SEAMUS HEANEY, PAUL MULDOON, DEREK WALCOTT, LORNA GOODISON, EDWARD KAMAU BRATHWAITE, TONY HARRISON, JOSEPH BRODSKY, LES MURRAY
Once he sensed a thematic link between George Herbert’s poem “The Pulley” and one of his own, “Squarings,” Seamus Heaney believed. His belief as he reports it to us is that “a reliable critical course could be plotted by following a poetic sixth sense.” It is not a matter of a critical intelligence and a poetic imagination being at odds: there is a critical imagination and a poetic intelligence as well. Introducing the volume of his Oxford lectures, The Redress of Poetry (1995), he was declaring, at the heart of an academic institution, that analytical criticism and literary theory are secondary, that serious readers navigate by ear and imagination. He goes further, calling Robert Pinsky as a witness (Heaney and Pinsky are both professors). In Pinsky’s essay “Responsibilities of the Poet,” in a language overballasted with metaphor, he proclaims a splendid truth. The poet “needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond. The promise may be a contradiction, it may be unwanted, it may go unheeded... but it is owed, and the sense that it is owed is a basic requirement for the poet’s good feeling about the art. This need to answer, as firm as a borrowed object or a cash debt, is the ground where the centaur walks.” That the poet is answerable—to his subject, his audience, or, more properly, to his language—is unexceptionable. What gives pause is the insistence on “the poet’s good feeling about his art.” Heaney pushes it: his notion of redress is that the poem takes the reader, even if only in a glimpse, “beyond confusion”; it is “a glimpse that has to be its own reward,” though he adds that it “fills the reader with a momentary sense of freedom and wholeness.” It is, in short, necessarily affirmative. Wordsworth becomes a prime witness; Heaney also calls Frost, Hardy and Rilke to the stand.
These arguments seem to me remote from poems. They can get in the way of poems and, as they become dogma, steer the art in directions it doesn’t necessarily want to go. In a poet of Heaney’s skills the art is generally stronger than the rhetoric that tries to enlarge it. Making poems is one thing, being a poet quite another. Being a poet comes after the event of the poem; poets can interpose themselves between the poem and the audience, the poem and its “redress” or “responsibility.” In Pinsky as in Heaney it is the poem that must answer, and it needs no special pleading. The kind of critical magniloquence that mars the often penetrating essays of Joseph Brodsky, who meant a great deal to Heaney, has rubbed off on many successful poets. It is nothing new; it is part of the legacy of Romanticism. When Wordsworth learned to talk in the large categories that Heaney admires, his poetry was in trouble. Poems hate such afflatus, such ambition at their expense.
Heaney was born in Mossbawn, County Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1939. His father was a Roman Catholic farmer. The eldest of nine children, Heaney won a scholarship, after attending Anahorish School, to St. Columb’s College, Derry, where he boarded. “My sensibility,” he told John Haffenden, “was formed by the dolorous murmurings of the rosary, and the generally Marian quality of devotion. The reality that was addressed was maternal, and the posture was one of supplication.” He learned patience, “the best virtue,” and the “Hail Mary” struck him as a “better poem” than the “Our Father,” because it is “faintly amorous.” Already—or is it retrospect adjusting history?—poetry was coloring, or displacing, faith.
He attended Queen’s University, Belfast, became a schoolteacher, then returned to his university as a lecturer in 1965. The next year he published his first collection, Death of a Naturalist. He taught at Queen’s University (with a year in California) until 1972, and during that time his second and third collections appeared, Door into the Dark (1969) and Wintering Out (1972). He spent four years in County Wicklow (North was published in 1975), then moved to Dublin. Field Work appeared in 1979, with his first Selected Poems. In 1984 he was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and in 1989 Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He has been prolific: Station Island and Sweeney Astray (1984), The Haw Lantern and New and Selected Poems 1966–1987 (1987), Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996) after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, in addition to anthologies, introductions, essays, and three prose collections, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (1979), The Government of the Tongue (1988) and The Redress of Poetry (1995).
For all his travels, Heaney remains a poet with a locality and landscape, though he is displaced from it as he was once displaced in it. His early displacement was due to the fact that he did not have a rural vocation—an estrangement like Tony Harrison’s from his class and community—but Heaney is neither bitter nor enraged: he expresses through his evocations a warm solidarity with what he left behind, a nostalgia for the past that becomes a nostalgia for the present, which he can watch but cannot in conscience fully engage. This failure of engagement is one of the most powerful themes of his poetry and a testament to its political and social integrity.
In Wintering Out he brings politics into his verse directly. Politics had been latent, he claims, before, and perhaps he is right. He began writing when he began teaching: an urge to compete with R. S. Thomas, with Hughes, classroom poets. Like Thomas he becomes political when his environment is politicized, when the pull of history becomes too hard to resist. Would he have achieved his public eminence without the Troubles? To what extent do external factors here, as in Plath and Hughes (and latterly Gunn), determine his reputation? The question, posed by those who resent his success, is fatuous. The Troubles are not external to one whose community is riven by them, nor do they become external when he leaves. We have to connect where he came from with where he has gone, what he was with what he now is, the uses made of him and his resistance to or complicity in those uses.
Brodsky used him (and Walcott and Murray) to develop his polemic about the decline of British and American poetry, the rotten center and the healthy periphery. Brodsky had a purpose: to empower the historically marginalized at the expense of the traditionally empowered. His chosen poets, with the full authority of the English tradition (a tradition rather lacking in the eighteenth century, rather poor in the Enlightenment, but then Brodsky was a child of Counterreformation), spoke and spoke for. Brodsky’s strategy was expedient, political and timely. But he came to believe in it himself. Fortunately, Heaney, Walcott and Murray, while they learned about the poetry of Eastern Europe from Brodsky and gained much from his wide learning, are less credulous. Having seen how writers and literatures can be marginalized, they have not lent their weight to the polemic. With Brodsky, however, they share a wariness of modernism and of the postmodern. (Critics speak of the influence of Williams on Heaney’s short-lined poems: the diction as much as the underlying iambic tell against this judgment.) Their prosodies are seldom radically experimental, whatever risks they take with diction and the larger forms. They align themselves with the Romantics, with notions of organic form. Their first-person singular, their “I,” is remarkably secure against the instabilities through which it is buffeted.
There seems to be a close kinship between the mature poems of Heaney and of Walcott, the ways in which they read back into their early lives and landscapes, making connections; the ways in which their language itself fans out like a place full of histories and losses. Their quatrain poems advance, in an oblique and condensed language, on their childhoods, Irish and Caribbean, restoring them in heightened hues. But Walcott never speaks, as Heaney does, of the “exclusive civilities” of English. In this Heaney sounds more like another poet of the Caribbean, Edward Kamau Brathwaite.
English, the argument runs, is a language imposed on Ireland; it is historically and semantically inimical to Heaney’s Irish Catholic experience. It is colored by Protestantism, it excludes whole registers of feeling, it ironizes attitudes that are close to Heaney’s heart. What are the “exclusive civilities”? What hegemony can a language exercise through literature? To what extent is a language we are born to, which our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were born to, imposed, to what extent is it given? Imposition is on the first and sometimes the second generation: then the people get hold of their language; they alter it, infiltrate it, make spaces in it, possess it. Stephen Dedalus in the famous “tundish” scene in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a witness to the difference of dialect between the English mentor and the Irish youth. He doesn’t wish he spoke Irish instead of English. He is stating a fact: that languages in different usage develop different valencies. He resents hearing his form of the language patronized by one who imagines his version is superior. Heaney’s and Brathwaite’s stance is now a commonplace, a form of rhetoric that can be adapted to various causes. Language is subvertible, however, and poetry has been and remains a means of subversion. But only if, as in Hill, it is reified, only if the poem is in and against its language. The subtle redress of such poetry is for the reader rather than the audience.
Is it not the various radicalisms of poetry which have ensured that in the area of literature at least language cannot tyrannize? The examples of Marlowe and Rochester, Milton and Blake, Shelley and Auden, Smart and Cowper; the hard models of Pound and MacDiarmid, within whose work we can discriminate both the radicalism and its signal failure: they affirm a more complex reality.
Opposition to literary hegemony is a notion that, if taken seriously into composition (as in the work of Brathwaite), impoverishes the poet’s expressive resources and works against the possibility of transcendence. Walcott is right to affirm that Herbert and Herrick belong as much to him as they do to Larkin, though he speaks from a more “problematic” background than Heaney’s. These are positive continuities; to break them is to impoverish self and art, and an impoverished art does not provide “redress.”
Fortunately Heaney does not take the argument deep into his poetry. He hears different dialects and accents and they mean different things. “The Guttural Muse” in Field Work, the book he struggled hardest for, brings together two experiences: the image of the “doctor fish” and the sound of people talking a “redemptive” dialect outside the poet’s hotel window, sounds that assuaged his sense of isolation and aloneness and let him see “beyond confusion.” The poem, however, talks about the issue, it does not embody it. In his essay “Englands of the Mind” he schematically teases out three models of diction, a Latinate, an Anglo-Saxon and a Norman, and characterizes Hill, Hughes and Larkin according to his plan. Too tidy, but suggestive.
Heaney’s model is not Joyce and not the great Irish Táin. It is Auden, who teaches that the poet’s tasks are making, judging and knowing. The making starts for Heaney in inadvertent politics. In 1974 he spoke of the Republican street rhymes he learned at Anahorish school, full of resistance and Irish patriotism. He was forced to memorize Byron and Keats. He loved to hear Wodehouse’s characters but he could not speak their accents aloud. He got over his schooling. He was touched deeply by Hopkins, by Frost and Roethke, by Patrick Kavanagh. Later he was knocked rather off course by the power of Lowell’s poems and by Lowell’s presence in Ireland.
His approach to the present and its recurrences is generally through analogues—ghosts, bog people, childhood—the past lighting and alighting on the present. It is a deeply conservative aesthetic. “Beware of ‘literary emotion,’ ” he says, and it is of Wordsworth, the poet of The Prelude, that he reminds us. The particularity of the early poems with their dependence on mimetic sound, their attempt to get close to the rural world, ensured his popularity. The world he created was authentically rural, and his rural world was closer to that of the Georgians than to the factory farming that had destroyed the wells and hedges of England.
He moves from that landscape to a wider sense of Ireland, the shape that it is in a map, the roads that intersect it, the histories that divide it. The development of his early writing is vivid, culminating in the historical and then the autobiographical poems in North. The struggle of Field Work is exhilarating: the poet has made a choice, has left the north of Ireland, has withdrawn from his great literary success into a place where he tries to rethink and remake his art. His most harrowing, quietly spoken political poem, “Casualty,” is embedded in a sequence that gives it depth and context. The best poems in The Haw Lantern, Seeing Things and The Spirit Level are the results of the ongoing reinvention of self that begins in Field Work. Other poets—Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Robert Lowell, Joseph Brodsky—are catalysts; the classics invite his complicity so that he takes Dante and Homer on board. There is a tentativeness in his growth, a willingness to be blown off course, a self-knowledge sufficient to right the rudder and go on, following that sixth sense he speaks of. In the last of his “Squarings,” the forty-eight twelve-line triplet poems that are the “invention” of Seeing Things, he says:
Strange how things in the offing, once they’re sensed,
Convert to things foreknown;
And how what’s come upon is manifest
Only in light of what has been gone through.
Like Heaney, Paul Muldoon was brought up in rural Ulster. He was born in Portadown, County Armagh, in 1951 and brought up near the Moy, a village to which his poems return. Muldoon’s mother was a teacher with strong literary interests, his father a farm laborer friendly to the Republican cause, a Lawrentian formula that resulted not in Sons and Lovers but in poems about complementarities and incompatibilities. Fruitful and tragic misalliances are a recurrent theme in his poems, wired and triggered by ironies that can be unexpectedly savage or heartbreaking. Seamus Heaney was one of his teachers at Queen’s University, and there, encouraged by Heaney and his own contemporaries, including Michael Longley, he became the most precocious poet of the Belfast “Group.” He read Frost with special attention, though the American’s impact on his prosody and narrative strategies is limited, except when he is producing, as in “The Mountain,” ironic connections. “Frost was important to me early on because his line, his tone of voice, was so much a bare canvas.” New Weather, his first book, came only three years after Heaney’s debut, in 1972. Muldoon was twenty-one. He went on to work as a BBC producer, then went freelance and, in 1980, took the academic route to the United States. He now teaches at Princeton.
Muldoon often builds with baroque delicacy a trellis of ironies over rather rudimentary themes and subjects. He likes the Metaphysicals, he likes conceits. Eclectic in his range of reference and allusion, very funny much of the time, without the sense of displacement that we hear in Heaney, he is always seriously at play, but never twice at the same game. Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting the British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990) and The Annals of Chile (1994) disrupt the strategies of the Martians and play fast and loose with the “narrative” or “anecdotal” school that displaced them, reminding readers (and poets, including his Irish contemporaries) of the enormous resources of modernism. Editors who had tired of pale imitations of Martian verse began to find their submission trays filling with Muldoon imitations. His formal and verbal inventiveness leads away from self. In Madoc he risks rewriting the lives of Coleridge and Southey, as if they had fulfilled the ambition of Pantisocracy and set up their community on the banks of the Susquehanna. Philosophers from the ancient Greeks to Stephen Hawking comment tersely and in character on the enterprise. It is very funny, very learned, a high-table game. He speaks for a whole history of thought, talked down, as it were, but not trivialized. “I’m interested in ventriloquism, in speaking through other people, other voices.” The Annals of Chile, on the other hand, is in voices that must be close to the poet’s own, exploring losses and a birth. The poet’s voice comes equivocally from his own lips. It won’t stay there for long, distrustful of the eloquence it finds. “I’m very much against expressing a categorical view of the world. I hope I can continue to discover something, and not to underline or bolster up what I already think I know.”
A poet’s first need, Heaney says, is “to make works that seem all his own work.” The second need is harder, “to go beyond himself and take on the otherness of the world in works that remain his own yet offer rights-of-way to everybody else.” This is Derek Walcott’s achievement in “The Schooner Flight.” “I imagine he has done for the Caribbean,” says Heaney, “what Synge did for Ireland, found a language woven out of dialect and literature, neither folksy nor condescending, a singular idiom evolved out of one man’s inherited divisions and obsessions, an idiom which allows an older life to exult in itself and yet at the same time keeps the cool of ‘the new.’ ” Synge: like Walcott, a dramatist. But Walcott is first a poet, and his language is less inventive than Synge’s, though no less compelling. Walcott was born in Castries, St. Lucia, in 1930. His father, a civil servant, died when he was one. His mother was a respected schoolteacher. His was a relatively prosperous family, part of the “high-brown bourgeoisie,” distant from poor blacks and from whites. Both his grandfathers were white Europeans, both his grandmothers were of African origin. His early world was scarred by a fire: Castries burned down in his childhood, and was rebuilt. He has two memories of the town, the first immutable.
Walcott attended local schools. With his brother he published his first two books, 25 Poems (Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, Guardian Commercial Printer, 1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (Barbados, Advocate, 1949). He had begun to paint, and he remains an accomplished watercolorist. A poet he perhaps encountered in Jamaica, Lorna Goodison (born in 1943), is a forceful artist and a substantial poet who touches on many of the issues that Walcott does but in a less formal verse, halfway between Walcott and Brathwaite. In “Guinea Woman” she says:
Great grandmother
was a guinea woman
wide eyes turning
the corners of her face
could see behind her...
It seems her fate was anchored
in the unfathomable sea
for great grandmother caught the eye of a sailor
whose ship sailed without him from Lucea harbour.
Great grandmother’s royal scent of
cinnamon and escallions
drew the sailor up the straits of Africa,
the evidence of blue-eyed grandmother
the first Mulatta
taken into backra’s household
and covered with his name.
They forbade great grandmother’s
guinea woman presence
they washed away her scent of
cinnamon and escallions
controlled the child’s antelope walk
and called her uprisings rebellions.
But, great grandmother
I see your features blood dark
appearing
in the children of each new
breeding
the high yellow brown
is darkening down.
Listen, children
it’s great grandmother’s turn.
Walcott went to the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, long before Goodison attended the Jamaica School of Art. He graduated in 1953. In 1959 he helped to found the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which he directed until 1977. Then he got onto the teaching circuit and went to the United States.
In the year of his graduation he published Poems (Jamaica, City Printery, 1951). His “real books” began to appear a decade later: In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (London, 1962) and Selected Poems (New York, 1964). Robert Graves declared, “Derek Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his contemporaries.” Then followed The Castaway and Other Poems (1965), The Gulf and Other Poems (1969), Another Life (1973), Sea Grapes (1976), The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), The Fortunate Traveller (1981), Midsummer (1984), Collected Poems 1948–1984 (1986), The Arkansas Testament (1987) and the epic Omeros (1990). He received the Nobel Prize in 1992, and published The Bounty in 1997.
Brodsky deprives Walcott of some essential roots and fundamental politics. Half of Walcott’s and Goodison’s ancestors were forced to come to the New World. The poets now compel the elements of European culture—language, genre, tropes, narratives—to come after, and force them to confront and then contain the very experiences which their original privilege compelled. If we believe that culture can be “owned,” it can also be “taken” or expropriated. An “owned language” cannot be disowned but it can be reformed and owned differently. A church building can become a stable or a theater, the epic of ancient heroes can be used to draw into heroic lineaments the experiences of fishermen and small traders (like the originals of the Homeric heroes).
It’s worth using a technical linguistic term: diglossia. It means that two identifiable, different varieties of language coexist in a single culture, one for formal occasions and literature, the other spoken in a variety of dialects. In the case of the West Indies, the “higher” language is the received or imposed one, whether French or Spanish or English. The task for the writer is to bring up, as in Leeds Tony Harrison does, the lower into the higher, to leaven and subvert it. To possess it. To scrape some of the colonial history off it, or put some of the written-out history back in. An alternative is to formalize the “lower language” and make a diglossia between a deliberately formalized dialect and a variety of spoken forms (which is Hugh MacDiarmid’s approach to Scots).
Our literary sense of the West Indies is largely shaped by V. S. Naipaul, the Biswas vision (1961). He is called “Old Misery” by some in the Caribbean; he’s of East Indian rather than African extraction, and there are shades of resentment in his attitudes as in attitudes toward him. The Middle Passage (1962) speaks of the people of Coronie in Surinam: “A derelict man in a derelict land; a man discovering himself, with surprise and resignation, lost in a landscape which had never ceased to be unreal because the scene of an enforced and always temporary residence; the slaves kidnapped from one continent and abandoned on the unprofitable plantations of another, from which there could never more be escape: I was glad to leave Coronie, for, more than lazy Negroes, it held the full desolation that came to those who made the middle passage.” Later he adds, “The history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies.” Derek Walcott writes in 1973, in response: “Nothing will always be created in the West Indies for quite a long time, because whatever will come out of there is like nothing one has ever seen before.”
Naipaul’s critics take issue with this: creation can begin in resistance and struggle. What are the images to be, however? Borrowed images or images generated at home? If borrowed, the authentication is borrowed. If forged at home, what will legitimize them? To Naipaul’s The Middle Passage Brathwaite responds with Rights [sic] of Passage: “Where then is the nigger’s home?” And in 1979 Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight” in The Star-Apple Kingdom proposes a new West Indian identity.
The poem is spoken by the mulatto Shabine. He begins in the colonial confusion, leaving Trinidad on his wanderings: “and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation” expresses the crucial European-sourced paradox. Naipaul’s “nobody,” Toussaint’s “nation,” yet a nation of synthesis and, in Shabine’s travels, a nation without frontiers, and a nation by choice. The racial categories are complex, not “monolithic,” especially in areas with substantial East Indian rooted communities. Race and region, race and religion, race and nation are not “congruent categories.”
In the Caribbean it is necessary to acknowledge the emblematic centrality of Aimé Césaire, whose Cahier d’un retour au pays natal is the first significant “text” from the West Indies, written in French and from exile in France in the 1930s, the first work using the word négritude, an essentializing idea that resulted in a series of “theories,” all in “a single category.” It was a reaction to the “them and us,” but also a necessary recognition. It helped to define, from a distinct and native perspective, facts about colonialism and its aftermath. It made it harder for historians of any race to ignore those perspectives and perceptions.
For Césaire’s anthology in 1948 Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Black Orpheus. Sartre prescribes négritude as a necessary part of black liberation and underlines the crucial importance of the new black writers in the process. French intellectuals welcomed writing in French by black people from the Caribbean and North Africa. But essentially African ideologies have only recently—in the 1980s and 1990s—begun to interpret what had previously been historicized in European terms, by way of ideologies of capitalism and socialism. Kamau Brathwaite and Wilson Harris, the novelist, poet and critic from Guyana, have long argued for different historical models to be applied to Caribbean culture.
Sartre declared that black writers “have no language common to them all; to incite the oppressed to unite they must have recourse to the language of the oppressor... Only through it can they communicate; like the scholars of the sixteenth century who understood each other only in Latin, the blacks rediscover themselves only on the terrain full of traps which white men have set for them. The colonist rises between the colonials to be the eternal mediator; he is there, always there, even though absent, in the most secret councils.” In the language. As Brathwaite says, “It was in language that the slave was perhaps most successfully imprisoned by his master, and it was in his (mis-)use of it that he most effectively rebelled.”
In the 1950s a necessary reaction against notions of négritude sets in among black writers themselves: Sartre’s argument, necessary at the time perhaps, had become reductive and homogenizing. Césaire himself began to warn against the anticolonial force of American rhetoric and what it implied for new patterns of dependence—on aid, capitalist patterns of exploitation and so on. The debate began among French writers. It was then taken up by the Spanish speakers (especially Cubans—Martì, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén) and finally the English speakers.
For English-language Caribbean writers the struggle for self-definition has affinities with the emergence of black identity and power in the United States. It began to gather steam in the 1960s. It is important to remember that before that time much of the force for reform (rather than revolution) came from religious groups. This continues. The Rastafarians started in the 1930s but came to the fore in the 1950s in Jamaica. Now it is impossible to separate West Indian, American and colonial experiences: they are part of a single nexus of interests, actions and reactions.
Walcott remembers an earlier time. In “Sainte Lucie” (1976) he says, “Come back to me my language”—the language of youth and innocence; also of “tribe” and “community.” But he had begun to change his language, and a comparison between two versions of the same poem demonstrates how, without too much adjustment, his verse could adapt to a new politics, a changing mission, best explored in “The Schooner Flight,” but also in exhaustive detail in Omeros. In 1958 he wrote the sonnet (Sonnet VI) with the epigraph “my country ’tis of thee”:
Garçon, that was a fête... I mean they had
Free whiskey and they had some fellows beating
Steel from one of the bands in Trinidad,
And everywhere you turn people was eating
And drinking and so on and I think
They catch two guys with his wife on the beach,
But “there will be nothing like Keats, each
Generation has its angst, and we have none,”
And he wouldn’t let a comma in edgewise
(Black writer, you know, one of them Oxford guys),
And it was next day in the papers that the heart
Of a young child was torn from it alive
By two practitioners of the native art.
But that was far away from all the jump and jive.
Ten years later the poem was included in In a Green Night:
Poppa, da’ was a fête! I mean it had
Free rum free whiskey and some fellars beating
Pan from one of them band in Trinidad
And everywhere you turn was people eating
And drinking and don’t name me but I think
They catch his wife with two tests up the beach
While he drunk quoting Shelley with “Each
Generation has its angst, but we has none”
And wouldn’t let a comma in edgewise.
(Black writer chap, one of them Oxbridge guys.)
And it was round this part once that the heart
Of a young child was torn from it alive
By two practitioners of native art,
But that was long before this jump and jive.
In The Arkansas Testament Walcott is writing largely in standard English, and the poems about his childhood in particular revisit it through English, through Latin, and by highlighting how the French words and the native words for different things and creatures give them a different force and identity. So when he brings Homeric themes and techniques into the American Mediterranean and the thousands of islands of the Caribbean, Homer is altered, and all that Homer has meant to English literature is subtly altered, by the new content, the new politics, which do not replicate but extend the old. Joyce used the Odyssey in analogous ways, but in a less answerable geography. It is a matter of making connections in terms that distort neither the classical nor the neoclassical culture. Walcott’s resistance to political imperatives and ideologies is heroic in just the ways Brodsky suggests, yet he is as open as Muldoon is to the charge of “failing to declare himself.” That failure is surely the crucial declaration a poet must make.
Not according to Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Brathwaite was born in Barbados in 1930 into a middle-class family. He was educated there and at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read history. From 1955 to 1962 he taught in Ghana and started a children’s theater there. It was a difficult time for him, but later he revised his view of it—a time of growing solidarity and self-discovery. His doctoral thesis at the University of Sussex was on the Jamaican slave trade and Creole society in the eighteenth century. He returned to the West Indies and taught history at the University of the West Indies until his retirement.
He published plays and several major collections of poetry, beginning with Rights of Passage (1967), then Masks (1968) and Islands (1969), which constituted his first trilogy, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973). This was followed by Other Exiles (1975), Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982), Third World Poems (1983), X/Self (1987) and Middle Passages (1992). For Brathwaite English is a colonial, “owned” language. He rebels in various ways against it, and against his own early poetry and poetic strategies, resembling in this the American poet Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), whose later work involves the complete unweaving of his powerful early poems and their replacement by quite a different kind of power, fueled less by compassion than by anger.
Brathwaite perceived in prosody what he took to be a crucial tyranny, and his analysis is vehement and subtle, though reductive. The crucial tyranny is in the iambic pentameter, which is hostile to native speech rhythms (which contain more “stress”), and in English poetic diction, which does not admit Caribbean reality or words. For centuries an English curriculum has been imposed in which Caribbean students are asked to read poems about snow and daffodils rather than their own weather, their own plants and creatures. The English tradition is less a resource than a form of impoverishment and constraint. Brathwaite tries to create a new poetry based on Jamaican speech patterns, unmetered, aurally emphatic and, on the page, using a range of types, sizes and densities, visually eloquent as well.
Like Walcott’s, his “landscape” is a seascape of islands and oceans in various states of weather. His Shakespeare is The Tempest and his hero Caliban. “Ah, brave third world!” as Walcott exclaims, devoted to the same play for other reasons. Like Walcott, Brathwaite tries to provide his culture with an epic. His trilogies are Homeric in scope. While Walcott attempts to create an accessible high culture, Brathwaite tries for a culture grown from and for the “grass roots,” which he identifies, defines and speaks for.
Tony Harrison identifies with the Caribbean poets in all of their languages, with the Central Americans, with the Africans engaged in liberation movements against Portugal, with anyone who is speaking out against historical injustices. The working classes at home in Britain are as much victims of colonial tyranny as the subject peoples of the Empire. They are ghettoized, their labor exploited, their rights expendable. In his Marxizing years, Harrison busily connected with his travels and his poems dozens of points of injustice on the globe—those points where articulate resistance occurred.
He was born in Leeds in 1937, into a working-class family. Leeds gives him his “mother tongue”: not English but a dialect of it. His father was a baker. He has commented on the “disintegrative effect” of the 1944 Education Act. At eleven he won a working-class boy’s scholarship to Leeds Grammar School, where by his account he suffered for his accent and his class. He proceeded to the University of Leeds, where he read classics, followed by a postgraduate diploma in linguistics. He was at Leeds with Geoffrey Hill, the editor and poet Jon Silkin and the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize in 1986.
Harrison presents himself as half missionary, half comic: Livingston and George Formby, Africa and Leeds. He is a missionary without metaphysics, but with a political dogma. He is a comic busking the wrong class. His first job was as a schoolmaster in Dewsbury. In 1962 he went to the new Ahmadu Bello University, Northern Nigeria, to lecture in English. He spent four years in Africa and here his sense of drama began to develop. He produces not readable but actable versions of plays: he generally writes with his eye on truth to the medium rather than the page. He speaks of Sophocles, of wrestling with the original, tapping “the political assumptions.” “You don’t have to batter the original into submission; you use the weight of its political assumptions.” Aikin Mata was more than a glimmer, it was the first evidence of his dramatic techniques. He adapted the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, pitting standard against pidgin English in a modern setting. He gave standard English to the dominant tribe. He included women.
After Africa, he spent 1966 teaching at Charles University, Prague, where he wrote two essays on Virgil, brilliant examples of his Marxist style. He was an Arts Fellow in 1967, shuffling between Newcastle-on-Tyne and Durham. Newcastle became home: the place from which one sets out on travels and adventures. He traveled: to North and South America (Cuba, Nicaragua and elsewhere, looking at revolutions and resistances). Between 1969 and 1970 he embarked on a UNESCO fellowship to Cuba, Brazil, Senegal, Gambia. Newcastle Is Peru had appeared. In 1970 he published his first controversial book, Loiners. It used bad language, it talked ill of the Commonwealth service, it shocked. His linguistic skills soon took him away from poetic to dramatic controversy. In 1977 he was made resident dramatist at the National Theatre, having already become a successful translator of opera libretti, with a strong sense of equivalences between the sound values of different languages and the dynamics of singing. In 1985 he hit real controversy, when his poem V was screened on national television, with its four-letter words (which caused the furor) and its gloves-off examination of adolescent hooliganism and racism. This is his most painful and candid work: as a Marxist, he sees the other side on a number of crucial issues. It was a point of political crisis for him. V signified “victory” (Churchill), “versus” and “fuck you” (Thatcher). Written in rough quatrains verging at times on doggerel, with a demotic entirely unalloyed, it was the first inclusion in verse of skinhead language, the rhetoric of racism, class and sexual division. It was also an elegy for the poet’s parents.
There are several models for modern political poetry. First is Yeats’s, intimate and engaged (or rather, implicated), the powerful statement of “Easter 1916.” Then there is Kinsella’s Butcher’s Dozen, Rickword’s “To the Wife of a Non-Interventionist Statesman,” Augustan satire that establishes cause, consequence and cure, “the doggerel Route.” Third is the Muldoonesque, in which the formal elements are foregrounded: doubt, indecision and inconclusion are the keynotes. Finally there is Harrison’s “Looking in on conflict”—the camera, the refusal to appropriate (or so he says) what the camera sees to a specific political end.
Harrison is always a dramatist poet, his poems are spoken outward to the audience, with designs on that audience. He creates a more or less credible, more or less consistent persona. He refers in his poetry to Milton and Keats as his models, but when one reads his work in extenso one is put in mind of Kipling. The use of dialect, the orchestration of voices, and the obsessively insistent iambic drub us into submission or alienation. In his later work George Formby and Keats are in retreat, the somber tones of Livingstone and Milton in the ascendant. With Marxism licking its wounds after the changes in Eastern Europe, Harrison has become rather an apocalyptic; the solving dogmas are dead. Revolution is no longer anticipated, and without it there is only the end of things. History now includes nature. Politics for the writer of radical instincts now includes ecology and little else. As he says in “Initial Illumination,” it is “doubtful in these dark days what poems can do.”
No longer do the reclamations of his early poems occur. Language brings with it a culture. The language may be Greek, or Latin, or Cornish, or Middle English, or Leeds dialect. The mixture of languages is a play of political ironies, but that play is played out. It is in Earthworks (1964) and Newcastle Is Peru (1967)—with its allusion to the poet Cleveland as the drunken protagonist (a tribute to MacDiarmid?)—the poems and Meredithian sonnets of Loiners (1970), From the School of Eloquence (1978) and Continuous (1980) that the essential Harrison is to be found. A few fine later poems, in particular A Kumquat for John Keats (1981), precede the television work, which is deliberately controversial, a poetry of painful simplifications of history, politics and culture. Whatever their power on the screen (variable at best), they represent an alarming intentionality. In The Blasphemers’ Banquet (1989) he joins the company of Byron, Voltaire, Rushdie and others as the champion of free speech. Giving voice to the voiceless, which he does so committedly in his earlier poems, is one thing; giving voice to those who speak perfectly well for themselves is something quite different. The poet is in danger of colonizing territories of infinitely greater wealth or power than he possesses: the German poet Heinrich Heine, for example, in The Gaze of the Gorgon: “If art can’t cope / it’s just another form of dope, / and leaves the Gorgon in control / of all the freedoms of the soul.” Harrison’s eye is keenly political. The Gulf War provoked A Cold Coming (1990), eloquent, incomplete, like The Shadow of Hiroshima (1995).
Harrison insists on his own life story. It is the heart of his best sonnets. From Robert Lowell he learns the surface lessons of confessionalism, the fiction of the self. Poems like “National Trust” and “On Not Being Milton” are powerful, and the poems to his parents moving and compassionate. The experiments with television have extended the medium of television, but not of poetry. Poetry that collaborates with the camera grows lax in its precisions, and journalistic. The eye takes over from the ear, and language becomes caption to image. It is different in the theater, where his mighty translations have made a durable impact. As a poet he speaks for others, even in their voices, but not in their terms nor in the terms of their culture. “Others” are translated for his needs, his program.
The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) deliberately mythologized himself. In the world of literal fact he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 as a “parasite,” became an American citizen and a celebrated academic and speaker, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. He grew powerful in the intellectual world of New York. It is more as an impresario and critic than as a poet that Brodsky has already figured in this history. He brought together Heaney, Walcott and Murray; he traced a new map of Parnassus, setting its various summits on the peripheries and showing a center grown hollow.
His Russian poems were advocated by W. H. Auden, who introduced a Penguin selection in 1973. The translator was George L. Kline, who tried to keep close to Brodsky’s forms. Brodsky was a stickler for formal equivalences between original poems and translations—not only his own. His second major volume in English, A Part of Speech, included a few of Richard Wilbur’s translations, “The Funeral of Bobo” being the single best translation of Brodsky. Auden’s claims for the Russian seemed to be sustainable in the light of such versions. But already Brodsky was dissatisfied with translators.
He began to collaborate with his translators, and then to crowd them out. Trying to compose in metered and rhymed English, he created a centipede with many elbows and very few wrists. What grace is to be found is not natural, though some of the striven-for effects actually work. The poems often express emphatic opinions, but their authority is not earned. Brodsky’s posthumous collection So Forth (1996) is either deliberately awkward in subtle ways which elude his critics, or bad. Take, for instance, these lines from “Flourish”:
O if the birds sang while the clouds felt bored by singing,
and the eye gaining blue as it traced their trill
could make out the keys in the door and, beyond, a ceiling
and those whose address at present begins with nil.
The emperor is not stark naked, but he wears rags of an archaic rhetoric, without even the belt of closed syntax to gird him. In On Grief and Reason, his posthumous collection of essays, he has lost the vigor of his earlier (translated) prose. These are polite essays, sententious and ingratiating. The rewards of exile in a country that stood in awe of his life story and his erudition, and was reluctant to withdraw the hand that fed him even when he bit, were considerable, but—to his writing—treacherous.
Les Murray is heard as “the Australian voice,” but an eccentric one: a rural poet speaking for an urban culture, a Roman Catholic speaking for a largely secular people. I doubt that he sees himself as speaking for “a people.” For persons, perhaps, for creatures (in Translations from the Natural World). His favorite polemic is that every form of expression is poetry: some people do it with language, others with dance, or skating, or chopping timber. Poetry, a universal making, a universal kind of engagement, is not, in his view, confined to language, though (fortunately) his own is. Neglect of writers who are not from the “central cultures,” neglect of the eccentric, the misfit, he will not tolerate. In the wake of the long neglect of Australian writing in Britain and America, he is a sharp critic and a warm advocate, calling attention to merit not only in the field of verse. But it is merit he calls attention to—there are no double standards. And the absence of a double standard makes him enemies at home.
It is worth remembering that Australia is a coastal culture, a necklace of habitation around a largely “dead heart.” The first Australian poet was the son of transported convicts—Charles Harpur, whom Murray celebrates, a nineteenth-century presence embodying the Europe/Australia split; hostile at once to England and to his cloddish society. In his anthology Fivefathers: Five Australian Poets of the Pre-academic Era Murray celebrates Kenneth Slessor, Roland Robinson, David Campbell, James McAuley and Francis Webb as establishing the traditions within which he writes. “This book,” writes Les Murray, “presents to British and European readers selections from the work of five leading Australian poets of the generation before mine.” They are, with Judith Wright, A. D. Hope and Gwen Harwood, key figures in “a Golden Age of Australian poetry which paradoxically coincided with its greatest marginalisation.”
Murray’s characteristically emphatic introductory essays to the poets, of whom he is in a real sense himself made, and his “essential” selections from their work, are personal. He evokes the writers’ circumstances, the trajectories of their very different work, and he suggests why their accomplishment has been eclipsed in the wider bourse of English-language literary reputations. The academy has much to answer for, he says, yet the freedom the poets enjoyed was partly a result of their very neglect by institutions. Murray strikes effectively against “that imperial trap of exclusion,” making the map of the century’s poetry larger. He also writes within a tradition described by Scottish writers, Hugh MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean; by Frost and Jeffers; by a host of poets he has read attentively and celebrated in essays or in tributes. Only, not the modernists. His impatience with Pound, Eliot and the rest is resolute.
He celebrates the environment of his childhood, the farm and its creatures, which he loved because he did not feel comfortable at school. He evokes the poetry of gossip, the “bush balladry.” His father was at the heart of things, and his voice, his stories are behind many of the poems. It is from this background that Murray learns the intimacy of his address, direct, subtle but always including. “An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow,” one of his most moving poems, exhibits his main qualities. It tells a story. It is cadential rather than metrical. It is democratic, about how people respond, and the urban world is presented sympathetically. It is religious but not doctrinaire, about a man weeping publicly and his effect on others, about the grace of acknowledged grief. It is an emotive poem, designed to be read aloud, but not a performance poem and not written on any audience’s terms. Most important, its antimodernist drift means that Murray’s intention is to “make it present” rather than “make it new.”
Murray’s collections begin in 1965 with The Ilex Tree. His verse novel The Boys who Stole the Funeral (1980) is 140 sonnets, a modest precursor to his massive verse novel Fredy Neptune (1998), a story that takes its protagonist through the history of the twentieth century in a series of adventures and reflections. His first substantial book to be published outside Australia was The Vernacular Republic: Poems 1961–1981 (1982). It put his poems not only on the map but at the center of it. Later books include The Daylight Moon (1987), Dog Fox Field (1990), the large Collected Poems (1991), Translations from the Natural World (1993) and Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996), awarded—ironically, in view of his attitude to modernism—the T. S. Eliot Prize of 1996.
Written in the wake of his father’s death, the book is full of the memories that, at whatever age, finding oneself an orphan elicit. In his case it was not only his father’s death but his own vexed childhood that came back in all its anxious detail. In “Burning Want” he writes,
From just on puberty, I lived in funeral:
mother dead of miscarriage, father trying to be dead,
we’d boil sweat-brown cloth; cows repossessed the garden.
Lovemaking brought death, was the unuttered principle.
I met a tall adopted girl some kids thought aloof,
but she was intelligent. Her poise of white-blonde hair
proved her no kin to the squat tanned couple who loved her.
Only now do I realise she was my first love.
But all my names were fat-names, at my new town school.
Between classes, kids did erocide: destruction of sexual morale.
Mass refusal of unasked love; that works...
“It would be as myopic to regard Mr. Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman,” Joseph Brodsky said in his overemphatic generosity. “He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.” And Derek Walcott: “There is no poetry in the English language so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and conversational.” Murray is a poet of the sacred, but a sacredness that rises out of this, our material world. The world of our language.
Lotus leaves, standing feet above the water,
collect at their centre a perfect lens of rain
and heel, and tip it back into the water.
Their baby leaves are feet again, or slant lips
scrolled in declaration; pointed at toe and heel
they echo an unwalked sole in their pale green crinkles
and under blown and picket blooms, the floor
of floating leaves rolls light rainwater marbles
back and forth on sharkskins of anchored rippling.