Candors

ROBERT LOWELL, JOHN BERRYMAN, TED HUGHES, SYLVIA PLATH, ANNE SEXTON, PATRICIA BEER, ELIZABETH JENNINGS, PHILIP LARKIN

The age of prurience, in which the public chooses its heroes and then whittles them down to size by dwelling in dubious detail on their life stories, is relatively new. There have been curious biographers such as Tacitus and Aubrey (and many biographers as naughty as they in invention and inflection); there have been shrewish and savage biographers like Strachey, and there have always been self-mythologizers among the poets. But poets who deliberately deal the paydirt on themselves are a more recent phenomenon. Poets have always complained and settled scores and licked their wounds, but have not for the most part opened their wounds and probed them before their readers. Discretion, obliquity have been the rule: the fiction, not the literal details and the untransmuted voices of the life. Not confession as it began to be practiced in 1959. Life Studies by Robert Lowell was described as “confessional verse” by the reviewer M. L. Rosenthal in The Nation in 1959: a new genre was born. It is important to remember that Lowell did not invent the term.

What does “confessional verse” imply? Donald Davie mischievously proposes Whitman as a “confessional poet.” Why must confession always suggest negative testimony? A poet might as well confess to virtue as to other qualities. The braggart is confessing; the negative confessional selects and exaggerates like the braggart. The virtue of Lowell’s poetry is in its seeming candor. “Confessional” suggests religion as well: the communicant on his way to penance and sacramental absolution. Confession would seem to imply the possibility of reparation and forgiveness. It is a sacrament Lowell understood from his Roman Catholic years, when he spent days at a time on his knees. The heart must be contrite, the posture humble. It doesn’t call good deeds and impulses into the account, though they should be part of any sacrament of self-recognition. Confession is not an end in itself: it leads to communion and back to community.

In confessional poetry this has not been the pattern. Lowell is unusual in the mercilessness of his verse, but also in the way he makes his situation generally pertinent, even characteristic, of his age, his class and his gender. With lesser poets (and in Lowell’s lesser poems) the hubris is overbearing. If the writer has such a firm handle on the situation, knows the details, the causes and effects, why bother to confess? The therapy precedes it. But in Lowell the details come together, a trail of cruel sparks that illuminate the past and future, yet cannot be controlled. He writes in “Night Sweat”:

...one life, one writing! but the downward glide

and bias of existing wrings us dry—

always inside me is the child who died,

always inside me is his will to die—

one universe, one body—in this urn

the animal night sweats of the spirit burn.

Here he confesses to a beloved, the woman who stands by him and who would understand him if she could. Confession of this kind can only take place in the context of love; but why then are we made party to it? For the same reason that we are made party (more obliquely) to Eliot’s pain in The Waste Land, and with greater candor to Pound’s in the Pisan Cantos: “the downward glide / and bias of existing.” When religious belief is in abeyance, whom can we turn to, in what terms can we speak? In literal details, or—the alternative strategy, which Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath devised—in symbolic narratives.

Lowell belonged to a vulnerable generation and like Jarrell writes a poetry of symptoms: illness, false health, false hope, failure—and love. The private and the public illuminate each other; his illness in crucial ways is representative of a mind-set and of a class, but is also, in crucial ways, distinct. From the forced formal and thematic stability of his early poetry to the controlled surrender of the later, the development is courageous and inevitable. It affects the earlier work: in an unstable world what has already been made and finished or abandoned can be remade, unmade. He returns to his early work and rewrites it. Poems written in the transition between phases are consistently his best, but always vulnerable to later attentions. Nietzsche in his later years refused to revise his early work on the grounds that the older man he had become despised the young man he had been, as the young man would have despised the older. For Lowell, though clearly his “I” was unstable, growing and withering and growing again, the poem stood apart from its original occasion and was prey to his revisitings.

He was born in Boston in 1917 into an undistinguished branch of a distinguished “aristocratic” Boston family with substantial political and cultural connections. He had a strong, sentimental and snobbish mother and a cardboard cutout of a father. At his exclusive school he was nicknamed Caligula because of his unpredictability and cruelty, and the nickname “Cal” stayed with him for life. He went to Harvard and then, rebelling against his family and his privileged culture, transferred to Kenyon College to study with Ransom and Tate. In 1940 he graduated in classics and, furthering his rebellion, became a Roman Catholic. Three years later, in protest against the Allied bombing of European cities (about which Jarrell wrote so memorably), he became a conscientious objector and spent time in detention, again to the horror of his family. His first book appeared in 1944 and his second, Lord Weary’s Castle, published in 1946 when he was twenty-nine, won a Pulitzer Prize. There was no contest: he was the major figure in American poetry.

The early verse was formally congested and opaque. Even today it has a forbiddingly bricked-in quality. There is not a moment of repose, the language is muscular and tense, intellectually and semantically overheated, metrically clenched. Elegy and anger are tightly bound. His Catholicism is not Boston Irish but has the Puritan intensity of his Pilgrim ancestors. Melville is a tutelary spirit, but where his prose is lavishly Jacobean, Lowell’s verse is austerely deliberate. He is with Ahab, not Ishmael. His poems neither spoke nor sang but throbbed and growled. “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” almost makes a break, using a complex metaphysical stanza form with amazing skill; but a spiritual tension turns image into conceit.

In The Mills of the Kavanaughs the Roman Catholic concerns weakened, giving way to a more classical movement, with consecutive narrative. In the twenty-two-page title poem he began to detect a new direction. It was hard work and eight years passed before Life Studies, a definitive break for him and for American and—subsequently—the other English poetries.

A suffering mad self is his subject, with its antecedent selves and the uncomprehended other selves around it—lovers, wife, family, friends, fellow inmates in asylums, figures from history—all are fodder for Life Studies; the title insists on the actuality of the circumstances and characters and their language. It also insists on the nakedness of the subjects. They are transformed into rather than out of themselves.

The change in his work came about for many reasons. One of the most interesting is that he gave public readings. “By the time I came to Life Studies I’d been writing my autobiography and also writing poems that broke meter. I’d been doing a lot of reading aloud. I went on a trip to the West Coast and read at least once a day and sometimes twice for fourteen days, and more and more I found that I was simplifying my poems. If I had a Latin quotation I’d translate it into English. If adding a couple of syllables in a line made it clearer I’d add them, and I’d make little changes just impromptu as I read.” He began to write new lines more simply and directly. On the reading circuit a sense of his audience changed him. And he heard Allen Ginsberg read, met him and admired the ways in which he made his own liberties. Lowell moved from a regularly stressed and metrical verse to looser meter, toward a free verse always ghosted by iambics. Did the loosening improve the poems? Auden declared that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. Lowell found he couldn’t let go, even of the work he had written fifteen years before.

Self-expression, self-exploration, sometimes self-dramatization: this was a peril he faced, and his imitators and successors even more so. But there are substantial gains: the heavy symbolism of the earlier poems is gone, or is made organic to a larger statement. The ordinary world finds a central place, indeed it is foregrounded. Politics begin to weigh: Korea, then Vietnam, and always domestic politics.

The mixed reception that Life Studies received, even from friends who found the poems too exposed and vulnerable, invasive of the privacy of others, may have been one factor in the difficult years that followed its publication. He had struggled to wrest the poems from his old style, and it took time for the work to settle in the public mind. With each book critics tended to say, “Lowell has gone off,” but after two or three years (always in time for the next book) the verdict was reversed, so that the next book could be seen as having “gone off.” It is a measure of his stride that there is so much distance between book and book.

He fished in other men’s waters with Imitations (1961), the translations and versions of foreign poetry, ancient and modern, which he brought within his orbit. He translated Racine as well, the Phèdre, and the theater seduced him (in 1965 The Old Glory, three plays based on stories by Hawthorne and Melville, appeared after respectfully received productions). It was, however, his 1964 volume, For the Union Dead, that eventually united critics around him. Here the vulnerability of relationships and values is most eloquently and politically explored; the good and the disabling traditions, history, politics and autobiography combine. His confession is circumstantial, full of the contingent world—not solipsism or exorcism but a going into. There is no quick fix, but candor can uncover the damaged nerves. His writing began to accelerate. In 1967 Near the Ocean appeared, then in 1970 the rich mess of fourteen-line poems looking like sonnets that was Notebook, broken down and expanded into three books in 1973: History, For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin. Was Lowell in competition with Berryman’s Dream Songs, trying to write a long poem out of short ones? He reassimilates earlier work. The fourteen-liners generally conclude in paradoxes that tip the poem into a quizzical resonance.

He broke up Notebook, which had mingled personal, historical and other verses in an impromptu spirit (hence the title), because he ended up disliking what one critic (whom he quotes in a poem—all part of the voracious, self-referential mix) called its “seedy grandiloquence.” He had a habit of listening to critics, even when they were wrong, and he lamented that he had so few. The worst moment for a poet, he confided, is when he is so celebrated that critics (and friends like Jarrell) cease to engage his work with direct severity. He also split up Notebook because his life changed. He fell in love with Caroline Blackwood, divorced his (second) wife Elizabeth Hardwick and found definable phases in his life that he wanted his new sequences to reflect. History contains the poems that deal with the many figures from history and from the literary past he knew intimately, with their life stories and their thought. For Lizzie and Harriet dealt with his love for his now ex-wife and daughter and the terrible difficulties of their marriage, for which he took responsibility. And The Dolphin celebrated his new love.

Auden was appalled: How could a poet actually take passages from the agonized letters of a woman who loved him and whom he was divorcing and set them verbatim in a poem? Elizabeth Bishop was equally, though less vehemently, affronted. But it was the logical development of the poet who had written “To Speak of the Woe Which Is in Marriage,” initially taken as a thinly veiled fiction, now revealed to have been pure candor. The focus on self, the confidence that self is of sufficient interest to readers that its unraveling is a sufficient subject, and the—call it—solipsism that appropriates the literal language of others’ suffering to lend veracity to his own account: this is a radical approach to subject matter, a setting of poetry not within but above life, as privileged to appropriate and consume whatever it wants from the living world. Yet the radicalism is not reflected in a formal way: the shock is in what he does rather than in how he does it. The great stylistic shift that occurs in Life Studies here becomes reflex—eloquent but formulaic, like those relentless and endless fourteen-liners, a form that will spin out two lines’ worth of occasion or boil down fifty, a kind of merciless Procrustean bed. The deliberate poet has become quite arbitrary, himself subject to the sway of a large and increasingly casual art.

In 1977 he died in a taxi from Kennedy Airport in New York, returning to Elizabeth Hardwick. Having seen all the symptoms in his society and in himself, he succumbed to them. A year later his last book, Day by Day, was published.

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—

why are they no help to me now

I want to make

something imagined, not recalled?

Memory and imagination had become snagged together, tragically, fruitfully. That was the big paradox of the life that produced the hundreds of small paradoxes in the later poems. “All’s misalliance.” Hence the power of the great poems, “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” “Skunk Hour,” “For the Union Dead,” “Waking Early Sunday Morning” and many others, including my favorite with its tender fatalism, its loving dependence, “The Flaw.”

Lowell wanted to be known as the greatest poet in America, and he was. He competed hard to get there, surpassing first Delmore Schwartz, who began before him and flowered richly before not quite enough literary success and personal failure brought him down; and then Randall Jarrell, who fascinated and frightened him and whose death, like Schwartz’s, touched him deeply. He also outran John Berryman, the one poet who for a time seemed to offer real competition and whose achievement, rather eclipsed at present, should be recognized.

The style Berryman developed for The Dream Songs, 385 poems in “18-line sections, three six-line stanzas, each normally (for feet) 5-5-3-5-5-3, variously rhymed and not but mostly rhymed with great strictness,” spoken by several voices, is more supple than Lowell’s fourteen-liners but ultimately as arbitrary. Critics rightly say his work is obscure and artificial; but it is also very funny, clear (when read aloud and the voices spoken) and heartbreaking in its depiction of helplessness, of man as subject and subjected. Berryman’s candor is not direct like Lowell’s, it lacks his patrician assurance, but it is no less vulnerable for its wan, ingratiating ironies, its standing apart from itself. “I think Dream Songs, now completed, is one of the glories of the age, the single most heroic work in English poetry since the War,” Lowell declared (Berryman had died by that time, having jumped off a bridge onto the frozen Mississippi). He added that Berryman “handles the language, as if he made it.” The sense of a poet making the language—we get it in more intense form in Hopkins—is part of the fascination of Berryman. The problem with this making, as we look back on it from the experimental perspectives of later poets, is that it doesn’t go far enough. The experiments with voice, form and literary allusion (there is almost as much quotation, misquotation and allusion in the sequence as in Pound) are formulaic, the poet (who taught English at university level, as Jarrell and Lowell and Roethke did) draws his resonances from the syllabus.

Yet in contrast with the inventive abundance of The Dream Songs, the earlier and conventional poems seem... conventional, even the famous early Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, in which he celebrates the mother of American poetry, inventing a voice for her. With dialect poetry the way to test it is to see what it would say, how it would say, adjusted into standard English. The same experiment practiced on Berryman will help the reader to discriminate between the feeble and the achieved poems.

Born in McAlester, Oklahoma, Berryman was a cradle Catholic. His banker father and schoolteacher mother moved the family to Florida, and there, when the poet was twelve, his father committed suicide in front of his window. He never escaped that image, it fueled in him a hunger for certainty and stability, a sustaining love: “All my life I will suffer from your anger,” he wrote. He wanted fidelity but could not give it. He tried to love and he tried to escape through promiscuity and other forms of experiment, including drink. The sure escape was the one his father suggested and which he finally took. In “Freshman Blues” he says with an appalling gaiety in his voice,

Thought much I then of perforated daddy,

daddy boxed in & let down with strong straps,

when I my friends’ homes visited, with fathers

universal & intact...

Berryman studied at Columbia and at Clare College, Cambridge. He taught in New York, Harvard, Princeton, and ended up at the University of Minnesota. He left no note to explain his suicide, but the poetry touches on the theme. He was persuaded that Jarrell had chosen to die, stepping deliberately out in front of the vehicle that killed him. Because of his continual hospitalizations, Lowell always seemed the most likely to die by his own hand, but he outlived them all and died of more or less natural causes. In autobiographical poems Berryman recalls suicide games at prep school. He alludes to the theme without exploring it.

Yeats was his first master, then Auden. Pound and Eliot—and Williams and Whitman—did not get to him as the Irish and English poet did. Curiously, Berryman was almost untouched by high modernism and may in the end take his place in the line of Robinson and Masters (and Stephen Crane). He has all the surface brilliance of experiment, but at heart and in his forms he remains conservative to the core. This is the irony, that Jarrell and Berryman restructured conventional resources so as to build a bridge across the troubled years of dowdy formalism and polemical experiment. They provided verse that seemed authentic and challenging, but not too challenging. They were bearded but not untidy like the Beats. They were reassuringly literary.

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart

só heavy, if he had a hundred years

& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time

Henry could not make good.

Starts again always in Henry’s ears

the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime...

The accented “só” puts us in mind of Hopkins, perhaps, and what follows is a strange paraphrase of Shakespeare’s Paulina, her impassioned remonstration with Leontes in A Winter’s Tale. And the poem progresses through Yeats, and again Shakespeare. When it falls into a brutal demotic diction, the word order is deranged, not to bring it close to voice, but to run it against the natural cadences of speech. Powerful to a point, but literary. “I am not Henry, you know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax.” Henry is the alien, the outcast, the white Negro, the man blacked up for the minstrel show, stepping out of himself, performing. All the Dream Songs are performance. We are put in mind of cummings, but a cummings carrying a huge library on his back: not just the Elizabethans but, credulously, all the critics and the variorums. Where cummings gets angry with books, with politics, with habitual language, Berryman gets tragic and sad: his norm is displacement, disappointment, and all the fun in his language is out of key. Self-indulgence has a place in every poet’s work, but in Berryman’s, too prominent a place. It is the candor of Hoccleve, mournful and helpless, saying me, me, me.

Good teachers end up as implausible headmasters, good salesmen as uncomfortable sales directors. And difficult, brilliant outsiders are often recognized and lured inside. Creon would rather Antigone were on his side of the wall when curfew sounds. Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes are both temperamental Antigones. Hughes had his own world and his own griefs: the establishment bought a stake in them. Larkin stopped writing when he became a celebrity: his apotheosis blurred his hard, reluctant vision. Hughes kept writing: Poet Laureate, he celebrated the Queen Mother’s birthday and mourned the death of Princess Diana. But whether inside or outside he remained an unstable, unsettling figure. He preserved himself better than Larkin did.

A writer of many parts, he was never content to stop with poetry. He wrote stories, children’s poetry, stage pieces. He invented a “talking without words,” Orghast. He translated from the poets of Eastern Europe and, triumphantly in 1996, from Ovid. He was a powerful advocate, especially of Emily Dickinson and Keith Douglas. He was drawn to manifestations of power and to those creatures (some of them human) who manage to survive the excesses of power. Singularity, the “single mind sized skull,” intrigued him; in Shakespeare’s tragedies how a single humor displaces the more complex elements of character and compels human action much as instinct compels animal action. His poem “Thrushes” is an alarming statement of this interest, seeming to celebrate pure instinct.

Here is another kind of candor, a poetic commitment to theme that does not reflect on morality but on essential energy, which is not “considered speech” in Davie’s sense but “authentic speech” (some of it hard to speak aloud), the language of Heathcliff rather than Linton. Humanism is alluring but inadequate, the old symbols bankrupt. Yet one of the incongruities in Hughes is that, while his poetry celebrates the natural action, the direct perception, its language is often worked up and overwrought, laboriously alliterative and assonantal, larded with adjectives (especially in Gaudete): a Baroque imagination with a bone through its nose. Against this there is the utter elegance of “October Dawn” or the tender poise of “The Moon and Little Frieda,” the subverted beauty of “Crow and the Birds.”

Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, in 1930. The landscape of his poems is here, their actual settings in a place sparsely inhabited, where nature is still red in tooth and claw: an austere, craggy and—apart from the vales—treeless area with big skies and the ruins of industry: mills, pits, with some pits still working. When he was seven his family moved to Mexborough, where he attended the local grammar school. His brother hunted and fished and became a gamekeeper. Hughes learned from him and from his father, a veteran of the First World War, one of seventeen survivors of a whole regiment which fought at Gallipoli. The natural world and his father’s life and losses were Hughes’s determining themes. By the time he was fifteen he was writing verse.

Before he went up to Cambridge, he did his National Service as an RAF ground wireless mechanic in East Yorkshire. He spent his time reading Shakespeare and putting together the thoughts and instincts that fill his enormous and eccentric study of the poet, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. The epyllia are, he believes, the key to the bard. His selection of Shakespeare’s verse contains the most brilliant of his introductions. His shorter critical writings are luminously clear, and though he beams a very particular and personal light on the writers he admires, he is clarifying even when he misses the mark.

At Cambridge he came up against Leavis with his harsh anticreative disciplines. He switched from English to anthropology and archaeology, disciplines crucial to his sense of underlying theme. In 1956 he married the American poet Sylvia Plath. They went to America, he taught at Amherst, they spent time at the writers’ community of Yaddo, and late in 1959 returned to England. Hughes’s first book, which his wife placed with a publisher, appeared in 1957. It was The Hawk in the Rain. The Movement was over for Hughes: his poems are rooted not in urban experience, not in the Apocalypse, but in a vigorous language that owes debts more subtle than Berryman’s to Hopkins, and especially to Shakespeare, though he is richly colloquial in his diction.

Was Hughes a “nature poet” or are his animals and images of nature in fact symbolic enactments of human types and aggressions? Lupercal (1960), his second substantial collection, raises the question more insistently. The single-mindedness of his creatures and the relishing in them of violence and survival, have—if read politically, as critics often read politically the early poems of Gunn celebrating the brutishness of young thugs—a treacherous note, as if Robinson Jeffers had been transported to the Yorkshire moors and celebrated atavistic rituals against the encroaching social world. The hawk, the thrush, the pike, the bull are not only the physical but the moral centers of their worlds; the poet, by withholding comment, seems to assent to and endorse their natures. The forms they choose are rough-hewn, conventional forms, accentual and often rhymed, stabilities within a natural world in flux, fragments of structured language within an inarticulate chaos. In the children’s books Meet My Folks (1961) and Earth Owl and Other Moon People (1963), fairy tale and fancy are superadded to this natural world. If D. H. Lawrence helped Hughes find a style, the two writers could hardly be more different in their tonality and in their moral vision.

For five years his relationship with Sylvia Plath was creatively fruitful. They separated in 1962 and the formal and imaginative frame of his poetry altered. Each substantial collection that followed approached the world of the early poems from a different angle, the poet moving from the literal-seeming into the allegorical and mythological. His first major book, Wodwo (1967), and his most celebrated and controversial book, the sequence called Crow (1970), paint him into a corner from which he has escaped spectacularly in Tales from Ovid. Cave Birds (1975), the staged but sometimes beguiling Season Songs (1976), the appalling narrative Gaudete (1977), Moortown Diary (1989) and the laureate poems Raincharm for the Duchy (1992), which reinvent the poem of public occasion, often seem the work of a poet who has strayed from his natural course. Birthday Letters (1998), evoking his relationship with Sylvia Plath living and dead—poems that he assures us were written over a period of thirty years—attempts a new prosody and at times an understated narrative quite out of character with what has come before, and with only a fitful authority.

If natural and human violence seem to dominate his work, they do so not as violence. Calvin Bedient says, “His weakness is not violence but the absolute egotism of survival. It is the victor he loves, not war.” This may be true of the first two books; in the later poems he marvels at and sometimes celebrates the survivor, and it is perhaps here that we should seek his “politics,” in the celebration of individual rather than collective will. Survival and growth occur not by acquiescing to an artificial or a historical structure but often by living against.

Lawrence declares, “Man cannot live in chaos... The animals can. To the animal all is chaos, only there are a few recurring motions and aspects within the surge.” The violence of the natural world is not absolute for Lawrence: he warns against exaggerated vision, he says that “the yearning for chaos becomes a nostalgia.” Violence taken too far becomes sentimental, if by that we mean a blurring of issues, simplification rather than clarification, that resolving of a poem in gesture. If Lawrence wrote about thrushes, his birds might be the clockwork figures of Hughes’s poem, but they would also sing. The sentimentality of violence—we meet it in Jeffers, in the Apocalyptics, in the Beats—is deceit and self-deception. In a number of Hughes’s early poems the word “horizon” does overtime in concluding lines as the poem is sent out in search of resonance. Resonances can be borrowed, too: from Hopkins, Owen, Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Lawrence. We keep coming back to Lawrence: what sets both poets apart from the dominant voices of their formative years is their distrust of irony, their attempt to get back inside the language of their poems, after the deliberate distancings of modernism in Lawrence’s case and the Movement in Hughes’s. In abandoning the ironically circumscribed but various world of the Movement, Hughes may strike a deeper note, but his thematic range is and remains extremely narrow. Solitariness, choicelessness: his animal and human creatures are distorted in order to serve his themes. This, in effect, is his form of candor, diffracting through more or less familiar images taken from a common world an uncommon sensibility, particular passions and anxieties. Creatures become emblematic, illuminating a metaphorical, not a complex natural truth: the quintessence of the poetic fallacy. When Hughes’s world and the animal’s world coincide, the best poems occur, or when Hughes—recognizing this tendency in his work—invents an animal, “Wodwo,” for instance, borrowed from the philological obscurity of Gawain and the Green Knight, to do within the natural world what Hughes is doing through it, defining a nature, an identity.

What am I to split

The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed

Of the river above me upside down very clear

What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find

this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret

interior and make it my own?

Crow is another such creature. So too is “The Thought Fox,” one of his earliest poems: an invention, and what matters is the process of inventing, of finding out.

Lawrence subjects us to violence and pain, “opens” us, in order to be filled and fulfilled. Hughes at times seems to want to open us to be hurt. His poems may not ironize, and yet the poet as often as not stands apart from the violence he makes in language—a witness, not a subject. When he includes himself, as in “Wind,” and nature rattles against the wobbly certainties of domestic life, his poems take on a deeper life. In the war poems, too, “Bayonet Charge,” for example, he recreates rather than witnesses. “Six Young Men,” a better poem, falls into the sentimentality of violence by making an emblematic experience out of what masquerades as a literal narrative. In “Pike” a reciprocity is established between fish and fisherman: the poem is not single-minded. “View of a Pig” in its cold, largely monosyllabic witness, is powerful, too: a dead energy generates a new kind of energy in the language. Not since Wordsworth has a poet been able to use the verb “to be” with what feels like transitive force.

In Wodwo literal creatures give way to imaginary ones, nightmare is all about us, and in Crow a metaphysical, historical and individual nightmare, cast in anthropological terms, occurs. The Australian artist Leonard Baskin produced a series of engravings and Hughes wrote his poems to illustrate them. The poems of Crow “wrote themselves.” Hughes presented them as a fragment of an unfinished epic, colored by primitive song, but also by the Bible and Shakespeare and—in fragmentary form as in The Waste Land, but masked and half digested—elements from the great cultures that led to the Second World War and the Holocaust. Exposure to the experimental and radical writing of Eastern Europe had an impact on his work. But whereas Vasko Popa and János Pilinszky, poets he translated collaboratively, developed a style in response to the mercilessly violent history of the century on their countries and people, Hughes devises a style that is not similarly compelled. In Crow the extremes of violence come to seem like the action in comic books, Tom and Jerryish, not credible and not quite funny.

His poetry proved less susceptible to development than the work of the Movement poets, Davie and Gunn in particular. He just wasn’t interested in language and form in the ways that they are; he did not think but felt his way forward. In Tales from Ovid he stepped into quite another world, a classical world not made of marble, not ruined, but a place in which extreme action is not the only option, where the lyrical has its place and psychology is more nuanced and various than it has been before. He was not translating Ovid but adapting him, or working in fruitful collaboration. He set himself free, by an act of will, of the repetitive and narrowing world of his earlier writing. His form of candor was exorcism, working out emotions and impulses through images and complex verbal structures. Exorcism is a form of candor that sidesteps confession. The freedom of Tales from Ovid does not reject but incorporates in a larger pattern what has gone before. In Birthday Letters he took a further step, addressing a loss without self-pity and with as much precision as his memory would allow, answering with unusual quietness, and with his eyes averted from them, decades of savage and malicious critics and gossips, trying to resolve a relationship that was his and hers but has become legendary, emblematic. It is a partial triumph, lacing in intimacy, a confession that must assert and reassert its sincerity, a candor that wants to be believed. At the root of the poems is love, of course, but also a complex set of angers that, in order to keep them under control, Hughes had to convey in a largely matter-of-fact prosody, writing against his cadential instincts. It is a fascinating experiment, a candor that is cold, calculated and only marginally vulnerable, the ultimate in his poetry of survival, counting the cost and discounting (obliquely) the lies that have grown around the story of two young poets and their marriage. It may be that “Lovesong” in Crow tells a deeper truth than Birthday Letters, but readers would rather this was not so.

Yet Birthday Letters, with its allusive echoes and tributes to Plath’s poetry, does not quite bridge the very real distances between these two poets: man and woman, British and American, rural and urban, primitive and sophisticated. In her poems, “The fountains are dry and the roses over.” Fountains, not rivers and lakes; roses, not thistles and brambles. She is the deliberate poet, she devises strategies, she competes for space and attention. She is experimental, setting herself exercises. She is an ironist. If the energies of their language at times seem comparable, they flow from different sources and it was more their human proximity than a sense of common poetic objectives that makes them seem so close in their marked differences, their incompatibilities. “Hughes loved her and wanted a wife; she loved him and wanted a monster.”

“I think my poems come immediately out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife or whatever it is.” This is what Sylvia Plath said, vainly preempting later imitators and advocates. “I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying—like madness, being tortured, this kind of experience—and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind. I think that personal experience shouldn’t be a kind of shut box and mirror-looking narcissistic experience. I believe it should be generally relevant, to such things as Hiroshima and Dachau, and so on.” That “and so on” tells us how much an artist she is, how devastating experiences of the century become a resource for the poet, how history (and autobiography) can be manipulated with aesthetic but not moral qualm. Anger, anxiety, fear and love, primary emotions, can dispose of the hard facts of existence as they wish. Intense ephemeral feeling is in control. Hughes celebrates the brutally single-minded. It is at least stable, or seemingly so. Plath places at the control panels of her art a treacherous instability licensed to do what it likes not only with language but with fact. Is there, she seems to ask, any imaginative fact outside language? What does she mean by generally relevant to Dachau and Hiroshima? Are Dachau and Hiroshima comparable historical facts in the way she suggests? Are her conflations, a casual shorthand, not treacherous to her, to the world, to her readers?

James Dickey thinks so, repelled by the slickness of her art (even at her most extreme she is artful, writing with and perhaps for effect). The poems for him are “glib”; he finds “intolerable in either literature or in the world” the “slick, knowing patter about suffering and guilt, particularly about one’s own.” His emphatic perspective is that of a male writer more in the mold of Hughes and Jeffers than of Eliot and Lowell. For Al Alvarez, who was instrumental after her death in promoting Plath’s poems in anthology and through criticism, she is far from glib. Indeed she is a weapon in his damaging polemic against the “gentility” of the Movement poets: she goes to the edge of polite experience and beyond, to the edge itself, and this he believes is laudable. He writes, “It needed not only great intelligence and insight to handle the material... it also took a kind of bravery. Poetry of this order is a murderous art.” His overstatement is as extreme as Dickey’s. If Plath’s art is “slick,” it is more than that: slickness is part of a wider aesthetic. If it were true, as Alvarez says, that “the achievement of her final style is to make poetry and death inseparable,” then the work is wicked, which is not the case. Plath raises moral and artistic issues that cannot be resolved by critics who want to use her for their own ends. This goes for later feminist criticism, with its tendentious hagiography and the demonization of Ted Hughes.

A poetry of extremity must first be poetry. And where Plath is concerned, getting at the poetry is complicated by the problem of biography: her relationship with her mother and father, her displacement as an American in England, her marriage to an unusual Englishman, the creation of a family, the end of their relationship, her suicide. The poems are read as oblique autobiography and explained in terms of events that biographers and legend supply. Yet no biographer has access to the human content of events. No one will ever be able to say that Sylvia Plath intended to die, even when the evidence points in that direction. No one, not even the participants themselves, can assign responsibility. Since the story is known, it is hard not to read the poems in the light of it; yet unlike Lowell’s, Plath’s confessions are symbolic rather than circumstantial. Even when she attended writing classes in Boston with Anne Sexton, and they met after class over cocktails to discuss their suicide attempts, she was an experimental writer who “manipulated” the self as much as she manipulated language: to be visible, audible, admired.

Plath was born in Boston in 1932. Her first poem was published when she was eight years old, in the Boston Sunday Herald. Her father, of German extraction, was an entomologist, a professor at Boston University. He betrayed and abandoned her, dying of diabetes and a gangrenous leg that finds its way into her poems. She was eight. This departure is one of the eventual occasions for the poem “Daddy.”

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Daddy, in Gestapo uniform, as Dracula, as an inhumanly passionate being, is a generalized projection bearing little relation to Mr. Plath—or to Ted Hughes. But her father’s death destabilized her. An early poem, written when she was sixteen, is entitled “To Ariadne”—a figure central to later poems—and subtitled “(deserted by Theseus).”

Your cries are lost, your curses are unheard by him

That treads his winged way above the cloud.

The honeyed words upon your lips are brine;

The bitter salt wind sings off-key and loud.

Her mother filled the space he left with a directive love that the young poet relished and resented. Letters Home tells the story of a complex relationship, the daughter’s needs always clear, but the mother’s needs implicit in the poet’s account of her progress, her successes. She graduated from Smith College (after a severe nervous breakdown induced by overwork) in 1955, and attended Lowell’s poetry course at Harvard (he was ill much of the time, and working toward Life Studies). She was reading Dylan Thomas (whose birthday she shared), Yeats, Moore, Roethke. Roethke’s impact and that of Anne Sexton on her work should not be underestimated. Sexton started writing relatively late, in response to mental breakdowns, and some of Plath’s poems draw with surprising freedom on Sexton, borrowing lines, cadences and strategies. Sexton was already further along the way to Plath’s kind of dramatic confessionalism than Lowell ever went. There was W. D. Snodgrass, too, one of Sexton’s elected models for handling personal material (though Snodgrass’s “confessionalism” does not ventriloquize and appropriate in the ways that Sexton’s does). Sexton’s first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, appeared in the same year as Plath’s The Colossus (1960), and became raw material (with other, rawer material) for Plath’s major poems in Ariel, published two years after her death, in 1965. What Sexton suggested to Plath was the force of simple rhyme and simple rhythm, the magic of nursery rhyme darkened by time, of fairy tale where the happy ending somehow doesn’t happen. Sexton showed Plath the way, and then Plath died first, stealing a march on her friend, which Sexton resented and envied. Four years Plath’s senior, Anne Sexton survived her by twelve years, committing suicide in 1974. But Plath keeps hold of the laurels. There are wonderful things in the Complete Poems of Sexton, published in 1981, but many of them are things we associate, whatever their original source, with Plath, and Sexton’s work seems but a footnote to hers.

After Smith College, after early successes—how competitive Plath was, and how jealous at times of the success of her contemporaries, Adrienne Rich, for example—she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and traveled to the older Cambridge, in England, where she met Ted Hughes and they married in 1956. After a time in the United States they settled in England in 1960. She died in 1963, the year in which her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar was published. Crossing the Water and Winter Trees were interim publications. At last in 1981 Ted Hughes assembled the Collected Poems.

The quality that distinguishes Plath, what has made her a potent influence on impressionable writers in the wake of Ariel, is her use of metaphors so strong that they displace what they set out to define and qualify, great cuckoos in the formal nest. By means of such metaphors she seeks to generalize her experience, to step outside it, to render impersonal the (apparently) intensely personal. Yet it is hard to imagine a poetry more forcefully stamped with a personality and voice: American, feminine and for all its traditional powers, eccentric. It is no wonder that feminist critics have found it difficult to approach her, except in the poems where she talks about male projections on women, and preferred initially to attack the people and social prejudices that “martyred” her.

The later work has attracted most attention, suicide validating extreme statement: “She really meant it all.” It is wasteful to overlook the Colossus poems, however. She was a busy housewife and mother as well as a poet: the verse and the life with their “complementary intensities” were kept apart (a strategy writers like Eavan Boland learned to reject, finding in poetry an integrative art). She said that her poems “have one thing in common. They were all written at about four in the morning—that still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow, before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles.”

“Daddy” is an extreme example of her distinctive “confessional” mode. It is important for what it reveals about Plath; it tries to attach her experience to a wide realm, by means of imagery and rhetoric. Yet it is the passionate love and anger we remember, so disproportionate that they adhere uniquely to the allegorical figures she has created of “him” and of “herself,” the speaker. She alters facts: she knows them, and what matters is the poetic experience, the ordered realization of what she knows, true to the impression, not the fact. She announces, “Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other—she has to act out the awful little allegory once more before she is free of it.” That is what the poems do, “act out the awful little allegory,” exorcise rather than confess. If we look for candor here, it is in her truthfulness to the emotion of the moment and the theme to which it attaches. In “Lady Lazarus” she gives symbolic order to her suicide attempts—or Lady Lazarus does. Lady Lazarus is a highly specific and radical creation.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

Of The Colossus some critics complain that it is a series of exercises or “compositions” rather than poems. Her earlier work should be assessed in different terms from the later. It was written before the full impact of Sexton’s book had registered, before marriage had become a place of pain. Her preoccupation with death in Colossus is a powerful but objective fascination. She takes different risks from those of the Ariel poems: prosodic risks, risks of diction and subject matter. In Ariel there is a radical rethinking of form, a powerfully directive “I” who is sufficiently the poet herself to give the poems an authenticity that Sexton’s generally lack. The authority of voice replaces the authority of closed form. The poems are for speaking aloud. Early poems suggest later strategies. “Lorelei”: “It is no night to drown in” yet there is the luring song of the fatal ladies:

Sisters, your song

Bears a burden too weighty

For the whorled ear’s listening

Here, in a well-steered country,

Under a balanced ruler.

Their voices derange “by harmony” and prefigure the tones of Ariel, where death is no longer held at a remove by art and its habitual imposition of objectivity, its natural irony. Ariel brings death close—killer and victim, the subject naked or in an imposed costume, facing the music and, worse, the silence. She shifts tone and shuffles images with enormous skill. It is a skill of urgency more than deliberate art. The art of verse is second nature to her.

As a collection Ariel is less complete, less lucid, than Colossus. The speaker is more centrally part of the later poems, she cannot stand back, she is implicated. An inverted irony takes her further in. The language of hysteria and madness and the language of surrealism merge. The flowers breathe her air; the pain of sickness and of childbirth gives rise, through eyes half open or half closed, to large and alarming metaphors. Fear is always near at hand. In “A Birthday Present” the poem asks: “What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful? / It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?” Fear is at its most intense in the “bee” poems, especially in “The Bee Meeting,” essentialized through allegory:

Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers—

The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.

In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,

And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?

They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.

I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?

The poem is made of questions and no answers, of assertions that she corrects with more bizarre assertions. Unlike the others, she is displaced: not of the village, singled out, patronized, the subject rather than a witness to the subject. The queen is flushed out, her society is wrecked. If Hughes is drawn to Ovid in his later work, Plath was a master of metamorphoses more than three decades before him:

I am exhausted, I am exhausted—

Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.

I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch.

The “pillar of white” comes first, the “magician’s girl” comes second. The metaphor precedes the subject. This reversal, not uncommon in Plath, means that we see first a blur and then a clarity, a process of refocusing which is nightmarish.

The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.

Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.

The questions abandon the question mark. The outsider is the victim—ignorant, vulnerable, manipulated. She no longer expects an answer. Such a small and eloquent detail as an absent question mark reveals a debt not to Sexton or Hughes or Rich, but to Robert Graves.

She is the victim all right, eaten, sacrificed, a meal for others, for the man, the child. She speaks with, rather than for, other victims. When she uses Hiroshima and Dachau it is in part to borrow a horror, to increase the volume of her poem; but it also suggests that suburban pain, the pain of rejection, loss, doubt, fear, misunderstanding, are not unlike the pain of those subjected to the great brutalities of the century. The theme is choicelessness and powerlessness. Hers is the voice of the victim, rendered passive, coming alive not to resist so much as to witness—a form of resistance, perhaps. The exploitation of the Holocaust and the bombing of Japan shocked when the poems were first published; now it sometimes offends. But it is impossible not to understand, beneath the rhetorical gesture, a different and compelling reason for making the connection. Her positive legacy has been less for those who ape her rhetoric, more for those who find in her use of wildly apposite metaphor a key to seeing things in new ways, a kind of Brechtian Verfremdung. In this sense the poet who has taken most from her is the cool, controlled and mannered Craig Raine, the Martian, with his now exhausted metaphor school. There is no clear evidence that Plath—or Raine, for that matter—was familiar with the earlier poems of Norman MacCaig. He passed that way with his wonderful formal tact, a miniaturist and a romantic. His poems are microcosms without totalitarian ambitions. Plath’s are always macrocosmic.

In the two or three months after her marriage was over, late in 1962, Plath wrote the bulk of the poems in Ariel at great speed and with astonishing assurance. She thought she knew how extraordinary they were, but there was nobody to tell her. She was very hungry for response, for affectionate recognition, but her human intensities, her transparent unhappiness, kept at bay those who might have responded to her that terribly cold winter of 1962. She died.

Early in the 1970s, when Robert Lowell was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, he met two English poets who intrigued him. The first, Elizabeth Jennings, was regarded as a “confessional poet.” He admired her will and her resourcefulness: “She’s tough,” he said, a judgment shrewder than her friends realized at the time. And in the formidably witty presence of Patricia Beer he recognized a poet whose restraint, like Elizabeth Bishop’s, though on a smaller scale, was telling in unusual ways. What she doesn’t say and how she doesn’t say it are a vivid lesson in an age when from so many sleeves hung psychotic hearts. Beer’s “Autobiography” is succinct and says all that we need to know, perhaps all that we ought to know, about a poet.

I sailed through many waters,

Cold following warm because I moved

Though Arctic and equator were steady.

Harbours sank as I discarded them,

Landmarks melted into the sky

When I needed them no longer.

I left behind all weathers.

I passed dolphins, flying-fish and seagulls

That are ships in their own stories.

In generous if patrician tones, she seemed to put the excesses of the 1960s behind her. Hers was an unusual candor: she had herself in wry perspective.

Born into a Plymouth Brethren (Fundamentalist Christian) family in 1919, Patricia Beer is the Stanley Spencer of modern poetry: lucid, cannily innocent, she apprehends death with a secularized religious imagination; she accepts the inescapable, vivid materiality of the world. In the introduction to her Collected Poems she speaks of her slowness in acquainting herself with modern poetry: it was hard disengaging herself from a strict, spiritual world. She went to Exeter for her university degree and read English with a view to becoming a teacher, the one vocation open to a woman of her family’s faith. But she went further, too far, and left the Brethren behind. She took a B. Litt. at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, then taught for seven years in Italy, in Padua and Rome. She became acquainted with Eugenio Montale, the great Italian poet. She began to read all the literature she had skirted round before. In 1953 she returned to England, not having written verse since her school days. She involved herself in the fashionable “loose and lush” writing of the time, laboring in the shadow of Dylan Thomas. In 1962 she became a critic and teacher at Goldsmith’s College, London. She felt a certain affinity with the Movement, but hers was a different kind of irony.

Religion taught her fundamentalism, personal salvation through faith, uprightness, respectability. She sang the hymns, she came to know the nineteenth century, she feared hellfire. Her mother was a strong-willed housewife, her father a clerk on the railway. One grandfather was a coffin maker, the other a tombstone sculptor. Death became a central theme. So was “madness” or inadequacy. In her wonderful memoir, Mrs Beer’s House (1968), she remembers a cousin who was incapable in various ways, who was loved and sent away. One critic—in the light of her poem “The Flood,” perhaps—calls her “a religious poet stripped of the blurring consolations of religion.” She visits churchyards, she evokes the dead of two centuries. Ghosts, witches and ancestors are her familiars. She wants to understand what she is made of. She is fascinated by believers, whether orthodox or eccentric, people who have something to live for and by. Even in the poems of landscape, it is the human figure (or a cat) that occupies center stage. And though by her choices she reveals herself, she does not take herself as subject, except in the poems that explore her illness, an illness of age which she renders in specific but not autobiographical terms. What she is becomes clear from what and how she sees.

Her native landscape is Devon: Exmouth represents security, Torquay adventure and exposure; there is the estuary, the nearby countryside, and eventually the landscape where she now lives, in Up Ottery. She loves writers associated with landscape, Hardy especially, and historical personages that belong to her corner of the world, Drake and the mariners, the sea and the colonies. Her poetic antecedents are often to be found in the prose and verse of the nineteenth century, especially in prose fiction, rather than in the Metaphysicals, about whom she has also written. The values of her verse are—duly ironized—continuous with the prose values of the Victorian writers she admires. Many of the poems grow out of writers’ lives or literary texts by Jane Austen, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Dickens and others.

What sets her apart from the Movement is the quality of her ironies. She takes the religious imagination, its certainties and uncertainties, seriously but without belief. With irony she defends herself from terror. It is not a distancing device nor an instrument to ingratiate herself with the reader or invite complicity. It separates her from memory and harsh subject matter. In her verse we meet prose virtues: narrative or argumentative structure, “plot” and climax, but the sense is evenly drawn out through the poem. She seems to believe in an objective truth in her verse. The cloth of the poems is starched: she uses meter and syllabics according to her subject, and her forms, even the experimental ones, are so subtle that we are inclined to take them for granted. What she writes is poetry because, for all their prose strategies, the poems approach truths that only poetry can essentialize. Relatively quietly, her poems condense and essentialize experiences, and they give to other lives, fictional and actual, a proper imaginative valency.

The experience of her poems, even those drawn from literature, is as vivid as “primary” experience: indeed, it is primary experience. Why not? The “derivative” nature of poetry is emblematized in her work not in a disabling way but as a virtue, as Bauhaus architecture acknowledges its materiality and its constituent parts by highlighting them. The real issue with Beer is the seemingly prosaic nature of her poems, a strategy as distinctive as Stevie Smith’s weird spoken and sung approach. There is, too, the matter of her wide-eyed candor. She is a poet whose work has gone through a series of mature periods, each her own, each a different sort of honesty. From The Loss of the Magyar (1959), book by book through to the Collected Poems (1988), Friend of Heraclitus (1993) and Autumn (1997) she has followed her own course. In Autumn she writes of a serious illness:

I was born tongue-tied. Ages later

Here comes once more the suffocator

That I cannot recall but must

Have been what paralysed me most

Of all the things I could not do.

My speech is back in prison now.

Whatever silenced me when young

Has put a thimble on my tongue.

Autumn (and illness) overtake her; her eyes are more than ever awake to ripening colors, and to the young whose season is not yet defined. She comes to terms: with her own serious illness, the deaths of friends and the encroachments of age. She also remembers family, with a surreal clarity in her materialism (“Ballad of the Underpass” is in equal degrees terrifying and affirmative). She reads characters from Shakespeare into life. Wilfred Owen writes to his “Dearest of Mothers” full of optimism, which the date, “1918,” ironizes. “Sequence” considers her own nearly fatal illness and its consequences, using tautened couplets that ache with the stark necessity of rhyme. Beer does not flinch from hard subjects or sentimentalize; she knows how grief works, how clarifying laughter can make things less intolerable. Hers is a crucially English form of disclosure: she stands outside herself, as curious as we are about what the poems will tell.

Elizabeth Jennings, like Beer, has gone through many transformations. She is a conventional poet, despite early interest in Eliot and Graves. Her conventionality has to do with diction and form. She is most at home in meter and rhyme, the sonnet and the lyric, where the challenge is diction and the accommodation of hard subject matter.

She was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, in 1926. She had a troubled childhood and attempted suicide more than once. Unlike Plath, Jennings does not allegorize the causes for her mental disturbance. Poetry is not exorcism but sacrament, a sharing. However extreme her illness, poetry is a way back from the edge, not over it; at her most disturbed she witnesses other people. Without recourse to stylistic ironies, she gains a perspective on herself. The seasons, landscapes, artifacts and people surround her.

In 1961, after she had written her first three celebrated collections of poems—A Way of Looking, A Sense of the World and Song for a Birth or a Death—she published her most substantial critical work. Of Every Changing Shape, a series of related essays, she writes: “I am concerned with three things—the making of poems, the nature of mystical experience, and the relationship between them.” She was thirty-five, working as an editor at a publishing house in London, on the threshold of a religious and psychological crisis that was to beset her for twenty years. She wrote this book “at the pitch of poetry,” with entire concentration.

She insists on continuities in the language of poetry, its inescapable contingencies. “Poets work upon and through each other,” she declares. The natural and inevitable interdependence between poets and poems is “the real meaning of tradition and influence.” This is not far from Eliot’s sense of the contemporaneity of all literature, and its transcendence. For her, transcendence is not an aesthetic but a spiritual verity. The connection between Herbert, Traherne and Vaughan is more than a literary matter. It entails affinities not so much of temperament as of spirit. Her own connection with Eliot and Hopkins, with Edwin Muir and Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Mew and Rilke, is as patent as her loving inferences from St. Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich. “If there is... a connection between poetry and mysticism, then it will be found as easily in the fifth century in Italy as in the fourteenth century in England or the twentieth century in France.” All her chosen poets are from the Christian era, and her poems—perhaps this is why Lowell honored them and her—invariably have a potent religious dimension.

She prefers the language of embodiment, containing rather than describing meanings: “With this ring I thee wed” rather than “I give you this ring as a sign of our marriage.” Enactment in language—a function of rhythm, word order, diction—can impart a spiritual dimension to work of secular writers; poems can mean more than a poet intends, as if touched by a grace the poet inadvertently accesses and cannot deny. For a religious poet, crisis comes when grace recedes, as it does in Vaughan and Cowper, St. John of the Cross and Hart Crane, and from time to time in Jennings: the anxiety of disconnection is potent and can be fatal.

A cradle Catholic, she has not sought emancipation from the metaphysical as Beer does. She makes no bones about belief or doubt. Yet without resorting to politic and bland strategies of ecumenicism, she finds energies outside her church, even outside faith. In taking the title of her critical book from Eliot’s early poem “Portrait of a Lady,” she indicates the protean nature of the spirit, eluding embodiment in an age of doubt. In choosing Eliot she signals a debt (not a great one, judging from her formal strategies) to the modernists.

She seeks out mystics, religious writers and those whose approach is oblique, for whom the structures of faith are drained of meaning, but who continue to surprise—in Larkin’s phrase—“a hunger in themselves to be more serious.” Language is a net made by men and women, its weave too coarse or fragile to snare and hold the transcendent meanings it is after. Mystics write about the experience of mysticism, striving to express what it is and how to attain it. A poet makes a poem, and “What the poet says about how he made it is always a falling away from the experience itself; it throws a backward light. The poet’s explanations are approximations at best.” All criticism illuminates, if at all, in retrospect, a backward light. It is the task of theory to project into the past and future.

The concerns of Every Changing Shape are the concerns of her poetry. She has written philosophical poems, but they take her no further than a threshold; beyond is a pathway or a set of stairs. What matters is what happens when the “I,” the insistent first person of the early poems, the conscious “mind” with its intractable definitions and flaws, which occurs with such frequency in her books, including those written during her illness, reaches the point of “communion.” Like Cowper, who wrote out of distress and nightmare toward a common light where men and women walked and worshipped in the vulgar tongue, Jennings’s work moves toward a norm. For her, as a Catholic, that norm has a crucial spiritual sanction.

Her poems function cumulatively, building toward understanding. They do not aspire to coherent structure but to coherent meaning. They are tentative and do not overreach, do not make claims too large. When they come up against contrary evidence they do not try to hide it. The age is secular and the concerns of the poetic imagination—as Davie argued in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry—have been trammeled in contingencies. Since the 1930s, for many writers, history has displaced the transcendent concerns of those poets from whom the large figures of the past took their bearings. Jennings is awkwardly out of place in her difficult adherence to a strict order, living at the same time in a daily world.

The self-effacement of her approach does not conceal the anachronistic nature of her quest, the hubris of her presumption that in 1961—or in 1999 or 2020—such concerns retain meaning for poets and readers. Postmodernism is in the ascendant and language itself beleaguered by those who deny that it possesses the nominal properties in which a religious poet’s faith is grounded. Her task may seem hopeless. She is no ironist, and this too sets her apart from her generation. She speaks of “bold humility and a disinterested intelligence.” No intelligence is disinterested—that much can be conceded to the postmodernist. But the quality of her interest is different in kind from that which emanates from most seminar rooms. Her beliefs are not a matter of opinion.

She attended St. Anne’s College, Oxford, and became a librarian in the city. Her early distinction made her a focal figure for younger poets. They gathered about her and called themselves Elizabethans. She encouraged them. Her own work is enhanced by her advocacies of her younger contemporaries, and of Charlotte Mew and Christina Rossetti. There is formidable accomplishment in the early work. For her second book she received a Somerset Maugham Award and traveled to Italy, one of the formative experiences in her life. The year when it all changed was 1961, the year of her breakdown. She turned to Hopkins, to the dark sonnets. The Mind Has Mountains, her 1966 collection, reveals the force and integrity of her struggle. Her first Collected Poems (1967) looked for a time like a swan song, the collections that followed containing few notable new poems. At last in 1975, in Growing Points, she found direction again, with a substantial increase in her technical resources. Since then her work has grown more confident and occasionally achieves moments of serenity that, in the fifteen years of her struggle with madness, would have seemed impossible. Her 1986 Collected Poems received the W. H. Smith Award—inevitably, one is tempted to say. In it she sorted out her earlier work, purged the poems of painful transition, abandoned the terrible free-association free-verse poems of her worst years, and came to rest on affirmation.

If the Movement adopted her, it was because of her formal intelligence and her responsible statements. They took their bearings from Empson, Auden and Betjeman; she took hers from Graves. Her stance is one of trust, not distrust; her poems are always vulnerable. And she did not wish to reject the poets of the 1940s or any other resources. She was and remains singularly unpolemical. If her early (unpublished) poems were pale imitations of Eliot, she stumbled on Graves and fell in love with the well-made lyric. She is more an heir of the Georgians than of Hopkins and Herbert, whom she reveres. The greatest influence on her poetic texture is not Eliot or Graves but Edwin Muir. Her religion, her poetic antecedents, and her effective absence from the world during the defining years of feminism left her poems untouched by theory, yet she is herself an interesting case study for feminists in terms of her poetic strategies, commitments and denials.

She compares making poems to the practice of prayer: it reconciles the individual with what is outside it; self is lost in a larger stability. “Each brings an island in his heart to square / With what he finds, and all is something strange / And most expected.” Prayer and poetry also risk the terrifying world of shadows. In her poem on Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, in which she implicates herself, she declares, “To paint’s to breathe / And all the darknesses are dared.”

The paradox of Jennings’s poetry is that the experiences that might have broken her style open—mental illness and its vertiginous phases—seemed to make the forms more tight. Not wishing to project or falsify, the poems about her experiences in a mental hospital are forceful by means of understatement. It is in the serener, later poems, when she revisits almost in a Fern Hill spirit her childhood in Lincolnshire, when she reflects on painters and other artists, on the bed-sit life, solitude, the solace and attrition of neighbors, the mature loves that leave so much unspoken, when she experiences bereavement or speaks in the voice of the Virgin or Christ, that form at last is challenged, as though it is no longer quite adequate for the fullness of her statements. In her later books parts of poems are the best she has written, other parts the worst. “This is my love and now it must be spoken” is an urgent line, but it introduces a tepid poem; another poem begins turgidly and rises to unprecedented heights. The unevenness is exhilarating and vexing. No poem is without a moment at least of astonishment, but few are as complete as “My Grandmother” and “Song for a Birth or a Death” from her middle books. Perhaps, though she writes discrete lyrics, she is a poet who, like another Catholic writer, David Jones, makes sense only in extenso, where the predictable and pedestrian exist beside the epiphanic. The world and her poetry include cliché and utter particularity, crude off-the-peg sentiment and the most bespoke of spiritual insights.

Almost every poem that Philip Larkin included in his four books was classically complete. Some pieces that Anthony Thwaite recovered from magazines and notebooks are also complete; only seldom does Larkin miss his targets; the lapses in diction are usually deliberate. He of all the Movement poets remained most true to his point of departure, and only he of his generation achieved the large readership that other poets envy. His work is controversial not in itself but in what he represents to poets and critics of different camps. He certainly did as much as Housman to turn back the clock of English poetry; like Housman, he is the modern poet most often quoted—in church, in Parliament, in the classroom—by folk who latch on to a phrase or stanza, without bothering to understand what the poem as a whole might mean. His was the characteristic voice of the 1950s and 1960s, regarded by some as the most significant English poet of the postwar.

Where does he come from? From the uptight middle class, with a father whose Little Englandism was Mosleyite, with a quiet, undemonstrative mother to whom he was devoted. Coventry, 1922. Grammar school in the city. A solitary adolescence filled with novel writing as other boys’ is with onanism. The manuscripts disposed of furtively. Oxford—St. John’s College. His friends included Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Robert Conquest. An infatuation with Dylan Thomas, and with Yeats up to Words for Music Perhaps—hence none of Yeats’s later asperity rubbed off on Larkin. This is fortunate, for Larkin learned his own asperity, which owes nothing to Yeats. He wrote to Michael Hamburger that, to him, the “tradition of poetry” is “emotion and honesty of emotion, and it doesn’t matter who it is written by or how, if this is conveyed.” Only one adjustment of this point of view was made after, but it is all-important: “how” became crucial. Auden and Betjeman taught him that, and finally the vaccination against Romanticism, the poetry of Hardy, read early on spring mornings in his uncurtained bed-sit. But it was a romantic temperament that had to content itself with disappointment as its theme.

He does not idealize the past. He does not see it, in Hardy’s terms, as unrealized, either. It is simply unrealizable. Not Wordsworth’s infant trailing clouds of glory behind whom gates of the prison-house close; not Brownings’ “Never the time and the place / And the loved one all together” or even Hardy’s “Everything glowed with a gleam; / But we were looking away.” There was no cloud-trailing infant, no all together, no glow. Yet from these poets Larkin took crucial bearings. Death is his abiding muse, not love or even lust, with its temporary solaces. He essentializes childhood in “I Remember, I Remember,” with its wan allusion to Thomas Hood’s lovely poem about home, its irony at Lawrence’s expense, its train journey (there are numerous train journeys in Larkin, the university librarian traveling to committee meetings around the country).

“Was that,” my friend smiled, “where you ‘have your roots’?”

No, only where my childhood was unspent,

I wanted to retort, just where I started...

There is time betrayed, as in “Home,” and opportunity wasted passim. It begins even before the bleak poem “On Being 26,” which he chose to exclude from his books but his executors have stirred back into the bleak, miraculous mix: not a good poem despite its formal deftnesses. Here we find self-pity. How he overcomes it is one triumph of his work.

Davie contrasts Hardy’s irony, which is thematic, with the irony of the Movement, which is stylistic. It is a distinction valid for all the Movement poets except Larkin. For Larkin irony inheres, and if it is at times stylistic, his stance toward the world, it is also inherent in the experiences he writes from. It is there in “Deceptions,” a line of which gives the title to his first mature collection, The Less Deceived (1955), and ends with a rapist imagined bursting into “fulfilment’s desolate attic.” Irony can be terrifying, even when it is funny, as in “Toads” and “Toads Revisited.” It can make a reader anxious and uncomfortable about pain, distance, exclusion, in “An Arundel Tomb” for example.

The earlier poems speak in the first person singular, but with The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) Larkin writes “we” more often than “I,” implicating us or inviting us into complicity, not communion. We share in diminishment, in the gathering darkness. What makes him distinctive? Formally, Kingsley Amis and—in different ways—Jennings, Gunn and Davie are comparably astute. Perhaps he understands the dynamics of living form better than they; or perhaps it is because he often chooses not the particular but the characteristic detail: “the music on the piano stool” (which music? that is for us to decide), “that vase” (again we fill in the shape and color of the noun). He wanted to be the novelist, Amis the poet, but irony dictated that they should be changelings. Yet just as Amis conceives of paragraphs and chapters as stanzas and introduces even in absurd situations unusually poetic structural elements, so that an emptied lyricism is always in his voice, so Larkin tells consistent stories and creates consistent voices in his poems. Whatever the form is doing (and mere narrative never displaces form), details are arranged so as to create a coherence in scene or emotional development. The movement of the eye in “Church Going”; the changing tones of voice, from anger, to fear, dismay and resignation in “The Old Fools”; the self-reflexive voice of “High Windows”; the scrupulous and bizarrely erotic allegory of “Next Please”: over and above formal precision there is a kind of consistent psychology, that of a character who may be a persona or—as seems more likely in a poet so apparently pitched against modernism as Larkin—may be a conjuration of the poet’s own voice.

Larkin’s inverted romanticism means that he distrusts the subjective, his own and that of the characters he creates and the people he observes. So he evokes them through the physical objects with which they surround themselves. The prospective landlady emerges from her mode of speech, Mr. Bleaney through the articles he has left behind, the footprint into which the speaker of the poem is willing to step. The “cut price crowd” rushes from the stark new suburbs to shop, its values determined and defined by the objects it rushes to acquire. His music is jazz, but the Sidney Bechet blues, not Charlie Parker.

In his first book he “ghosted for the ghost of Yeats.” The North Ship (1945) is full of echoes. He borrows the rhetoric of a passionate poet to express passionlessness: “The heart in its own endless silence kneeling.” He was actually young, writing on mauve paper, reading by candlelight through narrowed eyes, making poems from the froth of other men’s language. His two novels followed in 1946 and 1947, Jill and A Girl in Winter. Only his more serious fans value them.

The Less Deceived emanated from a small press in Hull, where Larkin had gone after time in Belfast and Leicester to be librarian at the Brynmore Jones Library at the university. It did well, and the next year he was a central exhibit in New Lines, Robert Conquest’s anthology, which defined the Movement in its first phase. His later collections came at longer and longer intervals, with, between times, a book on jazz (All What Jazz, 1972), the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973) and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (1983). His Collected Poems appeared posthumously in 1988, and a volume of letters and a biography followed, books he explicitly instructed in his will should never appear.

“I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals,” he says. His task as a poet is “to preserve things I have seen / thought / felt”; poems are “verbal devices,” “verbal pickling.” They build toward a point of “liftoff”; poems are structured, then, to a thematic or dramatic climax, which can occur in the release of an image or a change in tone of voice from the fatuous and lighthearted to deadly earnest. In his prose the irony is for the most part stylistic. In a guarded way in conversation he made concessions: about Laura Riding, whom he regarded as a charlatan but whose rhythms, he confessed, he found mysteriously irresistible; about French symbolism, even about Eliot and other modernist writing. He had a public persona to maintain, but the private man could have an open and independent judgment.

Like his beloved Hardy and Edward Thomas he is a great deployer of negative words, often positive words turned negative, but more subtly, negative words that by a prefix become very nearly affirmative: “unfakeable,” “unignorable,” “unpriceable.” Part of his understatement is that he works from below, as it were, not cutting down a large Romantic subject by irony but, by counterirony, building a subject up. When he is being savage about the poor, the old, the uncultured, we can be sure that by the end of the poem they will have been understood and celebrated, the savagery having been redirected at himself, his attitude, his circumstances. Hardy stands—hungry for faith—outside the church, “prayer denied.” Larkin stands apart from the group, excluded, observing and understanding his separateness.

His originality begins in reaction: to the naïve idealism of the 1930s poets, to the beguiling excess of the Apocalyptics. He accepted the various frustrations and defeats of life—active only in apprehending and describing, and not until the later work counseling action, in specifically social poems. If his technique did not develop after The Less Deceived, his perspectives broadened, and his conservatism tended toward satire.

The poems are invariably subtly made and self-contained; we respond without footnotes, without consulting any document beyond a daily paper. The poems are replete with the small dramas, losses and frustrations that add up to the large gradual tragedy of lives in a thousand furnished rooms and modest houses, in a particular country at a particular time.

Hardy taught him to look outside, to fix the eye on detail, and to leave the impulsive, private, impressionable world of The North Ship behind, to disembark on the terra firma of landscape, of the time that is now and the world that is the welfare state. Hardy showed him how to write as a person who stands at the edge of the crowd, prevented from joining in by a habit of mind that asks uncomfortable questions.

There are, thereafter, only poems, no concept of poetry, no impulse to order poems in a single “statement.” A poem works cumulatively: the scene, tone or argument is set in motion, details assemble, until there is a point of liftoff, a modulation of tone or a deepening of seriousness. From the evocation of externals, the poet proceeds to release their composite meanings. When “liftoff” fails the poems can be vivid verse catalogues only, like “To the Sea” and “Show Saturday.”

The themes in The North Ship—unwilling capitulation to the system of things, love’s unsuccess, frustration, boredom, loneliness, and especially time, “the echo of an axe / Within a wood”—inform the later poems. All that is lacking is the Larkin scenario to make emotion or lack of emotion come alive, through particulars. The early problem may have been that the “I” was not a voice but a poetical persona, much as the “I” in High Windows is sometimes an outdated “I” who no longer sounds true.

The adjustment of style between The North Ship and The Less Deceived is complete. The first poem in the second collection, “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,” is Betjemanesque, though more sinewy than Betjeman, with an Edwardian archness. The poet’s attraction to the young lady is strongly sexual. Images are not symbolic but evocative particulars. A subtler change came in The Whitsun Weddings. The perspective widens, images derive from broader experience, the vision becomes social. In a world heavy with late capitalism, a world of transactions and relationships which time renders senseless, the tragedy of unfulfillment moves out from the “I.” The first poem in the book, “Here,” progresses panoramically through details of landscape that reveal a community, its history and ambitions, much as the details in “Church Going” reveal a faith. The panorama is urban, then—moving out—rural, “where removed lives / Loneliness clarifies.” The juxtaposition of two isolations—individuals isolated in the crowd and the individual isolated in the landscape—is heightened by the speaker’s isolation from both, a middleman undertaking a verbal transaction. In “Wants,” the world divides between those who find despair incomprehensible and those who find it unspeakable.

In High Windows there are more Larkins at work than at any time before; each Larkin is skillful and suggestive but none quite so centered as the Larkin of the previous books. The poet of “Here” reappears—without his earlier power—in “To the Sea” and “Show Saturday.” His attempt to celebrate social customs and rites is hampered by his temperament. He knows that rites, too, have their date. Browning impinges on “Livings (iii)”: perhaps Larkin wanted to try dramatic monologues as a way out of the self. There are notable successes in essentially new tones. “High Windows” itself has assurance, candor, and an unresolved suggestiveness seldom found in the earlier work. The same quality, but a different tone, informs “The Explosion,” about a pit disaster. “The Old Fools” has an asperity tempered by tenderness. Age was nearer at hand. The last eleven years of his life included no further books of poems. Only one major poem, “Aubade,” was added to the body of work, a poem that, like so many before it but with unprecedented urgency, considered death: “Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere / And soon.” The wry, socially lacerating and self-lacerating tone of “Vers de Société” has given way to a genuine terror: not panic, but the fear of a man excluded from all consolation, approaching the summit of extinction’s alp, which he reached in 1985.

Why is a poet of such unoptimistic temperament so popular? Perhaps most of all because of the insidiousness of his verse, the way that after one or two readings it lodges in memory. It has, with its characteristic details, its spoken tones, its formal assurance, the sound of truth, and a poet who speaks bleak truths is probably more valuable than one who gives us airy and empty consolations. The candor of Larkin is different in kind from the candor of Lowell and Plath, not more English, precisely, but more democratic. His truths (if they are true) carry at least the consolation of clarity, unfuzzed by darkly autobiographical resentments. No doubt they are there behind the poems, but the poet has had the tact to push them very nearly out of sight.