just means. Throughout the poetry, from the first book to the most recent, there is a developing sequence of love poems (now elegies) which, teased out, would make a volume of very specific potency.
A writer needs nothing but a table.
His pencil races, pauses, crosses out.
Five years ago he lost his friend, without
him he struggles through a different fable.
The one who died, he is the better one...
There has always been a directness and candor about his love poems, but integrated as they are into collections in which experiment, satire, elegy and other activities are going on, they may have been read as “merely literary.” Nothing in Morgan, even the most amusing experiments, is “merely literary.” Even the translations take English (or Scots) as close as it can go to the originals, getting at the creative dynamic itself.
Like MacDiarmid and MacCaig, Morgan is often upbeat, committed to this world (for all its faults) because of its promise. The poems present dialogue, they believe in the social world. It is a salutary romanticism, rooted in the urban rather than the rural. Religion becomes a secular force; the foe is whoever says no to natural feeling, to growth and positive change.