GEOFFREY HILL, DEREK MAHON, CHARLES CAUSLEY, RICHARD WILBUR, BILL MANHIRE, CRAIG RAINE, CAROL ANN DUFFY, SIMON ARMITAGE
In the rare public readings Geoffrey Hill has given since he semi-emigrated from England, he speaks his poems clearly, attending to syntactical movement, diction, pause, without superadding “feeling” by variation in pace or tonal emphasis. A poem is complete in itself and requires of the reader only fidelity. Only fidelity: the hardest thing for the reading voice to do, to withhold subjectivity, to efface all but receptive intelligence and the sound of voice, in service of the poem. The poem contains all that is required, no more, no less (although readers may find less than they need to understand, not what the poem is saying, but what it is doing, especially in his 1996 collection, Canaan). The kind of discipline the poems require of the reader they require all the more intensely of the poet. A poem is not a meditation but a making: of a voice struggling in a historical context, for example, for spiritual clarity, or enduring pain to survive. Such a making must be true to the experience it creates, often across languages, across time: the poems has to know the world from which the voice is speaking so that the voice can speak; it must know that world and voice as well as the poet knows his own world and voice. The research that goes into a sequence like “Four Poems Regarding the Endurance of Poets” or The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy is not scholarly: the investment is more intense, more self-effacing than a scholar’s or novelist’s would be. The establishment of appropriate dictions in English for a French, Italian or Spanish voice is a further complicating challenge. A man belongs to his age and culture by virtue of language, institutions, objects, landscapes. To understand him well enough to use his voice is the poet’s tact, a tact he will use, too, in constructing his own voice.
It is revealing that in the poem “Canaan,” Hill, evoking the ways in which his people, in losing faith, are failing in their mission to reach a promised land, are inadvertently serving Moloch, the god who oversees the second part of Ginsberg’s Howl. Against Ginsberg’s apocalyptic vision, Hill’s, written forty years later, is hard and true; a too-late astringent corrective to one of the voices that most savagely and decisively traduced (by appropriation) Blake’s hard vision.
Blake has been with Hill from the beginning. In 1952 the Fantasy Press issued a pamphlet of five early poems, two of which remain uncollected (“To William Dunbar” and “For Isaac Rosenberg”). From the outset Hill chose to learn from poets who “knew the clear / Fullness of vision.” The poems in Canaan come closer than the earlier poems have done to particular events of the age in which they were written, to the extent of relating to Maastricht, privatization and some of the appropriative cultural products of the late twentieth century. The poems contain not only anger but its causes, in ways that will eventually require footnotes and explications as his earlier poems seem to do for many readers unequal to the coherent past worlds he draws together in all their otherness. It is as though he has taken on the role of an oblique Jeremiah. He gazes down, as Melville says of the preacher in Moby Dick, from “the Pisgah of his pulpit.” Canaan recedes: a past not recognized as Canaan when he had it, when we had it, or the possibility of it.
Hill was born in 1932 in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. It is the landscape of the Malverns, of the opening of Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, of Edward Elgar and Ivor Gurney. Woven into Mercian Hymns is as much as we need to know about his childhood: the intelligent child humored if not understood by his family (his father was in the police), studying and writing alone into the night. He went from grammar school to Keble College, Oxford, Butterfield’s patterned brick masterpiece which so offended Ruskin with its pseudo-Gothic lines and colors. It was a construction to feed Hill’s interest in architecture.
There he wrote his first major poem at the age of twenty. “Genesis” is a poem of creation and of origins. Originally subtitled “A Ballad for Christopher Smart,” it is not a conventional ballad, but there is in the persistent rhyme and progressive, lengthening rhythm a sense of the cruelly ordered world embodied in form. The poem is in five sections and follows a seven-day development. On the first day “the waves flourished at my prayer, / The rivers spawned their sand.” His vision of the fecundity of nature is then colored by a sense of its cruelty. In the second section he witnesses “The osprey plunge with triggered claw /... To lay the living sinew bare.” The third day the cry is one of fear. On the fourth day he attempts renunciation, by imagination, to elude the cruel processes of nature and create something stable and apart. The poem falls into archaism: the ideal set in a past of language, impermeable to the actuality of the present. But on the fifth day (in the fourth part of the poem) he is compelled to acknowledge and accept “flesh and blood and the blood’s pain.” He becomes in the last section part of the scheme, “in haste about the works of God.” To make sense of the cruelty of the world he must not withdraw but engage, and engage on the side of the maker. The seventh day is left unspoken: a day of judgment. The “Genesis” is not only the emergence of the world in the individual consciousness and imagination; it is the genesis of consciousness and the conscience that inevitably accompanies it, but the “I” is not characterized or differentiated: like the speaker of a ballad it is witness, even though the subject is self.
Hill started graduate work, began teaching at Leeds, where he became professor, then went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a fellow in the wake of Christopher Ricks, for many years Hill’s subtlest champion. He went to Boston University in 1988, thereafter spending two thirds of each year in the United States. For the Unfallen (1959) was his first book; it has been followed at irregular intervals by King Log (1968), Mercian Hymns (1971), Tenebrae (1978), The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983), The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (1984), Collected Poems (1985) and Canaan (1996). He translated Ibsen’s Brand for the National Theatre.
In “Genesis” and other poems, up through King Log, the poet’s occasions are unusual. When he, or the subject he is writing for, cannot feel or cannot act (feeling is a form of action) the poem happens: in the wake of battle, of torture, of unfulfillment in love. The compulsion, the pressure behind the poem, is frustrated sense, a need to articulate, combined with an intense reticence that limits the area in which he will allow the language to work. What is unfinished or unjudged is for Hill generative and haunting. Unlike many poets of his generation, he was drawn to the modernists, to their principles of juxtaposition, fragmentation in the interests of wholeness, the original integrity of form. Eliot in particular is crucial to his formation, and it is not only the Eliot of The Waste Land but the later Anglican Eliot that he unfashionably learns from. One critic referred to Hill’s “Imagism”—an imagism of a new kind, which is alive to dictions and tones in such a way as to make juxtapositions not of images but “voice images,” phrases which draw in, momentarily and with a weight of association, resonances from different registers: a flash of prose in quotation marks breaks across a poem, a false aphorism disrupts or occasions a contrary reflection, an archaism summons a ghost, or—as with Eliot—a quotation (or translated phrase) is embedded in the poem.
He does not write dramatic monologues but soliloquies. His voices speak from within their experience, not about it. Even “To the (supposed) patron” does more than imagine an interlocutor. The monologue is made, but the monologist creates a sense of his audience and world, a world of relationships with clear gradations of power and subjection, hierarchical and often brutally unjust.
There is an imbalance, the poems suggest, in all relations: in love, family, politics, religion. The language by its reticence evokes extremes of experience. Elegy is Hill’s dominant mode, but not mellifluous elegy: he is for the most part harshly consonantal, a poet of phrases rather than cadences. Vocalic values are foregrounded only occasionally, and to wonderful effect in “The Pentecost Castle,” a series of twelve-line fragments in a Spanish ballad mode in which secular and spiritual love and loss are fused and Lope de Vega’s measure sounds for the first time, with authority, in English.
The language and terms of liturgy and of church and secular music recur not only in titles—hymns, canticles, song-book, requiem, “Funeral Music,” fantasia—but in the structuring of the poems. Until Canaan his religious position seemed to be like Hardy’s, outside the fold, wishing to communicate but unable to say and mean the creed. Latterly he has described himself as an Anglican, as if the long discipline of the poems has made belief tenable.
Anglican: England. His vision of his country, which Donald Davie described as patriotism—and no weaker word will do—is far from sentimental. He understands the great divisions, not least that between the north and south, Robin Hood versus King Arthur. His own landscape is the Midlands, which has always been—even in the time of Gower—the mediating landscape, where a poet can talk in both directions, negotiating between the hierarchical south and the democratic-anarchic north. In Mercian Hymns, those short poems in long, psalmlike but spoken lines, plainsong, anthologies of phrases and registers, he proposes as the ambivalent tutelary spirit of his West Midlands King Offa, a great builder, a great tyrant. Into his landscape Hill draws his own and other tributary histories. Boethius reappears for the first time in three centuries, as alive for Hill as he was for Chaucer and Elizabeth I. Offa’s kingdom includes Shakespeare’s birthplace. Hill is a different kind of Shakespearean from Hughes. He turns to The Tempest: water, treachery, injustice, cruel judgment, regeneration, redemption, a magickable or magicked reality where the magic is the moral and potentially the spiritual solvent.
Hill’s contemporaries rejected the social ironies and tones of the Movement. Hill was not so absolute as they, learning useful lessons, in his quest for deeper integrities, from their ironies of disengagement. Used differently the same ironies might serve, as in “September Song” and “Ovid in the Third Reich,” to go to the center rather than hold it at a distance. He learned what Donald Davie was to find in To Scorch or Freeze, that by foregrounding language and tone, recognizing different and differently valenced registers, a poem can work through to social and spiritual truths.
Despite his attraction in his later poetry and prose to Ruskin, Pater, Pugin and the great figures of the nineteenth century, his fascination with times of violence and what that violence does to individuals and to the imagination has not abated. “Funeral Music,” the delicate approach to Paul Celan, the large imagining of Charles Péguy, the interest in Spain and the Counterreformation, the High Baroque, persist. In the Baroque the paradigms of the Reformation and then the Enlightenment are unfelt, the tension between medieval and Renaissance persists in allegory, in figuration. Hill, it sometimes seems, perilously hankers for Jesuit subtleties, precisions, logics and disciplines. His Baroque doesn’t put us in mind of Donne and Herbert but of the Spanish poets. His attraction to the work of Allen Tate may be an aspect of this: Tate’s single rhetoric, using words that come into the poem heavy with nuance, but within the poem, because of their very specific usage, shed nuance and revert to a single meaning.
Because of the integrity of Hill’s achieved poems, they build a unique space in imagination. Events for him remain implicit in the places where they occurred. It is a Bergsonian notion, which Sartre paraphrases in these terms: “On going into the past an event does not cease to be; it merely ceases to act and remains ‘in its place’ at its date for eternity. In this way, being has been restored to the past, and it is very well done. We even affirm that duration is a multiplicity of interpenetration, and that the past is continually organised with the present.” “Funeral Music” and Mercian Hymns are not feats of imaginative integration so much as acts of belief. Hill’s antagonism to “modernizing” the texts of the past—Tyndall’s Bible, Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity—is more comprehensible in this light: modernization falsifies the facts, falsifies the language.
In his essay “The Tongue’s Atrocities” he explores how far language can go—not, like Plath, probing the psyche, the subjective—but how far it can go in history, a language inevitably attached to and cultured in the individual. How far, with the Bergsonian past in mind, can a voice speak, speak of, speak to (it cannot hope to speak for); how far can it contain and judge the unspeakable and counterweigh Adorno’s notorious dictum that there can be no poems after Auschwitz. What can poetry do? It can effect a “felt change of consciousness.” It can make something happen within the individual, and through the individual within the wider communities to which that individual belongs. It is at this level that the unique value of Hill’s vocation needs to be understood. The poetry, because it is so hedged about by necessary integrity and restraint, requires an unusually resolute commitment from the reader. Hill’s poems aspire to exist in a public sphere. There, they compete with other vulgar tongue discourses—from liturgy to journalism—and compete with precision, though the unequal contest becomes more unequal year by year, as Canaan recedes.
Few modern poets are so completely scrupulous, so considered, as Hill. At his best the Belfast-born Irish poet Derek Mahon (b. 1941) can seem to be, but his investment in “something larger” is not so great as Hill’s: his imagination has been released from the demands of an informing culture. As a result he turns rather too readily toward his reader, wry, shrugging his shoulders, as though it is too late to find the big theme his skills might be equal to. And so—Boethius again, but only distantly—he concludes “Consolations of Philosophy,” about death and physical decomposition (there is no redemption), with an inclusive helplessness:
There will be time to live through in the mind
The lives we might have led, and get them right;
To lie in silence listening to the wind
Call for the living through the livelong night.
His celebrated “A Disused Shed in County Wexford” takes its epigraph from the Greek poet George Seferis: “Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels.” Weak soul and strong satirist: the combination is a doubly vulnerable one. A number of his poems end in question marks, and he travels, rootless, in search of answers that only rootedness could provide—rootedness, or a new approach to form, a break with the tidyings that his stanzas make in the mess of experience.
The tidy stanza—hymn, ballad—serves best the innocent poet, and there are few of them about. Indeed, after Stevie Smith, only one, Charles Causley, comes to mind. His work has been consistently undervalued for fifty years, not that neglect has seemed to bother or inhibit him. The word “innocent” used of a poet sounds pejorative. It needn’t. Causley’s innocence is formal. He knows about modernism, but what he has to say requires not fragmentation but narrative, often balladic in character. He writes poems for children and about them. He turns to the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca—not the Surrealist, but the maker of ballads and popular songs. He turns to John Clare.
O Clare! Your poetry, clear, translucent
As your lovely name,
I salute you with tears.
It is still just possible to write in these ways if your history allows: it is a perspective that cannot be simulated, a skill that cannot be faked. Innocence is Causley’s main theme (he was a schoolmaster for most of his life, and knew the bright and dark sides of Blake’s child), innocence and its betrayal.
He was born in 1917 in Launceston, Cornwall, with the round castle and the vividly decorated church; he stayed there, apart from his years in the navy (1940–46), which enriched his diction with odd colloquial metaphors and expressions. It also gave him themes and subjects: “separation, loss, death in alien places, extraordinary characters, a perpetual sense of unease about how things might end.” He played the piano in a four-piece band before the war, and the rhythms of his poems sometimes follow song and dance beats. He wrote plays. In 1940 he began to write verse. Farewell, Aggie Weston (1951) was his first substantial book, in the vulgar tongue and the vulgar forms of popular verse. Every five or six years he has added a further slim volume, with a Collected Poems in 1975 and another in 1992.
Sassoon was the first poet he deliberately committed to memory. Sassoon, Housman and the Georgians made him proof against Pound and Eliot, whose work he read with respect but took little from. Causley is at home in Housman’s meters, though his lads and lasses have Cornish blood in their veins and he never classicizes his locations or his plots. De la Mare, Betjeman and MacNeice have been of use to him, though none has overmastered him. His strong themes—the sea on the one hand, and a core of religious concerns and ambivalences on the other—he shares with the people he lives among. He is naturally, not by design, their poet. He and they together hear the ballad and the hymn. The poet does not foreground himself.
He calls his poems “entertainments,” which, among the more serious intentions of his contemporaries, is refreshing. They are that, and often more. He blurs the lines of a sketched plot, adding more than descriptive words, providing moral and allegorical dimensions. The plot itself may be susceptible to various readings. The poems entertain as ballads and hymns do, involving the audience. And it is often audience rather than reader that the poems envisage.
Causley does not “develop” as a poet. Like Betjeman he knows his area of activity well. His experiments with Surrealism were brief, and he came home to his landscape and his vocation. A folk and popular tradition survives in his work, which belongs too among the more deliberately literary writing of the time: he comes as close as a poet can to the sentimental without falling over into mawkishness. Like Clare, like Lorca, like de la Mare.
There is no danger of mawkishness in the formalism of Richard Wilbur. His attitude to form is not unlike Wordsworth’s, to which Coleridge took exception: “The strength of the genie comes of his being confined in a bottle.” Form is seen as restraint; molten forces within the poet need restraining. This view does not square with Wilbur’s declared mission: “Every poem of mine is autonomous”—(how Larkin would agree)—“and consists of an effort to exhaust my personal sense of the subject. It is for this reason that a poem sometimes takes me years to finish.” Not a very powerful genie, then: what enables (rather than restrains) the poem is the bottle, the form.
Born in New York in 1921, Wilbur studied at Amherst College (where he heard, and sometimes learned to sound like, Frost) and served in the American infantry in Italy in the Second World War, returning to further studies at Harvard. In those years he wrote The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947), realizing that he could make sense of experience only by giving it form. The play of wit begins in this work. These are “war poems” even if their subject matter is not war. There is common ground with Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle, published a year before, but Wilbur’s verse is the more accessible, his themes the more widely pertinent. He went on to more dramatic approaches to subject matter and subject, finding experience through poems. He translated Molière as he has never before been translated into English, with remarkable tact and wit. He wrote the libretto out of Voltaire for Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. His few translations from the poems of the Russian Joseph Brodsky are the only ones in English to suggest that poet’s substantial qualities.
He is temperamentally more of the school of Moore than of Ransom, whose formal strategies he admired and emulated. “There is no straight / way of approaching it,” he says, and his animals in their fragile, artificial-seeming (because other) worlds, into which the human world breaks with violence, are held with Moorelike care and even tenderness. “The tall camels of the spirit” could have been borrowed from one of Miss Moore’s caravans. Does nature wish to express itself as well as be? “There is something they mean,” he says of the “Water Walker,” whose world hovers tantalizingly near the core of our spiritual world, if only metaphorically. Wilbur is aware of what he is doing. His excursions and quests are schematized, focused in a form that makes them elegant, controllable, and falsifies or violates their nature as concrete, vital and unstable things: “Such violence. And such repose.” The classicist will not let him go, with his “There where” and “Then when” constructions. Yet in his forms the living antlers, the living trees, live differently. His most arresting early poem is “Castles and Distances”:
Oh, it is hunters alone
Regret the beastly pain, it is they who love the foe
That quarries out their force, and every arrow
Is feathered soft with wishes to atone;
Even the surest sword in sorrow
Bleeds for its spoiling blow.
It is not true, we say, but for the poem and the system that the poem becomes, it can be read as true. The poem has come up against reality, making an order which does not violate the given world. Wilbur’s insistent formalism, his stance against the romantic excesses and formal divagations of the age, make him a figure who might be central to the New Formalism, were it not for the demands he places on form and the complexity of themes he manages to combine in a single exhaustive poem. Wilbur is as odd in his way as Causley: not alienated, a “poet-citizen” with a sense of an audience to address, students to teach. An Augustan harbinger—or an eloquent anachronism? One suspects—given the Howard Nemerovs, Anthony Hechts, Donald Halls, John Hollanders and, on an entirely different scale, the glittering James Merrills—the former, but an Augustanism less acerbic, more celebratory and sometimes hedonistic, than the last, over which Ovid rather than Virgil presides and transformations which reveal the truth will be permitted. Polished old bottles, new water into wine.
Into the formal poetry of New Zealand, only mildly disrupted by the experiments of Allen Curnow, a disruptive force rumbled in the magazines and then burst forth with a book in 1970: Malady. This was the eminently civilized revolution of Bill Manhire, born in 1946, reared in the far south of New Zealand, where his parents were publicans. He began thriftily, with tautly Imagistic poems whose calm voices were out of place among the ego rant of his romantic and unbuttoned (not experimental) contemporaries. In the 1970s Manhire was in Britain studying Norse sagas, for he is a scholar by vocation, as well as a poet. He is drawn to sparsely peopled landscapes, preferably very cold. The last postcard I had from him was sent from Antarctica, where he is poet in residence, it would seem. He was making his first day trip to the South Pole on the weekend, “three hours each way.” He is like the Everyperson character in his do-it-yourself-novel game, The Brain of Katherine Mansfield (1988), except in the question of languages: “You are just an ordinary New Zealander. You have strength, intelligence and luck, though you are not particularly good at languages. Your family and friends like you, and there is one special friend who really thinks you’re swell. Yours is a well-rounded personality; your horoscope is usually good; your school report says ‘satisfactory.’ But somehow you are restless. Your life is missing challenge and excitement. You want to make things happen. Go to 2.” It is time for reinvention, because Manhire is, like Causley and Mahon and Wilbur, a poet who knows about the wheel, but it’s too round. He doesn’t want to make the square, triangular and spherical wheels that take Hill on his difficult journey over the rubble of centuries, but a new-world wheel with the best properties of the old and some new features. The fullest selection of his work is Sheet Music: Poems 1967–1982, to which he has added Milky Way Bar (1991), and My Sunshine (1996).
So he keeps for the most part to stanzas and to syntax, but his stanzas can be very arbitrary in what they impose, and his syntax can unfold like an Ashberyian Mobius strip. He is a scholar, he is naturally conservative and wants to communicate, to make fun of the excesses of his discipline and of the dialects that attach to literary criticism and theory; he is also an explorer in language, and he doesn’t like to go back to the museum every day but much of the time goes to work in the field bringing back new objects and collections. In the briefest of moments he will establish his theme (rhythmic, imagistic, syntactical) and immediately start playing variations. He is a comic rather than an ironic writer. Like other postmodernists (as we must regard him), he enjoys collaborative work, with artists and musicians. There is collaboration and there is mugging. He is generally frank about his muggings, as in “On Originality,” which describes in metaphor what happens in imagination.
Poets, I want to follow them all,
out of the forest into the city
or out of the city into the forest.
The first one I throttle.
I remove his dagger
and tape it to my ankle in a shop doorway.
Then I step into the street
picking my nails.
Manhire has a range of wheels and spares. He honors Charles Causley, he honors etymology. In “Milton” he honors the human impulse (not the hubris, but the hunger for love) behind the most ambitious and impersonal of poems.
It is this human impulse that is missing in the “ludic” first two books of Craig Raine, The Onion, Memory (1978) and A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979). With what rapidity his verse burst upon the scene, and how quickly it transformed itself, so that by 1981, in A Free Translation, though all four wheels of his vehicle were still simile and metaphor, he had found the force of anecdote and was preparing to translate it into narrative. And narrative is what he gave us in History: The Home Movie (1994), a saga with two family trees like a Russian novel, and with Russian characters, and a time scale long enough to snare thousands of similes: Russian revolutionary history (we begin in 1905), the Second World War (especially rich in similes), and the after-tremors right down to 1984. With “brilliant, minute intensity,” Richard Holmes declares, the family saga unfolds: the Pasternaks and the Raines.
Empson suggested that the problem with Imagism was that it had lost the use of its legs: stilled in time, the image lost context and without context, significance drains away. The constant use of strong simile deprives a poem of movement in quite another way. The points of comparison displace the subject. Narrative cannot be conducted by such means. The home movie flickers, each frame demanding attention but passing so quickly that we cannot attend; or if we stop the film and look, then we lose the flow of the poem. Ginsberg in Howl heaped language in and did not expect the reader to do more than get a sense of sense, a sense of anger and confusion. Raine wants us in his 334-page narrative quite as much as in his short poems to read.
James Fenton named the Martian School after Raine’s second book appeared. In recommending A Free Translation he declared: “Craig Raine has set a new style and standard for his contemporaries. He has taught us to become strangers in our familiar world, to release the faculty of perception and allow it to graze at liberty in the field of experience.” Fenton’s bovine metaphors are suspect, since “perception,” even on Mars, is hardly a cow, and experience is not a field. Metaphor has “made strange” as systematically as Raine does before: it has done so in MacCaig’s work, in some of Dylan Thomas’s, and notably in Sylvia Plath’s. In each case the poets have done something new with prosody at the same time. It has not been a matter of dropping everything else and setting metaphor down in a prose staccato. Raine’s experimentation with one poetic resource proved easy to imitate. At writing workshops students were told to “do a Raine.” Impatience with the exaggerated claims that accompanied his work did not detract from his originality, but the excitement has subsided, and the “new style and standard” stayed in the 1980s. It is worth remembering that Raine is not always defamiliarizing the world. Sometimes he takes an alien world—the zoo in winter, for example, or missionaries lost in the Kalahari desert—and “familiarizes” the experience, applying familiar metaphorical templates to bring the strange within the zone of our visual perception, at the same time falsifying the nature of what is being seen in a crude appropriation. What makes “The Kalahari Desert” powerful is that the metaphorical process of perception is invested in characters in a strange and cruel environment: to liken the extreme experiences to the recognizable and domestic tames them, until those experiences assert their own nature and take their toll. In “Nature Study” Raine writes of the zoo, “In winter time, the zoo reverts to metaphor, / God’s poetry of boredom,” and about his verse, even extended beyond endurance in History, this is what it can be, the product of leisure and tedium, with—occasionally—an astonishing poem that understands that the abandonment of metaphor can produce the most powerful effects, working against expectation as the best poetry will.
Two voices, Carol Ann Duffy’s and Simon Armitage’s, give a “new style and standard” to British poetry in the 1990s, both acclaimed with the same overemphasis as Raine was in the 1980s, as though commercial and educational interests need to identify market leaders and set texts, to simplify the task of marketing and of educational provision. Both poets are excellent performers and workshop leaders. Both are more generous to their fellow poets than their fellow poets generally are to them, perceived popular success being poison to the yet-to-acquire-perceived-popular-success poet. Duffy and Armitage (along with Glyn Maxwell and Sean O’Brien) have outrun the pack and are already subjects of undergraduate, M.A. and Ph.D. attention: canonical not only in their lifetime but in their youth. Accessibility is the keynote. When Geoffrey Hill read his poems in Manchester in 1997, Simon Armitage, who admires Hill’s work, was in the audience, yet a chasm gaped between them. It was as though they practiced quite different forms of art, more remote from one another than Skelton and Sidney, or Jonson and Clough.
Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955, studied philosophy at the University of Liverpool and graduated in 1977. She began as a playwright, and her poems often concentrate on character and voice—tones of voice, tones of feeling, rather than differentiated dictions, dramatic monologues and not soliloquies. She is a satirist who understands her foils and sympathizes with the ways in which people must behave in order to earn a living and survive in a modern world. Her Aunt Sallys have nothing in common with Auden’s: she gives them a fighting chance. Except when it comes to Auden in “Alphabet for Auden,” a cruel and accurate cleverly slant-rhymed doggerel indictment of the poet of this century with the greatest skills, who sold himself and his readers short.
Her books, Standing Female Nude (1985), Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1992) and Mean Time (1993), have been poetry best-sellers. Her most popular vein—dramatic monologues in the voices of wives of famous men (Mrs. Midas, Mrs. Aesop)—she develops with an eye to the audience, taking elements in the menfolk and their stories and exaggerating them for effect, an experiment she might carry further if she took the characterization into the syntax and diction of her “wives,” but the actual subjects sometimes remain the menfolk and their unreasonable ambitions and demands.
It is in relatively conventional poems like “Prayer,” “Miles Away,” “Small Female Skull,” “The Grammar of Light,” that an unusual directness and transparent passion for the human emerge: desire, aloneness, love, the physicality of existence, the hungry libido of imagination. These poems do what James Fenton praised Raine’s for doing through metaphor, but Duffy works with voice, meter and rhyme, with metaphor to make “strangers in our familiar world,” finding in the experience of the poems’ voices new experience in ourselves. Like Causley, Duffy goes to the brink of the sentimental. The process at work is one of inclusion, bringing marginal experiences into focus, aligning them with the larger structures of feeling to which they properly belong. From book to book there has been a double progression: some of the work seems more determined than ever to play to the audience, manipulating response, while the best poems are of a different order, finding new resources rather than new subject matter, and this is how a poet grows.
The poems of Simon Armitage are less grounded in human lives, more deliberately literary in their effects and concerns, though his themes too are often social and political. He has been too narrowly associated with the north of England and with Huddersfield, as if some virtue attaches to the connection; but even in his first book, Zoom (1989), the “demotic” of Yorkshire, used in uneasy combination with “standard” and literary English, had a staged feel about it. He found the work of Paul Muldoon enabling at the outset, and the outstanding comic and performance poet Ian McMillan, but he outgrew both and developed his own strategies, now commanding his own imitators. He has tried collaborations: with other media (Xanadu, written for television, 1992) and with other writers. Armitage, like Tony Harrison (who does not seem to have affected his verse, though he may have influenced his sense of objectives), finds the poem on the page only part of what a poem can be and do. The humor and pathos of his collections Kid (1992) and Book of Matches (1993) depend in part on voice and accents. The Dead Sea Poems move away from the safe northern base: he gathers subject matter and sets himself technical challenges with each poet he takes on board. Early admirers were sorry to see him move off from the assurance of Zoom and begin a more experimental progress. The peril for him, as for Duffy, is not the praise of critics but the seduction of audience. Its impact on substantial talents since the war, in the United States, Britain, Australia and elsewhere, has been marked. Local audiences make local “entertainment demands” of diction, syntax and form. At their best both Duffy and Armitage respond but issue serious counterdemands. It is not impossible that they may raise the audience with them (they have the technical means), but it is an English or at best a British audience, a reassuring and comfortable nest no doubt, but...