The Alvarez Generation : Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter [1 ed.] 9781781387603, 9781781381632

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THE ALVAREZ GENERATION

THE ALVAREZ GENERATION Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter

William Wootten

Liverpool University Press

First published 2015 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU

Copyright © 2015 William Wootten The right of William Wootten to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available

print ISBN 978-1-78138-163-2 cased epdf ISBN 978-1-78138-760-3

Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon cr0 4yy

In memory of my father Patrick James Wootten 1939–99

Contents

Acknowledgements ix Preface xi PART I

1

1: Beginnings: Oxford and Cambridge Poetry in the Early 1950s

3

2: Violent Times: Anti-Movement Poetry in the Mid to Late 1950s

19

3: In Opposite Directions: A. Alvarez and Thom Gunn 29 4: Against Gentility

45

5: On Being Serious

59

6: Anthology-Making

71

7: First Reactions: The Review Debate and the Initial Response to The New Poetry 91 PART II

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8: Sylvia Plath

101

PART III

129

9: Going to Extremes

131

10: ‘A Study of Suicide’

145

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PART IV

151

11: Against Extremism

153

12: Costing Seriousness

165

13: ‘I Don’t Like Dramatizing Myself’

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14: Birthday Letters 189 15: Geoffrey Hill’s New Poetry

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16: Children of The New Poetry

199

Bibliography 207 Index

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Acknowledgements

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uch of this book was researched and written while I was a postdoctoral research fellow on the Arts and Humanities Research Council Penguin Archive Project at the University of Bristol. I am grateful for the support both of Bristol University and the AHRC and indebted to the staff of the Bristol English Department and the other members of the Penguin Archive Project for their help, companionship and enlightening discussion. John Lyon looked at an early draft of the book and was encouraging and helpful even when disagreeing with some of my conclusions. George Donaldson cast a thoughtful eye over an early version of some of the material on Sylvia Plath. Markland Starkie assisted with the transcription of interviews. I am grateful to Penguin Books for granting me permission to consult the Penguin Archive and to Rachel Hassall for navigating me round it, as well as to Hannah Lowery, Michael Richardson and the staff of the Library of the University of Bristol, Special Collections. I am also indebted to the staff of the British Library and the Library of the University of Reading, Special Collections. I should like to thank Al Alvarez, Alan Brownjohn, Edward Lucie-Smith and the late Peter Porter for being so generous with their time and so patient in answering my questions. Above all, to Elv, who did so much to ensure this book finally got finished, and Lucy, who didn’t but who is wonderful nonetheless, I give my thanks and love. Early versions of some passages in the chapter on Sylvia Plath first appeared in the Cambridge Quarterly. I first aired a few of this book’s arguments in the Times Literary Supplement.

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For permission to reproduce substantial pieces of quotation, I am grateful to the following. Al Alvarez, from ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, ‘John Berryman’, and ‘Thom Gunn’ in Business: People, Pastimes, Poker and Books (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), copyright © Al Alvarez 2007, reproduced by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. A. Alvarez, from The Savage God, copyright © A. Alvarez, 1971, reproduced by permission of the Orion Publishing Group, London, and Aitken Alexander Associates. Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love VII, from Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012, ed. Kenneth Haynes (2013), copyright © Geoffrey Hill, by permission of Oxford University Press. Veronica Forrest-Thomson, from ‘A Plea for Excuses’ from Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Barnett (Shearsman Books, in association with Allardyce Books, 2008), copyright © Jonathan Culler and the Estate of Veronica Forrest-Thomson 2008, by permission of Allardyce, Barnett, Publishers. Editorial document on anthology schemes, letter from Richard Newnham to A. Alvarez, 1 October 1959, letter from Richard Newnham to Philip Larkin, 15 June 1961, from the editorial file of The New Poetry (DM1107/D63); letter from Richard Newnham to Donald Hall, 24 March 1962, Richard Newnham to Peter Levi, 11 October 1962 from the editorial file to Contemporary American Poetry (DM1107/D12) all reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Peter Porter, ‘Why Did Dante Pick on Suicides?’, from Afterburner, copyright © Peter Porter 2005, reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan. Peter Porter, ‘John Marston Advises Anger’, ‘Seahorses’ and ‘The Cost of Seriousness’, ‘The Delegate’ and ‘An Exequy’, from The Rest on the Flight, copyright © Peter Porter 2010 by permission of Pan Macmillan and Allen and Unwin Australia. Peter Porter, ‘The Historians Call Up Pain’ from Once Bitten, Twice Bitten copyright © Peter Porter 1961 and ‘Seaside Resort’ from Preaching to the Converted, copyright © Peter Porter 1972, reproduced by the permission of the Estate of author c/o Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.

Preface William Wootten

T

hat as recently as the 1960s and early 1970s English poetry could have been reckoned a matter of life and death will strike most readers now as a concept hard to credit. One of the first to look back in bemusement was Sean O’Brien, who, in a collection of essays published in 1998, breaks off from a discussion of Ted Hughes to point out: In the 1960s the savagery of the natural world as [Ted Hughes] conceived it was popularly twinned with [Thom] Gunn’s more urbanised and erotic interest in aggression, and (for reasons no longer clear, supposing they ever were) a set of associations grew up around the two poets’ work: natureviolence-the-Holocaust-psychic crisis—a kind of cultural shorthand of which the present will have its own equivalents. Alvarez’s essay ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, with which he introduced The New Poetry, as well as some of the essays in Beyond All This Fiddle and parts of the later study of suicide, The Savage God, are key documents in identifying the emotional style of the Fifties and Sixties—some features of which seem barely comprehensible at the moment.1



1 Sean O’Brien, The Deregulated Muse (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), p. 35.

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Quick and accurate in his summary of the emotional style in question, O’Brien is too cautious—or too canny—to give it proper explanation or elaboration. That, however, is the task taken on by this book. More generally, this is a study of the generation of poets born between 1929 and 1932 who succeeded and differed from the poets of the Movement. It concentrates on five poets: Thom Gunn (whose divided status as both a member of this group and of the Movement will be a subject of this study’s early chapters), Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter, and on one influential editor and critic, A. Alvarez. As O’Brien attests, those wishing to wrestle with the emotional style that succeeded the Movement need to come to grips with the prose of A. Alvarez. Alvarez was one of the first to identify the promise of Gunn, Hill, Hughes, Plath and Porter, and, more than the academic critics who followed him, Alvarez it was who helped establish their reputations, Plath’s and Hughes’s in particular. Whether as commentator, populariser or provocateur, Alvarez not only helped create the taste by which these poets were enjoyed, his prose affected how they would regard their own and each other’s work. Moreover, though Alvarez’s prose is often at odds with more recent criticism and poetic taste, and, at times, with my own views and interpretations, his is criticism of a high order which brings into relief both why its subjects were first lauded and why, and how much, they should continue to be prized. One key document whose existence has not been forgotten—by literary historians at least—is the key document to be examined by this book: Alvarez’s 1962 Penguin anthology The New Poetry. A bestseller on its publication, and a school and university textbook for two generations, The New Poetry is, alongside Robert Conquest’s 1956 Movement anthology New Lines, the most discussed poetry anthology of the post-war era. Since it first appeared, there has been scarcely an account of post-war British verse which has not sought to orientate itself by referring to Alvarez’s book and the arguments of its introductory essay ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. Randall Stevenson’s volume of the Oxford English Literary History, covering the years 1960–2000, would be a recent and influential, and, by and large, informed and informative example.2 More widely, Alvarez’s introduction to The New Poetry has been much more frequently endorsed than it has been understood. The idea of a popular critic arguing against the Movement, against the provincialism of English verse and for ambition, experiment and American influence is one thing, the detail of Alvarez’s actual argument is another,

2 Randall Stevenson, Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 12, 1960–2000: The Last of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 167–209.

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and conflation of the two has served literary history less well than it has rhetorical convenience. So it is worth making clear at the outset that Alvarez did not give general endorsement either to American influence or to latter-day modernism. Much of what comes to mind when these now are mentioned, and much of what has been championed by poets and critics in the years since, has no welcome in either The New Poetry or in Alvarez’s later criticism. Alvarez did not advocate the work of Allen Ginsberg and the Beats or Charles Olson and the Black Mountain poets, nor did he trumpet the emergence of John Ashbery and the New York School. Instead, the contemporary American poets Alvarez admired were what are usually termed ‘confessionals’, and what Alvarez would go on to call ‘extremists’. Above all, Alvarez advocated the examples of Robert Lowell and John Berryman, the two American poets he put at the start of what was supposed to be an anthology of British poetry in order to shame and instruct those who came after. The work of two further Americans was added to The New Poetry’s second edition: Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. The New Poetry did attempt to predict and steer the progress of AngloAmerican verse, and would go on to have as much success at both as any anthology was likely to achieve. Nevertheless, the continuing usefulness of The New Poetry as a prophetic work able to scry the rights and wrong of post-war poetic history has shrunk as that history has proved various in ways that no commentator could have quite predicted. The New Poetry was always a book that answered to its moment, and indeed its importance was, and is, very much bound up with how it did so. Nineteen sixty-two was the year of Adolf Eichmann’s execution, in May, and the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in September. At no point since the end of the Second World War were thoughts of ‘the concentration camps, of genocide and the threat of nuclear war’, all referred to by Alvarez in his introduction to The New Poetry, so much in the public mind.3 Facing up to these may have seemed less compellingly pertinent to the task of the contemporary poet through the years that followed, but that does not necessarily refute the argument that it was so in 1962. Moreover, The New Poetry’s timeliness and lack of timelessness give it a literary historical importance a less period-bound anthology would not possess: what was once contemporary pulse-taking is now a significant record of the mood and obsessions of the time. Behind Alvarez’s stated wish to move beyond gentility as a governing principle in British poetry is an implicit wish to move beyond gentility as a governing principle in British life. Behind Alvarez’s discussions

3 A. Alvarez, ed. The New Poetry, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 22.

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of literary seriousness is a critique of an idea of what should constitute the socially serious. Indeed, ascertaining what it was that Alvarez, Plath or Porter meant by ‘seriousness’, how their use recalled but differed from the use of prior poets, critics and philosophers, is a way of understanding more broadly how, despite apparent continuities in the vocabulary, the poetic and critical language of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s bent to the pressures of changed social and emotional reality. I wouldn’t have written this book if I did not believe that discussion of shared poetic sensibilities and generations can be worthwhile. Still, it must also be admitted that talk of the sensibility of a generation will always be somewhat presumptuous. The sensibility I examine here is not the sensibility of every poet who came of age with The New Poetry, nor even of all the poets whose work was included in its two editions. Not only did this sensibility have little purchase on those younger writers, such as Alan Brownjohn and Anthony Thwaite, who took on the Movement style, poets included in The New Poetry such as Charles Tomlinson and Christopher Middleton, and poets outside it such as Roy Fisher and Gael Turnbull, were finding their own international, neo-modernist alternatives to Movement ideals and practice. Furthermore, even the poets who are examined closely by this book produced some of their finest poetry outside, or comparatively unconcerned with, the emotional style that is its focus. I have nothing here to say of the more Australian Peter Porter or the more American Thom Gunn, of the Geoffrey Hill of Tenebrae or the Ted Hughes of Season Songs. And, to anyone who would point out that this is some of their best work, work by which their overall achievement should in part be judged, I would only respond: I agree. All that conceded, the sensibility here under examination is one that touched not only Gunn, Hill, Hughes, Plath and Porter, but others among their contemporaries, especially the poets of the Group. Nigh on ubiquitous in the mid-1960s, the Group has become increasingly unfashionable and has excited correspondingly little critical interest. This book is no bid for the Group’s en masse critical rehabilitation, but I do pay it some attention, for not only is the Group an informing backdrop to Peter Porter, who, like Peter Redgrove, Philip Hobsbaum, Martin Bell, Edward Lucie-Smith and George MacBeth, was one of the Group’s core members, reference to the Group also helps clarify what were general tendencies of the time rather than individual authorial quirks, and a Group perspective can help show just how interconnected the poets of this study actually were. Moreover, in the Group’s chairmen, Philip Hobsbaum and Edward Lucie-Smith, we find poet-critics and catalysts of poetic activity who, like Donald Davie and Ian Hamilton, would vie with Alvarez as a commentating influence upon the poetry of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

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I devote some space to the processes of publication of The New Poetry as well as the other high-volume titles of 1962 which first shaped and sounded the poetry boom of the 1960s: the second edition of Kenneth Allott’s hugely popular Contemporary Verse, Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry, the first two volumes of the Penguin Modern Poets, and the Faber Selected Poems of Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. Literary critics, when they take account of the publishing contexts of poetry at all, typically concern themselves with the single-authored poetry collection and the finely-crafted small edition put out by a small press, regarding the particularities of largescale editions from large publishers to be uninteresting on the grounds that poets typically have next to no influence over such books’ appearance. Nevertheless, in the mid-twentieth century, it was with the anthologies that contemporary poetry found a large readership, and it was with their contents that was established, to a considerable degree, the poetic canon we now inherit. While contingencies of commercial publication as well as the ideals of editors may have helped determine their composition, these anthologies affected both how most readers regarded the poems they contained and how poets, included and excluded, conceived of their own work in relation to that of their peers. Moreover, not only is it not always easy to extract the clear unmediated product of poetic genius from messy contingency, commerce and the editorial hand, it is not always the case that poetry and its readers would be better off if they could be. The poets discussed here are, as one would expect, subject to the influence of earlier writers, influence that could, depending on one’s critical credo, be examined in the Oedipal terms favoured by Harold Bloom or as an expression of allusion and gratitude after the manner of Christopher Ricks. Nevertheless, poetic influence and anxiety is not always a matter of fathers and sons, and poets are not always gracious. My preoccupation is less with the ways the poems of one poet behave towards those of a poet of another generation than with the ways in which contemporaries’ poems behave amongst themselves. There have been generations in which such behaviour can be fairly described as friendly, the poems tokens of and part of actual friendship—a state of affairs which itself does not rule out friction or competition. The poets discussed in these pages behave much more like siblings, the operations of influence upon them may perhaps at times be described as comradely, certainly as emulative, but, most typically, they are rivalrous. At the centre of this book are one year, 1962, and one poet, Sylvia Plath. Plath’s friendship with A. Alvarez and her strong interest in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ have excited surprisingly little detailed scrutiny, and Plath’s relationship to the wider emotional style traced in this book and to the generation of poets she joined in England has attracted less notice than

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one might expect. However, as was well indicated by Robin Peel’s study of Plath and Cold War politics, Writing Back, the time has come to re-situate Plath’s work, not merely in her life, but into her place and times.4 Alvarez’s taste in British, American and Central European poetry was to become a significant factor in the writing, publishing and reading of poetry throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s. So, while in Part One of this study A. Alvarez’s criticism is by and large referred to as a guide and critical counterpart to the poetic sensibility already forming more or less independently of it in the years before The New Poetry was published, in Parts Two and Three it is often looked to as writing that itself influenced as well described the course of contemporary poetry. The association of what Alvarez was now terming ‘extremism’ with great bodily and mental risk and, especially, with suicide, precipitated a strong negative reaction among both poets and critics that was itself to be a notable trend in the poetry and criticism of the 1960s and 1970s. Two poet-critics formulated detailed poetics that were in part intended as robust responses to Alvarez’s extremism: Donald Davie, whose debate with Alvarez in the first issue of Ian Hamilton’s Review was only the first of a number of public disagreements with him, and, latterly, and from a younger generation and different sensibility, Veronica Forrest-Thomson. My discussion of Forrest-Thomson’s work acts as a prelude to my consideration of the meditations upon suicide and poetry made by her champion Peter Porter, most notably those within the elegiac collection The Cost of Seriousness. Aspects of the poetics as well as the subject matter of the later poetry of Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes can, like Peter Porter’s, be seen to have evolved in reaction to bereavement by suicide and in opposition to the perceived suicidal tendencies of extremism. In the cases of Gunn and Hughes, this reaction forms part of a more general turn taken by their poetry against the emotional style that defined the poems of their youth. The ascertainment of how much these subsequent revisions and recantations convince leads onto wider reflections of the original virtues and vices of the extremist style and its alternatives. The book concludes with a look at the legacy of the generation of poets in its pages and their emotional style, at the later work of Geoffrey Hill, the form and success of the generational anthologies that have succeeded The New Poetry and what lessons the earlier anthology might have for the changed poetry world of the present.



4 Robin Peel, Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics (Cranbury, NJ, London and Ontario: Rosemont, 2002).

PA R T I

C hapter O ne

Beginnings: Oxford and Cambridge Poetry in the Early 1950s

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he contributors list to Oxford Poetry of 1953, edited by Donald Hall and Geoffrey Hill, reads like that of a broad-minded poetry magazine of the 1960s. Names on the list include, alongside those of Hill and Hall themselves: A. Alvarez, Alan Brownjohn, Jenny Joseph, J.E.M. [Edward] Lucie-Smith, George Macbeth and Anthony Thwaite. Oxford Poetry and publications like it bear out a general truth: most of the English poets who came to prominence the early 1960s had, like their editors and critics, been the student poets of the Oxford and Cambridge of a decade before. Oxford Poetry was a product of the Fantasy Press. This, the most significant poetry publishing venture in Oxford or Cambridge in the 1950s, was started in 1952 after Michael Shanks, then President of the Oxford University Poetry Society, linked up with the painter and printer Oscar Mellor. The pamphlets the press turned out were slim—five or six poems— but they were well produced, and they were keenly read, as was Oxford Poetry. Michael Shanks’s successor was Donald Hall, an American who had been a friend and follower of the poet Richard Wilbur at Harvard. The recipient of a Henry Fellowship, Hall came to Christ Church, Oxford in 1951 and quickly became friendly with Oxford’s nascent literary critics—Hall recalls how ‘George Steiner, Al Alvarez, and I were a little troika’.1 Already a graduate and slightly older than those now around him, Hall offered the young English poets of Oxford a mentoring service. He also introduced them to

1 Donald Hall and Ian Hamilton, Donald Hall in Conversation with Ian Hamilton (London: Between the Lines, 2000), p. 39.

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the American verse of the time.2 Hall and Mellor were to produce pamphlets 10–18 of the Fantasy series, pamphlets including those of Geoffrey Hill (11), Adrienne Rich (12), A. Alvarez (15) in 1952, the Cambridge import Thom Gunn (16) and the Oxfordian Anthony Thwaite (17) in 1953. Hall’s successor, Oxford undergraduate George MacBeth, brought in older poets associated with what was starting to be termed the Movement, publishing Donald Davie (19), Philip Larkin (21) and Kingsley Amis (22) in 1954. It was the Fantasy Press too which in that year published the first edition of Thom Gunn’s Fighting Terms. Studying English at Oxford in the early 1950s meant the imbibing of large measures of philology and dashes of old-fashioned appreciative criticism, but no modern literature. Students could be inspired by the lectures of C.S. Lewis, bored by the lectures of J.R.R. Tolkien and taught by dons who thought ‘magic’ a good description of the workings of a literary text. T.S. Eliot might as well never have existed. Because of this, some undergraduates looked enviously to English Literature as it was being studied in Cambridge and in the universities of the United States. Cambridge critics such as F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards and William Empson (the last already long-exiled from Cambridge itself) were making literary criticism and the study of English look both more intellectually demanding and more urgent. In America, New Criticism, a name designated by John Crow Ransom’s 1941 study The New Criticism, was at its zenith. Ransom and others such as W.K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, R.P. Blackmur, Allen Tate and Monroe Beardsley, informed by the ideas of Eliot and the practice of I.A. Richards, rigorously discounted matters such as authorial intention, viewed the poem as a self-sufficient made object and would undertake detailed examinations of a poem’s tensions, paradoxes and ambivalences.3 Still, while the New Critics may have made academic English, especially the analysis of poetry, look a discipline capable of matching up to the sciences, they also exhibited a religious devotion to the sanctity of the text and an interest in Southern Agrarianism at odds with modern mechanistic and industrialised society. Hoping to bring Oxford English up to date and into line with such developments, A. Alvarez and Oxford contemporaries David Thompson, John Miles and Graham Martin founded a Critical Society. The meetings were to be addressed by F.R. Leavis, William Empson and a host of the American



2 Recalled by Alan Brownjohn in interview with the author, 10 September 2010. 3 My brief summary here owes something to that in Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 48–49.

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New Critics.4 The poet, critic and novelist John Wain, a friend and contemporary of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, and the critic Frank Kermode, both now teaching at Reading University, attended and offered advice and support. The lecture halls were packed out. Along with this new taste in criticism came the wish to write verse like that of William Empson, a wish as manifest in Alvarez as it was in Wain, and attested by the knotted, academic—and surprisingly myth-filled— Fantasy pamphlet Alvarez produced at the time. This Empsonianism of Wain and Alvarez, and not the poetry of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin or Donald Davie, was the poetry originally most associated with the term ‘the Movement’. Indeed, that association was to be the reason New Lines did not link itself with the Movement by name and why Robert Conquest had, in his original draft introduction to the anthology, attacked the Movement as ‘producing verse of notable aridity’.5 Oxford’s most conspicuously talented young poet of the time would also show a marked interest in Empson and a poetry of ambiguity, and yet, from the start, would write poetry markedly unlike, if not antipathetic to, that of the Movement, whether defined by Conquest or by anyone else. Anthony Thwaite recalls how at the Oxford Poetry Society ‘this youth in the corner stood up and recited “Genesis”; I felt like Larkin when he met Kingsley Amis, you know, that “here was a talent greater than my own”.’ 6 The youth in question was Geoffrey Hill. Others who encountered Hill at this time were to be similarly awed. Having asked Hill to submit to the Fantasy Press, Donald Hall received Hill’s manuscript and ‘could not believe it. You can imagine reading these poems suddenly in 1952. I was amazed. I remember waking up in the night, putting on the light and reading them again.’ 7 Hall befriended Hill, probably introducing him to the work of Robert



4 See A. Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right? (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999), pp. 114–115. 5 Robert Conquest, ed., New Lines: An Anthology (London: Macmillan, 1956), p. xiv. That Conquest wished to associate the label ‘the Movement’ with the Empson-influenced verse of Wain and Alvarez was revealed by Karl Miller and is referred to by Alan Jenkins, ‘Thom Gunn’s Postures for Combat’, in The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Davie, Gunn and their Contemporaries, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 187–203: p. 196. 6 Quoted in Robert Potts, ‘The Praise Singer’, Guardian, 10 August 2002. www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/aug/10/featuresreviews.guardianreview15. Accessed 10 November 2011. 7 Robert Potts, ‘The Praise Singer’.

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Lowell, a poet whose wrought densities and ambiguities, religiosity and studied impersonality at this time made him very much a poet of the New Criticism and a natural successor to the T.S. Eliot-influenced Americans already admired by Hill, notably Allen Tate.8 Hill’s interest in the American academic poetry of the 1940s came with a devotion to the British antiacademic poetry of the same decade: to the heavy-stressed, punning, oracular poetry of Dylan Thomas and George Barker, but also to the soldier poets Keith Douglas and—a taste more peculiar to Hill—Sidney Keyes. It is Lowell or Tate whose formative influence on Hill is stressed by Hill’s critics. But the British Neo-Romantic poets of the 1940s are every bit as significant to the shaping of Hill’s style and attitudes. Take, for instance, these lines from Sidney Keyes’s ‘The Bards’: their raftered halls Hung with hard holly; tongues confusion; slow Beat of the heated blood in those great palaces.9

‘Merlin’, which featured in Hill’s Fantasy pamphlet, and which is the best of those very early poems, contains the lament: ‘Arthur, Elaine, Mordred; they are all gone/ Among the raftered galleries of bone’. Here Hill/Merlin considers the greater number of the dead in a manner that also appears to remember the dead heroes of the Second World War. Deliberately or not, the echo of Keyes’s lines is a means of including Keyes the poet and soldier within that slain Arthurian host. Nor does the influence of these lines of Keyes stop there. They reverberate through Hill’s poems down the years, whether in the ‘tongue’s atrocities’ of ‘Annunciations’, or in blood and ‘groves of legendary holly’ in ‘Mercian Hymns’.10 We hear too the bard ‘Robed in his servitude’ in Keyes’s ‘strike the strings and muster/ The shards of pain to harmony’ and find a vision of the poet with a supposed patron negotiating the difficulties of an audience in a manner that looks forward through ‘Annunciations’ to the ‘stubborn blinded pride’ of Hill’s later work.11 With such poetic activity and achievement going on in Oxford, it might

8 Hall recalls: ‘I remember talking about Lowell with Geoffrey. I might have introduced him to Lowell’s poems. I’d brought them with me.’ Hall and Hamilton, Donald Hall in Conversation with Ian Hamilton, p. 37. 9 Sidney Keyes, Collected Poems, ed. Michael Meyer, int. Jeffrey Wainwright, memoirs Milein Cosman, Michael Meyer and James Lucas (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), p. 41. 10 Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 84, 132. 11 Keyes, Collected Poems, p. 41.

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be thought her student poets would be feeling confident in their output and ability. Yet this was not, it seems, the case. Edward Lucie-Smith recalls: We Oxford poets had an inferiority complex about our Cambridge contemporaries. The chief cause was Thom Gunn. Though his first collection, Fighting Terms, did not appear until 1954, the poems Gunn was publishing in magazines were already much discussed, and were causing ripples in a literary world well beyond our own student environment.12

Reviewing early ’50s Oxford from the perspective of the mid 1970s, Lucie-Smith provides a straightforward explanation for Gunn’s success: ‘a Cambridge passion for Eng. Lit. was combined with a rather taking bullyboy strut’, a conclusion Lucie-Smith backs up by quoting the opening verse of ‘A Mirror for Poets’: It was a violent time. Wheels, racks, and fires In every writer’s mouth, and not mere rant. Certain shrewd herdsman, between twisted wires Of penalty folding the realm, were thanked For organizing spies and secret police By richness in the flock, which they could fleece.13

Gunn’s poem may evince the renewed interest in traditional formal resources that would characterise poetry by the Movement, but it also shows marked differences from a typical Movement poem. It is less polished in either its rhymes or its metre than is characteristic contemporary work of Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings or John Wain. Likewise, Gunn’s poem shows none of the love of reason, common sense, proportion and the comfortable life usually associated with those slightly older poets. It also evinces a different attitude to the past. In Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Jim Dixon reckons the hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chiang Kai-shek, Senator McCarthy himself, would … seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages. Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as miserable, as cock-sure, as bad at art, as dismally ludicrous or wrong … ?14

12 Edward Lucie-Smith, The Burnt Child (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975), p. 163. 13 Thom Gunn, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 24. 14 Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (London: Victor Gollancz, 1954), p. 88.

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True, Dixon’s thoughts aren’t directed at Gunn’s prized Elizabethans. Nevertheless, their whole attitude to the pre-modern, and especially the preEnlightenment, its, art, ethos and unpleasantness is starkly at variance with the non-progressive history given by Gunn’s poem, whose title, ‘A Mirror for Poets’, makes a case: the desperate heroics of poets in the Elizabethan age are the glass in which poets should still see themselves reflected. With a different attitude to the past comes a different attitude to the present. Peered into, Gunn’s mirror seems to reflect back poets not so much of another age as of another place. ‘[S]pies and secret police’, torture, the horrid attractiveness of the violent despot: ‘Her state canopied by the glamour of pain.’15 The twisted wires folding this flock seem snipped from the Iron Curtain, the totalitarian state of Elizabeth presented in terms of the dictatorships of the 1930s and ’40s, or of the Eastern Bloc of the 1950s. At the same time, state violence is met by resistant personal violence, and this connected to poetic vitality. Rather than the impersonally elegiac, late ’40s manner of young Hill, or the calm good sense and diminished realism that would become associated with the Movement, Gunn offered a way in which young poets, whose experience of National Service would, for the most part, have been, like Gunn’s, inactive if not tedious, could turn their University studies into vigorous, threatening activity. The guiding intellectual force behind this early poetry of Gunn was the teaching and writing of F.R. Leavis, at this time a fellow of Downing College, Cambridge. Leavis made it possible to believe that the proper reading of literature was, or at least should be, dynamic action. Gunn later said of Leavis: ‘he had a very interesting view of literature, seeing it as a part of life. That was what was so wonderful. Literature is not like a fine wine that you taste and judge by comparison with other wines. You compare a book to a person, for example, or to an action.’16 The passivity of tasting is dropped for doing; the appeal of literature is not merely literary but judged by action and felt life. Leavis also had a Romantic confidence that Poetry matters because of the kind of poet who is more alive than other people, more alive in his own age. He is, as it were, at the most conscious

15 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 24. 16 Thom Gunn and James Campbell, Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell (London: Between the Lines, 2000), p. 22.

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point of the race in his time. … He is unusually sensitive, unusually aware, more sincere and more himself than the ordinary man can be.17

Such description, then, made becoming a poet of note not merely a matter of iambs and images, but of becoming one who would exhibit the higher awareness of the age, a higher sincerity. The great sway the teaching and opinions of F.R. and his wife Q.D. Leavis held in Cambridge, the interest in Cambridge criticism in Oxford, as evinced by the Critical Society, ensured that other Oxbridge poets of Gunn’s generation would be marked by the imprint of their ideas and their attitudes. Geoffrey Hill has a strong Leavisite streak.18 For all his antipathy to academic analysis, so too does Gunn’s Cambridge junior Ted Hughes. D.H. Lawrence, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, a little John Donne, the tastes of the young Hughes were very much the product of Leavisite Cambridge. It was no accident that, come 1962, A. Alvarez’s ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ would begin and end with citation of Leavis’s views. It begins by recalling how F.R. Leavis trumpeted the revolution of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in 1932 and ends with Alvarez’s belief in the possibility that the new poetry could bring about what F.R. Leavis denied: the possibility of reconciling the spirits of T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. That Alvarez could use Leavis as a common point of reference in the introduction to a paperback anthology intended for a large readership indicates not just Leavis’s influence on an editor and the poets he chose to include but also how wide the dissemination of Leavis’s views had become by 1962, and that this dissemination had created an audience likely to be sympathetic to criticism that could present itself as carrying on from where Leavis had left off. To return to Cambridge and to Thom Gunn and ‘A Mirror for Poets’. Gunn’s poem is underpinned by a thoroughly Leavisite position on the organic society of the Elizabethan dramatist, one backed up by books such as L.C. Knights’s Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson,19 where Jonson’s

17 F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with Chatto and Windus, 1972), p. 16. 18 This is noted by Christopher Ricks in True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 28–29. 19 L.C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1937).

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‘flail of comedy showed coherence in society.’20 This coherence in the society of Elizabethan England, where ‘the boundaries met/ of life and life’, stands opposed, not just to Jim Dixon’s preference for the modern world, but also to the coherence of an eighteenth century of refined taste, chaste practice and pure diction appealing to an enlightened reading public that would be admired by the Movement poet-critic Donald Davie.21 In Q.D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, it is asserted that: ‘Elizabethan civilization … as a whole presents to us—in Shakespeare, for instance—an inexplicable mixture of the profound and the naïve, the fine and the gross, the subtle and the crude’.22 Surveying Elizabethan pamphlets, Q.D. Leavis concludes: By modern standards they show an insulting disregard of the readers’ convenience: the dashing tempo, the helter-skelter progress, the unexpected changes of direction and tone so that the reader is constantly faced with a fresh front, the stream of casual allusion and shifting metaphor, leave us as giddy as the Elizabethan dramas leave us stunned.23

Pure diction, good taste, clear syntax, an even tone, chastity and control of metaphor: all the virtues of New Lines and the Movement are alien to such a critical temperament. In such matters, it is not the Movement but its opponents who are the more Leavisite. From the Leavises would come many of the terms and criteria that would be used to reject the Movement in general and Larkin in particular, and these would endorse one vision of coherence in (past) society at the expense of other less welcome and more recent social cohesions. When, for instance, Thom Gunn, A. Alvarez and others use ‘suburban’ in their prose as a term of disapprobation, it is a recognisably Leavisite scorn, born of the opinion, expressed in Culture and Environment, that: ‘Instead of the community, urban or rural, we have, almost universally, suburbanism.’24 Q.D. Leavis’s analysis of Shakespeare and Elizabethan poetry portrays purity of diction as very much a social as well as a poetic hindrance. Such too is the view of other similarly minded critics of the period. Patrick Cruttwell accounts for Shakespeare’s coming into his own by writing of 20 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 25. 21 Gunn, Collected Poems, pp. 25, 24. 22 Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, intr. John Sutherland (London: Pimlico, Random House, 2000; first published 1932), p. 89. 23 Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, p. 88. 24 F.R. Leavis, Culture and Environment (London: Chatto and Windus, 1933), p. 1.

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how ‘Language such as this breaks through the barriers of poetic diction exactly as the characters who use it break through the conventions which surround them’.25 Far from Cambridge (and partly as a result of the influence of Yvor Winters, about whom more anon), Thom Gunn would come to disagree with the valorisation of the later as opposed to the early Elizabethans, the view that the ‘Daniels and Draytons and Fulke Grevilles’ were ‘worthy and honourable writers, but irredeemably limited—and outside their limits was the capacity to change their tune to a changing age’, but this was a belief widely held and forcefully presented, and there is little doubt that it was Gunn’s view too before other views and wider reading changed his mind.26 What emerges in Cruttwell’s Shakespearean Moment (which is also the Donnean moment) is a much-praised desertion of ‘the old kind of rhythm, a smooth mellifluousness, and the old kind of mentality, a preference for simple and agreeable contents and an aversion from complexity and toughness.’27 Reading how Cruttwell goes on to bemoan what happened to English poetry when the Shakespearean moment was over makes it easy to see how in the years ahead Ted Hughes could come to compound the analysis of Cruttwell with the language of A. Alvarez. As Neil Corcoran points out, ‘When [Hughes] says in “Myths, Metres, Rhythms” that “Shakespeare’s hybridization and cross-breeding, for all its superior vigour, multiple genetic resource and incidental, exotic, half-caste beauty, became [after the Restoration] a barbarous offence against gentility”’, Hughes’s terms may be A. Alvarez’s but his sentiments are Cruttwell’s.28 Still, the coherence in Cambridge society was not total, even among Leavisites. In 1952, Philip Hobsbaum, who was studying under F.R. Leavis at Downing College, decided to begin a verse-speaking society and advertised for members. At the inaugural meeting, a natural science student named Peter Redgrove quickly impressed Hobsbaum by telling someone fumbling for ‘The Exequy’ of Henry King that the poem could be found on page 203 of

25 Patrick Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment and its Place in the Poetry of the 17th Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954; second impression 1970), p. 59. 26 Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment, p. 62. 27 Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment, p. 63. 28 Neil Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 190. The original observation that Hughes must have read and learned from Patrick Cruttwell was John Lyon’s.

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Herbert Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems.29 This first bond between Hobsbaum and Redgrove (who was regularly sitting in on Leavis’s lectures) was followed by an early division. Hobsbaum read out Gunn’s poem ‘Carnal Knowledge’, which had recently appeared in the Cambridge magazine Granta, and which was now serving ‘as a talking point for literati in cafés and common-rooms.’30 To Hobsbaum, the poem was ‘slick’ and ‘execrable’. 31 Not so to Redgrove. Indeed, Redgrove and a friend were planning to publish two poems by Gunn, ‘Here Come the Saints’ and ‘Hide and Seek’, in a new magazine they were setting up—delta.32 Unpacking the word ‘slick’ and second guessing the young Hobsbaum, I would hazard Hobsbaum disliked the poem’s debt to Empson and that he might also have disliked what was revealed of the poet’s sexuality. Nevertheless, what must have most irked him is the conscious posing that takes place within the poem. Its opening words, ‘Even in bed I pose’, might be a sad confession, but can also read as a manifesto for a lack of sincerity, the poem’s refrain of variations on ‘You know I know you know I know you know’ a mise en abyme of two persons knowingness that is contrary to the honesty of either the spoken word or of the human body. Within the poem, the old alliance between nakedness and truth is dissolved: ‘an acute girl would suspect/ That my self is not like my body, bare.’33 What might have been a Donne-like depiction of ‘His Mistris Going to Bed’, has the poet naked first but, upon reflection, not naked after all. Jean-Paul Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness (which Gunn may have not yet have read but whose disseminated influence is already traceable in Gunn’s work): ‘My body as it is for me does not appear to me in the midst of the world.’34 For Sartre, in a slightly different way from the way that is depicted in ‘Carnal Knowledge’ but one which Gunn would go on to explore: ‘I am possessed by the Other; the Other’s look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it.’35 To adapt the Eliotic terminology that might have been used to discuss the poem in Cambridge at the time, the poem reflects upon 29 For a first-hand account of this meeting, see Philip Hobsbaum, ‘The Redgrove Momentum: 1952–2003’, The Dark Horse, 15, Summer 2003, pp. 24–31: p. 25. 30 Hobsbaum, ‘The Redgrove Momentum’, p. 24. 31 Hobsbaum, ‘The Redgrove Momentum’, p. 24. 32 delta, No. 1. Winter 1953, no page numbers. 33 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 15. 34 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, intr. Mary Warnock (London and New York: Routledge, 1958), p. 303. 35 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 364.

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a dissociation of erotic sensibility, a space between ‘breast and lips’, heart and word, ‘thighs and head’ and genitalia and intellect, ‘So great, we might as well not be in bed.’36 The erotic poetry of unfeeling toughness was a territory Gunn would come to mark as his own—decades later, Gunn’s mock personal ad. ‘The Search’ alerts possible respondents: ‘insensitivity a big +’. 37 Through the 1950s the pose was to become a defining preoccupation, whether for the poet himself or for those he watched. For instance, a look at ‘Elvis Presley’ in Gunn’s next book, The Sense of Movement (1957) prompts the observation: ‘Whether he poses or is real, no cat/ Bothers to say: the pose held is a stance’.38 ‘Carnal Knowledge’, however, seems less at ease about its insensitivity and dishonesty, for the protagonist is not as insensitive as he would appear to wish to be: his stammers meet her tears, that he knows of ‘no emotion we can share’ is cause for anything but rejoicing. 39 A year after he had first disliked ‘Carnal Knowledge’, Hobsbaum was himself editing delta and invited to meet Gunn, by this time already graduated and, in the little world of Oxbridge poetry at least, something of a celebrity. During their talk, Gunn explained to Hobsbaum the technical inadequacy of D.J. Enright, before thrusting at the young Hobsbaum poems by Philip Larkin that either Gunn or John Wain had copied out. Hobsbaum recalled: ‘this was what I’d been looking for; that’s why every one of my four books has an epigraph from Larkin. This was plot, scene, circumstance.’40 Andrew Motion writes in his life of Larkin, ‘“Fantasy Poets, Philip Larkin, Number 21” arrived in March [1954], but attracted almost no attention’, a statement no doubt true so far as sales figures and press coverage are concerned.41 Yet as the Gunn/Hobsbaum meeting shows, those people who did come across the pamphlet took very careful note of the poems it contains. (That A. Alvarez was to become one of the pre-publication subscribers to The Less Deceived was presumably largely down to its existence).42 In that pamphlet, Thom Gunn would have read poems including ‘At Grass’, a poem which, like ‘Church Going’, was published in the Spectator that same year. 36 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 364. 37 Thom Gunn, Boss Cupid (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 79. 38 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 57. 39 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 16. 40 Gerry Cambridge and Philip Hobsbaum, ‘Philip Hobsbaum in Conversation’, The Dark Horse, No. 14, Summer 2002, pp. 30–50: p. 38. 41 Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 240. 42 Motion, Philip Larkin, p. 262.

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Gunn’s discovery of Larkin was, very slightly, earlier and it was a discovery of poems which seem less archetypically Larkinesque. Gunn later remembered: Philip Larkin was an extraordinary revelation when I read him in 1954. I can remember the anthology I read him in; I was also in that anthology. And there was a poem I really admired tremendously, called ‘Wedding Wind’. It’s a very Lawrentian poem, not a Larkinesque Larkin poem, and it’s very good too.43

This was the unironic, unsuburban and passionate Larkin, the Larkin which Gunn continued to value, in spite of those other contrary Larkins whose values and influence he would come to deprecate. The anthology Gunn had been reading was Springtime, a selection of young poets edited by G.S. Fraser and Ian Fletcher, two veterans of wartime Cairo and the milieu of Personal Landscape poets such as Lawrence Durrell and Keith Douglas.44 Fraser and Fletcher may have thought Larkin a find but, seeming to think him Irish (Larkin was living in Belfast at the time), they knew as little about the poet as did Gunn. The brief selection of Larkin in Springtime includes, along with ‘Wedding Wind’, ‘Wants’, ‘Coming’, ‘Deceptions’, ‘Going’ and ‘Since the Majority of Me’. The Lawrentianism of ‘Wedding Wind’ might appeal to those who shared F.R. Leavis’s veneration for D.H. Lawrence, but these were poems no longer guided by the late sixteenth- and earlier seventeenth-century poetic golden age admired by the Cambridge critics and their poetic followers. Fraser and Fletcher mention that a friend—a friend who had, it seems, recently purchased a copy of Donald Davie’s Purity of Diction in English Verse—found that some of Larkin’s lines ‘reminded her a little of the second half of the eighteenth century: a smoothness that is not vapid, a weightiness that is not jolting or rough, as in Goldsmith or Johnson.’45 Larkin’s initial impact on Gunn made the latter not up to date Elizabethan but derivative. Kenneth Allott, when introducing Gunn in Contemporary Verse, an anthology to which we shall return, points out that ‘Thoughts on Unpacking’ is in ‘Philip Larkin Country’.46 Indeed, ‘Thoughts on Unpacking’ is a poem with not just a typical Larkin scenario, but with typical Larkin language, 43 Gunn and Campbell, Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell, p. 24. 44 Springtime: An Anthology of Young Poets and Writers, ed. G.S. Fraser and Ian Fletcher (London: Peter Owen Limited, 1953). 45 Springtime, p. 7. 46 The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, ed. Kenneth Allott, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 374.

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containing phrases such as ‘unpacked, unlabelled, somehow followed too’, ‘seeming to sneer “This is the past you shared”, ‘the diminished luggage’.47 This is tribute to Larkin, but only in the way that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. During the spring of 1954—so, about the same time as he was being introduced to Larkin by Thom Gunn—Philip Hobsbaum also met fellow Cambridge undergraduate Ted Hughes. It took a while before Hughes made it known to Hobsbaum and mutual friend Peter Redgrove that he was a poet, but in due course Hughes submitted to delta.48 What these poems were, Hobsbaum did not later recall, other than to say that they were ‘Hopkins inflated by reminiscences of Yeats and Dylan Thomas’, a combination which didn’t much appeal.49 Not only was Hobsbaum in training to be man of firm and fierce critical opinion, to a young editor who had just discovered D.J. Enright and Philip Larkin, Hopkins inflated by Yeats and Dylan Thomas would be synonymous with the persistence of the Neo-Romantic style that such Movement poets were now making look overblown. Hobsbaum was won over to Hughes’s talent by an early, uncollected poem entitled ‘The Woman with Such High Heels She Looked Dangerous’. But this does not mean that Hobsbaum’s first impressions of Hughes’s poetic origins and project were much mistaken. (Hobsbaum himself, following his disenchantment with the work of Hughes’s later years, would deem Hughes’s whole career as being that of ‘an intelligent Dylan Thomas’).50 There is plenty of ‘Hopkins inflated by reminiscences of Yeats and Dylan Thomas’ in Hughes’s first volume The Hawk in the Rain, not least its title poem, whose description of how the ‘hawk/ Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye’ is the product of having read many times that ‘Over St John’s Hill/ The hawk of fire hangs still’.51 The descriptor of how ‘banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,/ Thumbs my eyes’ 52 well knows ‘the wrangling hedges’ and ‘the hawk on fire, the halter height, over Towy fins/ In a whack of wind’ of Thomas’s poem.53 Those same loud notes resound in the very next poem in 47 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 79. 48 Philip Hobsbaum, ‘Ted Hughes at Cambridge’, The Dark Horse, Autumn 1999, pp. 6–12: p. 6. 49 Hobsbaum, ‘Ted Hughes at Cambridge’, p. 7. 50 Hobsbaum, ‘Ted Hughes at Cambridge’, p. 12. 51 Dylan Thomas, The Poems, ed. and int. Daniel Jones (London: Dent, Everyman, 1982), p. 201; Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 19. 52 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 19. 53 Thomas, The Poems, p. 202.

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Hughes’s collection, ‘The Jaguar’, where the violent physicality becomes the noise of ‘the bang of blood’.54 The young Hughes was taking many of the same lessons from Dylan Thomas that were being learnt by Geoffrey Hill at Oxford: consider the ‘burly air’, the striving salmon, ‘the hawk’s deliberate stoop in air’ and so forth in Hill’s ‘Genesis’.55 Hughes accentuates the brute physicality of the wind, the whack of it. ‘Wind’ turns the whack to a ‘crashing’, ‘booming’ and ‘stampeding’; its force is felt against bodily effort: ‘the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes’.56 (Such features may also be an exaggerated response to the sort of physicality looked for in Leavisite close readings, and a desire to see poetry as a work of active service—Thom Gunn, a poet who does not show Hill’s and Hughes’s debts to Thomas, displays this when harking to how ‘the first cock crow/ Batters our ears’ in ‘Here Come the Saints’.57) That many in the 1950s, including erstwhile Neo-Romantics/New Apocalyptics such as Norman Nicholson and G.S. Fraser, could find the rhetoric of Dylan Thomas and his followers and associates overblown in a way they had not done a decade before is as much indicative of a change in the world as an improvement in critical faculties. The outrages, strangenesses, immensities and sufferings of the Second World War, and the psychic anguish it brought to readers, had made the overblown, the irrational and obscure seem fitting in a way they would not be thereafter. Changing conditions brought changed verse from Thomas himself, who, with ‘Over St John’s Hill’, produced a post-war poem which demonstrated to his juniors how a way of writing that had suited the war years could be addressed to peacetime subject matters, to the violence of nature and, as it invokes the gallows at Tyburn, to the violence of Britain’s past. Yet, if awareness of what Hughes carried over from Thomas and Neo-Romanticism is important to understanding the poetry Hughes would write over the next few years, so too is an awareness of what he straightaway discarded. ‘Over St. John’s Hill’ may be about violence in nature, but rather than moving towards exultation of that violence, the poem comes to grieve ‘for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing’.58 Hughes—and here he differs from Geoffrey Hill—discontinues the Neo-Romantic tradition of elegy and lament. In its stead come lines such as ‘the master-/ Fulcrum of violence’ and the ‘diamond point of will’, which make it plain how the 54 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 20. 55 Hill, Collected Poems, p. 15. 56 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 36. 57 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 4. 58 Thomas, The Poems, p. 203.

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pairing of Hughes with Gunn is not merely a whim of the publishers and promoters of the time.59 A shift in disposition and mode of address had been made plausible by a shift in subject: write about birds, or other animals, and not people and notes of elegy and sympathy do seem, to most readers at least, far less obligatory. At the same time, much of the charge of the poetry—and the unease it would arouse in unsympathetic readers—is gained from the sense that this shift is nevertheless only nominal. The diagnosis is similar when another influence on ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ is considered. Tim Kendall, who has found Wilfred Owen’s letters behind the poem’s opening lines, writes that they illustrate a problem ‘which besets much of Hughes’s work: shearing wartime atrocity from its specific contexts, his poetry risks sounding absurdly overwritten.’60 At the same time, Kendall finds the poems of violence in nature superior to, and more original than, the poems in The Hawk in the Rain which deal directly with the First World War, poems troubled by belatedness and ‘the profound jealousy that [Hughes] can never achieve the authority of the combatant poet.’61 A look at ‘Bayonet Charge’, a poem which directly—or rather, given that Hughes was not a witness, indirectly—recounts the action of the First World War, would seem to confirm the point. Yet the case is not quite as straightforward as such an analysis maintains. Other poems in the volume, in spite of their belatedness, show Hughes more diverse in his sympathies and perspectives than one might expect. When, in the second part of ‘Griefs for Dead Soldiers’, ‘the widow’ watches the ‘telegram opening … more terribly than any bomb’, the depicted experience may not be first hand, but Hughes could hardly be accused of Boys Own daydreams of war and of forgetting its cost. When Hughes addresses the photographs of ‘Six Young Men’, he, no less than Philip Larkin in ‘MCMXIV’, is writing of his own experience of war, his own relationship to its participants, an experience that is perforce belated, a subject that could not in the same way be theirs. It was, however, the poetic discoveries and perspectives of poems such as ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ that Hughes would choose to build on and which dominate his 1960 volume Lupercal.

59 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 19. 60 Tim Kendall, Modern English War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 200. 61 Kendall, Modern English War Poetry, p. 201.

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Violent Times: Anti-Movement Poetry in the Mid to Late 1950s

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ed Hughes and Philip Hobsbaum chose not to let their experience of Cambridge literary life stop on graduation. Hughes continued to haunt the town and its literary circles. At the party that launched St Botolph’s Review, he would meet a young American poet on a Fulbright scholarship who was discovering what it was like to be berated for ‘beginning a poem like John Donne, but not quite managing to finish like John Donne’: Sylvia Plath.1 Philip Hobsbaum went to London to train as a teacher, and there re-established his reading group. The Group’s first meeting was held in Hobsbaum’s Edgware Road flat in October 1955; its attendees were: Hughes, Peter Redgrove, Julian and Catherine Cooper, two actors, Patricia Hartz and Leon Cripps, and Hobsbaum’s fiancée, Hannah Kelly. Among other contributions that evening were Hughes’s ‘Misanthrope’ and ‘Secretary’ and Redgrove’s ‘Bedtime Story for my Son’: astonishingly good poems from a couple of recent graduates, the last-named perhaps the most impressive of the three, and perhaps the first cause of Hobsbaum’s peculiar preference for Redgrove’s poetry over Hughes’s.2 In November, Julian Cooper invited the Australian bookseller Peter Porter to attend meetings. Four months later, they were joined by Edward Lucie-Smith, who had been

1 Sylvia Plath and Peter Orr, Interview, 30 October 1962 in The Poet Speaks, Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press and Ian Scott-Kilvert (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 167–172: p. 168. 2 The Group: An Exhibition of Poetry, Catalogue for an Exhibition, the Library, University of Reading, 7 June–10 December 1974, p. 15.

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in contact with Hobsbaum as an undergraduate at Oxford but who had been doing his military service in the RAF. As the 1950s wore on, the Group’s number was added to by the somewhat older Martin Bell, and by contemporaries such as Alan Brownjohn, the BBC producer George MacBeth and the Canadian David Wevill. One way of stating the Group’s importance is to declare it a forerunner to the contemporary poetry workshop, or indeed to deem it the first proper poetry workshop in England. At the same time, it should be stressed that Group meetings had a flavour that would make them unfamiliar to most who attend poetry workshops today. Not only was there the bearded and forbidding Hobsbaum in the chair and a heavy Leavisite aspect to proceedings, there was also the structure of the evening: its first half would concentrate on new work by one writer; this would then be followed by a coffee break, after which members could share work they particularly liked and, increasingly in later years, new poetry of their own. The Group perpetuated ideas and an ambience as well as a social network that had started in Oxford and Cambridge, but it also brought its members into contact with poets who had been very much outside both. Peter Porter, who had managed to acquire his impressive knowledge of European culture without attending university, had beginnings as a poet which owed nothing to the literary tastes and programme of Oxbridge English. Not only was he an admirer of W.H. Auden and the social poets of the 1930s, poets unfavoured by Leavis and his followers, Porter was no great fan of D.H. Lawrence either and, in later years, was heard to say that: ‘I would rather spend a winter in a canning factory in Narvic than have to read Women in Love again.’3 Unsurprisingly, Porter went on to become a vocal anti-Leavisite. Nevertheless, by joining the Group, he was attending what was, to all intents and purposes, a Leavisite seminar whose shape, tastes and attitudes would affect both his views and poetic practice.4 Recalling his years in the Group, Alan Brownjohn writes: Meetings ended at about eleven, and voices, lifted in contention, would keep it up about Leavis, the New Statesman, the intentionalist fallacy, the Spectator and the Movement, up the stairs to the square outside, along the street to Stockwell underground station and on into the train. Passing



3 Ann Thwaite, ‘An Open Letter to Peter Porter’, in Paeans for Peter Porter, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Bridgewater Press, 1999), pp. 66–69: p. 67. 4 Porter spells out his dislike of the Leavisite approach in his essay ‘Grub Street Versus Academe’, The New Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, July 1974.



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circumspectly one night a large array of rockers, Peter Porter said, ‘Gunn’s friends have come for us.’5

Sided with one set of Oxbridge poets at the Group, Porter had also joined Hobsbaum’s war of words against Thom Gunn, the recent Cambridge hero now eulogising wild ones in black jackets. What made for Group quips made also for Group poems. The notion that poets of the time might be, quite literally, on ‘fighting terms’ is the jokey contention of ‘It was a Violent Time’ by Martin Bell, a poem chronicling the boozy brawls and misdeeds of the era’s poetry scene which takes as its epigraph A. Alvarez’s opinion in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ that ‘… literary history; it is savage with gang-warfare’.6 7 Bell’s poem is no more than an entertaining period piece. Yet Group jostling against Gunn’s work in general, and ‘A Mirror for Poets’ in particular, produced poetry which better stands the test of time. ‘A Mirror for Poets’ rests confidently on authorities it doesn’t care to name: ‘Yet the historians tell us, life meant less./ It was a violent time, and evil-smelling.’8 So a rival young poet might be forgiven for asking quite who these historians—or should that be Leavisite literary critics?— might be. Furthermore, Gunn’s poem as a whole does beg a question of the poets who look into its mirror: how willing are you, really, to pay a violent price for better art and a better audience? Peter Porter’s ‘John Marston Advises Anger’ is an outsider’s attack on ‘A Mirror for Poets’, but also a considered answer to its question, and one which honours its rival despite itself. Echoing Gunn’s use of ‘the historians’, but noting who they really are, Porter observes: ‘The critics say/ Think of them as an Elizabethan Chelsea set’.9 Putting critics in their place (and his own writing in its contemporary milieu), Porter points out how they’ve ‘never listened to our lot’ before conceding ‘the bodies are the same’.10 Where Gunn enlists Ben Jonson as his poetic representative from the past, Porter takes up cudgels on behalf of Jonson’s great adversary (and occasional

5 Catalogue to the Group Exhibition, p. 31. 6 Martin Bell, Collected Poems 1937–1966 (London, Melbourne and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 1967), p. 98. 7 The New Poetry, ed. A. Alvarez, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 22. 8 Thom Gunn, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 25. 9 Peter Porter, Collected Poems 1: 1961–1981 (Oxford and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 20. 10 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 20.

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friend) John Marston, spits contempt for the Chelsea set and for a recent lover with expensive tastes, before rounding on the purveyors of the sort of poetic history to be found in the poems of Thom Gunn: What’s in a name, If Cheapside and the Marshalsea mean Eng. Lit. And the Fantasie, Sa Tortuga, Grisbi, Bongi-Bo Mean life? A cliché? What hurts dies on paper, Fades to classic pain. Love goes as the M.G. goes.11

Not a direct imitation of Marston’s style (it is less so even than Gunn’s poem is of Jonson’s), Porter’s verse does have some of Marston’s deliberate roughness; it keeps well clear of the ‘slick’. Porter’s poem shifts from the ‘glamour of pain’, imagined in the past, to ‘classic pain’, which may be Marston’s but may also be the present poet’s. The exotic nonsense list of ‘Fantasie, Sa Tortuga, Grisbi, Bongi Bo’ (nightspots and coffee bars of the 1950s) evokes life as F.R. Leavis meant life, but undercuts it with satire and realism. Thus is conjured the idea of an Elizabethan-cum-Jacobean organic community with which to contrast present-day fallings and failings which the poet then refuses to endorse, discovering the two periods, their two Londons, are remarkably alike, each full of moneyed girls with cheap affections and a yen for well-heeled lovers. The poem concludes: It’s a Condé Nast world and so Marston’s was. His had a real gibbet—our death’s out of sight. The same thin richness of these worlds remains – The flesh-packed jeans, the car-stung appetite Volley on his stage, the cage of discontent.12

Marston’s society connects to ours not through the parade of violence but through shallowness. Around the time this was composed, Porter, who was fired from Bumpus bookshop by A. Alvarez’s friend Tony Godwin, joined Notley’s advertising agency, which would also employ Peter Redgrove, Edward Lucie-Smith and the translator, wife of David and occasional Group member Assia Wevill. Rather than ignoring the counters of a day job for one of the demons of the Leavisite cosmos, Porter imports into his poem the bright hollow ring of brand names. In place of Gunn’s energetic would-be 11 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 20. 12 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 21.



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heroic self-image shining out from an Elizabethan mirror, the face of disaffection and corruption stares back through the glass. Group scepticism towards the work of Gunn was balanced by an absolute certainty as to the virtues of the work of Redgrove and Hughes. Of the latter, Porter recalled: ‘It was apparent to me when first I joined that to see Hughes as an already mature and original poet was an article of faith demanded of all Group members.’13 Hughes did not visit the Group for long. The immediate reason for this was the fact that Hughes was accompanying his now wife Sylvia Plath to America, but it is unlikely Hughes would have remained a regular attendee. While Hughes may have relished the chance to declaim poems such as Hopkins’s ‘Dreadful Sonnets’ to an audience, the academic spirit of analysis fostered by Hobsbaum was never going to be much to his liking.14 Still, Hughes’s abandonment of Group meetings did not curtail the presence and influence of his poems there. Hughes continued to send poems to the Group for their discussion, among them poems which later appeared in his first volume, The Hawk in the Rain, such as: ‘The Horses’, ‘Famous Poet’, ‘Wind’ and ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’.15 The Group poets did not just discuss these poems at meetings, they evangelised on their behalf. According to Edward Lucie-Smith, when the Group attended G.S. Fraser’s London poetry soirees: ‘Our usual way of baiting the company was for one or other of us to read a poem by Ted Hughes. A favourite was “The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar”.’16 The poem’s ability to provoke must have derived in large part from the vicious spectacle that is its subject and from its manifest keenness to dwell on grisly details. Set in the reign of Mary, so slightly predating the setting of ‘A Mirror for Poets’, and not yet, I think, informed by the notions on Protestantism and Catholicism that were to dominate Hughes’s reading

13 Peter Porter, ‘Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: A Bystander’s Recollections’, Australian Book Review, 233, August 2001, http://www.australianbookreview. com.au/past-issues/online-archive/153. Accessed 5 October 2009. 14 Porter, ‘Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’. 15 There are, for example, Group Reading Sheets of Ted Hughes poems ‘The Horses’, ‘Famous Poet’, ‘Wind, ‘Bayonet Charge’ and ‘Macaw and Little Miss’, University of Reading, MS 4457/ 20 30. These are recalled by, for instance, Edward Lucie-Smith The Burnt Child (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975), p. 166. ‘Macaw and Little Miss’, ‘Famous Poet’, ‘Fallgrief’s Girlfriends’ and ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ are all recorded in Peter Porter, ‘Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: A Bystander’s Recollections’. 16 Lucie-Smith, The Burnt Child, p. 173.

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of Shakespeare, ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ places bodily pain at its centre. That pain never loses its fascination, but there is no pretending the bishop’s martyrdom is anything other than revolting. While Farrar suffers, ‘watching Welsh townspeople/ Hear him crack in the fire’s mouth; they see what/ Black oozing twist of stuff bubbles the smell/ That tars and retches their lungs’.17 The bystanders do not just see horror; they inhale it, passively smoking the dying man. The poem itself replicates the dynamic between flaming martyr and crowd, between the poet or reciter and audience, daring the crowd to turn away or cover up their mouths and ears: a quality prized by the Group poets as they witnessed their faith in Hughes in front of G.S. Fraser’s appalled guests. ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ glories in a transfiguration through which the body is literally ‘tongued with fire’.18 Words are enacted in flesh. Bloody Mary’s burning of Farrar is ‘her sermon’.19 Insisting no less than Gunn’s ‘A Mirror for Poets’ that words here are not ‘mere rant’, Hughes’s poem has smoke burn Farrar’s ‘sermons into the skies.’20 Edward Haley comments: The meeting of vitality and death is the fuel which powers Farrar’s transience, but it is of interest to note how the conclusion of the poem draws attention to the survival of language; what is the significance of Hughes specifically citing the transience of Farrar’s sermons if it is not a latent self-conscious desire for the endurance of the poet himself after death?21

That survival is contingent on a point of connection between bodily and doctrinal sincerity, which entails the making good of words by steadfast martyrdom, Farrar’s ‘pocketed’ ‘hot’ words as ‘good gold as any queen’s crown’.22 At the head of his poem, Hughes quotes Farrar’s words on being chained to the stake: ‘If I flinch from the pain of the burning, believe not the doctrine that I have preached.’23 The protestant stand and the sincerity that goes with it are here absolute. ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ keeps its historical distance; it is 17 Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 48. 18 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 49. 19 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 48. 20 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 49. 21 Edward Hadley, The Elegies of Ted Hughes (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), p. 30. 22 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 49. 23 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 48.



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concerned with the particularities of the martyrdom of Farrar: the words of absolute sincerity are Farrar’s not Hughes’s. Strictly speaking, the poetics of sincerity has overtaken neither dramatic context nor a poetics of impersonality, nor is the poem itself a sermon. While acknowledging this, it is nonetheless possible to find this a scenario that differs from those prevailing in the poetry of the time of its composition. The immortality of poets, whether directly summoned or figured in their standbys, is a, if not the, favourite theme of the Neo-Romantics. But, in the work of Dylan Thomas, the poet does indeed have to be dead for immortality to be achieved; that death is neither violent nor is the manner of death a guarantor of words. In ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’, sincerity, extreme suffering and extreme death intersect. Starkly clear for the first time is a dynamic that would be used by a number of the most striking poems from Hughes’s generation, from Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’, whose protagonist addresses her own gawping crowd, to Offa in the eighteenth of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, who watches how ‘flesh leaked rennet over them; the men stooped, disentangled the body’.24 Peter Porter may have thrown his lot in with Ted Hughes’s early friends and apostles. Nevertheless, from the outset, his verse is quite as uncomfortable with, as fascinated by and as rivalrous of, the poetry of Hughes as it is Gunn’s. The historians of ‘The Historians Call up Pain’ are, like the critics in ‘John Marston Advises Anger’, a borrowing from and a commentary upon the historians of ‘A Mirror for Poets’. Yet a close look finds ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ also contested with. The implication that pain, in particular, bodily pain, makes good coin of words and that these are indicative of a sincerity which poets may do well to emulate, there in ‘The Martyrdom of Nicholas Farrar’, is, in Porter’s poem, grown greater, grown even more extreme. ‘The Historians Call up Pain’ lets the death of one condemned protestant lose its particular and individual purchase by being subsumed in a mass martyrdom of Anabaptists. ‘Ten thousand heretics’ are burnt to death in a year, the protestant martyrs dying ‘soundlessly at the stake/ Their eyes hotter than the flames’,25 silent riches that make small change of Farrar’s ‘miserdom of shrieks’ and the way that ‘out of his eyes,/ Out of his mouth, 24 Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 122. I state this not instead of my earlier, political reading of this poem but to add a further plausible and complementary interpretation. See William Wootten, ‘Rhetoric of Violence in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and the Speeches of Enoch Powell’, Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 11, 2000, pp. 1−15. 25 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 36.

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fire like a glory broke’.26 Porter’s poem then shifts period and frame of reference. Where ‘John Marston Advises Anger’ has its swipe at Eng. Lit., it is now the Cambridge history courses that appear smug and distant: This, of course, was Six centuries ago: today this persecution Is a best bet Honours question In the History Tripos.27

Granted, this is an outsider’s bristling at the privileged young Cambridge poets with whom he was now coming into contact (‘Tripos’ is the name given to Cambridge undergraduate courses—a nicely dividing and divisive wedge of specialist vocabulary), yet Porter, with his commanding tone and erudition, appears not to look up at these Cantabrigians enviously but to glare upon them from commanding heights of wisdom and experience. Porter is not just trying to do down and outdo his Cambridge rivals, he is also minded to cast doubt on what is so striking in their poems. Hughes advances the possibility of an identification with the pain and passion of Farrar. When Porter moves to a single instance of martyrdom, he denies reader and poet such sympathetic powers: ‘We cannot know what John of Leyden felt/ Under the Bishop’s tongs’.28 For all that, Porter’s poem is not a straightforward denial of what Hughes is about in ‘The Martyrdom of Nicholas Farrar’. Towards its end, ‘The Historians Call up Pain’ turns like a corkscrew. Satire, a Kingsley Amislike realism and hostility to romanticism, and the very desires that Hughes conjured up in his poem, give way to one another: Yet if we keep Our minds on the four last things And join the historians on their frieze of pain We may forget our world of milk gone stale, Cancer touches in the afternoon, girls in Jensens, Gramophone records scratched and warped, Managers fattening tumours of ambition. We cannot know what John of Leyden felt Under the Bishop’s tongs—we can only Walk in temperate London, our educated city, 26 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 49. 27 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 36. 28 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 36.



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Wishing to cry as freely as they did who died In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness And our regret with which to build an eschatology.29

Ringing as these lines are, they do not ringingly endorse a position. Instead, their rhetoric makes quarrel with itself as much as with the words of other poets, leaving readers to ask whether they are encountering a fixing of the mind, a diagnosis or an exhortation. The first sentence appears to suggest that looking to the heroic pain of the past over and above our smaller, actually felt pain is a species of escapism. The second shifts us towards an Audenesque notion of the temperate civilised city, a scolding of Gunnish historians (and by implication poets) who would want something more painful for the good of strong emotion, verse or the coherence of society. Indeed, it could be taken as a gloss on, and riposte to, Gunn’s comment to the London Magazine, which looks complacently at the National Health, the unions and the demise of the squirearchy, and declares: ‘The agony of the time is that there is no agony.’30 In fact, Porter finds, there is no shortage of agony, of cancer, ambition and loneliness, nor, with the ‘milk gone stale’, an absence of the evil smelling. This last sentence could be read as a manifesto for the poetry of secular eschatology Porter would often write in the future, but it could also be read as being altogether more resigned. A poet much less given to ambiguities than was the Movement fashion has been led to produce that type of ambiguity which shows the poet genuinely in two minds as to his subject.

29 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 36. 30 Thom Gunn, Letter to the London Magazine, June 1957, pp. 65–66.

C hapter T hree

In Opposite Directions: A. Alvarez and Thom Gunn

T

hough A. Alvarez’s appointment as poetry editor of the Observer in 1956 would quickly make him best known as a literary journalist, through much of the 1950s he was primarily an academic. Alvarez studied and taught at Oxford and at Princeton, where he was a protégé of R.P. Blackmur, and his university posts resulted in two critical books aimed largely at an academic audience: 1958’s The Shaping Spirit, which is about the poetry of English and American modernism, and 1960’s The School of Donne, which is on the metaphysical poets. The Shaping Spirit is somewhere between being a work of Movement criticism (John Wain is a notable influence) and a reaction against it. On the one hand, Alvarez offers up the opinion that ‘The experimental trappings of modernism are a minor issue in English verse. It is largely an American importation and an American need.’1 On the other, as he writes of Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Lawrence, Auden, Empson, Crane and Stevens, there is no doubting the pull of American modernism for the young Alvarez, nor his interest in seeing, in Yeats and Lawrence in particular, versions of a modern poetic intelligence beyond the American. The chapter on D.H. Lawrence is the most telling. Here innovation and emotion become one: ‘The whole of Lawrence’s power and originality as a poet depends on the way he keeps close to his feelings. That is why he had to rid himself of conventional forms.’2 Here too Alvarez falls out of temper

1 A. Alvarez, The Shaping Spirit (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958), p. 12. 2 Alvarez, The Shaping Spirit, p. 153.

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with the poetry of the 1950s. Criticism of Lawrence’s ‘carelessness’ as a poet rouses the response: Our modern poetry began with a vigorous attack on outworn conventions of feeling and expression. But the emphasis has gradually gone so much on the craft and technicality of writing that the original wholeness and freshness is again lost. … The real material of poetry … depends on getting close to the real feelings and presenting them without formulae and without avoidance, in all their newness, disturbance and ugliness. If a poet does that he will not find himself writing in Lawrence’s style; but like Lawrence, he may speak out in his own voice, single and undisguised. 3

There is no great distance from this statement to Alvarez’s endorsement in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, first of Lowell’s trying to cope with disturbances ‘nakedly, and without evasion’ and then of Hughes’s ‘serious attempt to re-create and so clarify, unfalsified and in the strongest imaginative terms possible, a powerful complex of emotions and sensations.’4 Perhaps surprisingly—though, given the nature of criticism of the time, perhaps not—it is The School of Donne that contains the more revealing foreglimpses and rationales for ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ and Alvarez’s critical positions of the 1960s. Alvarez’s John Donne ‘was clearly one of those writers, like Ben Jonson and Dr Johnson, Blake and Lawrence, whose importance as a poet is closely linked to his vitality as a person’.5 Alvarez writes of Donne’s ‘masculinity’: ‘there was also a further overtone to “masculine”: that is, “active”. This meant something more than just getting things done and said in poetry. It also implied a whole world of responsibility both to the writer himself and to his position in society.’6 Donne and the Attic writers, who for Alvarez are Donne’s proper context, eschewed appealing to a public and arts associated with public speaking, preferring in their stead a slipshod intimacy: They replaced formality by personal sincerity and wrote in a deliberately offhand manner for the pleasure of their intimate friends. Montaigne is quite open about this in his essay on letter writing; it is behind Donne’s comments on The Progresse of the Soule and the continual stream of remarks he made 3 Alvarez, The Shaping Spirit, p. 161. 4 The New Poetry, ed. A. Alvarez, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 29, 31. 5 A. Alvarez, The School of Donne (London: Chatto and Windus: 1961), p. 46. 6 Alvarez, The School of Donne, p. 124.



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in verse-letters to friends about his harshness. It is as though he were always congratulating himself on writing badly. Not to bother about one’s metre was a token of intimacy.7

Donne is a supreme poet through being a supreme anti-poet. Too sincere to be bothered about fripperies and smoothnesses, he has: that vibration behind all his verse: his desire for fulfilment within the body of society as an active, intelligent, professionally trained man. This is why he objected so strongly to being known as a poet: from this masculine point of view a poet was somehow parasitic, a mere entertainer who did not fulfil any serious functions. His emphasis on the active and professional intelligence in some way affects the whole tone of his poetry.8

Seriousness, the poetic watchword for Alvarez as it had been for Leavis, exists in this analysis not within poetry but beyond it. In the case of Donne, ‘his circle, esteemed him as one of the most accomplished and gifted men of his day; as such, his verse was almost a failure of seriousness’.9 The value of the poetry which Alvarez holds up for our admiration is in its encoding of sincerity. The School of Donne may have been in large part gestated in an American academy dominated by the New Criticism (the book was the product of a stay in Princeton from 1957 to 1958), but, despite the odd ritual kow-tow, Alvarez is writing as if the notion of the intentional and affective fallacy, the pure thoughts of W.K. Wimsatt or Cleanth Brooks, their verbal icons and well-wrought urns counted for nothing against the personality of the poet discernible through the work. 10 Alvarez’s love of Donne, and his endorsement even of what might be 7 Alvarez, The School of Donne, p. 33. 8 Alvarez, The School of Donne, p. 125. 9 Alvarez, The School of Donne, p. 125. 10 According to Wimsatt and Beardsely, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’: ‘begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism.’ ‘The Affective Fallacy’, though, ‘is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does)’, this is to be avoided because it ‘begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism.’ By this stage, Alvarez’s criticism appears to regard neither as a fallacy. See two preliminary essays written by W.J. Wimsatt in collaboration with Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (University of Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1954): ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, pp. 3–18; ‘The Affective Fallacy, pp. 21–39: p. 21.

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queried as careless or unkempt in Donne’s poetry, is matched by Alvarez’s manifest wariness of the neatness of Andrew Marvell. It matters to Alvarez that Marvell can, placed beside John Donne, look insincere as a writer. Indeed, using a feeling for sincerity to bypass the New Critical ban on biographical speculation even as he denies that he is doing so, Alvarez writes of ‘To His Coy Mistress’: ‘I cannot believe that, in terms of the poem—the biography, in these matters, being neither here nor there—the mistress ever existed.’11 Marvell’s smoothness and artifice do garner praise, but praise of a lower order than that bestowed upon the vital, masculine, emotional and original Donne: when compared with Donne, it seems that what Marvell gained in control he lost in pressure. He rarely, if at all, lapses as Donne did at times. But then he hasn’t the excuse. He was never as original; his poetic discoveries were within already charted poetic forms. His first desire in verse was, I think, to do it perfectly. And he gained this perfection by keeping away from insistently personal situations, and absorbing all his energies in the literary form and process.12

Reading Alvarez’s discussion of the relative merits of Donne and Marvell, one cannot but notice an uncanny similarity to a comparison Alvarez would go on to make in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, a comparison between a vital, rough-edged masculine poet and a Hull poet who happened to be published by the Marvell press. In this discussion, Marvell gains in control and loses in pressure. In the comparison between Philip Larkin’s ‘At Grass’ and Ted Hughes’s ‘A Dream of Horses’ that Alvarez would later make in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, Hughes’s poem is ‘less controlled’ than Larkin’s but, when it comes to considerations of ultimate merit, the pressure, the personal are all on Hughes’s side.13 Perfection of an already existent form is of a lower order than an imperfect creation answering to a particular demand, and this is inherently connected to the requirement for form to meet requirements that are inherently personal. The less polished, less stable, sincere, personal and informal Donne is preferable to Marvell, a poet whose ‘whole effort is directed towards a full and delicate sanity, so that what he finally achieves is a kind of personal impersonality.’14 Even more 11 Alvarez, The School of Donne, p. 116. 12 Alvarez, The School of Donne, pp. 113–114. 13 The New Poetry, p. 31. 14 Alvarez, The School of Donne, p. 106.



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than he foreshadows what Alvarez was to discover and value in the work of Ted Hughes, Alvarez’s John Donne has the qualities Alvarez would come to prize in the Robert Lowell of Life Studies. But what of Thom Gunn? In the early 1950s, Gunn was as Donnean poet as Alvarez could have wished for, a key reason for Alvarez’s great admiration for Fighting Terms. Where New Lines would include but one poem from the volume, ‘Lericis’, The New Poetry would include six: ‘Carnal Knowledge’, ‘The Wound’, ‘Lofty in the Palais de Danse’, ‘Helen’s Rape’, ‘The Secret Sharer’ and ‘A Mirror for Poets’.15 Alvarez went on to review Fighting Terms twice. The first time, addressing an American audience in 1958, Alvarez calls the collection ‘for my money, the most impressive first book of poems since Robert Lowell’s.’16 There is … a great vitality in his poems that makes Gunn sound, in a wholly contemporary way, rather like Donne. Not the orthodox Donne, as created by Cleanth Brooks, all dandified logic, contrived conceits and an irony so refined as to be humorless; but the Donne who, out of impatience with the pieties of Elizabethan verse, changed the language of poetry to suit his own colloquial intelligence.’17

The review picks Gunn, enthusiastically, and Philip Larkin, more reluctantly, as standard-bearers of current English verse. Why was this view not in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’? In the first two versions of the essay, it was. ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ was published twice in 1961, in a much-truncated version which appeared in the Observer, and in a full-length version in the American journal Commentary, where it was called ‘English Poetry Today’. In the latter, one may assume that it is the need to address an American audience that solicits comments such as: It is to the point that the two Englishmen who are most concerned to write at this kind of depth have spent the better part of their poetically formative twenties in America. I mean Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. So they have been less open to pressures which would flatten both their intelligence

15 Robert Conquest, ed. New Lines: An Anthology (London: Macmillan, 1956). 16 A. Alvarez, ‘Poetry Chronicle’, Partisan Review, Vol. XXV, No. 4, 1958, pp. 603–609: p. 604. 17 Alvarez, ‘Poetry Chronicle’, p. 604.

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and the sharp violence of their experience into a socially more acceptable middle style.18

Still, the mention of Gunn by name here seems noteworthy, especially as it takes place again in its closing paragraph. The Observer article also names him, declaring: The new seriousness is not an impossible ideal. It is present, in different ways and degrees in the work of Americans like Robert Lowell and John Berryman and Englishmen like Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. It is a combination of D.H. Lawrence’s concern with the inner life, however violent or painful, and T.S. Eliot’s concentration, formal intelligence and skill.19

If this paragraph is absent The New Poetry, it seems fair to conclude that it is because, having read and reviewed My Sad Captains and The Sense of Movement and seen the revised Fighting Terms, Alvarez had changed his mind. Gunn had deserted the New Seriousness. The older Alvarez was ruefully to acknowledge that ‘apart from a handful of early poems, Gunn has never shown much interest in the style of exacerbated intensity that attracted his Cambridge contemporary, Ted Hughes.’20 Even about those early poems Alvarez and Gunn would disagree. To return to Gunn’s ‘Carnal Knowledge’, the fact that we now know Gunn knows he is homosexual but cannot let his audience know that he knows may make the poem read as enacting a species of sincerity. For such a reading, the poem is ultimately sincere because of its insincere heterosexuality, expressed at a time when male homosexual acts were not only contrary to the societal norm, but also illegal. Nevertheless, Gunn has explicitly denied the validity of such a reading. In general he notes, ‘The danger of biography, and equally of autobiography, is that it can muddy poetry by confusing it with its sources’, for ‘the historical truth of the germ is superseded by the derived but completely different artistic truth of fiction’.21 In particular, Gunn asserts that 18 A. Alvarez, ‘English Poetry Today’, Commentary, Vol. 32, No. 3, September 1961, pp. 217–223: pp. 221–222. 19 A. Alvarez, ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, The Observer, 19 February 1961, p. 28. 20 A. Alvarez, ‘Thom Gunn’, in Risky Business: People, Pastimes, Poker and Books (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), pp. 232–240: p. 239. 21 Thom Gunn, The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography, ed. and intr. Clive Wilmer (London: Faber and Faber 1988), p. 187.



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anyone aware that I am homosexual is likely to misread the whole poem, inferring that the thing ‘known’ is that the speaker would prefer to be in bed with a man. … The poem, actually addressed to a fusion of two completely different girls, is not saying anything as clear cut as that.22

Looking back in a 1994 New Yorker piece on Gunn, Al Alvarez (in more recent years Alvarez has augmented his first initial) chooses to doubt this, seeing Gunn’s doubleness as evincing a confusion between Leavisite morality and Gunn’s homosexuality.23 If for young Leavisites such as Gunn, ‘Marriage … was the ultimate vindication of literary seriousness … how can the potential offender maintain a comfortable attitude toward moral seriousness and responsibility?’24 More broadly, ‘the best poems in Fighting Terms—“The Wound”, “The Secret Sharer” and “Carnal Knowledge”—are all about the huge wound in his head; that is, they are about psychic pain, the difficulties of growing up and coming to terms with your own identity.’ 25 This core point is much the same as it was in Alvarez’s 1962 review of the Faber reissue of Fighting Terms, where he wrote: ‘the achievement of “Fighting Terms” was to force that “inarticulate grief” into highly articulated, moving poetry.’26 Where Gunn would maintain, ‘it has not been of my primary interest to develop a unique poetic personality, and I rejoice in Eliot’s lovely remark that art is an escape from personality’, Alvarez notes the rejoicing but raises an eyebrow.27 Gunn’s and Alvarez’s perspectives on ‘Carnal Knowledge’ are not as incompatible as both writers would appear to maintain. Autobiographical doubleness may be the ultimate cause of the doubleness of the poems, but to grant this may not be to reveal what the poem is really about. Gunn’s explanation is not a clear disavowal of homosexual subtext, just a statement of the originating circumstances and the way that the poem itself frustrates reductive biographical analysis. And so it is through much of Fighting Terms. ‘The Wound’ is a poem about a homosexual, or at least bisexual, Achilles. But to say, for example, that the narrator of ‘The Wound’ is really Gunn is to ignore the poem on its own terms, its wounded narrator, its use of the background of the Trojan War, its relationship to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. In this regard, to say what the poem 22 Gunn, The Occasions of Poetry, p. 188. 23 Alvarez, ‘Thom Gunn’, pp. 235–236. 24 Alvarez, ‘Thom Gunn’, p. 235. 25 Alvarez, ‘Thom Gunn’, p. 234. 26 A. Alvarez, ‘Tuning into a New Voice’, The Observer, 11 March 1962. 27 Gunn, The Occasions of Poetry, p. 186.

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is really about can be a way of missing what it is actually about. ‘Carnal Knowledge’ and ‘The Wound’ are, in their different ways, dramatic poems, ‘The Secret Sharer’ a novelistic one. Yet, all that granted, there remains a wider point to consider: Gunn’s impersonality can seem to spring from very personal desires. This is, if anything, even clearer in the poems which follow Fighting Terms than in the volume itself. When the motorcyclists of ‘On the Move’ are described as ‘In goggles, donned impersonality’, the resonances are much more of S&M than they are of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. To be encased like this is to be entirely objectified, entirely the self-for-other, yet it is also to be all-perceiving. This is more of a mask than it is a simple escape from personality, and, as a model for poetry, much closer to a fetishistic self-fashioning than it is to ascetic self-abnegation. Indeed, a number of poems in The Sense of Movement are no longer poems of the wounded or divided self but of the self-created and asserted. This change makes Gunn more coherent, a poet who knows what he’s about, yet the cost paid is the loss of the great sense of strangeness, splitting, wounding, of the irresolvable interior and exterior drama that is to be found in Fighting Terms. The prevailing analogy of ‘On the Move’ is that of existentialism and the existentialist choice in a ‘valueless world’.28 Existentialism does resolve some prior quandaries found in Gunn’s work. But as within a number of Gunn poems old and late, there is also, and in addition to the depiction of impersonality, an implicit analogy about the poetic art in play, albeit one not fully worked out: the motorcyclists arrive like inspiration, their riding past is like the poem in writing, ‘Exact conclusion of their hardiness/ Has no shape yet’, making the poem a sort of mechanised equivalent of what Ted Hughes would essay in ‘The Thought Fox’.29 As with its reinterpretation of impersonality, the poem responds to Eliot the poet as well as Eliot the critic in a way that counters the earlier poet every bit as much as it honours him. Where at the close of ‘Ash Wednesday’, Eliot had prayed, ‘Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood … Teach us to sit still’, Gunn questions the notion of truth and falsehood in a vision where sitting is not sitting still but being in restless motion. 30 And where Eliot writes of ‘Our peace in His will’, Gunn notes how:31

28 Thom Gunn, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 40. 29 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 39. 30 T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 105. 31 Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 105.



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Much that is manufactured to the will must yield And use what they imperfectly control To dare a future from the taken routes. 32

Thus Gunn bodies forth a new anti-Eliotic ideal that is atheistical and intriguingly dichotomous. The images of confinement and of ‘the created will’ in the poem struggle with the wildness of ‘what they imperfectly control’, as if indeed the ability to handle speed and danger, the command of form, must also be o’ermastered by something that cannot be quite controlled, which is here equated with masculine energy: ‘their hum/ Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.’33 It is an ideal similar to that of Hughes’s ‘Acrobats’ in Lupercal, a poem which lauds elite, skilled, brave figures who flash above the earth and the ‘dumbstruck crowd’ and above the ‘[f]altering of the will’ with ‘nonchalant pride’ in their ‘high risk’.34 In this regard at least, ‘On the Move’ would seem the perfect poem for The New Poetry. It speeds no less than the equine beasts in Hughes’s ‘A Dream of Horses’, and with considerably more authorial control. 35 Yet it is also the case that that sense of psychic turbulence of the early poems has abated; the violence has been made exterior. Compare ‘On the Move’ with ‘Tamer and Hawk’ from Fighting Terms; ‘Tamer and Hawk’ may offer itself as a masculine love poem of the tough guy almost tamed, but it is also possible to read it as a description of the poetic art: ‘The habit of your words/ Has hooded me.’36 Gunn is not simply asserting the virtues of the civilised against the wild, he is depicting a precarious balance. Of the Tamer/Lover/ Poet he writes: ‘You but half civilize’, in a poem that is also prepared to turn the relationship around to see ‘Tamer as prey’.37 It is this, over the more disciplined ‘On the Move’, that gives the meeting of maximum wildness and vitality with half-control that is the defining ideal of The New Poetry. In 1958 Alvarez had conceded Larkin the limited achievement, not of having ‘mapped out any great new continent of poetry; it is simply to have created a tone of voice for the time.’38 He had caught the ‘neutral weariness of enlightened suburbanism’ that had been the mood of the country since 32 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 39. 33 Gunn, Collected Poems, pp. 40, 39. 34 Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 73. 35 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 73. 36 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 29. 37 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 29. 38 Alvarez, ‘Poetry Chronicle’, p. 606.

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the war.39 Not quite the same as ‘smelling out and analyzing that sense of violence which underlies the inertia of contemporary England’, the ability Alvarez applauds in Gunn.40 Moreover, Larkin, in contradistinction to Gunn, receives another compliment which, from Alvarez, is similarly backhanded: ‘It has a finish and perfection in its own terms, like that of Graves or Frost, which comes partly from the high level of technical accomplishment and partly from the poet’s knowing precisely his own limitations.’41 Ultimately, Alvarez saw limitations merely as limitations. Nevertheless, limitations were becoming a dominant theme of the poetry of Thom Gunn. Even Gunn’s poems of excess and excessive violence make limitation a virtue, as when the speaker of ‘The Beaters’ says: ‘I see them careful, choosing limitation’.42 The poems were also getting more polished. On the advice of Donald Hall, Gunn had moved to California in order to study under the poet and critic Yvor Winters at Stanford.43 Where Alvarez’s decision to do postgraduate study in America was a journey to the centre of the New Criticism, to Princeton and R.P. Blackmur, Gunn’s was a journey to the New Critics’ most outspoken enemy. The New Criticism itself finds John Crow Ransom maintaining that Winters’s ‘effect on the new criticism is to blight it. For the new criticism has not been morally hypersensitive; it has tried to be a literary criticism.’44 To borrow the words of Robert Archambeau: ‘the subordination of poetry’s formal elements to its morality made Winters’s poetry and poetics of this period a kind of heteronomous art, at odds with the New Criticism and the academic institutions it dominated.’45 This moralism entailed an especial relationship to romanticism and poetic form. Winters had in his youth been a modernist, imagist poet, before changing style to become much more rigidly formalist in the traditional manner. One reason for this shift and for the moralising classicism of Winters’s critical prose was his relationship with Hart Crane, a poet Winters had known and admired in the years before Crane’s suicide. According to 39 Alvarez, ‘Poetry Chronicle’, p. 605. 40 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 29; Alvarez, ‘Poetry Chronicle’, p. 604. 41 Alvarez, ‘Poetry Chronicle’, pp. 604–605. 42 Thom Gunn, The Sense of Movement (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 36. 43 Donald Hall and Ian Hamilton, Donald Hall in Conversation with Ian Hamilton (London: Between the Lines, 2000), p. 37. 44 John Crow Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941), p. 216. 45 Robert Archambeau, Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry (Notre Dame, Ind., University of Notre Dame Press: 2010), p. 27.



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Winters, ‘The Emerson doctrine, which is merely the romantic doctrine with a New England coloration, should naturally result in madness if one really lived it; it should result in literary confusion if one really wrote it. Crane lived it; he wrote it’.46 Poets who followed its creed and who followed the Whitman line of free verse were likewise courting their own deaths: The doctrine of Emerson and Whitman, if really put into practice, should naturally lead to suicide: in the first place, if the impulses are indulged systematically and passionately, they can lead only to madness; in the second place, death, according to the doctrine, is not only a release from suffering but is also and inevitably the way to beatitude.47

Winters’s championing of reason, form, classicism against madness, formlessness and romanticism has evident common ground with the outlook of the Movement, and it is natural that the most important poet-critic associated with the Movement, Donald Davie, should have felt an affinity with Winters. In practice, Winters, like Davie, was less consistent than his theories suggest. For all that he pointed out the shortcomings of American modernism, Winters understood and admired the achievements of its best practitioners. It was he who recommended Gunn read poets such as William Carlos Williams, thus planting the seeds for Gunn’s experiments away from traditional metre.48 It should also be born in mind how, as the poem ‘To Yvor Winters 1955’ attests, Gunn’s response to Winters was by no means unquestioning. Gunn’s association with Winters was nevertheless to trouble Alvarez. In his second, 1962, review of Fighting Terms Alvarez states, with some justification, a dislike of the revisions Gunn made to the book as well as reservations about the poetry that Gunn had written since its first publication, and the move to America and into Winters’s orbit. Alvarez writes: ‘the achievement of “Fighting Terms” was to force that “inarticulate grief” into highly articulated, moving poetry. I prefer it to the bonier, more adjusted style he now uses.’49 This is effectively glossed in Alvarez’s New Yorker essay, which regrets the move to ‘too smoothly flowing rhythms and bland rhymes’ 46 Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 599. 47 Winters, In Defense of Reason, p. 590. 48 James Campbell, Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell (London: Between the Lines, 2000), p. 30. 49 Alvarez, ‘Tuning Into a New Voice’. ‘Inarticulate Grief’ is a quotation from Gunn’s ‘Round and Round’.

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that Winters encouraged.50 There was, as we have just seen, a key American influence affecting this shift, but there was an English influence as well, the influence Gunn had communicated to Philip Hobsbaum: Philip Larkin. After its brief phase of weak imitation, Gunn’s poetry began to grapple with Larkin’s more strongly, a truth revealed by ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’, the first poem in Thom Gunn’s 1961 volume My Sad Captains. ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’ contemplates Caravaggio’s painting of St Paul’s conversion situated in the Italian church of the title. The first stanza finds Gunn describing how: I see how shadow in the painting brims With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out But a dim horse’s haunch and various limbs, Until the very subject is in doubt. 51

Words in the passage shadow not just the picture, but other poems. ‘Brims’, used of shadows, is surprising yet reminiscent of particular past coinages, for while the Oxford English Dictionary gives examples stretching back to the nineteenth century, ‘brims’ as a verb is uncommon, and less so when employed figuratively. Moreover, among the OED’s nineteenth century examples, ‘brims’ is either connected with something watery—ice, tears—or a quality such as intelligence or deep feeling. A look through well-known poetry turns up a couple of usages similar to Gunn’s own. A.E. Housman’s ‘Reveille’ has ‘the silver dusk returning/ Up the beach of darkness brims’.52 Here, I take it, it is the silver dusk rather than the darkness that is doing the brimming, but it is easy to see how the usage could be half-recalled and transformed to one of darkness in the very different scene of early morning soldiering in Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Break of Day’. Here soldiers have: Cowed anger in their eyes, till darkness brims And roars into their heads, and they can hear Old childish talk, and tags of foolish hymns. 53

50 Alvarez, ‘Thom Gunn’, p. 237. 51 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 93. 52 A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, with notes and bibliography by Carl J. Weber (Waterville, Maine: Colby College Library, 1946), p. 12. 53 Siegfried Sassoon, Collected Poems 1908–1956 (London: Faber and Faber 1956), p. 82.



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Sassoon’s lines then go on to turn Housman’s countryside look to war into a wartime memory of the countryside in which the reveille is ultimately replaced by a huntsman’s horn rousing a quiet pastoral scene: ‘In solitudes of peace, no longer dim./ The old horse lifts his face and thanks the light,/ Then stretches down his head to crop the green.’54 The ‘Hark there’s the horn’ at the end is registered as a huntsman’s horn, but is presumably the reveille, waking soldiers to another day of war.55 Despite the horses and brimming darkness to be found within ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’, neither the Housman nor Sassoon can be reckoned a certain and direct influence on Gunn’s poem. But there is a poem written in between the Sassoon and the Gunn, gently influenced by the first and contested by the latter, a poem where a horse ‘crops grass’ and ‘Dusk brims the shadows’ in an overflowing of the darkness of elegiac pastoral: Philip Larkin’s ‘At Grass’.56 Considering ‘Reveille’ and ‘At Grass’ together, it is possible to detect the ways in which, I would guess unconsciously, Larkin uses a brimming over of something like the darkness at the beginning of Sassoon’s poem to give the edges of the poem an inexplicit reminiscence of two world wars. ‘At Grass’ is a more sombre and chillier poem than it might first appear, and one with distinct undertones of violent conflict. Consider the ‘cold shade’ in the first verse, the way the wind ‘distresses tail and mane’.57 Consider too the choice of ‘Squadrons’ to describe the empty cars, the way the horses ‘stand at ease’.58 While these last two invoke airfield and parade ground, the horses themselves have slipped their names like ex-serviceman back to quiet civilian life, the titles of their old ranks now irrelevant. ‘At Grass’ is, in its edges and undertones, a post-war poem on the absences left after the war, and the continuing shadows cast by it. In this way, ‘At Grass’ is ultimately about the same something Ted Hughes sees on the garden lawn in ‘Thrushes’ or ‘Sunstroke’, but where Hughes’s locates within the mightbe-pastoral setting a merciless war continuing by other means and laments how ‘The Retired Colonel’ may be the end of an old warrior breed, the ‘maneating British lion/ By a pimply age brought down’, Larkin enjoys how grass and fauna have been demobbed.59 54 Sassoon, Collected Poems, p. 83. 55 Sassoon, Collected Poems, p. 83. 56 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. and intr. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber and Faber and the Marvell Press 1988), p. 29. 57 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 29. 58 Larkin, Collected Poems, pp. 29, 30. 59 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 77.

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The dusk (not morning) that brims the shadows in ‘At Grass’, is more generally a brimming of death, but its brimming is loaded with inexplicit significances that give the poem a plenitude in excess of its explicit subject matter. Evening, horses, grooms, the way the shadows ‘brim’: reminders of ‘At Grass’ abound through the lines of ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’. And while the shadow of war that was still traceable in Larkin’s poem is now gone, that dark abundance of its brimming cannot be contained. As Gunn tells how ‘evening gives the act, beneath the horse/ And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl’, he describes the shadow as ‘real’, but it is nevertheless becoming broodingly metaphorical.60 The shadow in the Caravaggio that brims ‘Until the very subject is in doubt’ can also be read as a description of the problem of viewing the Larkin poem, with its niggling excess of darkness. Gunn’s poem shows the influence of Larkin as it were displaced, the literary echoes coming from one poem, the themes and topos from another. Gunn’s is a poem about religious revelation, doubt and disbelief set in a church. The engagement with ‘At Grass’ gives the poem its background shading. In the foreground, ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’ is in more or less overt and rivalrous dialogue with Larkin’s ‘Church Going’. The two poems’ obvious similarities are counterpoised by their obvious dissimilarities. Even their stanza shape suggests conscious closeness and conscious difference, Gunn’s eight lines of pentameter (a longer stanza than in any of the other poems in My Sad Captains) almost match Larkin’s nine; Gunn’s stanza with its straight ababcdcd is on the whole firmer in its rhymes if less tricky in its scheme. The image presented at the start of Larkin’s poem was, for Alvarez in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, that of the ‘post-war Welfare State Englishman’.61 It is certainly an image that seems content to show a down to earth poet both cheerfully unaware of what rood lofts and other ecclesiastical arcana might be and disinclined to go to the bother of looking them up. Gunn’s poem, on the other hand, is set in Italy, and confidently names and discusses the work and name of an Italian painter. What Alvarez describes as ‘agnostic piety’ in Larkin is met with much more conspicuous displays of faith in the Gunn.62 Read attentively, Larkin’s poem is more atheistical than it is agnostic. The dry opening line: ‘Once I am sure there’s nothing going on’, is nicely ambiguous about whether it is a church service or the existence of the deity

60 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 93. 61 The New Poetry, p. 24. 62 The New Poetry, pp. 24–25.



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that is not manifest.63 But ‘nothing’ for Larkin, though it may be distantly informed by empirical philosophy, is not used in a way that is philosophically particular. Contrast how the end of Gunn’s poem describes, in a way that is and is not describing Caravaggio’s Paul, ‘the large gesture of solitary man,/ Resisting by embracing, nothingness.’ This nothingness is no neutral and pedigreeless nothing, it is the Sartrean le néant, and Paul is depicted as an unlikely existential hero. The parade of heroes and toughs that marches through Gunn’s early books can become wearing, but Gunn’s Paul, being balanced in the composition by the several people ‘Mostly old women’ with their ‘poor’ ‘tired’ arms, keeps intelligence and empathy awake. And while, given some of Gunn’s other poems of the time, it might seem reasonable to view ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’ as a glorification of the revealed hero at the expense of the others around him, nevertheless the poem is less aggressive, less swaggeringly sure of itself than one might expect. The narrator himself is ‘unenlightened’ even if Paul has been relieved from being a subject ‘in doubt’.64 Such notes appear to be in sympathy with the Larkin of ‘Church Going’. At the same time, there are distinctions to be drawn. While the carefully fashioned ambiguities of the Larkin and the Gunn may both emerge from the post-Empsonian sensibility of the 1950s, in Larkin’s poem, these exist chiefly as qualifications, doubts and ironies; in Gunn’s poem, as in other poems following Fighting Terms, the ambiguities are features whose treatment of ideas and themes is at root dialectical, although concerned with the clashing of ideas and positions rather than their synthesis. ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’ is a poem of implicit, and, by its end, fairly explicit, existential choice. A poem that bears out how Gunn is both in and agin Larkin and the Movement, it proves no less fruitful in its rivalry, envy and emulation of Larkin’s work than are the early poems of Peter Porter in reaction to the early work of Gunn himself.

63 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 97. 64 Gunn, Collected Poems, pp. 94–95.

C hapter Four

Against Gentility

B

ritain in 1962 was more respectable, more reserved, more uptight, more polite, more class-ridden, in a word, more genteel than it was to become by the end of the decade. It was also considerably less violent. The causal connection between attacks on gentility and expressions of violence in the cultural productions of the time, albeit largely the productions of popular culture, is cited by Stephen Pinker as a key part in the decivilising process by which he explains the rise in violent crime in those years and the years following.1 Such wider pros and cons of 1960s society and culture extend well beyond the scope of this book. Nonetheless, it is worth keeping in mind how the poetic movement chronicled here formed part of a much larger picture of progression from small pockets of anti-gentility in the society and culture of the 1950s to the much more pervasive societal shift of the 1960s and 1970s. It is also worth bearing in mind also that the attack on gentility constituted by The New Poetry and related writings was very specific in formulation, making clear a distinction between English anti-gentility in the literature of the 1950s and its own. Any reader in 1962 would have broadly understood what it meant to be contra gentility, and it is fair to say that A. Alvarez’s attack upon it did entail the qualities she or he would have in mind and a delight in a brasher, American way of going about things. Yet while many readers, whether pro- or anti-American, would have been more or less opposed to such gentility themselves, they may well also have regarded the Angry Young Men, and to some extent the Movement,



1 See Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (London: Penguin, 2011), esp. pp. 128–138.

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not as the current standard bearers for gentility but in the artistic vanguard of those against it. The most common perception of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim was as an affront to, rather than an endorsement of, the norms of genteel society: behaving badly, getting drunk, dropping one girl for the next, hardly the sort of behaviour one would wish to encounter at a dinner party. On that last count at least, Alvarez and the norms of genteel society would have concurred. Introducing the account of the composition and compilation of The New Poetry in his autobiography, Alvarez recalls a party at which Amis proceeded to lure away the women one by one. Each time the couple would then rejoin the company with a look of furtive triumph. The morning after, everybody was thoroughly miserable and embarrassed and yet unable properly to own up to what had happened.2 The story would not figure as everyone’s epitome of gentility in action, but it does, in its manifestation of the emotional repression of a failure to confront or own truth in speech, evince gentility in reaction. To put the matter in the more general terms of The New Poetry: The upper-middle class, or Tory, ideal … may have given way to the predominantly lower-middle class, or Labour, ideal of the Movement and the Angries, but the concept of gentility still reigns supreme. And gentility is a belief that life is more or less orderly, people always more or less polite, their emotions and habits more or less decent and more or less controllable; that God, in short, is more or less good. 3

According to this neatly defined scheme, gentility is not simply repression by politeness, it is connected to the repressions of the culture at large: the emotional and social repression of ‘libido’ or ‘evil’, ‘two world wars’, ‘concentration camps’, ‘genocide’, ‘the threat of nuclear war’.4 A poet needs to confront ‘the fears and desires he does not wish to face’ and gentility serves to hide from this.5 While Kingsley Amis was avoiding facing up to the emotional truths and complications of his speedy serial adulteries, Alvarez was coming to terms with major problems in his life and marriage: ‘Nineteen sixty was,

2 Al Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right? (Richard Cohen Books: London. 1999), pp. 186–187. 3 The New Poetry, ed. A. Alvarez, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 25. 4 The New Poetry, p. 26. 5 The New Poetry, p. 28.



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I suppose, the worst year of my life. My marriage was on the rocks, I was chronically depressed, and I celebrated Christmas by attempting to take my own life.’6 At this time, Alvarez was immersing himself in books about the Nazi death camps; indeed, shortly before The New Poetry’s publication, he was to visit the camps twice, his sense of grief and identification no doubt intensified by the fact that he himself is Jewish.7 The simple explanation for ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ is that Alvarez was looking for poems that dealt maturely and properly with his personal crisis and the horrors he was reading about, and the majority of the poems he was put into his anthology were not doing this. Peter Porter reckoned that ‘one of the reasons Alvarez was influential was that he codified what a lot of people had been thinking anyway’.8 So far as practising poets were concerned, a sizeable proportion of these people would have been Porter’s friends and acquaintances in the Group. Ian Fletcher and John Pilling rightly observed that the poetry of Martin Bell was ‘beyond the gentility principle’ long before Alvarez coined the phrase.9 Bell’s poetry presents disgust as social dis-ease. For the narrator of ‘Manicure’, nails are for ‘Squeezing black-heads, scraping corns from toes,/ And picking one’s nose’, and arouse the violent consciousness that they should not be grown and used for ‘Razors’ or ‘flick-knives.’10 Peter Redgrove’s distaste is even more primal. ‘The Secretary’, for instance, tells us: ‘I catch his breath. His teeth stained tawny with tobacco/ It is rank and vicious, like menstrual blood.’11 As those lines indicate, Redgrove’s disgust could be part and parcel of misogynistic fantasy. ‘Being Beauteous’, for instance, observes as its recoils from a spider woman: ‘But the mind cannot properly cope with disgust, and mine shrank from the horror and thought only of the weaving:



6 Al Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right?, p. 188. 7 ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’, The Review, 1, April/May 1962, pp. 10–25: p. 15. 8 ‘The Poet in the ‘Sixties: Vices and Virtue: A Recorded Conversation with Peter Porter’, in British Poetry since 1960: A Critical Survey, ed. Michael Schmidt and Grevel Lindop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1972), pp. 202–212: p. 205. 9 The Group: An Exhibition of Poetry, The Library, University of Reading, 7 June–10 December 1974, p. 7. 10 Martin Bell, Collected Poems 1937–1966 (London, Melbourne and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 1967), p. 57. 11 Peter Redgrove, The Nature of Cold Weather and Other Poems (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 27.

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madame launched herself from the bare twigs, flinging her bottom from side to side and throwing out threads …’12 Group desire to go beyond gentility may antedate Alvarez’s essay, but the form it took was not, it would prove, greatly to Alvarez’s liking. Reviewing A Group Anthology in 1963, Alvarez complained how, if there is a Group preoccupation, it ‘is with, in one word, nastiness: torture, wounding, defecation, rotting teeth and the death of small animals. The tone of the book is dominated by a rather schoolboyish spitefulness.’13 As a generalisation, this might be a trifle unfair, but it fits some Group poems well enough: going beyond the gentility principle, for some, could be less a matter of facing up to uncomfortable truths than a straightforward wish to shock and to transgress. Redgrove’s poems are not only interested in the distasteful, they dare the reader to go beyond distaste. ‘Corpossant’ is a combination of both in its delight in sharing items such as ‘Shrouded cheese, ebony eggs, soft tomatoes’.14 The rotting comestibles are then seemingly connected (the poem’s narrative is very hard to follow) to a woman who is dead yet animate through processes of live decomposition: The rancid larder glimmering from her corpse Tall and wreathed like moulds or mists, Spoiling the market value of the house.15

With that last line, Redgrove hits that down to earth satirical note of anti-gentility more commonly heard in verse by Bell or Porter. Present in Redgrove’s poem as a whole there is a contrary spirit which dares some readers to be disgusted while triumphing in how the poet remains resolutely undisgusted himself. This principled failure of the gag reflex developed in Redgrove into what Roger Garfitt has characterised as a concern to express an organic unity of being in which no bodily function is shameful or meaningless, ‘and which a child urinating can be, in “A Testament”, ‘gentle, clear and strong as a sunbeam’.16 Life-affirming as such visions may be, neither such organic delight nor 12 Redgrove, The Nature of Cold Weather, p. 53. 13 A. Alvarez, ‘Whatever Happened to Modern Verse’, The Observer, 9 June 1963. 14 Redgrove, The Nature of Cold Weather, p. 8. 15 Redgrove, The Nature of Cold Weather, p. 8. 16 Roger Garfit, ‘The Group’, in British Poetry since 1960: A Critical Survey, ed. Michael Schmidt and Grevel Lindop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1972), pp. 13–69, p. 59.



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such disgust compare well with the surprising and genuine acceptance of the natural world to be found within Ted Hughes’s poems of the time, such as ‘The Bull Moses’, where: the warm weight of his breathing, The ammoniac reek of his litter, the hotly-tongued Mash of his cud, steamed against me.17

Redgrove is so keen to express beneficence that he turns urine to sunbeams or gold liquor, thereby rendering it pleasantly tasteless and odourless and, to be frank, not a lot like urine. Contrast that with how in ‘The Bull Moses’ the poet evinces no disgust, but doesn’t shy from what might be its cause: the reek of Moses’s litter, the food eaten in the presence of excreta. For all their sense of myth and religion, early Hughes poems such as ‘The Bull Moses’ do not present the natural world as a simple cipher for human tastes and distastes. Because of this, much of the poetry in Hughes’s first two books stands beyond the gentility principle in a way more absolute than that which would be advocated by Alvarez or essayed by the Group. Hughes’s poems simply ignore gentility entirely by ignoring the standards of the human world. In that way, the poet of The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal is notable as much for his capacity to escape the emergent spirit of the English poets of his generation as for his ability to exemplify it. Such a diagnosis would doubtless have pleased the reviewer Richard Kell, who took issue with an unpleasant stink emanating from Peter Porter’s first book Once Bitten Twice Bitten: ‘there is no intrinsic virtue in being onesided, as Porter is in his concentration on death and on physical and spiritual disease. An excessive interest in the smell on the landing is as immature as an infatuation with the smell in the rose garden’.18 Such interests are not necessarily indicators of poetic immaturity. T.S. Eliot’s poetry, for instance, summons both types of smell but not at the same time. The domestic stinks rise early; the roses bloom late. As Eliot became less alienated from the society around him, he felt less distaste for it, and accordingly expressed less distaste within his verse, one reason why the older Geoffrey Hill, a writer who has continued to write a poetry of distaste, should turn against the older Eliot. This older Eliot could pen, in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, a far more inclusive definition than some of the portrayals of civilisation and tradition that had gone before, which included: ‘Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar’. The English 17 Ted Hughes, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 74. 18 Richard Kell, ‘A Mingled Odour’, Guardian, 17 March 1961, p. 10.

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cuisine might seem bland or unappealing to some palates, but it matters in that it is part of the ‘whole way of life’ of a people.19 For Porter though, ‘Trapped on the landing, a sea/ of cabbage air’, ‘We retch involuntarily.’ We can no longer stomach what we once could.20 Some of the reasons behind English poetry’s move towards an endorsement of the responses of nausea and disgust are very English: they are in reaction against the oppressiveness of the class system and social repression, but telling outbreaks of disgust at this time were by no means confined either to England or to poetry. Of these, the case of Marc Rothko and his abandonment of the commission for the Seagram murals in 1958 may well be the most written about. Quite what Rothko understood the terms of his commission to be, quite what he first intended to produce and quite what caused him to rescind his commission have been a source of critical contention ever since. Nevertheless, the essential story is straightforward and telling. Rothko agreed to accept a large fee to paint murals in an expensive and exclusive dining room; at the same time, he is alleged to have declared: ‘I accepted this assignment with strictly malicious intentions … I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room’.21 While this hope would have come, in part, from a dislike of having art being made to serve as trendy décor for the fine dining of the rich, other factors were in operation. Indeed, Rothko’s strong feelings about the nature of the commission seem to have been connected as much to the morals and politics of the Second World War as those of class. According to Rothko’s biographer, James E.B. Breslin: this was a commission for the Bronfman empire, to produce paintings for a building designed by Mies van der Rohe, former director of the hated Bauhaus, to hang in a restaurant designed by Philip Johnson, rumoured in New York art circles to have been sympathetic to the Third Reich in the early 1930s.22

Rothko needed an art of an intensity and character that would be capable of disgusting those who should have been disgusted by their past lives and 19 T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p. 31. 20 Peter Porter, Collected Poems 1: 1961–1981 (Oxford and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 29. 21 Quoted in James E.B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 376. 22 Breslin, Mark Rothko, p. 393.



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complicities and present situation. In abandoning the project, it seems Rothko implicitly conceded that, whatever the intent, there was no guarantee that the effect of the completed work of abstract expressionism would resist the processes of commodification and decoration made substantial by the setting for which the murals had once been destined. Something similar happened in poetry. Edward Brunner observes of American mainstream domestic poetry of the 1950s: ‘Defying the political situation but refusing to bring politics into play, this is a poetry, that is, below its amiable surface, a discourse of alienation, disgust, and sorrow that insists on the primacy of the individual and the family over the state.’23 Writers in England did not live in fear of McCarthyite witch-hunts. The dissatisfactions of the Angry Young Men, with class division, outmoded conventions, stuffiness and the post-war establishment, were all well aired. Nevertheless, there is no doubt as to the alienation, disgust and sorrow present in some poetry written at the time. In Peter Porter’s ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’: A man eating his dressing in the hospital Is lied to by his stomach. It’s a final feast to him Of beef, blood pudding and black bread.24

Here, the urge to gag may be construed as a moral or political act, a bodily reaction to the disgusting truths of present society and of recent history. This and other indirect presentations of atrocity make parts of ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’ a powerful read, yet the poem’s deployment of disgust is not always so successful. Consider, for example: London is full of chickens on electric spits, Cooking in windows where the public pass. This, say the chickens, is their Auschwitz And all poultry eaters are psychopaths.

Just as the would-be clinching rhyme between ‘pass’ and ‘psychopaths’ is too partial to convince, Porter’s sense of tone is off here, and the limits of distaste and taste as moral markers apparent. ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’ is a flawed but decent attempt to tackle a subject that profoundly questions artistic attempts at its representation. 23 Edward Brunner, Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. xiv. 24 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 38.

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The same cannot be said for all Group depictions of Nazi atrocity. Affirming the justness of some forms of disgust, Alvarez commented in his review of George Macbeth’s first full-length collection: ‘What I find distasteful in all this is not the fantasies of murder and Nazism as such, but the positive relish with which he seems to indulge them’.25 Looking at the poems, one has to concede the point. ‘The Disciple’ is written in the persona of an SS officer who recalls: When I Raked the ovens or even touched a Spade I felt so sick. I vomited when I saw The pyramid of their bodies.26

I suppose one could argue that the poem grasps, however crudely, that disgust and vomiting may be a form of moral act. Still, once he or she has encountered, for instance, the masturbating Neo-Nazi in Macbeth’s ‘The Crucifix’, the reader is hard put to tell where sheer fascination finishes and where moral purpose might begin. Despite the highly dubious nature of some of the poetry it engendered, the Group’s interest in explorations of the ethics of the bystander, distaste, consumption and the Second World War was, at least potentially, worthwhile. The truth of this is best borne out by poems written in the same period, quite independently of the Group, by Geoffrey Hill. It is glimpsed in ‘Two Formal Elegies: For the Jews in Europe’, where the ‘pushing midlanders … relieve/ Their thickening bodies’.27 It takes starker form in the sequence ‘Of Commerce and Society’, also in 1959’s For the Unfallen, which, in its fourth part, declares that Auschwitz is ‘a fable/ Unbelievable in fatted marble’, lines whose foul and classical glut embodies tersely what is spelled out ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’.28 It can hardly be accidental that that same sequence of Hill has as its sixth part ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian’. Here an American may envisage history as a painless bargain, a painting ‘scraped clean of its old price’, from 25 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 38. 26 Penguin Modern Poets 6: Jack Clemo, Edward Lucie-Smith, George MacBeth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 105. 27 Hill, Collected Poems, p. 31. 28 Hill, Collected Poems, p. 49. This is as good a place as any to record that my thoughts on Geoffrey Hill and distaste have been informed by Stephen James, Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).



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a replete perspective that is ‘Well-stocked with foods,/ Enlarged and deepoiled’.29 Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom in art is ‘harmless to the nation’, and that nation is an American one. This is a Cold War poem, albeit one that is ostensibly a ‘Homage to Henry James’. And while it does not address the recent cultural and economic relations between America and Europe explicitly, it does depict a brash, rich and more or less innocent America and a guilty, sophisticated Europe, the Europe of the Marshall Plan as well as of America’s increasing dominance in the purchase (and also the production and promotion) of art. This paradigm may have seemed true to Hill and other poets in England at the outset of 1959. During that year, however, a book was published that showed a modern American culture neither innocent nor guiltless, a book which sent cultural, as opposed to simply economic, capital flowing from America to Europe rather than in the other direction. If there was a single collection which did not just further or crystallise mainstream English poetic sensibilities at this time but changed them, it was Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. Alvarez devoted his whole column in the Observer of 12 April 1959 to a warm appreciation of what he reckoned was, at last, something new in poetry.30 Other reviewers blew more coolly. Frank Kermode, writing in the Spectator, was particularly lukewarm. On 15 May, the Spectator ran an indignant letter from Edward Lucie-Smith and Peter Porter protesting: Mr. Kermode shows himself sadly blind to a new and exciting way of writing poetry. He says that ‘it seems to be slack tide with Mr. Lowell’ and talks of ‘superior doggerel’ when discussing a book which overflows with skill and creative vitality. Mr. Lowell has burst out of the prison of an impressive but highly artificial style and has achieved a kind of fresh, immediate language which appears too rarely in current verse. 31

Not only had Group poets spotted that Lowell’s breaking of formality and the artificial could be a cue for the development of looser and fresher expressions in their own work, they had also seen that their autobiographies, confessions and family histories could be subjects for verse. Lucie-Smith’s ‘The Lesson’ is about the loss of his father when Lucie-Smith was a bullied schoolchild and about weeping for the bitter knowledge: 29 Hill, Collected Poems, p. 51. 30 A. Alvarez, ‘Something New in Verse’, Observer, 12 April 1959. 31 Edward Lucie-Smith and Peter Porter, Letter to the Spectator, No. 7829, 15 May 1959, p. 702.

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That grief has its uses—that a father dead Could bind the bully’s fist a week or two; And then I cried for shame, then for relief. 32

There is confession relating to the attention that bereavement brings, the shameful and true. At the same time, the diction and versification owe more to the Movement than they do to Life Studies. The scope of confession, and the poem’s power to shock are limited, the event and the emotions are at a distance; ultimately, not too much is betrayed of Lucie-Smith or his father. Peter Porter’s ‘Ghosts’ likewise confesses to uncomfortable truths about the poet himself, here shown as a ‘priggish feminine child’, and the poem is harder still on the poet’s father, who was still living at the time. 33 ‘Ghosts’ was one of the poems included in Penguin Modern Poets 2. The original manuscript submitted by Porter makes clear his father’s failure to fight in the First World War alongside Porter’s uncles and his son’s inability to love him.34 Late in the publication process, Porter wrote to Richard Newnham at Penguin requesting the most wounding words be excised, a change of heart that reveals both the extent to which Porter had absorbed the possibilities of confessionalism and the emotional daring it could involve, and that at the same time he had discovered how the moral and social world beyond the poem placed limits upon how far they could be conscionably explored. 35 Group interest in a confessional aesthetic cannot be separated from an equally strong propensity to essay a form of writing with little appeal for A. Alvarez, who noted in A Group Anthology a ‘penchant for bombastic monologues, in the manner of a kind of latter-day sour-breathed Browning’. 36 The Group poets, at the very moment they were exploring writing of the intimate self, fired by the example of Life Studies, were also engaged with what might seem its direct opposite, a poetry of the created, fictive self with Victorian antecedents. Introducing A Group Anthology in 1963, Edward Lucie-Smith noted this and offered an explanation: Very frank autobiographical poems—the poetry of direct experience—have been frequent. So too, by contrast, have dramatic monologues: poems where 32 Penguin Modern Poets 6, p. 52. 33 Porter, Collected Poems 1, pp. 50–53. 34 Typescript of poems in Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collections, File Dm1107/D62. 35 Peter Porter, letter to Richard Newnham, 11 January 1962, Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collections, File Dm1107/D62. 36 Alvarez, ‘Whatever Happened to Modern Verse’.



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the poet puts forward a persona quite different from his own. Perhaps the fact that we are used to reading our work aloud to an audience forms the link between these two kinds of speech. 37

To re-put the point, the poetry of Group members in both the frank autobiographical poem and the dramatic monologue encouraged an orality of the performed self. The two modes may be characterised less as alternative and opposing courses but as two routes out of Robert Lowell, the precedent for the dramatic monologues coming from not just from Lowell’s work preceding Life Studies but also from Life Studies itself. It is not at all clear that ‘Waking in the Blue’ or ‘Skunk Hour’ were any more significant to the Group that the account Marie de Medici gives of herself in ‘The Banker’s Daughter’. Indeed, there is in their practice a denial of the logic of progression from dramatic monologue to self-examination and revelation. The continuing popularity of both and, in fact, the defining popularity of the former implicitly argued against the narrative of progression and breakthrough propounded by Alvarez. Time has, in most cases, justified Alvarez’s scepticism about the Group’s use of the Browning monologue, but it did produce some good poetry, and good poetry that faced up to some of the current concerns preying on the mind of the writer of ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. Peter Porter’s ‘Soliloquy at Potsdam’, probably written in 1960–61, is an impersonation of Frederick the Great. The poem shows Porter’s expansive blank verse, his pushing of the pentameter towards the hexameter, his stress-loading of the caesura, his rhetorical grand style, all to impressive effect.38 The Potsdam of Frederick the Great is, by implication, also the Potsdam of the Potsdam Conference, and Porter’s inquiry into the co-existence of intellectual and artistic refinement with militarism and tyranny is of the same moment as Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’. Not an allegory of the Nazis per se, ‘Soliloquy at Potsdam’ nevertheless addresses moral conundrums posed by fascism. More widely, it evinces the familiar interest in power, discipline and the will shown by Porter’s generation around this time. Alvarez in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ would advocate the exploration 37 Edward Lucie-Smith, ‘Foreword’ to A Group Anthology, ed. Edward LucieSmith and Philip Hobsbaum (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press 1963), pp. v–ix: p. v. 38 A discussion of this poem that followed my paper and presentation on the Group at Reading University proved helpful in thinking about this poem. I am unable to recall the names of the individual audience members who participated other than that of Peter Robinson. Nevertheless, all have my thanks.

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of how ‘the forceable recognition of a mass evil outside us has developed precisely parallel with psychoanalysis; that is with our recognition of the ways in which the same forces are at work within us.’39 While these words have a psychoanalytical emphasis not conspicuous in ‘Soliloquy at Potsdam’ or ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’, Hill and Porter are likewise intrigued by the connection between individual psychology and mass atrocity, it is just that that individual does not happen to be the poet himself, nor an individual to be read psychoanalytically. The concluding question of Porter’s soliloquy is: ‘Who would be loved/ If he could be feared and hated, yet still/ Enjoy his lust, eat well and play the flute?’40 Once more, a young poet of the post-war welfare state gifts the best lines to the enemies of liberal democracy, but in this case he, like Hill, presents them in a way that allows the reader to scrutinise their attractions and arguments. R. Clifton Spargo has claimed that it was the Eichmann trial that provided writers with the most significant moment in reassessing society and the artist’s relation to the Holocaust: ‘Over the course of the decade of the 1960s, Eichmann became an occasion for recollecting the Holocaust and also for figuring the average person’s complicity with or obedience to unjust political structures’; ‘Eichmann’s imaginative distance from his own crimes, whether honest or merely self-justifying, connoted for much of the non-European world a distance from the events of the Nazi genocide that had informed their own original reception of such horrible news.’41 But the examples of Geoffrey Hill and Peter Porter make it evident that lessons that would be drawn from the trial were presented in poems dating from before the trial even began. Eichmann, though his capture was announced on 23 May 1960, did not go on trial until April 1961. The poems in For the Unfallen were all written by 1959. ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’, whose direct prompt was Alain Resnais’s 1955 film Nuit et Bruillard, was published in Porter’s Once Bitten, Twice Bitten on 24 February 1961, and so was certainly not written as a result of the trial itself.42 Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’ is a poem that would likewise seem a classic reaction to Eichmann, 39 The New Poetry, p. 27. 40 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 49. 41 R. Clifton Spargo, ‘1961, Jerusalem: Eichmann and the Aesthetic of Complicity’, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English, ed. Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 161–172: p. 162–3, 161. 42 Resnais’s influence was disclosed in an interview with the author on 10 August 2008. For the date of publication, see John R. Kaiser, Peter Porter: A Bibliography 1954–1986 (London and New York, Mansell, 1990).



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with its beginning: ‘I love my work and my children. God/ Is distant, difficult.’43 But if it is, it is a reaction to pre-trial publicity and not the trial itself. Indeed, it can even be read as part of that publicity. ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’ being published in the New Statesman, primarily a news magazine, on 17 February 1961 would have had the effect of making its readers suspect their own complicity with the speaker, and perhaps feel themselves in a comparable situation.44 Still, compared to comment to come, there is difference as well as prescience in such poems. Later 1960s reaction to the Eichmann trial tended to be mediated by Hannah Arendt and her oft-cited formulation ‘the banality of evil’. Yet, in the poems of the first couple of years of the 1960s, even in ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’, which admittedly comes closer, the interest of poets is primarily not in the banality of evil but in its horror, the archetypal figure not the Nazi as bureaucrat but the Nazi as cultured intellectual; complicity with atrocity and in particular the complicity of art, or culpable ignorance being the concerns brought to the forefront of their depiction.

43 Hill, Collected Poems, p. 61. 44 Geoffrey Hill, ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’, New Statesman, Vol. 61, No. 1562, 17 February 1961, p. 264.

C hapter Five

On Being Serious

T

he New Poetry’s most remembered phrase is the ‘new seriousness’, a phrase which may sound urgent and understandable at first reading, but which is situated within a complex web of debts and implications. ‘Seriousness’ has both commonplace currency and a distinguished heritage in the critical tradition, in part because the word has served to translate into English a term from one of the earliest and most important works in that tradition. Matthew Arnold writes in ‘The Study of Poetry’: Only one thing we may add to the substance and matter of poetry, guiding ourselves by Aristotle’s profound observation that the superiority of poetry over history consists in its possessing a higher truth and a higher seriousness (φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπουδαιότερον). Let us add, therefore, to what we have said, this: that the substance and matter of the best poetry acquire their special character from possessing, in an eminent degree, truth and seriousness. We may add yet further, what is in itself evident, that to the style and manner of the best poetry their special character, their accent, is given by their diction, and, even yet more, by their movement.1

Translating Aristotle into English and into an Arnoldian Victorian, Arnold makes seriousness connect to ‘truth’, and this in turn to an appropriate diction. ‘Seriousness’ becomes a loaded term which inclines towards certain presuppositions of what does and does not merit the highest praise; a lack



1 Matthew Arnold, ‘The Study of Poetry’, in The Essential Matthew Arnold, ed. and introductory notes by Lionel Trilling (Chatto and Windus: London, 1969), pp. 299–331: pp. 310–311.

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of grave dignity, too much of a sense of humour perhaps, may debar even Chaucer from poetry’s top rank: ‘The substance of Chaucer’s poetry, his view of things and his criticism of life, has largeness, freedom, shrewdness, benignity; but it has not this high seriousness, which Aristotle assigns as one of the grand virtues of poetry.’2 The transition from σπουδαιότερον to ‘seriousness’ involves the employment of a word which, as well as meaning ‘weighty, important’, will, in common usage and OED definition, signify ‘expressing or arising from earnest purpose’, ‘of grave or solemn disposition or character’, ‘not light or superficial’ and that which is routinely opposed to the joking or the humorous. These meanings are not so easy to untangle: often one meaning will imply others, and the user of the word, even if primarily employing one sense, will be glad of or hampered by other connotations. So seriousness will be particularly useful as a term of approbation for those who value the sincerity and earnestness of authors, and who do not have much time for literature’s lighter sides. This would explain why it turns up with such regularity in the pages of F.R. Leavis and his followers. Such heavy reliance upon seriousness has been by no means universal among critics. To give a telling instance, the term does not crop up with anything like such regularity, and is seldom given such weight, in the criticism of T.S. Eliot. There is nevertheless a notable exception to this rule, and that is Eliot’s essay on Andrew Marvell, where ‘serious’ has to do strenuous work in order to secure Marvell’s credentials as a major poet. For Eliot here, the point is not that ‘serious’ should be coterminous with sincere: as an advocate of poetic impersonality, this does not interest Eliot. Nor is the point to echo Arnold, with whom Eliot was more at odds than in sympathy. Rather, it is whether Marvell’s wit, play, lightness of tone should or should not be considered trifling, whether his poetry should be reckoned a poetry of the fancy or of the imagination and what this says about the standing of his work. Of ‘To His Coy Mistress’ Eliot writes, ‘this fancy is not indulged … for its own sake. It is structural decoration of a serious idea’; ‘this alliance of levity and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified) is a characteristic of the sort of wit we are trying to identify.’3 Later in the essay, William Morris’s ‘The Nymph’s Song to Hylas’ is compared unfavourably to Marvell’s ‘Nymph and the Fawn’: ‘the former, though it appears to be more serious, is found to be the slighter’, the latter ‘appearing the more slight is the more serious.’4

2 Arnold, ‘The Study of Poetry’, p. 317. 3 T.S. Eliot, ‘Andrew Marvell’, in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. and int. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 161–171: p. 164. 4 Eliot, ‘Andrew Marvell’, p. 167.



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Again, the poet of the nineteenth century, with his construction of a dream world, is beside Marvell ‘a trivial and less serious figure.’5 Marvell’s wit, like French wit and unlike Dryden’s, is not ‘pure fun’.6 Marvell’s precise taste finds ‘the proper degree of seriousness for every subject he treats.’ 7 The School of Donne finds A. Alvarez out of accord with Eliot’s essay. Alvarez looks again at a passage from Upon Appleton House where: … the Salmon-Fishers moist Their Leathern Boats begin to hoist: And, like the Antipodes in Shoes, Have shod their Heads in their Canoos.8

Where Eliot sees an unsuccessful conceit, Alvarez detects ‘not so much a conceit as a joke’, and one which Marvell prepares for carefully.9 Furthermore, Alvarez maintains that: ‘Marvell’s concept of wit was flexible enough to include the kind of deliberate playfulness that is found now only in light verse, and, if Eliot’s Old Possum poems are typical, not often in that.’10 This is a rare instance of Alvarez finding Marvell successful where Eliot does not, but the achievement celebrated is not an achievement to outstrip John Donne; it is the achievement of Edward Lear. Arnold, Leavis, Eliot on Marvell, Ezra Pound in his essay ‘The Serious Artist’: the old seriousness had plenty of distinguished representatives. But from where does the new seriousness arise? Come the mid-twentieth century, it was not just Leavisites who were proclaiming their own seriousness, nor only Alvarez who could put ‘seriousness’ into a poetic manifesto. Charles Olson writes in his 1950 call for ‘Projective Verse’: ‘a man’s problem, the moment he takes up speech in its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature.’11 Nor was debate on seriousness confined to critical prose. One poem referred to in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ powerfully defines and

5 Eliot, ‘Andrew Marvell’, p. 168. 6 Eliot, ‘Andrew Marvell’, p. 169. 7 Eliot, ‘Andrew Marvell’, p. 170. 8 Quoted in A. Alvarez, The School of Donne (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), p. 110. 9 Alvarez, The School of Donne, p. 110. 10 Alvarez, The School of Donne, p. 111. 11 Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’, in Modern Poets on Modern Poetry, ed. James Scully (London and Glasgow: Collins Fontana, 1966), pp, 270–282: p. 281.

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redefines seriousness as few other uses have, and that is Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’. At its outset, ‘Church Going’ is a poem where the speaker, church and language are pointedly not serious: I peruse a few Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce ‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant. The echoes snigger briefly.12

The hectoring bible, ‘the verses’, have a language Larkin’s own can only incorporate with mock solemnity and a snigger, ‘here endeth’ being particularly at odds with Larkin’s general tone at this point in the poem. But serious the poem does indeed become. Indeed, the last stanza of ‘Church Going’ uses the word ‘serious’ no less than three times, two as it begins: ‘A serious house on serious earth it is,/ In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,/ Are recognised, and robed as destinies’.13 Church seriousness is thereby tacitly associated with garb and ritual. The lines also refer back to the previous stanza, where Larkin observes how the church ‘held unsplit … marriage, and birth,/ And death.’ Alongside this trio there is a natural progression in time, but also in seriousness, and it is the last of the three that most heavily underwrites it: ‘gravitating to this ground’, ‘If only that so many dead lie round.’14 What we have then is a tacit movement from air to altar, lectern and congregation/readership and into soil. The movement drops away from religion and airy sentiments to the final surety of the serious house, serious earth, which is serious because … it is within a graveyard. To become serious may be to bear witness to the seriousness of life, but the ultimate seriousness, the cause of being grave, is the grave itself. In this moment of becoming serious, history, and knowledge of the burden of history too, shrugged off earlier in the poem, is returned to and picked up. The language of the poem changes to reflect this. When we come to the line ‘And that much never can be obsolete’, the word order is jostled to give us ‘never can’, rather than ‘can never’.15 This slight awkwardness, this audible 12 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. and intr. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber and Faber and the Marvell Press, 1988), p. 97. 13 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 98. 14 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 98. 15 A contrary interpretation, in line with the views of Geoffrey Hill, is given by Peter McDonald in his book Serious Poetry: ‘metrical regularity trammels the speaking voice into a cadence that rings false, protesting too much. The hollow sound made by this line gives the game away, as far as the poem’s



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bending of spoken language to the form of the pentameter, is in keeping with the scheme of tone and diction reached out to at the poem’s end. This is the ‘Here endeth’ part parodied before. The end of a poem that for the most part has kept to a word order that is—and was much more so by the standards of the early ’50s—extremely close to that of prose, has had a change of register signalled by an inversion: ‘A serious house on serious earth it is’. For all the affirmations that lead up to it, ‘that much’ may not in the end amount to that much. Larkin’s tone is sliding back into the tentative as the poem enacts an assertion by deletion and redefinition; it occurs within a movement through which churchgoing and its language is reassessed in light of an assertion of atheism. ‘That much’ does not look backward to the affirmations of the stanza’s first three lines so much as look forward to the last, where it modulates to the concession of ‘If only that’. Not the language of prior conclusion, it is a language of thinking and reassessment, a weighing of just what that much might be, a trying to find a new language of seriousness, the final line being a final qualification. And what that line qualifies is also that earlier assertion of the value of the church being that it ‘held unsplit/ So long and equably what since is found/ Only in separation— marriage, and birth,/ And death, and thoughts of those’.16 J.L. Austin’s William James Lectures were delivered in 1955, the year which also happened to see the publication of The Less Deceived. How to Do Things with Words, the book Austin’s lectures became, was published in 1962, the year of The New Poetry. The notion that Larkin gave Austin much study is not especially likely—though it is possible that Larkin picked up on some of Austin’s ideas through Oxford friends. Nevertheless, the parallels between Austin’s thought and Larkin’s poetry are worth consideration. Christening and marriage are key examples in J.L Austin’s theory of performatives.17 The emphasis on the form over the spirit of ritual and on ritual words in ‘Church Going’ and in How to Do Things With Words belong to a similar intellectual moment, a moment at once rational and post-Christian and yet careful to preserve Christianity’s trappings, structure and function. Austin is careful to disclaim the view that ‘we are apt relation to form is concerned: at points of stress within the argument, the regular tramp of metrical progress becomes too audible, and form is not the poem’s rationale but the mode of enforcement for its thought.’ Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 7. 16 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 98. 17 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edition, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; reprint 2009). For example, on baptism p. 35; on marriage pp. 16–17.

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to have a feeling that their being serious consists in their being uttered as (merely) the outward and visible sign, for convenience or other record or other information, of an inward and spiritual act’.18 At the same time, Austin has also stated that ‘Surely the words must be spoken “seriously” so as to be taken “seriously”’ is ‘an important commonplace’—‘I must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem’.19 Larkin, who is writing a poem, one which moves towards seriousness, towards a language more like the speech act, ultimately does not let the seriousness attained rely on the circular logic of the seriously performed therefore being serious. Instead, there is that last hesitancy. Someone with a hunger to grow serious could grow wise on this ground. Yes, by implication, because ceremonies, particularly those of marriage, birth and death, have been seriously performed, but this imagined future person could also grow wise in this place, rituals and observances all forgotten, ‘If only that so many dead lie round’; the ultimate guarantor of seriousness being awareness of common not individual mortality.20 That said, what is hungered for and moved towards is an interior state of seriousness, neither building nor forms being sufficient; it is a condition of interiority and, by implication, solitude. Larkin is a poet who observes traditional form in his poems and in their subjects, but who at times explores the tension between the outward sign and the inward act. While ‘Church Going’ finds no ultimate conflict between seriousness of disposition and the seriousness of passing time and death, elsewhere Larkin couples the seriousness of the passing of time and of death with awareness of the possibility of a lack seriousness to an originary disposition or intention; the lasting monument, for a poet who has inherited Hardy’s interest in the undoings of time, may continue to manifest a meaning to the ‘hardly meant’.21 Such is the case with ‘An Arundel Tomb’, about which Christopher Ricks reflects: ‘We will soon be as far from any living continuity with the buried dead as we are from the funeral sculpture which Philip Larkin ponders’, a thought which appears to counteract some of the force of the argument at the end of ‘Church Going’.22 The subject of Ricks’s essay is the use poets make of the word ‘lies’, particularly their punning on it. ‘An Arundel Tomb’ is excellently suited to the theme, being a poem about one sort of lying that cannot stop contemplating 18 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 9. 19 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 9. 20 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 98. 21 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 111. 22 Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 384.



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another.23 The use of the word here draws attention to the relationship between formal monument and the passage of time in a way that brings to mind two unstated analogies: the form of marriage, which may endure beyond the love that brought it into being, and the enduring form of the poem itself. We are alerted to the gap between meaning and manifestation, intention and sign, and how ‘Time has transfigured them into/ Untruth.’24 The reader may wonder, even as the poem does not, whether the poem’s quasi-elegiac marmorealism is or is not like the tomb and whether the poem has the same relationship to truth or to untruth as its subject. ‘An Arundel Tomb’ raises such questions, but is carefully tentative and ambiguous about providing them any answers. Nevertheless, there are in The Whitsun Weddings flutters of disquiet. ‘Talking in Bed’, a living and contemporary companion poem to ‘An Arundel Tomb’, notes ‘Lying together there goes back so far,/ An emblem of two people being honest’, yet finds time passing outside, the ‘wind’s sense of unrest’ implying a restless bed.25 Where ‘An Arundel Tomb’ may be ambiguous in its contemplation of love’s enduring form going on beyond intention, ‘Talking in Bed’ concentrates upon the difficulty of finding a form of ‘Words at once true and kind,/ Or not untrue and not unkind.’26 Despite the characteristically Larkinesque un-saying of its expression, the phrase, when pulled out from its context, is surprisingly akin to the niceties of linguistic philosophy, having a relationship to truth which is not the wishful ‘almost true’ but one tightly hedged by preconditions. Truth and sincerity and form here have great difficulty in matching up, a difficulty which illustrates, not the strain towards the ideal formulation of marriage, but the strains undergone by a generation who could take their freedoms in the bedroom while being scarcely less troubled by acceptable forms of word and ceremony than were their parents. Discoverable in ‘Talking in Bed’ then, is some of what is signified by that horrid embarrassment and evasion following Kingsley Amis’s sexual shenanigans with the female guests at the house party, some of what makes such behaviour qualify as a prime act of malignant gentility: an obeisance to form, a wish not to cause a fuss prevents an expression of words or behaviour in accordance with true feeling. It is telling that, while others may have been having affairs and wretched marriages, Alvarez was about the first British poet of his approximate generation actually to divorce. It is telling too that the new poems he should most 23 Ricks, The Force of Poetry, pp. 384–385. 24 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 111. 25 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 129. 26 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 129.

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value, the last few poems in Life Studies, ‘Man and Wife’, ‘To Speak of the Woe That is Marriage’ and, more obliquely, ‘Skunk Hour’, should be poems of marital unhappiness, rankling in and tearing through their traditional forms.27 In life and art, Alvarez had given up on one sort of seriousness. Writing of Thom Gunn in 1994, Alvarez recalled the spell of F.R. Leavis upon his peers and upon himself: ‘We lusted after responsibility, and in the ’50s responsibility meant marriage—the wife, the kids, the little home and the dog. Marriage (even a quarrelsome, unhappy marriage like that of Lawrence and Frieda) was the ultimate vindication of literary seriousness.’28 If Leavisite morality brought about such a state of seriousness, Alvarez’s failed marriage and suicide attempt brought it to an end; as Alvarez would put it in The Savage God: ‘Those who survive suicide, like those who make a new marriage, survive into a changed life, with different standards and motives and satisfactions.’29 To make a broad generalisation, for the poets of this study, and for many in the wider society of the 1960s, the increased emphasis on one sort of seriousness, that of personal sincerity, became important at a time when seriousness as sanctioned by custom, tradition, social norm, oath and obligation became less binding. Marriage may have been an exemplary form of an old seriousness, but it was being newly questioned in the lives of the poets. Geoffrey Hill, Peter Redgrove, David Wevill, A. Alvarez and George MacBeth all divorced. The marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath contained unhappiness, infidelity and the contemplation of divorce, and ended with Plath’s suicide; Peter Porter’s first marriage ended with his wife taking her own life. In fact, the closest thing to an enduring first marriage amongst the poets looked at in this book is that between Thom Gunn and his life partner Mike Kitay. With seriousness the badge of poetic honour, the seriousness of the wedding ceremony was ready to receive some pointed questioning. In introducing his proposal for ‘a new seriousness’, Alvarez affords us a rare glimpse of a critic defining what seriousness might actually mean. In a critical world where seriousness was all, this gave his advocacy a distinct attractiveness. Alvarez states in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’: ‘I would define this seriousness simply as the poet’s ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience with his full intelligence; not to take 27 Robert Lowell, Life Studies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1959), pp. 87–90. 28 Al Alvarez, ‘Thom Gunn’, in Risky Business (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), pp. 232–240: p. 235. 29 A. Alvarez, The Savage God (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 87.



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the easy exits of either conventional response or choking incoherence.’30 ‘Conventional response’ here may be taken to mean the response of the Movement poets sans Gunn; ‘choking incoherence’ that of the followers of Dylan Thomas. The essay’s examples of poets who unquestionably do have such a seriousness would appear to be T.S. Eliot and, closer to Alvarez’s own time, Robert Lowell. In praising them, Alvarez also stresses how, since Freud, the ‘dichotomy between emotion and intelligence has become totally meaningless’.31 Seriousness for Alvarez is then very like what seriousness was for Harold Rosenberg when he described abstract expressionism in The Tradition of the New.32 This book, Rosenberg’s writing in the 1950s and writing like it, were part of the intellectual baggage Alvarez had carried with him from the United States. Rosenberg’s contemplation of ‘This new painting’ or ‘the new American painting’, easily morphs into the phrases Alvarez uses to assess ‘The New Poetry’, 33 as when Rosenberg declares that: ‘the test of any of the new paintings is its seriousness—and the test of its seriousness is the degree to which the act on the canvas is an extension of the artist’s total effort to make over his experience.’34 Alvarez, a keen follower of the visual art of the time, was combining the language of literary criticism with the language of the art world, specifically the language used to explain and justify abstract expressionism. To read The Tradition of the New on abstract expressionism is thus to read some of Alvarez’s later poetry criticism in rough. Here the term ‘extremist’ art is employed, in time Alvarez’s chosen term for poets such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and John Berryman.35 Rosenberg says of abstract expressionism that: A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a ‘moment’ in the adulterated mixture of his life … The actpainting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life. 36

30 The New Poetry, ed. A. Alvarez, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 28. 31 The New Poetry, p. 28. 32 Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959). 33 Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, pp. 24, 26. 34 Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, p. 33. 35 Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, p. 40, for example. 36 Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, pp. 26–27.

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It was easy enough for admirers of Lowell and Berryman, and of Life Studies in particular, to find the act, the moment and the autobiography, the breaking down of the distinction between life and art now characteristic of painting to be there also in their poetry and to see this as a new way of making it new, different from the more formalistic advances of some of the prior moderns. Alvarez redefines the ‘serious’, making what had been a somewhat vague term of literary approval both more precise and more in accord with his taste, and in so doing places great stress on sincerity to experience, particularly extreme experience. When, at the close of ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, Alvarez notes F.R. Leavis’s belief that ‘D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot represent the two warring and unreconcilable poles of modern literature,’ Alvarez proposes (if not in such terms) that the best contemporary poets are capable of a Hegelian synthesis within ‘the seriousness of what I have called the new depth poetry, the openness to experience, the psychological insight and integrity of D.H. Lawrence would, ideally, combine with the technical skill and formal intelligence of T.S. Eliot.’37 Alvarez’s 1958 essay ‘The Fate of the Platypus’ is recognisably a prelude to, even a play through for, ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ and the ideas it propounded, and helps illumine their background and their nature. According to ‘The Fate of the Platypus’, it is ‘psychological realism’ that ‘made the work of the great twentieth-century poets seem fresher and more serious’.38 ‘By serious’, here, Alvarez ‘mean[s] simply that the reader finds himself caught up at the deepest level, continually faced with his most obscurely felt motives’; ‘[t]his is the kind of seriousness … lacking in the poetry of the 1950s.’39 Poetry, an art ‘which depends wholly upon concentration’, upon being a ‘wholly individual statement of “the pain and trouble of living”’, needs to be able to withstand the pressure of mass culture and lower attention spans, to confront the situation diagnosed by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition and Eric Kahler in The Tower and the Abyss, that ‘the real enemy of the new, vast, highly organised societies … is the individual’.40 The attractiveness of such an argument is that it states a simple truth; the objection, that it is extremely simplistic and is so even when the generalisations about mass culture are set to one side. It is possible to concur that psychological realism is a vital feature of the excellence of modernist 37 The New Poetry, pp. 31–32. 38 A. Alvarez, ‘The Fate of the Platypus’, in Beyond All This Fiddle, Essays 1955–67 (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1968), pp. 59–66: p. 65. 39 Alvarez, ‘The Fate of the Platypus’, p. 65. 40 Alvarez, ‘The Fate of the Platypus’, p. 61.



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and other poetry without making that feature anything like their be all and end all. Declaring this the essence of seriousness and modernism and then concentrating upon it makes all the many other virtues of Alvarez’s cited writers, Yeats, Lawrence and Eliot, become by the way. In ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, psychological realism, intelligence and technical expertise are not to be prised apart, the first being indivisible from the other requisite achievements of a new seriousness. With this formulation, Alvarez’s argument may be taken to task for a misplacing of emphasis, but not for ignoring other crucial factors. Indeed, take account of that re-emphasising, and what is being advocated is not so very different from Eliot’s account of a unified sensibility. Alvarez’s desire for the writer to be ‘caught up at the deepest level, continually faced with his most obscurely felt motives’, stated in ‘The Fate of the Platypus’, would explain particular examples of his taste, why he had already responded so positively to Thom Gunn’s Fighting Terms and why he was to be less enthusiastic about Gunn’s subsequent poetic output. Fighting Terms has poems which seem to touch on deep but obscure psychological perturbation. Later poems find compulsions and emotions better known and martialled by consciousness. Leave aside the fact that Gunn has grown older, happier and more sure of himself, and this is how the technical and thematic control learned from Yvor Winters and Philip Larkin has changed Gunn’s work in ways which are not wholly an improvement. But while such characterisation of Gunn’s progress is persuasive, with Gunn developing in quite the opposite way from that which Alvarez desired, it is a characterisation which did not bode well for a critic endeavouring to point and plot the future course for poetry. This is the explicatory background to Alvarez’s contention in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ that, despite the poem’s failings, despite its lack of control when compared to Philip Larkin’s ‘At Grass’, Ted Hughes’s ‘A Dream of Horses’ is ‘unquestionably about something; it is a serious attempt to re-create and so clarify, unfalsified and in the strongest imaginative terms possible, a powerful complex of emotions and sensations.’41 The statement that Hughes’s poem is about something and Larkin’s is not, is, on the face of it, and in the way the world tends to employ such terms, patently untrue. Larkin’s poem is about all sorts of things, and things which could be taken to be serious: alongside real horses, race meetings and pastures, it touches on themes of ageing and death, naming and freedom, work and retirement, and that is to omit covert or implicit themes such as those I have already

41 The New Poetry, p. 31.

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discussed. In these terms, Hughes’s poem is, in comparison, not about that much at all. But then Alvarez has changed the terms. Compare the language used here in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ with ‘The Fate of the Platypus’. In the first, praise is reserved for the ‘deepest’ and ‘obscurely felt’; in the second, the talk is of how to clarify emotions. Both may drive at something similar. However, the governing metaphor is entirely opposite. True, critics use words like ‘clarify’ with such regularity that their metaphorical burden can go unnoticed—the usual business of criticism would be considerably hampered if they could not—yet, in this case, the choice of the word appears to be significant. Clarity and lack of falsification well describe the baring of psychology in those poems Alvarez admires from Life Studies and what is prized by the general tenor of his argument. Employed to regard the English poetry of the time and the dark world of Hughes’s dream, the terms are much less well suited. What is being made clear here? What is not being falsified? A dream of horses? If so, how can a critic—not privy to Hughes’s sleeping visions—possibly tell? Because its poetic representation has the indicators of sincerity? Because it reads like work by another writer known for being sincere, D.H. Lawrence? But are those not grounds for suggesting its inauthenticity? While also vulnerable to some objections, obscurely felt and deep seems at least a more plausible description of what is conjured with in Hughes’s poem. This in turn highlights a difference between the American poet and the English. There may be a smattering of Jung somewhere behind ‘A Dream of Horses’, but only as much as serves Hughes’s neo-apocalyptic, Lawrentian turn. Like Thom Gunn in Fighting Terms, Ted Hughes brings in the unconscious, deep, obscurely felt motives yet does not subject them to clear, conscious analysis. Indeed, analysis is exactly what is absent. The two British poets may be interested in the psyche at the level of semi-conscious exploration, but they are not penning the poetry of psychoanalysis.

C hapter S i x

Anthology-Making

T

he coming of the Movement may have been announced in the pages of the Spectator, but it was anthologies, above all Robert Conquest’s 1956 Macmillan anthology New Lines, that consolidated the arguments and personnel of the Movement in the public mind.1 This was achieved through Conquest’s clear taste and agenda, New Lines’ limited personnel of just nine poets and the generous selections from the poets’ work it contained. The formula may be contrasted to that of another anthology of the same year, G.S. Fraser’s Poetry Now, from Faber and Faber, in which no less than 74 poets are represented. The contents list reveals Fraser to be acquainted with the work of many poets from all sides of the poetry world, and the introduction reveals him to be well informed on recent poetic trends.2 Along with poems from Fraser’s own generation, including the dead war poets Keith Douglas and Sidney Keys, Poetry Now has poems by the New Lines Poets (Larkin is represented by ‘At Grass’ and ‘Lines on a Young Ladies Photograph Album’) as well as by George MacBeth and A. Alvarez in his Movement phase; it contains the popularly minded and worldly Christopher Logue and the religious and austere R.S. Thomas; it includes ‘Genesis’ by Geoffrey Hill. There are also poems by a considerable number of names that are now more or less forgotten. But an attempt to please everyone with many names from many camps may serve no poet very well and neither please nor serve the wider public. As Stephen Spender pointed out in the Listener: ‘One poem per poet representation may sound democratically just, but it gives readers



1 D.J. Enright’s Poets of the 1950s: An Anthology of New English Verse (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1955) may have had a similar remit, but it reached far fewer people. 2 G.S. Fraser, ed. and intr., Poetry Now (London: Faber and Faber, 1956).

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little idea of the value of most of the poets, and does not add up to a total impression either’; Fraser’s ‘lack of severer discrimination tends to reduce complexity to confusion.’3 The effective response to New Lines came not from Faber and Faber or Macmillan, but from Penguin. This was, in itself, a significant development. Commercial poetry publishing in the 1950s was primarily based on the small print run mid-priced hardback aimed at poetry aficionados and the then well-funded libraries. Penguin, the biggest British publisher at that time, had become successful through specialising in high-volume, lowmargin, cheap paperback reprints of reliable quality. During the 1950s, this business model confined Penguin’s publishing of contemporary poetry to the occasional selection from a big, established name such as T.S. Eliot or W.H. Auden and to the anthology, most pertinently, Contemporary Verse, edited by Kenneth Allott. In the late summer or autumn of 1959, Penguin’s young poetry editor Richard Newnham was drawing up a scheme of new poetry anthologies. He had three in mind: 1. A new edition of Kenneth Allott’s Contemporary Verse. 2. Poetry since the War, a book suggested by [C.B.] Cox and [A.E.] Dyson of the Critical Quarterly. 3. An Anthology of Twentieth Century Lyrics with an emphasis on the Georgian style and its inheritors to be edited by one John Smith.4 3 Stephen Spender, ‘Low Pressure Gauge’, review of Poetry Now, Listener, 11 October 1956, p. 573. 4 Editorial document on ‘Anthology Schemes’, Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collections, File DM1107/D63. The mooted book on the Georgian style appears to have had C. Day Lewis in mind rather than anyone from the Movement. A senior hand suggests a ‘tactful letter’ to Smith. The Cox-Dyson proposal bandies a large number of names, including some from a slightly earlier generation, such as William Plomer, Burns Singer and Alan Ross, and some now more or less forgotten, such as J. Turner and Peter M. Griffith, and Movement poets excluded by Alvarez such as Elizabeth Jennings. The editors wished to concentrate on a top ten of: ‘Ted Hughes, [Philip] Larkin, R.S. Thomas, [Christopher] Logue, [Thom] Gunn, [Robin] Skelton, [Roy] Fuller, [D.J.] Enright, [Francis] Levinson, [Terence] Tiller’. The proposed introduction ‘would consider: how far Georgians have reappeared, why no more Waste Lands and Four Quartets, why Hungary not like Spain in the 30s, what are “neo Augustans”, new Romantics, new symbolists.’ At Critical Quarterly, Cox and Dyson went on to produce mini-anthologies which would have reached a circulation of above 5,000, a figure including over half the grammar

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Contemporary Verse had first appeared in 1950. The anthology covered the poetry of the century so far, from Yeats to the young poets of the 1940s. Kenneth Allott had been co-editor of Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse between 1938 and 1939, and Allott’s own poems such as ‘Lament for a Cricket Eleven’ exhibited the social style of the poets of the Auden group. Allott was also a scholar and critic and, by 1959, an English professor at the University of Liverpool. Allott’s book mixed poetry, editorial pugnacity and helpful information in a way that was to prove extremely attractive to book buyers. Come 1959, Contemporary Verse had already achieved sales of 190,000 since its first publication in 1950; it went on to sell more than 250,000.5 A large proportion of these sales must have been to schools and students. The Butler Education Act, the growth in grammar schools, the pedagogic fashion in English literature favouring practical criticism and the analysis of poetry had created not just a large interest in new verse but a very competent readership. Not only was a substantial educational market ripe for tapping,

schools in the country (Brian Cox gives the circulation and other details in conversation with Nicholas Tredell. Nicholas Tredell, Conversations with Critics (Manchester and New York: Carcanet and Sheep Meadow Press, 1994), p. 203.) Poetry 1960: An Appetiser describes itself as ‘An Anthology of the Best Poems by New Writers in the ’50s; new poems by established poets; prize poems’. In the Poems of the 1950s section are Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas, D.J. Enright, Christopher Levenson, Thom Gunn, Christopher Logue, John Wain, Graham Hough, Elizabeth Jennings and Lawrence Lerner. Donald Davie and John Holloway turn up in the New Poems section. The prize poems are Sylvia Plath’s ‘Medallion’ and Alan Brownjohn’s ‘William Empson at Aldermaston’. Cox and Dyson are still committed to a diversity of names, but there is a narrower list of the last decade’s new stars: ‘Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Ted Hughes have a firm place in our poetic tradition for their poetic achievement alone.’ The following year’s American Poetry Now, guest edited by one Sylvia Plath, does show that broadmindedness and a particular taste can well co-exist: while Plath may strongly represent her young confessional counterpart Anne Sexton, she also introduces readers to the New York poet Barbara Guest and the Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley. In 1962, the year of the New Poetry, Cox and Dyson edited English Poetry Now, ‘A Selection of the Best Poems by Modern British Writers’. All poets are allotted a poem apiece except for Larkin, Thomas, Hughes and Gunn, who have two each. Other poets of the Hughes/Gunn generation are in as well. Sylvia Plath is represented by ‘Parliament Hill Fields’, Peter Porter by the nuclear warning ‘Your Attention Please’; George MacBeth and Edward Lucie-Smith each contribute one poem. 5 Editorial document on ‘Anthology Schemes’, Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collections, File DM1107/D63.

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Allott’s book, along with other popular but demanding anthologies such as Michael Roberts’ Faber Book of Modern Verse, had helped a whole generation of poetry readers become acquainted with modern poetry. Penguin—canny enough to know they needed to exercise caution when dealing with the editor of one of their most successful books—extended Allott the courtesy of running all three schemes by him. Allott, predictably enough, came out ‘against schemes 2 and 3’ as he felt ‘both would conflict and cause drop in sales.’6 Nonetheless, Allott, who was unable to begin revising Contemporary Verse before September 1960, was not in a strong position. On the document recording the schemes, a handwritten comment from a senior Penguin employee agrees to wait for the revision while pointing out that a reprint before 1961 was essential, but it also adds to the list of proposed anthologies: ‘Write to Alvarez, keep CQ interested, but do not commit’. The letter Richard Newnham sent to A. Alvarez on 1 October 1959 says merely that Penguin were ‘thinking of embarking on a new anthology of modern poetry, probably to be based on a selection of poetry since the war’ and wondering what Alvarez’s view might be ‘about the scope of our anthology and also as to a possible editor for it.’ 7 A postscript asks for strict confidentiality. At the meeting, Alvarez must have offered to take on the job himself, and, by showing greater purpose and focus than Cox and Dyson had up to then displayed, must have been accepted. In 1960, Penguin books appointed Tony Godwin as Chief Editor. Alvarez had met him when Godwin was still a bookseller at Better Books on London’s Charing Cross Road. The two became friends, and in future years Godwin was to become Alvarez’s champion and editor at Penguin and, later on, elsewhere.8 At Better Books, Godwin had laid on poetry events and demonstrated a keenness to be connected to the new writers.9 He had also seen how many highly literate young readers there now were, and that they would be amenable to purchasing cheaply priced, intellectually demanding books. Nineteen sixty was also the year Penguin books went on trial for obscenity following the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The succès de scandale of Lawrence’s book produced a huge and unexpected surplus on the Penguin account sheets at the same time as Penguin’s founder, Allen

6 Editorial document on ‘Anthology Schemes’. 7 Richard Newnham to A. Alvarez, letter, 1 October 1959, editorial File for The New Poetry, Bristol University Special Collections, DM1107/D63. 8 Al Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right? (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999), p. 228. 9 See, for example, Jeremy Lewis, Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane (London: Viking, 2005), p. 310.

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Lane was beginning to take a backseat in his firm. Godwin was soon the de facto day-to-day head of a company with ideas for projects and cash to spend, and one of these projects was to be poetry. Alvarez had been called in to edit an anthology of the best English poetry by young poets of the 1950s. To a degree, this was simply a matter of covering the ten years not covered by Allott’s last edition. But, being obliged to represent fewer poets by more poems, Alvarez’s book was never going to be quite like Allott’s. Moreover, while in Allott’s book, each poet’s entry came prefaced with a profile and critique, Alvarez’s book needed to be different and to shape readers’ opinions in other ways. At first, Alvarez toyed with the idea of sorting poets out into schools, a method later employed by Edward Lucie-Smith in Penguin’s British Poetry since 1945.10 But, even at this early stage, Alvarez already favoured a straight anthology in which importance would be shown by space allocated, perhaps with a section of influential poems. With the letter recording these ideas comes a document ‘The Poetry of the Fifties: Suggestions for a Penguin Anthology’ in which Alvarez’s emotional biography of modern poetry is sketched out.11 According to Alvarez, the younger poets who had best married emotion and intelligence in order to survey their life and the life of the age were: Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, R.S. Thomas, Geoffrey Hill, Norman MacCaig, David Holbrook and Iain Crichton-Smith. As in the book Alvarez would eventually produce, not all of these were particularly young: R.S. Thomas was born before Dylan Thomas. Strangely, Alvarez even thought of including the first-generation modernist Hugh MacDiarmid on the grounds that he had only recently been writing in English as opposed to synthetic Scots. Alvarez entertained the notion of including a selection of influential work by Robert Lowell and John Berryman, but also by D.H. Lawrence and the later W.B. Yeats, to preface his approved poets. A section devoted to the Movement, which, at this stage, included Elizabeth Jennings and John Miles, would be led by poetry by W.H. Auden, Robert Graves and William Empson. Space given to the aesthetic turn in Donald Davie and Charles Tomlinson would show the influence of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. Alvarez also wished to include those he believed to be followers of Dylan Thomas, whose names here include Vernon Scannell and Jon Silkin. While much of the above is recognisable in the book that eventually appeared, some of the differences between first plan and final anthology are 10 A. Alvarez, letter to Richard Newnham, 30 January [presumably 1960], Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collections, File DM1107/D63. 11 A. Alvarez ‘The Poetry of the Fifties: Suggestions for a Penguin Anthology’, Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collections, File DM1107/D63.

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telling. Lawrence’s work may not be included in the published anthology, but is of great importance to the introduction. The absence of Yeats, however, explains a great deal. If one were looking to find an influence to unite Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, R.S. Thomas and Geoffrey Hill, that influence would be Yeats. The section on the Movement would not be prefaced with Larkin’s master Thomas Hardy, but with the poets who actually did most to influence the Movement as a whole: W.H. Auden, William Empson and Robert Graves. Not having writers under the star of Dylan Thomas makes the epochal break between the 1940s and the ’50s appear rigid and absolute. Not having a further division between Tomlinson, the more recent Davie and the poets of the Movement hides the fact that the former were engaging with modernism and American poetry, albeit in ways uncalled for by Alvarez. While the original suggestions for the anthology have their virtues, there are a number of reasons that would have made them unworkable. Some are a matter of honest taxonomy. To pit the poetry of Philip Larkin against the poetry influenced by Yeats or Lawrence is to foster falsehood. Alvarez is unlikely to have caught the Yeatsian sailing of Larkin’s first volume The North Ship, but, as Gunn had found to his pleasure in ‘Wedding Wind’, there is some good Lawrentianism to be found in The Less Deceived. Moreover, even at the time, some were seeing traces of Yeats in Larkin’s mature work. G.S. Fraser, in his introduction to Poetry Now, writes how Larkin ‘sometimes (as in his beautiful poem about old horses at grass) suggests a chastened Yeats—a Yeats “done over again” in water colour.’12 All that notwithstanding, the overwhelming problem with the plan is financial: the fat permissions fees required for these influences would have made Penguin’s tight budgets quite unworkable. In the end, Alvarez decided to confine the explicit statement of editorial opinion to the book’s introductory essay and to arrange the contributors by putting two exemplary, American, poets first: Robert Lowell and John 12 G.S. Fraser, introduction to Poetry Now, p. 24. Fraser’s statement would seem to be backed up by Stephen Regan’s opinion that ‘At Grass’ has a stanza form modelled on ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, a confirmation that, given the marked differences in metre and rhyme scheme between Larkin’s poem and Yeats’s, is scarcely a clinching one. Stephen Regan, ‘Larkin and the Movement’, The Cambridge Guide to English Literature, ed. Michael O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 879–896. Christopher Ricks too thinks he can hear Yeatsian echoes in ‘At Grass’, albeit to different Yeats poems. Christopher Ricks. True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 53–54.

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Berryman. The British poets would then follow, by order of their date of birth. This was a book with fewer awkwardnesses and inconsistencies than its mooted alternatives, a book which made a clearer, emphatic statement, and which did not pigeonhole its poets in the manner of a school textbook. One reason it would not really do to have Robert Lowell and John Berryman in a section of ‘Influences’ was that, for most poets under consideration, they scarcely were. The poet who was most conspicuously in the debt of the impersonal and strenuous Lowell of the books before Life Studies was Geoffrey Hill, but it would be hard to pinpoint any poem in the first edition of The New Poetry noticeably affected by Life Studies itself. As Observer critic and poetry editor, Alvarez was of course aware that the book’s influence was starting to be felt, and yet the two most conspicuous examples of young poets learning from Life Studies, Peter Porter and Sylvia Plath, were excluded from the first edition to The New Poetry on the grounds that they were not British.13 The reasons for that would have been as much ones of timing as of nationality. Alvarez had yet to read Plath’s more Lowellian work. Porter’s Once Bitten, Twice Bitten would only have been read by Alvarez late in the compilation of his anthology, Alvarez’s review coming out in the Observer of 14 May 1961, a review which anyway showed Alvarez only really enthusiastic for ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’ and the satires. Still, in one regard at least, a slightly more mixed message would have been nearer editorial intent. It ‘is unfortunate that, one way or another, we are not able to represent you as fully as the editor originally wished’, wrote Richard Newnham to Philip Larkin on 15 June 1961.14 This was not because of antipathy between Alvarez and Larkin, or at least not overtly because of it. Alvarez had written to Larkin asking to see poems published since The Less Deceived and, on 9 June, Larkin gave him prices for ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘Mr Bleaney’, ‘Reference Back’, ‘Love Songs in Age’, ‘Lambs that Learn’ (later called ‘First Sight’) and ‘Days’. The fees were far higher than those asked by any other poet: for ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, £15 15s, for ‘An Arundel Tomb’, £10 10s, ‘Lambs that Learn’ and ‘Days’ were £5 5s, the rest £8 8s. After looking at the figures, Alvarez held out for ‘Mr Bleaney’ and ‘Days’. Even then, the prices were still prohibitively high for a volume that would retail at the very low price of 3s 6d. Richard Newnham wrote back on 21 June, pointing out that Penguin were not quite as rich or quite as exploitative of their poets as Larkin seemed to think: the anthology was likely not to sell out its 25,000 print run in under two years 13 The New Poetry, p. 17. 14 Richard Newnham to Philip Larkin, letter of 15 June 1961, Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collections, file DM1107/D63.

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and was therefore probably going to lose Penguin money, so would Larkin settle for £8 for ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ and £5 for ‘Mr Bleaney’?15 On 28 June Larkin settled at £12 for one and £6 for the other.16 This, combined with the few expensive poems from a Marvell Press worried for the sales of their one slim Larkin volume, were to net Larkin the sum of £61 19s for his eight poems (plus the unsolicited ‘At Grass’, for which Larkin duly made sure he was paid). For his twenty-one poems, Hughes received £49 7s. Larkin’s under representation in The New Poetry therefore was not just a feature of the editorial stance of A. Alvarez, it was also a result of the permissions policy of Philip Larkin. Kenneth Allott was not the only Penguin anthologist having his turf trespassed on by Alvarez. Donald Hall, who had been commissioned to provide a counterpart anthology to The New Poetry covering American verse, found that two of his most important poets were due to appear in The New Poetry. Alvarez and Hall had met up again and talked about the books, discussions which left Hall with the sense that Alvarez might have secured exclusively Lowell and Berryman for The New Poetry. On 18 March 1961, Hall wrote to Newnham, telling him that he been informed by Alvarez at least a year before of Alvarez’s plan to include ‘The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket’.17 Richard Newnham responded on 24 March 1962: Don’t get me wrong about Lowell, Berryman, and [Theodore] Roethke. If you want to include all three of them, then don’t take any notice of Al’s plans. He is the trespasser, not you! Incidentally, latest news from him is that he will definitely want Lowell and Berryman (no mention of Roethke).18

By publishing in April, Alvarez had two-thirds of a year in which to place Robert Lowell and John Berryman in his own anthology and argument and away from competing American contexts. In The New Poetry, Lowell’s more cooked confessionalism would not vie with the rawness of Ginsberg’s Howl or Kaddish; his breakthrough in verse would not have to contend with rival versions of the new modernism from the Black Mountain and 15 Richard Newnham to Philip Larkin, letter of 21 June 1961, Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collections, file DM1107/D63. 16 Philip Larkin to Richard Newnham, letter of 28 June 1961, Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collections, file DM1107/D63. 17 Penguin Archive, Bristol University Library Special Collections, file DM1107/ D12. 18 Penguin Archive, Bristol University Library Special Collections, file DM1107/ D12.

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New York schools. The word from America could be presented as clear and unambiguous. Kenneth Allott was predictably cross at the arrival of Alvarez’s anthology as a competitor to his own, and he had yet more reason to feel a sense of grievance when Contemporary Verse’s original scheduled publication date of January 1962 was shifted so that it eventually came out in June, despite the fact that Allott had requested his book appear prior to Alvarez’s.19 A grand relaunch of Penguin’s poetry list was arranged for April 1962. Marketed together, The New Poetry and the first of the two books in the Penguin Modern Poets series attracted considerable notice; Allott’s new edition slipped out behind almost unnoticed in their wake, a fact that did not go unremarked. Richard Newnham notes in a letter to Peter Levi of 12 October 1962: ‘Allott has been sounding off at me for not getting the book enough publicity against Alvarez, and he’s right that we didn’t make enough stir with CONTEMPORARY VERSE’.20 Allott’s book continued to be extremely successful in its revised form—Contemporary Verse is one of Penguin’s alltime bestsellers—but Contemporary Verse did not in 1962 establish the canon of the poetry of the day in quite the way it had at the start of the previous decade. When it did at last appear, Contemporary Verse read like a direct response to The New Poetry, and one not voicing the calm if weary rationalism with which Robert Conquest introduces New Lines, but one prepared to take the argument energetically to the opposition. Philip Larkin is ‘the best of the post-Second World War generation and the most exciting new poetic voice—with the possible exception of Dylan Thomas—since Auden’.21 Whereas Alvarez chooses to compare Philip Larkin’s ‘At Grass’ with Ted Hughes’s ‘A Dream of Horses’, Allott compares a Larkin poem with one by Dylan Thomas, ‘I Remember, I Remember’ with ‘Fern Hill’, in order to point out the difference between the poetry of the ’40s and 19 Allott complained of the scheduling and of the possible clash in a letter to Richard Newnham, 11 November 1960, Correspondence in Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collection, file D1107/D12. 20 11 October 1962, Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collection, file D1107/D12. 21 The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, ed. Kenneth Allott, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 332. In accord with the scheme of an anthology which could only give short space to its poets, Larkin is represented by only three poems: ‘Church Going’, ‘Love Songs in Age’ and ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, but the first and last of these are, by Larkin’s lyric standards, lengthy.

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that of the ’50s, to the advantage of the latter.22 Like Alvarez, Allott had chosen a tricky contest. Most readers in 1962, and I suspect most now, would be likely to prefer ‘At Grass’ or ‘Fern Hill’ to the poems with which they are contrasted. But not choosing the more obvious strategy of setting their favoured poet’s best poem against a weaker poem by a rival enables the editors to set their readers a severer test of sensibility in which the important reasons for favouring one poem over the other must overcome natural preference. What to Alvarez is new, what he indicates such poems as ‘A Dream of Horses’ are evolving towards, Allott would diagnose as a throwback the poetry of the 1940s. Casting his eye over past followers of Auden and Thomas, Allott writes: ‘If the social poets wished to marry Marx and Freud, Dylan Thomas may be said to have married the Old Testament and Freud, and his Freud is seen through D.H. Lawrence’, features very close to what Alvarez finds fresh and exciting about Ted Hughes.23 But it is in his commentaries, rather than his introduction, that Allott’s attack on Alvarez’s taste is at its most forthright. Noting in Thom Gunn ‘a dark T.E. Hulme-ish flavour of action-worship as the badge of an élite’,24 Allott expresses surprise at how the sharp-eyed Robert Conquest and Frank Kermode have not noticed just how ‘unattractive’ such poems as ‘The Beaters’ and ‘Lines for a Book’ are.25 Here Allott has a point. If we assume ‘unattractive’ means brutal, sado-masochistic and fascistic or, to be both more indulgent and harsher in appraisal, adolescent and not very good, it is indeed surprising that Conquest and Kermode were willing to be blind to faults in a young poet that they surely would have deprecated in a poet of the Modernist generation (Gunn would exclude ‘The Beaters’ from his Collected Poems). Allott’s other reservation about Gunn also has something to it, and would prove somewhat prophetic: ‘A willingness to experiment can be looked on as hinting at the possibility of a long poetic development, but I feel that the poet stripped of his heroic pose is too unsure of his identity as yet to develop a distinctively personal style.’26 Nineteen sixty-one’s My Sad Captains was published after Allott first penned the note, but he adds a postscript to say that this new collection ‘leaves the reader in much the same state of suspended judgement’.27 22 23 24 25 26 27

The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, p. 19. The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, pp. 28–29. The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, p. 373. The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, p. 374. The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, p. 374. The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, p. 374.

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Allott’s scorn is most decisively turned on Ted Hughes. To Alvarez’s review of Lupercal as ‘the best book of poems to appear for a long time’ and ‘a first true sign of thaw in the dreary freeze-up of contemporary verse’, Allott gives the quietly testy response that to speak of a ‘freeze-up’ is a ‘little too melodramatic’: ‘Mr Alvarez may be responding too favourably to a violent element of expression in some of Ted Hughes’s poems’.28 Allott has qualified praise for the poems of animals or weather but argues that Hughes tends to be too exercised by the physical world’s ‘shocking roughness, noise, cruelty and violence to think much or subtly in his verse’.29 Hughes is, he concedes, an ‘interesting poet’ and ‘it seems likely that as he becomes more self-critical he will feel less need to rape the attention of his readers’, an observation Allott justifies by referring to how in 1957 ‘he said himself that his writing represented “the only way that I can unburden myself of that excess which, for their part, bulls in June bellow away”’.30 From one point of view, this is ridiculous. Bulls are not rapists. However much bovine sex is or is not consensual, the terms of rape are human and do not apply. Moreover, just because Hughes is feeling heavy with seed, that does not mean he is about to rape woman or reader. And yet Allott could counter that Hughes is indeed very keen to bring the appetites of animals into the human world, where they too are non-applicable. Furthermore, the notion that the new poetry could be self-consciously masculinist, define itself in ways hostile to women and indeed indulge in the glorification of sexual as well as other forms of physical violence, is not without supporting evidence and argument. Conscious of how Philip Larkin broke away from the influence of Yeats, James Keery has asserted that Larkin’s ‘“Deceptions” and [Yeats’s] “Leda and the Swan” are contrasting allegories of poetic inspiration’. 31 Yeats has ‘implicitly condoned’ how divine rape brings esoteric knowledge which is ‘exclusively masculine except as vouchsafed to the “mastered” female, a medium to be subdued by and imbued with the power of immortal art.’32 Larkin in ‘Deceptions’ ‘associates male sexuality with violence, self-deception and futility; female sexuality with suffering, intensity of vision and immortality. Identifying with the later, he presents the poetic vocation as 28 The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, pp. 379–380. 29 The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, pp. 379–380. 30 The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, pp. 379–380. 31 James Keery, ‘“Menacing Works in My Isolation”: Early Pieces’, in The Thing about Roy Fisher: Critical Studies, ed. John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 27–85: p. 61. 32 Keery, ‘“Menacing Works in My Isolation”: Early Pieces’, p. 61.

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a kind of martyrdom.’33 One need not go along with Keery’s argument in all respects to see that, in so far as their vision of poetry is connected to the rapes they depict, there is a profound contrast between the two poets. Furthermore, the Oxbridge poets of the early 1950s were much preoccupied with rape and Leda. The fifth Fantasy pamphlet, by Simon Broadbent, whose decision to quit poetry for advertising cannot be greatly regretted, has the female ‘Attendants on Leda’ ‘observe her loss/ Desirous of the beast astride’, feeling ‘envy of each god-given bruise.’34 Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes are in another league. Still, it is very clear that Gunn and Hughes have much more in common with Yeats’s Ledan vision than with Larkin’s sense of deceptions, sometimes explicitly so, as when Gunn’s ‘Helen’s Rape’ both does and does not assert the antiquated sense of rape as abduction, rather than (necessarily) violation, declaring: Hers was the last authentic rape: From forced consent of common breeder Bringing the violent dreamed escape Which came to her in different shape Than to Europe, Danae Leda. 35

Not quite the chronicle divine intervention of Zeus, and emphasising Paris’s status as a man, ‘Helen’s Rape’ prizes the ‘violent dreamed escape’, being Yeats less engaged and argued with than Yeats post-dated. Nevertheless, this ‘authentic rape’ had had the ring of authenticity for A. Alvarez at Oxford. It reminded him ‘of John Donne’; ‘this was what the new poetry should sound like—powerful, confident, allusive with the swagger or a young poet who has something original to say and an authentic voice to say it in, loud and clear.’36 While it may be true that feminist criticism has made such swaggers, their portrayal and advocacy more worrying to subsequent readers than they were to some young men of the late 1950s and early ’60s, it is also true that what was worrying in them did not go unnoticed by Kenneth Allott at the time. Allott’s ungenerosity to the significant early achievement of Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes has long ceased to command much critical attention. Not 33 Keery, ‘“Menacing Works in My Isolation”: Early Pieces’, p. 60. 34 Simon Broadbent, The Fantasy Poets, no. 5 (Oxford: Fantasy Press, 1952), no page numbers. 35 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 12. 36 Al Alvarez, ‘Thom Gunn’, Risky Business: People, Pastimes, Poker and Books (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), pp. 232–240: p. 232.

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so Allott’s comments upon the work of the young Geoffrey Hill, whom Allott forced to explain the workings of two of his trickiest poems: the sonnets ‘Annunciations’. Hill’s explanations and Allott’s uncomprehending commentary were occasioned by the fact that the editor and young poet could not agree on poems both wished to include, Allott preferring Hill’s earlier work, Hill preferring what he had written more recently. Allott found the ‘darkness’ of ‘Annunciations’ ‘so nearly total that I can see them to be poems only by a certain quality in their phrasing’, 37 going on to declare: ‘I understand “Annunciations” only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice)’, an allusion to Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ where, in Iceland, Auden ‘cannot understand what people say,/ But like a dog must guess it by the tone’.38 Allott, still very much the 1930s poet, has a reaction to ‘Annunciations’ that is at once self-deprecatory and laced with accusation. Peter McDonald depicts this as part of ‘a comic non-meeting of minds … between a critic who lives by “tone” and a poet who lives intensely, uncertainly, and often self-checkingly in words’.39 By this McDonald does not only mean that Allott’s faux humility is ultimately condescending—which it certainly is— he is also importing into his assessment Hill’s own terms of approbation, as formulated in his essay on Eliot, ‘Dividing Legacies’, where ‘tone’ is set against ‘pitch’ to the detriment of the former.40 Leaving aside the question of whether Hill’s idiosyncratic distinction between pitch and tone is true in general, the distinction would certainly not have been understood by readers back in 1962. So it may be that critics such as McDonald are completing a curious loop, for if ever there were a case for ‘tone’ being indicative of a lack of attention, which comes with a certain self-satisfaction, it would appear to be Allot on ‘Annunciations’. Since ‘Annunciations’ is, according to Harold Bloom in 1975, Hill’s best poem, the matter of its apprehension and misapprehension is no small thing.41 Nevertheless, it is possible to feel some sympathy with Allott. 37 The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, p. 391. 38 W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (London: Faber, 1937), p. 18. 39 Peter McDonald, Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 14. 40 Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 366–379. 41 Geoffrey Hill, Somewhere Is Such a Kingdom, intr. Harold Bloom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. xvi.

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‘Annunciations’ reads much better for its attentiveness to words, their various meanings, corruptions and debasements, than for its attentiveness to the world. Who actually are these ‘searchers’ and ‘curers’ present at the banquet in the first sonnet?42 Hill’s explanation that the searchers have been ‘hunting the beasts’ and the curers are ‘chemists and distillers and picklers and putters-right’ does not really tell us much.43 If this poem is set anywhere or anywhen, it is in some medieval-cum-dark age hall such as one finds in Sidney Keyes’s ‘The Bards’, but this is poorly drawn, the poem’s secondary significations so outweighing its primary scene that nothing coherent or convincing is depicted. The secondary significations too are somewhat confused. When we read of those who ‘attend to fiddle or to harp/ For betterment’, these are, according to Hill, those ‘who listen to violin and harp, because the function of art is to instruct by delight’ at the same time they ‘pull strings to get on’.44 We are left to ponder whether these are poets or critics and if the poet himself is included. Moreover, if the searchers and the curers, who appear to be those with the ‘specimen jar’, are ‘connoisseurs’ and are ‘as likely to be the poet as the critic’, how are they to be distinguished from those at the feast who actually do have the role traditionally assigned to the poet, those who ‘fiddle and harp’?45 Is this indeed so much an attack on poets as it is a recharacterisation of the modern academy and the practice of offering ‘gobbet questions’, as Hill would inevitably have done in his position as lecturer in Leeds University’s English Department?46 ‘Annunciations’ is a coming into theme and style, a discovery of the path Hill would tread with greater sureness through other poems better able to define their setting, stance and parameters that would be collected in King Log, but it is also the coming apart of a style, a showing of the conditions

42 43 44 45 46

The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, p. 393. The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, p. 392. The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, p. 392. The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, pp. 391–392. This point has been observed by Andrew Michael Roberts, who suggests that ‘Annunciations’ is both disillusioned response to ‘the poetry scene of the early sixties’ and ‘a self-directed rebuke’. Andrew Michael Roberts, Geoffrey Hill (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004), p. 14. I am indebted too to the reading of ‘Annunciations’ and discussion of Hill’s relation to Allott in Stephen James, Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), pp. 88–90, and to Peter Robinson, ‘Reading Geoffrey Hill’, in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work, ed. Peter Robinson (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 196–218: pp. 197–199.

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of poetry at the time which are struggled with, not come to terms with. A very academic poem, ‘Annunciations’ appears to disdain academic analysis. A poem of disgusting brutality, ‘Annunciations’ would fastidiously disdain disgusting brutality. A poem contemptuous of the rivalries and selfadvancement of poets, it abundantly manifests such traits itself. The poetics of impersonality, the aesthetics of the New Criticism are cleaved to, along with the compounded, strenuous ambiguities of American academic poetry of the 1950s (albeit, flavoured by English Neo-Romanticism). They are, however, barely able to repress something very unruly indeed. No wonder Allott thought he was owed an explanation. The assumption that Allott’s listening to the tone in ‘Annunciations’ was an attendance to something the variably pitched utterances of the poem would not give up betrays an attitude not just of Geoffrey Hill but of his generation. The great rhetorical coup of ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ is its composite poem made up of lines that come from eight of the nine New Lines poets. Alvarez insists that though this ‘poem may not be quite comprehensible, it is … unified in tone’ with a ‘considerable similarity in the quality both of the language and of the experience’, a ‘unity of flatness’.47 Not only is Alvarez querying the quality of the New Lines poets (even as he introduces an anthology which would include so many of them) and the fact that so much of their work is in regular iambic pentameters, he is showing the homogenising limitation of the critical taste that applauded them, the way in which, in the words of Donald Davie’s ‘Remembering the Thirties’, ‘A neutral tone is nowadays preferred.’48 One question raised by this tonal preference is: to what extent was it really so neutral? Is this, as Alvarez put it of Larkin when reviewing him for an American audience four years earlier, ‘the neutral weariness of enlightened suburbanism?’49 That is, is it the sound of an outlook, a class and a profession, an ‘academic administrative verse’ reflective of the fact that, of New Lines’ contributors, six were ‘university teachers, two librarians and one a Civil Servant’?50 As Alvarez continues, the one poem becomes the one man who is ‘summed up at the beginning of Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’, the ‘image of a post-war Welfare State Englishman’.51 The commonness of 47 The New Poetry, p. 24. 48 Donald Davie, Collected Poems, ed. Neil Powell (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), p. 29. 49 A. Alvarez, ‘Poetry Chronicle’, Partisan Review, Vol. XXV, No. 4, Autumn 1958, pp. 603–609: p. 604. 50 Alvarez, The New Poetry, pp. 2–3. 51 The New Poetry, p. 24.

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the readership, the relevance of the experience conveyed in the poems to the likely experience of its readers has become a drab sameness, poetry as a sort of utility clothing. For the poets of Alvarez’s generation who would react to the Movement, a neutral tone was emphatically not preferred. Whether it is grandiloquently oratorical or attempting intimacy, their poetry is less comfortable with little ironies, decided rather than neutral. Hughes’s peculiarities of sound and style, his voice, could not easily be slid into a synthetic New Lines poem. Others’ poems—intimate self-revelations and wrought dramatic monologues alike—make a virtue of singleness rather than commonality of utterance. A poet’s phrase could not be anyone’s; it is stamped with the poet’s own seal, not coinage that has common currency. Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Annunciations’ is more like a composite poem that would not work; the different interpretations and provenance of the words and phrases resist being smoothed over. But it prompts a thought. How would a real composite poem, a cento, of Hill and his contemporaries read? Outlasting centuries of grit and water, More dark, more separate now, yet not still dead, The Word comes. Remember the parable Of the ages and continents of his fathers; The same thin richness of these worlds remains, Nothing in this bright region melts or shifts, Fast as fire away on the surface of the sun.

These lines are culled from the second edition of The New Poetry, from poems by Geoffrey Hill, Peter Porter, Thom Gunn, David Wevill, Peter Redgrove, George MacBeth and Ted Hughes. The poem they make up proves, first, that vaguely convincing composite poems of pentameters and near-pentameters are not particularly difficult to produce. It also shows some common rhetorical tropes, what one might term a ‘unity of highness’, a fondness for the grand pronouncement, an avoidance of Movement hesitancies or modesties. It is, if you like, a fresh way of obtaining some of what had been thrown out when poets disowned the manner of Dylan Thomas. There are lines, even pentameter lines, from these poets that would not fit, above all Peter Porter’s satirical register, ‘the Pick of the Pops and the Daily Express’, the ‘Cavalry-twilled tame publishers praising Logue’.52 But these are unusual, and such headlong plunges into early ’60s consumer culture

52 The New Poetry, pp. 167, 168.

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are not what Patrick Cruttwell, the Leavises or A. Alvarez had in mind when they advocated the mix of high and low. The satirist of fashioned-swayed publishers and of the consumer culture was soon to become their beneficiary. While the New Poetry was being edited, Peter Porter was chosen as one of three poets to be included in Penguin Modern Poets 2 (the others were Kingsley Amis and Dom Moraes), which, along with Penguin Modern Poets 1 (Lawrence Durrell, Elizabeth Jennings and R.S. Thomas), was to share The New Poetry’s April 1962 date of publication. Though proceeding from the same publishing house as The New Poetry and Contemporary Verse, this initiative from Tony Godwin was very different from both in the messages it conveyed about contemporary poetry . This was even true of the cover design. The first edition of The New Poetry has a cover by Penguin designer Stephen Russ: a grid of orange, brown and white circles recalling modernist design of the pre-war era. In similar vein, the revised edition of Contemporary Verse has white snowflakelike and flower-like geometric designs on a yellow background. Penguin Modern Poets, in contrast, had stylish semi-abstract photographic covers that made the volumes look like issues of a magazine—and, at 2s 6d, they retailed at about the same price. Rather than a book for school, university or self-improvement, this was a book you could buy yourself to please yourself, poetry that looked and felt like a consumer item. Context-free practical criticism had been rebranded as consumer democracy. The books had no author biographies and no conspicuous editorial apparatus, but having 30 poems from each author, readers were given plenty of material with which to make up their own minds. With the editorial and critical voices removed, the collectable series may have promoted brand loyalty, but it was not promoting loyalty to any particular school, taste or critical programme. At the same time and by the same publisher, the divisions of taste of The New Poetry, and its elite vision of poetry, were being very tacitly questioned—and would increasingly be so as the Penguin Modern Poets series broadened and enjoyed successes such as Penguin Modern Poets 10: The Mersey Sound. In 1962, the most effective counterblast to the taking sides over Larkin, Gunn and Hughes being urged by Alvarez and Allott would have been to put all three poets together in a volume that would make them seem joint voices of new poetry, as Gunn and Larkin had once seemed when collected into New Lines, and not oppositional ones. This very nearly happened. After refusing Penguin permission to put first Thom Gunn and then Ted Hughes into Penguin Modern Poets (thereby allowing Peter Porter to take Hughes’s place), Faber poetry editor Charles Monteith planed a rival volume

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containing Gunn, Hughes and Larkin.53 Of the Gunn/Hughes selected volume that Faber rushed out, Gunn recalled: it was our editor Charles Monteith’s idea … [Hughes and I] emerged at about the same time, and he thought that neither of us was sufficiently well-known to have his own Selected Poems. But a Selected Poems of the two of us would be ideal. Originally, his idea was to include Philip Larkin as well.54

The chief rationale for Monteith’s plan may have been commercial, but the idea that these talented young poets belonged together would not have seemed unreasonable to two of them. Gunn, we have seen, was deeply impressed and influenced by Larkin at this time. Hughes’s verse may have, for the time being, escaped Larkin’s influence; nevertheless, Hughes was as yet to display Larkin nothing but respect: in 1958, he described Larkin as a ‘very good gentle poet’.55 The regard was not mutual. Larkin wrote to Robert Conquest of the proposed paperback of ‘Thom, Thed and Yours Thruly’: ‘Honestly, I’m sure they’re good chaps, and there’s nothing personal about this, but I can’t think of any two who affect me less. [D.J] Enright, Lizzie [Jennings], John [Holloway]—they’re giants beside these two Cantabs. Why should I earn money for them, eh.’56 Contemplating the division between Cambridge and Oxford poets (a division that is more a stylistic shorthand than an actual record of university attendance—D.J. Enright studied at Downing College, Cambridge) leaves Larkin sure of where his preferences lie. Still, Larkin would have agreed with Alvarez that there was indeed a contest to be fought. Yet in this contest, it would soon appear, Larkin was on the losing side.57 On 53 The original plan for Penguin Modern Poets 1 was to include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes along with Anne Ridler; Penguin Modern Poets 2 would contain work by Lawrence Durrell, R.S. Thomas and Elizabeth Jennings. Internal memo from Richard Newnham to Anthony Godwin, dated 28 September [probably 1960], Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collections, File D1107/D62. 54 James Campbell, Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell (London: Between the Lines, 2000), p. 26. 55 Ted Hughes, letter to Olwyn Hughes, June 1958, Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), p. 125. 56 Philip Larkin, Letter to Robert Conquest, 11 July 1961, Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940–1985, p. 331. 57 A further factor in Larkin’s refusal may well have been fear of damaging the sales of his own books. The note to Donald Hall’s selection of New Poets from England and America in 1963 bears this out: ‘The selection here is not as

A ntholog y - M a k ing 8 9

receiving his complimentary copy of The New Poetry, Larkin would write again to Conquest, on 20 February 1962, noting the 21 poems from Ted Hughes, the 17 from Thom Gunn, and forgetting all he had done to ensure the number of his own poems had been kept low: ‘The Mvt is dead: P.L. 8, K.A. 5, D.J.E. 10, D.D. 5, J.W. 5. No Liz J., or Holloway, Thwaite, MacBeth or indeed that singer of Mars & Venus R.C. Oh well—the Georgians only lasted five years’.58 Fears of the death of the Movement may have been exaggerated, but The New Poetry did sell extremely well. In June 1962, Ted Hughes wrote to his sister Olwyn enclosing both a copy of the Gunn/Hughes Selected Poems and of The New Poetry, commenting: ‘He’s sold 10,000 copies of it in its first month. There must be a poetry boom.’59 Had Hughes made it into the Penguin Modern Poets, he would have been similarly impressed. That same month Penguin Modern Poets 1 had sold 14,335 copies and Penguin Modern Poets 2 13,790 copies and, since the 30,000 copy editions were due to run out of print by November 1962, reprints were scheduled.60

substantial as I would like, Mr Larkin felt it necessary to limit the number of poems printed, lest we assemble here too great a proportion of his next book.’ New Poets of England and America, second selection, English poets edited by Donald Hall, American poets edited by Robert Peck (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1963), p. 21. Larkin had some reason for such caution. Certainly Ted Hughes thought his heavy representation in The New Poetry damaged his own sales. See the Internal Memo Esther Sidwell to Anthony Godwin 29, 3, 1965, which records Hughes asking Alvarez if he would, as a personal favour, cut four poems from his selection on the grounds that the sales of his own books were being adversely affected by his heavy representation in The New Poetry. Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collections, DM1107/D63. 58 Philip Larkin, letter to Robert Conquest, 20 February 1961, Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, pp. 240–241: p. 241. The initials stand for Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, D.J. Enright, Donald Davie and John Waine. Liz J. is Elizabeth Jennings. The first names of Holloway, Thwaite and MacBeth are: John, Anthony and George—Larkin is presumably thinking of MacBeth’s early poetry and, I would assume, had not read the more recent work which MacBeth was presenting to the Group. 59 Ted Hughes, ‘Letter to Olwyn Hughes’, June 1962, Letters of Ted Hughes, p. 200. 60 Penguin, Internal Memo, Stamped ‘Publicity Department’, Penguin Archive, file Dm1107/D70, Bristol University Special Collections.

C hapter S even

First Reactions: The Review Debate and the Initial Response to The New Poetry

I

an Hamilton’s The Review was a high-minded, forward-thinking poetry magazine with a print run of about 1,000. Still, its first, April/May 1962, number was as much concerned with catching up with A. Alvarez as with pointing out the way ahead. The issue, which has an advert for all the new Penguin poetry books on its back cover, has as its longest piece a transcript of Alvarez in protracted debate with Donald Davie. The previous year Davie had written an article for the Guardian calling for ‘A New Aestheticism’ and proclaiming a reaction, not to Alvarez and like minds, but to those thinkers of the New Left who supposed ‘that the relation between the writer and his medium is subordinate and secondary to his relation with his society.’1 As Davie upholds the importance of the medium, he is aware that things have moved on since the first days of the Movement. Davie notes the current fashion for the Beats, but concentrates on a far less coarse young group of poetry readers, claiming that ‘the rising generation’ do not ‘admit that a lively tenderness to experience can go along with inert or brutal dealings with language. They would sooner read Valéry’s poems than Lawrence’s, Charles Tomlinson’s sooner than Philip Larkin’s or Ted Hughes’s.’2



1 Donald Davie, ‘Towards a New Aestheticism’, Guardian, 21 July 1961, p. 7. 2 Davie, ‘Towards a New Aestheticism’, p. 7.

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Charles Tomlinson had once been an undergraduate student of Davie. International in reading and aesthetic in outlook, Tomlinson took his bearings from French and American modernism and was increasingly to ally himself with William Carlos Williams and the objectivist tradition in American poetry. So Tomlinson did offer an English alternative to the Movement, and indeed to Ted Hughes, neo-Lawrentianism and expressionism. But at this stage it was not clear quite in which direction Tomlinson, still over-echoing the different manners of his modernist masters, was headed. It was certainly wishful to reckon the aesthetic austerities of Tomlinson were likely to gain an audience comparable to that excited by the more immediate attractions of Larkin or Hughes. ‘Towards a New Aestheticism’ is a pencil sketch of an ideal backed up by assertion. During his debate with Alvarez in The Review, Davie gives ideals and ideas considerably more shade and colour. Indeed, the debate airs some of the more significant thoughts and positions he and Alvarez would develop in opposition to one another over the coming years, albeit in ways that are yet to be fully formed. At the same time, Alvarez and Davie agree far more than one might expect. Speaking of ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, Davie says: ‘You analyse, very interestingly and to my mind very justly, the three “negative feedbacks” to modernism [W.H. Auden and the poets of the 1930s, Dylan Thomas and the poets of the ’40s, the Movement] … This analysis of literary history is precisely mine’.3 The point of disagreement would therefore be, not with analysis, but the prescription: ‘I don’t understand why you don’t draw the same conclusions from it as I do. Let’s go back, then, to them [Pound, Eliot and Yeats], and go forward from there.’4 Even from this apparent impasse, Davie and Alvarez proceed to the common ground of their admiration for Robert Lowell, whom they agree is ‘the best poet now writing’, and in particular, Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’.5 Nonetheless, Davie and Alvarez admire ‘For the Union Dead’ in very different ways. Davie declares: ‘It was in relation to that poem that it seemed to me that I understood for the first time something of what is meant by poetry becoming like music’.6 The appreciation puts the form not the denotative content to the fore and is of a piece with his statement at the outset of the interview that: ‘for some years now I have been able to see my ideas in order about the poems I write and the poems of other people by thinking

3 A. Alvarez and Donald Davie, ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’, The Review, No. 1, April/May 1962, pp. 10–25: p. 22. 4 Alvarez and Davie, ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’, p. 22. 5 Alvarez and Davie, ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’, p. 11. 6 Alvarez and Davie, ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’, p. 16.

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in terms of analogies between the different arts—how is poetry like music? How is poetry like sculpture?’ 7 For Davie, not only is the medium the message, what matters too is the relation between the medium of poetry and the media employed by the other arts. Having little patience for this or Davie’s talk of resistant material, Alvarez insists upon an alternate ideal: What one has to do is to get a language which is tough enough and clear enough, and pure enough. Not tough in an Allen Ginsberg way, but in a[n] … unflinching way, in a facing what there is way, in facing what you don’t what to have to recognize, which is done superbly by a poet like, say, Robert Lowell … You create this language of the self, and its [sic] a language very disciplined, highly disciplined, and it’s got to be because one has not only got to write of oneself, one has also got to be intelligent about it.8

Purity in verse has had its many defenders, the Donald Davie of Purity of Diction in English Verse amongst them, as has toughness. Clarity has its more memorable champions in prose—think, for instance, of George Orwell—poetry, modernist poetry in particular, being more frequently valued for its linguistic opacity than for its opposite. Alvarez, though, is arguing for a language of the self. The poet does not come up against a resistant medium, for the language employed is not separate from its user, the self having, in this figuring, no outside: what is required, then, is control, and this is internal. Returning to the central thrust of ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, Alvarez asserts: ‘one has to cope with in poetry … the ability to express the complexity, the bastardy of being human and having to face all the pain and … remain sane’.9 This is because what happened in Auschwitz, and the other 130 concentration camps that were within the Reich, and that’s happening in concentration camps in Russia and presumably China … makes it very important to … be sane about one’s own identity, because the whole movement of the concentration camps is the movement to destroy individuals, and towards the kind of efficiency that destroys art.10

7 8 9 10

Alvarez and Davie, ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’, p. 10. Alvarez and Davie, ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’ p. 16. Alvarez and Davie, ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’ p. 16. Alvarez and Davie, ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’, p. 14.

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This leads Alvarez to cite the opening to Marianne Moore’s poem ‘Poetry’: ‘I too dislike it. There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle’.11 This non-meeting of critical minds appears to cast Alvarez as the practical man who would go beyond the fiddle of poetry, Davie as the craftsman and aesthete. Yet it is Alvarez who asks far more of poetry. In the debate and in his criticism, Davie habitually stresses how poetry should be bounded by civil responsibility, proportion, reason, decency and so forth. Not such an aesthete as all that, Davie propounds a vision of poetry that is therefore absolutely conditioned by the knowledge that there are things important beyond poetry’s own bounds; indeed, that there are factors whose overriding importance will give those bounds their circumscription. Alvarez, however, would wish poetry to play a vital role in psychic survival, for it to counter the anti-individualism of the modern mechanised world in general and of the concentration camps in particular. It is hardly surprising that Alvarez’s thoughts should then tend to the countries where the camps and totalitarian oppression had recently been in action, in particular to Poland, whose poetry he had begun to value through the translated work of Zbigniew Herbert.12 Whether what Alvarez discusses bears scrutiny as a test of poetry in general, and whether what is pertinent to poetry written in post-war Poland is pertinent to poetry in the 1960s Britain of the democratic welfare state, is a conundrum readers are left to ponder but upon which Alvarez chooses not to dwell. The debate between Davie and Alvarez differs from a more frequently iterated debate between the Movement and its opposition, the debate summed up by Ted Hughes as he defined himself against Robert Conquest and the Movement, whom, he believed, were part of a post-war feeling of having had enough, ‘enough rhetoric, ‘overweening’ pushes, ‘dark gods’, ‘the id’, ‘Angelic powers’ or ‘heroic efforts to make new worlds. They’d seen it all turn into death camps and atomic bombs.’13 Because of this, they ‘wanted it cosy’, whereas the slightly younger Hughes ‘was all for opening negotiations with whatever happened to be out there’, and thus when Hughes summoned a jaguar, ‘they smelt a stormtrooper.’14 Other than to suggest that his critics were missing the point, Hughes does not justify the change in 11 Alvarez and Davie, ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’, p. 14. 12 Alvarez and Davie, ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’, p. 24. 13 Ekbert Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe with Selected Writings by Ted Hughes & Two Interviews (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), p. 201. 14 Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe, p. 201.

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practice in relation to the grounds of the criticism: his poetry may be legitimate expression, but it is not legitimised by its relation to death camps and atom bombs. In contrast, Alvarez sets up terms of debate where it would be. He is therefore a champion for Hughes in ways that Hughes has not necessarily countenanced. Indeed, a peculiar feature of the Alvarez/Davie debate is its lack of proper focus on what is actually taking place in Hughes’s verse. When the two come to discuss D.H. Lawrence, once again they agree on what to like but not on why they like it. Alvarez finds ‘considerable art and subtlety’ in Lawrence’s good poems and an ability to create objects … not only out there but they’re in here, too.’15 Davie inverts the analysis: the poem ‘Snake’ gives the ‘response of the human to the non-human, splendidly rendered’; he maintains that Alvarez’s programme for poetry tends ‘to exclude such poems and look on them as necessarily trivial because they are not essentially human, not dealing with human relations.’16 The dispute moves on to the verse of Charles Tomlinson and the virtue of ‘the relation that is set up between him and that stone wall’ as a test case for the valuing of the non-human in opposition to Alvarez’s concentration upon the purely psychological.17 This concentration on Tomlison and stone walls seems designed to find a hard case about which Davie and Alvarez will have to disagree. Yet, it could be pointed out that it is Hughes, in his animal poems at least, who is, of Davie and Alvarez’s near-contemporaries, the poet writing poems that come closest to ‘Snake’, and that there is on the part of each critic an odd lack of will to confront this. Davie’s later book Thomas Hardy and British Poetry would find him developing his disagreement with Alvarez, taking him to task for the comparison between ‘At Grass’ and ‘A Dream of Horses’. Davie opines: the horses are ‘symbolic’—and symbolic of what? Why, of something in the human psyche of course. In other words, it’s only when what seems to be a nature poem can be converted into a human-nature poem that we begin to take it seriously. This is a humanism like Larkin’s, but less respectable because it does not count the cost, seems not to know that there is any cost incurred.18

15 Alvarez and Davie, ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’, p. 20. 16 Alvarez and Davie, ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’, p. 20. 17 Alvarez and Davie, ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’, p. 20. 18 Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 68.

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There is in this attack a tacit assumption both that Alvarez has portrayed Hughes’s poem correctly and that such a poem is representative of Hughes’s poetry at the time; yet this assumption ignores the question of the extent to which most of Hughes’s early nature poems, which are not framed as dreams, are about his psyche and not the world beyond. In a 1970 interview with Ekbert Faas, Hughes defends himself from charges of glorifying violence or of being fascistic by maintaining, ‘what I had in mind is Nature thinking. Simply Nature.’19 For Hughes, granted, nature is seldom simply nature: it will signify the goddess, elemental forces and so on. Nevertheless, Hughes does insist that he thinks of his jaguar poems as ‘first, descriptions of a jaguar’.20 And indeed what gives many of the early poems their considerable power, and a power both to unsettle readers and their human assumptions and to evoke the natural world, is Hughes’s ability to both keep up a strong attendance on the specifics of the life before him, to be the empirical observer and nature poet whilst also manifesting considerable psychic energy and disturbance. Alvarez’s approval, like Davie and Allott’s disapproval, by viewing only one side of this, misses the whole picture. Moreover, both the terms of approval and disapproval rule out factors such as myth, in which neither Davie nor Alvarez is much interested. As a result of such partial reading, Hughes has been made a prize toy soldier, to knock down others or be knocked over in the poetry war. To give an example, ‘To Paint a Water Lily’ is indeed about insects on a water lily; it is a Darwinian horror show, it is about violence within a psyche and in the modern world and it is also a poem of reverent mysteries and boy’s book of wonder excitement of ‘Prehistoric bedragonned times.’21 The terms of the Davie/Alvarez standoff, however, account for only two of these ways of looking at a water lily, and these are mutually exclusive. The best poems from The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal remain some of the principal poems on which rests Hughes’s high reputation and with which that reputation may be defended, and this is in large part because of their sensuous attendance to language, the body and the natural world, rather than their other aspects. ‘The Bull Moses’ may be read in ignorance, or indeed dislike, of all the mythic underpinnings the story may have had for Hughes and still be seen as valid and effective. Conversely, if The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal have a strong sense of the claims of the non-human, they also have a significant number of poems devoted to the human. True, some 19 Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe, p. 199. 20 Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe, p. 199 21 Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 70.

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deal in caricatures and types, be they a ‘Dick Straightup’ or a ‘Secretary’. But there are significant poems of history, whether of the First World War or of Nicholas Ferrer, and poems which address themselves to a recognisable human world, not merely to the painted faces and spirits of psychic drama. It is also the case that, whether overtly in the (perhaps understandably) over-pitched ‘A Woman Unconscious’, or coolly and beautifully in the mininuclear submarine of ‘Pike’, whose ‘delicacy and horror’ is ‘a hundred feet long in their world’, Hughes did catch something of the Cold War tension and suppressed violence of the time.22 It was understandable that Alvarez should have been so enthused by the work of this young poet, and in some ways surprising that Davie should have been so resistant. But it is also noteworthy that neither critic’s constructs could fully come to terms with the work they were arguing about. The new Penguin poetry books and The Review debate quickly generated a considerable amount of high-profile discussion. Bernard Bergonzi wrote a feature on both for the Guardian, finding Davie with the arguments and Alvarez with the poets.23 ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ was the subject of a leader column in the Times Literary Supplement written by G.S. Fraser. The leader asks ‘if Mr. Graves can be accused of “classicising”, could not Lawrence be accused of “romanticising”?’24 Echoing the Movement’s call for sanity, decency and good sense, it opines: Mr Alvarez seems to have forgotten that Freud wished to release neither our primitive drives nor the desire for self-punishment consequent on their release, but to strengthen the rational ego in its struggle to control both the id and the superego. Freud himself, perhaps, was a victim of Mr Alvarez’s Gentility Principle.25

Fraser concludes by stating that: ‘No poet, in even the worst of times, has ever merely reflected the world’s disorder: the good poets have striven to wrest their own order out of that.’26 Such reaction might have been predicted. Inside the TLS, a review of The 22 Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 85. There is a similar reading of ‘Pike’ in Adam Piette, The Literary Cold War: 1945 to Vietnam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 123. 23 Bernard Bergonzi, ‘The Poet’s Reasons’, Guardian, 27 April 1962, p. 6. 24 Anonymous [G.S. Fraser], Leading article, The Times Literary Supplement, 20 April 1962, p. 265. 25 Anonymous [G.S. Fraser], Leading article, p. 265 26 Anonymous [G.S. Fraser], Leading article, p. 265.

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New Poetry and the first two volumes of Penguin Modern Poets makes some less expected points. The New Poetry is ‘a quite notable piece of publishing, for its aim is no less than a creation of a fresh taste and it makes not the slightest concession to easy popularity.’27 The potential market for these books is spotted: Sixth forms, undergraduates, teachers—these surely are the first outward ripples of audience which the “Penguin Modern Poets” series expects and deserves … for it is an audience already prepared by post-war changes in our educational system. It may be guessed that the last thing such an audience would want from poetry would be “gentility”’.28

The anonymous reviewer (Roy Fuller) sides with the Penguin Modern Poets series against the New Poetry with its smack ‘of that cliquishness from which the “Penguin Modern Poets Series” is reassuringly free’.29 Since Fuller’s own style and generation are passed over by The New Poetry and not by the Penguin Modern Poets, such comments may not be wholly disinterested. But the way Fuller commends the Penguin Modern Poets series and Peter Porter—‘a real discovery this poet’—is worth noting, in that the manner of his approval is so close to and yet so far from Alvarez’s own. For, while one should note the difference between ‘sensitivity to’ and the ‘expressing of’ that one associates with Alvarez, Fuller’s endorsement of ‘the sensitivity to horror and pain, the concrete bang-up-to-date, didacticism’ in Porter appears in its first half to be close to finding work that delivers what Alvarez is calling for. The second half of the statement, however, reveals the gulf between older and younger critic. For all his calls for relevance, Alvarez is not particularly interested in the concrete rendering of the bang up to date; moreover, he is still enough of an aesthete not to have been looking for the didactic in verse. Porter is nearly but not quite what Alvarez wanted. Another poet omitted from Alvarez’s anthology would prove a much better fit for the role.

27 Anonymous review [Roy Fuller] of The New Poetry and Penguin Modern Poets, The Times Literary Supplement, 20 April 1962, p. 266. 28 Anonymous review [Roy Fuller] of The New Poetry and Penguin Modern Poets, p. 266. 29 Anonymous review [Roy Fuller] of The New Poetry and Penguin Modern Poets, p. 266.

PA R T I I

C hapter E ight

Sylvia Plath

T

he poetry boom of 1962 left Sylvia Plath off the invitation list. Plath’s name makes the first edition of The New Poetry only in the apologies for absence, where Alvarez mentions Plath and Peter Porter as being among poets he has, ‘often regretfully’ had to exclude because ‘although living in this country, [they] are not British.’1 Since this was a book which made a point of including poets who were neither British nor resident in Britain, this may not have struck Plath as a wholly satisfactory explanation. The consequence of her exclusion meant anyone leafing on from Alvarez’s introduction to see how writers were squaring up to the great challenges of the time would refer to the Americans Robert Lowell and John Berryman or to the prominent British poets gathered in the book, but not to the young poets from abroad who had made England their home. This may not have greatly worried Porter, who was being lifted from obscurity to prominence by Penguin Modern Poets, but Plath had not that consolation. Moreover, though Plath was, it seemed, too American to qualify for The New Poetry, her residency in England may well have been a factor in her surprising exclusion by Donald Hall from the forthcoming Contemporary American Poetry. The only Penguin anthology that would number Plath among the new British poets and champion her work in 1962 was Kenneth Allott’s Contemporary Verse, but here she seems a bastion against, rather than an exponent of, Alvarez-style new poetry. Allott finds in Plath’s (earlier) work the influence of John Crow Ransom, which is ‘pleasant’ in one poem, ‘a shade too obtrusive’ in another. Plath is a writer whose ‘poetic gift’ is ‘civilized’,

1 The New Poetry, ed. A. Alvarez, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 17.

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‘without being at all weak or precious’.2 Though showing Allott generous in his praise of young writers when so moved, this praise is somewhat ineffectual: Plath sounds neither as new nor as exciting as does Hughes in Allott’s attack on him, and her work appears to flourish well within the bounds of the gentility principle. One can see why, when George MacBeth wrote to ask Plath if she’d like to have her poems ‘In Plaster’ and ‘The Surgeon at 2 a.m.’ included in his thoroughly ungenteel Penguin Book of Sick Verse, Plath would greet the project and her inclusion in it with unalloyed delight. 3 Kenneth Allott endorsed what had impressed A. Alvarez rather less, the American Plath of The Colossus. MacBeth, in picking her for Sick Verse, responded to a Plath whose work, since her settlement in England in 1959, had become much more of a piece with the British poetic developments of which MacBeth was a part. Indeed, a poem such as ‘The Surgeon at 2 a.m.’ would have slotted perfectly into a Group meeting. Not only is it a dramatic monologue with a MacBethian interest in the morbid, it has too a similar mix of the colloquial and high rhetoric, the grand historical sweep that is there in the poetry of Peter Porter and, less successfully, in that of Edward LucieSmith, a use for the Lowellian that has nothing to do with confessionalism: ‘How I admire the Romans—/ Aqueducts, the Baths of Carcalla, the eagle nose!’4 More broadly, Plath’s strong theatricality, a use of personal material and an increased desire for rough edges and looseness of form, as well as an interest in the depiction of extremes, should have made Plath a natural Group member. (That Plath was not in fact part of the Group is down to Philip Hobsbaum’s short-sighted, and, it is fair to surmise, sexist, dismissal of her work when Ted Hughes showed him her poems in a tacit bid for her membership.)5 Plath herself was quite aware of what she had in common with MacBeth. On meeting the BBC producer in 1960, she observed: ‘I see you have a concentration camp in your mind too’, a statement which says more about her intentions, MacBeth’s verse and her following of it than

2 The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, ed. Kenneth Allott, revised and enlarged edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 389. 3 Sylvia Plath, to George MacBeth, 15 August, 1962, copied letter, Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collections, file D1107/D80. 4 Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber, 1981; 1989 reprint), p. 171. 5 Philip Hobsbaum, ‘Ted Hughes at Cambridge’, The Dark Horse, Autumn 1999, pp. 6–12: p. 11.



S y lvia P lath 1 0 3

it says about any poetry Plath had yet written.6 More broadly, while Plath retained American contexts and affiliations for her writing—the most significant of those being those already established with Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell—her contemporary influences and rivalries became more English, as did her concerns, features we might take as being very distinctively Plathian fitting neatly into the English scene. To return to ‘The Surgeon at 2 a.m.’, the poem (dated 29 September 1961), like many Plath would write, has a fascination with the body’s prostheses, the body made plaster, statue-like, the patient with the plastic limb, the doctor in the white coat. Where the possession of an outer carapace—leather, goggles or what have you—is a thing of self-protection and self-definition, an object of fascination, even of celebration, for Thom Gunn, for Plath it is the occasion of profoundly mixed feelings. In both Plath and Gunn, such depictions of self and body can, logically enough, be seen as co-extensive with sexual identity and with a concomitant social identity that is obliged to armour or disguise itself for living as the object of a possessing male gaze. Still, that is not the whole of it. Consider Plath’s ‘The Applicant’, with its talk of ‘our sort of person’ followed by questions about whether the applicant in question wears various types of prosthesis: false limb, eyes, arms, breast and crotch before the answer ‘no’ elicits the response ‘Then/ How can we give you a thing?’ 7 The greater prosthesis is ‘this suit’, ‘Black and stiff’, which the applicant is to marry, and which is depicted in terms of a coffin. Such preoccupations cross the gender divide, as is seen when ‘The Applicant’ is compared to ‘Metamorphosis’ by Peter Porter. ‘Metamorphosis’ is partly a piece of social observation-cum-satire on the wearing of a ‘new Daks suit’ ‘to show responsibility’.8 Throughout there is Porter’s characteristic enumeration of realist detail and an expression of material envy and social grievance. Yet the unease grows: ‘I am only the image I can force upon the town./ The town will have me: I stalk in glass,’ until the narrator turns on himself: ‘my putty mask,/ a face fragrant with arrogance, stuffed with recognition— I am myself at last.’9 To be fragrant here is not to give off the appropriate stink; while elsewhere other sorts of persona in poetry may be desirable, here the persona required for the business of everyday life is unnatural

6 Edward Butscher, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976), p. 335. 7 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 221. 8 Peter Porter, Collected Poems 1: 1961–1981 (Oxford and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 13. 9 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 13.

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and unpleasant. The poem finishes with the evocation of a ‘werewolf film’ as the ‘tyrant suit’ chokes me. This is not simply a poem recognising the stultifying stuffiness and class-ridden conformity of late ’50s life—it is that too—it is a poem which evinces a remarkably similar alienation from the body’s clothing, from the body itself and for the projections of the self to that found in Plath. Plath, Gunn and Porter are, it is evident, incorporating social pressure of the time, anxiety relating to the performance of roles and the need to conform, individual subjectivity and objectification. But, they do so in a particular manner, that formulated by existentialist literature and its popularisations. Existentialism, consciousness of pose, of being there for the other as an act of will, in due course seems to have brought a protective happiness to Gunn. Indeed, his acceptance of an exoskeletal self would become one he could playfully ironise. ‘Considering the Snail’ in My Sad Captains is, in the words of Paul Giles, ‘a witting self-parody of the poet’s earlier self-projection, the motorcyclist defining himself belligerently by joining “the movement in a valueless world”’.10 To put it in other terms, Gunn moves from tough fragility to tough protectiveness to a knowingness that a couple of decades later would have been called postmodern. But Gunn is a fully paid up Sartrean and has the comfort of a coherent philosophy to make sense of his disturbing symptoms. Plath and early Porter note and exhibit the symptoms—bad faith, the look, being for others, inauthenticity, nausea—but the symptoms are there to sicken not to receive philosophical salves or explanations. Moreover, these two poets are much less comfortable with what they wear than is Gunn. The suit as coffin or as werewolf manifests anonymity, an existence for others. So, even as it appears to protect, it brings about a metaphorical death. Years after, Gunn joked about his early career as a ‘Shakespearean, Sartrean Fascist’.11 It is not a joke that would come from Porter or Plath, who make similar connections to Gunn but in a spirit of horror. The second of Porter’s ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’ finds the poet describing how ‘My suit is hairy, my carpet smells of death’; the third has him fall asleep on the underground then ‘shuffle with the naked to the steel door’.12 Porter does not probe it as much as he might, but one can detect an implicit connection between bourgeois uniform and .

10 Paul Giles, ‘Landscapes of Repetition: The Self-Parodic Nature of Thom Gunn’s Later Poetry’, Critical Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2, Summer 1987, pp. 85–99: p. 86. 11 Thom Gunn and James Campbell, Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell (London: Between the Lines, 2000), p. 29. 12 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 37.



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those of victims and perpetrators, the transformation of ‘Metamorphosis’ and the dehumanisation of the death camps, a linking of nakedness and victimhood, suits and burial. It is Plath who depicts such things most repeatedly, to the greatest degree and with the greatest sense of interconnection. On 11 October 1962, she writes ‘The Applicant’; on 12 October she writes ‘Daddy’, where the suit has become the ‘black shoe’ of the opening lines.13 In ‘The Bee-Meeting’, we find the beekeeping suits, the poet encountering the costumed villagers in her summer dress, becoming clothed as for a rite. The sense of the cultic may be unSartrean, and indeed unPorterlike, but when the narrator asks if it is the ‘hawthorn that smells so sick?’ there is a similar nausea. Suited herself, Plath discovers that the surgeon, ‘the butcher, the grocer, the postman’, and perhaps by implication the nuclear scientist, in their suits look much like one another.14 Plath’s alienation from an objectified physical self extends to her own body: to the head ‘Of Japanese paper’ and ‘golden skin’ of ‘Fever 103˚’, to the thumb wound of ‘Cut’ to ‘Lady Lazarus’ and its ‘Nazi lampshade’ skin and the ‘Jew linen’ of her face.15 What is surprising, cool and detached in the tone frequently comes at those moments of corporeal alienation, with her own body perceived like that of another, at the moment of surprise in objectification. The body is felt more as one object among other objects in the world than as the core of the individual’s own being. Instead of being the core of his true self, the body is felt as the core of a false self, which a detached, disembodied, ‘inner’, ‘true’ self looks on at with tenderness, amusement, or hatred as the case may be.16

The quotation above was not conceived of as commentary on Plath; rather, it comes from R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self, which, published in 1960, brought such Sartrean analysis of objectification into a critique of psychoanalysis which was ultimately to lead to the anti-psychiatry movement. Yet a number of passages in Laing’s book could serve as an introduction to Ariel or, bearing in mind Porter’s clothes, Gunn’s jackets, shells and motorcycles, and Hughes’s beasts, to the early work of those three poets as well: ‘In the 13 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 222. 14 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 211. 15 Plath, Collected Poems, pp. 232, 244. 16 R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, int. Anthony David (London: Penguin, 2010; first published 1960), p. 69.

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following pages’, writes Laing, ‘we shall be concerned specifically with people who experience themselves as automata, as robots, as bits of machinery, or even as animals.’17 These experiences also include petrification, often quite literally the fear of being turned into stone. Laing also examines how patients, along with the fear of being petrified themselves, may see ‘someone else not as a free agent but as an it.’18 In the former case, ‘the very act of experiencing the other as a person is felt as virtually suicidal.’19 For a Plath reader then, encountering The Divided Self can be uncannily like encountering an explication of Plath’s verse: If the individual cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy, and identity of himself and others for granted, then he has to become absorbed in contriving ways of trying to be real, of keeping himself or others alive, of preserving his identity, in efforts as he will often put it, to prevent himself losing himself. What are to most people everyday happenings, which are hardly noticed because they have no special significance, may have become deeply significant in so far as they either contribute to the sustenance of the individual’s being or threaten him with non-being.20

Whether it is the ultra-vivid and intense realm of everyday occurrence, the site of a collapse of the distinction between the disturbed psyche and the world around it or the desire to do something to ‘feel real’, this is recognisably the world of Plath’s later poems. It would have been surprising if no one had noticed the startling aptness of Laing’s descriptions to Plath’s work, and, sure enough, that aptness was picked up early on by David Holbrook (another of Plath’s poetic generation, his poetry was included in both The New Poetry and Penguin Modern Poets 4), first in his 1968 Encounter essay on Laing ‘R.D. Laing & the Death Circuit’,21 and later in his 1976 book, Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence.22 Yet, as Holbrook is otherwise broadly antipathetic to Laing and keen to evaluate Plath by the terms and standards of Laing’s rivals in the psychoanalytical movement, Holbrook does not make as much of the resemblance as he might. 17 Laing, The Divided Self, p. 23. 18 Laing, The Divided Self, p. 46. 19 Laing, The Divided Self, p. 47. 20 R.D. Laing, The Divided Self, p. 42–43. 21 David Holbrook, ‘R.D. Laing & the Death Circuit’, Encounter, Vol. XXXI, No. 2, August 1968, pp. 35–45. 22 David Holbrook, Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence (London: The Athlone Press, 1976).



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To Holbrook’s eyes, Laing offers a diagnosis of phenomena in Plath’s work of which Plath is more or less innocent. Yet Laing’s book was a bestseller. So it is extremely likely that Plath would have been aware of the arguments it advanced.23 Even had she managed to miss a book sure to intrigue her, neo-Sartrean ideas on human psychology were in any case pervasive in the intellectual culture of the time. Plath may not have had that self-conscious interest in Sartre which Gunn had by the late 1950s, but, even if she had done little more than dip into the works themselves, she would still have read and heard Sartre’s ideas discussed repeatedly. This is not to suggest that there is not a profound personal pathology underlying some of these presentations any more than to suggest that knowing about the ideas of Sigmund Freud resolved Plath’s problems with her father. But it is to suggest that, as with that use of Freudianism, there is knowingness and self-pathologisation in her use of such ideas and imagery. Moreover, put in the context of her peers, Plath seems only exceptional in the degree, variety and intensity of the depersonalisations her poetry presents. The mental states were more extreme, but so was the self-awareness. Like her contemporaries, Plath also evinces in her work an implicit but nonetheless felt analogy between the emphasis on the constrictions and depersonalisations of clothing and those of poetic form. As Gunn allied himself with Yvor Winters in the United States and, to a lesser extent, with the Movement back in England, he became more and more interested in formal constriction. Nor was this interest curtailed by his experimentations away from stressed-based metrics: Gunn’s taking on of syllabics, where the discipline is largely compositional, the effect upon the reader diminished, is utterly of a piece with it. Aiming for the effects of free verse, Gunn willed himself to remain unfree, clad in a new black jacket. With Porter, conventional form is for the most part put on, but it is worn with considerable discomfort. Occasionally there are what read like straightforward mistakes or infelicities, but much more often Porter makes use of purposive roughnesses of metre, diction and rhyme that are consonant with the Leavisite taste in roughnesses fostered by Philip Hobsbaum and which also derive from writers in Porter’s own pantheon, such as Rochester. Porter’s blank verse resists the squeeze into ten syllables, and is, at this stage of his development, most characteristic when it moves out towards the hexameter. This can be a sign of rhetorical expansiveness characteristic 23 I have come across more than one critic who appears to be convinced of Plath’s having read Laing, but none has produced evidence to substantiate the claim. Having been unable to track down such evidence myself, I shall merely maintain that I think it extremely probable that she did.

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of the best of his early poems such as ‘The Historians Call Up Pain’ or ‘Soliloquy at Potsdam’, but in stanzaic poems such as ‘Metamorphosis’ the effect of the uneven lines, the near, yet not always quite perfect, rhymes is to let form become its own Daks suit. The mimesis of form in such a case is fairly clear-cut, as it is, I think, in the correlation between cages and formal stricture in the figures of Ted Hughes’s early verse, which imply some primal, dangerous animal self barred in by the civilising inorganic structure it inhabits. As Plath takes on those strange hybrids of formalism and free verse that would be her defining style, the analogies with clothing and bodily appearance are less straightforward. The movement away from traditional metre might be taken as liberating, or at least as undisciplined, yet every effort is made in the arrangement into regularly lined stanzas to give a tightly organised, formal aspect and impression. The poetry is at once suited and dishevelled. Moreover, for a verse describing so much maiming, so many prostheses, the idea of broken feet and metres is peculiarly apposite. The dead metaphors of literary criticism have been brought to life, literalised in verse, dead metaphors which Plath and her contemporaries used habitually. A telling example occurs in Plath’s interview with Peter Orr, when she says that English poetry is ‘in a bit of a straight jacket’, a phrase that implies both formal and social constraint. In her next comment, she explains: There was an essay by Alvarez, the British critic: his arguments about the dangers of gentility in England are very pertinent, very true. I must say that I am not very genteel and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold: the neatness, the wonderful tidiness, which is so evident everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface.24

That is, the English poets of the Movement—the context strongly implies that it is them Plath has in mind—have brought together formal neatness and social nicety. Their poetry exists in the same restrictive clothing, the straitjacket that is used to restrain those deemed dangerous through mental illness. The further use of the term ‘stranglehold’ suggests that with formal constraint comes the restraining of personal violence by institutional and societal force. 24 Sylvia Plath, interview with Peter Orr, 30 October 1962 in The Poet Speaks, interviews with contemporary poets conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press and Ian Scott-Kilvert, ed. Peter Orr, pref. Frank Kermode (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 167–172: p. 168.



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Plath believes that Alvarez has got it right in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. So what metaphorical language can he supply as an alternative? The answer is there in Alvarez’s essay: Where once Lowell tried to externalize his disturbances theologically in Catholicism and rhetorically in certain mannerisms of language and rhythm, he is now, I think, trying to cope with them nakedly, and without evasion. But to walk naked is, of course, no guarantee of achievement in the arts—often the contrary.25

As Alvarez seeks to describe Lowell’s change of style, the approbatory metaphors switch too, to a divesting of the external clothing of language, its mannerism and rhythms. Nevertheless, walking naked is itself an occasion of anxiety since discipline and so forth are still required. Hankered after is an unattainable ideal: the ability both to be and not to be naked. That same mixture of endorsement and worry about what walking naked in poetry might mean is there in Plath. The poems will knowingly take the reader towards nakedness. Yet even as Plath reveals, she withholds a moment where that nakedness could be simply seen and recognised. From the concealing smoke scarves of ‘The Bee Meeting’ to the striptease to the bone and then to nothing in ‘Lady Lazarus’, the clothes are always coming off, yet even when one sees the skin, the process of stripping does not necessarily stop. Nakedness is externalised in the ‘nude/ Verdigris’, of the condor in ‘Death and Co’.26 It becomes wholly human in shape but wholly inanimate in the ‘Naked’ leaning of ‘The Munich Mannequins’.27 Such examples point to the end of a logic implicit in the talk of nakedness in poetry. If rhetoric, language and rhythm as clothing have a new alternative in poetic nakedness, the words on the page must now reveal the naked self, concealing no true self that lies beyond them. That is all there is. The line between artifice and natural life has been erased. Poems are indeed like Munich mannequins or a body, perfect, statue-like and unchanging as in ‘Edge’, poetry which prompts Debora Forbes to point out that Plath ‘asks: is making a formally perfect poem like committing suicide or like living? The answer is more complicated than some of her critics would suggest.’28 25 The New Poetry, p. 29. 26 Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, p. 254. 27 Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, p. 263. 28 Deborah Forbes, Sincerity’s Shadow: Self-Consciousness in British Romantic and Mid-Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 74.

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To recap then, the tendency to figure or literalise the dominant critical metaphors of the time, a tendency very much there in her contemporaries, is particularly pronounced in Plath. Moreover, this tendency, in a poetry of statues or bee-keeping suits, applies even to such a seemingly abstract concept as poetic impersonality, a concept which can easily be depicted in terms of Laingian depersonalisation. With the simplifying wrong-way telescope of hindsight, Plath could be said to have moved from a paradigm of poetic impersonality to a personalised aesthetic of confessionalism or extremism. But in fact many of the intriguing and valuable tensions in her later work proceed from how she is attempting to make use of the material of the latter while still evincing considerable attachment both to the paradigm of the former and to the fashion for the dramatic soliloquy and dramatic monologue, a mode to which she kept returning, even in the last poems of 1963. Discussing those supposedly archetypal confessional poems ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ for the BBC, Plath describes them in terms that were acceptable to Practical Criticism sessions at Cambridge University or Smith College, making clear that the speaker in the poem may be distinguished from the poet herself. This was not, I believe, mere habitual observance of the conventions of the time; it shows a real split, and a strength seldom found in Plath’s followers. Set aside later New Critical accretions and return to the theory of impersonality at source, T.S. Eliot states: It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.29

Plath has, for many, become the figure who completely combines the suffering and the creative mind. Yet, at the same time she does have that detachment from herself, that ability to objectify herself mercilessly and completely. If that is Laingian depersonalisation, it is also exceedingly close to Eliot’s depiction of the poet’s task. Though Plath mentions Alvarez by name just once in the Peter Orr interview, that interview is suffused with the ideas of ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This is in part simply a matter of shared interests—Alvarez’s essay was exploring and extolling issues, approaches and influences she had begun to take up anyway. Plath was a poet who had sat in on Robert 29 T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. and int. Frank Kermode, (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 37–44: p. 41.



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Lowell’s classes along with Anne Sexton and who had no need to be told of new developments in either poet’s work. Likewise, having Ted Hughes for a husband, Plath was more than aware of the power and potential of his poetry. There are, however, good reasons for stating that the influence of The New Poetry’s introduction had a more direct effect upon the course on Plath’s poetic development. Some of these are biographical. As a result of his journalistic advocacy of Hughes’s work, Alvarez had become Hughes’s friend and had got to know Plath a little over the preceding two years. Alvarez met Plath again in June 1962 and on 21 July she sent him the poems ‘Event’ and ‘The Rabbit Catcher’.30 By this stage, Plath must already have known The New Poetry, but its influence becomes clearly discernible only after Plath began meeting Alvarez and reading him her poems upon her London visits, the first of these being on 25–26 September. 31 The weekend Plath met Orr, she also met Alvarez. We have Alvarez’s own testimony that in these meetings Plath would talk of ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’: ‘Apparently, this essay said something she wanted to hear; she spoke of it often and with approval, and was disappointed not to have been included among the poets in the book’. Alvarez goes on to suggest that Plath may have taken comfort that someone was ‘making a critical case for what she was now trying to do.’32 This leaves uncertain whether Plath’s attraction to the essay was simply because it argued for what she was in any case trying to do, or whether it was something of a prompt. This second view is cagily hinted at in the introduction to the second edition of The New Poetry, where Alvarez writes that ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ seemed ‘to respond to some genuine poetic reality and even hit a responsive nerve in one or two serious writers.’33 Alvarez does not say who these serious writers might be, but it is not hard to guess the name of one of them, for Alvarez goes on to declare how it is the work of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath ‘more than anyone else’s’ that ‘makes sense of my introduction’.34 Since Sexton was already proving her confessional

30 See Linda K. Bundtzen, The Other Ariel (Thrupp: Sutton, 2005), p. 45. 31 I establish the dates of Plath and Alvarez’s meeting in ‘“That Alchemical Power”: The Literary Relationship of A. Alvarez and Sylvia Plath’, The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2010, pp. 217–236: pp. 222–223. 32 A. Alvarez, The Savage God (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), pp. 21–22. 33 The New Poetry, p. 18. 34 The New Poetry, p. 18.

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mettle some time before Alvarez was introducing his British anthology, she is unlikely to be the ‘or two’. That Plath is the ‘one’ is a pretty safe bet. These hints amount to an audacious claim, yet it is a claim supported by other facts.35 In the interview with Peter Orr, Plath states that a poet should be able ‘to control and manipulate experiences’, even such terrifying experiences as ‘madness, being tortured’, doing so ‘with an informed and an intelligent mind’, and that this should not be a narcissistic experience but generally relevant, ‘to bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau’. 36 This is pure ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, and the result of causal influence, not merely the result of a coincidence in the outlooks of two writers. Answering set questions from the London Magazine touching upon the same topics earlier that year, Plath’s views may appear similar, but they are less developed. Plath is preoccupied by the ‘genetic effects of fallout’ and ‘big business and the military in America’, yet this influences her poetry in a ‘sidelong fashion’, her poems turning out not to be ‘about Hiroshima’, but about a child forming ‘finger by finger’, not about ‘mass extinction’ but about a moon over a yew tree.37 Plath reckons her poems are ‘deflections’ from such issues but not, she trusts, an avoidance. The earlier response has Plath tentative about how directly relevant the poems are to the political world and mass trauma, and about the extent to which they express it. Come the October interview, the correlation between personal experience and mass trauma is exact, the material handled; extreme personal experiences match up to the world. Between these two interviews, of course, came new poems. The October voice is of a poet no longer feeling her way towards handling such matters, it is the voice of one deploying them with confidence. Poems Plath could cite to back this up, such as ‘Daddy’, ‘Fever 103˚’ or ‘Lady Lazarus’, had been written that October, that is, in the very month since she had first read her poems to Alvarez and was preparing to visit him again, and the month of excited mentions in her letters of his interest in her work. On 25 October, Sylvia writes to Warren and Maggie Plath of how delighted she is that A. Alvarez, ‘the opinion-maker in poetry over here’, will be devoting his afternoon to hearing her read her new poems and that Alvarez says she is ‘the first woman poet he’ has taken seriously since Emily Dickinson (a remark that appears to forget Alvarez’s evident admiration for the work of Marianne

35 I make this case fully in ‘That Alchemical Power’, pp. 222–223. 36 Sylvia Plath in The Poet Speaks, pp. 168–169. 37 London Magazine, February 1962, p. 45.



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Moore).38 That same day she was writing to her mother accusing her of shying away from the hardest things, citing Hiroshima, the Inquisition and Belsen as examples.39 The 25th of October is also the day Plath wrote ‘The Tour’. If ever there were a poem tilting at the gentility principle, it is this address to that perennial symbol of genteel respectability, the maiden aunt. From late September 1962 on Plath becomes not merely less genteel than the English/Movement norm, but is gentility’s noisy adversary. Almost directly after her return from the London meeting with Alvarez there are ‘tits/ On mermaids’ in ‘The Courage of Shutting Up’, which is dated 2 October.40 These, paradoxically, may owe something to Philip Larkin and the ‘figurehead with golden tits’ in ‘Next, Please’.41 However, soon comes the very unLarkinish use of language and ungenteel subject matter of such poems as ‘Lesbos’, which deliberately overturn domesticity into viciousness and squalor. There is also an increased violence of tone and imagery. Most particularly, there is the link forged between facing an uncomfortable range of personal emotions and dealing with mass horror. There are no poems which answer the call of ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ more overtly than the two with which Alvarez chose to begin Plath’s selection in the revised version of The New Poetry, ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Daddy’.42 The personal demons, the primitive psychological drives which might parallel, and be connected to, modern mass-traumas, in particular the Holocaust, are there, as is the strong, unfettered voice confronting not just that trauma but also the reader as it gives its harrowing performance. Indeed, the close of ‘Daddy’ pushes the spirit of ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ to its furthest conclusion, in Plath’s use of the word ‘bastard’ to unfather her father as she unfathers herself, and in the way it follows Alvarez’s belief that in so far as violence and psychology are concerned, ‘makers of horror films are more in tune with contemporary anxiety than most of the English poets’.43 By the time of the poem’s vampire ending, the 38 Sylvia Plath, letter to Warren and Maggie Plath, 25 October 1962, Letters Home, selected and edited with commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), p. 476. 39 Robin Peel, Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics (Cranbury, NJ, London and Ontario: Associated University Presses, 2002) p. 253. 40 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 210. 41 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London and Hull: Faber and Faber and the Marvell Press, 1988), p. 52. 42 The New Poetry, pp. 61–66. 43 The New Poetry, p. 27.

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genuine horror of the earlier poem is teetering on the edge of black comedy and exhilaration at having gone so far beyond good taste and proportion, so far beyond gentility. A peculiar feature of the argumentation of ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ is the way it collapses the psychology of the contemporary moment with that of the Second World War, the death camps and Hiroshima. Why diagnose the crises experienced by Anglophone society of the 1960s and its poets as if they were contemporaneous with the tragedies of the generation of those poets’ parents and older siblings? There are different answers. Some are the personal ones we have already touched on: Alvarez’s marital breakdown and suicide attempt were accompanied by an increased preoccupation with the camps. Other answers are general and political. The Eichmann trial meant that wartime atrocity was once more the stuff of the daily news. The arms race and hostile relations between Russia and America made the atomic bombs dropped on Japan appear a horrid foretaste of what was about to come. Equally pertinent was what Alvarez had been reading. Alvarez’s ideas on mass evils and mass psychology are more or less a précis of arguments in Erich Kahler’s 1958 study The Tower and the Abyss, cited by Alvarez in ‘The Fate of the Platypus’ in its year of publication.44 Even the use Alvarez makes of the findings of Bruno Bettelheim echoes similar use made of them by Kahler.45 Kahler writes: Terror reaches its peak of success when the victim loses his awareness of the gulf between himself and his tormentors. With the complete breakdown of the personality the most primitive historical force, imitation, becomes openly prevalent in the dehumanized atmosphere of totalitarianism. This ultimate stage in regression is described by Dr. Bettelheim: ‘A prisoner had reached the final stage of adjustment to the camp situation when he had changed his personality so as to accept as his own the values of the Gestapo …’46

For Kahler, mass evil accompanies ‘mass society’; the more personalised atrocities of the past have given way to the depersonalised atrocities of present western democracies and their consumer societies. The existential psychology of The Divided Self would diagnose

44 A. Alvarez, ‘The Fate of the Platypus’, in Beyond All This Fiddle (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1968), pp. 59–66: p. 65. 45 Erich Kahler, The Tower and the Abyss or The Transformation of Man (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958). 46 Kahler, The Tower and the Abyss, p. 67.



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schizophrenics unable to cope in society as suffering from dissociation; Kahler diagnoses modern society as suffering from schizophrenia: The frightening new feature in modern atrocities is exactly the lack of such personal focus in which conflicting faculties can still cohere. The split in personality reaches into unfathomable depths, it is total, it is consummate schizophrenia. … [T]he part that commits atrocities seems wholly impersonal and, accordingly, in-human in the literal sense of the word; indeed we should rather call it a-human.47

This incongruity turns into schizophrenia when it establishes itself within the human mind. Traces of such happenings are observable everywhere in modern life, in modern warfare in particular, but this state of mind assumed monstrous proportions under the impact of Nazi indoctrination. In Kahler, then, we have a sentiment that is also expressed in Laing when he asserts: It is well known that temporary states of dissociation of the self from the body occur in normal people. In general, one can say that it is a reason that appears to be available to most people who find themselves enclosed within a threatening experience from which there is no physical escape. Prisoners in concentration camps tried to feel that way, for the camp offered no possible way out either spatially or at the end of a period of time. The only way out was by a psychical withdrawal ‘into’ one’s self and ‘out of’ the body.48

Notwithstanding such overlaps, there are differences between Laing and Kahler. For Laing, there is little other than mental escape in extremis to recommend such dissociation. But Kahler at times appears to portray dissociation as a sort of psychic heroism, as when he quotes Ernst Jünger’s essay Über den Schmerz: a person can only maintain himself and prove himself worthy if he does not try to evade or push away pain but sustains it, faces it, and establishes distance from it; if he is able to place himself beyond the zone of pain, even of sensation, if he is able to treat that region of the self where he participated in pain, that is, the body, as an object.

Such notions informed ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. They would likewise inform Alvarez’s appreciative critiques of Sylvia Plath’s work. In between, it 47 Kahler, The Tower and the Abyss, p. 77. 48 R.D. Laing, The Divided Self, p. 69.

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would be fair to surmise, they would also have informed Alvarez and Plath’s conversations. At some level, the fact that Alvarez was of Jewish and Plath of German stock must have played a role in their relationship. Questions of appropriation were being voiced. Alvarez was to object successfully to what he maintained was an unjustified inclusion of the Japanese bomb victims in the original version of ‘Lady Lazarus’.49 That a Jewish critic ultimately approved of what she was writing must have helped convince Plath of the probity of her use of the Holocaust as subject matter and correlative. But if problems of cultural specifics and legitimacy of voice were not wholly neglected by Plath and Alvarez, the ideas Alvarez was discussing formed a framework of apprehension that stressed both the universalisation and individualisation of the conception of mass atrocity. By the standards of this framework, the commonly made accusation that Plath misappropriated the experience of the victims of concentration camps by equating their great suffering to her private pains—however true it may be as a charge if her work is judged by other standards—simply isn’t pertinent: the psychic process and the relation between the private and public are identical and tie into a wider analysis of modern mass ‘totalitarian’ society and its psychology. Whether Plath herself read the various works of Laing, Kahler, or indeed Alvarez’s other great source, Hannah Arendt, with great attention, or even at all, does not greatly matter. She was getting enough of them in concentrated form from talking to Alvarez, from reading ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ and from the many pieces of popular and specialised neo-Sartrean analysis of the time. Still, to read Kahler and Arendt is suddenly to be thrust into the world of ‘Lady Lazarus’, even to guess why the poem may have been so called. For Arendt: We attempt to understand the behavior of concentration-camp inmates and SS-men psychologically, when the very thing that must be realized is that psyche can be destroyed even without the destruction of the physical man; that indeed, psyche, character, and individuality seem under certain circumstances to express themselves only through the rapidity or slowness with which they disintegrate. The end result in any case is inanimate men, i.e., men who can no longer be psychologically understood, whose return to the psychologically or otherwise intelligibly human world closely resembles the resurrection of Lazarus. … The reduction of a man to a bundle of reactions separates him as radically as mental disease from everything within him that

49 See Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 16.



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is personality or character. When, like Lazarus, he rises from the dead, he finds his personality or character unchanged, just as he had left it. 50

The parallels with ‘Lady Lazarus’ are clear enough. The following description, from Kahler, which sets the camps alongside the processes of objectification pursued by the modern media and modern consumerism, is likewise a fair summary of some of the poem’s contents: The interrogation of terrified Jews as a feature of the radio, the mailing of the ashes of murdered people by parcel post, the use of human bones, fats and hair for the manufacturing of fertilizers, soap and mattresses, of tattooed human skin for lampshades and handbags, the setting up of advertising posters next to the extermination camps by the firms which furnished installations—all such combinations of things human, of death and suffering which, throughout history, have been surrounded by awe and ritual cultivation, with the mechanized processes of modern industry and technology and the exploitation of matter which they imply —all this reflects the same weirdly incoherent form of human behaviour, which, I contend, made its first appearance in our epoch.51

Whatever personal disturbances may have helped occasion it, Plath’s poetry held the burden of such interpretative accounts spectacularly well. And, as such accounts have greatly lessened their influence, it has become the case that readers and critics have understood less of that original intellectual burden and the assumptions that went with it, even as they have seemed to see the truths of Plath’s work more starkly. Kahler, Arendt, the Laing of The Divided Self deal with the extreme and terrible but, for the most part, do so in more or less measured tones. The other crucial intellectual debt shown by Alvarez in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ and in the Review debate is to the work of a writer who, while sharing ideas with Kahler, Arendt and Laing, including a large debt to existentialism, is more histrionic in those ideas’ portrayal: Norman Mailer. In his 1957 essay The White Negro, Mailer observes: ‘Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these

50 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: George Allen and Unwin 1951; enlarged edition 1958), p. 441. 51 Kahler, The Tower and the Abyss, p. 76.

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years’.52 Nevertheless, the familiar question is posed: ‘if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?’ This leads Mailer to conclude: whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention, the life where a man must go until he is beat, where he must gamble with his energies through all those small or large crises of courage and unforeseen situations which beset his day, where he must be with it or doomed not to swing.53

Reading past the intellectual hep talk, with Mailer the response to mass horror and existential alienation is, besides taking on the symptoms of insanity, the need to be physically daring. The appeal of this to Alvarez the critic at his typewriter must have been greatly intensified by its appeal to Alvarez the man who drove an E-Type jaguar, played high-stakes poker and was a dedicated rock climber. In years to come, such pursuits would feed into Alvarez’s literary criticism, not least into his habit of using metaphors that value speed and risk taking.54 With writing such as Mailer’s, extolling danger seeking as the appropriate response to the age, there must have seemed little reason to think its terms were inappropriate. For all their importance, neither Alvarez nor his intellectual sources gave a clear blueprint for the poems Plath was producing in autumn 1962. Indeed, when he first heard ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’, Alvarez was ‘appalled’ at how these seemed to be less poetry than ‘assault and battery’.55 But he and they encouraged them, gave them licence. To judge from the large number of rejection letters she received, Plath needed all the support she could get. Moreover, at the right moment in Plath’s personal and poetic development, The New Poetry presented a challenge. It had an introduction in tune with her sensibility, while at the same time excluding her and championing her estranged husband. After such undesired exclusion, few poets have the

52 Norman Mailer, The White Negro (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1957), no page numbers. 53 Mailer, The White Negro. 54 I discuss this at length, and give a number of examples in my essay ‘“That Alchemical Power”: The Literary Relationship of A. Alvarez and Sylvia Plath’. 55 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 15.



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chance to then prove themselves to an editor. Plath wholeheartedly took advantage of the opportunity. When commenting on Plath’s poetry at one of their meetings, A. Alvarez singled out ‘Ariel’ for particular praise, calling it ‘the best thing she had done’. A ‘few days later’, he writes, she sent him a copy of it, ‘carefully written out in her heavy, rounded script, and illuminated like a medieval manuscript with flowers and ornamental squiggles.’56 The fair copy of the poem in the Alvarez Archive of the British museum looks less like a medieval manuscript than a prize piece of schoolwork written to impress a favourite teacher.57 Alvarez was to comment on ‘Ariel’: ‘You are made to feel the horse’s physical presence, but not to see it. The detail is all inward. It is as though the horse itself were an emotional state.’58 It is ‘about what happens when the potential violence of the animal is unleashed. And also the violence of the rider.’59 Alvarez’s appraisal is of a ‘curiously “substanceless”’ poem as close to abstract expressionist art as words are likely to be.60 It has captured the violence of the poet, as well as that of the animal. It is all speed, risk and daring. As well as being what would generally appeal to Alvarez, ‘Ariel’ answers his taste rather more specifically. Heather Clark notes the similarity between Plath’s evocations of horses and two poems in Ted Hughes’s The Hawk in the Rain: ‘Horses’ and ‘Phaetons’.61 She does not, however, mention a horse poem from Lupercal, which has quite as many, if not rather more, correspondences with ‘Ariel’ and other later Plath poems—the poem Alvarez singles out for appreciative analysis in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, ‘A Dream of Horses’. Both poems are about horses and the riding of them, capturing the dawn hour and the speed of the horses; they share details: the repeated emphasis upon the horses’ eyes, the suicidal way ‘we’ ‘longed for a death trampled by such horses’.62 Both poems too have an apocalyptic ending, Hughes’s closes: ‘If but doomsday’s flames be great horses,/ The forever itself a circling of the hooves of horses.’63 56 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 15. 57 Alvarez Papers, British Library, Add 88589. 58 A. Alvarez, ‘Sylvia Plath’, in Beyond All This Fiddle (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1968), pp. 45–58: p. 50. 59 Alvarez, ‘Sylvia Plath’, p. 50. 60 Alvarez, ‘Sylvia Plath’, p. 50. 61 Heather L. Clark, ‘Tracking the Thought-Fox: Sylvia Plath’s Revision of Ted Hughes’, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2005, pp. 100–112. 62 Ted Hughes, ‘A Dream of Horses’, as quoted in Alvarez, The New Poetry, p. 31. 63 The New Poetry, p. 31.

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Given the couple’s disintegrating marriage and the fact that Plath had only recently found her full voice as a poet, one might have expected a straightforward rejection of Hughes’s aesthetic. But ‘Ariel’, which appears to have mixed Plath’s sedate regular horse riding with an incident involving a runaway horse while she was at Cambridge, takes on and outstrips qualities admired in Hughes’s poem.64 According to ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, Hughes’s horses are more urgent, violent, more impending in their presence than Larkin’s; Hughes gives us vital ‘sharp details’, the horses ‘reach back, as in a dream, to a nexus of fear and sensation. Their brute world is part physical, part state of mind.’65 Still, if the race between the two poems has a winner, that winner is by no means clear. Larkin’s poem ‘is more skilful’; Hughes’s is, by his own standards, not all that good. Not only do some of the trappings verge on the pretentious, it is also ‘less controlled than Larkin’s’.66 Alvarez’s ideal poem would provide the virtues of the two. And this is what Plath offers in ‘Ariel’. ‘A Dream of Horses’ may come across as powerful and speedy when compared to ‘At Grass’; in comparison with ‘Ariel’, it, like the other horse poems cited by Heather Clark, seems more passive. Plath’s is a poem of fully awake morning, Hughes’s is but a dream, dreamed by those who ‘sleep still’ and who only talk about ‘what horses ail’.67 Plath, to use Alvarez’s description of Hughes, has responded with a poem which is ‘unquestionably about something; it is a serious attempt to re-create and so clarify, unfalsified and in the strongest imaginative terms possible, a powerful complex of emotions and sensations.’ She has taken the very poem Alvarez used to show the direction in which he would like poetry to go, divested it of quasi-medieval trappings and pretentiousness and made it more controlled. No doubt Plath’s thought processes were not as calculating as this account makes them sound; good poems are unlikely to be the result of coldly figuring out what will please an editor. Nevertheless, the fact that this poem was written two days after the letter to her mother that enthused over meeting Alvarez again, a letter 64 Anne Stevenson calls the horse ‘elderly’. Anne Stevenson with additional material by Lucas Myers, Dido Merwin and Richard Murphy, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 272. Plath was not an experienced rider and, according to Kate Moses, who interviewed Plath’s riding teacher, she was not skilled enough to gallop in October 1962. See Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—A Marriage (New York: Viking Press, 2003), p. 327. 65 The New Poetry, p. 31. 66 The New Poetry, p. 31. 67 The New Poetry, p. 30.



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full of the message of ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, and indeed on the verge of spending the afternoon with Alvarez to read him new poems, does indicate that such factors helped shape the poem, even if at no more than a subconscious level. ‘Ariel’ is one of the great rivalrous poems of an extremely rivalrous age. A further poem which Clark identifies as being influenced by Hughes’s horse poems, ‘Years’, also picks up the repeated ‘hooves’ from ‘A Dream of Horses’. Here the cult of speed is even more pronounced, showing us ‘The piston in motion’ as well as the ‘hooves of horses’.68 With no time for Christ the tiger, Plath asks of ‘Stasis—/ what is so great in that?’ apparently wishing to undo even the moment of stasis with which ‘Ariel’ had begun. Plath has watched Hughes up close; she has also seen Thom Gunn from a distance and she too has learned to tire of Eliotic lessons in sitting still. Come the autumn of 1962, Plath and Alvarez are speaking the same language, and one of its most important words is ‘control’. The Peter Orr interview finds Plath speaking of how one should be able ‘to control and manipulate’ even the most terrifying of ‘experiences with an informed and intelligent mind’, before going on to echo The New Poetry’s talk of the psyche, Hiroshima and the Holocaust.69 ‘Control’ also crops up in the verse itself, being specifically mentioned in ‘Stings’, where Plath writes, ‘It is almost over./ I am in control’.70 The question of whether or not Plath is in control in these poems has occasioned much spilling of ink. But the most useful way of thinking about the question is given in the title essay of Beyond All This Fiddle, where Alvarez attempts to characterise the way situations and feelings are handled in her late poetry: ‘It is an art like that of a racing driver drifting a car: the art of keeping precise control over something which, to the outsider, seems utterly beyond all control.’ 71 The speeding simile implies that, yes, the art looks out of control to the audience, but the poet/racing driver knows what she is doing. The analogy has limitations: we are justified in reckoning a driver knows her business because on repeated occasions she does not crash; the absence of crashing is less self-evident in a poem. Nevertheless, what the simile ultimately suggests (and what I think is implied if we return to the riding of ‘Ariel’) is the exhilaration of being not quite out of control, having the expertise to set things up so that they nearly

68 Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, p. 255. 69 Alvarez, ‘Sylvia Plath’, p. 52. 70 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 214. 71 A. Alvarez, ‘Beyond All This Fiddle’, Beyond All This Fiddle (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1968), pp. 4–21: p. 16.

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crash but do not. That is not control per se, but that isn’t exactly what is being figured. And that, rather than the more straightforward exertion of control, is what we get in the poems. Time and again in the autumn poems, the wild and dangerous—whether bees or horses or human emotion and experience—is half, and only half, tamed. For taming is wanted only to a degree: it is closeness to a lack of control that excites. The price for that is signs of hastiness, notably the excessive use of repetition and the over-reliance on stock words and images (hooks, for instance). The control of riding at speed has become an enabling metaphor for the poems’ peculiar mixture of looseness with traditional elements of technical skill. It is like Patrick Cruttwell’s description of a ‘poem like the Second Anniversarie, or a play like King Lear, [which] maintains, but only just maintains, control over the clashing elements which compose it. Chaos is very near; its nearness, but its avoidance, gives the poetry its force. And the poetry delights in it’.72 Plath wrote in a letter of June 1962 how she and Hughes, who broadcast on Keith Douglas that year, regarded the Second World War poet as a ‘lovely big brother’ to them.73 What she and Hughes seem to have found in Douglas’s poetry was what Alvarez had encouraged and was now responding to in her own. Introducing an edition of Douglas’s Selected Poems in 1964, Hughes describes how Douglas ‘renews the simplicity of ordinary talk … infusing every word with a burning exploratory freshness of mind—partly impatience, partly exhilaration at speaking the forbidden thing, partly sheer casual ease of penetration.’ 74 This ‘new language’ has an ‘air of improvisation’ that is a ‘vital part of its purity’; while having the ‘trenchancy of inspired jotting’, it also ‘leaves no doubt about the completeness and subtlety of his impressions’.75 Returning to such themes in the introduction to a 1987 edition of Douglas, Hughes borrows from Alvarez again, praising Douglas’s ‘effort to confront reality undeluded … and yet maintain detachment and self-control. Each line gives a strong impression of acrobatic balance involving the whole body: a feat of graceful, outer balance improvised over

72 Patrick Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment and its Place in the Poetry of the 17th Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954; second impression 1970), p. 113. 73 Sylvia Plath, letter to Aurelia Plath, 7 June 1962, Letters Home, p. 456. 74 Keith Douglas, Selected Poems, ed. and intr. Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), pp. 12–13. 75 Douglas, Selected Poems, p. 13.



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a pit of turbulent, inner, psychic unbalance.’ 76 Given that Alvarez partly arrived at such terms in response to Hughes’s own early work, Hughes may well be indulging in would-be self-description here. Yet, were his words not about Douglas, one would naturally think not of Hughes but of Plath. Nineteen sixty-two witnessed Plath’s becoming newly serious. In ‘Three Women’, written in March, so just before the publication of The New Poetry, the seriousness is academic: a black college gown is a ‘little funeral’ which ‘shows I am serious’.77 There is no apparent love of death in these lines; this old seriousness is stifling and with its dark garb goes an implied personal inauthenticity. ‘A Birthday Present’, dated 29 September, just after Plath first visited Alvarez to read him her poems, treats seriousness very differently. If the birthday present were ‘death’, ‘I’ would then ‘know you were serious’.78 No longer academic, this new seriousness backs up authenticity of statement with the promise of death as guarantor. Plath remains a theatrical, rhetorical poet: scarcely less so than members of the Group. But while a poem like ‘Lady Lazarus’ is acutely conscious of itself as performance, if dying is ‘an art’, it is also done so that it ‘feels real’.79 Indeed, the peculiar effectiveness of Plath’s later poetry stems in part from its strange combination of the autobiographical and confessional and the performative, in serious and unserious registers. The very fascination of Plath for the reader, and one of the reasons she is so much more intriguing than common portrayals would suggest, is that she is at once the most and least authentic of writers. Yes, she incorporates the intimately biographical and emotionally raw, but her poses, her dances of the seven veils also betoken an inauthenticity as unsettling as the authenticity with which she is supposedly synonymous. ‘Dying/ Is an art, like everything else’ would suggest not that Plath’s work escapes art and artifice, but that there is no delimiting their domain.80 Something that ‘feels real’ is, logic implies, potentially not so. Plath’s display is theatrical, but it also transfers the body from subject into objects and absences. Plath’s very offhandedness, her failure to be serious in the book-lugging collegiate manner, becomes an indicator that she is newly serious, that her statements are authentic and personal. There is a good deal in the 76 Ted Hughes, introduction to the second edition, reproduced in Keith Douglas, The Complete Poems, ed. Desmond Graham (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. xix. 77 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 185. 78 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 208. 79 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 245. 80 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 245.

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later poems that is grimly funny. That Plath could introduce ‘Daddy’ to Alvarez as ‘light verse’ betokens its incorporation of some characteristic formal elements of light verse, but also a consciousness of a curious double motion.81 In order to become more serious in one way, to face the full range of experience unblinkingly, she would need to become less seriousness in others, cognisant of the fact that many of the standard modes and formulae associated with seriousness in literature were indeed standard: dull and somewhat inauthentic, the clichés of seriousness. In such terms, the old seriousness could therefore be equated with a sort of gentility. Moreover, since Plath’s father was an academic, such old seriousness was very literally a patriarchal discourse. Experience was also growing disenchanted with that seriousness that was being admired by Philip Larkin and J.L. Austin from afar, causing a lack of respect for it and for forms endowed with the seriousness of prior practice, authority and tradition. The stilted jogtrot of light verse could be tied to the barefoot run of everyday speech and high emotion in order to make apparent faltering poetic and societal artifice; the ‘oo’ sounds played through ‘Daddy’ could be at once the sound of fearsome repetition compulsion and language of the infant id, and the rickety formality repressing it. In her own marriage ceremony, Plath would not have said ‘I do I do’, as she does in the poem. First, because she doubles it, appearing to mimic the moment in the service where the vicar is responded to by both bride and groom; second, because, like Austin, she appears to misremember ‘I will’ as ‘I do’. That this is not merely a felicity is shown by the similar parodic repetition that occurs in the last line of ‘The Applicant’, when ‘Will you marry it?’ decays into a repetition of its final two words.82 Plath was commissioned to review Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry by the BBC Third programme. The book’s editorial presence was notably more relaxed than that of The New Poetry, and neither its format nor its introduction has Alvarez’s fighting spirit. Black Mountain and New York poets, Robert Bly and Louis Simpson, as well as the best of the academic formalists, it seems, all have something valid to contribute to the rich melting pot of modern American verse. Such, however, is not quite the impression given by Plath’s review. This makes Hall’s book sound like The New Poetry’s American cousin. Lowell is the defining new poet; he has dropped the ‘flashing elaborate carapace’ of Lord Weary’s Castle for ‘walking the tightrope naked’ in Life Studies; the defining piece of furniture for the

81 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 15. 82 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 222.



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new poetry is the psychoanalyst’s couch.83 Moreover, Plath maintains, one can hear the new spirit similar to Lowell’s in American verse in the work of a number of different poets: in Louis Simpson, James Wright and Robert Bly, all of whom she quotes. Plath asks whether it is a coincidence that ‘so many American poets should all at once cast off the old stiff suits of early styles?’; the stripping of these different poets becomes at one with the Lowellian revolution.84 They too possess the ‘quiet, colloquial, laconic, wry’ voice, an inclination to solipsism, inwardness and the ‘claustrophobic flow of nightmare and the startlements of free association’.85 Deliberately or not, but certainly tellingly, Plath has misread or misrepresented Hall’s introduction, in which Hall explicitly denies that Lowell’s Life Studies is either particularly novel or generally significant: we could argue that the movement which Robert Lowell typifies, from Lord Weary’s Castle to Life Studies is only a movement from one style of the twenties to another, from Allen Tate to William Carlos Williams, and that it is retrospective. If it makes it new, it makes in new within Lowell only.86

The one note Hall does find in American verse that is ‘genuinely new’ and relevant to more than one poet is to be found not in Lowell but in lines such as Robert Bly’s ‘In small towns/ the houses are built right on the ground’ or Louis Simpson’s ‘These houses built of wood sustain/ Colossal snows/ And the light above the street is sick of death’.87 In such notes Hall discerns ‘the imagination is irrational yet the poem is usually quiet’ without ‘straining for apocalypse’; ‘there is an inwardness to these images, a profound subjectivity. Yet they are not subjective in the autobiographical manner of Life Studies or Heart’s Needle which are confessional and particular.’88 Instead these correspond to the ‘objective life of shared experience and knowledge.’89 Fed back through Plath’s review, Hall’s anthology becomes a description of Plath’s later poems. Confronted once again by her absence from an anthology, Plath describes a book in which her verse would be both included 83 Sylvia Plath, ‘New Comment’, The Spoken Word, recorded and broadcast 10 January 1962, BBC, British Library, Compact Disc, NSACD 71. 84 Plath, ‘New Comment’. 85 Plath, ‘New Comment’. 86 Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Donald Hall (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 24. 87 Quoted in Plath ‘New Comment’. 88 Plath, ‘New Comment’. 89 Plath, ‘New Comment’.

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and exemplary—to an eerie extent, for the poetry she chooses to quote is startlingly reminiscent of her own lines. When Plath quotes and approves of ‘My black shoes stand on the floor/ Like two open graves’, from Robert Bly’s ‘Sunday in Glastonbury’, one cannot but note the similarity to, for instance, the shoe in ‘Daddy’.90 With the passage she quotes from Louis Simpson’s ‘There Is’, some of the similarity may be less a coincidence than a result of the influence of the poems Plath was reading for review upon her. It is not simply that the lines ‘the air is filled with Eros, whispering./ Eyes, mouths,’ show disembodiments and quiet description close to that contained in a number of Plath poems of 1962–63;91 it is how these follow Simpson’s description of how the ‘mannequins stare at me scornfully’, ‘pretending’ to be ‘in earnest’ in the manner of ‘The Munich Mannequins’, a poem Plath was not to date as completed until 28 January, suggests such influence, as indeed does that poem’s talk of setting ‘Down shoes for a polish of carbon’ that will be worn tomorrow brings to mind Bly’s lines.92 Plath’s review of Hall’s anthology shows Plath staying true to much of the agenda of The New Poetry and, indeed, continuing to read its words through, and in spite of, some of the words of the book that was actually in front of her. At the same time, the manner of her misrepresentations does suggest a shift in her relationship to the earlier anthology. The poem which captures this in process is the last of Plath’s riding poems, ‘Sheep in Fog’. Here, suddenly, the cult of motion is abandoned: the train is ‘slow’, the hooves are become ‘dolorous bells’ and Plath, who finds herself disappointing her audience of ‘People or stars’, has bones which ‘hold a stillness’.93 This disenchantment with the cult of speed and motion may have accompanied a disenchantment with the man who had helped inspire it. ‘Sheep in Fog’ is dated 2 December 1962 and 28 January 1963, and was revised into its final, slowed version on the latter. Plath saw Alvarez for the last time on 24 December 1962. If the final phase of Plath’s work is much more about stillness, much less obviously in tune with Alvarez’s aesthetic, this appears to be, at least in part, because of personal disappointment. In his memoir The Savage God, Alvarez recalls that, on leaving Plath on Christmas Eve, ‘I knew I had let her down in some final and unforgivable way.’94 Recent years have seen Alvarez, understandably reticent closer to the time, become more

90 Contemporary American Poetry, p. 139 91 Contemporary American Poetry, p. 102. 92 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 263. 93 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 262. 94 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 48.



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forthcoming about this, implying that Plath had romantic feelings for him which he avoided and, by implication, rejected.95 Whatever personal and physical attraction Alvarez may or may not have held for Plath, the poems Plath wrote between the end of September 1962 and December of that year do show evidence of at least a literary infatuation. ‘Letter in November’, dated 11 November 1962, was first sent to Alvarez through the post with a rose petal, perhaps as a romantic gesture reminiscent of Assia Wevill’s declaration of love for Ted Hughes.96 The poem itself apostrophises ‘Love’. Nevertheless, precisely how the poem relates to Alvarez, beyond possibly describing being in love with him, is not immediately easy to fathom. The love addressed at the beginning and end of the poem is, at its most bodily, isolated and celibate, and it is not love for Alvarez nor for any living being, but for a wall of old corpses and for ‘history’ that is declared as the poem unfolds. The poem’s symbolism is derived from alchemy. Plath’s decision to highlight this in her notes for a BBC recording would suggest that she was, in part, thinking about the al-chemistry of Al Alvarez.97 The way the poem lets the leaden ultimately turn to gold, the movement from one colour to the next, suggests that Plath’s interest in the alchemical process and its connection to Alvarez had considerably more significance than a private pun. David Punter has observed: Suicide is the last and most extreme of uncreative acts or perhaps we should say it is simply the most desperate, it is the end—the goal, the perfection and the closure—of alchemy, the final and fatal attempt to convert the dross and base metal of quotidian life into the blushing silver of rapture, memory and reputation: it is an attempt to strike out beyond the world through a movement within and a movement without time: ‘without’ in the sense of the

95 Janet Malcolm writes that Alvarez ‘confirmed that it was Plath herself he didn’t want’, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (London: Granta, 2005), p. 121. In Where Did It All Go Right Alvarez talks of Plath’s wanting ‘someone to live with and take care of her’, but that he loved her ‘the way I loved other friends’; furthermore, he had just met the woman who was to be his second wife, p. 206, see also pp. 208–209. See also Vanessa Thorpe, ‘I failed her. I was 30 and stupid’, Observer, 19 March 2000. 96 Middlebrook, Her Husband, p. 204. See also, Ronald Hayman, The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (Stroud: Sutton, 2003), p. 184. 97 Such certainly is the impression given by the introduction to ‘Letter in November’ Plath wrote for the BBC. British library, Box 88589, Plath Manuscript for BBC Reading, p. 20.

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purported possibility of removal to a higher sphere, ‘within’ in the sense of history, an attempt to move beyond the petty disregardings and slights of the present and find an ecstatic salvation beyond the grave.98

Punter does not refer to ‘Letter in November’, though he does go on to refer to Plath, yet his words give us a very tenable reading of the poem. The more positively one regards some aspects of ‘Letter in November’, the more negative others appear. Critics have portrayed the allusion to Thermopylae as not so different from the other horrors of history in Plath’s poems.99 Yet Thermopylae has traditionally been seen as a site of heroism, more particularly of the doomed heroism of the 300 Spartans. The poem sets itself up in implicit comparison with Robert Lowell’s ‘Pigeons’, the very free adaptation of Rilke dedicated to Hannah Arendt that closes his Imitations, a poem which also invokes the hoplites of Thermopylae, and in which a poet addresses a critic and cultural commentator (and comrade in arms) of the opposite sex, a comparison that Alvarez at least should have picked up on straight away.100 ‘Letter in November’ portrays dying as a matter of virtue and daring; but there are strong hints of the war hero being equated with the doomed artist, Plath alone, ‘Squelching through the beautiful red’.101 ‘Walking the wastehigh wet’ seems the last moment of the valiant fighter wading blood.102 If she is ‘stupidly’ happy, this may be partly love, partly the loveliness of the orchard, but it may also be because Plath is happy to die as heroes die. Plath portrays herself as a survivor, but not one likely to breathe long. In these circumstances, ‘Love’ is felt for artistic transformation, history, death and the gold fruit of posterity, all of which Alvarez did, in fact, help secure for Plath after her suicide. Within a week of Plath’s death, Alvarez’s ‘A Poet’s Epitaph’ was published in the Observer on 17 February 1963. Perhaps uniquely, this piece was at once an obituary, a first attempt to bestow upon a poet high critical standing and a first showing of examples of the work that would justify esteem. Three of the poems included (‘Edge’, ‘Contusion’, ‘The Fearful’ and ‘Kindness’) were less than three weeks old, two of them less than a fortnight. 98 David Punter, Rapture: Literature, Addiction, Secrecy (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic, 2009), p. 193. 99 See, for instance, Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (London: Faber, 2001), pp. 173–174. 100 Robert Lowell, Imitations (London: Farrar and Strauss and Giroux, 1961), p. 149. 101 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 254. 102 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 254.

PA R T I I I

C hapter N ine

Going to Extremes

A

t the time of publication of the 1966 edition of The New Poetry, the preponderance and success of A. Alvarez’s taste were lapping their high watermark. The cover, a photographic reproduction of Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist painting ‘Convergence’, now looked an ideal match for the vision set out in the book’s introduction.1 But, in comparison to four years before, so too did a much larger proportion of the book’s poems. Peter Porter was included, as were George MacBeth and David Wevill; so too were Jon Silkin, whose ‘Poem for my Son’ is as raw an elegy as one is likely to encounter, and Ian Hamilton, whose pared down, intense and pain-filled lyricism owes something to A. Alvarez’s friendship and influence. Most importantly, the new edition contained the later poems of Sylvia Plath. These, like the poems of Anne Sexton, were placed in the admonitory American section of the book, and, above all others poems included, appeared to vindicate the call of its introduction. Yet if it was Plath’s work that best justified Alvarez’s advocacy of a way of writing and its possibilities, her suicide could appear to signify their dangers. How the excellence of the former does or does not connect to the tragedy of the latter exercised critics from the moment Plath’s death and her last poems became known, and well before the Plath biography industry made the link between life and art seem inevitable. In his BBC tribute to Plath, later published as an essay in Ian Hamilton’s Review, Alvarez was the first critic to assess Plath properly, and his judgments 1 The cover image, in all probability the choice of Tony Godwin, has been described by A. Alvarez as ‘absolutely brilliant.’ A. Alvarez, ‘Penguin Archive Project: Al Alvarez’, interview with William Wootten, The Wolf, 22, Winter 2009/2010, pp. 66–75: p. 68.

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remain defining and some of the best that have been written. Still, the end of the essay is one to cause qualms: The achievement of her final style is to make poetry and death inseparable … the poems read as though they were written posthumously. It needed not only great intelligence and insight to handle the material of them, it also took a kind of bravery. Poetry of this order is a murderous art.2

What can such a statement mean? If the poems are inseparable from the suicide of their poet, is suicide not cowardice, as it is sometimes portrayed, but bravery? And does the poetry partake of that bravery? Is one sort of seriousness, that of artistic intent, vouchsafed by the seriousness of another sort of intent, that of suicide, thereby proving that the suffering and death obsession in the poetry are not mere talk but seriously meant? In which case, what we have is a grotesque answer to J.L. Austin’s formulation that ‘the words must be spoken “seriously” so as to be taken “seriously”’ is ‘an important commonplace’—‘I must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem’. 3 It is the answer of ‘Fanaticism’, one of the poems in Ted Hughes’s Capriccio, where Hughes recalls Assia Wevill, the woman for whom he left Plath and who herself was to commit suicide and kill their child: ‘“After forty I’ll end it,” you laughed. (You were serious)’.4 If so, a lot more than just the intentional fallacy is being sacrificed in order to justify this new art. Edward Lucie-Smith, evidently reckoning that just such formulations lurked behind Alvarez’s words, was early to respond: ‘I thought the phrase embarrassing when I first heard it; I find it no less embarrassing now’, with Alvarez, ‘we feel that the true poet must certify his poems by dying for them—Orpheus torn to pieces in a ritual sacrifice.’5 Returning to the Group’s belief in the dramatic, rather than to its interest in a poetry of the personal, Lucie-Smith unpicks Alvarez and Plath’s connection between powerful emotion and direct autobiographical expression, Lucie-Smith’s authority being not Donne but Shakespeare: ‘There is no lack of basic emotions in Lear, but few people will be bold enough to claim that Lear reflects Shakespeare’s

2 A. Alvarez, ‘Sylvia Plath’, in Beyond All This Fiddle (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1968), pp. 45–58: p. 57. 3 Alvarez, ‘Sylvia Plath’, p. 57. 4 Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 789. 5 Edward Lucie-Smith, ‘A Murderous Art?’, Critical Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 4, Winter 1964, pp. 355–363: p. 355.



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private circumstances in detail.’6 With this Lucie-Smith scores a double hit, having not only Shakespeare to support him but also Robert Lowell, who declared in his 1961 Paris Review Interview: ‘other things being equal, it’s better to get your emotions out in a Macbeth than in a confession,’ a remark which suggests Lowell was less convinced of the superiority of his personal breakthrough over existent, dramatic models than was his English champion.7 Scorning ‘ossified romantic attitudes’ and a cult of suicide suited to the age of Werther, Lucie-Smith ridicules the narcissism and exhibitionism in the desire to walk naked, slightly changing the scenario: ‘The poet is rather like the showgirl in a glossy theatrical entertainment, whom the law allows to appear in the stage more or less stark-naked, on the sole condition that she doesn’t move a muscle.’8 As an alternative, Lucie-Smith asserts the value of social poetry and a poetry of history. Such criticism must have stung Alvarez, for when the latter collected the essay in 1968 he included a ‘Prefatory Note’ and a postscript he first appended to the essay when it had appeared in the Tri-Quarterly in 1966. The preface excuses the roughness of some of the piece but also explains that the postscript is there because ‘some of the closing remarks have been misunderstood.’9 Alvarez states that ‘breakdown or suicide is not a validation of what I now call Extremist poetry.’10 He denies the necessary connection between the extreme art and the extreme life, or the idea that the suffered life validates the art. Nevertheless, he states that he ‘did mean to imply that this kind of writing involves an element of risk. The Extremist artist sets out deliberately to explore the roots of his emotions, the obscurest springs of his personality … “for the sake of the range and intensity of his art”.’11 Here Alvarez (reverting to the language of obscurity rather than that of clarification) doubles back. Sylvia Plath’s source of creative energy was ‘her self-destructiveness’, but it was ‘a source of living energy’, imaginative and creative power.12 To account for Plath, Alvarez has made a change to the current critical formulae: Leavisite life and energy have become equated with a suicidal urge. Alvarez goes on: ‘death itself may have been a side 6 Lucie-Smith, ‘A Murderous Art?’, p. 356. 7 Robert Lowell, ‘An Interview with Frederick Seidel’, in Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 246. 8 Lucie-Smith, ‘A Murderous Art?’, p. 358. 9 Alvarez, ‘Sylvia Plath’, p. 57. 10 Alvarez, ‘Sylvia Plath’, p. 57. 11 Alvarez, ‘Sylvia Plath’, pp. 57–58. The quotation is self-quotation from Alvarez’s 1965 book Under Pressure, which will be discussed later. 12 Alvarez, ‘Sylvia Plath’, p. 58.

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issue, it was also an unavoidable risk in writing her kind of poem. My own impression of the circumstances surrounding her eventual death is that she gambled, not caring much whether she won or lost; and she lost.’13 Had she lived, the poetry would still be valid. These statements and statements like them are of course highly questionable and highly problematic. Yet they are problematic, in part, not because they avoid a very thorny problem but because they attempt to grasp it. Plath’s late poems are good in a way which is patently unsuited to the established use of approbatory terms of life, health and vitality. Moreover, while other writers have committed suicide, that fact will often not seem especially relevant when reviewing their best work. To maintain such lack of relevance in the case of Plath, however, is unconvincing. Patricia Waugh has a point when she takes issue with Alvarez’s later questioning of what, for her, is that ‘most aristocratic and masculine of myths, that of the doomed and suffering artist, and tracing it to Plath.’14 Risk-taking, the idea of the artist as suffering and potentially doomed is strongly operative in the work of Robert Lowell, John Berryman or Norman Mailer. Indeed, Mailer had opined that: the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, … to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.15

One could add that Plath was in any case feeding back what Alvarez had been calling for writers to produce. Nonetheless, Plath’s suicide was an eventuality neither Alvarez’s theories, nor, I conjecture, Alvarez himself, had predicted when he first admired Plath’s work, but was something with which they had to come to terms. Alvarez had, it is true, attempted to kill himself, but ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, like the other early essays, is interested in a poetry of psychic disturbance, not in exploring themes and risk-taking to the point of suicide. Alvarez’s criticism changed in order to account for the unmistakably thanatopic themes in Plath’s extraordinary 13 Alvarez, ‘Sylvia Plath’, p. 58. 14 Patricia Waugh, ‘1963, London: The Myth of the Artist and the Woman Writer’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth Century Literatures in English (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 173–185: p. 181. 15 Norman Mailer, The White Negro (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1957), no page numbers.



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last bursts of creativity and for their possible connection to the death of the author herself. One sign of this change was a piece of vocabulary. Alvarez first uses the label ‘extremism’ in his 1965 book Under Pressure. Under Pressure contains interviews with intellectuals of the US and Eastern Europe that derive from radio programmes Alvarez had made for the BBC. The interviews were situated by Alvarez’s commentary and bookended by Alvarez’s essays. Leaving behind English poetry, Alvarez’s ideas expand to fill greater spaces. In the introductory essay, he states: Over the last few years in the West, particularly in America, the arts have become more and more concerned with breakdown. Poets like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, painters like the abstract expressionists are attempting to give coherent form to great reservoirs of feeling—destructive, manic, paranoid—which are shut off from more-or-less normal life and more-or-less traditional art forms, but are released in breakdown.16

Alvarez, however, balances this romantic doctrine against that which informs the best Polish art—by which he means in particular the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert—which has ‘the same inwardness and sense of complexity’ but ‘directed outwards’.17 The terms of approbation are very similar to those used to praise Plath: Herbert has a way of ‘coping coolly with facts which could easily slide out of control’. Nevertheless, Alvarez finds in Herbert a ‘classicism’ which is ‘detached, ironic and historically minded which copes with the external pressures of the Eastern Bloc.’18 Extremism as a term is named and defined in the ‘Epilogue: America and Extremist Art’. Alvarez also reveals where he thinks it leads: ‘Extremism in the arts—the cultivation of breakdown and all the diverse facets of schizophrenia—ends not so much in anarchy as in a kind of internal fascism by which the artist, to relieve his own boredom, becomes both torturer and tortured.’19 It is ‘ruthless, destructive, deeply self-involved, wildly selfgratifying.’20 Although his readers may have needed to pinch themselves in order to realise it, by this Alvarez was advocating not castigating a stripe

16 A. Alvarez, Under Pressure: The Writer and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 28. 17 Alvarez, Under Pressure, p. 28. 18 Alvarez, Under Pressure, p. 31. 19 Alvarez, Under Pressure, p. 188. 20 Alvarez, Under Pressure, p. 188.

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of Western art, that, set beside his descriptions of the poetry of Eastern Europe, appears morbidly decadent. That this extremism was being advocated, and advocated strongly, and that Alvarez was theorising its support, would be made abundantly clear in Alvarez’s long essay ‘Beyond All This Fiddle’, which appeared, signed, in The Times Literary Supplement on 23 March 23 1967 and which, in contrast to ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, was cheered on by a supportive leader column written by Ian Hamilton. ‘Beyond All This Fiddle’ is a broad and ambitious survey of the arts and a recognisable descendent of ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ and the Review discussion. Alvarez cites, as he did in the Review discussion, the painter Sidney Nolan’s idea that artists ‘act as an Early Warning System for history’, and maintains: ‘Extremist art becomes a premonition of the Holocaust, whilst its lightly schizophrenic detachment from its own anguish corresponds to the split in the environment between violence and cosiness, war and well-being.’21 It is not only the incorporation of an overtly Laingian diagnosis that has tightened, changed and intensified the argument from one which might have found relatively broad assent among those tired of the gentility and provincialism of Movement verse into a narrow and contentious advocacy. Extremism ‘is based on a form of psychic Darwinism that is far beyond the most stringent usual demands of talent.’22 Readers perturbed by what such a formulation might imply would not have been comforted by how on the same page Alvarez talks of Plath’s poetry as a ‘logical extension of Lowell’s explorations’ that ‘went to the extreme, far edge of the bearable and, in the end, slipped over. That is a risk in handling such touchy, violent material.’23 This account makes suicide an unfortunate accident in the lab, an accident to be justified by the quality of the research to be derived from working with hazardous substances: ‘she turned it … to advantage: the courage it took to gamble in this way is reflected in the curious sense of creative optimism, of possibilities in the teeth of the impossible’.24 The fact that the language the essay uses to approve of extremist art also figures Alvarez’s love of risk-taking, poker and (elsewhere) fast cars, is likewise unlikely to dispel the qualms of doubters. As Alvarez was making bigger and more general claims about how the life and art of his favoured poets reflected the state of contemporary civilisation, the question was not just whether Alvarez’s 21 A. Alvarez, ‘Beyond All This Fiddle’, in Beyond All This Fiddle (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1968), pp. 4–21. 22 Alvarez, ‘Beyond All This Fiddle’, p. 17. 23 Alvarez, ‘Beyond All This Fiddle’, p. 17. 24 Alvarez, ‘Beyond All This Fiddle’, p. 17.



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rhetoric might be reckless, but whether his terms of approbation for a more personal poetry were themselves becoming too personal to command the assent of his readers. Predictably, it was Donald Davie who offered a response, and who, taking on the raised temperature of the time, lost his cool, concluding with aggressive hauteur that: ‘The view of poetry which emerges from this issue of the TLS is irremediably vulgar.’25 When Davie calms from diatribe to disquisition he makes a couple of sharp points about the direction in which Alvarez was now travelling. These develop Davie’s arguments from the Review discussion into a more convincing riposte. Alvarez’s contention that technique is ‘no longer’ the ‘prime concern’ of his chosen poets, who ‘take their technical originality for granted’, along with similar comments from Hamilton, provokes Davie to write: The medium—words for the poet, stone for the sculptor, pigment for the painter—is more than just a medium. It is itself a segment of Nature, raw material rude and resistant (and the more resistant the better). And as such is the crucial third term in the artist’s situation when he sets out to work. Instead of looking always at himself in the mirror, his real or imagined audience, the artist has to look away at what he has in his hands or at the tip of his pen. And it is this, the medium and the necessity of handling it, which most consistently and savingly breaks the circle around the exhibitionist Narcissus.26

Half of Davie’s argument simply shows him to be a writer of a different taste unable to appreciate how fascinating a first-class ‘exhibitionist Narcissus’ can be; the other half poses a crucial question about some of the presumptions Alvarez was beginning to make. Has going beyond all this fiddle meant taking the medium for granted? Or, to be fairer to the fuller context of Alvarez’s argument, has poetry itself come to be regarded as a vehicle already finely tuned, whose chief purpose is the conveyance of the existential purport of the writer? If so, what it is that makes poetry poetry no longer seems to be very important. From the point of view of English poetry, there was another problem, though one that by now may not have much worried Alvarez. ‘Beyond All This Fiddle’ has no place for English poets among the extremists, whose golden exemplars are Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Sylvia Plath. In 25 Donald Davie, ‘“Beyond All This Fiddle” A Rejoinder to A. Alvarez’, The Times Literary Supplement, Thursday 25 May 1967, p. 472. 26 Donald Davie, ‘“Beyond All This Fiddle” A Rejoinder to A. Alvarez’, p. 472.

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this, ‘Beyond All This Fiddle’ follows the way Under Pressure presents extremism as an essentially American phenomenon: a product of the land of shopping malls, Kennedy, Oswald and psychoanalysis. That earlier book, however, does cite a partial exception to this rule, Ted Hughes: Hughes, who starts out as a nature poet and whose work contains more animals than London Zoo, lavishes all that loving, sharp detail on his menagerie only for whatever corresponding sense of unpredictable violence he finds in himself. He writes like a nature poet gone blind; and he is typical.27

The observation is intriguing. ‘A Dream of Horses’ is singled out in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ partly because it is more definitely a poem of that sort than are most of the more awake animal poems in The Hawk in the Rain or Lupercal. Whether because he had intuited the direction in which Hughes’s work was moving or whether his criticism and friendship had some effect in deciding that direction, Alvarez had proved correct in his forecast. This was to be confirmed by the publication first of the limited edition Recklings in 1966, and then by the far more expressionist Wodwo in 1967. As was picked up early by Alan Bold, in contrast to the earlier books, the ‘animals have become symbolic, unreal’; it can be seen in the difference between ‘The Jaguar’ in The Hawk and the Rain and the ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’ in Lupercal.28 Those few who managed to read Recklings and the uncollected poems contemporaneous with it could also have seen that the poetics of disgust was now also being used by Hughes and that his lack of gentility had moved into the social sphere, and aggressively so. Anyone wondering whether the quasi-fascist tendency in Hughes was confined to his portrayal of animals was unlikely to be consoled by the loathing for ‘the Giant Stupids’ ‘grimy to the spinal fluid’ watching the moonlanding on the ‘Public Bar T.V.’ or the ‘refugees/ dragging the country down’ in ‘the lamentable press toward Atlantis’ with their ‘attendant/ Bladder dogs, their old corks and condoms’ to seen by ‘Westminster Bridge’.29 There is nothing quite as offensive or as bad as those two poems in Wodwo, but it remains a very moot point whether extremism was making Hughes better as a poet. At the same time as he was making the creatures of the natural world solely the counters of a violent psyche, Hughes was jettisoning the discipline of conventional form. Not, as Gunn was in America, 27 Alvarez, Under Pressure, p. 186. 28 A. Bold, Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1976), p. 106. 29 Hughes, Collected Poems, pp. 133, 104–105.



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for alternative prosodies and for a thorough grounding in the American tradition of free verse, nor, for all Hughes’s belief in a quasi-Anglo-Saxon verse prosody, for any strict adherence to the stress-based poetics of sprung rhythm. Instead, Hughes had begun to trust ear, instant and expression. Since Hughes’s ear is a good one, the result can be effective. Nevertheless, it tends to a poetry that, like its content, is all will and no constraint. Shock effects, bold metaphors keep up the reader’s interest, but their intensity is the intensity of sensation and does not in truth run counter to a world sated by the shock effects of lurid media, in the way that Alvarez and, it is fair to assume, Hughes would have asserted. Responding to Alvarez’s composite poem made of New Lines poets, Robert Conquest wrote: to demand that each line or phrase should be highly charged is as if one insisted that a whole painting should consist of highlights. As Yeats has pointed out, in all except ‘dream poetry’ like Kubla Khan, ‘certain words must be dull and numb’ … There is a spinsterish opposition to balance and proportion and in favour of ‘brutal’ frankness; and a demand for vigour is vulgarly satisfied by a plethora of kinaesthetic adjectives and images. For there are those who treat verse as no more than a means of whipping up their emotions—(and increasingly, these days, not even as an aphrodisiac but rather as what one might call an areac, a drug for arousing feelings of violence.) Some justify this on the grounds that verse should match the age. It is maintained, rather dubiously yet at least arguably, that our present situation is the most extreme, the most appalling that has ever existed. But even granting this, there is no reason whatever to draw from it the conclusion commonly seen, that poetry should ‘reflect’ it, or ‘cope with’ it by falling into violence and disproportion. 30

This seems to me to be questionable as a response to ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, or indeed to Lupercal and The Hawk in the Rain, but absolutely correct as an analysis of what happens to Hughes’s verse over the coming decade. The poems try to be all action and highlights, and in so doing lose proportion, grace and tension. Nevertheless, the problem is not that Hughes should have been following Conquest and the New Liners—whatever the faults of Wodwo, it is still considerably livelier and more memorable than most of those poets’ work—but that as extremism and his own verse had developed, he had taken on only half the prescription of ‘Beyond the

30 Robert Conquest, ed., New Lines II (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. xxii–xxiii.

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Gentility Principle’; rather than concentrating on technical skill and control, he had lessened it. Hughes’s uncoupling of the poetic—now vouchsafed principally by metaphor—from verse coincided with his, and indeed Alvarez’s, interest in, and promotion of, translated literature, especially that emanating from Eastern Europe. Hughes and Daniel Weissbort founded the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation. Alvarez, who was on the board of MPT, followed up the broadcasts and book of Under Pressure with a long stint as Advising Editor on the great Penguin Modern European Poets list of the 1960s and ’70s. Such work, while not the focus of this book, is undoubtedly a major achievement in the careers of both poet and critic, and one which put Anglophone poetry readers very much in their debt. It was partly through their offices and their keenness to partner literary translators with the best English and American poets that poetry in translation became readable and read, thus countering for a time the provincialism of English letters. Appropriately enough, in his introduction to the Penguin Modern European Poets edition of the poems of Vasko Popa in 1969 Hughes’s prose shows marked debts to Alvarez’s. In part this is a similarity to the introductions Alvarez supplied to the Penguin translations of Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub, to which models Hughes would naturally have referred. Still, where Alvarez sees the work of Herbert and Holub as a counterpoint to Western extremist art, he does not fall into the trap of envying the misery of their countries’ recent history. Hughes is altogether less cautious when he states how we decay ‘when our bodily survival is comfortably taken care of’: I think it was Miłosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realized that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually do die. But some is. And the poets of whom Popa is one seem to have put their poetry to a similar test. 31

That Hughes has lazily misremembered a curiously aesthetic piece of Miłosz to serve his own comfortable fantasies of violence was, in due course pointed out by (of course) Donald Davie.32 Though he had resisted baring the details of his own life in the way that confessionalism would have neces 31 Vasko Popa, Selected Poems, trans. Anne Pennington, intr. Ted Hughes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 9–10. 32 Donald Davie, ‘Poet’s Prose: Hughes and Hill’, in Under Briggflatts: A History of Poetry in Great Britain 1960–1988, Donald Davie (Manchester: Carcanet 1989), pp. 164–166.



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sitated, Hughes here makes extreme circumstance the judge of poetry. In the place of suicide, poetry is judged by the flight of bullets. Against this assertion it could be fairly pointed out that Hughes is not putting himself in the company of the poets he is discussing. And yet, that his next book would draw so heavily on Popa would imply that Hughes is indeed aligning his work with that of Popa, despite the fact that said bullets are never to come within 800 miles of Hughes himself. Crow follows the logic of the extremist aesthetic to its skull-grinning caricature. There is speeding, but there is no heroic death-defiance, rather there is a chuckling nihilism. Crow entertains the careering ideal: ‘Crow thought of a fast car—/ It plucked his spine out and left him empty and armless.’33 But instead of a speeding dream of horses come repeated crashes into a horrid hilarity. ‘Cars collide and erupt luggage and babies/ in laughter’, as do aircraft.34 No nature poetry this, Crow alludes to death camps, nuclear war and, by implication, Vietnam; the sequence can now take in the ugly, the distasteful and the modern. A piece of rivalrous writing if ever there was one, Hughes’s Crow pointedly seeks to outstrip the imagery of Plath. This is most conspicuously the case with ‘Lovesong’, which takes a personnel and imagery immediately recognisable as coming from Plath’s later works and contains ‘jackboots’, ‘hooks’ and a ‘surgeon’, and which would wear the rival’s face at the same time as attacking it.35 But ‘Lovesong’ is by no means the only example. Crow himself is blacker than ‘the moon’s shadow’ or ‘a negro’s eye-pupil’, Plath’s moon muse or the ‘Nigger-eye/ berries’, outstripping them by a nihilistic willingness to stop, or rather not to stop, at nothing.36 If Plath’s ‘Daddy’ is poetic battery, ‘Song for a Phallus’ throws in a crowbar. As poetry, ‘Song for a Phallus’ is nothing like as good as its rival, but those after primal verse ingredients and vulgarised psychoanalysis will find it difficult to surpass: You stay in there his Daddy cried Because a Dickybird Has told the world when you get born You’ll treat me like a turd. 37

33 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 234. 34 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 233. 35 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 255. 36 Hughes, ‘Crow Colour’, in Collected Poems, p. 243; Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber, 1981), p. 239. 37 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 248.

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You thought Daddy a bastard, ‘You will never know/ What a cruel bastard God is’. You reckoned the monorhyme of ‘Daddy’ basic, try reading this. 38 ‘Song for a Phallus’ may set verse’s sights not much higher than the lines on the bottom of the cubicle door, but with the spectacularly bad ‘As if he had never been bore’ (rhymed with ‘gore’) to finish things off, it can scarcely be argued that the effect is unintentional.39 More typically, it is not bludgeoned rhyme but repetition that provides such formal auditory structure as there is in Crow, and not the instant repetitions of Plath, but the litany. This can be intentionally reminiscent of primitive verse and the Bible. It is also of a piece with the way that the book is a would-be quasi-mythical narrative sequence. Nevertheless, the book fails to have much structure or story. Certainly, Crow does not tell the tale Hughes apparently envisioned, and despite its returning central character and setting up of the expectations of a folk-cum-religious narrative, the songs of Crow come nowhere near to adding up to a coherent narrative or a structured single work.40 The voice of Crow may not be confessional in the sense that Anne Sexton or Robert Lowell are, but in ‘Crow Tries the Media’ it does want ‘to sing very clear’.41 That view of poetic language we find in Alvarez and his influences, as needing a sheer intensity to outface the modern media, has reached the stage that it would do without its medium, for Crow does ‘not even want words.’42 In doing this, ‘He shuddered out of himself he got so naked/ When he touched her breast it hurt him.’43 The writing is now sometimes so extreme it is often impossible to tell if what is being written is parody or merely the pushing of a tendency to its furthest point. It cannot be denied that Crow is one of the more distinctive volumes of post-war verse. There is no doubting that some of its dark fables and abject litanies have their raw power; nor can it be gainsaid that the book’s embracing of grim comedy and what David Trotter has interestingly diagnosed and applauded as a poetry of anti-pathos brought a new aspect to

38 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 249. 39 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 250. 40 Ted Hughes talks of this narrative with Ekbert Faas in Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), pp. 213–214. It is telling that even the extremely sympathetic Ekbert Faas cannot find a properly coherent narrative to Crow as a whole, see: pp. 97–118. 41 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 231. 42 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 231. 43 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 232.



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Hughes’s work and to some extent the English scene.44 Yet, as Ian Hamilton observed anonymously in The Times Literary Supplement, Crow has ‘moved far beyond any real gravity or wisdom into a horror-comic realm of barely controllable fascination with its own subject-matter. An important quality for poets is knowing exactly where to stop; this poem, like so many others in this book, not only doesn’t know but doesn’t care.’45 Which, it could be added, is the point and problem of the whole exercise.

44 David Trotter, The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), pp. 196–209. 45 Anonymous [Ian Hamilton], Review of Crow, The Times Literary Supplement, 8 January 1971, p. 30.

C hapter T en

‘A Study of Suicide’

I

n Alvarez’s next book, The Savage God, the Ted Hughes of Crow flaps up to his place in the pantheon of extremist art to push Anne Sexton off her perch. Now, ‘the four leading English-language exponents of the style are Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.’1 Extremist art is a Western counterpart to the outwardly directed ‘Totalitarian Art’ (the term is borrowed from Norman Mailer), which ‘tackles the historical situation frontally, more or less brutally, in order to create a human perspective for a dehumanizing process.’2 Both are linked to suicide: Totalitarian Art ‘is as much an art of successful suicide, as Extremist Art is that of the attempt.’3 The Savage God is not chiefly a literary critical study, but is, in the words of its subtitle, ‘A Study of Suicide’. Moreover, while it contains considerable scholarship upon the subject of suicide, The Savage God is by no means an impersonal book. The portrait of Plath and her death at its beginning and the corresponding portrait of Alvarez and his own suicide attempt at its end would, with grim inappropriateness, these days be termed ‘life writing’. As Alvarez switches genres, biography becomes central and the poetry peripheral; Plath’s significance to the book is as a case study of a suicide as much as a poet. The Savage God is then the decisive step towards the current position, where Plath criticism is overwhelmingly biographical criticism. The account of the relationship between Plath’s suicide and her art and the relationship between art and suicide in general is far more complex and nuanced in The Savage God than it is in Alvarez’s earlier writings. Alvarez 1 A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 214. 2 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 205. 3 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 209.

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states that he felt that the suicide ‘was “a cry for help” which fatally misfired’ as well as being ‘a last desperate attempt to exorcise the death she had summoned up in her poems.’4 In The Savage God Alvarez is also acute in pointing out the falsity of Plath’s and others’ idealisations of death when in the face of death’s reality. As is well noted by Susan B. Rosenbaum, Alvarez’s description of Plath’s corpse is carefully counterpoised against the perfected image of ‘Edge’: this a real body with ‘its ludicrous ruff’, the smell of apples as though they were beginning to rot.5 The Savage God is no naïve advocacy of suicide for artists. Following on from this description of the dead body, Alvarez categorises Plath’s suicide as a mistake … and out of it a whole myth has grown. I don’t think she would have found it much to her taste, since it is a myth of the poet as sacrificial victim, offering herself up for the sake of her art, having been dragged by the Muses to that fine altar through every kind of distress. In these terms, her suicide becomes the whole point of the story, the act which validates the poems, gives them their interest and proves her seriousness. So people are drawn to her work … not for the poetry but for the gossipy, extra-literary ‘human interest’.6

This is the same criticism Edward Lucie-Smith lodged at Alvarez’s labelling of Plath’s work as ‘a murderous art’, the true poet certifying ‘poems by dying for them—Orpheus torn to pieces.’ 7 Instead, Alvarez here clearly states how Plath’s suicide is not a guarantor of seriousness and such categorisation also misses her ‘liveliness’, ‘intellectual appetite’ and ‘harsh wit’, her ‘imaginative resourcefulness and vehemence of feeling, her control’, the courage which let her ‘turn disaster into art.’8 Nevertheless, The Savage God does not entirely eradicate the connection between suicide and artistic seriousness. Later on, Alvarez notes how for ‘the more serious artist experiment has not been a matter of merely tinkering with the machinery. Instead, it has provided a context in which 4 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 33. 5 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 34. Susan B. Rosenbaum, Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press: 2007), pp. 151–152. 6 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 33. 7 Edward Lucie-Smith, ‘A Murderous Art?’, Critical Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 4, Winter 1964, pp. 355–363: p. 355. 8 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 33.



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he explores the perennial question, “What am I?” without benefit of moral, cultural or even technical securities.’9 In the light of this, Alvarez returns to Plath: ‘It is as though she had decided that, for her poetry to be valid, it must tackle head-on nothing less serious than her own death, bringing to it a greater wealth of invention and sardonic energy than most poets manage in a lifetime of so-called affirmation.’10 For this not to read as a full inconsistency with the earlier statement about Plath’s suicide and seriousness would necessitate the drawing of some nice distinctions. Leaving aside the non-committal ‘It is as though’, validity and seriousness are being intimately linked to Plath’s confrontation of her own death, the seriousness of the art is linked to the seriousness of the artist killing herself. Readers might also notice a connection with another passage of The Savage God in which Alvarez speculates that the pleasures of rock climbing for him may be similar to the risks of suicide for others: Consider a climber poised on minute holds on a steep cliff. The smallness of the holds, the steepness of the angle, all add to his pleasure, provided he is in complete control. … The possibility of danger serves merely to sharpen his awareness and control. And perhaps this is the rationale of all risky sports: you deliberately raise the ante of effort and concentration in order, as it were, to clear your mind of trivialities. It is a small-scale model for living but with a difference: unlike your routine life, where mistakes can usually be recouped and some kind of compromise patched up, your actions, for however brief a period, are deadly serious.’11

Seriousness, ‘control’, these are once again the watchwords for the appreciation of extremist art and the artist for whom, as Alvarez says later: ‘The operative word is “control”. The Extremist poets are committed to psychic exploration out along that friable edge that divides the tolerable from the intolerable; but they are equally committed to lucidity, precision and a certain vigilant directness of expression.’12 This, and much of the theorising Alvarez did on extremist art, can be seen to stem from the central assumption that the way Plath wrote in her late poems and those poems’ painful excellence were intimately connected with her taking of her own life, and that, even if the death itself was no guarantor of that excellence, it was an unfortunate side product of the psychic 9 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 199. 10 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 216. 11 Alvarez, The Savage God, pp. 112–113. 12 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 214.

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risk-taking and brinkmanship involved. But is this connection between Plath’s best art and her suicide correct? Ted Hughes, for one, believed that it was not. In a letter to Aurelia Plath of 13 July 1966, Hughes states that he felt the original Ariel poems, with their positive ending in ‘Spring’ had actually been therapeutic, had ‘cured her’.13 Instead, it is the novel, The Bell Jar, which is the ‘accursed book’.14 This is a view completely opposed to that of Alvarez: that death was an ‘unavoidable risk in writing her kind of poem’, and one expressed while Hughes and Alvarez were still friends.15 Art may be connected to the suicide, but that art is the art of a novel which Alvarez believes markedly inferior to Plath’s principal achievement, that of her later poetry. In this respect at least, Hughes was not an extremist and was not going to be swayed into a belief that Plath’s death had changed the rules of writing about poetry, thereby making a new, biographical context and approach necessary for the appreciation of her work. Writing to Alvarez in the letter that expresses his fury at the publication of The Savage God and the intrusiveness of Alvarez’s memoir of Plath, Hughes declares: ‘You would be the first to point out—if the context were different—that such notes are superfluous to any appreciation of the poems. In fact, they are guaranteed to corrupt a real appreciation of the poetry with a sensational involvement of another sort.’16 Hughes had seen the original Ariel manuscript, with its arrangement of poems indicative of belief in rebirth, as the world at large had not. He was also aware of the progression in Plath’s work. To those without such privileged information, Plath’s poems of 1962–63 would have seemed much less differentiated. The simultaneous publication of Alvarez’s Review essay and the poems of the autumn as ‘The Last Poems of Sylvia Plath’ does not allow for the break between the poems Plath wrote in the autumn and the last poems, poems which she appears to have regarded as belonging not to Ariel but to another book. It is only later on, in The Savage God, that Alvarez picks up how poems such as ‘Lady Lazarus’ or ‘Daddy’ have ‘energy’, a ‘weird jollity in the teeth of everything’ and ‘recklessness’, which the last poems Plath read to him do not.17 There, Alvarez’s reading of ‘Edge’ as a poem of 13 Ted Hughes, Letter to Aurelia Plath, 13 July 1966, Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), p. 259. 14 Ted Hughes, Letter to Aurelia Plath, p. 260. 15 A. Alvarez, ‘Sylvia Plath’, in Beyond All This Fiddle (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1968), pp. 45–58: p. 58. 16 Ted Hughes, ‘Letter to A. Alvarez’, November 1971, Letters of Ted Hughes, pp. 321–322. 17 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 26.



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‘great peace and resignation’ of images with a ‘full, still life’, or of the same ‘translucent calm’ in words, captures well its distinct qualities.18 Elsewhere in the book, however, Alvarez continues to describe Plath’s suicide in terms of risk-taking and poker-playing: Risks didn’t frighten her; on the contrary, she found them stimulating. Freud has written, ‘Life loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked.’ … She gambled for the last time, having worked out that the odds were in her favour, but perhaps, in her depression, not much caring whether she won or lost.19

This linkage between the risk-taking Alvarez found in the poems and Plath’s death has, in latter years, been felt by Alvarez as a source of self-reproach. In his autobiography, no longer convinced that any poems, however good, were worth Plath’s death, Alvarez worries whether the currency that lauded such ‘extremist’ art may have led to Plath’s demise: ‘I’ve sometimes wondered if all our rash chatter about art and risk and courage, and the way we turned rashness and despair into literary principle, hadn’t egged her on.’20 But, accepting that Plath took her precise motivations with her, there seems fair reason to doubt both the terms of the initial analysis and those of the regret. First, it is perfectly likely that Plath’s poetry was almost entirely incidental to her suicide. She had attempted to kill herself in the past; she did so again because she was profoundly miserable and mentally unstable, and because her marriage and life, it seemed, were damaged beyond repair. In such circumstances, rash chatter from Alvarez, Life Studies and the sort of perilous fancies that turn up in Norman Mailer are unlikely to have made much of a difference. Even were a causal link between the poetry and the death to be admitted, it is the case that risk-taking, courage and so forth are all features of the autumn 1962 poems, and are partly so because they are written under Alvarez’s own influence. So while it must be conceded that these poems have the spectre of death and suicide over them and are scarcely evidence of composure, well-being and good psychic health, it needs also to be acknowledged that their manic darkness has gone from the poems Plath wrote immediately before her suicide, replaced by a depressive enervation that has left gambling, risk-taking and speeding horses far behind. These poems 18 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 30. 19 Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 32. 20 Al Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right? (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999), pp. 209–210.

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inhabit a world where ‘bones’ have become ‘full of stillness’; where a train’s ‘running is useless’, a world not risk taking and daredevil but slow, fated and inevitable.21 It would be difficult to contest that there is no connection between such poetry and suicidal feelings or to deny the unreal glamorisation and aestheticisation of suicide in ‘Edge’. Nevertheless, this is not the connection between poetry and suicide that led to the formulation of the category of extremist poetry.

21 Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber, 1981), pp. 263, 264.

P art I V

C hapter E leven

Against Extremism

A

Alvarez’s suggestion, in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ as in The Shaping Spirit before it, ‘that the techniques of Eliot and the rest never really took on in England because they were an essentially American concern: attempts to forge a distinctively American language for poetry’, could read as similarly applicable to the development of extremism.1 Plath, for all her English contexts, is ultimately more an American poet than she is an English one. It was only Hughes who appeared to manage to be English and extremist both—and, no confessional, even Hughes did not quite fit the mould. By the time of the stocktaking of the ’60s in Edward Lucie-Smith’s British Poetry since 1945, the effective successor to Kenneth Allott’s Contemporary Verse, Lucie-Smith was questioning whether the British had taken any real notice of the American developments Alvarez had hoped they would learn from: ‘Robert Lowell has been the most praised poet of recent years and surely the least followed. “Confessional Verse” has scarcely managed to take root in English poetry.’2 Only the post-Poundian ‘Black Mountain’ poets had had a marked impact, their message being ‘stylistic’ not social, their techniques amenable to British poets.3

1 The New Poetry, A. Alvarez, ed., revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 21. 2 Edward Lucie-Smith, ed. and intr., British Poetry since 1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 29. 3 British Poetry since 1945, p. 30.

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In his Review debate with Alvarez, Donald Davie had stated: You analyse, very interestingly and to my mind very justly, the three ‘negative feedbacks’ as you put it … This analysis of literary history is precisely mine and I don’t understand why you don’t draw the same conclusions from it as I do. Let’s go back, then, to them [Pound, Eliot and Yeats], and go forward from there.4

It was to be the first of those, Pound, the poet least amenable to Alvarez, who was greatly to preoccupy Davie as critic and who was directly or indirectly to prove a model for much of the British Modernism of the 1960s. As the modernism of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and their new disciples in the Black Mountain School became the American verse to which young poets aspired, the desire to marry T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence became less urgent, even irrelevant, to them. Ian Hamilton, who would be poetry and fiction editor of The Times Literary Supplement and Alvarez’s successor as poetry editor at the Observer before becoming editor of the New Review, was a prolific literary journalist of a similar mind to Alvarez. His Review had reflected this (a fact which makes Hamilton’s troubles with Crow all the more telling). When interviewed by Dan Jacobson, Hamilton recalled how the: impulse behind the Review came from the discovery that much more interesting things were going on in America than here. Poets like Roethke, Berryman, Lowell and Plath all seemed to be much more exciting than anything being done in this country. These were, if you like, our exemplars. [Jacobson] Very Much the Al Alvarez line. [Hamilton] Al was a big influence. He shaped a lot of that terrain …5

The Review was to champion young poets of emotional intensity and elliptical compression, notably David Harsent and Hugo Williams, the latter of whom was to become a manifestly post-Lowellian poet in the decades following. Their chaste lyricism was vaguely in sympathy with some of Alvarez’s preferences, yet these were by no means a crop of British extremists.

4 The Review, No. 1, April/Mary 1962, p. 22. 5 ‘You Muddy Fools’, Ian Hamilton, interviewed by Dan Jacobson, London Review of Books, Vol. 24, 2–14 January 2003, pp. 3–14. Accessed online, http:// www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n02/dan-jacobson/youmuddy-fools, 5 June 2011.



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The same interview finds Hamilton noting how he shared Alvarez’s enthusiasm for Plath’s later work: ‘we thought yes. But where do you go from there? She was a one-off poet.’6 For Hamilton, who neither shared Alvarez’s enthusiasm for Anne Sexton nor admired Plath’s lesser American imitators, Plath was good, but not a writer whose work could be read as a signpost. Extrapolating from his position, one could conclude that, while Plath’s later poetry may vindicate the positions taken up in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, Plath’s place at the front of the anthology does not really make sense for it does not show the British poets in which direction they are to strike out. In fact, work by some poets of the New Poetry would go on to reveal implicit resistance to the combination of Plath and Alvarez. Nineteen sixtyeight’s King Log finds Geoffrey Hill keeping up an interest in violence, a dislike of accepted good taste and gentility, and a preoccupation with the Holocaust, all the traits that make his classic poetry of The New Poetry generation. Yet in it, Hill’s attachment to a poetics of impersonality had, if anything, intensified. Moreover, when in ‘September Song’, Hill appears to write just the sort of poem called for in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, its intense moral questioning could be interpreted as a rebuke to Alvarez’s essay rather than an endorsement. The much-debated parenthesis ‘(I have made/ an elegy for myself it/ is true)’ converts the belief that one can equate the problems of the contemporary Western poet and the Holocaust survivor into an ethical quandary.7 Behind the way in which the ‘harmless fires’ and fattened vines of the poet cannot be those suffered by the poet’s double, murdered in the Holocaust, lies a reproach to a poetry which would confidently figure the much more exact correspondence between great, harmful fires and the small fires of the kitchen oven, the correspondence of ‘Mary’s Song’ by Sylvia Plath. If ‘September Song’ is, to use a term favoured by Hill and his supporters, an exemplary poem, it is one mindful of other poems which it would not have taken as examples. ‘September Song’ is critical of Plath and Alvarez by no more than an (admittedly arguable) implication. There were plenty of other poems more than prepared to make their criticisms of the two explicit. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s there appears something like a sub-genre devoted to attacking the notion of extremism in verse. Charles Tomlinson’s ‘Against Extremity’, from his 1969 collection The Way of the World, is particularly outspoken and unpleasant, referring to how ‘That girl’ who nearly took her own life before writing a book

6 Hamilton and Jacobson, ‘You Muddy Fools’. 7 Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 67.

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To exorcise and to exhibit the sin, Praises a friend there for the end she made And each of them becomes a heroine.8

‘That girl’ and her friend, I take it, are Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. The word ‘girl’ is calculatedly patronising. These are ‘spoiled children’.9 For the young James Fenton, writing a verse ‘Letter to John Fuller’, it is not so much the poets that are the problem as the serious voiced A. Alvarez: He tells you, in the somberest notes, If poets want to get their oats The first step is to slit their throats. The way to divide The sheep of poetry from the goats Is suicide.10

The stanza gained a large audience through being quoted by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion in the introduction to their successor volume to The New Poetry, The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, Fenton’s words being used to question the ‘implication’ ‘that a correlation necessarily exists between gravity of subject and quality of achievement’.11 Randall Stevenson has defended The New Poetry from the attack by restating what Alvarez actually said, rather than what he is presumed to have said.12 As a defence of The New Poetry and a critique of Morrison and Motion, this is fair. But Stevenson is wrong to censure Fenton, for what Motion and Morrison have not mentioned is that Fenton is alluding to Alvarez’s writing subsequent to The New Poetry, and above all to The Savage God, which was published about the time as Fenton’s verse letter—a verse letter whose ridiculing of Alvarez is by no means confined to this one stanza. This front against extremism spread wide. Roy Fisher, a late modernist 8 Charles Tomlinson, Collected Poems (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 163. 9 Tomlinson, Collected Poems, p. 163. 10 James Fenton, The Memory of War: Poems 1968–1982 (Edinburgh: Salamander Press, 1982), p. 55; quoted in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, ed. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 13. 11 The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, p. 13. 12 Randall Stevenson, Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 12, 1960–2000: The Last of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 195–196.



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poet with very little otherwise in common with James Fenton, also took the stand for the prosecution, declaring: ‘The poets are dying because they have been told to die’.13 Fisher’s poem is called ‘Occasional Poem 7.1.72’. The date is that of John Berryman’s suicide. Later that year, Alvarez wrote: For years I have been extolling the virtues of what I have called extremist poetry, in which artists deliberately push their perceptions to the very edge of the tolerable. Both [John] Berryman and Sylvia Plath were masters of the style. But knowing now how they both died I no longer believe that any art— even that as fine as they produced at their best—is worth the terrible cost.’14

If extremist verse really was pushing writers to suicide, Alvarez had had enough. And, with those words, Alvarez’s full-throated advocacy of extremism came to an end. For the time being, though, the attacks on extremism kept up. These included sallies by poets too young to have been included in The New Poetry, the fiercest and most comprehensive coming from a bright young Scottish academic named Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who inveighed against: the suicide merchants who say in effect, ‘no one can become a great poet unless he has at least tried killing himself.’ It is obvious that this springs from an insistence that innovation in experience is the only innovation possible. But people are still taking-off at such a rate … Why, only the other day John Berryman, who was at least enough of a poet to know quite a bit about formal innovation …

At such moments, when she is confronting extremism directly, ForrestThomson’s Poetic Artifice is a loud, insensitive polemic. Nevertheless, this assessment is not true of the book as a whole, for where others tended to attack Alvarez on more or less pre-existent grounds, Forrest-Thomson is in the business of elaborating a new and complex theory of poetry. Poetic Artifice argues strongly that, while it ‘is easy to treat poetry as if it were engaged in the language-game of giving information and thus to assume that what is important about a poem is what it tells us about the external world’, this is mistaken, and ignores much of what is distinctive

13 Roy Fisher, Poems 1955–1987 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 99. 14 Al Alvarez, ‘John Berryman’, in Risky Business (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), pp. 205–209: p. 209.

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about poetry and our reading of it.15 Thus, when she writes how the work of ‘Mr Hughes … has come to stand for “sincerity” or “naturalness”’, ForrestThomson does not intend a compliment.16 Good poetic practice and good criticism which acknowledges and accounts for the central importance of poetic artifice may, in Forrest-Thomson’s view, avert the fallacious myths of poetic self-expression and the fatalities attendant upon them. But ForrestThomson’s desire to reclaim the poetic realm from judgments stressing non-poetic criteria is not confined to her concern about their possible relationship to suicide. She bemoans how: poets are expected to explore a new range of extreme external experiences (often with disastrous consequences) in order to earn the title of creative poet. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are praised for opening up new depths of psychological insight; writers with techniques as disparate as Ted Hughes, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Lowell are held to combine such insight with a special view of contemporary society.17

Forrest-Thomson’s tastes could be called postmodern, were that not to imply something considerably less high-minded and more easy-going than that which tended to excite the astringent and academic Forrest-Thomson. Forrest-Thomson particularly admired the work of John Ashbery and that of the notoriously difficult Cambridge poet J.H. Prynne. None of this is surprising in a writer who was swept up by the first wave of the influence of French theory on the study of English literature and who was, for a time, Prynne’s doctoral student at Cambridge. Yet Forrest-Thomson was more eccentric than such summary suggests. She was also much more of an aesthete, with a strong nineteenth-century component to her taste and a particular veneration of Swinburne. Moreover, despite her loathing of extremism, Forrest-Thomson was also a strong admirer of Sylvia Plath, or at least of Plath’s verse. For while Plath herself may have believed in sincerity and the nonsense of the ‘suicide merchants’; the poems, in ForrestThomson’s opinion, are smarter. Deft readings of ‘Daddy’ and ‘Purdah’ find Forrest-Thomson highlighting quite how much artifice there is in their sound and imagery. After having praised the detached use of the first person singular in ‘Daddy’, Forrest-Thomson pronounces:

15 Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), p. x. 16 Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice, p. 163. 17 Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice, p. 163.



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People praise this and other poems, “Lady Lazarus” for instance, because they present extreme states of mind; unfortunately Sylvia Plath was not able to recognise this as a bad Naturalisation with extended meaning, external limitation/expansion, and devaluation of the non-semantic levels. She was unable to recognise in theory what she knew in poetic practice.18

Strip off the special terminology and the point is a good if unsurprising one: the actual words on the page rather than the extreme state of mind we may infer from it are what makes the poetry worthy of attention; Plath’s poetry is thoroughly immersed in and committed to its own strategies of artifice. Forrest-Thomson clarifies her position: I do not mean (and may I say this for the last time) that the ‘content’ is not important, that Miss Plath’s suffering the invocation of concentration camps elsewhere in the poem, the lack of telephone connection, even the vampire myth, are of no importance. Certainly they are. A thematic synthesis requires extended meaning, as a stage before it returns to the safe and separate planet of Artifice.19

‘Safe and separate planet of Artifice’ is such a peculiar phrase that it sounds ironical. I take it that it deliberately echoes an earlier use of the phrase in the book, where it is used as the chapter heading: ‘The Separate Planet’, which picks up on Forrest-Thomson’s interest in William Empson’s essay ‘Donne the Spaceman’.20 I take it too that Forrest-Thomson has arrived at the phrase via thought, reading and sophistication, and gives every appearance of being quite sincere (hate the word though she might) in her use of it. But is artifice really such a place, perfect unto itself, a painless planet which sends probes out to the suffering world? At the end of Forrest-Thomson’s one critical book, the parenthesis ‘(and may I say this for the last time)’ sounds double-edged. Forrest-Thomson’s decision to use Plath as an example of the proper use of poetic artifice, rather than more obvious candidates elsewhere in the book, likewise seems telling—and more so if one knows that Veronica ForrestThomson committed suicide before Poetic Artifice was published and before she could properly establish her reputation as a poet. The coupling of Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Sylvia Plath might appear a painfully obvious one to make. Both were academically gifted outsiders on the English poetic scene, Forrest-Thomson coming from Glasgow, Plath 18 Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice, p. 160. 19 Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice, p. 161. 20 Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice, p. 87.

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from Boston, Massachusetts. Both wrote their best work following breakups with their husbands. Both died young and in tragic circumstances: Plath at 30, Forrest-Thomson at 27. Yet this connection is seldom made. Forrest-Thomson is reckoned a member of the Cambridge School, and she is something of a guiding light for the Language School of poets in America, especially Charles Bernstein. Concentration on the self, the lyric or indeed that dangerous composite ‘the lyric self’, interest in authenticity and truth to experience and its extremes are held in much lower regard by the Cambridge and Language Schools than they are by Plath fans and scholars. Thus, while Plath criticism is too often too narrowly defined by her life and love, ForrestThomson’s work has tended to be wholly defined her own interest in artifice and literary theory. Concern with Plath can be found in the later poetry of Veronica ForrestThomson as well as in her criticism. And where other borrowings, pastiches, parodies, allusions and influences from authors—T.S. Eliot, J.H. Prynne, Swinburne, Tennyson, Empson, Max Jacob, and so on and so on—are overt and immodest, the influence of Plath seems covert and telling. ‘Strike’, subtitled ‘For Bonny my First Horse’, is at the outset and on the surface all game playing and silly intertextual artifice for the Cambridge-minded, beginning with the mock Shelleyan ‘Hail to thee, blithe horse, bird thou never wert!’21 Yet, as ‘Strike’ continues, this brittle surface keeps breaking up to reveal a more affective, more autobiographical—and more substantial—poem and poet. Eyes last seen in T.S. Eliot return in a number of Plath-like repetitions, ‘His eyes/ His eyes his eyes his eyes his eyes his eyes’, and these start to indicate a poem ultimately more about a lover than a horse, a horse whose true name, in any case, seems less likely to be Bonny than Ariel.22 Similarly, ‘The Lady of Shalott: Ode’, despite being self-consciously caught up in Tennysonian art and self-consciousness, can seem more reminiscent of ‘Lady Lazarus’ than the Lady of its title, and is so even when it is quoting ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ to tell of ‘The nightmare life-in-death is she, who thicks men’s blood with cold.’23 There are likewise loud echoes of ‘Daddy’: ‘When the telephone goes dead, The fridge is broken, the light …’.24 Beyond this, the love of rhyme, about which Forrest-Thomson had her own theories, is made less an ornament of delight than a morbid compulsion:

21 Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Barnett (Exeter: Shearsman and Allardyce, 2008), p. 134. 22 Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems, p. 134. 23 Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems, p. 136. 24 Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems, p. 136.



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‘Bear tear flair dare’.25 The false cheer of Forrest-Thomson’s voice owes more than a touch to Plath’s cool, daring wit. Indeed, it is a paradox that the British critic most resolutely opposed to A. Alvarez is also the British poet who can be most uncannily like the poet with whom he is most associated. As the title of her early volume Language Games attests, Forrest-Thomson was immersed in Wittgenstein’s theories of language. Furthermore, her poetry and criticism show familiarity with the philosophy of language of the Anglo-American school and a strong interest in structuralism, deconstruction and the writers associated with Tel Quel. So, while comparison between Philip Larkin and J.L. Austin has to be made in the knowledge that Larkin may not have encountered Austin’s ideas at first hand, and that he might well have harrumphed at the very suggestion that he had, in Veronica ForrestThomson’s case, the writer not only knows such things, she is extremely knowing about knowing them. ‘A Plea for Excuses’ is the title both of an essay by J.L. Austin and of one of Forrest-Thompson’s poems. Not only that, that poem’s subtitle gravely pronounces itself ‘i.m. J.L. Austin’, leaving the reader to ponder whether this is a serious memorial to the philosopher of ordinary language or an attempt to leave his words and intentions dead and buried. ‘A Plea for Excuses’ the poem is, at first blush, arch and academic to a ridiculous degree, an exercise in the incorporation of phrases from How to Do Things With Words in order to show that there are ways to do things with words which aren’t what Austin meant, that is if we can assume we understand what that means: The clue discovered in a performative verb promises completion to the poem; it defines ‘the indirect free style’.26

Such poetry is clever-clever but, it should be conceded, also genuinely clever. Indeed, were one to be generous, one could say the poem gives something of a foretaste of Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on speech acts in his attack on John Searle in Glyph.27 Certainly, ‘A Plea for Excuses’ is highly conscious of Austin’s own strictures regarding the unhappiness of speech acts when their words are put within a poem, and highlights how Austin’s very words will change their status when incorporated:

25 Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems, p. 136. 26 Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems, p. 145. 27 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (essays in Glyph, Vol. 1 and 2, 1977) (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1977).

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well, this subject is to many a nominal unhappiness, especially, articulate insincerity; which let us avoid.28

If at first it seems the poem delights in poetry’s exemption from successful and happy speech acts, as it repeatedly returns to unhappiness and insincerity, to the idea that ‘world is language’ and world is not language, readers may come to suspect that the author is not as easy in her linguistic play as she might wish to be. There are signs the author is undergoing that peculiar vertigo that can afflict those who read books about books all day, wherein the Derridean assertion that there is nothing outside the text can appear all too literally to be the case. This effect has been heightened by an emphasis on the fictive qualities of poetry (it is no accident that Forrest-Thomson in her poetry/ theory world of looms and mirrors should also have written a poem titled after Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’): Thus: all possible words exist and we are true to none, unless the poem be performative and promises that we exist (We promise that it is.) There may be pleasure equally In deploying the ambiguous richness Of unhappy words.29

By focussing on the ambiguity attaching to ‘unhappy’, Forrest-Thomson means not simply that a performative might be unapt, as Austin did, but that it may in its effects lead to misery—and in the context of promises. Why might that be the case? The answer is in Austin: Besides the uttering of the words of the so-called performative, a good many other things have as a general rule to be right and to go right if we are to be said to have happily brought off our action. What these are we may hope to discover by looking at and classifying types of case in which something goes wrong and the act—marrying, betting, bequeathing, christening, or what

28 Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems, p. 145. 29 Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems, p. 145.



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not—is therefore at least to some extent a failure: the utterance is then, we may say, not indeed false but in general unhappy. 30

As this talk of promises and excuses is unhappy for a ‘we’ in relation to a performative, so it may also be unhappy for the ‘we’ who in reality happen to be marrying one another. Moreover, a marriage may in the common sense of the word be unhappy without the formula that brought it into having been ineffectual. Making Austin ambiguous where no ambiguity was presumably intended has a clear enough logic. Although I do believe it could have done so, that possibility did not come into my head solely on the basis of the words on the page. Knowing that Veronica Forrest-Thomson was married, and that by the time she wrote the poem the marriage had broken down, I have read this back into the poem in a way in which Forrest-Thomson would have loathed. Still, I believe mine to be a correct reading, and also believe that readings that ignore the personal distress underlying the poem collude in a repression of the underlying intimacy of its motivation. Gareth Farmer, for example, only attends to Forrest-Thomson’s apparent intention rather than the truth of her practice when he writes: ‘For Thomson, writing is always an “articulate insincerity”. It is little surprise, therefore, that she turned to the work of philosophers like Austin to outline why and how this is the case.’31 The problem is that it is one thing to be all for articulate insincerity in art and in literary theory, but it is another to have to deal with its painful effects in life. Forrest-Thomson’s late poems inhabit that paradox. In late poems such as ‘Cordelia’, Veronica Forrest-Thomson is gesturing, half-playfully, half in deadly earnest at the serious: Especially if one may be plumber as well as poet And thus unstop the drain as well as writing Poetic Artifice ‘Pain stopped play’ and Several other books and poems including

30 J.L. Austin How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edition, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; reprint 2009), p. 14. 31 Gareth Farmer, ‘Selection Restrictions, Individuals, Acorns and Oaks’, Kenyon Review, p. 8. Accessed via Internet, http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http:// www.kenyonreview.org/kro/vft/Farmer.pdf&chrome=true, 5 August 2009. Farmer paints a fuller picture in his subsequent DPhil thesis ‘Veronica ForrestThomson, Poetic Artifice and the Struggle with Forms’, University of Sussex, 2012. I should like to thank him for alerting me to this and for sending me an electronic copy.

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1974 and All That (seriously though) I, Veronica did it, truth-finding, truth seeking. 32

With all the coruscations of irony and artifice, how was anyone to know for sure when Forrest-Thomson was becoming serious? In fact, in the last poems, glimpses of the acute unhappiness of the writer are abundant and evident—despite the much-theorised method having little space for them or idea what to do with them. It is significant that in ‘Sonnet’ or at the end of ‘The Garden of Prosepine’ Forrest-Thomson can give shape to her feelings only through the form of conventional lyric. At this point, the borrowing, allusion and echo move from parody towards a working in tradition; Forrest-Thomson becomes a lyric poet making plaints made with and against the plaints of that tradition, writing at her best in a manner her whole career seemed to have been working its hardest to avoid. Sylvia Plath’s work may not be exactly described by Alvarez’s extremism and her own remarks in that line, her achievement being one of artifice as much as sincerity, but Forrest-Thomson’s prisons of her own making are a much more confining space. Furthermore, Forrest-Thomson’s reading of Plath, like Alvarez’s before it, equates the suicidal with the sincere, the extremist. She does not take into account how the artifice of Sylvia Plath can be read as quite as suicidal as her sincerity, how as well as feeling real, Plath’s dying is an art. Alvarez may lack Forrest-Thomson’s detailed knowledge of structuralist and post-structuralist theory but, as he points out in The Savage God how ‘Words’ is ‘about the way language remains and echoes long after the turmoil of life has past’, he does bear witness to the fact that the linguistic autonomy that was to be associated with Roland Barthes’s ‘Death of the Author’ might have its suicidal correlative just as much as does the cult of sincerity.33 Even as her linguistic models moved away from the fixity inherent in words that Plath’s last poems imply, Forrest-Thomson shows this. In ‘Sonnet’, she writes ‘Words were made to prevent us near’, the medium of her art has become the gap between her and her departed lover, the gap between her and sincerity, the gap between her and any reader.34 The planet of artifice proves not so much safe as desolate.

32 Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems, p. 108. 33 A. Alvarez, The Savage God (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 31. 34 Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems, p. 141.

C hapter T welve

Costing Seriousness

I

n the poems Peter Porter wrote between the late 1960s and the late ’70s, the word ‘serious’ never appears except under strain and at slight angle from customary usage, and this is partly because of the pressure of its use by Alvarez and like critics. An example is to be found in ‘Seahorses’, from 1969’s A Porter Folio, a poem in which Porter recalls finding seahorses upon the beach in the Australia of his childhood. Amidst descriptions of the child’s heroic world to which the seahorses seemed to belong comes the thought of how sometimes they were ‘like a suicide wreathed in fine/ Sea ivy and bleached sea roses/ One stiff but apologetic in its trance.’1 Later on, Porter reflects: If we wondered why we loved them We might have thought They were the only creatures which had to die Before we could see them— In this early rule of death we’d recognize The armorial pride of head, the unbending Seriousness of small creatures, Credit them with the sea’s rare love Which threw them to us in their beauty, Unlike the vast and pitiable whale Which must be quickly buried for its smell.2



1 Peter Porter, Collected Poems 1: 1961–1981 (Oxford and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 109. 2 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 110.

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As Porter observes of ‘The Story of Jason’: ‘As with all good stories, one cannot tell/ If it is an allegory.’3 Moreover, if this poem is an allegory, what it represents is not fixed. The ‘unbending/ Seriousness of small creatures’ is strange, and its strangeness may partly be explained by the fact that when Porter uses the word ‘creatures’, as in his poem ‘The Sadness of the Creatures’, the creatures he is thinking of are as likely to be human as animal.4 A small unbending armorial head perhaps recalls a coat of arms. But its seriousness is not simply a matter of heraldry, for the sight of this creature’s seriousness comes with its death. Seahorses bend well enough alive beneath the sea; they are only unbending for us; for us they are wholly objectified. Furthermore, they seem loved creatures, small and odourless, their deaths distant, beautiful and romantic. This beauty is deliberately and jarringly deserted at the end of the poem, when the scale is enlarged and the stench of death brought in. The thought that we, and perhaps the poet, need to be jolted from rhapsodising distant suicidal beauties and from a beautiful poem more than half in love with easeful death, appears to prompt an object lesson on the unbeauty of the corpse. To put it in Laingian terms, what is resisted is the beauty of depersonalisation, Porter’s sentiments antedating, going further than, but of a piece with, Alvarez’s description of Plath’s body after her suicide in The Savage God. Porter’s seriousness surfaces in different guise, but again at the foreshore, in ‘Seaside Resort’, from 1972’s Preaching to the Converted, as he contemplates a statue of Queen Victoria. Here it is a quality with which Porter chides himself as he invokes the war and the Queen’s stern clothes of mourning. Nevertheless, in a poem that asserts it is right ‘To be in two minds about her’, Victorian seriousness, the Queen in mourning, the bells of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, but also Britain’s wartime past, those bells that were supposed to ring on invasion, are bridled at as well as acknowledged as Porter sets recent imperial history against the post-war consumer society:5 There will be stone on stone, say the bells, whatever happens to trade, and we have so much burying to do— you cannot withdraw so much from our Christmas Club and it’s not yet time for the Resurrection. But try to be serious 3 Peter Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 380. 4 Porter, Collected Poems 1, pp. 164–166. 5 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 199.



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like bombed-out Number Three of the terrace and the bombazined Queen. In the hinterland, important things like electrical farms and literary shrines are showing up well; further off still in London, the life of statistics (while hiding from Germany and Japan) is a big deal.6

The first of these paragraphs is spoken by the bells, the third appears to revert to the voice of the poet, but the identity of the voice of the second is left slightly uncertain. Porter was to prove fond of elegiac churchgoing, but while the language of seriousness in Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’, with its equation of seriousness with death, ceremony and life’s significant rites of passage, often informs Porter’s own, Porter here gifts that language to the peripheral voice that urges us to try to be serious. Similarly, the not-so-serious word play around seriousness found in ‘bombed-out’ and ‘bombazined’ is more of a piece with talk of the Christmas Club and the acquiring of money one can ill afford in order to spend at the consumer festival rather than with doomsday and higher Christian purpose. Such language seems to banter with Matthew Arnold’s assertion that ‘So far as high poetic truth and seriousness are wanting to a poet’s matter and substance, so far also, we may be sure, will a high poetic stamp of diction and movement be wanting to his style and manner.’ 7 In the lines which follow, the serious is replaced by the ‘important’, even as it questions the transition, by the ‘big deal’ of the big deal. ‘Seaside Resort’ half mourns the passing of the Victorian age and the age of seriousness that succeeded an age of faith. But then, even as he calls to mind Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, Porter is holding his nose: I am almost in love with the small black Queen in the wind and I will not notice that the beach is full of mussel shells and crab claws and the smell is unimaginable yet like your mother’s corpse, that the torn feather is a terrible 6 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 199. 7 Matthew Arnold, The Essential Matthew Arnold, edited and with introductory notes by Lionel Trilling (London: Chatto and Windus, 1949), p. 310.

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catastrophe, and I am cold and lonely on an unimportant strand.8

In ‘The Descent into Avernus’, one of the ‘Studies From Lemprière’, a sequence from 1975’s Living in a Calm Country, the stench gets worse: Coming down from the serious hills upon The Campanian flatlands, then we saw The black lake where the stars reflected shone Among the stagnant argosies of weed, Small sulphur roses knocking at the shore And swollen pumice, jammed among the reeds. This was the Leader’s promise.9

What are ‘serious’ hills? Steep of gradient, hard to navigate, yes, but in a particular way, explained by the Cumaean Sibyl’s response to Aeneas in book VI of the Aeneid: facilis descensus Averno: noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est. easy is the descent to Avernus: night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open; but to recall one’s steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this is the toil!10

Down such a hill, seriousness facilitates movement in only one direction. Porter’s vision of the deathly mephitic lake near Naples, Avernus as portal to the underworld comes as a fantasia upon Lemprière’s classical dictionary and upon Virgil’s description of Aeneas coming to Avernus, a deep cave sheltered by a dark lake. ‘The Leader’ in Porter’s poem remains nameless; he is and is not Aeneas and he seems reminiscent of Basil Bunting’s Alexander

8 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 200. 9 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 299. 10 Virgil, Aeneid, VI.126–129, Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid I–VI, English trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G.P. Goold (Cambridge Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 548, 549.



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in the Poundian Hell that is the third section of Briggflatts, but the voice and perspectives here are those of the followers. ‘The Descent into Avernus’ counts the cost of military and poetic journeys to hell. Although it directly invokes neither, it is a poem that has emerged from the witnessing at a distance of Vietnam and the world wars. The stinking shore has now become, it seems, wholly mythic, the story an allegory, but again, if it is an allegory, its ultimate referents are not spelled out. We are told, however: ‘One of our purposes was to trace the smell,/ The all-pervading smell of misery.’11 Antedating the frequent sub-‘Little Gidding’ day trips to Hades of Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, ‘The Descent into Avernus’ remembers what they sometimes forget, not the heroic nature of a trip or the chance to glimpse a dead poet or two, but the sheer hellishness of the place. Porter, then, does not wish himself the imperial hero Aeneas, or the great poets Virgil or Dante; his narrator has no wish to journey to a disgusting realm. Nevertheless, both narrator and poet have let themselves be led there. In ‘Seahorses’ and ‘Seaside Resort’, the stinking beach had been used to distance the narrator from and to question the stink certain discourses of seriousness would conceal. ‘The Descent into Avernus’, while nauseating and questioning of both the Virgilian and Dantesque, heads to a foul portal of inspiration that, like despair itself, is an acknowledged object of fascination: ‘The air itself a teeming oracle’.12 The corollaries of a poetry of seriousness are still being strongly questioned but they are also being conceded. As with his early response to historians and pain, Porter in ‘The Descent into Avernus’ offers a reaction that is critical, even contemptuous, but also captivated. All the doubt of poetries glorifying Aeneases and Alexanders and championing the overdogs of history is here. But if this doubt manifests the distrust of grand poetry and grand politics that we might associate with Donald Davie or Kingsley Amis, that grand matter is also the poetry’s subject and inspiration. Similarly, an irrational poetry of inspired despair is questioned, loathed but nevertheless returned to. As its title would suggest, Porter’s next collection, The Cost of Seriousness, brings questions of seriousness and its cost to a head. The volume’s first poem, ‘Old-Fashioned Wedding’, is, as John Fuller noted in his review at the time, a poem ‘owing much to Larkin: “after this huge/ Joke, a terrible deluge/ The speeding innocents know nothing of”’.13 Language and topic may bring to mind ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, but this is not the Larkin of ritual affir 11 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 299. 12 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 300. 13 John Fuller, ‘Love Perhaps’, New Statesman, 2 June 1978, p. 742.

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mation, rather this is the Larkin of hope mocked by experience. The falling talk and raised glasses bring ‘an elevation of hope, the drinks a vow/ Naming everything which is to be’.14 One could not marry in a marquee in the Britain of the early 1960s, the time of Porter’s own wedding, or indeed in the 1970s; the wedding vow has been displaced into a toast. The ‘Old Fashioned’ wedding is ‘this huge/ Joke’. The same problems with vows and truth telling in life to be found in ‘Old-Fashioned Wedding’ spill into ‘The Lying Art’, a poem whose subject is exasperation at poetry itself, and whose similes are telling: It is all rhetoric as rich as wedding cake and promising the same bleak tears when what was asked for but not recognized shows its true face after a thousand breakfasts.15

Poetry, like wedding cake, is no more than a sweetly unhealthy rhetorical device. Its words promise, but what they will deliver is bleak breakfasts and unmade faces: in place of the happy tears of weddings, the tears will come in a life of mornings after. ‘The Lying Art’ is a Cretan paradox of a poem, more valuable for its thinking than for its finished thought. Like a number of Porter poems, its discussion of the mendacity of poetry brings to mind the moment when J.L. Austin, explaining how to do things with words, speaks of ‘an utterance’ of any kind issued ‘in the course, for example, of acting a play of making a joke or writing a poem—in which case it would not be seriously meant and we shall not be able to say that we seriously performed the act concerned.’16 But, as Porter sets poetry alongside the rhetorical flummery that surrounds the ceremony which provided Austin with the archetypal speech act, the problem is not so much that poetry and weddings promise what they do not achieve, rather, as Austin’s erroneous ‘I do’ hardens into ‘I will’, it is that they do, albeit in ways that were not intended. Seriously performed speech acts may lead to seriousness of other kinds. J.O. Urmson may have not thought J.L. Austin’s mistake in assuming the wedding ceremony had the words ‘I do’ rather than ‘I will’ ‘philosophically’ important.17 Nevertheless, the distinction is an important one to those 14 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 317. 15 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 324. 16 J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 227–228. 17 J.L. Austin How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edition, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; reprint 2009), note 2, p. 5.



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actually making their vows, it being much easier to say ‘I do’ than to live with ‘I will’. Time, as in Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’, may convert a seriously intended declaration of fidelity into an infidelity, its particular sort of seriousness outlasting the seriousness of intent. That J.L. Austin seeks to exclude the literary and to highlight the ordinary use of language whilst employing somewhat literary language himself may call into question Austin’s attempts to make clear delineations between serious and non-serious language use. But, as Forrest-Thomson was finding at the same time as Porter, it is also possible to notice how, just as Austin seeks to rid performatives of one sort of infelicity or unhappiness, he cannot help but conjure others. Porter’s difficulties with Austin’s seriousness are matched by his continuing argument with the new seriousness as well. In 1975, Porter told an audience in Australia: Americans award their poets lavishly but they expect them to pay the highest price. Confessional verse, so-called, has claimed an authenticity not just from its excellence as poetry but because of the real blood its poets have poured upon the page. Suicide has become the endorsement not merely of genius but of seriousness. The roll call of names is ominously full—from Hart Crane to Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and John Berryman.18

What is notable is not the attack, which, as we have seen, puts Porter in broad company, but how Porter does not disown or discredit such uses of the word ‘serious’. Strongly as he may question the poetics of authenticity, the connection between seriousness and death, suicide in particular, is as well-established in Porter’s work as any of those Americans to whom he alludes, and it is a connection that meets horror and repulsion, compulsion and fascination in equal measure. The title poem of The Cost of Seriousness (1978) finds Porter writing: Once more I come to the white page of art to discover what I know and what I presume I feel about those forgettable objects words. To begin with penalties: the cost of seriousness will be death. 18 Peter Porter, ‘Poetry and Madness’, in Saving from the Wreck, with an Introduction by John Lucas (Nottingham: Trent Books, 2001), p. 2. Originally broadcast 1975, ABC Radio, Sydney.

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Not just naming death again to stoke fires, but thinking of suicide because life or art won’t work and words trying to help, Mallarmé-like, undefine themselves and say things out of the New Physics: self-destruct! Which is why the artist must play.19

In this poem of abstract argument, the question of the link between suicide and the poetic act is confronted directly and in a way that echoes one of the insights of The Savage God, wherein A. Alvarez writes of superstructures on misery and that it ‘is as true of poor Fanny as of Marilyn Monroe as of the seedy Stephen Ward, the pimp in the Profumo affair, as of the great and eminently successful Mark Rothko. They killed themselves because their lives, by all the standards they had built up for themselves, no longer made sense.’20 Porter’s poem goes beyond this, finding in language’s instability a correlative to, and further symptom of, life’s not making sense. Yet if Alvarez’s language of extremism is alluded to and to some extent taken on board, seriousness and death being ultimately coterminous even as they are rejected, the discourse figured is different. Mallarméan aestheticism, the new physics encompass difficulties of language and subject matter not associated with extremism and much more likely to be the concern of neo-modernist and postmodernist poetries, for which suicide is not a central preoccupation. Porter, a poet with a wide interest in poetry’s different manifestations and something of a magpie, surveys a poetic world beyond extremism but brings its most troubling tendency with him. Rather than envisioning a safe and separate planet of artifice, as he ponders the unstable properties of language, even the injunction to play is an injunction to an activity that must take place in the face of and in spite of the entropic, suicidal tendencies of words. Meanwhile, the real stuff making up the world to which words so fail adequately to refer is likewise self-destroying. As this suggests, ‘The Cost of Seriousness’ is not an easy poem to untangle. Herbert Lomas comes as close to arriving at a précis as it will allow: In this very knotty poem there seem to be two main strings: art cannot be serious, and art should not be serious. It shouldn’t be serious because to face the facts is to wish to die. It cannot be serious, because the facts of experience 19 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 338. 20 A. Alvarez, The Savage God (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 121.



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are both continually recurrent and unique, and the unique suffering of the recurrent fact cannot be put into words. Hence the preliminary rule mustn’t claim Ezra Pound’s kind of seriousness as the price for not dying …21

Porter may go on to attack suicide in art as an underwriter of seriousness, along with Poundian pretensions, but he is also attacking the belief in language as a stable monument that the suicidal artist could leave behind, the stark consolation of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Words’. In doing so he breaks with the assumption that the suicide of the poet bequeathing unchanging texts achieves transcendence into perfected stability. ‘The Cost of Seriousness’ is at once an urgent disquisition and a poem whose digressiveness frustrates straightforward conclusion. This manner of drifting, of not quite cohering, is quite as interesting as the argument the poem is trying to make, for it evinces key divisions in Porter’s mind that mirror those in the wider poetry world at a time when extremism, now questioned even by Alvarez, and its alternatives vied to assert the legitimacy of their premises and practices. As the poem carries on digressing, Porter notes how he is avoiding the point, before concluding: Seriousness—ah, quanta pena mia costi! I note from a card that hills are dyed purple by a weed named Paterson’s Curse. That is in New South Wales. The dead may pass their serious burdens to the living.22

Once again, the message looks clear-cut until one tries to interpret it. Is writing left by absent authors to be the equivalent of Paterson’s curse? The interpretation will more or less work but, given the nature of the collection and the poem’s title, it would imply that seriousness is more a stain of grief, possessed, and passed on by the dead, a cost, a burden. At the poem’s conclusion, the curse of language is not an instability that may let intention elude posterity, but its capacity, like the earth of New South Wales, to be a medium capable of showing the costly seriousness of the dead to those who still remain. Porter may well have written ‘The Cost of Seriousness’ for Veronica

21 Herbert Lomas, ‘Taproots’, London Magazine, November/December 1980, pp. 126–132: p. 128. 22 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 338.

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Forrest-Thomson after hearing of her death.23 In December 1976, Porter reviewed Forrest-Thomson’s posthumously published On the Periphery, giving it considerable praise: The collection gives the strongest impression of unhappiness, together with the mental toughness necessary to record it and outface it. Her poetry remains something of a mystery, and one’s reaction to the following simplicities can hardly be simple:

The god knows what will be the end And he will never tell. For I love you and you love me Although we are in hell



And what death has to do with it Is always simply this: If it isn’t your arms I’m heading for It’s the arms of gloomy Dis.24

Twelve years later, Forrest-Thomson’s Collected Poems and Translations appeared. Again, Porter was fulsome in his appreciation: I remember the shock of recognition I felt when Edwin Morgan and I gave her the award in the Second Leeds New Poets’ Competition in 1971, for her Language Games. These austerely garnished found-poems should have been frigid and unapproachable, but were the opposite—fantastic and frightening. On the Periphery, which came out after her death, is like an incompletely carved statue—shapes of suffering are shown emerging from theoretical exercises and assemblies of literary disjecta membra. Purged of pastiche, her words nevertheless are here entirely traditional.25

Porter once again gives the same quotation, whose lines are some of ForrestThomson’s best, presenting allusion not pastiche, traditional poetic form not 23 This was told to me as a third-hand report, so should be treated with a degree of caution. But, given the content of the poem, the tale does have the ring of truth. 24 Peter Porter, ‘Impeccable Bad Taste’, Observer, 12 December 1976. The lines come from Forrest-Thomson’s ‘The Garden of Proserpine’. 25 Peter Porter, ‘On the best battlefields, no dead bodies’, Observer, 5 August 1990.



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quirky artificiality. They also show surprising, readily discernible common ground between Forrest-Thomson work and Porter’s own. Pondering further possible connections between Porter and ForrestThomson, it is natural to fall upon the damaged statue of Porter’s ‘An Angel in Blythburgh Church’, from The Cost of Seriousness: Their painted faces guard and guide. Now or Tomorrow or whenever is the promise— The resurrection comes: fix your eyes halfway Between Heaven and Diss. The face is crudely carved, simplified by wind.

‘Diss’, that realm of Forrest-Thomson’s, and behind her, Swinburne’s, gloom, in turn brings to mind the ‘The Lying Art’ and its litany of diswords—‘dislike’, ‘distract’, ‘disclaimer’, ‘dishonesty’, ‘disappointed’, ‘discontent’—which threaten to dissolve into Stygian compound puns feel allied to Forrest-Thomson’s own Dis-appointed language. Where Forrest-Thomson might dream of safety in linguistic artifice, Porter is much more pessimistic. The most playful poem within The Cost of Seriousness, ‘Gertrude Stein at Snails Bay’, has the patron saint of Language Poetry transported to Australia. Porter impersonating Stein juggling with words, ostensibly removing much of their capacity for reference, ought to be gamesome as can be. But as Porter’s Stein muses on a way with words that lets them escape their denotatative or performative functions, she finds sadly that this does not also entail a complete lack of the affective:

Nothing can be done in the face of ordinary unhappiness



Above all, there is nothing to do in words



I have written a dozen books to prove nothing can be done in words.26

The language is deliberately shifting and ambiguous, a primer in How Not to Do Things with Words, yet doing nothing in the face of ordinary unhappiness does not, it seems, stop words becoming coloured by it.

26 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 340.

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‘An Angel in Blythburgh Church’ was published in periodical form some months before Porter’s review of On the Periphery, as were ‘The Cost of Seriousness’ and ‘Gertrude Stein at Snails Bay’. Since Porter was already interested in Forrest-Thomson’s earlier work, he may have seen the pamphlet Cordelia, which had been published in 1974 and whose poems include ‘Sonnet’, ‘The Garden of Prosepine’ and ‘Ode: The Lady of Shalott’. Indeed, he may even have been shown these poems by Forest-Thomson herself.27 Nonetheless, ‘The Cost of Seriousness’ aside, for the most part it is safer to assume that the minds of the two poets were tending towards similar questions and similar language and strategies with which to address them rather than that there was a large direct influence of Forrest-Thomson upon Porter. Both were intrigued by the forms of poetic discourse and their truth value and often at pains to show, stress and prize poetic artifice as opposed to authenticity while at the same time being worried about lies, inauthenticity and poetry’s relation to them and to seriousness. Both were also exceedingly unhappy, their unhappiness connected to how they were unhappily married. The minds of each turned towards death, the first towards her own, the second towards the death of his wife. Porter’s first wife, Jannice, committed suicide in December 1974. Two decades later, Porter remarked in an interview with Ian Hamilton: ‘I saw pretty sharply the appalling selfishness of, on the one hand, the actual literary career and, on the other hand, the literary impulse and ambition. I did feel very strongly that she paid a high price.’28 Porter’s later work can be too easily moved to employ an Audenesque register to dismiss poetry and poets, but The Cost of Seriousness is at once more bitter and more original in its calling of poet and poetry to account. It is also more urgent in its search for what valid purpose, in the face of this, poetry might still perform. In ‘An Exequy’, Porter writes of: A map of loss, some posted cards, The living house reduced to shards, The abstract hell of memory, The pointlessness of poetry— These are instances which tell Of something which I know full well, I owe a death to you.29 27 Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Cordelia or ‘A Poem Should Not Mean but Be’ (Loughborough: Omens Poetry Pamphlet, no. 2, 1975). 28 Quoted in Ian Hamilton, ‘Triumph of the Downside’, Guardian, Saturday 20 February 1999, pp. 6–7: p. 7. 29 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 329.



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The charge of pointlessness here is as far from a celebration of the ludic as could be envisaged. Yet even as its author might also have wished to disown the idea, if any of his poems has a point to it, it must be this formal lament, written in imitation of the ‘Exequy’ of Bishop Henry King. From a collection full of weddings and lies, ‘An Exequy’ is that rare thing, a poem which is a speech act, for it makes a public statement of a vow: ‘I owe a death to you’. It is seriously performed and it voices its seriousness explicitly against the language of confessional poetry: you Would never share your heart with those Whose only talent’s to suppose, Nor from your final childish bed Raise a remote confessing head. 30

Jannice Porter, a close friend of Assia Wevill, would have been well aware of the nature of discussions around confessional verse and suicide.31 Porter’s tribute honours his wife’s own antipathy towards the manner. In sympathy with this, and in contradistinction to the loose style that would be the badge of authenticity and suited to confession, the tetrametric ‘An Exequy’ gives us the ‘grief in formal state’, the wish to ‘give the dead a public stance’ that it admires in King’s ‘Exequy’.32 This is a ‘baroque architrave’ and not the popular ‘ragged natural life’ of ‘bottled flowers’. Poetry may also have an additional small virtue: being, if nothing else of value, part of Jannice Porter’s worldly afterlife, it keeps her trace in words in a way similar to the way she lives on in posted cards. Poetry is certainly capable of envisaging the animation of the other thin traces that remain: one day The time will come to me to pay When your slim shape from photographs Stands at my door and gently asks If I have any work to do Or will I come to bed with you.

30 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 329. 31 Here, as elsewhere, my knowledge of some of the details of Peter Porter’s life has been informed by Bruce Bennett’s Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and his Poetry (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1991). 32 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 329.

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This intimacy is an intimacy of the deathbed, and it places work, a category which presumably includes poetry, as something that came between the couple in life and which now delays the speaker’s own journey to the tomb. ‘The Exequy’ embodies a contradiction. It seeks the language and status of public and formal address, but we have been taken to the marriage bed and the deathbed, in words in that are, in their way, quite as achingly intimate as are those of the poems of Sylvia Plath. Much of the power of ‘The Exequy’ comes, not from addressing the public or speaking in neutral terms, but from addressing Jannice Porter directly. This language of direct address between ‘me’ and ‘you’ is, like it or not, shared with the language of intimate, confessional writing, a language listened in to by those not in the marriage. Moreover, Porter is writing without evasion. The poem honours, and later celebrates, the life gone, but before it can reach that point, it is uncomfortable, self-accusatory and honest about ways Porter may have viewed his wife in life and in death. At the beginning of ‘An Exequy’, Jannice Porter appears in nightmare, ‘in guilt’s iconography’, depicted as the monster attacking Andromeda in a painting, as a ‘lost beast, beleaguered child’. 33 To figure the mourned as monster, and oneself as guilty of her slaying is to be as unflinching, even caustic in honesty as the closing poems to Life Studies. ‘The Exequy’ manages to be the most eloquent rebuttal of the poetics of ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ and yet a poem that bears out many of its contentions. The point applies to Porter’s work as a whole. Porter evidently preferred to be a social poet, a discursive poet of culture, as well as a ludic one rather than a poet of the emotionally extreme situation. Yet it is also the case that the best Porter is frequently the Porter who treats of the irrational, the oneiric and the disturbing, and who has to exert all his powers of control in order to harness profound or tempestuous emotional material. The last third of ‘An Exequy’ brings back Jannice Porter, to set her in the earthly paradise of Italy, ‘In narrow streets applauding wines,/ The moon above the Apennines’.34 Heaven on earth is attained, for the addressee this once, in memory at least. For other poems within The Cost of Seriousness, the problem is one of hell: the church’s traditional place for suicides, and the hell on earth one guesses they suffered to wish to leave it. ‘The Delegate’, where she is depicted as one walking ‘alone/ among the plains of hell’, has Jannice Porter again come back and speak in her own voice.35 The poem echoes, and stands comparison with, the ghost voices of Thomas Hardy. Once again, the

33 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 328. 34 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 330. 35 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 332.



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characteristic modes of the confessional are avoided as a much older tradition is brought into play, as the ‘you’ and ‘I’ of the confessional poem are reversed: I was there even in our worst hour—the wreaths and the mis-named name competing with the other mourners’ flowers upon the crematorium slabs. I am divided into an infinity of myself, pieces for everywhere—especially that damp day, that insistence on seriousness. We shall never be so serious again. But this frees you for levity today, and perhaps a little licensed selfishness. Take this gift of despair—what can a ghost give but remembrance and forgetfulness in the right proportions?36

With ‘The Delegate’, Porter’s seriousness reaches its zero point. Seriousness of disposition and intent are at one with the seriousness of death. It is a point beyond poetry; in pieces, it is the domain of the bottled flowers, to which ‘An Exequy’ contrasts its baroque architrave, though here the flowers are even more ragged and misnamed. Compared with this, poetry is not serious, nor in witnessing does it become so. Poetry is a pastime of levity and requires a licence for its undertakings from the seriousness of mourning. Thus, for this moment at least, the spirits of poetic play and emotional seriousness are reconciled. At the end of ‘The Lying Art’, Porter gives up the case against poetry, settling to ‘make the best of’: dishonesty, accept that all epithalmiums are sugar and selfishness. Our world of afterwards will have no need of lies. 37

At the end of his indictment of his art’s falsity, the argument about the ‘it’ that never names itself as poetry no longer appears to refer to all poetry but to ‘epithalmiums’, the poems full of promise of what is to come; the poetry that is rhetoric, words as makeup. These lines may in fact find some worth in 36 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 331. 37 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 325.

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poetry, even as they disown so much of the poet’s output, for the ‘world/ of afterwards’ brings to mind ‘Afterwards’, Hardy’s poem of his own death, the poem Porter was to describe as Hardy’s ‘masterpiece’.38 Porter thus holds the door ajar just enough to suggest that there might be honesty to death in poetry and a performance of duty to the memory of the dead outweighing poetic vanity, that indeed there may be a few poems that are more or less without lies. The pressure to achieve this is a factor in the excellence of The Cost of Seriousness and the best of the elegies Porter wrote thereafter. Nevertheless, disenchantment with much of poetry’s ambition and many of its practices may also have sapped strength and urgency from some of the later work. The later poem ‘Why did Dante pick on Suicides?’ provides an explanation and justification: Life is someone’s gift. Dante thought it God’s. Doggerel or great verse or what’s to hand Can warm the afterlife. The Afterwards Of Hardy trades full stop for ampersand. And this is not great verse. It’s written for Those loved unhappy shades whom Dante turned To sticks and marl. Forget the every Law Of Trespass: peace may be strangely earned. 39

By this analysis, great verse is not something that deserves great admiration. What is important is the justness and generosity of the afterlife given to the dead, the suicides. If ever there were a poetics that really did connect poetic value with suicide it is manifest in such poems by Porter. But, the link between suicide and poetic creativity and excellence severed, they are about as far in conception from the Romantic and extremist versions as could be.

38 Landscape Poets: Thomas Hardy, selected and introduced by Peter Porter, photographs by John Hedgecoe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), p. 9. 39 Peter Porter, Afterburner (London: Picador, 2004), p .8.

C hapter T hirteen

‘I Don’t Like Dramatizing Myself’

‘E

xpression’, a poem from Thom Gunn’s 1982 collection The Passages of Joy, finds Gunn reading the output of some younger poets. The experience may ‘not always seem first-hand’, but, telling of unsympathetic ‘Mother’, hating ‘Daddy, the noted alcoholic’, and addressing mental breakdown, incarceration and attempted suicide in darkly ironic terms, it is, Gunn concludes, ‘very poetic poetry.’1 Where his students are wrought with emotion, Gunn is dry and droll. These junior extremists have the Plathian subjects, tone and vocabulary (mother may be ‘Mother’, but father will, of course, forever be referred to as ‘Daddy’), yet such poetry of authenticity may not, on close examination, be all that authentic. Indeed, being ‘very poetic poetry’, it may be quite the opposite. In search of an alternative, Gunn goes to the art museum. Here he finds, not further displays of self, but an ‘early Italian altarpiece’ of virgin and child, a child with ‘the knowing face of an adult’.2 Viewing them is like drinking water: ‘after too much birthday cake’, the solid forms of mother and son ‘stare outward, two pairs of matching eyes/ void of expression.’3 ‘Too much birthday cake’, implies overindulgence on a day set aside for the singing and celebration of oneself. Reference to birthdays may also call to mind Plath’s ‘A Birthday Present’ and ‘Poem for a Birthday’. The criticism of Gunn’s juniors is clear enough. Their poems are explicitly about parent and child and the suffering of the latter, but as they seek to describe children

1 Thom Gunn, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 321. 2 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 321. 3 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 321.

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overburdened with experience, their poems manage only to read as inauthentically authentic, seeming not to be products of the very first-hand experience of which they brag. For all that its figures are void of expression, the altarpiece is an archetypical figuring of what Gunn’s students have been seeking to portray, a child at once innocent and knowing too much. As an altarpiece, it shows the Christ child as sinless while implicitly looking forward to the suffering on the cross; its mother and child may be without expression but that does not mean they do not present the structure of profound and terrible emotion. Gunn’s encounter with the altarpiece may look like an escape from young tragedy. But it may also be read as an example of a steadfast facing-up to it. Discussing ‘The Gas Poker’, a poem from his last volume, 2000’s Boss Cupid, Thom Gunn remarked: ‘I don’t like dramatizing myself. I don’t want to be Sylvia Plath. The last person I want to be!’4 The statement causes one to pause. There is, after all, a great deal of self-dramatisation in Gunn, if not exactly self-dramatisation in the Plath manner. Autobiographical poems can make Thom Gunn a dramatic player; poems not ostensibly about Gunn himself may figure dramatisations that are less impersonations than playings out of aspects of the self, often aspects of the self that the poet may not be entirely comfortable owning. This is most acutely the case in Fighting Terms, but it is discernible in much of the subsequent poetry as well. ‘Misanthropos’ or ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’ more or less fit the description. Indeed, it could also be argued that one of the reasons Gunn was never content with the former was because the smell of self was never quite washed off its protagonist. But there may be a stronger reason why Gunn should not want to be like Plath. ‘My Mother’s Pride’, the poem placed prior to ‘The Gas Poker’ in Boss Cupid, finds Gunn writing of his mother: ‘She dramatized herself/ Without thought of the dangers.’5 The poem concludes with the line: ‘I am made by her, and undone.’6 ‘The Gas Poker’ itself relates how Gunn and his brother discovered their mother’s corpse after she had gassed herself. The connection between one mother who dramatised herself without thought of the dangers, who gassed herself leaving two children behind, and another is not a difficult one to make. Not only does Gunn not over-dramatise himself, apart from the early interpolation after the mention of forty-eight years ‘—Can it be forty-eight/ Since then?—’ indicating authorial involvement

4 Thom Gunn and James Campbell, Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell (London: Between the Lines, 2000), p. 19. 5 Thom Gunn, Boss Cupid (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 9. 6 Gunn, Boss Cupid, p. 9.



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in the narrative, he tells of himself and his brother as if they were other boys entirely.7 To return to ‘Expression’, it is fair to posit that the lack of expression emanating from its mother and son has its correlative in the lack of direct expression in Gunn’s verse of his relationship to his mother and to the manner of her death. The sentiment of ‘Expression’ could be taken as being emotionally similar to the ways the older members of the Movement avoided, minimised or repressed the violent or the apocalyptic in their poetry, having already had too much of both in the war. Following a surfeit of histrionic emotionalism and suicide in early life, Gunn had little cause to seek it out in art, and every reason to seek a mentor such as Yvor Winters, who would make poetic theory and practice a bulwark against them. Yet, just as there is no indication that the altarpiece does not in some ways embody emotion, likewise, the lack of the ‘expression’ of emotion in Gunn’s work does not preclude its being caught or conveyed. Talking of ‘The Gas Poker’ itself, Gunn pointed out ‘I think I probably got a bit of help from Thomas Hardy writing that poem, the emphasis on the rather awkward, forced, rhymes: barricaded/ they did, and so on.’8 The technical learning from Hardy would have been accompanied by the lessons about the place for personality and emotion Gunn recorded in his 1972 essay ‘Thomas Hardy and the Ballads’: It is never the poetry of personality: nothing could be further from him than the Confessional poetry that was all the rage in the US and England a few years back. He must have been a genuinely modest man. His first person speaks as a sample human being, with little personality displayed and no claims for uniqueness—with as little distinguishing him beyond his subject matter, in fact, as distinguishes the personages of the Ballads beyond their actions.9

Commenting upon this statement, while reckoning it ‘misleading both about Hardy and confessional verse’, Alan Jenkins maintains that it is richly suggestive in relation to Gunn’s ‘late elegies for friends who have died of AIDS’, which ‘carry a charge or personal emotion that is unprecedented in

7 Gunn, Boss Cupid, p. 9. 8 Gunn and Campbell, Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell, p. 19. 9 Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 77–105: p. 94.

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his work’ but which accords with ‘excluding the speaker’s personality’ and with this universalising, balladic tendency in Gunn’s writing.10 Jenkins’s belief that the statement is misleading is in accordance with Donald Davie’s views in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, a book of the same period as ‘Thomas Hardy and the Ballads’ (although the views are stated in a passage that is, to a large extent, an update of Davie’s 1966 essay ‘Sincerity and Poetry’).11 With some mixed feelings and a slightly inaccurate chronology, Davie acknowledges how in the mid ’50s came [Robert Lowell’s] collection called Life Studies in which the ‘I’ of the poem nearly always asks to be taken, quite unequivocally, as Robert Lowell himself … now we have once again poems in which the public life of the author as author, and his private life, are messily compounded …12

The ‘once again’ is significant, for Davie makes conspicuous that this is not some brave new phase of modernism but a post-Romantic heritage, that the language of sincerity is that which may determine our understanding of Wordsworth as well as Lowell, and indeed the poet who, in Davie’s view, is the presiding genius of modern English verse, ‘Hardy … is a thoroughly confessional poet, though his reticence about his private life concealed this to some extent until lately.’13 Here is a shift from the debates of 1962. Hardy turns up in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ as the man who remarked to Robert Graves that: ‘All we can do is to write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than those who went before us’, the harbinger of all those ‘negative feedbacks’ that would see British poetry turning its back upon modernism.14 The idea that Hardy as well as, or alternatively to, Robert Lowell might be a model for the confessional, for the poet dealing with extreme subject matter does not arise, and for understandable reasons. First of all, Larkin, who is the conspicuous heir to Hardy amongst the Movement poets, is not heir 10 Alan Jenkins, ‘Thom Gunn’s Postures for Combat’, The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie and Their Contemporaries, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11 Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry; ‘Sincerity and Poetry’, in The Poet in the Imaginary Museum: Essays of Two Decades, ed. Barry Alpert (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977), pp. 140–146. 12 Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, p. 136. 13 Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, p. 136. 14 The New Poetry, ed. A. Alvarez., revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 21.



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to the extreme or the confessional Hardy. Or, to put it another way, Larkin is an elegist of the ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ variety, not an elegist of the variety of ‘The Going’. Yet Hardy bequeaths Peter Porter and Thom Gunn a model of the writing of intimate, painful experience without being a confessional in the self-dramaticising manner. A less categorical statement in ‘Hardy and the Ballads’ has it that: We never for a moment doubt that Hardy means what he says. We make much of ‘sincerity’ nowadays—it is the most striking quality in the poetry of for example Allen Ginsberg or Anne Sexton. And clearly sincerity is a value, even though one rather difficult to define—maybe it is one of the ultimate values in literature. But there are different ways of being sincere, and I suggest that Hardy’s is a supremely successful one.15

The importance of sincerity to poetry then is granted, it is its mode that is in question. Some of the resistance to the confessional mode evinced by Gunn and Peter Porter may well be down to old-fashioned English and Australian emotional reticence: stoicism, repression or gentility, depending on how you wish to characterise it. There is something of this when, for example, Porter in ‘The Lying Art’ complains of how poetry allows a man disappointed with his mother to be ‘a huge cry-baby.’16 Yet here, as in ‘Expression’, there is also an implicit complaint: less that confessionalism is too sincere than that it is not sincere enough. The performance of confessional verse entails an apparent truth to the self is in fact an exhibitionist being-for-others. Such an outlook may have its philosophical correlative, in J.L. Austin and speech act theory, yes, but also in the later Wittgenstein’s move towards post-Cartesianism in which, with the forms of speech and communication foregrounded, a private language becomes a chimera. In that regard, the argument that confessionalism is bounded up with existentialism, and with it an ultimately Cartesian view of the self, is convincing. The elegy is a poem for others, its sincerity is guaranteed not by the self expressing but by a form of words, an audience and occasion and the conventions and traditions in which it is situated. It is thus a variety of occasional poetry, albeit one of a very particular type. Porter and Gunn have opted for externalised models of what might have been conceived of as strictly internal processes of poetic inspiration. Gunn 15 Thom Gunn, The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography, ed. and intr. Clive Wilmer (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 95. 16 Peter Porter, Collected Poems 1: 1961–1981 (Oxford and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 324.

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justifies the writing and admiring of ‘occasional poetry’ in the introduction to his Penguin selection of the work of Ben Jonson: nowadays we tend to use the phrase ‘occasional poetry’ to indicate trivial or insincere writing. Yet in fact all poetry is occasional: whether the occasion is an external event like a birthday or a declaration of war, whether it is an occasion of the imagination, or whether it is in some sort of combination of the two. (After all, the external may lead to the internal occasions.) The occasion in all cases—literal or imaginary—is the starting point, only, of a poem, but it should be a starting point to which the poet must in some sense stay true. The truer he is to it, the closer he sticks to what for him is its authenticity, the more he will be able to draw from it in the adventures that consist of the experience of writing.17

Compare this to the Alvarez model which makes the engine of verse (even when the external would correspond to the internal) ex-pressive, the internal pressing outward. The model of the occasional presented by Gunn is of a staying true not to the core of the self but to something conceived of as outside it, under which heading may also be included imaginary creations. Authenticity is then not truth to self but truth to occasion. Gunn, we may take it, is, at the time of writing this introduction, no longer the good existentialist. Whereas the archetypal visual correlative for existentialism was twodimensional and quickly and impulsively made, the abstract expressionist painting, the visual correlative for Hardy, was, as Davie made evident in a quotation from Hardy, something altogether more public and laborious, architecture: Years earlier he had decided that too regular a beat was bad art. He had fortified himself in his opinion by thinking of the analogy of architecture, between which art and that of poetry he had discovered, to use his own words, that there existed a close and curious parallel, both arts, unlike some others, having to carry a rational content inside their artistic form. He knew that in architecture cunning irregularity is of enormous worth, and it is obvious that he carried on into his verse, perhaps in part unconsciously, the Gothic art-principle in which he had been trained … He shaped his poetry accordingly, introducing metrical pauses, and reverse beats; and found for his trouble that some particular line of a poem exemplifying this principle

17 Gunn, The Occasions of Poetry, pp. 106–107.



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was greeted with a would-be jocular remark that such a line ‘did not make for immortality.’18

With this analogy, Hardy does not argue for the smoothest, regular metres in poetry, yet neither does he see deviation from regularity as a product of the will, an expression of the self. Davie was of a disposition to endorse stony visual illustrations of the poet’s craft. His Hardy is the poet as architect, his Pound had been, in the title of another book of Davie’s, Pound Poet as Sculptor.19 In later years, Gunn, now become something of a Poundian himself, was of a similar mind to Davie and evidently attracted to sculptural modernism as well as architectural traditionalism. Nonetheless, within his late elegies, Gunn’s urge to be like a sculptor, to be like Pound, is overpowered by the stronger wish not to be like Plath, though it is a desire that is not shown as directly as it was in ‘Expression’. ‘The Missing’, confronted by the deaths of many friends, finds Gunn discovering: ‘I do not like the statue’s chill contour,/ not nowadays’.20 The deaths of others, unlike the enclosed and enfolding self-administered death of ‘Edge’, leave the poet ‘less defined’: Eyes glaring from raw marble, in a pose Languorously part-buried in the block, Shins perfect and no calves, as if I froze Between potential and a finished work. —Abandoned incomplete, shape of a shape, In which exact detail shows the more strange, Trapped in unwholeness, I find no escape Back to the play of constant give and change.21

In ‘Her Pet’, where Gunn contemplates the tomb of Valentine Balbiani, it is both Plath and Philip Larkin who are implicitly set right. With the ‘Ruff crisp, mouth calm, hands long and delicate,/ All in the pause of marble signify/ A strength so lavish she can limit it’, the poem once more brings to mind Plath’s ‘Edge’.22 With the way the statue’s composure is ruffled by 18 Quoted in Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, pp. 14–15. 19 Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1965). 20 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 483. 21 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 483. 22 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 475.

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the jokey homonym relating the pause of marble to the paws of the pet, we are brought back to ‘that faint hint of the absurd—/ The little dogs under their feet’ from ‘An Arundel Tomb’.23 Yet Gunn leaves off the idealised stillness of Larkin or Plath as he goes on to contemplate another panel. As he does so, his language has the much more the epitaph-like chiselled quality of Basil Bunting, ‘Death, is so Plain!’, and echoes the stone mason and his gravestones in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts and the lament: ‘Love is so sore’.24 Reading the lower monument’s truth, of a body now disfigured, ‘big ears’, ‘creased face’, ‘sinewy throat’, Gunn writes ‘I can read the pain’.25 If this is what it is to read pain, both Plath and Larkin are not sincere enough.

23 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber and the Marvell Press 1988), p. 110. 24 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 475; Basil Bunting, Collected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 39. 25 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 475.

C hapter Fourteen

Birthday Letters

T

he publication of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters showed modern poetry at its least resistant to the mass media. The long attention given to the Hughes/Plath marriage guaranteed the book widespread publicity, the idea that the poet would be personal and sincere proving immensely attractive to critical pundits and readers alike. Not only that, the book could be reckoned much more ‘accessible’ than the Hughes/Plath poems of old. Most of the verse in Birthday Letters is technically free, but, like so much mainstream contemporary poetry, it likes to keep the pentameter in sight, and much of it functions at a very low pressure. Indeed, the majority of the book’s poems can be read more or less like prose. If the trouble with much of the poetry of the 1960s and ’70s is too much striving for intensity of effect, the problem here is too little. Furthermore, most of the poems’ artifice, their particularly poetic features, can, with the exception of some heavy-handed symbolism, be more or less ignored. In mitigation, it can be pointed out how a long narrative sequence does not require the same level of intensity as a lyric and that readability is not actually a fault. Still, Birthday Letters reads much better the first time than it ever will again and, read in isolation, few of its poems particularly reward the time spent with them. Birthday Letters put a poet, now of the 1990s, in correspondence with his younger self and the younger Plath. The poems comment on, allude to, contradict or compete with those of Plath. There is a certain amount of putting facts right, a settling of scores that relates to the two poets’ marriage and to the intrusion of others’ biographical speculation about that marriage. There is a continuing poetic rivalry. But Hughes does not just revisit Plath; he revisits his young self. Not only has the older Hughes seen the virtue of the qualities of prose in poetry, in other respects too, he appears to have joined up with Robert Conquest and the Movement. Suddenly all the old

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criticisms the straightened and war-bitten generation levelled at his own verse are levelled at Plath and hers. ‘Your Paris’ has Plath quite unaware of the recent occupation and of ‘each bullet scar’ in the stone work, unlike her post-war British husband.1 It is Plath’s art that is violent and extreme, and it is Plath who is repeatedly associated with such language even as her husband disowns it, whether she is writing of ‘Drawing’ objects which are ‘suffered’ and ‘tortured’ or penning her verse.2 While making Plath ‘jailer’, himself ‘nurse and protector’ answers the viciously passive-aggressive ‘The Jailer’, it does so in a way that hardly rings true to the violence and sexual imaginings of so much of Hughes’s poetry of the ’60s and ’70s.3 There is nothing in Philip Larkin that has quite the studied passivity of Birthday Letters. Only ‘You Hated Spain’, which had been first published in 1979, hints at an earlier, different dynamic, one which assumes a link between a stomach for animal violence and poetic strength. For her birthdays Plath has been given the gift not just of her own extremism, but of Hughes’s too. The style is not just over, it has been (re)written out of history. The more typical objectors to Birthday Letters have focused on the poems’ superstitiousness and fatalism. With them have come those who, with all the confidence of neighbourhood gossips, are sure of the rights and wrongs of the Plath/Hughes marriage. Still, leaving whatever may or may not have happened outside the book aside, there are reasons to be queasy about what happens within its pages. The deployment of Daddy, the minotaur (the monster figured as at the end of the dark path of Plath’s inspiration by Alvarez in The Savage God), the elm wood writing desk, fate and fame, the guarded putting of Hughes’s own case, his careful answering of Plath’s charges, his laying of countercharges, though perhaps understandable given the years of harrying suffered by Hughes, find the poet determined to pronounce himself not guilty and a mere victim of people and events.4 This may be most glaring in the deeply unpleasant and racist ‘Dreamers’, which, like some of the Capriccio poems before it, paints Assia Wevill as a German Jewish Lilith while absolving Hughes of his own agency, but it is consistent with the collection as a whole. Ted Hughes was not guilty of the death of Sylvia Plath, nor, for that matter, was he ultimately responsible for the deaths of Assia and Shura 1 Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 1066. 2 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 1071. 3 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 1148. 4 See A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971), p. 32.



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Wevill. But it would be astonishing, given the circumstances, if he did not feel some guilt all the same. To go back to Alvarez’s formulation of dealing with disturbances ‘nakedly and without evasion’, it is clear that the form and content of Hughes’s poems are evasive in a way the elegies of Porter and Gunn, and behind them those of Thomas Hardy and indeed Ben Jonson or Henry King, are not.5 For all that the poem as letter sets up an apparent dialogue of intimacy, the reader’s being privy to private correspondence, a good post-Lowellian vouchsafe of sincerity, other, older terms of reckoning closer to public avowal, or indeed ballad, have, in practice, proven to give testimony that is both more forthright and more honest. In a 1970 interview with Ekbert Faas, Hughes was asked about his move from meter and traditional formal device. His answer does not trumpet the superior virtues of free verse: I think it’s true that formal patterning of the actual movement of verse somehow includes a mathematical and musically deeper world than free verse can easily hope to enter. It’s a mystery why it should do so. But it only works of course if the language is totally alive and pure and if the writer has a perfectly pure grasp of his real feeling … and the very sound of metre calls up ghosts of the past and it is difficult to sing one’s own tune against that choir. It is easier to speak a language that raises no ghosts.6

Raising the ghosts of past literature, speaking with pure grasp of real feeling, might, in the manner of Hardy or Porter, have raised ghosts Hughes had no wish to face.

5 The New Poetry, A. Alvarez, ed., revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 29. 6 Ekbert Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), p. 208.

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Geoffrey Hill’s New Poetry

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ylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn and Peter Porter are all dead, as are the vast majority of the Movement, the Group and the contributors to The New Poetry. And long before they died, the spirit of The New Poetry, and the spirit of extremism, in so far as they had ever advocated it, had been turned against by all who survived the 1960s. Still, one poet of the New Poetry generation has over the last two decades been more active and in some ways more extremist than he ever was before, and that is Geoffrey Hill. From 1996’s Canaan on, the costive impersonality of Hill’s earlier work has been shredded to reveal a poet more nakedly rivalrous and rancorous, more overtly ungenteel, more flagrantly assertive of bad taste and distaste than he ever was before. Indeed, it can seem as if 1962 happened forty years later for Hill than for everyone else. The dramatics of the long sequences, The Triumph of Love and Speech! Speech! in particular, are those of the badmannered poet beyond gentility giving a show to a ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ and telling them uncomfortable contemporary and historical truths.1 Hill has not been reckless with the details of his intimates, but, making his age, his depression and its medication the subject for verse, he is much closer to Plath’s domain than he once was. Indeed, in his poetry, the ethical problem of relating to portrayals of human suffering in the world and in history has taken on a much more personal colouring. Hill may be aware that the small injustices visited on him by the reviewers of his books are of little significance compared to the gravest historical crimes, but they do cause comparable consternation in a poetry which thrives as much on its bad taste and lack of proportion as on a sense of moral rectitude.



1 Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber, 1981), p. 245.

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Of a piece with this are Hill’s cantankerous dealings with T.S. Eliot. In The Shaping Spirit, A. Alvarez, who is much more appreciative of the later Eliot than Hill was to be, comments on a passage of The Dry Salvages, italicising ‘Or even a very good dinner’ as one of those ‘flashes of rather heavy condescension that bring home how much depends on maintaining the decorum and formality of his poetic occasions.’2 It may be that in the 1950s and ’60s Hill cared for such lines as little as Alvarez, but Hill wasn’t putting this on record at the time. The more recent Hill, all gusto and disgust, gives applause for gusto and disgust in Eliot’s early work and contempt for its later withdrawal. Hill is championing the exegetically difficult modernism of early Eliot, rather than the emotional difficulty of Eliot and Lowell, but the attack on ‘a narrow English possessiveness, with regard to “good sense” and “generous common humanity”’ in Larkin and the Eliot of Four Quartets is quite of a piece with ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’.3 In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hill became increasingly interested in the Modernist long poem, the Cantos particularly, but more as an enterprise than as a form. Often Hill reaches a high pitch of verbal intensity, in his case through the deployment of a few narrow, exaggerated tonal registers, erudite allusion and wordplay, a dance of the intellect among words that is an equivalent to mid-period Hughes’s own parade of intensities.4 There are bits of Hill’s long poems that are dull, bits that don’t work, and what would call itself ‘pitch’ is too often merely sarcasm (which can be as complacent a tonal register as any), but none that appears to be so deliberately, none that subordinates itself to the wider sense of the poem as a whole. The result is that Speech! Speech!, The Triumph of Love and The Orchards of Syon all have excellent parts, but are comparatively weak on architecture or thematic development, tonal subtlety or variation. As a result, they don’t stand with the great Modernist long poems, with Gunn and Davie’s later touchstone, Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts, or indeed Four Quartets, and ask to be judged in the same way one would judge a sequence like Crow. The curiously belated quality to Hill’s later poetry is manifest in its frequent returns to the poetic battlegrounds of Hill’s youth, as here in The Triumph of Love VII:

2 A. Alvarez, The Shaping Spirit (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958), p. 30. 3 Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 701. 4 This is a reprise of Edward Lucie-Smith’s view of Hughes’s ‘series of thunderous special effects’ in British Poetry since 1945, ed. and int. Edward Lucie-Smith, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 25.



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Romsley, of all places!—Spraddled ridgevillage sacred to the boy-martyr Kenelm, his mouth full of blood and toffee. A stocky water tower built like the stump of a super-dreadnought’s foremast. It could have set Coventry ablaze with pretend broadsides, some years before that armoured city suddenly went down, guns firing, beneath the horizon; huge silent whumphs of flame-shadow bronzing the nocturnal cloud-base of her now legendary dust.5

The Triumph of Love VII is a poem that knows it happens in a poetic country that also contains Philip Larkin’s ‘I Remember, I Remember’, a poem which opens with a stopping train prompting the response: ‘“Why Coventry!” I exclaimed. “I was born here.”’6 Having thus prepared the reader for an outcome of pure nostalgic reverie, Larkin finds that he can barely recognise the place. There is a straightforward explanation for this failure of recognition, an explanation which the poem never gives: Coventry had been very heavily bombed. Hill’s ‘Romsley, of all places!’ has, in contrast, no trouble locating childhood as a remembered excitement.7 The ‘stocky water tower’ like ‘the stump of a super-dreadnought’s foremast’ that could have ‘set Coventry ablaze with pretend broadsides’ may well encode some hostility to one of Coventry’s pre-war residents; more importantly, the lines recall what has been forgotten: to remember childhood is also to remember the war and what actually happened to Coventry, even while recording its own distance in place, attitude and experience.8 With The Triumph of Love VII seemingly designed to win a Kenneth Allott-style comparison with ‘I Remember, I Remember’, it is no surprise to find Christopher Ricks reading The Triumph of Love LII as a poem which has its eyes on Larkin’s poem in The New Poetry’s introduction, ‘At Grass’. Christopher Ricks implies that Hill the poet, by thus engaging with ‘At Grass’, must rate Larkin’s work more highly than does Hill the critic. Yet Ricks also implies that this manifestation of influence may be neither generous-spirited nor unconscious: ‘In the case of The Triumph of Love, the

5 Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), pp. 2–3. 6 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. and intr. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber and Faber and the Marvell Press, 1988), p. 81. 7 Hill, The Triumph of Love, p. 2. 8 Hill, The Triumph of Love, pp. 2–3.

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exasperation is that of an oyster, and it precipitates a pearl’, a characterisation which suggests less a manifestation of the gratefulness of the poetic mind Ricks usually discerns than a late outbursting of the fierce poetic rivalry characteristic of Hill’s generation.9 It is in Hill’s poetry rather than his prose that his disparagements of Larkin find whatever justification they may have. To read Hill the critic declare of Larkin: ‘What he is seen to be in the letters he was and is in the poems’ is, in itself, merely to be made to question both Hill’s much-trailed ethics of reading and his right to wounded anger at lazy dismissals of his own work.10 But to read The Triumph of Love with those words in mind may alert us to the possibility of a more covert yet more worthwhile attack. ‘By what right did Keyes, or my cousin’s/ Lancaster … serve to enfranchise these strange children/ pitiless in their ignorance and contempt?’ asks The Triumph of Love LXXVII.11 Who is being taken to task here? Is it the presentday youth, or is it Hill’s own generation who are the ‘Strange Children’? Whatever the ignorance and contempt of the current young generation, can ignorance of Sidney Keyes rate so highly on their list of crimes? Later Geoffrey Hill can be an unreasonably irascible writer, so the explanation is not impossible. But, if we look at Philip Larkin’s letter to Norman Iles of 7 April 1942, a further interpretation suggests itself. The letter shows traces both of the political views of his fascist-leaning father and of the fascistic streak to D.H. Lawrence: ‘I am more than ever certain that England cannot win this war: there’s absolutely no spirit in this country’,12 Larkin writes, agreeing with Iles that ‘we don’t deserve to win.13 He follows this up with a prolonged outburst of feelings of envy provoked by ‘reading shit by Sidney Keyes’ everywhere.14 Hill’s 2007 essay on Keyes points out how the latter ‘knew about Dachau as early as 1941’ and testified to this in his poetry. Hill also gives Keyes’s style of elegiac declamation an oblique defence by making a concession against the speaking voice favoured by Keith Douglas (a poet nevertheless admired by Hill): ‘the speaking voice has its own system of betrayal, as is 9 Christopher Ricks in True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 51–54. 10 Hill, Collected Critical Writings, p. 701. 11 Hill, The Triumph of Love, p. 40. 12 Philip Larkin, Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 33. 13 Larkin, Selected Letters, p. 34. 14 Larkin, Selected Letters, p. 34.



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demonstrated by many poets from Movement to Merseysound’. A footnote refers the reader to New Lines, drawing particular attention to its contributors’ use of ‘yet’, ‘but’, ‘so’, ‘we’ and ‘our’.15 Mounting an assault on New Lines and its tonal strategies that would also look to the Second World War for justification of its favoured poetry might be seen to reprise or even improve on ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. But, while loyalty to Keyes makes Hill’s attacks on Larkin and the Movement seem better warranted and less selfserving than they would seem otherwise, they also underline just how eccentric Hill’s view of modern poetry can be. For Geoffrey Hill, Sidney Keyes has been one of the more influential English poets of the twentieth century, and that has helped make Hill Hill. But that doesn’t stop Keyes from being a far more minor figure than two of the poets gathered in New Lines. Nor does it put paid to the thought that Hill might have been wiser to have learnt a couple of lessons from the example of the Movement instead of simply dismissing it. In 2008, Alvarez wrote a very mixed review of Hill’s A Treatise of Civil Power, repeatedly citing examples of his earlier work with approval and preferring the poetry of impersonality to what has followed.16 This was not merely indicative of an old critic’s preference for old favourites. The judgment is entirely of a piece with ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, where Alvarez was sympathetic to the Movement to the extent that: ‘with their deliberate common sense and understatement, some of the Movement poets command, at their best, a self-contained strength and a concern for the discipline of verse which is vital if the art is to remain public.’17 There is no doubt as to the strength of Hill’s art when he’s on form, and there are greater virtues than common sense and understatement. Nevertheless, it is also the case that Hill now mixes vital public matter with a manner that is scarcely more public than was that of the Neo-Romantics who were amongst his first models. Furthermore, that Hill’s poems have become much more rebarbative in their overt allusion and manner than they used to be can lead one to suspect that the keeping out of all but the scholar and the acolyte has become an aim of expression rather than its accident. Such an intolerance of inadequate understandings and of ways of writing which would allow or encourage them may be as much a consequence of 15 Geoffrey Hill, ‘Sidney Keyes in Historical Perspective’, in The Oxford Hand Book of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. Tim Kendall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 410, 413. 16 Al Alvarez, ‘On the Edge’, review of A Treatise of Civil Power, by Geoffrey Hill, New York Review of Books, Vol. LV, No. 9, 29 May 2008, pp. 37–39. 17 The New Poetry, ed. A. Alvarez, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 31.

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a change in audience as a change in Hill. For the dwindling of the sort of reading public for poetry there was for The New Poetry has made it possible to depict the decision between writing for a popular or a scholarly audience as a stark one. That the audience enjoyed by Larkin or Hughes might be one worth having is not contemplated even as its absence is resented. One can regard most demands for poetry’s ‘accessibility’ as patronising or misplaced and still find this state of affairs a source of considerable regret.

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Children of The New Poetry

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he New Poetry has had several offspring, yet no subsequent anthology has had the nerve or nous to have both the fierce partiality and the representativeness of Alvarez. Its Penguin successor, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s Penguin Book of Contemporary British Verse, was certainly partial. Twenty years on, it honoured The New Poetry in the hope of burying it, declaring that it ‘has become a historical document’. The insistence that: ‘the forces of disintegration’ be represented in poetry, not hushed up by English decency, has come to seem simplistic. The implication of The New Poetry that a correlation necessarily exists between gravity of subject and quality of achievement is one that many young writers—James Fenton for instance—regard with scorn.1

It is, according to Motion and Morrison, this very dislike of the obliquities of language and history that means Alvarez has no taste for the work of Seamus Heaney. The attack on Alvarez is, as Randall Stevenson has pointed out, somewhat wide of the mark in the way it ignores Alvarez’s emphasis on technical control.2 But it is not so wide of the mark as not to have something to it. Motion and Morrison may have been dubiously partisan in their choice of poets, but they were right to reflect a width of subject matter and mode of address, an interest in narrative not countenanced by Alvarez’s programme.

1 Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, eds, The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 13. 2 Randall Stevenson, Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 12, 1960–2000: The Last of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 195–196.

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Yet it could also be observed that Heaney and the Belfast poets were finding a fraught external correlative to their more intimate concerns no less charged than was the geopolitics of 1962. And if seriousness of subject matter was a key ingredient of worthwhile poetry, the Northern Irish poets certainly had that. While they may have differentiated their poets from Alvarez and from extremism, Motion/Morrison compiled an anthology that was ultimately a consolidation of a dominant taste more than an argument for a fresh one. The oft-stated complaint about the younger poets championed in their book is that their work was merely a continuation of the Movement by flashier device, but in truth a number of them are better seen as children of The New Poetry. The direct connections are there: Anne Stevenson was Plath’s official biographer and for some years the partner of Philip Hobsbaum; the Lowell-influenced Hugo Williams was one of Ian Hamilton’s Review poets. The work of Seamus Heaney itself contains a potent melange of the styles of 1962: heavily influenced by his friend Hughes, Heaney was a member of the Belfast Group, the direct successor to the London Group and also under the direction of Hobsbaum. True, scratch the surface of what appeared to the editors to be newly fangled and postmodern, the Martianism and the ludic verse of Craig Raine and Christopher Reid, and you will find the old empirical reality of the Movement. But that surface owes much to the emphases and metaphor-mindedness of Ted Hughes. As Edward Lucie-Smith put it in his introduction to the 1985 edition of British Poetry since 1945: It was Hughes who put an emphasis on the function of the metaphor which is still felt by nearly all British poets. He led readers to think of the power of metaphor as being the primary poetic power, and the rest—rhythm, form, what is loosely called ‘tone’—as something subsidiary. When he fails (and his failures are always at a high level) it is because the parts are more powerful than the whole: the poem becomes a series of thunderous special effects. As his best-known poem, ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’, suggests, Raine uses poetry to alienate us from the quotidian, and through this alienation to make us experience it afresh. This, of course, is precisely what the Metaphysical poets, and especially the later members of the school, did in the seventeenth century. 3

3 Edward Lucie-Smith, British Poetry since 1945, ed. and int. Edward LucieSmith, rev. edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 25.



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In more recent years, Raine’s debts to Lowell, Plath and Berryman have become more obvious and his desire to see frankness as the test of poetic worth and to mix it with admiration for Donne and the Metaphysicals has found him sounding ever more like the last man beyond the gentility principle. Penguin continue to publish poetry anthologies of one sort and another, but Bloodaxe, a specialist poetry house, has for the last two decades taken upon itself the job of publishing generation-defining anthologies. That Penguin, or indeed any other large general imprint, has not done the job will in part have been due to the exorbitant permission costs for a volume of work composed entirely of living writers. Still, that objection would have quickly vanished had sufficient sales been deemed likely. In the 1990s, the Penguin Modern Poets series was relaunched, but though the quality of poets included stands good comparison with that of the first series, its sales do not. Despite all the many declarations of poetry’s rude health, and the popularity, for instance, of poetry packaged as self-help (a far cry from the poetry of psychic disturbance), there has been a marked decline in interest in new poetry for its own sake.4 Bloodaxe’s own The New Poetry followed up with its New Generation 1993.5 Borrowing Alvarez’s title, if not his sense of purpose, but drawing heavily on the format and ethos of Edward Lucie-Smith, if not his evaluative sense, the editors assembled work which often showed the influence of Paul Muldoon as well as the New York Poets, whose sense of play, even of fun, is much more clearly at odds with the spirits of Alvarez and of Conquest than are the influences of the Motion/Morison book. The editors finish their introduction thus: It is a poetry which understands that before it is moral, representational or empirical, it is above all sceptical; whose defining presences are, consequently, most often to be found in John Ashbery, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and Derek Mahon; and which represents an exhilarating re-discovery of the freedom of the imagination. Or, as Paul Muldoon wrote of Nerval:



4 The trend has grown even more marked in recent years. According to Nielsen Bookscan, sales in all sectors of poetry were worth £8.3m in 2009; by 2012 this had fallen to £6.7 million. Of the 20 bestselling poetry titles during that period, not one was an anthology of new poetry. See Felicity Wood, ‘Rhyme and Reason: Poetry Publishing’, The Bookseller, 23–30 August 2013, pp. 16–17. 5 The New Poetry, ed. Michael Hulse, David Kennedy and David Morley (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1993).

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… he hanged himself from a lamp-post with a length of chain, which made me think of something else, then something else again.6

It is, I think, no coincidence that the introduction choses to show the poetic worth of the spirit of their anthology by quoting a poet writing of a poet’s suicide. However, if suicide is the test of this new poetry, it passes that test, not through sincerity, not through direct confrontation with reader or subject matter, but through a chain of quizzical, distancing associations. Alvarez’s American and British poetic gods are gone; the serious gives way to ludic scepticism. Despite this, inside the book one still sees the shadow of the first New Poetry falling, not least upon a poet often portrayed—by himself as much as others—as the present heir to Ted Hughes, Simon Armitage. Indeed, Hughes and Plath, and, to a lesser extent, Gunn, Porter and Hill, continue to exert influence over today’s poets to a daunting degree. But, to misappropriate Marxist terminology, what gets appropriated is often superstructure rather than the fraught, vital relationship to a disturbing psychological and social base. Compare poets now of an age to be in a new New Poetry with the far more Oedipal generation on which they model their work and they seem excessively dutiful, and scarcely more so than their counterparts of the avant-garde, who likewise have a marked tendency to take the poetic models and calls to arms proffered in the ’60s as paradigmatic. The 2010 collection Identity Parade, in which Roddy Lumsden explicitly models himself on Lucie-Smith, not Alvarez, may be admirable in its attempts to cover work from all sides of the poetry world, but the decision to trawl a much wider net than Motion and Morrison goes with a studied avoidance of seeking out the bigger fish.7 No less than 85 poets are featured, all with more or less the same short space devoted to them. It would be comforting to think that the range and number of poets of talent is much greater than it used to be and that all published poets are roughly equal, but, then, that is more or less how G.S. Fraser would have defended the diverse 74 he once included in Poetry Now. And as with Poetry Now, a book such as Identity Parade prompts the

6 Hulse, Kennedy and Morley, The New Poetry, p. 28. 7 Roddy Lumsden, ed., Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2010).



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question: when all shall have prizes, how can prospective readers guess who is really worth their time?8 For Alvarez in 1962, the problem was academic administrative verse. Hughes and Plath were professional poets, or at least professional writers. The higher public profile granted by the brief age of Penguin popular poetry allowed Group poets to try make their living, if not exclusively from the writing of poetry, at least from the associated business of being a poet and from various forms of writing and journalism. A similar survey to Alvarez’s would find a similar number of promising young poets in academia, although a large proportion would be teaching creative writing and not English literature. Other poets would be writers in residence and so forth. This may not greatly matter in itself—poets need to earn their living somehow and these ways seem as good as many others. Nonetheless, it does signify a professionalisation, and indeed institutionalisation, of poetry liable to encourage a sameness of style and ambition. That Lumsden will find so many competent poets yet no Hughes or Larkin may be, if not solely an index of critical timidity, less a sign of cheerful plurality than of stagnation. Moreover, while the universities may do more to aid the writing of poetry, they do less to aid the reading of it. The assumption of Alvarez and his contemporaries, like Leavis, Eliot or Richards before them, was that there was a correlation between the new poetry produced and the values of criticism, and this was backed up by a strong linkage between the reading of new verse and the subject of English literature. There were drawbacks to such a state of affairs. Poems that exist for the benefit of classic close reading, or indeed any other form of academic exegesis, can be lifeless, finicky, worthy and pointlessly clever, and much of the American academic poetry of the 1950s stands testimony to that fact. But the ubiquity of the teaching of practical criticism and the close reading of verse, in particular contemporary verse, in schools and universities did create a large sophisticated readership with an appetite and high regard for the poetry which was quite capable of making its own mind up as to what it did or did not like. Within the universities, the tight relationship between criticism and new poetry was loosened with the coming of critical theory. Veronica ForrestThomson’s is the telling case of a poet and academic who would seek to reconcile new forms for poetry and older needs of expression with the latest complexities of literary theoretical debate after the terrain had shifted.

8 An even more recent example, the anthology of young poets Dear World and Everyone In It, ed. Nathan Hamilton (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2013), is less afraid of opinion and contention in its introduction and arrangement, but, with its 74 poets, is similarly unprepared to pick and choose.

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Not only did she never discover a sympathetic audience of any size, being destined to remain a university coterie poet, the terms of her critical engagement were more antipathetic to her development as a poet than they were helpful. There are laudable exceptions, but it is now common for academics to be at the vanguard of literary studies and have no interest in contemporary poetry, and for contemporary poets to have little or no interest in academic literary criticism. These poets are a far cry from the Empsonian Movement, but also from Sylvia Plath or, much as he detested it the thought, the apostate-Leavisite Ted Hughes. In his 2008 review of Hill’s A Treatise of Civil Power, Al Alvarez writes: ‘It is hard now to remember how high-minded students were in the Fifties, or how serious, or how innocent, or how literary.’9 That there has never been such seriousness again may seem just as well. The possibility, and indeed the danger, of taking poetry and a taste in it too seriously has been a recurrent theme of this book. And yet another theme has been the importance of poetry as a form and expression of seriousness. The injunction to choose between ‘A Dream of Horses’ and ‘At Grass’, ‘I Remember, I Remember’ and ‘Fern Hill’ might seem as ridiculous as the need to endorse either the Movement at its most humdrum and genteel or extremism at its rashest. Good art tends to outlast the taste that fostered it and which it once fostered. We no longer need Robert Conquest in order to appreciate Philip Larkin or A. Alvarez in order to appreciate Sylvia Plath, and few will think it odd if we appreciate both. Yet if modern poetry is to continue to matter, taste, and indeed the taste-making article or anthology—or their digital equivalents—will matter too. While it is vital to point out the injustices, oversights, dangers and simplifications of a taste, and to spot where literary gang warfare overtakes the promotion of good verse, it is a sign of vigour in poetry that its tastes are created and contested. The very heterogeneity of taste-making, its mixing of non-literary with literary criteria, is an essential part of what makes contemporary art valued. Literary fighting, coteries and mutual backscratching will always be with us. But their manifestations change, and one manifestation may be less desirable than another. In a 2002 editorial to PN Review, Michael Schmidt, at one time a protégé of Donald Davie, made reference to some of Davie’s strictures against Ian Hamilton, before noting that, come 2002, times had changed. Poetry ‘prizes are now the vehicle of literary reception’, and that it



9 Al Alvarez, ‘On the Edge’, review of A Treatise of Civil Power by Geoffrey Hill, New York Review of Books, Vol. LV, No. 9, 29 May 2008, pp. 37–3: p. 39.



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is here that the literary ‘putsch’ now concentrates its efforts.10 This change had ramifications. A single taste-making critic or editor presenting a case and evidence before the jury of readers occupies a position analogous to the advocate; prize-givers confer upon themselves the authority and claims to impartiality of a panel of judges who need offer little or no evidence or argument to the jury before handing down their verdict. Yet, this impartiality may be chimerical. Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of individual cases, the accusation that panel members have given awards to poets from the same publishing house, to friends or to younger poets of like style is too often borne out by the list of prize recipients for it never to have something to it. Moreover, even carefully scrupulous panels drawn from the poetry establishment will be far more prone to caution and inertia, to the promoting of compromise candidates than would the contentious anthology editor or the demanding critic. And where a new poetry is not argued for, the old one will be handed down to the rising generations. A large number of people whose 1960s equivalents would have had a strong opinion on the virtues of Ted Hughes versus Philip Larkin will have views on the new Ian McEwan novel or, indeed, the new Radiohead album or Damien Hirst retrospective and feel that this art has, however obliquely, a bearing on their apprehension of their lives, their orientation to the world and the pressing issues of the age. These same people are likely to have little or no interest in contemporary poetry, and certainly not in poetry written by poets younger than the ageing stars of the New Generation. The problem may be that there is no young poet good enough. But, at a time when appreciative reviews of poetry in the press are more or less ubiquitous, it could equally be that there is no public arena in which evaluations are taken seriously enough for anyone to take notice. The poetry scene of 1962 now looks quaintly homogenous, and there is much to be said for the comparative diversity of the present. Yet the loss of an intelligent, demanding, mutual discourse in which poetry may be discussed and evaluated is a profound one that has led to the creation a series of isolated, self-justifying realms which encourage the perpetuation of the same old tastes. And when tastes don’t change or matter, they dull; meanwhile the food goes stale. Academicism, professionalisation and slapdash populism have left poetry in need of freshening up. Not by a rehash of The New Poetry or a return to extremism, certainly. But by … what? A new seriousness? 10 Michael Schmidt, ‘Editorial’, PN Review 147, Vol. 29, No. 1, September/October 2002, http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=1267;hilite=michael %20donaghy, accessed 29 April 2013.

Bibliography Works by A. Alvarez (see also The Fantasy Poets and the Observer) Alvarez, A. The Shaping Spirit. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958. –––. ‘Poetry Chronicle’. Partisan Review, Vol. XXV, No. 4, Autumn 1958, pp. 603–609. –––. ‘Something New in Verse’. Observer, 12 April 1959. ––– The School of Donne. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961. –––. ‘English Poetry Today’. Commentary, Vol. 32, No. 3 1961, pp. 217–223. –––. ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. Observer, 19 February 1961, p. 28. –––. ‘Tuning into a New Voice’. Observer, 11 March 1962. –––. ed. The New Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962. –––. and Davie Donald. ‘A. Alvarez and Donald Davie: A Discussion’. The Review, 1, April/May 1962. –––. ‘A Poet’s Epitaph’. Observer, 17 February 1963 –––. ‘Whatever Happened to Modern Verse’. Observer, 9 June 1963. –––. ed. The New Poetry, revised edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. –––. Under Pressure: The Writer and Society. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1965. –––. Beyond All This Fiddle. London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 1968. –––. The Savage God. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. –––. Where Did It All Go Right? London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999. –––. The Writer’s Voice. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. –––. ‘The Myth of the Artist’, in Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture. Ed. Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 194–201. –––. ‘On the Edge’. New York Review of Books. Vol. LV, No. 9, 29 May 2008. –––. Risky Business: People, Pastimes, Poker and Books. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.

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–––. with William Wootten. ‘Penguin Archive Project: Al Alvarez’. The Wolf, No. 22, Winter 2009/2010, pp. 66–75.

Works by Thom Gunn (see also The Fantasy Poets) Gunn, Thom. Fighting Terms. Swinford: The Fantasy Press, 1954. –––.The Sense of Movement. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957. –––. Letter to the London Magazine. June 1957, pp. 65–66. –––. Fighting Terms (with Revisions). London: Faber and Faber, 1962. –––. and Hughes, Ted. Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1962. –––. The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography. Ed. and intr. Clive Wilmer. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. –––. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. –––. Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs and an Interview. London: Faber, 1994. –––. Interviewed by Clive Wilmer. The Paris Review, No. 135, Summer 1995, ‘Thom Gunn, The Art of Poetry No. 72’. http://www.theparisreview.org/ interviews/1626/the-art-of-poetry-no-72-thom-gunn. –––. Boss Cupid. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. –––, and Campbell, James. Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell. London: Between the Lines, 2000.

Works by Geoffrey Hill (see also The Fantasy Poets) Hill, Geoffrey. ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’. The New Statesman, Vol. 61, No. 1562, 17 February 1961, p. 264. –––. Collected Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. –––. Somewhere Is Such a Kingdom. Intr. Harold Bloom. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. –––. Canaan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996. –––. The Triumph of Love. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. –––. Speech! Speech! Washington: Counterpoint, 2000. –––. The Orchards of Syon. London: Penguin, 2002. –––. Scenes from Comus. London: Penguin, 2005. –––. Without Title. London: Penguin, 2006. –––. ‘Sidney Keyes in Historical Perspective’, in Tim Kendall ed., The Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 398–418. –––. A Treatise on Civil Power. London: Penguin, 2007.

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–––. Collected Critical Writings. Ed. Kenneth Haynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Works by Ted Hughes (see also Thom Gunn) Ted Hughes. Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose. Ed. William Scammell. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. –––. Collected Poems. Ed. Paul Keegan. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. –––. Letters of Ted Hughes. Ed. Christopher Reid. London: Faber and Faber, 2007.

Works by Sylvia Plath Plath, Sylvia, ed. American Poetry Now. Supplement, Critical Quarterly, 1962. –––. ‘Context’. London Magazine, February 1962, p. 45. –––. ‘The Last Poems of Sylvia Plath’. The Review, No. 9, October 1963, pp. 3–19. –––. Ariel. London: Faber, 1965. –––. and Peter Orr, Interview, 30 October 1962, in The Poet Speaks, Interviews with Contemporary Poets. Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press and Ian Scott-Kilvert. Ed. Peter Orr. Pref. Frank Kermode. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, pp. 167–172. –––. Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber, 1981; reprinted 1989. –––. Letters Home. Ed. Aurelia Schober Plath. London: Faber and Faber, 1978. –––. The Spoken Word. British Library, Compact Disc, NSACD 71, 2010. –––. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962. Ed. Karen V. Kukil. London: Faber, 2000. –––. Ariel: The Restored Edition. Foreword Frieda Hughes. London: Faber and Faber, 2010.

Works by Peter Porter Porter, Peter. ‘Grub Street versus Academe’. New Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, July 1974. –––. ‘Impeccable Bad Taste’. Observer, 12 December 1976. –––. ‘On the Best Battlefields, No Dead Bodies’. Observer, 5 August 1990.

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–––. Collected Poems 1: 1961–1981. Oxford and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999. –––. Collected Poems 2: 1984–1999. Oxford and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999. –––. with Clive James. Dialogues: ‘On Not Having a Classical Education’ (22 April 2000). ‘The Literature of the 20th Century’ (29 April 2000). ‘Humour in English Literature’ (17 July 2000), ‘On Becoming a Poet’ (24 July 2000), Sex and Love in Literature and the Arts’ (19 August 2000), ‘The Artist and Politics’ (26 August 2000). Recorded for ABC Radio Australia. www.clivejames.com –––. Saving from the Wreck. Introduction by John Lucas. Nottingham: Trent Books, 2001. –––. Afterburner. London: Picador, 2004. –––. ‘Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: A Bystander’s Recollections’, Australian Book Review, 153, August 2001. http://www.australianbookreview.com. au/past-issues/online-archive/153. –––. Better than God. London: Picador, 2009.

Archives Penguin Archive, Bristol University Special Collections Editorial files for poetry. In particular those for The New Poetry, The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, The Penguin Book of Sick Verse, The Penguin Book of Contemporary American Poetry and Penguin Modern Poets 1–9 and 18. University of Reading Special Collections, The Group Papers, 1951–80. Peter Porter Collection. British Library (St Pancras) Alvarez papers.

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Interviews Apart from the 2012 interview with Al Alvarez, the following interviews were carried out as part of my research into the poetry files in the Penguin Archive rather than for this book, and the questions asked reflected this. Nevertheless, the answers given proved extremely helpful in shaping my apprehension of the character of the period and its poets. Al Alvarez. Bristol, Wills Memorial Building. Public Interview on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of The New Poetry and Penguin Modern Poets, 15 March 2012. –––. London, 25 September 2008. An edited version of this appears in ‘Penguin Archive Project: Al Alvarez’. The Wolf, 22, Winter 2009/2010, pp. 66–75. Alan Brownjohn. London, Thursday 2 September 2010. Peter Porter. London. 10 October 2008. Edward Lucie-Smith. London. 7 August 2011.

Selected Newspapers and Journals This book required extended browsing in a number of newspapers and journals through articles too numerous to cite. Some chief locations of that browsing are listed below. Articles referred to in the text are listed separately, as are a few articles of particular importance. Critical Quarterly (1958–63). delta (1953). London Magazine (1954–70). The New Statesman. Relevant articles and reviews, especially 1960–63. The Observer. Poetry reviews and features, 1956–66, edited or by A. Alvarez. Oxford Poetry. 1952–54. The Review. The Spectator. Relevant articles and reviews, especially 1960–63. The Times Literary Supplement. Relevant articles and reviews, especially 1960–63.

Other Works Allott, Kenneth, ed. The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse. Revised edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962. Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. London: Victor Gollancz, 1954.

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Archambeau, Robert. Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry. Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press: 2010. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: George Allen and Unwin 1951; enlarged edition 1958. –––. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Arnold, Matthew. The Essential Matthew Arnold. Ed. and introductory notes by Lionel Trilling. London: Chatto and Windus, 1949. Auden, W.H. and MacNeice, Louis. Letters from Iceland. London: Faber, 1937. Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd edition. Ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; reprint 2009. Austin, J.L. Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. Bayley Sally and Brain, Tracy, eds. Representing Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Bell, Martin. Collected Poems. London, Melbourne, New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 1967. –––. Complete Poems. Ed. Peter Porter. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1988. Bruce Bennett. Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and his Poetry. Auckland: Oxford, 1991. Bergonzi, Bernard. ‘The Poet’s Reasons’. Guardian, 27 April 1962, p. 6. Berryman, John. Collected Poems 1937–1971. Ed. and intr. Charles Thornbury. London: Faber, 1990. –––. The Dream Songs. London: Faber, 1990. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Bold, A. Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1976. Brennan, Claire. The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Icon, 1999. Breslin, James E.B. Mark Rothko: A Biography. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Britzolakis, Christina. Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Sylvia Plath. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004. Brunner, Edward. Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Bundtzen, Linda K. The Other Ariel. Thrupp: Sutton, 2005. Bunting, Basil. Collected Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Butscher, Edward. Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. New York: The Seabury Press, 1976. Clark, Heather L. The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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–––. ‘Tracking the Thought-Fox: Sylvia Plath’s Revision of Ted Hughes’. Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2005, pp. 100–112. Clemo, Jack, Lucie-Smith, Edward, Macbeth, George. Penguin Modern Poets 6. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964. Clifton Spargo, R. ‘1961, Jerusalem: Eichmann and the Aesthetic of Complicity’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English. Ed. Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson. Edinburgh University Press, 2006, pp. 161–172. Conquest, Robert, ed. New Lines. London: Macmillan, 1956. –––. ed. New Lines II. London: Macmillan, 1963. Corcoran, Neil. English Poetry since 1940. London: Longman, 1993. –––. Shakespeare and the Modern Poet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Cotton, John. Oscar Mellor, The Fantasy Press: A Memory. Hitchin: Dodman Press, 1977. Cox, C.B and Dyson, A.E. eds. English Poetry Now. Supplement, Critical Quarterly, 1962. –––. Poetry 1960: An Appetiser. Supplement, Critical Quarterly, 1960. Cruttwell, Patrick. The Shakespearean Moment and its Place in the Poetry of the 17th Century. London: Chatto and Windus, 1954; second impression 1970. Davie, Donald. (see also A. Alvarez) ‘Towards a New Aestheticism’. Guardian, 21 July 1961. –––. ‘“Beyond All This Fiddle” A Rejoinder to A. Alvarez’. Times Literary Supplement, Thurs 25 May 1967, p. 472. ––– Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. ––– The Poet in the Imaginary Museum: Essays of Two Decades. Ed. Barry Alpert. Manchester: Carcanet, 1977. –––. Under Briggflatts: A History of Poetry in Great Britain 1960–1988. Manchester: Carcanet 1989. ––– Collected Poems. Ed. Neil Powell. Manchester: Carcanet, 2002. ––– Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1977. Douglas, Keith. The Complete Poems. Ed. Desmond Graham. Intr. Ted Hughes. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Dyson, A.E., ed. Three Contemporary Poets: Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes & R.S. Thomas: A Casebook. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990.

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Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1974. –––. Notes towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber and Faber, 1962. –––. Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. and intr. Frank Kermode. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. Enright, D.J., ed. Poets of the 1950s: An Anthology of New English Verse. Tokyo, Kenkyusha, 1955. Faas, Ekbert, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe with Selected writings by Ted Hughes & Two Interviews. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980. Farmer, Gareth. ‘Selection Restrictions, Individuals, Acorns and Oaks’. Kenyon Review. http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.kenyonreview.org/kro/vft/Farmer.pdf&chrome=true. ––– ‘Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice and the Struggle with Forms’. DPhil thesis, University of Sussex, 2012. Fisher, Roy. Poems 1955–1987. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Forbes, Deborah. Sincerity’s Shadow: Self-Consciousness in British Romantic and Mid-Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Cambridge Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2004. Forrest-Thomson, Veronica. Cordelia or ‘A Poem Should Not Mean but Be’. Loughborough: Omens Poetry Pamphlet, No. 2, 1975. –––. Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978. –––. Collected Poems. Ed. Anthony Barnett. Exeter: Shearsman Books in association with Allardyce Books, 2008. Fraser, G.S., and Fletcher, Ian, eds. Springtime: An Anthology of Young Poets and Writers. London: Peter Owen Limited, 1953. Fraser, G.S., ed. and intr. Poetry Now. London: Faber and Faber, 1956. –––. (writing anonymously) Leading article. The Times Literary Supplement, 20 April 1962, p. 265. Fuller, John. ‘Love Perhaps’. New Statesman, 2 June 1978. Fuller, Roy. Review of The New Poetry and Penguin Modern Poets. Times Literary Supplement, 20 April 1962, p. 266. Gifford, Terry, and Roberts, N. Ted Hughes: A Critical Study. London: Faber, 1981. Gifford, Terry. Ted Hughes. London: Routledge, 2009. –––. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Giles, Paul. ‘Landscapes of Repetition: The Self-Parodic Nature of Thom

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Gunn’s Later Poetry’. Critical Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2, Summer 1987, pp. 85–99. Gill, Jo. The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Grubb, Frederick. A Vision of Reality. A Study of Liberalism in TwentiethCentury Verse. London: Chatto and Windus, 1965. Hadley, Edward. The Elegies of Ted Hughes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Haffenden, John. Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. Hall, Donald, and Hamilton, Ian. Donald Hall in Conversation with Ian Hamilton. London: Between the Lines, 2000. Hall, Donald and Peck Robert. New Poets of England and America. Meridian Books: Cleveland and New York, 1963. Hamilton, Ian. A Poetry Chronicle: Essays and Reviews. London: Faber, 1973. –––. ‘Triumph of the Downside’. Guardian, Saturday 20 February 1999, pp. 6–7. –––. and Jacobson, Dan (interviewer). ‘You Muddy Fools’, Ian Hamilton. London Review of Books, Vol. 24, 2–14 January 2003, pp. 3–14. http:// www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n02/dan-jacobson/youmuddy-fools. Hamilton, Nathan, ed. Dear World and Everyone In It. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2013. Hardy, Thomas. Landscape Poets: Thomas Hardy. Sel. and intr. Peter Porter. Photographs by John Hedgecoe. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981. Ronald Hayman. The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. Stroud: Sutton, 2003. Herbert, Zbigniew. Selected Poems. Trans. Czesłow Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott. Intr. A. Alvarez. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968. Hibbett, Ryan. ‘The Hughes/Larkin Phenomenon: Poetic Authenticity in Postwar English Poetry’. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 49, No. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 111–140. Hobsbaum, Philip. A Theory of Communication. London: Macmillan, 1970. ––– Tradition and Experiment in English Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1979. –––. ‘The Group: An Experiment in Criticism’. The Yearbook of English Studies 17, British Poetry since 1945 Special Number, 1987, pp. 75–88. –––. ‘Ted Hughes at Cambridge’. The Dark Horse, Autumn 1999, pp. 6–13. –––. and, Cambridge, Gerry. ‘Philip Hobsbaum in Conversation’. The Dark Horse, 14, Summer 2002, pp. 30–50. –––. ‘The Redgrove Momentum: 1952–2003’. The Dark Horse, No. 15, Summer 2003, pp. 24–31. Holbrook, David. ‘R.D. Laing & the Death Circuit’. Encounter, Vol. XXXI, No. 2, August 1968, pp. 35–45. –––. Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence. London: The Athlone Press, 1976.

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Holden, Anthony, and Kermode, Frank, eds. The Mind has Mountains: a.alvarez@lxx. Cambridge: Los Poetry Press, 1999. Holub, Miroslav. Selected Poems. Trans. Ian Milner and George Theiner. Intr. A. Alvarez. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967. Housman, A.E. A Shropshire Lad. Notes and bibliography by Carl J. Weber. Waterville, Maine: Colby College Library, 1946. Hulse, Michael, Kennedy, David and Morley, David. The New Poetry. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1993. James, Clive. ‘Big Medicine’. The Review, Nos 27–28, pp. 22–38. –––. ‘Knight, Death, the Devil and Peter Porter’. http://www.clivejames. com/articles/clive/porter. James, Stephen. Shades of Authority: The Poetry of Lowell, Hill and Heaney. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Kahler, Erich. The Tower and the Abyss or The Transformation of Man. London: Jonathan Cape, 1958. Kaiser, John R. Peter Porter: A Bibliography 1954–1986. Compiled by John R. Kaiser. London: Mansell, 1990. Keery, James. ‘“Menacing Works in My Isolation”: Early Pieces’, in The Thing about Roy Fisher: Critical Studies. Ed. John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Kell, Richard. ‘A Mingled Odour’. Guardian, 17 March 1961. Kendall, Tim, ed. The Oxford Hand Book of British and Irish War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007. –––. Modern English War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. –––. Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study. London: Faber, 2001. Keyes, Sidney. Collected Poems. Ed. Michael Meyer. Intr. Jeffrey Wainwright. Memoirs Milein Cosman, Michael Meyer and James Lucas. Manchester: Carcanet, 2002. Knights, L.C. Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson. London: Chatto and Windus, 1937. Laing, R.D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Intr. Anthony David. London: Penguin, 2010. Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. Ed. and Intr. Anthony Thwaite. London: Faber and Faber and the Marvell Press, 1988. –––. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. Faber and Faber: London and Boston, 1992. Leader, Zachary, ed. The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Davie, Gunn and their Contemporaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Leavis, F.R. Culture and Environment. London: Chatto and Windus, 1933. –––. New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary

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Situation. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with Chatto and Windus, 1972. Leavis, Q.D. Fiction and the Reading Public. Intr. John Sutherland. London: Pimlico, Random House, 2000. Lewis, Jeremy. Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane. London: Viking, 2005 Lomas, Herbert. ‘Taproots’. London Magazine, November/December 1980, pp. 126–132. Lowell, Robert. Life Studies. London: Faber and Faber, 1959. –––. Life Studies. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1959. –––. Imitations. London: Farrar and Strauss and Giroux, 1961. –––. with Alvarez, A. ‘Robert Lowell in Conversation with A. Alvarez’. The Review, No. 8, August 1963. –––. Collected Prose. Ed. Robert Giroux. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. –––. Collected Poems. Ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter with the editorial assistance of DeSales Harrison. London: Faber, 2003. Lucie-Smith, Edward. ‘A Murderous Art?’ Critical Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 4, Winter 1964, pp. 355–363. –––. The Burnt Child. London: Victor Gollancz, 1975. –––. ed. and intr., British Poetry since 1945. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. –––. Changing Shape: New and Selected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 2002. Lucie-Smith, Edward and Hobsbaum, Philip, eds. A Group Anthology. London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1963. Lucie-Smith, Edward and Porter, Peter. Letter to The Spectator, 15 May 1959, p. 702. Lumsden, Roddy, ed. Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2010. MacBeth, George. Lecture to the Trainees. Oxford: Fantasy Press, 1962. –––. The Penguin Book of Sick Verse. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. –––. Selected Poems. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. Pref. Carol Ann Duffy. London: Enitharmon, 2002. Mailer, Norman. The White Negro. San Francisco: City Light Books, 1957. Mark, Alison. Veronica Forrest-Thompson and Language Poetry. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2001. Marsack, Robyn. Sylvia Plath. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992. Marvell, Andrew. Complete Poetry. Ed George de F. Lord. Intr. A. Alvarez. London: Dent, 1984. McDonald, Peter. Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Michael Roberts, Andrew. Geoffrey Hill. Writers and their Work series. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004.

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Middlebrook, Diane. Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—A Marriage. New York: Viking Press, 2003. Morrish, Helen et al. The Poet Speaks, Interviews with Contemporary Poets conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press and Ian Scott-Kilvert. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. Morrison, Blake. The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. –––. and Motion, Andrew, eds. The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. O’Brien, Sean. The Deregulated Muse. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998. O’Neill, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Guide to English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Olson, Charles. ‘Projective Verse’, in Modern Poets on Modern Poetry. Ed. James Scully. London and Glasgow: Collins Fontana 1966, pp. 270–282. Peel, Robin. Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics. Cranbury, NJ, London and Ontario: Associated University Presses, 2002. Perloff, Marjorie. ‘Extremist Poetry: Some Versions of the Sylvia Plath Myth’. Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1972, pp. 581–588. –––. ‘The Two Ariels: The (Re)Making of the Sylvia Plath Canon’. American Poetry Review, 13, November–December 1984, pp. 10–17. Piette, Adam. The Literary Cold War: 1945 to Vietnam. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Pinker, Stephen. The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity. London: Penguin, 2011. Popa, Vasko. Selected Poems. Trans. Anne Pennington. Intr. Ted Hughes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Potts, Robert, ‘The Praise Singer’. Guardian, 10 August 2002. www.guardian. co.uk/books/2002/aug/10/featuresreviews.guardianreview15. Punter, David. Rapture: Literature, Addiction, Secrecy. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic, 2009. Raban, Jonathan. Society of the Poem. London: Harrap, 1971. Raine, Craig. Haydn and the Valve Trumpet. London: Picador, 2000. Ransom, John Crow, The New Criticism. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941. Redgrove, Peter. The Collector, and Other Poems. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959. –––. The Nature of Cold Weather, and Other Poems. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961.

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–––. At the White Monument, and Other Poems. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963. Ricks, Christopher. The Force of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. –––. Allusion to the Poets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. –––. True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell under the Sign of Eliot and Pound. New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Robinson, Craig. Ted Hughes as Shepherd of Being. London: Macmillan, 1989. Robinson, Peter, ed. Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work. Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Oxford University Press, 1985. –––.  ‘Toiling in a Pitch’. Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3, 1997, pp. 263–269. Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. London: Virago, 1991. Rosenbaum, Susan B. Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press: 2007. Rosenberg, Harold. The Tradition of the New. New York: Horizon Press, 1959. Sagar, Keith, ed. The Achievement of Ted Hughes. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983. –––. Ted Hughes. Harlow: Longman for the British Council, 1972. –––. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. –––. ed. The Challenge of Ted Hughes. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994. –––. The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. Intr. Mary Warnock. London and New York: Routledge, 1958. Sassoon, Siegfried. Collected Poems 1908–1956. London: Faber and Faber, 1956. Schmidt, Michael, and Lindop, Grevel, eds. British Poetry since 1960: A Critical Survey. Manchester: Carcanet, 1972. Schmidt, Michael. ‘Editorial’. PN Review 147, Vol. 29, No. 1, September–October 2002. Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems. Foreword Maxine Kumin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Sherry, Vincent. The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Michigan Press, 1987. Spender, Stephen. ‘Low Pressure Gauge’. Listener, 11 October 1956, p. 573. Steele, Peter. Peter Porter. Melbourne and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 Stevenson, Anne, with additional material by Lucas Myers, Dido

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Merwin and Richard Murphy. Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989. Stevenson, Randall. Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 12, 1960–2000: The Last of England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. The Fantasy Poets 1–22 (A. Alvarez, Geoffrey Hill, Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin et al.). Oxford: Oxford University Poetry Society, 1952–54. The Group: An Exhibition of Poetry. Catalogue for an Exhibition, The Library, University of Reading. 7 June–10 December 1974. Thomas, Dylan. The Poems. Ed. and intr. Daniel Jones. London: Dent, Everyman, 1982. Thorpe, Vanessa. ‘I failed her. I was 30 and stupid’. Observer, 19 March 2000. Thurley, Geoffrey. The Ironic Harvest: English Poetry in the Twentieth Century. London: Edward Arnold, 1974. Thwaite, Anthony, ed. Paeans for Peter Porter. London: Bridgewater Press, 1999. Tomlinson, Charles. ‘The Middlebrow Muse.’ Essays in Criticism, Vol. VII, No. 2, 1957, pp. 208–217. –––. Collected Poems. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Tredell, Nicholas. Conversations with Critics. Carcanet: Sheep Meadow Press, 1994. Trotter, David. The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. Van Dyne, Susan R. Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Virgil, Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid I–VI. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G.P. Goold. Cambridge Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1999. Wagner, Linda W. ed. Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. Wainwright, Jeffrey. Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Waugh, Patricia. ‘1963, London: The Myth of the Artist and the Woman Writer’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth Century Literatures in English. Ed. Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006, pp. 173–185. Weiner, Joshua. At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Wilmer, Clive. ‘The Self You Choose’. The Times Literary Supplement, 25 April 2008, pp. 13–15.

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Wimsatt, W.J. and Beardsley, Monroe C. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. University of Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1954. Winters, Yvor. The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1957. –––. In Defense of Reason. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. –––. The Collected Poems of Yvor Winters. Intr. Donald Davie. Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1978. Wood, Felicity. ‘Rhyme and Reason: Poetry Publishing’. The Bookseller, 23–30 August 2013, pp. 16–17. Wootten, William. ‘Rhetoric of Violence in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and the Speeches of Enoch Powell’. Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 11, 2000, pp. 1−15. –––. ‘“That Alchemical Power”: The Literary Relationship of A. Alvarez and Sylvia Plath’. The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2010, pp. 217–236.

Index abstract expressionism 67 academia, and poetry 203–204 aestheticism 91–93, 94 Allott, Kenneth Contemporary Verse (anthology) 72–74, 79–81, 101 on Gunn 80 and Hill 83 on Hughes 81 on Larkin 79 and Plath 101–102 on Thomas 80 Alvarez, A. on ‘Ariel’ 119 on ‘At Grass’ 120 ‘Beyond all this Fiddle’ 136 ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ 33–34, 97, 111–112, 113–114, 134 on breakdown in art 135 on ‘Church Going’ 42 on control 121–122, 147 on ‘Daddy’ 118 Davie, debate with 91–97 on ‘A Dream of Horses’ 69–70, 120 on Eliot 194 and extremism xiii, xvi, 132–136, 147 ‘The Fate of the Platypus’ 68–70 on Fighting Terms 39–40 on gentility 46 on A Group Anthology 48 and Gunn 33–35, 38, 39–40, 69, 82 and Heaney 199 on Herbert 135 on Hill 197 on Hughes 30, 33–34, 69–70, 120 on ‘Lady Lazarus’ 118 on language of the self 93 on Larkin 37–38, 42, 120 on Lawrence 29–30, 95 and Leavis 9 on literary violence 21

on Lowell 30 Motion and Morrison criticize 199 on the Movement 197 on nakedness of form 109 and Nazism 47 on New Lines 85–86 The New Poetry (anthology) 74, 75–79, 113 and Plath, influence on xv–xvi, 108, 110–114, 116, 118–122, 126–128, 149 and Plath’s death 128, 131–135, 145–150 on Plath’s final style 132 on Plath’s poems as ‘assault and battery’ 118 ‘A Poet’s Epitaph’ 128 and risk taking 118, 136–137, 147, 149 The Savage God 145–150, 156 The School of Donne 30–33, 61 on seriousness 66, 67, 68 The Shaping Spirit 29–30 on totalitarianism 93 and translated literature 140 Under Pressure 135 American poetry xiii, 78–79, 153–155 Amis, Kingsley, Lucky Jim 7–8, 46 anthologies xv, 71–75 see also individual anthologies architecture 186–187 Arendt, Hannah 57, 68, 116–117 Armitage, Simon 202 Arnold, Matthew 59–60, 167 Auschwitz 51, 93, 104–105 see also Holocaust Austin, J. L. 63–64, 132, 161–163, 170–171, 185 Belfast Group 200 Bell, Martin 20 ‘It was a Violent Time’ 21 and poetry of disgust 47 Bergonzi, Bernard 97

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Berryman, John 77, 78, 134, 137, 145, 157, 171, 201 Bettelheim, Bruno 114 Bloodaxe (publishers) 201 The New Poetry (anthology) 201–202 see also Identity Parade (anthology) Bloom, Harold 83 Bly, Robert 125, 126 Breslin, James E. B. 50 British Poetry since 1945 (anthology) 75, 200 Broadbent, Simon 82 Brownjohn, Alan xiv, 20–21 Brunner, Edward 51 Bunting, Basil 188 Cambridge School (of poets) 160 Cambridge University delta (magazine) 12, 13, 15 English curriculum 4 F.R. Leavis 8–10 Q. D. Leavis 10 student poets 7, 11–12, 13, 15 Clark, Heather 119, 121 confessional poetry as essentially American 153 and the Group 53–55 Hardy and 184–185 Porter and 177 and suicide 132–133, 171 Conquest, Robert attacks the Movement 5 on extremism 139 New Lines (anthology) 71 Contemporary American Poetry (anthology) 101, 124–126 Contemporary Verse (anthology) 72–74, 79–81, 87, 101 Corcoran, Neil 11 Cox, C. B. 72 Crane, Hart 38–39 Critical Society, Oxford University 4–5 criticism, and new poetry 203–205 Cruttwell, Patrick 10–11 Davie, Donald Alvarez, debate with 91–97 on confessional poetry 184 on ‘A Dream of Horses’ 95–96 on extremism 137 on Hardy 184, 186–187 on Lawrence 95 on music 92–93 and Pound 187

‘Towards a New Aestheticism’ 91–92 and Yvor Winters 39 delta (magazine) 12, 13, 15 disgust, poetry of 47–52, 138 divorce, and the poets 65, 66 Donne, John 19, 30–33 Douglas, Keith 122–123, 196 dramatic monologues 54–55 Dyson, A. E. 72 Eichmann trial xiii, 56–57, 114 Eliot, T. S. Hill and 194 and impersonality 110 and poetry of disgust 49–50 and seriousness 60–61 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 39 Empson, William 5 existentialism 43, 104, 185 see also Laing, R. D.; Sartre, Jean-Paul extremism Alvarez and xiii, xvi, 132–136, 147 as essentially American 153 Fenton and 156 Forrest-Thomson and 158, 159 Hill and 25, 155, 193 Hughes and 25, 138–143, 148, 190 nature of 133, 135–137 in painting 67 Plath and 131–135, 136, 145–150 Porter and 172, 178 resistance to xvi, 155–159 and suicide 145–150, 155–156, 157 Tomlinson and 155–156 see also confessional poetry; pain; violence Faas, Ekbert 96, 191 Faber and Faber (publishers) 87–88, 89 Poetry Now (anthology) 71–72 ‘Fantasy Poets’ 13 Fantasy Press 3–4 Farmer, Gareth 163 Fenton, James, ‘Letter to John Fuller’ 156 First World War 17 Fisher, Roy xiv ‘Occasional Poem 7.1.72’ 157 Fletcher, Ian on Bell 47 Springtime (anthology) 14 Forbes, Debora 109 Forrest-Thomson, Veronica 157–164 on content of poetry 159

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‘Cordelia’ 163–164 on extremism 158, 159 ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ 174 ‘The Lady of Shalott: Ode’ 160 late poems 163–164 and philosophy of language 161–163 and Plath 158–161 ‘A Plea for Excuses’ 161 Poetic Artifice 157–159 and Porter 174–176 ‘Strike’ 160 Fraser, G. S. 16, 23 on ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ 97 Poetry Now (anthology) 71–72, 202 Springtime (anthology) 14 Fuller, John 169 Fuller, Roy 98 Garfitt, Roger 48 Giles, Paul 104 Godwin, Tony 74–75, 87 Group Anthology, A 48, 54–55 Group, the and confessional poetry 53–55 and dramatic monologues 54–55 and Gunn 21 and Hughes 23 members and meetings 19–21 and nastiness 48 and Plath 102 and Second World War 51–52 Gunn, Thom and Allott 80 ‘The Beaters’ 38 Boss Cupid 182 and Bunting 188 ‘Carnal Knowledge’ 12–13, 34–36 and clothing 103 and confessional poetry 185 ‘Considering the Snail’ 104 and Donne 33 and Eliot 36–37 and existentialism 36, 43, 104 ‘Expression’ 181–182, 183 and Faber selected volume 88 Fighting Terms 69, 70 ‘The Gas Poker’ 182–183 and Hardy 183–185 ‘Her Pet’ 187–188 and impersonality 35–36 ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’ 182 ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo 40–43 and Larkin 13–15, 40–43, 187–188

‘A Mirror for Poets’ 7–8, 9–10, 21 ‘The Missing’ 187 ‘My Mother’s Pride’ 182 and occasional poetry 186 ‘On the Move’ 36–37 and Oxford student poets 7 and Plath 182, 187–188 and poetic form 107 and Pound 187 and rape imagery 82 ‘The Search’ 13 and sincerity 181–188 ‘Tamer and Hawk’ 37 and violence 21, 27, 38, 82 and Winters 38–40 ‘The Wound’ 35–36 Haley, Edward 24 Hall, Donald 3, 5–6 Contemporary American Poetry (anthology) 78, 101, 124–126 Hamilton, Ian 131, 143, 154, 155 Hardy, Thomas and architecture 186–187 as confessional poet 184–185 Gunn and 183–185 Porter and 178, 180 Harsent, David 154 Heaney, Seamus 199, 200 Herbert, Zbigniew 94, 135, 140 Hill, Geoffrey and ‘accessibility’ 83, 197–198 ‘Annunciations’ 6, 83–85 Canaan, 193 early influences 5–6, 16 and Eliot 194 and extremism 25, 155, 193 For the Unfallen 52–53 ‘Genesis’ 5, 16 and Keyes 196, 197 and Larkin 195–196, 197 later poetry 193–198 ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian’ 52–53 Mercian Hymns 25 ‘Merlin’ 6 ‘Of Commerce and Society’ 52 The Orchards of Syon 194 ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’ 56–57 ‘September Song’ 155 Speech! Speech! 193, 194 A Treatise of Civil Power 197 The Triumph of Love 193, 194–196

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‘Two Formal Elegies’ 52 and war 52–53, 55, 56–57, 195 history 7–8, 21–23, 25–27 Hobsbaum, Philip and the Group 19–20 and Gunn 11–12 and Hughes 15 and Larkin 13 and Plath 102 Holocaust 56–57, 93, 114–118, 136 Holub, Miroslav 140 Housman, A. E. 40–41 Hughes, Ted ‘Acrobats’ 37 and Allott 81 ‘Bayonet Charge’ 17 Birthday Letters 189–191 ‘The Bull Moses’ 49 Crow 141–143 disgust, absence of 49 on Douglas 122–123 ‘A Dream of Horses’ 32, 69–70, 119–121 ‘Dreamers’ 190 and extremism 25, 138–143, 148, 190 and Faber selected volume 88, 89 ‘Fanaticism’ 132 and Group 23–24 ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ 15–17 influence on later poets 200 ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ 23–25 and metaphor 200 on the Movement 94 as nature poet 96–97 and Plath 19, 119–121, 148, 189–191 and poetic form 108, 140, 142, 191 on Polish poetry 140 ‘Public Bar T.V.’ 138 Recklings 138 ‘Six Young Men’ 17 and Thomas 15–16 ‘The Thought Fox’ 36 ‘To Paint a Water Lily’ 96 and translated literature 140 and violence 16–17, 96, 97, 140–141, 190 ‘Westminster Bridge’ 138 Wodwo 138 ‘You Hated Spain’ 190 ‘Your Paris’ 190 humanism 95–96, 97 Identity Parade (anthology) 202–203

Jenkins, Alan 183–184 Jünger, Ernst 115 Kahler, Eric, The Tower and the Abyss 68, 114–115, 117 Keery , James 81 Kell, Richard 49 Kendall, Tim 17 Kermode, Frank 53 Keyes, Sidney 6, 196, 197 ‘The Bards’ 6 Laing, R. D. The Divided Self 105–107, 114–115 Language School (of poets) 160 Larkin, Philip ‘An Arundel Tomb’ 64–65 ‘At Grass’ 32, 40–43, 69, 120 ‘Church Going’ 42–43, 62–64, 85–86 in Contemporary Verse 79–80 and Faber selected volume 88 Fantasy Poets pamphlet 13 ‘I Remember, I Remember’ 195 ‘MCMXIV’ 17 and The New Poetry 77–78, 89 and rape imagery 81–82 and Second World War 196 and seriousness 62–65 ‘Talking in Bed’ 65 Lawrence, D. H. 20, 76, 95 Leavis, F. R. 8–10, 22, 60 Leavis, Q. D. 10 Lomas, Herbert 172–173 Lowell, Robert and Arendt 128 and confessional poetry 133 in Contemporary American Poetry 124–125 ‘For the Union Dead’ 92 Life Studies 53, 55, 66, 77, 184 and nakedness of form 109 and New Criticism 6 in The New Poetry 77, 78 Lucie-Smith, Edward British Poetry since 1945 (anthology) 75 and confessional poetry 132–133 on dramatic monologues 54–55 on Gunn 7 on Hughes 23, 200 ‘The Lesson’ 53–54 and Lowell 53 on Raine 200

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Lumsden, Roddy Identity Parade (anthology) 202–203 MacBeth, George 4, 20, 102–103 ‘The Crucifix’ 52 ‘The Disciple’ 52 Penguin Book of Sick Verse (anthology) 102 Mailer, Norman 117–118, 134 Marvell, Andrew 32, 60–61 Upon Appleton House 61 McDonald, Peter 83 Mellor, Oscar 3 Modern Poetry in Translation (magazine) 140 Monteith, Charles 87–88 Moore, Marianne, ‘Poetry’ 94 Morris, William 60–61 Morrison, Blake, Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (anthology) 156, 199 Motion, Andrew 13 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (anthology) 156, 199 Movement, the Alvarez praises 197 Empson’s influence 5 and Fantasy Press 4 and gentility 45–46 Gunn and 183 Hughes and 189–190 neutral tone 85–86 and New Lines 71 Plath criticizes 108 poetic descendants 200 nature poetry, value of 95–96 Nazism 51–52, 55–57, 93, 114–118 New Criticism 4, 6 New Lines (anthology) composite poem 85, 139 Hill and 197 and the Movement 5, 71 unity of tone 85 New Poetry, The (anthology) xii–xiv 1966 edition 113, 131 and American verse 78–79 composite poem 86 cover design 87, 131 and extremism 156 and gentility 45–46 Motion and Morrison attack 199 planning of 75–78

Plath and 101, 113, 118–119 poetic descendants 199–205 reviews 97–98 sales 89 New Poetry, The (Bloodaxe, anthology) 201–202 Newnham, Richard 72, 74, 78, 79 Nicholson, Norman 16 Nolan, Sidney 136 non-human, value of in poetry 95–96 O’Brien, Sean xi occasional poetry 186 Olson, Charles 61 Oxford Poetry (magazine) 3–4 Oxford Poetry Society 5 Oxford University Critical Society 4–5 English curriculum 4–5 ‘Fantasy Poets’ 13 Fantasy Press 3–4 Oxford Poetry (magazine) 3–4 Poetry Society 5 student poets 5–7 pain and history 25–27 and sincerity 24–25 painting 67 Peel, Robin xvi Penguin (publishers) 72, 74–75, 140, 201, 203 see also British Poetry since 1945 (anthology); Contemporary American Poetry (anthology); Contemporary Verse (anthology); New Poetry, The (anthology) Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (anthology) 156, 199–200 Penguin Book of Sick Verse (anthology) 102 Penguin Modern Poets 54, 87, 89, 98, 201 Pilling, John 47 Pinker, Stephen 45 Plath, Sylvia and Alvarez xv–xvi, 108, 110–114, 116, 118–122, 126–128, 145–150 anthologies, inclusion in 77, 101–102, 113, 118–119, 124–126, 131 ‘The Applicant’ 103 ‘Ariel’ 119–121 and authenticity 123 ‘The Bee-Meeting’ 105, 109

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‘A Birthday Present’ 123 and Bly 125, 126 concentration camp in her mind 102 and control 121–122 ‘Cut’ 105 ‘Daddy’ 110, 112, 113, 118, 148 ‘Death and Co.’ 109 death of 128, 145–150 and Douglas 122–123 ‘Edge’ 109, 148–149 and existentialism 104 and extremism 25, 131–135, 136, 145–150 ‘Fever 103º’ 105, 112 and gentility 108, 113 and Group 102 and Hughes 19, 119–121, 189–191 and impersonality 110 ‘Lady Lazarus’ 25, 105, 109, 110, 112, 113, 116–117, 118, 123, 148 and Laing 105–107 last poems 148–150 ‘Letter in November’ 127–128 on Lowell 124–125 and MacBeth 102–103 and mass trauma 112, 113, 116–117 ‘The Munich Mannequins’ 109 and nakedness 109 objectification of self 103–104, 105, 106, 110 and poetic form 107, 108 relationship between poetry and suicide 131–135 and Sartre 107 and seriousness 123–124 ‘Sheep in Fog’ 126 and Simpson 125, 126 ‘Stings’ 121 ‘The Surgeon at 2 a.m.’ 102, 103 ‘The Tour’ 113 ‘Years’ 121 Poetry Now (anthology) 71–72, 202 Poland 94 Pollock, Jackson 131 Popa, Vasko 140, 141 Porter, Jannice 176–179 Porter, Peter on Alvarez’s influence 47 ‘An Angel in Blythburgh Church’ 175, 176 ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’ 51, 104–105 and confessional poetry 177, 185 ‘The Cost of Seriousness’ 171–174, 176

‘The Delegate’ 178–179 ‘The Descent into Avernus’ 168–169 ‘An Exequy’ 176–178 and existentialism 104 and extremism 172, 178 and Forrest-Thomson 174–176 Fuller praises 98 ‘Gertrude Stein at Snails Bay’ 175, 176 ‘Ghosts’ 54 and Group 20, 23 ‘The Historians Call up Pain’ 25–27 ‘John Marston Advises Anger’ 21–23 on Lawrence 20 and Lowell 53 ‘The Lying Art’ 170, 179–180, 185 ‘Metamorphosis’ 103–104 and The New Poetry 77, 101 ‘Old-Fashioned Wedding’ 169–170 and poetic form 107–108 and poetry of disgust 49, 50, 51 ‘Seahorses’ 165–166 ‘Seaside Resort’ 166–168 and Second World War 55–56 and seriousness 165–180 and sincerity 25–27 ‘Soliloquy at Potsdam’ 55 and suicide 166, 171–172, 180 and suicide of Jannice Porter 176–179 ‘Why did Dante pick on Suicides?’ 180 Potsdam Conference 55 Pound, Ezra 154, 187 prizes, for poetry 204–205 Punter, David 127–128 Raine, Craig 200–201 Ransom, John Crow 101 rape imagery 81–82 Redgrove, Peter ‘Bedtime Story for my Son’ 19 ‘Being Beauteous’ 47–48 ‘Corpossant’ 48 and Gunn 11–12 and poetry of disgust 47, 48 ‘The Secretary’ 47 Review, The (magazine) 91, 154 Ricks, Christopher 64–65, 195–196 Rosenbaum, Susan B. 146 Rosenberg, Harold, The Tradition of the New 67 Rothko, Marc 50–51 Russ, Stephen 87 Sartre, Jean-Paul 12, 107

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Sassoon, Siegfried 40–41 scepticism 201–202 schizophrenia 115 Schmidt, Michael 204 Second World War 16, 51–52, 55–57, 93, 114–118, 196–197 seriousness in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ 34 in critical tradition xiv, 59–61 and evaluation of new poetry 204, 205 and extremism 147 Forrest-Thomson and 163–164 Larkin and 62–65 as personal sincerity 66–68 Plath and 123–124 Porter and 165–180 as psychological realism 68–70 and scepticism 201–202 in School of Donne 31 and suicide 132, 146 see also sincerity Sexton, Anne 111–112, 131, 135, 156, 158, 171, 185 Shanks, Michael 3 Silkin, Jon 131 Simpson, Louis 125, 126 sincerity Gunn and 181–188 and pain 24–25 see also seriousness Spargo, R. Clifton 56 Spender, Stephen 71–72 Springtime (anthology) 14 Stevenson, Anne 200 Stevenson, Randall xii, 156, 199 suicide and artifice 163–164 and confessional poetry 171–173 Gunn and 182–183 Plath and 109, 127–128, 145–150

and poetic value 180, 202 of Jannice Porter 176–179 Porter and 166, 171–172, 180 relationship with poetry 131–135, 136, 157 romanticisation of 166 Winters on 39 Thomas, Dylan 15–16, 80 ‘Over St. John’s Hill’ 16 Thwaite, Anthony xiv, 5 Tomlinson, Charles xiv, 92, 95 ‘Against Extremity’ 155–156 Totalitarian Art 145 totalitarianism 8, 55–57, 93, 94, 114–118 translated literature 140 Trotter, David 142 Turnbull, Gael, xiv violence Gunn and 21, 27, 38, 82 and history 24–27 Hughes and 16–17, 96, 97, 140–141, 190 in literary circles 21 relationship with art 21–27, 140–141 sexual 81–82 Virgil, Aeneid 168 Waugh, Patricia 134 Weissbort, Daniel 140 Wevill, Assia 132, 190 Wevill, David 20 Whitman, Walt 39 Williams, Hugo 154, 200 Williams, William Carlos 39, 154 Winters, Yvor 38–40, 183 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 185 Yeats, W. B. 76