Something We Have That They Don't: British and American Poetic Relations since 1925

Something We Have That They Don’t

Something We Have That They Don’t british & edited by american poetic steve clark & relations since mark ford 1925

University of Iowa Press iowa city

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2004 by the University of Iowa Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Design by Richard Hendel http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Something we have that they don’t: British and American poetic relations since 1925 / edited by Steve Clark and Mark Ford. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-87745-881-2 (cloth) 1. English poetry—American influences. 2. English poetry—20th century— History and criticism. 3. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Literature, Comparative—English and American. 5. Literature, Comparative—American and English. 6. Great Britain—Relations—United States. 7. United States—Relations—Great Britain. 8. American poetry— English influences. I. Ford, Mark, 1962–. II. Clark, S. H. (Steven H.), 1957–. pr129.u5s66 2004 821'.9109—dc22 2003068652 04 05

06

07 08 c 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Introduction “Something We Have That They Don’t” 1 Steve Clark and Mark Ford “Why Should Men’s Heads Ache?” Yeats and American Modernism 30 Edna Longley “A Package Deal” The Descent of Modernism 53 Stan Smith Writing “Without Roots” Auden, Eliot, and Post-national Poetry 75 Nicholas Jenkins “A Whole Climate of Opinion” Auden’s Influence on Bishop 98 Bonnie Costello The American Poetry of Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill 118 Langdon Hammer The White Room in the New York Schoolhouse 137 Tony Lopez “Rebellion That Honors the Liturgies” Robert Lowell and Michael Hofmann 151 Stephen Burt Authority, Marginality, England, and Ireland in the Work of Susan Howe 168 Alan Golding

“The Circulation of Small Largenesses” Mark Ford and John Ashbery 182 Helen Vendler Bibliography 197 Notes on Contributors 213 Acknowledgments 215 Index 217

Introduction “Something We Have That They Don’t” steve clark & mark ford

This volume’s title derives from “Tenth Symphony” by John Ashbery, which includes a typically inconclusive meditation on the differences between British and American poetry. The British, he muses, are so clever about some things Probably smarter generally than we are Although there is supposed to be something We have that they don’t — don’t ask me What it is . . .1 The essays collected here explore some aspect of the rich and complex history of Anglo-American poetic relations of the last seventy years. Since the dawn of modernism poets either side of the Atlantic have frequently inspired one another’s developments, from Robert Frost’s galvanizing advice to Edward Thomas to rearrange his prose as verse, to T. S. Eliot’s and W. H. Auden’s enormous influence on the poetry of their adopted nations (“whichever Auden is,” Eliot once replied when asked if he were a British or an American poet, “I suppose, I must be the other”2); from the impact of Charles Olson and other Black Mountain poets on J. H. Prynne and the Cambridge School, to the widespread influence of Frank O’Hara and Robert Lowell on a diverse range of contemporary British poets. This book aims to chart some of the currents of these ever-shifting relations. “Poetry and sovereignty,” Philip Larkin remarked in an interview of 1982, “are very primitive things”: these essays consider the ways in which even seemingly very “unprimitive” poetries can be seen as reflecting and engaging with issues of national sovereignty and self-interest, and in the process they pose a series of interesting, often awkward questions about the national narratives that currently dominate definitions of the British and American poetic traditions.3 The notion of an autonomous American poetry can be taken back as far as the seventeenth century and the writings of colonial poets like Anne Bradstreet

and Edward Taylor; in debating this issue critics frequently contrast Puritan or Puritan-inflected representations of a paradigmatic American self with British poetry’s greater consciousness of history, society, and audience.4 It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that Americans began vociferously to demand what Edward Tyrell Channing called, in the wake of the conflict with Britain between 1812 and 1815, “a literature of our own”: Our literary delinquency may be principally resolved into our dependence on English literature. We have been so perfectly satisfied with it, that we have not yet made an attempt towards a literature of our own. In the preeminent excellence of this foreign literature we have lost sight of, or neglected our own susceptibility. So easy is it to read English books, that we have hardly thought it worthwhile to write any of our own.5 Part of the blame for this “delinquency” can be attributed to the absence of copyright protection, which made it easier for American publishers to pirate “English books” than commission from their own writers. It was necessary, as Edgar Allan Poe noted, for American authors to seek to place their work in Britain to receive any significant financial return, which rendered them correspondingly vulnerable to the verdict of the major British journals. Sydney Smith’s famous gibe, “in the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” made in the Edinburgh Review in 1820, continued to rankle throughout the century. John Neal, himself obliged to adopt an anglicized persona (Carter Holmes) in order to publish in Blackwood’s, claimed in 1828 that after hearing “the insolent question” of this Scottish reviewer he could “neither eat nor sleep” until he had “made war alone against this foe.”6 For the writers of the American Renaissance this war assumed a variety of rhetorical forms that established a template for Anglo-American poetic relations that persists to this day. Walt Whitman sums up many of the most crucial of the frequently cited antitheses between British and American poetry in a comparison of himself with Tennyson in one of the anonymous reviews he published as part of his promotion of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass: Poetry, to Tennyson and his British and American eleves, is a gentleman of the first degree, boating, fishing, and shooting genteelly through nature, admiring the ladies, and talking to them, in company, with that elaborate half-choked deference that is to be made up by the terrible license of men among themselves. The spirit of the burnished society of upper-class England fills this writer and his effusions from top to toe. Like that, he does not ignore courage and the superior qualities of men, but all is to show forth through dandified forms. He meets the nobility and gentry half-way. The 2 : : : Introduction

models are the same both to the poet and the parlors. Both have the same supercilious elegance, both love the reminiscences which extol caste, both agree on the topics proper for mention and discussion, both hold the same undertone of church and state, both have the same languishing melancholy and irony, both indulge largely in persiflage, both are marked by the contour of high blood and a constitutional aversion to anything cowardly and mean, both accept the love depicted in romances as the great business of a life or a poem, both seem unconscious of the mighty truths of eternity and immortality, and both devour themselves in solitary lassitude.7 One may note that many of these characterizations — “elaborate half-choked deference,”“dandified forms,”“reminiscences which extol caste,”“languishing melancholy and irony,” and “solitary lassitude” — will re-emerge almost unchanged in the transatlantic reception of Philip Larkin. Whitman then proceeds to oppose his own poetry to that of Tennyson, though, like John Ashbery, he too insists on the difficulty of exactly defining this consciousness of difference: He never presents for perusal a poem ready-made on the old models, and ending when you come to the end of it; but every sentence and every passage tells of an interior not always seen, and exudes an impalpable something which sticks to him that reads, and pervades and provokes him to tread the half-invisible road where the poet, like an apparition, is striding fearlessly before.8 The political corollary of “striding fearlessly” down the “half-invisible road,” and attendant vision of the unlimited scope of American democracy, was support for the expansionist policies of such as President James Polk (1845–49); Whitman found his virulent anticolonialism no obstacle to envisaging Cuba and Canada as future American states.9 “This day,” he writes in “Song of Myself,” his first attempt at an epic commensurate with the fledgling Empire’s beckoning greatness, “I am jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics.”10 Ironically, the later editions of Leaves of Grass were received rather more warmly in Britain — most significantly by Swinburne and the pre-Raphaelites — than they were in America, but the strength of Whitman’s example and conviction made him seem to American modernists such as Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, and William Carlos Williams both a forerunner to and a catalyst of their own secessions from the traditions of British poetry.11 Whitman’s distinctively nationalistic conception of the role of the American poet led him to direct his “chants democratic” to a specifically American readership, but many nineteenth-century poets on either side of the Atlantic Steve Clark and Mark Ford : : : 3

considered themselves as addressing a common audience. Rudyard Kipling, for instance, felt it to be fully his right to compose poems advising the United States administration on foreign policy issues, urging the McKinley presidency to “Take up the White Man’s burden” — that is to accept its responsibilities as an imperial power, and annex the Philippines, after its swift and crushing victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898.12 Kipling was right to see America’s triumph in the war against Spain as inaugurating a new phase of expansion, but wholly failed to foresee that this would ultimately be at the expense of the British Empire. Numerous markers may be proposed for this displacement, such as the rapid industrial and demographic expansion in the late nineteenth century or the decisive military interventions of 1917 or 1941. However, if, as the historian B. J. C. McKercher argues, the 1930s were the crucial period in which the balance of power and influence tipped decisively in America’s favor,13 the dominant British poet of the 1930s, W. H. Auden, has some claim to be treated as the nation’s first postimperial poet. His evocative diagnoses of industrial decay (“Smokeless chimneys, damaged bridges, rotting wharves and choked canals, / Tramlines buckled, smashed trucks lying on their side across the rails”) and black humorous denunciations of “this country of ours where nobody is well” can be read as dramatizing, on one level at least, British anxiety at the onset of imperial decline.14 Auden’s decision to settle in New York in 1939 caused such outrage and dismay in his home country the matter was even raised the following year in the House of Commons, and some kind of official action mooted.15 Auden always claimed he moved to America for personal reasons, but conceded his timing was unfortunate. “Poetry,” he declared in the first poem he composed on arriving in New York, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” “makes nothing happen.” This much-quoted phrase makes most sense in the context of Auden’s determination to evolve a cosmopolitan poetic language that would evade the traps and snares of nationalism; his elegy implies that Yeats’s poetry, in contrast, was driven by dangerously atavistic forces and nationalistic obsessions: “mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”16 The extent to which poetic relations can be seen as mirroring the economic and political realities of international affairs is an issue often raised by these essays. Obviously, it is highly problematic to posit a direct causal relationship between the two spheres, but equally, it would seem implausible that both the specific debacle at Suez and the large-scale historical narrative of Britain’s fall and America’s rise has no link to, for example, the alterations of format visible in Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson’s anthology New Poets of England and America. The two traditions are accorded comparative parity of esteem on its first publication in 1957, but are segregated on the book’s reissue 4 : : : Introduction

in 1962, with the former receiving a prefatory rebuke for its parochial insularity from the editor; this division is replicated by Al Alvarez in The New Poetry, also published in 1962. Indeed Alvarez is even more scathing than Hall about the failure of British poets to confront the horrors of the twentieth century. “The concept of gentility,” he famously complains, “still reigns supreme. And gentility is a belief that life is always more or less orderly, people always more or less polite, their emotions and habits always more or less decent and more or less controllable; that God, in short, is more or less good.”17 Alvarez quotes, as evidence, Philip Larkin’s “At Grass,” which describes a pair of aging racehorses whiling away their retirement: Do memories plague their ears like flies? They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows. Summer by summer, all stole away, The starting-gates, the crowds and cries — All but the unmolesting meadows. Almanacked, their names live; they Have slipped their names, and stand at ease, Or gallop for what must be joy, And not a fieldglass sees them home, Or curious stop-watch prophesies; Only the groom, and the groom’s boy, With bridles in the evening come.18 In a curious loop, Alvarez suggests the poem embodies the “New Yorker idea of the English scene, part pastoral, part sporting,” as a kind of heritageindustry promo aimed at American tourists.19 Such a perspective, however reductive, does prompt reconsideration of its element of conscious fabrication: the scene is derived not from personal recollection but from a documentary newsreel on the retired champion flat-racer and jumper, Brown Jack. The poem is one of Larkin’s most deliberate attempts to rework Georgian pastoralism into a continuous tradition of “Englishness,” seen as originating in Thomas Hardy, interrupted by the deaths of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas, and re-emerging in the wake of the Movement. Any such narrative is complicated, of course, by such factors as the formation of the style of the “quintessential English poet,” Edward Thomas, out of a protomodernist poetics of vernacular speech borrowed from Robert Frost, and it should be stressed that this genealogy is itself a retrospective construction, as a response both to the achievements of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and to the global reverberations of postwar transitions of power.20 Written in 1950, “At Grass” was Steve Clark and Mark Ford : : : 5

collected in Larkin’s second volume, The Less Deceived, which was published after the first wave of decolonization in the late 1940s, most notably withdrawal from India, and as many critics have pointed out, the lines subtly convey a powerfully sublimated charge of “post-imperial tristesse.”21 Yet there is also an element of liberation and release. In response to the question of whether “memories plague their ears like flies,” the horses “shake their heads”: having “slipped their names” they not only “stand at ease,” but also “gallop for what must be joy.” The tableau expresses not only nostalgia for an idealized past but also suggests a possible future of “radical pastoral utopianism.”22 Over the last decade a number of historical studies have offered revisionary assessments of the economic and political factors that shaped the transatlantic transfer of supremacy.23 There has, however, as yet been very little consideration of the way literature, and in particular poetry, can be read as a form of mapping “the changed relationship of the English-speaking partners,” to borrow a phrase from Donald Davie’s Afterword to Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973), in which he laments the complete “breakdown in communication” between British and American poetries.24 The essays in this book eloquently dispute Davie’s unduly gloomy diagnosis, but there is no doubt that there is something particularly problematic about the business of discussing interactions between countries separated, as the familiar tag has it, by a common language. France’s relationship to America, for instance, as expounded by Jean-Phillippe Mathy in Extrême-Occident: French Intellectuals and America (1993) or Richard F. Kuisel in Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (1993) seems more straightforwardly open to analysis than Britain’s ever does.25 One reason for this may be the aura of secrecy in which the so-called special relationship has habitually been shrouded. In his autobiography, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1970), Dean Acheson records being presented in 1950, during his tenure as United States secretary of state, with a discussion paper on “the special nature of Anglo-American relations.” “My immediate and intense displeasure with the document,” he writes, “caused its origin to become unknown. It was not the origin that bothered me but the fact the wretched paper existed.”26 Acheson insisted all copies be collected and burned. One can attribute this gesture to justified exasperation with the British assumption of the role of “Greeks to their Romans,” as Harold Macmillan once phrased it, but there is also the more specific context of the issue of nuclear bases in Britain and the problems posed to British sovereignty by the Cold War equation of Mutually Assured Destruction.27 After the crisis 6 : : : Introduction

of the Berlin airlift, the United States decided to prolong its tenure on British airfields, and a series of secret treaties were signed in 1949, never subject to Parliamentary ratification, which not only cede control of the areas concerned but also waive the necessity for consultation on the use of nuclear weapons from British soil. For the doctrine of deterrence to be credible, the Soviet Union had to accept that the United States would not hesitate to respond to any attack even at the cost of inviting immediate retaliation, which, before the advent of ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles), would necessarily be restricted to European targets. As George Orwell had predicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Britain had been transformed into “Airstrip One.”28 Therefore explicitly to define the “special relationship” would be formally to declare the status of Britain as expendable first line of defense.29 The anecdote is sufficiently striking for it to be read as a kind of thick description of the “odd edgy flavor” of Anglo-American relations during a transitional period in which “Great Britain,” as Acheson had famously remarked,“has lost an empire and not yet found a role.”30 It illustrates more generally the extent to which ties between Britain and the United States have tended to be cloaked in the vaguest of rhetorics — making the special relationship a sort of political equivalent of the love that dare not speak its name. A pronounced contrast, however, may be drawn with regard to the degree of public articulacy of their respective literatures. The American tradition possesses not only the oracular precedent of Whitmanesque amplitude, visible in figures as diverse as Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and more recently John Ashbery, but also the civic decorum of the “culture poetry” of the postwar period.31 This composure is evident, for example, in Jorie Graham’s “What the End Is For,” which can confidently engage with the permeation of the Cold War (B-52 bombers on continuous standby) into the private sphere of a lovers’ parting.32 In contrast, it is close to axiomatic that British postwar writing, though supposedly committed to and constrained by a consensual voice, has lacked any comparable register: where are the Odes to Suez, if that is to be taken as the pivotal event of the period?33 One can cite British poems dealing with similar material — from different ends of the political spectrum, Robert Conquest’s “Guided Missiles Experimental Range” and Blake Morrison’s “The Kiss,” on the use of British bases for the bombing of Tripoli — but these instances are both marginal and notably infrequent.34 More resonant historical insight may be elicited from the oblique political dimension of familiar canonical texts. Larkin’s melancholic introspection is now customarily read as postimperial threnody (“Something is pushing them / To the side of their own lives”), with “the skirl of the bulletin” that “unpicks the world like a knot,” Steve Clark and Mark Ford : : : 7

announcing a new global partitioning into “a string of infected circles” dominated by superpowers,“Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate.”35 Similarly, Ted Hughes’s bestiaries are at times explicitly infused with nuclear anxieties: the (Cold War) “Hawk Roosting,” who “in sleep rehearse[s] perfect kills,” or “Pike,” whose “killers from the egg,” patrol Polaris-like, “Of submarine delicacy and horror / A hundred feet long in their world.”36 The paucity of studies addressing literary interrelations during the period is indicative of an apparent reluctance to analyze in detail the traffic in poetic rhetoric between the two countries.37 Both British and American criticism seem more comfortable with narratives that define their respective poetries in isolation from each other, and this separation has come to be institutionalized in universities on both sides of the Atlantic. This split is perhaps best analyzed as another symptom of “the failure of modernism,” to borrow the title of Andrew Ross’s 1986 critical study, or at least of a certain kind of modernism.38 In the 1940s and 1950s American literature departments played a crucial role in the canonization of Anglo-American modernism in the context of Atlanticist ideals of cooperation and interchange; its transatlantic configurations have been exhaustively explored both in critical surveys of the first decades of the century, and in detailed studies of writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D.39 Reversing the paradigm of the American innocent abroad, New Historicist revisionism has stressed the worldliness, pragmatism, and selfinterest of the modernist coteries whose careers were launched in the astutely targeted and well funded little magazines of the 1920s. Certainly the first generation of American modernist writers who based themselves in Europe quickly learned to avoid the snares that threaten the idealistic protagonists featured in the fiction of such as Henry James and Edith Wharton — indeed the skillful literary tactics adopted not only by Eliot and Pound but also by Gertrude Stein, e. e. cummings, Ernest Hemingway, and numerous others could be seen as inaugurating a new era of literary professionalism. From this perspective, these writers were driven to settle in London and Paris not so much by dislike of the brash commercialism of turn-of-the century America, as because they hoped, like some shrewd conglomerate, to effect a takeover of decadent European high culture.40 Donald Davie, for one, has memorably figured Eliot and Pound as adopting a “detached and predatory” attitude to British culture, in the hope of exploiting the cultural vacuum created by the Great War.41 Certainly it is hard now not to read Eliot’s interest in Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough as at least subliminally motivated by its vision of the ritual slaughter of an old order: “in the sacred grove . . . a grim figure might be seen to prowl. . . . He was a priest and a murderer. . . . [H]e retained office till he himself was slain by a stronger or craftier.”42 8 : : : Introduction

In the years following the death of Eliot in 1965, however, increasing amounts of attention began to be paid to the work of more nationalistic American modernist poets, in particular William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane. The British-American axis so crucial to the developments of Pound and Eliot — and Robert Frost, H.D., and Laura Riding — played little or no part in the formation of the likes of Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer — that is, the poets featured in Donald Allen’s path-breaking 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry.43 This volume was launched in direct opposition to Hall, Pack, and Simpson’s far more conservative selection, which favored the work of formalists such as Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, Philip Booth, John Hollander, and Howard Moss. While this conflict between the “cooked” and “raw” has been much discussed, little attention has been paid to its Anglo-American dimension. Allen was able to present his volume as yet another declaration of independence, a gauntlet thrown down to the “dry-heads,” as James Schuyler once called them, “who wishfully descend tum-ti-tumming from Yeats out of Graves with a big kiss for Mother England.”44 One of the unfortunate repercussions of this ferment, however, was its fostering of the assumption in America that all British poetry tends toward the formal and reactionary. Not until the American academic and champion of experimental poetry Keith Tuma published (in the United States only) his Anthology of Twentieth-century British and Irish Poetry (2001), have Americans been offered a comprehensive overview of twentiethcentury avant-garde poetry as it developed on the other side of the Atlantic.45 Tuma sets out to rescue from obscurity a number of experimentalists from the first half of the century — poets such as Mina Loy, Joseph Gordon Macleod, John Rodker, and Nicholas Moore — and to establish continuities between 1940s neoromanticism (the Apocalyptics, as they were known), 1960s performance poetries, and more recent schools of experimental writing. This is not the place to argue the merits of, say, John Betjeman, Michael Longley, Tom Paulin, or James Fenton — none of whom feature in Tuma’s anthology — over those of Drew Milne, Maggie O’Sullivan, or John James, who are all given substantial entries. The point, rather, is to stress the way a transatlantic perspective on British poetry leads to a substantially different narrative from that presented in the mainstream British anthologies such as those published by Penguin, Picador, and Bloodaxe in the run-up to the millennium.46 If Hall, Pack, and Simpson could be accused of favoring an American poetry that derived its ancestry from British and Irish sources, then Tuma could be charged with over-representing British poets whose work can be seen as either prefiguring or imitating the kinds of experimental writing produced and celebrated by the American Steve Clark and Mark Ford : : : 9

academy over the last thirty years. The central paradox of such a progressive teleology is that to participate in cosmopolitan emancipation involves submission to predominantly American models: originality is hence curiously derivative, a form of cultural obsequiousness. In this context, what Tuma terms the “near obstinance or difficult nuisance of residual forms of poetic practice” within the British tradition might be seen as possessing a salutary recalcitrance.47 The competing tendencies toward isolationism and internationalism are of course both present in British and American poetic traditions at any point in history. It is our contention, however — and that of the essays in this volume — that an awareness of Anglo-American literary relations is particularly important to an understanding of the production, marketing, and consumption of poetry as it has evolved on both sides of the Atlantic. The spread and focus of the essays suggest that, on the whole, British poets have been more inspired by their American counterparts than vice versa. Numerous exceptions can be cited to the general tendency — Thomas Hardy on Yvor Winters, Basil Bunting on Robert Creeley, the reciprocal influence of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and more recently Veronica Forrest-Thomson on Charles Bernstein.48 Nevertheless, a narrative of British poetry of the period not centering on the impact of various schools of American writing is scarcely possible to conceive, whereas it is difficult to imagine an American critic according any such equivalent degree of influence to British poetry, however varied, unpredictable, and productive the local cross-fertilizations may be. Of the British poets discussed by our contributors, only Auden — who became a United States citizen in 1946 — is seen as having had a really significant impact on American poetry. Not only was his work a crucial influence on the development of a number of the most important poets who began writing in the 1940s and 1950s, poets such as James Merrill, John Ashbery, John Hollander, Anthony Hecht, and Elizabeth Bishop (a relationship explored in this volume by Bonnie Costello), but also as judge of the Yale Younger Poets Award he exercised considerable power as an arbiter of taste. Indeed the talk-poet David Antin once characterized what he saw as the negative effects of Auden’s ideals and status on American poetry in the years after the Second World War as a Fisher King–style curse, whose “blight . . . lay heavy on the land.”49 Auden’s own ambivalence about his metamorphosis into a campus-hopping poetic superstar is memorably captured in his 1963 poem, “On the Circuit”: Among pelagian travellers Lost on their lewd conceited way 10 : : : Introduction

To Massachusetts, Michigan, Miami or L.A., An airborne instrument I sit, Predestined nightly to fulfil Columbia-Giesen-Management’s Unfathomable will, By whose election justified, I bring my gospel of the Muse To fundamentalists, to nuns, To Gentiles and to Jews, And daily, seven days a week, Before a local sense has jelled, From talking-site to talking-site Am jet-or-prop-propelled. He had claimed on his arrival almost twenty-five years earlier that his aim was to live “without roots,” and his “jet-or-prop-propelled” passage through the skies of America on reading tours arranged by his managing agents is certainly a form of rootlessness. “Another morning comes,” the poem concludes, I see, Dwindling below me on the plane, The roofs of one more audience I shall not see again. God bless the lot of them, although I don’t remember which was which: God bless the U.S.A, so large, So friendly, and so rich.50 The implications of “so large, / So friendly, and so rich” should not be underestimated. Whereas in Britain, the concentration of literary journalism, media, and publishing in London centralizes opinion-forming elites in such a way as to allow rapid elevation of individual schools of writing,51 in contrast, the greater scale of academic activity in the United States has allowed regional diversity and also comparatively rapid assimilation of various forms of experimental writing. There is no denying that American poetic innovators of the last eighty years have been better organized and far more successful in promoting their work and gaining consequent accreditation.52 Here the importance of creative writing courses as staple of the American academy must be Steve Clark and Mark Ford : : : 11

stressed.53 These only started to appear in the United Kingdom on any scale during the 1990s, with the result that comparatively few poets are directly employed within the academy as poets. British writers, particularly those associated with “other traditions,” have often taken steps to avoid being contaminated by a “mainstream” they despise and tend to exult in their very exclusion, whereas even so ostentatiously oppositional a movement as Language writing has rapidly received critical recognition and institutional patronage.54 Larkin for one has called into question the wisdom of Auden’s quest for deracination. “This is of course very funny,” he observes of “On the Circuit”’s final lines, “but I think it rather dreadful too.” Larkin has no time for Auden’s “wilful jumble of Age-of-Plastic nursery rhyme, ballet folklore, and Hollywood Lemprière served up with a lisping archness that sets the teeth on edge,” a view shared by John Ashbery, who dismisses the discursive ruminations of Auden’s later style as “too chatty and too self-congratulatory at not being ‘poetry with a capital P.’”55 Auden scholars such as Edward Mendelson and Nicholas Jenkins, on the other hand, have backed up the poet’s own claim, made in a letter of 1957 to Laurence Lerner, that “believe it or not, I have got better.”56 Auden was among the first of numerous British and Irish poets to accept positions in American universities; in his wake Thom Gunn, Donald Davie, Christopher Middleton, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Hofmann, Eavan Boland, Glyn Maxwell, and many others have benefited from the largesse of the transatlantic academy, particularly pronounced in the early postwar years.57 Whether or not all these writers have become “better” poets for “making the move” (to borrow the title of a Paul Muldoon poem) all have certainly become significantly different, and significantly richer, for transplanting themselves across the Atlantic. If none — except perhaps Heaney — have had an impact on American poets and audiences comparable to that of Auden, the widespread engagement with American poetry illustrated by this diaspora marks a general determination to escape the complacencies of Alvarez’s gentility principle, though of course to “dream only of America,” to borrow the early Ashbery title, may itself be seen as an ideologically determined relation.58 Yet some kind of encounter with American poetry has come to seem what one might almost call a rite of passage for aspiring British poets. Sometimes the meeting is both actual and memorialized, like Thom Gunn’s with Yvor Winters, or Lee Harwood’s with Ashbery, or Seamus Heaney’s with Robert Lowell, but more often the phase of intense engagement with American poetry is figured as a kind of essential catalyst for the poet’s development.59 The experience of Simon Armitage might be adduced as representative of that of any number of British poets from all parts of the spec12 : : : Introduction

trum: when asked in an interview in 1990 to name his most formative influences, he replied: I particularly remember reading Geoffrey Moore’s Penguin Book of American Verse, which took the top of my head off. I literally read it until it fell to pieces. Poems like “The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner,” or “Relating to Robinson,” or “Dirge,” suddenly seem to open up great new possibilities.60 If on the one hand Armitage has made his reputation as the laureate of Yorkshire, on the other he enjoys casually tipping the wink to unheralded American poets such as Weldon Kees, whose persona Robinson reappears in a sequence in Armitage’s second volume, Kid (1992). It is striking, in this context, how often British and Irish poets invoke some aspect of America as a prelude to an attempt to define, and sometimes defend, the poet’s own locale, rituals, culture, and career. Take, for instance, Heaney’s early “Bogland”: We have no prairies To slice a big sun at evening — Everywhere the eye concedes to Encroaching horizon, Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye Of a tarn.61 Irish “pioneers” strike “inwards and downwards” rather than lighting out for the western frontier. Armitage performs a similar maneuver in “Poem” in his first collection, Zoom! (1989): Frank O’Hara was open on the desk but I went straight for the directory. Nick was out, Joey was engaged, Jim was just making coffee . . .62 And in a squib included in a letter of 1959, Philip Larkin makes deft use of the opening of Henry Vaughan’s best-known poem to contrast the lives of his more worldly Movement colleagues, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and Robert Conquest, who had all landed lucrative jobs teaching at American universities that year, with his own determination to remain true to unglamorous, hidebound England: They are all gone into the world of light, Kingsley and John and Bob.

Steve Clark and Mark Ford : : : 13

I suppose in some way I can’t be as bright Not getting myself a job. For me the shops marked books & magazines, For me the gassy beer, The trolley-bus at ten past nine, the Deans — I’m staying here.63 If the influence of America and American poetry on British poets is relatively easy to discern, it is much harder to define with clarity the importance of British work to American poets, particularly in recent decades. Keith Tuma — one of the few American critics to have written extensively on contemporary British poetry — argues in his critical study, Fishing by Obstinate Isles (1998), that what the brand name British poetry has come to mean in America is “flip frivolity and Audenesque chattiness, a strangely sentimental cynicism in regular measures, one or another post-Georgian pastoralism.” Therefore, in the years since 1945, “British poetry has been crossed off our map, or relegated to the zones of the quaint and antiquarian; American poets and critics no longer feel the need to read widely in contemporary British poetry.”64 Larkin, according to Tuma, need not have worried about the withering verdict he puts into the mouth of his imaginary American biographer, Jake Balakowsky (“One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys”). The page may indeed have been microfilmed, but now languishes in some obscure archive, unread.65 Many would want to challenge Tuma’s analysis — and he himself cites many reasons why American poets ought to pay more attention to British poetry — but it’s also worth noting that a transatlantic turning of the tables of the kind he describes was a prime motivation behind the poetic evolution of Stevens and Williams, the two modernist poets who, it might well be argued, have had most influence on developments in the United States in the second half of the century. Both started out writing 1890s-style lyrics in archaic literary language — “Lady of dusk-wood fastnesses, / Thou art my lady,” begins a typical early Williams poem.66 Later, both repeatedly stressed the importance of a rigorous purification of language as the first precondition for the development of a poetry capable of expressing the new American reality of the twentieth century: “It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. / It has to face the men of the time and to meet / The women of the time” admonishes Stevens in “Of Modern Poetry,” while Williams declared Paterson “a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands.”67 Nevertheless, the nationalistic agenda implicit in their experiments in form and language rather disappeared from view in the decade following the Sec14 : : : Introduction

ond World War. The young poets who became prominent in that era looked back to Yeats and Eliot and Auden for guidance: the early work of Robert Lowell, John Berryman (who spent two years at Cambridge, during which time he set up meetings with both Eliot and Yeats), Sylvia Plath (who first came to England on a Fulbright Scholarship), Richard Wilbur, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Howard Nemerov, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, and Anthony Hecht exemplified the formalist ideals of Atlanticist culture; their poetry was, in turn, highly influential on the development of the characteristic idiom of the Movement.68 Indeed, by the mid 1950s the intricately patterned, morally responsible, New Criticism–friendly poem had achieved a kind of hegemony on both sides of the Atlantic, one bitterly resented by the various countertraditions that erupted into prominence in the years following the publication and trial for obscenity of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1956. The public obsession with the Beats initiated interests in other kinds of poetic innovation — the work of the Black Mountaineers Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, of Objectivists such as George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky, of San Francisco poets such as Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen.69 In the 1986 facsimile edition of the poem, Ginsberg includes excerpts from various poets who inspired his groundbreaking mini-epic: these include Christopher Smart, Shelley, Antonin Artaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Kurt Schwitters, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Federico Garcia Lorca, Williams, and Hart Crane.70 This eclectic list serves as a useful reminder of the openness of American poetry to non-English language influences, which played a crucial part in the overthrow of the model Anglo-American lyric. In their search for ways of escaping the orthodoxies of the English tradition, poets who began publishing in the 1950s turned to a vast range of foreign writers. Kenneth Koch’s “Fresh Air” of 1956 offers an exhilarating denunciation of the limited characteristics of the conventional American poem: You make me sick with all your talk about restraint and mature talent! Haven’t you ever looked out the window at a painting by Matisse? Or did you always stay in hotels where there were too many spiders crawling on your visages? Did you ever glance inside a bottle of sparkling pop, Or see a citizen split in two by the lightning? I am afraid you have never smiled at the hibernation Of bear cubs except that you saw it in some deep relation To human suffering and wishes, oh what a bunch of crackpots!71 The New York School turned particularly to the French — “My heart is in my / pocket” concludes Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them,”“it is Poems by Steve Clark and Mark Ford : : : 15

Pierre Reverdy.” Equally important were Raymond Roussel (who was translated by both Ashbery and Koch), Paul Valéry, René Char, Guillaume Apollinaire, Aimé Césaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Marcelin Pleynet.72 The Deep Image poets on the other hand, Robert Bly, James Wright, and W. S. Merwin, were drawn to Spanish forms of surrealism, especially the work of Pablo Neruda, Lorca, and Antonio Machado, as well as the German poets Georg Trakl and Rainer Maria Rilke (both translated by Bly). Others, such as Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth, immersed themselves in the poetry of the Japanese. Such connections are beyond the scope of this volume; the point, rather, is to suggest how the English poetic tradition began to be figured by the 1950s as only one among many available to the aspiring American poet. This is not to say, on the other hand, that the formalist lyric so popular in the decade after 1945 petered out. In the work of Plath, Lowell, and Berryman it fused with the tradition of autobiographical confession so prominent in American literature from the Puritans to the present day. Lowell was rebuked by his mentor, Allen Tate, for writing in Life Studies (1959) poems that are “definitely bad” and of “no public or literary interest”: “by and large,” Tate complained,“the poems are composed of unassimilated details . . . which might well have been transferred from your autobiography without change.”73 The confessional lyric has been under almost continuous attack from the moment of its inception by poets and critics of other persuasions. It is what is rejected by every new generation of experimental poets, rather as the standard Movement poem has been reviled by avant-gardists of every stripe in Britain.74 It is interesting to note, however, that whereas poets such as Ed Dorn or Robert Duncan or Kenneth Koch or James Merrill have never established large-scale followings in Britain, the 1960s collections of Lowell, Plath, and Berryman were greeted almost on publication by mainstream British poetry commentators as major contributions to the canon. Further, in America what one might call the postconfessional lyric still occupies the middle ground, and in the hands of writers such as Billy Collins or Sharon Olds has proved itself capable of appealing to vast and diverse audiences of the kind more experimental poets can never hope to reach. If on the whole American poetry in the period covered by these essays sets about divorcing itself from the traditions of English poetry, one should not overlook the part played by British and Irish poetry in the development of the work of the Confessionals, and the persisting influence of the kind of poem they pioneered in the late 1950s and 1960s. And while in recent decades their achievements have been radically revalued, and it seems a long time since Lowell was automatically described as the most important poet of his generation, that eclipse may itself be seen as a symptom of a determination to present American poetry as having conclusively outgrown its British roots. 16 : : : Introduction

In a late poem John Berryman revisited the difficulties he had had developing a poetic idiom of his own: I didn’t want my next poem to be exactly like Yeats or exactly like Auden since in that case where the hell was I? but what instead did I want it to sound like?75 For Plath and Lowell and Berryman, the labor of self-fashioning involved working through Anglo-American modernism and its ideals of objectivity toward a poetry grounded in the I. It is hard to think of American poets since the Middle Generation, as they are often called, who have wrestled in similar ways with British and Irish precursors. The work of Larkin has been admired by New Formalist poets such as Brad Leithauser, J. D. McClatchy, and Dana Gioia, and his death elicited a fine elegy from the doyen of postwar formalist poetry, James Merrill; more typical, however, have been the responses of such as M. L. Rosenthal, who found himself disgusted by “the sullenness of a man who finds squalor in his own spirit and fears to liberate himself from it,” or Marjorie Perloff, who objected to Larkin’s “constant name-calling, suspicion and failure to envisage change.”76 Although the acute historical consciousness of Geoffrey Hill has been highly praised by American academics and critics, it seems to have made little impression on the practice of specific poets. Similarly, the Irish poets Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, and Seamus Heaney all have large followings in America — and Muldoon was recently awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his collection Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) — yet one is hard-pressed to locate and define their influence on the development of recent American poetry. This is not to declare contemporary American poetry insular or inward-looking: one has only to consider the ways in which in recent years avant-garde American poets have appropriated and made their own that most French of forms, the prose poem, to which a recent anthology has been devoted, to register American poetry’s willingness to seek new challenges.77 But even in relation to this form, to which the British have been largely immune, there is a pertinent Anglo-American dimension: one of the major catalysts for the prose poem’s renaissance in America was John Ashbery’s Three Poems, published in 1972, a work heavily influenced, as Ashbery has acknowledged, by the endlessly exfoliating, mock-Jamesian address of Caliban to the audience that concludes W. H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror (1944).78 The essays in this volume are arranged chronologically, and Auden features a great deal in those that consider the first half of the period covered. The book begins, however, with the complex negotiations of the late Yeats with Steve Clark and Mark Ford : : : 17

the forces of modernism (the term Anglo-American has been stretched to allow discussion of the Irish contexts of Yeats and Susan Howe). Edna Longley offers a probing analysis of Yeats’s relationship to Eliot and Pound, focusing on his rejection of, on the one hand, the bleak “prose” of Eliot’s vision of modernity, and, on the other, of the chaotic sprawl of Pound’s vers libre. Longley pays particular attention to Yeats’s various defenses of the ideal of form, as encoded both in late poems such as “Lapis Lazuli,” and in his choice of poems for, and introduction to, the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). The late Yeats is often figured — not least by himself — as an isolated reactionary magnificently defying the tides of modernity. He emerges from Longley’s study as an astute literary politician who sought to outflank the poetical revolution instigated by Pound and Eliot, and cannily allied himself with the new generation of 1930s poets who imitated — or at least continued — his use of a public voice, of traditional meters, and of forms such as the sonnet, the ballad, and the folk song. The debate over the lineage, nationality, and nature of modernism is furthered in Stan Smith’s discussion of two of the first users of the term, Robert Graves and Laura Riding, whose A Survey of Modernist Poetry was published in 1927. Graves was claimed in the 1950s by poets such as John Wain, Kingsley Amis, and Philip Larkin as the literary godfather of the Movement, whose members in the main distrusted the aesthetics of a modernism they often caricatured as a wholly American import. As Smith points out, however, Graves’s own poetry received its “kick-start” not only from his relationship with Riding and engagement with her work, but also from his absorption in the poetry of such as Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, Marianne Moore, and T. S. Eliot. Among Graves’s most fervent early admirers were the editors of the little Nashville magazine the Fugitive, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate, who also discovered, and then helped across the Atlantic, the selfcast “avatar of modernism,” Laura Riding. Smith amusingly traces the collisions, frictions, and unlikely results of Graves’s and Riding’s collaboration, and suggests, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that their residence in Iffley allows Oxford some claim to be the true cradle of Anglo-American modernism. One of the unwanted progeny of their union was the young Auden, whom they accused, with some justice, of importing lines from Laura Riding into his own early work, also composed in Oxford. Like Graves, Auden exiled himself from England for the second half of his life, and in “Living ‘Without Roots’: Auden, Eliot and Post-National Poetry,” Nicholas Jenkins explores the aesthetic and political motivations behind his decision to make his home in New York in 1939. He offers an illuminating close reading of one of the first poems 18 : : : Introduction

Auden composed on arrival in America, his elegy “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” which emphasizes Freud’s heroically “rational voice,” his brief exile (in London) before his death, and his Jewishness to outline the possibilities of a “post-national” poetry unswayed by the tribal hatreds at that moment consuming Europe. If on one level, as Jenkins shows, the poem is a justification of Auden’s own determination to live “without roots,” it also presents an oblique but telling critique of his mentor and editor T. S. Eliot’s celebration in After Strange Gods of a settled agrarian community that would exclude rootless “free-thinking Jews.”79 While Auden’s influence on American poetry was at its height during the 1940s and 1950s, it was his English poetry of the 1930s that most affected Elizabeth Bishop, who began work on a review of Auden’s 1937 volume, Look, Stranger! (published in America as On This Island). The piece was never finished and was thought lost, but has recently been unearthed, and is one testimony among many analyzed by Bonnie Costello in her discussion of their relationship. More striking still are the many verbal echoes of Auden that Costello discovers in Bishop (the “master” / “disaster” rhyme of “One Art,” for instance, had previously been used by Auden in his “Letter to Lord Byron”), and the similarities she notes in their projections of same-sex desires onto land- and cityscapes. Auden, Costello argues, offered Bishop “a way out of the impasses of modernism, its crisis mentality, its withdrawal from history, and its fetishizing of technique. Auden represented the successful integration of ‘dazzling technique’ with ‘real world’ psychological, social and political experience.” Anglo-American relations are frequently presented in these essays as enabling poets to find ways out of an “impasse” reached in their own national traditions, and Langdon Hammer discusses the importance of Yvor Winters for Thom Gunn and of Allen Tate for Geoffrey Hill very much in these terms. Hammer has written brilliantly on the debates of Winters, Tate, and Hart Crane in the 1920s on the relations between the drive toward lyricism and the constraints of form, rationality, and moral responsibility; his essay here examines similar kinds of conflict in Gunn’s and Hill’s arguments with modernism, and reveals the way Winters and Tate offered, as Auden had for Bishop, “alternatives to those disputes.”80 Gunn’s precise, formalist poetry marries Winters’s ideal of discipline with the homoerotic charge that Winters believed had led Crane astray, while in Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” Hill found an exemplary fusion of an intensely moral verbal scrupulousness with a heroic rejection of the compromises of contemporary politics. The queer content of many of Gunn’s later volumes was made possible by gay liberation movements of the 1960s that culminated in the Stonewall riot Steve Clark and Mark Ford : : : 19

of 1969. In “The White Room in the New York Schoolhouse,” Tony Lopez examines the English poet Lee Harwood’s representation of his affair of 1965–66 with “the man with blue eyes,” John Ashbery, then a relatively obscure poet, editor, and art critic resident in Paris, but soon to be hailed as the most significant American writer of the last third of the twentieth century. Lopez provides some fascinating comparisons between English and American traditions of the avant-garde, and presents The Man With Blue Eyes (which was published in New York by Angel Hair Books in 1966, with cover art by Joe Brainard) as a seminal bridge between the two. Harwood is an extremely early example of the influence of Ashbery and the work of other New York School writers. Lopez reads the sequence not only as a moving treatment of a love affair, but as dramatizing the differences between a young Englishman’s relatively limited social horizons and the glamorous cosmopolitan lifestyle of an American art connoisseur in Europe. In the decades since Harold Bloom formulated his Oedipal theories of influence, imitation has come to be seen less as well-meaning tribute and more as a strategy in a parricidal struggle for poetic survival. Harwood’s open, if somewhat ingenuous, avowal:“I imitate you”81 is no longer an available option for the German-born but English-eduated Michael Hofmann, whose novelist father Gert Hofmann is the subject of many of his best-known poems. Acute filial anxiety is both a threat to his selfhood and a source of poetic resonance and power. Hofmann’s second collection, Acrimony (1986), is written in an idiom frankly derived from his poetic father, Robert Lowell, but in his analysis of Hofmann’s use of verbal maneuvers borrowed from Lowell’s late sonnets, Stephen Burt makes the case for his early poetry as vividly charged with forces of adolescent aggression that rarely find such competent, memorable expression. Here again, an Anglo-American affiliation makes possible a poet’s treatment of seemingly intractable material. Susan Howe is one of America’s most thought-provoking contemporary experimental writers. A number of critics have analyzed the ways in which her fractured poems make use of early American history and texts; less commented upon have been her references to various figures from English and Irish political and literary history, whom she evokes, as Alan Golding explains, as a means of extending her investigation into the nature of poetry’s complicity with the history of colonization.82 Born of an Irish mother, Howe dramatizes in her 1993 text, Melville’s Marginalia, the conflict between the marginalized nineteenth-century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan, and the cultural authority embodied in the poetry and theories of Mathew Arnold. Howe, as Golding points out, is herself a citizen of the world’s dominant 20 : : : Introduction

empire, but her techniques of poetic dispersal prompted by her identification with Mangan work to undermine the centripetal forces of imperial authority. In the book’s final essay Helen Vendler returns to the influence of John Ashbery on British poetry, in particular the work of Mark Ford. She characterizes Ashbery as “the first notable American poet to free himself, stylistically and thematically, from nostalgia for religious, philosophical and ideological systems,” and suggests this freedom has in turn enabled Ford to question and loosen “aspects of the English imagination which had remained within the stricter borders of Audenesque intellectuality, Movement dourness, and Larkinesque gloomy comedy.” If British poetry, as she intimates, has moved decisively beyond the range of its postwar configurations, then Ashbery’s poetic example, his unique combination of wit, literary sophistication, and extreme self-consciousness, has played a major role in this transformation. A collection like this cannot of course hope to provide an inclusive account of such a complex and contentious theme over such an extended period of time. What these essays do reveal, however, is how an awareness of AngloAmerican issues can help to clarify a variety of significant contexts for poetry — contexts often obscured either by their magnitude (the big picture of global politics), or the misunderstandings implicit in the diverse uses to which roughly the same language is put in so many diverse communities: Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.83 T. S. Eliot wrote at a time when the ideal of the Anglo-American poet promulgated in Four Quartets seemed at its most pertinent, and since the above passage from “Burnt Norton” was first published in 1935, the very notion of a pure language that might somehow “stay still” has been either severely qualified, or attacked as an oppressive Establishment fiction. The third of the sequence, “Dry Salvages,” published in 1941, has been persuasively read as an appeal for Lend-Lease.84 Nevertheless, as Eliot had himself insisted through the character of Sweeney Agonistes several years earlier, “I gotta use words when I talk to you,” and those words cannot help but illustrate the pressures of both large-scale historical events and the specific moment of their utterance.85 These essays demonstrate the importance of AngloAmerican concerns to the business of decoding these pressures, and, taken together, constitute a series of fascinating, illuminating, multifaceted definitions Steve Clark and Mark Ford : : : 21

from either side of the Atlantic of the elusive “something we have that they don’t.” notes 1 John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 46. 2 On the relation with Robert Frost, see R. George Thomas, Edward Thomas: A Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 225–32; T. S. Eliot,“American Literature and American Language,” in To Criticize the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 55; see also the section “Eliot or Auden” in Neil Corcoran’s English Poetry since 1940 (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 3–14. 3 Philip Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955–1982 (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), pp. 57–76, especially p. 75. 4 See for example Donald Davie, “Edward Taylor and Isaac Watts,” in Older Masters: Essays and Reflections on English and American Literature (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992), pp. 56–70. 5 For Channing’s “Reflections on the Literary Delinquency of America” (and also in the same year, 1815, his “American Literature and Language”), see Peter Rawlings, ed., Americans on Fiction, 1776–1900, 3 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002) I: pp. 29–36, 23–28, especially 31. 6 Edgar Allan Poe, “Editorial Miscellany,” in The Broadway Journal 2 (October 4, 1845): pp. 199–200; Sydney Smith, review of Adam Seybert’s Statistical Annals of the United States of America, in the Edinburgh Review 33 (January 1820): p. 79; John Neal, preface and unpublished preface to Rachel Dyer, in Rawlings, ed., Americans on Fiction, I: pp. 118–29, especially 122. 7 Francis Murphy, ed., Walt Whitman: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 40–41. 8 Murphy, ed., Walt Whitman, p. 41. 9 See Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 39. 10 Francis Murphy, ed., Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 722. 11 See Gay Wilson Allen and Ed Folsom, eds., Walt Whitman and the World (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), pp. 25–27, 29–30; Benjamin Lease, Anglo-American Encounters: England and the Rise of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 235–54; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Toward the Twentieth Century: English Readers of Whitman,” in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 201–18. 12 T. S. Eliot, ed., A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 136. Eliot’s selection itself was originally issued in 1941; its introduction is a key document in his own increasing preoccupation with “the problem of soundness at the core of empire; this core is something older more natural, more natural and more permanent. But at the same time [Kipling’s] vision takes a larger view, and he sees the Roman empire and the place of England in it. The vision is almost that of an idea of empire laid up in heaven” (p. 27). 22 : : : Introduction

13 B. J. C. McKercher, Transition of Power: Britain’s Loss of Global Pre-eminence to the United States, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 14 Edward Mendelson, ed., The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1977; rev. ed., 1991), pp. 48, 62. 15 See Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), p. 291. 16 W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), pp. 197–98. 17 Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, eds., New Poets of England and America (New York: Meridian, 1957); Donald Hall and Robert Pack, eds., New Poets of England and America: Second Selection (New York: Meridian, 1962). In his introduction to his selection of English poets in the 1962 volume, Hall complains that in England “obscurity, Europeanism, and even intensity have come to be regarded as phoney in themselves. . . . English literary opinion is beset by false standards derived from true prejudices. Really the source of this prejudice is class; to be obscure in your poems can be a form of social climbing’ (p. 21). A. Alvarez, ed., The New Poetry: An Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962; 2nd rev. ed. 1966), p. 25. 18 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (East Saint Kilda and London: The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 75. 19 Alvarez, ed., New Poetry, p. 30. 20 For detailed mapping of this tradition, see Philip Larkin, ed., The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), and the discussion of its rationale with Anthony Thwaite in Philip Larkin, Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews, 1952–1985 (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp. 94–102. For Edward Thomas’s two reviews of Robert Frost’s North of Boston, see “A Language Not to Be Betrayed”: Selected Prose of Edward Thomas, ed. Edna Longley (Manchester: Carcanet, 1981), pp. 125–31. For “quintessential,” see Stan Smith, Edward Thomas (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 11; compare Andrew Motion, The Poetry of Edward Thomas (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 1–11; and Robert Wells, “Edward Thomas and England,” in The Art of Edward Thomas, ed. Jonathan Barker (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1987), pp. 61–74. Thomas’s own declared ambition, furthermore, was to move to the United States if he survived the war. 21 See Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 82–83. 22 Keith Tuma’s phrase, from an otherwise largely hostile analysis, in Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 203. Larkin notes that Brown Jack is “completely forgotten and quite happy” (Further Requirements, p. 58). This impulse is common to both post-Movement verse and more experimental writing. As an example of unexpected continuities, see Larkin’s adaptation of J. H. Prynne’s “Ad Parnassum” (Force of Circumstance and Other Poems [London: Routledge, 1962], p. 3): “a large wheatfield / Gleaming with improbable silences” becomes “wheat’s restless silence” in “MCMXIV,” and the “combine harvester / Soon due for a thorough overhaul” becomes the “outdated combine harvester” in “High Windows” (Collected Poems, pp. 99, 129).

Steve Clark and Mark Ford : : : 23

23 These include David Reynolds, Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the Twentieth Century (London: Longman, 1991); D. Cameron Watt, Succeeding John Bull: America in Britain’s Place, 1900–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Alan P. Dobson, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century: Of Friendship, Conflict and the Rise and Decline of Superpowers (London: Routledge, 1995); John Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relationship, 1940–1957 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995); Alex Danchev, On Specialness: Essays in Anglo-American Relations (London: Macmillan, 1997); John Dickie, Special No More: Anglo-American Relations: Rhetoric and Reality (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1994); W. R. Louis and H. Bull, eds., The Special Relationship: AngloAmerican Relations since 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986); C. J. Bartlett, The Special Relationship: A Political History of Anglo-American Relations since 1945 (London: Longman, 1992); C. Grayling and C. Langan, Just Another Star: Anglo-American Relations since 1945 (New York: Harraps, 1997); John Baylis, ed., Anglo-American Relations since 1939: The Enduring Alliance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Louise Richardson, When Allies Differ: Anglo-American Relations during the Suez and Falklands Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1996); and Ritchie Ovendale, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1998). 24 Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 184. 25 Jean-Phillippe Mathy, Extrême-Occident: French Intellectuals and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); see also Denis Lacorne, Amérique dans les Têtes: The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). 26 Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970), pp. 387–88. 27 “We, my dear Crossman, are Greeks in the American empire”: Richard Crossman,“The Making of Macmillan,” Sunday Telegraph, February 9, 1964, p. 4. For a succinct exposure of this deeply rooted fallacy, see Christopher Hitchens, “Greece to Their Rome,” in Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990), 22–37. 28 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, ed. Bernard Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 184. 29 Alex Danchev comments that “in the wake of the Berlin airlift, American facilities in Britain mushroomed at an unparalleled rate. Overnight Airstrip One had become a reality” (“In the Back Room: Anglo-American Defence Cooperation, 1945–51,” in Richard J. Aldrich, ed., British Intelligence Strategy and the Cold War [London: Routledge, 1992], pp. 215–35, especially p. 225). 30 Malcolm Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages: Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel (London: Secker & Warburg, 1995), p. 414, who also quotes Acheson’s remark delivered in a speech to the Military Academy at West Point, December 5, 1962. 31 On this “Roman feeling,” see Robert von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 1–9, especially 4. For con-

24 : : : Introduction

32

33

34

35

36 37

textualizing readings of Ashbery, see Mutlu Konuk Blasing, “John Ashbery: ‘The Epidemic of How We Live Now,’” in Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O’Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and Merrill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 110–55; and Steve Clark, “‘Uprooting the Rancid Stalk’: Transformations of Romanticism in Ashbery and Ash,” in Romanticism and Postmodernism, ed. Edward Larrissy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 157–78. Jorie Graham, The End of Beauty (New York: Ecco Press, 1987), p. 28, discussed by Peter Middleton and Tim Woods, Literatures of Memory: History, Time, and Space in Postwar Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 214–16. See Blake Morrison’s The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 248–50; and Robert Hewison, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1981), p. 122. Tuma also notes, a distinctive “ambivalence . . . which is the product of both geopolitical realities and cultural tensions specific to Britain (Fishing by Obstinate Isles, p. 102). One might cite Adrian Mitchell’s performance piece, “Remember Suez,” in Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), p. 31, but little else. Robert Conquest, Poems (London: Macmillan, 1955), reprinted in D. J. Enright, ed., The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse, 1945–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 86; Blake Morrison,“The Kiss,” in The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper (London: Chatto, 1987), p. 10: “High from the rainchecking satellites / our island’s like a gun set on a table, / still smoking, waiting to be loaded again.” Philip Larkin, “Afternoons,” and “If, my Darling,” in Collected Poems, pp. 115, 72. On internalized elegy, see Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, p. 71; Tom Paulin, “She Did Not Change,” Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (London: Faber, 1992), pp. 233–51, especially 233; and Steve Clark, “‘The Lost Displays’: Larkin and Empire,” in New Larkins for Old, ed. James Booth (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 166–81. Ted Hughes, The Hawk in the Rain (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 11; Lupercal (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), pp. 56–57. There are a handful of volumes specifically concerned with Anglo-American literary relations. The most important of these are Stephen Spender’s Love-Hate Relations: A Study of Anglo-American Sensibilities (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974), which, though elegantly written, now seems rather dated in its transposition of a broadly Eliotic model of tradition from literary to cultural spheres; Peter Conrad’s Imagining America (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), which discusses only Auden of the writers covered in this volume; and Malcolm Bradbury’s Dangerous Pilgrimages: Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel, which is concerned exclusively with prose. All three illustrate traditional American Studies approaches to the topic as developed by critics such as Marcus Cunliffe and Melvin J. Laskey (see Cunliffe’s “Europe and America: Transatlantic Images,” in In Search of America: Transatlantic Essays, 1951–1990 [New York, Westport, and London: Greenwood Press, 1991], pp. 309–32, and Laskey’s “America and Europe: Transatlantic Images,” in Paths of American Thought, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Morton White [London: Chatto and Windus, 1964], pp. 465–91). There is also some consideration of the topic in Neil Corcoran’s British Poetry since 1940; in Ian Gregson’s Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism: Dialogue and Estrange-

Steve Clark and Mark Ford : : : 25

38

39

40

41

42 43 44 45

ment (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), and in David Kennedy’s New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry, 1980–1994 (Bridgend: Seren, 1996). Dennis Brown’s The Poetry of Postmodernism: Anglo-American Encodings (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994) appears to promise to engage the topic head-on, but proves to be less concerned with the interplay of the two traditions than with trying to define different strands of postmodernism. Also of relevance are James Acheson and Romana Huk, eds., Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); Robert Hampson and Peter Barry, eds., New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); Ann Massa and Alistair Stead, eds., Forked Tongues? Comparing Twentieth-Century British and American Literature (Harlow: Longman, 1994); and Mark Ford and Steve Clark, eds., Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 3, no. 1 (April 1999). Andrew Ross, The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). On American academia in the first half of the century, see also Gail MacDonald, Learning to Be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), and Mark Jancovitch, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See Eric Sigg, The American T. S. Eliot: A Study of the Early Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Jacqueline Kaye, ed., Ezra Pound and America (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); and Cassandra Laity, H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), and Louis Menand’s Discovering Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), especially the section “Literature and Professionalism,” pp. 97–132. The best description of what this “professionalism” involved is Ezra Pound’s letter of June 28, 1915, to T. S. Eliot’s father in which he explains in detail the strategies by which his son is making his name in the English literary scene (The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1: 1898–1922, ed. Valerie Eliot [London: Faber and Faber, 1988], pp. 100–2). Donald Davie, “The Waste Land Drafts and Transcripts,” in Under Briggflatts (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), pp. 98–103, especially 102. Eliot himself compared the process of developing a reputation in London to “breaking open a safe” (Letters, p. 392). Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, 12 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1911–1915), 1: p. ix. Donald Allen, ed., The New American Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1960). Simon Pettet, ed., James Schuyler: Selected Art Writings (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1998), p. 1. Arguably the most significant feature of Tuma’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) is the transference of cultural power implied by allocation of the “Oxford Book” (though renamed and perhaps thereby downgraded to “Anthology”) to an American academic and the adoption of the Norton college textbooks format, copious, imposing, and embedded in critical apparatus (impressively assembled by Nate Horbrook), by a publisher that famously guillotined its own list of British poets. One indication of the stark commercial realities underpinning selection is the excision of the four-nations model of “English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish poetry” on the grounds that “Scots Gaelic, Irish or Welsh” are “not read in the United States” (pp. xx, xxiv).

26 : : : Introduction

46 These include Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford, eds., The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (London: Viking, 1998); Sean O’Brien, ed., The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland since 1945 (London: Picador, 1999); Peter Forbes, ed., Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (London: Penguin, 1999); and Edna Longley, ed., The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry from Britain and Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2000). 47 Tuma, Fishing by Obstinate Isles, p. 3. This quality is sufficiently pronounced to be foregrounded in Tuma’s title via “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”; Ezra Pound, Collected Shorter Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 187. 48 On the latter relationship, see Alison Mark, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2000), pp. 111–32. 49 David Antin, “Modernism and Post-modernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry,” in The Avant-garde Tradition in Literature, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1982), p. 221. 50 W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, pp. 548–49. 51 The Movement is the most famous example, but similar mechanisms of promotion can be discerned for Martianism and New Generation writing. For a functionalist account of canon-formation, see Peter Barry,“Mapping the Zones of Contemporary Poetry,” in Contemporary British Poetry and the City (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 11–16. 52 For copious documentation, see Jed Rasula, The American Poetry Waxworks Museum: Reality Effects, 1940–1990 (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996). 53 The discipline ultimately derives from early indebtedness to Scottish universities, with the emphasis of their curriculum on rhetoric (evident in the practice of freshman composition). See Robert Crawford, ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and his own essay, “Men, Women, and American Classrooms,” in The Modern Poet: Poetry, Academia, and Knowledge since the 1750s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 223–66. 54 Richard Caddel and Peter Quatermain, the editors of Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1999) regard the “neglect” of the writers collected in their anthology as “hardly surprising, since the writers concerned would not seek — or have indeed formally rejected — inclusion into existing hierarchies, which they see as increasingly lifeless and irrelevant” (p. xvi). 55 Larkin, Required Writing, pp. 90, 127; though in a later essay, there is praise for “On the Circuit” as showing Auden’s “personal toughness and isolation, scouting self-pity in himself and others,” which “recalled the life-style of his Anglo-Saxon ancestors” (Further Requirements, p. 40). John Ashbery, Poets at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. George Plimpton (New York: Penguin, 1989), p. 395. The interview was conducted by Peter Stitt in 1980. 56 Quoted in Edward Mendelson’s Later Auden (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 478. 57 What David Lodge termed “a reversal of that cultural Gulf Stream which had in the past swept so many Americans to Europe in search of Experience”(Changing Places [London: Penguin, 1975], pp. 194–95) has even generated its own subgenre of campus farce. These novels are discussed in M. Spiering, Englishness: Foreigners and Images of Identity in Post-war Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), pp. 83–90. Steve Clark and Mark Ford : : : 27

58 Paul Muldoon, Poems, 1968–1998 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 90; John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), p. 13. 59 See Thom Gunn, “To Yvor Winters, 1955,” in his Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), pp. 69–70; Lee Harwood, The Man With Blue Eyes, in Crossing the Frozen River: Selected Poems (London: Paladin, 1988), pp. 15–32 (discussed in this volume by Tony Lopez); and Seamus Heaney, “Elegy,” in Fieldwork (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), pp. 31–32. 60 “Simon Armitage interviewed by Jane Stabler,” in Talking Verse: [Interviews with Poets] ed. Robert Crawford et al. (St. Andrews and Williamsburg: Verse, 1995), p. 22. The poems mentioned by Armitage are by Randall Jarrell, Weldon Kees, and Kenneth Fearing. The Kees poem is not in fact included in Moore’s anthology. 61 Seamus Heaney, Door into the Dark (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 55. 62 Simon Armitage, Zoom! (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1989), p. 33. 63 Philip Larkin, Selected Letters, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 307. 64 Tuma, Fishing by Obstinate Isles, p. 3. For a still more skeptical reading of twentiethcentury British poetry, see Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (New York: Knopf, 1988). 65 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 139. 66 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Vol. I, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000), p. 4. 67 Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), p. 240; William Carlos Williams, Paterson (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 2. 68 The genealogy may be demonstrated through Oscar Mellor’s series of Fantasy Press pamphlets issued in the early 1950s that included Hall and Rich alongside Larkin and Wain. For fuller discussion, see Eric Homberger, The Art of the Real: Poetry in England and America since 1939 (London: Dent, 1979), pp. 61–165, especially pp. 86–95. For an excellent brief characterization of the style by a recent practitioner, see J. H. Prynne, “Figments of Reflection,” Cambridge Review 84 (1963): pp. 281–82. 69 Rexroth edited New British Poets (New York: New Directions, 1949), a primary conduit for the dissemination of 1940s neoromanticism. The prestige of these writers waned rapidly in their native culture but continued to receive an enthusiastic transatlantic reception: for example, Henry Treece’s Collected Poems was published by Knopf in 1942, but not in Britain. Their influence may be discerned not only in the proto-Beat poets Rexroth and Patchen, but also deep-image poets such as Robert Bly and W. S. Merwin, and at longer range West Coast Language writing, all of which are later re-imported as original styles. The trajectory may be exemplified in the career of Denise Levertov, who published her first volume, The Double Image (London: The Cresset Press, 1946), alongside the Apocalyptics in 1946, before moving to the United States to re-emerge as an influential affiliate of the Black Mountain School. See A. T. Tolley, The Poetry of the Forties (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 113, 273–74. 70 Allen Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, ed. Barry Miles (New York: Viking, 1986). 71 Kenneth Koch, Selected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1985), p. 37. 28 : : : Introduction

72 Donald Allen, ed., The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 258. The Ashbery and Koch translations of Roussel are in Trevor Winkfield, ed., How I Wrote Certain of My Books (Boston: Exact Change, 1995). 73 Quoted in Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 237. 74 See Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville, eds., A Various Art (London: Carcanet, 1987), p. 12; Adrian Clarke and Robert Sheppard, eds., A Floating Capital: New Poets from London (Elmwood, Conn.: Poets Press, 1991), p. i; Iain Sinclair, ed., conductors of chaos: a poetry anthology (London: Picador, 1996), p. xix; and Caddel and Quartemain, Other, p. xxii. Davie’s own self-indictment, of “pusillanimity” and “insularity and philistinism” occurs as early as 1959 in “Remembering the Movement,” in With the Grain: Reflections on Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998), pp. 199–202, especially 199. 75 “Two Organs,” in John Berryman, Collected Poems, 1937–1971, ed. Charles Thornbury (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), pp. 178–79. 76 “Philip Larkin (1922–1985),” in James Merrill, Collected Poems, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser (New York: Knopf, 2001), p. 835; M. L. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 222; Marjorie Perloff, “What to Make of a Diminished Thing,” Parnassus 19:2 (1994): pp. 9–29, especially 29. Nigel Alderman’s explicitly allegorical equation that “Larkin’s position as a belated national poet . . . corresponds to England’s problematic status as a belated nation,” only makes explicit a consistent underlying premise (“‘The Life with a Hole in It’: Philip Larkin and the Condition of England,” Textual Practice 8:2 [1994]: pp. 279–301, especially 285). 77 See David Lehman, ed., Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present (New York: Scribner, 2003). 78 John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford (London: Between the Lines, 2003), p. 56. 79 T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 20. 80 Langdon Hammer, Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 81 Lee Harwood, Crossing the Frozen River (London: Paladin, 1988), p. 15. 82 See, for example, Peter Nicholls, “Unsettling the Wilderness: Susan Howe and American History,” Contemporary Literature 37 (1996): pp. 586–601, and George F. Butterick, “The Mysterious Vision of Susan Howe,” North Dakota Quarterly 55 (1987): pp. 312–21. 83 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 175. 84 See Peter Robinson, “Lend-Lease and ‘The Dry Salvages,’” in In the Circumstances: About Poems and Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 47–57. 85 Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, p. 125.

Steve Clark and Mark Ford : : : 29

“Why Should Men’s Heads Ache?” Yeats and American Modernism edna longley

In this essay I visit the prehistory of postwar poetry to argue that certain dynamics and dialectics, which pivot on the self-remaking of W. B. Yeats, have been obscured by the “modernist” paradigms of Anglo-American criticism. I will discuss Yeats’s reception by some younger poets during the 1930s, his provocative Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), his fitful rivalry with T. S. Eliot, and his long argument with Ezra Pound. That argument — about form — is surely central to twentieth-century poetics. But first I want to suggest why Yeats’s poetry might elude readings predicated on the theory and practice of his American juniors. To apply his own critique of the Cantos, not “all the wine” gets “into the bowl.”1 In fact, the modernist bowls seem mixed in shape and size, not to say leaky. As Astradur Eysteinsson notes, “while modernism is often accused of being a cult of form, it is also . . . attacked for formlessness”; and “the theory of aesthetic autonomy frequently appears to co-exist with that of cultural subversion.”2 Thus modernist paradigms themselves conflict over the relation between form and history. Further, some of the contradictions highlighted by Eysteinsson peculiarly suggest a failure to adjust the focus for Yeats. And since “postmodernism” might be seen as “modernism” by (roughly) the same means, whether these categories refer to poetic structure or to critical constructions, readings of contemporary poetry are also at stake. It is difficult to insert “Irish” into “Anglo-American”: Anglo-Irish leans in one cultural and political direction, Irish-American in another. Yet more correct ethno-national labels (like “Hiberno-British-American”) seem equally beside the aesthetic point. All of which posits a doubly disruptive role for Irish poets. The Ashbery quotation, “something / We have that they don’t,” may assume that an American “we” and English “they” are the key players: its pronouns happen to echo Robert Frost’s sly remark that T. S. Eliot has “left us and you know he’s never really found them.”3 However, as Christopher Hitchens has shown, the politics of them and us, including “cultural cross-fertilisations,” can be unexamined, collusive, metropolitan, and imperial. Hence the appeal

of each country to the other’s dissidents. Hitchens traces an “emotional diagram” whereby “conservative Anglophile Americans [like T. S. Eliot] and transplanted liberal and radical Englishmen [like W. H. Auden]” change places.4 This helps modernist aesthetics to have it both ways: the power of an institution, the glamour of perpetual revolution. To speak of “American modernism” conflicts with the global claims of “international modernism.” Yet the components of that term, as it affects literature, have come to appear mutually and separately unstable. Peter Nicholls prudently called his 1995 “Literary Guide” Modernisms, yet the plural, also used by other critics, may still miss the aesthetic point if “international” — which sometimes signals no more than Anglo-American — is not also broken down.5 Within and outside of the Anglo-American sphere we find the national shading into the nationalist. If English resistance to modernism can have such nuances, as with Philip Larkin, so can American insistence, as when Hugh Kenner dubbed literary modernity The Pound Era, or when Frank Lentricchia takes America circa 1900 to be the crucial “site of emerging modernist poetic idioms.”6 As Gail McDonald argues, Pound’s and Eliot’s “modern” aesthetic was conditioned by their national and academic origins.7 Hence the hegemonic force of its return full-circle. Besides disguising or advancing American interests, “international” models of modern literature may give (selected) foreign writers modernist visas on American terms.8 The process has been documented in Joseph Kelly’s “reputation-history” of Joyce, which argues that his championing by Pound and Eliot and later by the American “Joyce industry” involves a “de-Irishing” of his writing, and the recasting of his audience in avant-garde “elitist” terms. Pound, true to the fin-de-siècle a-historicity that formed him, envisaged “culturally superior” readers; Eliot, a “small number of people . . . sensitive to good literature.”9 My own stress is neither on any national poetry nor on “our” Yeats — not that every Irish reader would own him. It is on cross-cultural dialogues that shaped the aesthetics of modern poetry in English, and which require critics to attempt a balance between underplaying and overplaying local/national specifics. Here the active force of “inter” in “international” should be stressed. Mutual stimulus sharpens difference as well as affinity or possibility. If these dialogues have often been homogenized into “cosmopolitanism,” latter-day ethnocentrism also obstructs their visibility and continuance. Admittedly, Yeats’s efforts to make a national literature were fired by competition with Scotland and emulation of America. He wrote in 1892: “America, with no past to speak of, a mere parvenu among the nations, is creating a national literature which in its most characteristic products differs almost as much from English literature as does the literature of France. Walt Whitman, Edna Longley : : : 31

Thoreau, Bret Harte . . . are very American, and yet America was once an English colony.”10 In 1893 he praised “Emerson’s admirable saying — ‘To thine orchard’s edge belong / All the brass and plume of song’” as an antidote to “cosmopolitan water-gruel.”11 George Russell (AE) was also keen that the Revival should do “what Emerson did for the New Englanders.”12 There is good warrant, then, for assumptions of American-Irish revolutionary solidarity. But we might note Pound’s progressive annexing of Ireland as he crows over the English in “How to Read”: “the language is now in the keeping of the Irish (Yeats and Joyce); apart from Yeats, since the death of Hardy, poetry is being written by Americans. All the developments in English verse since 1910 are due almost wholly to Americans.”13 Now you see Yeats, now you don’t. There are two main ways in which I see Yeats as misrepresented or unrepresented by modernist constructions of modern poetry. First, he figures as a precursor rather than a player, and a largely obsolescent one, whenever Imagism is held to succeed Symbolism on a progressive model rather than as a dialectical alternative in a complex aesthetic field.14 Second, although named in modernist cast-lists, he is rarely quoted for purposes of definition. Hence he may be co-opted for generalizations at odds with his aesthetic, and read through the lenses of Eliot and/or Pound. When Pound regrets that the Yeats of Responsibilities remains a symboliste rather than an imagiste, he is less writing an epitaph than conceding a defeat. Pound reviewed (in Poetry) both Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (1914) and Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916). In his first review, Pound describes the “manifestly new note in [Yeats’s] later work” in language familiar from his own Imagist manifestoes: “he has driven out the inversion and written with prose directness”; “his work [is] becoming gaunter, seeking greater hardness of outline”; “this quality of hard light is precisely what one finds in the beginning of . . . ‘The Magi.’” Yet Pound calls that effect “a passage of imagisme [such as] may occur in a poem not otherwise imagiste”; accepts that “there is no need for [Yeats] to recast his style to suit our winds of doctrine”; and mentions that what Yeats criticizes in les Imagistes is “what he calls ‘their devil’s metres.’”15 The conclusion of Pound’s second review (he had now read The Wild Swans at Coole) is more precise about where the poets’ aesthetic compatibility ends, and more inclined to see Yeats as obstructing a clear run for his own agenda: “Mr. Yeats is a romanticist, symbolist, occultist, for better or worse, now and for always. That does not matter. What does matter is that he is the only one left who has sufficient intensity to turn these modes into art.”16 C. K. Stead concludes, however, that the relation between Poundian and Yeatsian aesthetics can be construed as developmental: 32 : : : Yeats and American Modernism

It is the difference between the marmoreal and the Mallarméan, between the stillness and finality of the musée and the action and inconclusiveness of the atelier. This is why I think Pound especially appeals to poets . . . It is that atmosphere of the studio which suggests further excitement, possibility, life still to be lived and work still to be done. But it is probable too that this air of incompleteness, of energy, of possibility, appeals to something in the modern temperament.17 In fact, two Pounds are invoked to make the Yeatsian aesthetic appear passé: the Imagist Pound and the Pound of the Cantos. The Imagist Pound has his own “marmoreal” tendencies, and his doctrine of brevity secretes “finality” even if his doctrine of “the musical phrase” refuses a stanzaic means to that end. What puzzles the formal theory of both Pounds (always in implied argument with Yeats) is the conundrum of whether there exists a point — between taking everything out and putting everything in — where a poem realizes its shape. Yeats’s most enduring insistence — his most significant fidelity to symbolism — was on the possibility of formal unity, which need neither imply nor impose other kinds of coherence (eventually delegated to the conveniently elastic back-up system of the gyres). A poem’s parts may cohere to say “the center cannot hold.” Later, I will argue that the negative fetishizing of “closure” (a product of the view that Symbolism collapsed rather than evolved) is a simplistic way in which to think about tradition, form, and audience. And Stead’s language of openness and energy is, at bottom, mimetic. It evokes a poetic New World. Eysteinsson faults Anglo-American criticism for an obsession with canonformation that stresses “iconic individuals,”“superwriters,” rather than movements.18 This obsession produces iconic listings of strange bedfellows, where Yeats typically illustrates rather than creates trends. The main problem arises where definitions of poetic modernism narrow to particular criteria regarding form and language, as when Richard Sheppard states: “A similar sense of pessimism about the possibility of revivifying language, a similar sense that all that remains are a few isolated and arbitrary symbols, runs through the writings of Eliot, Yeats and Rilke.”19 Yeats could make himself believe that his symbols came from anima mundi, and he saw Irish literature as belated in a different sense: Ireland was neither gripped by the crisis of modernity, nor a “half-savage country, out of date,” but an originary mythopoeic source. While this may still correspond to Perry Meisel’s sense of modernism as “a structure of compensation,”it yet makes Ireland a metaphor for creative resilience rather than for cognitive pessimism or semantic collapse.20 Edna Longley : : : 33

In part, the current academic map reproduces Yeats’s two distinct points of entry into America: first through Irish America; later, through Pound, Harriet Monroe, and Poetry. If John Quinn, the Irish-American lawyer and patron of modern art, connects these two constituencies, he also marks their differences. Yeats saw the success of his pioneering 1903–04 lecture tour in terms of playing off Irish, English, and American audiences. He was of course speaking as promoter of the Irish Literary Revival, if obliquely as self-promoter, when he said,“I find I annoy English people exceedingly by my praises of America”; and noted, “If the intellectual movement makes . . . a large public for itself here, that will help us greatly in Ireland. It is impossible to discount American opinion the way English opinion can be discounted.”21 Today, however, academic Irish-America is a mixed blessing to Yeats. The contexts it supplies place him outside the Anglo-American mainstream. This also casts light on Helen Vendler’s anxious presentation of Seamus Heaney as not merely an Irish poet: “the history of his consciousness is as germane to our lives as that of any other poet.”22 Meanwhile, in Ireland Yeats’s relation to American modernism has been construed in ways that question not only his modernism but his Irishness. This tendency has long roots. After the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, some poets wanted to declare their independence of aesthetics associated with the Literary Revival and its perceived “Anglo-Irish” or Protestant origins. The “revolt” of American modernism against “English” traditional forms seemed an apt role model, although the Irish “neo-modernists,” their imitators, and their critical champions often recall the reflexly counter-canonical uses of transatlantic models in England (with the added complication that Irish canons are more unstable). Most contributors to Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis’s 1995 collection, Modernism and Ireland, for example, fail to test such oppositions as “fidelity” and “fragmentation,” and thereby question the canonical building-blocks of poetic modernism itself.23 This is my hypothesis with respect to Yeats’s contradictory surfacings in Hiberno-Anglo-American cross-currents then and now: the uncertainties of his cultural-political locus, uncertainties that include the disappearance of his “Anglo-Irish” context in all its hyphenated meanings, have combined with his distance from the making of academic paradigms to produce partial views of his aesthetic and its influence. One possible remedy is to trace Yeats’s presence in transatlantic relations during the 1930s. I have written elsewhere about Louis MacNeice’s role in the Yeatsian succession with respect to both “modern” and “Irish” poetry, and to his internal dialectic between the precedents of Yeats and Eliot.24 But 34 : : : Yeats and American Modernism

Yeats, Eliot, and Pound were also being absorbed and debated in America. For instance, Terence Diggory discusses the response to Yeats by the southern Agrarian poets who sought regional tradition and “traditional sanctity,” and for whom “Yeats and Ireland vis-à-vis England” paralleled the situation of writers in the American South. In Diggory’s view, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren understood Yeats’s access to Irish “tradition” rather literally. It took them time to see that his myth could not “assume public assent” and that he had “made the failure of such assent one of his themes.”25 Nonetheless, a need for aesthetic and religious reassurance determined the transcendental tilt in New Critical readings of Yeats, their greater resort to A Vision than to Irish culture and politics. In effect, the midcentury American poet-critics de-historicized Yeats’s poetry by folding Yeatsian history into vague “world history.” This is Yeats as Wallace Stevens. It also brings Yeats closer to Eliot without regard to the formal differences between their respective poetries. One example is Tate’s article of 1942, “Yeats’s Romanticism: Notes and Suggestions,” in the influential “Special Yeats Issue” of the Southern Review. Tate celebrates the “profundity of Yeats’s vision of the modern world and the width of its perspective”; vindicates A Vision as a dissolving framework that “broadens out and merges with the traditional insights of our culture”; and argues that Yeats’s poetry “is nearer the centre of our main traditions of sensibility and thought than the poetry of Eliot or of Pound.” (The tone resembles Vendler on Heaney, and Eliot on himself.) Tate disagrees, but does not engage, with two critics who “sum up the case for Yeats’s romanticism, the view that he was an escapist retiring from problems, forces, and theories relevant to the modern world.”26 The critics in question are Edmund Wilson and Louis MacNeice. Tate misrepresents and resists them both to an interesting extent. Thus, while Wilson is “impatient” with A Vision, and feels that Yeats “in rejecting the methods of modern science [has] cut himself off in a curious way from the general enlightened thought of his time,” he also describes Yeats as “completely recreat[ing] his style so as to make it solid, homely and exact” and as getting ever “closer to the common world.”27 Again, Tate interprets MacNeice’s The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1941) as implying that Yeats “had bad luck in not belonging to the younger group of English poets who had a monopoly on ‘reality.’” And he asserts, “Yeats’s preference for the nobleman, the peasant and the craftsman does not betray, as Mr MacNeice’s somewhat provincial contention holds, the ‘budding fascist’; it is a ‘version of pastoral’ which permits Yeats to see his characters acting beyond the ordinary dignity of men.”28 In fact, MacNeice revises the 1930s Left critique of Yeats in the light of the changing “reality” constituted by war. He writes, “If the war made nonsense of Yeats’s poetry Edna Longley : : : 35

and of all works that are called ‘escapist,’ it also made nonsense of the poetry that professes to be ‘realist.’” MacNeice concludes his book by claiming Yeats for himself and Auden (perhaps this is what really annoyed Tate). In what I see as an important judgment, he says, “Whatever their system was, [the 1930s poets] stood with Yeats for system against chaos. . . . Where Eliot had seen misery, frustration, and ruins, they saw heroic struggle — or, sometimes, heroic defeat — and they saw ruins rebuilding.”29 MacNeice’s end-of-the-1930s distinction between Yeats and Eliot, a distinction that turns on form and history, does not put these two modern masters in the same New Critical box. As for Tate’s revealing adjective “provincial,” MacNeice seems well placed to read Yeats in terms of Ireland, Europe at war, the modern movement, and the ideological conflicts of the 1930s. He was then close to Auden, and they thought alike on Pound. As we know, Pound could “not share the Auden craze,” nor did Auden have much time for Pound.30 MacNeice in 1935 had criticized A Draft of Thirty Cantos as “literary,” “monotonous,” and formless. In Modern Poetry (1938) he discusses the Cantos as an extreme and unsuccessful example of the method that works in The Waste Land: Pound takes the whole of history as stock for his soup and cuts backwards and forwards from one country or one century to another, adding plenty of the smell of cooking and noise of the typewriter to make it clear that all these elements combine for him in a living and contemporary whole. I doubt if they will so combine for many of his readers. . . . For this enormous work Pound uses the method of the imagists, and this sometimes gives effective vignettes. . . . But more often his passion for the particular detail conduces to a total blur.31 MacNeice’s sense of Pound’s failure may have influenced the different crosscutting in time and space, and ratio between particularity and panorama, that characterize the “living and contemporary whole” of Autumn Journal. MacNeice in Modern Poetry, and more so in The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, returns compliments, if rather backhanded, paid by Yeats to himself, Auden, and other “thirties poets” in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. He is conscious (alerted by his friend E. R. Dodds who knew Yeats) that Yeats has given them the nod as compared with other young pretenders. And perhaps Yeats too had only recently become more alert. In 1935 he was still associating Auden wholly with Pound and Eliot, rather than with his own aesthetic, when he pinpointed his main difficulty with the anthology: “My problem . . . will be: ‘How far do I like the Ezra, Eliot, Auden school and if I do not, why not?’”32 In the Oxford Book this becomes: “that lack of form and consequent obscurity which is the 36 : : : Yeats and American Modernism

main defect of Auden, Day Lewis, and their school, a school which, as will presently be seen, I greatly admire.”33 The Oxford Book famously united the literary worlds of Ireland, England, and the United States in varieties of outrage. But Yeats’s maneuvers on the Irish and English fronts (his exclusion of Austin Clarke and Wilfred Owen, his indulgence toward Dorothy Wellesley, etc.) have attracted greater retrospective notice than his strategy with regard to American poets in general and American modernism in particular. The terms “maneuvers” and “strategy” seem exact: his biographer Roy Foster likes the notion that “for Yeats’s life the only analyst you need is Clausewitz.”34 Babette Deutsch spoke for much of America when she wrote in the New York Herald Tribune: It is not representative of the development of modern poetry: one does not know whether to be more amazed at its inclusions or its omissions. . . . [Yeats] felt that he knew too little of American poets to make a representative selection. His grounds for omitting them are intelligible, but the results are unfortunate. Here is a collection of “modern verse” that ignores the work of such men as Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings . . . while ample space is assigned to lesser verse-makers who happen to be natives of the British Isles.35 Or, as a subeditor headed her review: His Choices for This Anthology Are Surprising, He Likes the Irish and Omits America. Yeats, of course, did not “omit America” when it came to two poets qualified or quarantined by “long residence in Europe”: namely, Eliot and Pound. (Deutsch notes that H.D. should have logically made the cut.) Perhaps he wanted these resident aliens at once isolated and under his eye in order to play down their claims on the young. Yeats stakes his own claim by representing the 1930s poets as having moved beyond Eliot, the war poets and himself in their vision, although heading in a Yeatsian direction. Above all, as he remarks with deceptive casualness, they have rejected free verse for a revival of “traditional metres”: Ten years after the war certain poets combined the modern vocabulary, the accurate record of the relevant facts learned from Eliot, with the sense of suffering of the war poets, that sense of suffering no longer passive, no longer an obsession of the nerves. . . . Day Lewis, Madge, MacNeice, are modern through the character of their intellectual passion. . . . I can seldom find more than half a dozen lyrics that I like, yet in this moment of sympathy I prefer them to Eliot, to myself — I too have tried to be modern. . . . George Barker, like MacNeice, Auden, Day Lewis, handled the traditional Edna Longley : : : 37

metres with a new freedom — vers libre lost much of its vogue some five years ago.36 Further, Yeats did omit The Waste Land. F. O. Matthiessen (in the Southern Review) spotted that Eliot was being “skillfully represented by a selection that keeps him in a minor key.”37 In some ways, American reviewers, fewer in number than the English, were more respectful. Deutsch finds Yeats’s introduction “acute” on Eliot and “discerning” on Pound. The most positive review of all was Morton Zabel’s in Poetry, which calls the anthology “eccentric, prejudiced, and obscure in its principles,” but acknowledges that it “disconcerts” him into reflecting on the forces that produce orthodoxies, categories, and the prevention of criticism. Zabel may underrate Yeats’s strategy as he overstresses his eccentricity. But what he construes as the “lesson for future anthologists and historians of contemporary verse” is relevant to the focus of this essay: Poetry today is not usually judged by critical taste or impersonal intelligence. It is rated, promoted, classified, boomed, and discarded according to the advantages of the moment, and these are dictated not merely by advertising and book-column reputations, but by group politics and careerism, the distortions of literary causes and “beliefs.” . . . Exaggerated adorations are followed by equally violent disgusts. . . . Yeats gives one example of how aloofness to these dishonesties may persist beyond his momentary confusions; a disillusioned concern for art that can weather fifty years of schools and experiments without losing enthusiasm for the youngest of his fellowworkers.38 Yeats’s polemical caricature of Eliot as an uninventive realist (Pound had never managed to persuade him otherwise), echoed in his contemporaneous broadcast “Modern Poetry,” points to differences in the literary relation between Yeats and Eliot, Yeats and Pound. When Yeats confronts Pound’s aesthetic in the Oxford Book, he is addressing an intimately known “opposite” long removed from the metropolitan scene. When he questions Eliot’s aesthetic, he is addressing an immediate rival for the ear of England. Hegemonic competition between Yeats and Eliot goes back a long way, and it has cultural dimensions: Yeats’s Anglo-Irish mix of closeness and criticism contrasting with Eliot’s Anglo-American urge to “find them.” In sequence of literary logrolling and literary fashion, the Celtic Twilight took over London in the 1890s; The Waste Land in the 1920s. Yeats’s sojourn in America brought home the opportunity, for Ireland and himself, offered by a barren decade in American verse. His retrospect “America and the Arts,” published in the New York Met38 : : : Yeats and American Modernism

ropolitan Magazine in April 1905, is “delighted” by everything except American poetry, because (unlike American architecture which has successfully combined tradition and novelty) it has “followed the modern way of [James Russell] Lowell who mistook the imaginative reason for poetry, and not that ancient way Whitman, Thoreau and Poe had lit upon.”Yeats now places Emerson lower, on the grounds that “he loved the formless infinite too well to delight in form.” And, pointing out that “New England has passed away,” he concludes: “One cannot think that this new America which has robbed culture of its languor and yet kept its fineness has found an adequate expression.”39 Yeats’s teasing versions of tradition and modernity cue in Eliot and Pound. Whether deliberately or unconsciously, Eliot erased Yeats when he began “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a month prior to its original composition in 1919, with the sentence: “In English writing we seldom speak of tradition.”40 Yeats spoke of little else. A month earlier Eliot had reviewed Gregory Smith’s Scottish Literature, asking in metropolitan mode,“Was there a Scottish literature?” and affirming a transhistorical “English mind” as later “the mind of Europe.” “Tradition and the Individual Talent” also erases Smith who, as Robert Crawford says, “devotes particular attention to the ‘attitude to tradition’ in Scottish literature.”41 In July of 1919, Eliot had reviewed the traditionobsessed essays assembled by Yeats in The Cutting of an Agate. Thus the professedly “mainstream” version of tradition urged by “Tradition and the Individual Talent” might be seen as implicitly contending with other provincial claims. The review is headed “A Foreign Mind,” and the reviewer’s own Anglo-American mind, uttered by the metropolitan “we,” finds Yeats philosophically and hence nationally alien: The difference between his world and ours is so complete as to seem almost a physiological variety, different nerves and senses. It is, therefore, allowable to imagine that the difference is not only personal, but national. . . . Mr Yeats’s mind is a mind in some way independent of experience; and anything that occurs in that mind is of equal importance. It is a mind in which perception of fact, and feeling and thinking are all a little different from ours.42 This has the genuine ring of an Anglo-American bewildered by what he may take for Celticism; of an American puritan bewildered by the literary transmutations of a more colorful Protestantism; of a Harvard-trained critic bewildered by a poet. Yet The Cutting of an Agate, despite its Irish tilt and the fact that most of its contents were written before 1912, cannot have been wholly foreign to Eliot’s mind. The book abounds in allusions to classical and Renaissance texts. Edna Longley : : : 39

Moreover, it includes “Poetry and Tradition” (1907), which speaks of “seeing all in the light of European literature”; praises “perfection of personality, the perfection of its surrender”; regrets that power has “passed to small shopkeepers, to clerks”; and concludes by stating the necessity to “fill our porcelain jars against the coming winter.”43 In “Ulysses, Order and Myth” (1923) Eliot does acknowledge Yeats’s significance as a mediator of tradition. Commending Joyce’s mythic “method which others must pursue after him,” he says, “It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to be the first contemporary to be conscious.”44 It is interesting that Eliot should use a word associated with a poem by Wilfred Owen (futility) and one associated with a poem by Yeats (anarchy), while perhaps laying greater stress on the “controlling” function of myth than seems appropriate to the negotiations between history and myth dramatized by either poet or by Joyce. By the mid 1930s Eliot was writing about Yeats more positively than Yeats was writing about him, although still implying that “superfluous stage properties” and a “minor mythology” have impeded his progress or made him “eccentric”: “he has arrived at greatness against the greatest odds; if he has not arrived at a central and universal philosophy he has at least discarded, for the most part, the trifling and eccentric, the provincial in time and place.”45 Eliot had probably read the canonical message of the Oxford Book by the time he gave his memorial lecture on Yeats in Dublin in 1940. The lecture combines generosity, diplomacy, and self-assertion. First, Eliot explains that Yeats has never influenced his own work; then he concedes to Yeats the “admiration” of the English young on the basis that it excludes influence. He says, “It was good for them to have the spectacle of an unquestionably great living poet whose style they were not tempted to echo and whose ideas opposed those in vogue among them. You will not see, in their writing, more than passing evidences of the impression he made.”At the same time, Eliot himself is clearly impressed by Yeats’s later poetry and plays. What enthralled him may have been his own switch to verse-drama and experience of poetic midlife crisis. He writes finely of Yeats: “This, I am sure, was part of the secret of his ability, after becoming unquestionably the master, to remain always a contemporary.” And, twenty years on, Eliot takes back the “Foreign Mind” review. Refusing to discuss the “aspects of Yeats’s thought and feeling which to myself are unsympathetic,” he ends by calling Yeats “one of those few [poets] whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.”46 40 : : : Yeats and American Modernism

Posthumously, in that tribute, Yeats drifts closer to Eliot than to Pound. The relationship between Yeats and Pound has been much debated, usually in language that turns on power and its balance: Oedipal conflict, master and pupil, ancien régime and “make it new,”America and Ireland. There has also been a desire to install Pound as the “onlie begetter” of modern poetry by representing him as doing for Yeats what he undoubtedly did for The Waste Land. Not every American critic, however, represents Pound as the more powerful force. On the one hand, George Bornstein sees Yeats’s liberation from English late romantic modes as having been brokered by “modernist patterns” which are “predominantly Irish and American rather than British.” Hence, “phrases like ‘fumble in a greasy till’ or ‘dried the marrow from the bone’” are characterized as belonging more significantly to “literary modernism” than to “Irish speech rhythms.”47 On the other hand, James Longenbach judges that “the actual turns of influence reveal Yeats as the dominant force” — and this despite his belief that Pound and Yeats were conspiring to produce “the rise of Anglo-American modernism.”48 Pound himself regarded J. M. Synge as the real begetter of Yeats’s stylistic transformation. Yet Yeats’s tribute to Pound at the Poetry magazine banquet in 1914 is still cited as a great day for America (by Lentricchia, for instance), even though Longenbach and others have thrown buckets of scholarly cold water over it: We [in the Rhymers’ Club] rebelled against rhetoric, and now there is a group of younger writers who dare to call us rhetorical. When I returned to London from Ireland, I had a young man go over all my work with me to eliminate the abstract. This was an American poet, Ezra Pound.49 We should remember that Yeats — for whom abstraction was “modern” — added discouragingly: “Much of his work is experimental; his work will come slowly, he will make many an experiment before he comes into his own.” And when he read aloud Pound’s “The Return” (later cited in A Vision, and not only included in the Oxford Book but also quoted in the Introduction), he called it “the most beautiful poem that has been written in the free form, one of the few in which I find real organic rhythm” (my italics).50 Some might call it the most Yeatsian poem “written in the free form.” Yeats may have seen Pound as a more radical challenge to his aesthetic, if not to his influence, than Eliot.51 To apply a religious metaphor — perhaps not only a metaphor: the more Yeats became a Swiftian Anglican in aesthetic doctrine, the more Pound became a neo-Whitmanesque free-associating nonconformist. At the same time, the admiration for Yeats that drew Pound to London, and led him to model his own coterie-forming activities on the Rhymers’ Club, allowed Yeats to receive Pound’s volatile stimulus under controlled Edna Longley : : : 41

conditions. Yeats had a way of internalizing the challenges of his juniors, of drawing them into his quarrel with himself, of switching roles between precursor and ephebe (Eliot’s “master” and “contemporary”). This kept his poetry on the move. Those who take his tribute to Pound over-literally should remember his comparable genuflections to Dorothy Wellesley or F. R. Higgins. The Pound-Yeats relationship, however, was the most prolonged and various of such encounters. Terence Diggory puts it shrewdly: “Yeats, having had more experience, knew exactly what he wanted from Pound, and was determined to appear to get it, even when Pound did not have it to give.”52 Before approaching the nub of the formal argument between Pound and Yeats, an argument by no means over, I want to consider a poem closely meshed with Yeats’s critical utterances during the year of its composition, 1936. “Lapis Lazuli” introduces itself as an intervention in the 1930s debate about politics and aesthetics — of which reading for the anthology had made Yeats more conscious: I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay, For everybody knows or else should know That if nothing drastic is done Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out, Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in Until the town lie beaten flat. All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia; Yet they, should the last scene be there, The great stage curtain about to drop, If worthy their prominent part in the play, Do not break up their lines to weep. They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.53 What the poem attacks, if dubiously in the mouth of “hysterical women,” is the 1930s doctrine of the committed artist. This is a recurrent motif in Yeats’s critical writings and in his letters to Ethel Mannin, and it has several facets. First, whether or not he admits this, Yeats’s own attraction to a brand of authoritarian elitism sets him at odds with left-wing poetry of sociopolitical protest. Second, partly in conflict or contradiction, he speaks here as an older 42 : : : Yeats and American Modernism

poet who has already traveled the gyres of art and history, and thus earned his seeming detachment from contemporary issues. But, as an artistic manifesto at a period when such abounded, the poem appears more broadly concerned to redefine the doctrines of 1890s aestheticism in the face of 1930s “bombballs” poetry (together with its provenance in Great War poetry); just as “The Grey Rock,” twenty-three years earlier, had redefined them in the face of Irish antagonists. Further, besides explicitly mocking the utilitarianism of the literary left (“if nothing drastic is done”), Yeats may implicitly mock modernist aesthetics (“break up their lines to weep”). What prohibits both heresies is the artist’s primary duty to form. The arts that “Lapis Lazuli” conflates in preRaphaelite spirit — painting, music, drama, sculpture, carving — are invoked for their consummate craft: “Tragedy wrought to the uttermost,” “Callimachus, / Who handled marble as if it were bronze,” “Accomplished fingers begin to play.” The poem not only identifies art with form; it identifies art as form. Yeats’s Chinamen, at once creations and creators, perennially being “imagined” in the poem’s present tense, as “begin[ning] to play,” symbolize the formal transactions between poet and poem, poem and reader. Their “ancient, glittering eyes” figure not the aesthetic gaze but the constructive impulse (MacNeice’s “system against chaos”), whose “gaiety” may issue in “mournful melodies”: All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay . . . One asks for mournful melodies; Accomplished fingers begin to play. Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay. The constructive impulse is divorced neither from contingency nor from nature. Just as Callimachus “Made draperies that seemed to rise / When seawind swept the corner,” so the poet-speaker follows the stone’s carver in transmuting nature into art and hence into meaning: Every discoloration of the stone, Every accidental crack or dent, Seems a water-course or an avalanche, Or lofty slope where it still snows Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch Sweetens the little half-way house Those Chinamen climb towards, and I Delight to imagine them seated there . . . Edna Longley : : : 43

“Accidental” evokes two nouns prominent in Yeats’s critical vocabulary at this date: accident and accidence. In “A General Introduction for my Work,” he also makes Shakespearean protagonists stand for the poet who has been subsumed into his forms, who is: never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete. A novelist might describe his accidence, his incoherence, he must not. He is more type than man, more passion than type. He is Lear, Romeo . . . he has stepped out of a play. . . . If I wrote of personal love or sorrow in free verse, or in any rhythm that left it unchanged amid all its accidence, I would be full of selfcontempt because of my egoism and indiscretion . . . I must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem traditional.54 Here the implied dialectical opposite is Pound, mentioned in the essay as one of those who “wrote admirable free verse.” The Oxford Book introduction is less kind. There Yeats writes of Poundian form as “break[ing] up their lines to weep”: “constantly interrupted, broken, twisted into nothing by [style’s] direct opposite, nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion. . . . [T]his loss of self-control. . . .”55 “Lapis Lazuli,” in various ways, shows off Yeats’s own formal nerve and verve. Thus the last fourteen lines, in keeping with his preRaphaelite appeal to panartistic solidarity, take shape as a Rossettian iconic sonnet. At the same time, the rhyme scheme makes these lines continuous with the previous six, where a combination of chinoiserie with japanoiserie may hint at aesthetic interests shared by Yeats and Pound (“Lapis Lazuli” is followed by “Imitated from the Japanese”). If we take “legged” as two syllables, the lines compose three haiku: Two Chinamen, behind them a third, Are carved in Lapis Lazuli, Over them flies a long-legged bird, A symbol of longevity; The third, doubtless a serving-man, Carries a musical instrument. Yet what might seem a tribute to Imagism incorporates Imagist effects into a narrative, an argument, a not-quite stanza, in a metrically complex poem that plays rhythmical and discursive dynamics against stanzaic boundaries. All this obliquely asserts, as well as manifests, the capacities of Yeatsian form. Yeats’s precise quarrel with the Cantos is thrown into relief by his different complaints about Eliot’s aesthetic in the Oxford Book and “Modern Poetry.” 44 : : : Yeats and American Modernism

First, Yeats regards Eliot as having conceded so much to modernity, to “this life that has lost heart,” that he seems “a satirist rather than a poet.”Yeats finds “No romantic word or sound, nothing reminiscent. . . . Poetry must resemble prose and both must accept the vocabulary of their time; nor must there be any special subject matter.” This (mis)reading signals Yeats’s resentment of Eliot’s “revolutionary” influence in 1930s England, a resentment more crucially voiced by his second complaint: “a rejection of all rhythms and metaphors used by the more popular romantics rather than by the discovery of his own, this rejection giving his work an unexaggerated plainness that has the effect of novelty” similar to “the rhythmical flatness of An Essay on Man.” In the Oxford Book, presumably justifying his exclusion of The Waste Land,Yeats allows some “rhythmical animation to ‘The Hollow Men,’‘Ash Wednesday,’ and Eliot’s dramatic poems.”56 But overall, in rhythm, diction, and imagery, Eliot has sold the pass to accidence and hence to prose. If Yeats interprets Eliot’s work as a denial of poetry, he interprets Pound’s as a denial of form. Yeats’s critique of Pound goes deeper because it turns less on particular techniques or effects than on conflicting philosophies. A Packet for Ezra Pound addresses “Ezra Pound, whose art is the opposite of mine, whose criticism commends what I most condemn.” The assonantal chiasmus commends / condemn suggests that Yeats is indeed calling to his own opposite, to the antithetical creative gyre. In the Packet — a word which can also mean a beating — Yeats bases his doubts about the Cantos on sequence: “I have often found there brightly printed kings, queens, knaves, but have never discovered why the suits could not be dealt out in some quite different order.”57 In the Oxford Book he elaborates this objection (mentioning that Pound’s “belief in his own conception is so great that . . . I have tried to suspend judgment”): Ezra Pound has made flux his theme; plot, characterisation, logical discourse, seem to him abstractions unsuitable to a man of his generation. He is mid-way in an immense poem in vers libre. . . . The relation of all the elements to one another, repeated or unrepeated, is to become apparent when the whole is finished. There is no transmission through time, we pass without comment from ancient Greece to modern England, from modern England to medieval China; the symphony, the pattern is timeless, flux eternal and therefore without movement. Like other readers, I discover at present merely exquisite or grotesque fragments. He hopes to give the impression that all is living, that there are no edges, no convexities, nothing to check the flow; but can such a poem have a mathematical structure? Can impressions that are in part visual, in part metrical, be related like the Edna Longley : : : 45

notes of a symphony; has the author been carried beyond reason by a theoretical conception? . . . Style and its opposite can alternate, but form must be full, sphere-like, single. Even where there is no interruption, he is often content, if certain verses and lines have style, to leave unbridged transitions, unexplained ejaculations, that make his meaning unintelligible.58 In A Packet Yeats seems to invite comparison between the “orderly” metaphysical infrastructure of his own poetry and Pound’s disorderly poetic structures. However one regards A Vision, the suits are dealt out in a certain order. As for Poundian history, in advising Pound not to “be elected to the Senate of your country,”59 Yeats not only boasts his own involvement in public affairs, but also implies the remoteness of Pound’s opinions from the tests of that arena. In A Vision he uses the word “single” to define what his own “system,” his “stylistic arrangements of experience” have made possible: “They have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice.”60 That Yeats also compares his system with Wyndham Lewis’s “cubes” and Brancusi’s “ovoids” suggests a refusal to be out-avant-garded by Pound. Yeats’s dialectic with Pound contributes to those moments when his later poetry over-insists on form, as in “The Statues” where “calculation, number, measurement” equate poetry with mathematics. Ireland may principally trigger that poem’s attack on the “filthy modern tide” and its “formless spawning fury”: Yeats’s alienation from de Valera’s Ireland reactivates his old thought that “the sense of form . . . has always been Protestant in Ireland.”61 But the opposition between Pythagorean “plummet-measur[ing]” and “All Asiatic vague immensities” also resembles the language in which Yeats questions formless modernism, in which he asks whether Pound’s “immense poem in vers libre” can “have a mathematical structure.” These combined resonances, which fuse Phidias with “We Irish,” claim European tradition for Yeats’s individual talent. The notion that form might be “single” is unpopular today. Yet critics disagree as to whether the Cantos are open, subversive, and self-subverting; whether they are authoritarian/totalitarian in form and/or politics; or whether their formal undecideability tries to preempt ethical judgment of their author’s politics.62 Perhaps the local workings of form need to be pondered before we ideologically load such terms as “openness” and “closure.” In turning to the Pisan Cantos, we may indeed feel, to use Stead’s metaphor, that we have left the museum for the atelier: and as to poor old Benito one had a safety-pin one had a bit of string, one had a button all of them so far beneath him 46 : : : Yeats and American Modernism

half-baked and amateur or mere scoundrels To sell their country for half a million . . . the problem after any revolution is what to do with your gunmen as old Billyum found out in Oireland in the Senate, Bedad! or before then Your gunmen thread on moi dreams O woman shapely as a swan, Your gunmen tread on my dreams Whoi didn’t he (Padraic Colum) keep on writing poetry at that voltage “Whenever you get hold of one of their banknotes (i.e. an Ulster note) burn it” said one of the senators planning the conquest of Ulster This he said in the Oirish showing a fine grasp of . . . of possibly nothing. But if a man don’t occasionally sit in a senate how can he pierce the darrk mind of a senator? . . . but old William was right in contending that the crumbling of a fine house profits no one (Celtic or otherwise) nor under Gesell would it happen As Mabel’s red head was a fine sight worthy his minstrelsy a tongue to the sea-cliffs or “Sligo in Heaven” or his, William’s, old “da” at Coney Island perched on an elephant beaming like the prophet Isaiah . . .63 Pound’s memorial version of Yeats differs, comically enough, from Yeats’s memorial versions of himself in such poems as “The Municipal Gallery Revisited.” Pound subverts Yeatsian tropes by nicknaming him “old Billyum”; by mimicking his accent; by parodying his poetry; by importing “accident and incoherence” into Yeats’s masks, dramatis personae, and utterances. Where the Pound-voice seems weak, dependent, bewildered, external, is in channeling Edna Longley : : : 47

the poem’s own means of negotiating with memory and history. The passage does attempt to order the past, but in relatively shallow terms. For instance, its vague language of value-judgment (“poor,” “so far beneath him,” “right,” “fine”) fails to tighten a structure that not only flouts “transmission through time” but also proceeds by simple addition rather than syntactic complication. Nor does this translation or dilution of Yeats into Poundian take the chances offered by montage — routinely used rather than effectively exploited. Italian and Irish politics, for instance, might have had more to say to each other. The opening stanza of “The Municipal Gallery Revisited,” a stanza in which ironical montage is a key structural element, seems far clearer about the ambiguities of art, power, and violence: Around me the images of thirty years: An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side; Casement upon trial, half-hidden by the bars, Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride; Kevin O’Higgins’ countenance that wears A gentle questioning look that cannot hide A soul incapable of remorse or rest; A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blest . . . This “stylistic arrangement” speaks as an intervention in history that does not foreclose other interventions. The poem is “single” because its parts cohere (“plot, characterization, logical discourse”) not because it resolves every contradiction. The formless and the pointless are akin. MacNeice writes: “Yeats’s formalising activity began when he thought about the world.”64 Openness is not an end in itself but may imprison us in “flux eternal.” Paul Morrison argues that a decentered structure might be “characterised not as ‘unthinkable’ but as strategically resisting thought, a modality of power that would not be known as such.”65 Thus by limiting his formal, emotional, and ethical “means” of discriminating among the verbal data he juxtaposes, Pound does not thereby escape the question of “ends.” Either succumbing to “flux,” or refusing responsibility toward it, are the alternative errors that, for Yeats in the Oxford Book, distinguish both Pound and Eliot from his own artistic demeanor: Ezra Pound has made flux his theme. . . . Nature, steel-bound or stone-built in the nineteenth century, became a flux where man drowned or swam; the moment had come for some poet to cry “the flux is in my own mind.” . . . Eliot’s genius is human, mundane, impeccable, it seems to say “this man will 48 : : : Yeats and American Modernism

never disappoint, never be out of character. He moves among objects for which he accepts no responsibility, among the mapped and measured . . .”66 Yeats pronounces his judgment in the name not of romantic “subjectivity,” but of a “formalising activity” at once symbolic (what Eliot lacks) and conceptual (what Pound lacks). His later rhetorical question sets Ireland against AngloAmerica: “why should I, whose ancestors never accepted the anarchic subjectivity of the nineteenth century, accept its recoil; why should men’s heads ache that never drank?”67 To suggest a few conclusions: First, Yeats was caught up in dialectics with younger Irish, British, and American poets. The idea that he had been left behind in either a Revival or a Symbolist time-warp does not stand up. Second, Yeats’s dismissals of political “hysteria” — whether Marxist or Poundian — are not merely disingenuous. He intuited what would date in contemporary poetry, while yet maintaining the public voice that his juniors (pace Eliot) imitated. Finally, Yeats’s renewed stress on high art and folksong as staking out the formal antinomies was prompted as much by aesthetic as political conflicts. (He wrote “A Prayer for Old Age” as a riposte to Pound: “He that sings a lasting song / Thinks in a marrow bone.”) Yeats’s compiling the Oxford Book helped to give a historical overview of what he now calls “modern poetry” and of his own role therein. It brought the 1930s into significant conjunction with the 1890s. And it strengthened his belief that “traditional meters” secreted the impulses that first constituted poetry as form: “imagination must dance, must be carried beyond feeling into the aboriginal ice . . .”68 notes 1 W. B. Yeats, A Vision (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. xxvi. 2 Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 15–16. 3 See Robert Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 45. 4 Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990), p. 30. 5 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). Compare Eysteinsson, Concept of Modernism, pp. 85–86. Even Laurence Rainey’s illuminating materialist study, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), neglects the extent to which Yeats’s publishing strategies were conditioned by Irish as well as avant-garde imperatives. 6 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 3. 7 Gail McDonald, Learning to Be Modern: Eliot, Pound, and the American University (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Edna Longley : : : 49

8 For a rare counterinstance stressing the native experimentalism, see Stuart Sillars, Structure and Dissolution in English Writing, 1910–1920 (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 1–2. 9 Joseph Kelly, Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), pp. 69, 77, 83, 56. For further discussion of factitious universalizing, see also Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 7–8. 10 John Kelly and Eric Domville, eds., The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), I, 339. 11 John P. Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1970), I, 289. 12 John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson, eds., Uncollected Prose, by W. B. Yeats, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1975), II, p. 70. 13 T. S. Eliot, ed., Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1954), p. 34. On the tautological reproduction of a Pound-centered modernism, see K. K. Ruthven, Ezra Pound as Literary Critic (London: Routledge, 1990), p. xii; and John Harwood, “The Hollow Man,” review of Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound, and James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism, in Yeats Annual 8 (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 256. 14 See for example, the retrospective determinism of Rainer Emig, Modernism in Poetry (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 58–59. 15 Review in Poetry Chicago, May 11, 1914, reprinted in A. N. Jeffares, ed., W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1977), pp. 186–89. 16 See James Longenbach, Stone Cottage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 141, 253–54. In Longenbach’s words: “Yeats had been pushing for his stonier idiom long before the younger poet attempted to enhance his own reputation by boasting that he had bullied Yeats into making a few minor changes in his verse.” 17 C. K. Stead, Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and the Modernist Movement (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 158–59. For a less stark transition in terms of “a naturalising of the poetic sign,” see Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 109–10. 18 Eysteinsson, Concept of Modernism, pp. 85–86. 19 Richard Sheppard, “The Crisis of Language,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 323–36, especially 324. 20 Perry Meisel, The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 5. For a valuable corrective in terms of specific influences, see Terence Diggory’s Yeats and American Poetry: The Tradition of the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 21 John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, eds., The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), III, pp. 563, 501. 22 Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 149, italics added. 23 Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis, eds., Modernism and Ireland: The Poets of the 1930s (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), p. 19. Robert Crawford’s Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 216–70, shows signs of the same syndrome, though taking American modernist premises less for granted. 50 : : : Yeats and American Modernism

24 See Edna Longley, “The Room Where MacNeice Wrote ‘Snow,’” in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994), pp. 252–70; ‘“It is time that I wrote my will’: Anxieties of Influence and Succession,” in Yeats Annual 12, ed. Warwick Gould and Edna Longley (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 117–62; ‘“Something wrong somewhere?’ Louis MacNeice as Critic,” in Poetry and Posterity (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2000), pp. 134–66. 25 Diggory, Yeats and American Poetry, pp. 135–36. 26 Tate’s article, first printed in Southern Review 7, no. 3 (Winter 1942), is reprinted in James Hall and Martin Steinmann, eds., The Permanence of Yeats (1950, reprint, New York: Collier Books, 1961), pp. 97–104, italics added. 27 Edmund Wilson, “W. B. Yeats,” (originally published in Axel’s Castle [New York: Scribner’s, 1931]), in Hall and Steinmann, Permanence of Yeats, pp. 14–37, especially 35, 27, 34. 28 Tate, in Hall and Steinmann, Permanence of Yeats, pp. 97, 103–4. 29 Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1941; reprint, London: Faber, 1967), p. 191. 30 See Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 483. 31 Louis MacNeice, Modern Poetry (1938; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 163–64. 32 Letter to Olivia Shakespear, in Allan Wade, ed., The Letters of W. B. Yeats (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 833. 33 The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. xxv. 34 “Writing a Life of W. B. Yeats,” Irish Review 21 (Autumn/Winter 1997): pp. 92–101 (96). 35 Babette Deutsch, New York Herald Tribune Books, December 13, 1936, p. 9. 36 Yeats, Oxford Book, pp. xxxv–xli. 37 F. O. Matthiessen, “W. B. Yeats and Others,” Southern Review 2, no. 4 (Spring 1937): pp. 815–34, especially 816. H. T. Kirby-Smith, The Origins of Free Verse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) comes to the same conclusion (p. 257). 38 Morton D. Zabel, “Poet as Anthologist,” Poetry 49, no. 5 (February 1937): pp. 273–78, especially 273–74, 276–77. 39 See Frayne and Johnson, eds., Uncollected Prose, by W. B. Yeats, II, pp. 338–42. 40 Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (London: Kermode Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 37. 41 See Crawford, Devolving English Literature, pp. 254–58. 42 See Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage, pp. 231–32. 43 “Poetry and Tradition,” in W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan 1961), pp. 246–60, especially 248, 255, 260. 44 Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, p. 177. 45 See Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage, p. 231; Tate (quoting Eliot), in Hall and Steinmann, Permanence of Yeats, p.104; T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 47. 46 “Yeats,” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, pp. 248–57, especially 248–49, 257. 47 George Bornstein, “Romancing the (Native) Stone: Yeats, Stevens, and the Anglocentric Canon,” in The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 108–29, especially 117. 48 Longenbach, Stone Cottage, pp. 19, x. Edna Longley : : : 51

49 See Frayne and Johnson, eds., Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, II, p. 414. 50 Yeats, Oxford Book, p. xxii, italics added. 51 For a fine discussion, to which I am much indebted, see Warwick Gould, “The Unknown Masterpiece: Yeats and the Design of the Cantos,” in Pound in Multiple Perspective: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Andrew Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 40–92, especially p. 66. 52 Diggory, Yeats and American Poetry, p. 34. 53 All citations of Yeats’s poetry are from A. Norman Jeffares, ed., Yeats’s Poems (London: Macmillan, 1989). 54 Yeats, Essays and Introductions, pp. 509, 522. 55 Yeats, Oxford Book, p. xxv. 56 Yeats, Oxford Book, pp. xxi–ii; Essays and Introductions, p. 499. 57 Yeats, A Vision, pp. 3–4. 58 Yeats, Oxford Book, pp. xxiii–v. 59 Yeats, A Vision, p. 26. 60 Yeats, A Vision, p. 26. 61 See Edna Longley, “‘Defending Ireland’s Soul’: Protestant Writers and Irish Nationalism after Independence,” in The Living Stream (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994), pp. 130–49, especially 138. 62 See Paul Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Paul de Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), especially pp. 122–23. 63 From Canto LXXX, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1987), pp. 495–96, 507. 64 MacNeice, Poetry of W. B. Yeats, p. 157. 65 Morrison, Poetics of Fascism, 122–23. 66 Yeats, Oxford Book, pp. xxiii, xxviii. 67 Yeats, Essays and Introductions, pp. 405, 407. 68 Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 523.

52 : : : Yeats and American Modernism

“A Package Deal” The Descent of Modernism stan smith

the english-speaking world “A Package Deal” is the title of a review of Robert Graves’s Steps by an up-and-coming young critic in the Observer shortly after the book was published in 1958. “The title of this review,” writes John Wain, “is an Americanism: I use it as a code signal of solidarity with Mr Graves, whose English vocabulary and sentence-construction are becoming daily more Americanised”: Looking through this book at random, one finds the pages peppered with such words as “rangy” (meaning tall and loose-limbed), cable “collect” (i.e. with charges reversed),“around” (for English “round,” e.g.“around the corner”), “jibe” (meaning “fit in” — this last in a poem), etc., etc.1 Wain’s donnish indignation seems quaintly mock-antique now, an index of how far the Americanization of English usage has proceeded since the 1950s. His explanation of the phenomenon in Graves is patronizing equally of the English poet and of Americans, with its knowing hints about the transatlantic groupies currently congregating in Deyá, Majorca: The reason is clear: Mr Graves, in his Balearic fastness, talks Spanish with the neighbours and English only with the visitors; many of these same visitors, and especially the young, literary ones who make up Mr Graves’s entourage, are American; as a result, his ear is losing the power to distinguish between the two languages. For Wain, the erosion of English English figures also the failing of cultural and political powers. Not for nothing does he deploy the idiom “losing the power,” with its implicit sense of a decline in both sexual and geopolitical potency. Americanization means the loss of everything at the level of cultural register that has made Britain great, from Jane Austen’s regulated hatred, the reflex of an imperial stiff upper lip, through the Anglicized mandarin subtlety of James and Eliot, those masters of nuance and scruple, to the intrinsically English

discriminations of an F. R. Leavis and — no doubt — the columns of the Observer in January 1959. Wain suggests a more than metaphorical connection between loss of linguistic hegemony and commercial decline. The British once traded around (or “round”) the world. Now they have been sold a “package deal” by former colonials: So, as a token of our respect for him, let us speak of this book, even in these English pages, as a package deal. As business men are well aware, a package deal is a way of unloading on to the customer a certain amount of stuff he doesn’t want. The buyer has to take all or nothing; since the package contains certain items he really needs, he takes all. . . . The nauseating blurb gives an arch description of the treat in store for the fortunate child who gets this lovely stocking (“He continues to wear his variegated learning — as lightly as his customary crownless straw hat”) and winds up the catalogue with, “Twenty-two new Poems complete the jaunt.” Graves has become a court jester in the service of his American entourage, a vaudeville entertainer in a straw hat, putting on an act of eccentric stage Englishness to gratify his American patrons. But Britain itself has bought the package, which runs from Lend-Lease through Marshall Plan to the Cold War and Coca-colonial penetration of its economy and culture alike. We inhabit a client state, a subaltern culture, which has sold its heritage for a mess of bubble-gum. Wain has one qualification: “If this book is worth thirty shillings of anybody’s money,” he says, maintaining the snooty tone of a nation of shopkeepers confronting shoddy foreign imports, “it is the poems that tip the scale.” In Wain’s world, Graves’s poetry remains an island of English purity in the midst of a commercialized — which is to say Americanized — culture.2 The package, that “day-to-day stuff that Mr Graves writes to make a living — all of it more or less pointless and trivial,” is, like newspaper around British fish and chips, “wrapped round twenty-three wonderful pages of poetry.” The offense justifies vandalism: “Probably most discerning readers will tear out the pages of verse and throw away the rest in the interest of conserving shelf-space, and I don’t blame them”: But really it is intolerable when one of the finest poets alive in the Englishspeaking world, a man whose poetry gets better and better, continually purging away its dross, and refining itself by the sheer heat of its own imaginative strength and virtue — when such a writer offers us twenty-two 54 : : : The Descent of Modernism

poems, nearly all of them up to his own highest standard, we should be asked to accept them as a makeweight in a volume of barrel-scrapings. The “English-speaking world” gives the game away. This new postwar locution, familiarized by Winston Churchill’s contemporaneously published A History of the English-speaking Peoples (1956–58), reveals the shift in the balance of power effected by Britain’s wartime reliance on United States aid and military support, for which we are now paying the price.3 The Americans are over here, overpaid, and over-voluble, seducing our poets with the literary equivalent of nylons and bubble-gum: Graves, in Wain’s perception, is a poetic G.I. Bride. And yet “English-speaking” makes another claim, one implied in Churchill’s appropriative title. This language was ours before it was theirs; if America speaks English now, it is because we gave it to them. Churchill’s formula was an attempt at recruitment; his quixotic postwar ambition had been the political reunion of United Kingdom and United States. Graves as poet, however, Wain insists, continues to produce something that in its purity and refinement is quintessentially English: “Where the prose is unbalanced, opinionated, aggressive, perverse, the poetry brings order and harmony, resolving conflict in the discipline of its strict and yet generous art.” Wain used, he says, to find it a mystery that Graves’s poetry criticism should be so ludicrous, when his poetry is so superb; but as I live longer I begin to understand that there are some artists who, loving their art too much to blemish it with their own private grudges, envies, hatreds, and irritable obsessions, must find an outlet for them elsewhere. Mr Graves’s literary criticism is just steam-blowing. This is a familiar antithesis. There is Graves’s pot-boiling work, mundane, quirky, and bogged down in personality. And then there is the impersonal, transcendent purity of art. But why does he engage in such polemic flights of rhetoric in the first place? Wain’s answer is clear, though implicit: Robert Graves does it for money. Surely everyone admits that Wordsworth wrote many clumsy poems; was it really necessary for Mr Graves, when an audience had turned out on a February night in Chicago to hear him speak on “Pulling a Poem Apart”, to treat them to a demolition of the sonnet “Great men have been among us”? Yet, in the fidelity of his commitment to his Muse, Graves stands proud and solitary on an island of the self — an island not unlike that which stood alone in Stan Smith : : : 55

1940, without American assistance, against the dark tides of unreason. More than a decade after that war ended, but only two years after American intervention brought an end to Britain’s nostalgic imperial kickback over Suez, Wain’s embattled language speaks with the tones of some Dunkirk-spirit film from Elstree Studios: It is in his poetry that the quarrel with himself, the long war to impose order and significance on the shifting atoms of thought and feeling, has been fought, bravely and honourably. For anyone who loves language, it is easy to become so engrossed in its variety of effects that the thing he is supposed to be celebrating can be smothered under technique. But the defence against this is not, as our latest breed of moon-baying yard-dogs would have it, to abandon technique; it is to follow the example of such as Graves, who can love the shape and texture of a poem just because it fits so snugly to what it is conveying. And who precisely, in 1958–59, are these “moon-baying yard-dogs” who have abandoned technique? Could they, perhaps, be Americans? “Beat Poets,” such as Allen Ginsberg, whose Howl and Other Poems was published in 1956; or Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose A Coney Island of the Mind was published in the same year as Graves’s book?4 Among those already following the example of Graves, whose technique fits so snugly — and possibly smugly — with what it is conveying, Wain himself is a prime candidate, his 1956 volume A Word Carved on a Sill actually taking its title from one of Graves’s poems.5 So too are the other contributors to Robert Conquest’s New Lines anthology in 1956, which set itself up in antithesis to Anglo-American modernism and its successors, positing instead a return to a premodernist, native tradition, represented by Hardy, Edward Thomas, et al., of strict metrical forms and domestic scenarios, to which Graves, without consultation, had been recruited.6 Wain’s own anti-Americanism, combining left and right attitudes in a characteristic postwar blend, is revealed in his long poem “A Song about Major Eatherly” in his 1961 volume Weep before God, which blends the antinuclear rhetoric of Campaign for Nuclear Development (CND), founded in 1958 and then at the height of its influence, with a more traditional anti-Americanism, contemptuous of the commercialized mass culture for which foreign commentators had maligned the United States from de Tocqueville onward. Major Eatherly is the American pilot who dropped the atom bomb on Nagasaki. His subsequent remorse, the poem suggests, did not affect his cash flow:

56 : : : The Descent of Modernism

Good news. It seems he loved them after all. His orders were to fry their bones to ash. He carried up the bomb and let it fall. And then his orders were to take the cash.7 “Tak[ing] the cash,” while nurturing a sense of virtuous purity, is precisely what Graves’s journalism is indicted for; whereas his poetry represents a disinterested, one might say characteristically English, resistance to such meretriciousness. Wain’s review, then, sets up an Anglo-American antithesis for which Graves is the stalking horse. Wain’s rhetoric proclaims retrenchment, little Englandism, the antimodernist stance of New Lines. If English is on the wane, Wain is on the up. Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti are the heirs of Whitman’s barbaric yawp, and Whitman is not “one of us.” Odd then, that in the introduction to one of his postwar volumes, Poems and Satires (1951), Graves should cite Whitman as if with approval, as the justifier of a deep contradiction in the self that is the birthright of the poet, just that “quarrel with himself ” of which (quoting the Irish Yeats) Wain speaks.8 Odd too, that Wain should so ignore that seminal work of literary criticism, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, with its deep admiration for and understanding of Anglo-American modernism, from Eliot to Hart Crane and e. e. cummings, that a youthful Graves had written in 1927 in collaboration with Laura Riding, a young American poet whose influence effected the transplant to his etiolated Georgian idiom of a tougher, more acerbic transatlantic register. It could be argued, in fact, that far from polluting Graves’s poetry, the shock of American modernism gave it a kick-start. When Graves in the 1950s evinces an “English vocabulary and sentence-construction . . . becoming daily more Americanised” (“in a poem” even), this is something right at the supposedly English heart of a poet who, going into exile with an old cloak in 1929, kicked the dust off his feet, by declaring Good-bye to All That, to live in a Spanish island fastness. Even as he calls up his “Dad’s Army” of British traditionalists, Wain now inescapably belongs to the English-speaking world, that “free world” of which the United States is the undisputed leader. We need to look a little more closely at this particular package. After all those other questions, “What was modernism?,”“When was modernism?,”“Is modernism gendered?” etc., I want to ask another one. which side of the pond was modernism? In 1932 Ezra Pound wrote of the literary revolution he and Eliot initiated as “a movement to which no name has ever been given.” He was not quite correct. Graves and Riding, in their 1927 study, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Stan Smith : : : 57

published in England, had first given currency to the epithet by which it was to be generally known, in the second half of the century.9 Curiously, though, the term “modernism” did not become general usage until the later 1960s, when it emerged holding incestuous hands with its sibling/progeny “postmodernism” (blind Oedipus led by an attentive Antigone). It has been suggested that it was not until Harry Levin’s essay “What Was Modernism?” in 1960 that, in the words of Morton P. Levitt, “The term first appeared in a literary context,” and not until the essay’s republication in the book Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature in 1966 that it achieved wide circulation.10 Superficial support for this might be provided by Stephen Spender’s The Struggle of the Modern, published in 1963, but based on lectures given in the United States in 1959 and 1961. Spender’s introduction attempts to distinguish between traditional writing about “modern subject matter” and the specific object of his study, in which “I am only discussing obvious examples of modernism or anti-modernism,” while his chapter on “Moderns and Contemporaries” distinguishes “art which is modern . . . from several movements grouped approximately under the heading ‘modernism.’”11 Nevertheless, Levitt’s 1960 is far too late, even though the first instance of “modernism” used in its current sense cited in the Complete Oxford English Dictionary is an editorial comment in the Listener on November 23, 1961, which speaks of “The American Modernism introduced by Mr T. S. Eliot, following Mr Ezra Pound.” That “American” is a moot point, given not only the expatriation of these two authors, but also the cis-Atlantic status of other key modernists, and the history of the word’s usage.12 “Modernism” in our current restricted sense has in fact surfaced and disappeared with equal rapidity in every decade of the twentieth century. Graves and Riding did not invent the concept. Although there is an early use by John Middleton Murry in the short-lived little magazine Rhythm in 1911, its genealogy, applied to the revolution of the word effected by Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, can be traced to the slightly longer-lived little magazine the Fugitive, edited from Nashville by John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate between 1922 and 1925.13 It was here that Graves and Riding found the word and took it home for adoption. That etiology is of some interest, in that it mimics the larger global reconfiguration of Anglo-American political and cultural relations in this century. In a letter of July 21, 1922, Allen Tate wrote to his fellow editor Donald Davidson of the new “revolutionary” poetry: “perhaps we shall have to get a new term by which to designate this latest genre of literature.” A couple of days later Davidson wrote in reply of “the Cubists, the Futurists, the Imagists, etc.” 58 : : : The Descent of Modernism

and “even these Dadaists to some extent”; but none of these epithets seemed quite right. Shortly thereafter Tate responded by referring to “the master of the genre, T. S. Eliot,” who “goes straight to the real thing; this is of course his ‘modernity.’”14 But the mot juste was first stumbled over publicly in an editorial by John Crowe Ransom,“The Future of Poetry,” in the Fugitive in February 1924. There Ransom reflected that, “The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism — how should poetry escape?” before adding, “And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.”Ransom alluded to Imagism and free verse, before qualifying the assertion that, “The future of poetry is immense,” with the remark: “One is not so sure in these days, since it has felt the fatal irritant of Modernism.” In a subsequent issue, Allen Tate continued the discussion of “the Modern poet of this generation,” speaking of his [sic] intellectualism and complexity, and invoking Carl Sandburg, Marianne Moore, e. e. cummings, and Hart Crane — all names that will appear in A Survey of Modernist Poetry and thereafter in Graves’s criticism.15 “Modernism” in these discussions is still more a state of mind,“modernity,” than a precise literary movement, but the formula is beginning to congeal. What I want to pick out, though, is what looks at first like a purely fortuitous conjunction. Immediately following Ransom’s essay, an editorial announcement welcomes a new contributor to the journal: Laura Riding Gottschalk, who was one of the contestants qualifying last year for the Nashville Prize. . . . We count it as a special privilege to present, in this and our succeeding issue, a number of poems by a young writer of such distinguished promise. Laura Riding has arrived, right on cue, at the very same moment that the new poetic movement gets its christening — a wicked or benign witch at the font according to how you rate her poetry and/or personality. It is not a coincidence she would have missed. Henceforth Riding casts herself as the avatar of modernism, carrying its gospel everywhere, and specifically across the Atlantic. And Robert Graves will soon be recruited as her apostle. “Robert Graves, the English poet” had already been lauded in the pages of the Fugitive in 1922, for his critical study On English Poetry, with its Freudian account of poets as “men of repressions and inner conflicts,” who “contain within themselves the conflicting emotions of different classes of society,” its exploration of “the social function of poets,” and its “study of the psychological origins of poetry.” Graves himself is praised as “the first man to handle it who compounds in his own person a genuine poetic talent with modern psychological learning.” In the final issue that year, an essay on “Modern Art” argued that, “Perhaps T. S. Eliot has already pointed the way for this and the Stan Smith : : : 59

next generation,” but added, confidently, “However, the Moderns have adequately arrived,” while an editorial announcement welcomed Graves as one of the “visitors come among us in this issue.”16 By 1924 the next generation was not only knocking at the door, but had talked its way into the drawing room, with the announcement that the Nashville Prize of $100 had been awarded to Laura Riding — according to the judges, “The discovery of the year, and they deem it a privilege to be first in calling attention to the work of a young writer who is coming forward as a new figure in American poetry.” By the first issue of 1925 Riding’s advent needs an editorial annunciation: We expect general felicitations upon the recent acquisition of Mrs Laura Riding Gottschalk of Louisville, as a regular participating member of the Fugitive group. It will be unnecessary in future to introduce her as a foreign contributor to these pages. Meanwhile, Graves was making his own mark. The same issue that announced Riding’s Nashville Prize also advertised Ransom’s collection Grace after Meat, selected by Robert Graves. Pace Wain, Graves was already in 1924 engaged in transatlantic hustling on behalf of his American “entourage,” for he had in fact arranged the book’s publication by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in the Hogarth Press in London. Graves’s own Poetic Unreason was reviewed in volume 4, no. 3, along with Hart Crane and e. e. cummings, and Graves reviewed Ransom’s Chills and Fever in the Saturday Review of Literature in late December 1924. There is, in the infancy of modernism, much taking in of each other’s washing — including some rather dirty linen — on the analogy of the Scilly Islanders Graves used in his preface to Poems, 1938–1945 and reused in The Crowning Privilege.17 The Fugitive’s lauding of Graves’s modernity, together with the clear evidence of his promotional talents, could only fire the imagination of a young poet eager to establish her own modern credentials, and to make influential contacts. Not entirely disinterestedly, Tate worked hard to kindle the flame. Having introduced each to the other’s verse, he wrote to Davidson in March 1924, that “she will be thrilled over Graves’s liking for her work; I pass on the news. I feel almost paternal.”18 With some reason, perhaps, since there is a rumor, of mysterious provenance, about an affair with Tate culminating in an abortion. Whatever the case, Tate vigorously encouraged the literary trysting with Graves, and in particular Riding’s growing resolution to take on literary England. Of her stay in the Tate ménage, he wrote to Davidson, a little disingenuously: 60 : : : The Descent of Modernism

It is great to have Laura here. I’ve been informed, to my exceeding pleasure, of her coming success in England. I saw Graves’s letter; it was the highest praise. I’m betting on the young lady, and when she gets over thinking every poem she writes is great because it’s hers, I’ll bet everything on her. Laura is great company, and we’ve had a fine time since she arrived. . . . She would put life into — well, into anything. . . . Carolyn [his wife] finds her very charming, if strenuous!19 In July 1925, Graves’s essay, “Contemporary Techniques of Poetry,” had enthused about Riding’s verse. A match was being prepared in modernist heaven. By mid October 1925, Tate could write that Laura was “destined to great fame before two years are out. She’ll be the most famous of us all.”20 This less than disinterested praise is also tinged with relief. Laura is off his hands, crossing the Atlantic to mess up some other couple — taking the love-child of modernism with her as a dowry. “a new style of hairpin”: oxford, cradle of modernism The year after the publication of Graves’s and Riding’s A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Roy Campbell, writing on “Contemporary Poetry” in Edgell Rickword’s collection, Scrutinies, deployed their second-hand word as a term of abuse held at arm’s length by scare quotes, indicting “The most formidable innovations with which the more conscious ‘modernists’ have threatened poetry so far.”21 Campbell, however, applies the term not to Eliot (whom he has just praised as the author of “the one outstanding poem of our time”) but to “his most unconditional imitators of to-day.” These imitators he refers to as “the younger university poets” — in 1928, a clear reference to the coteries around W. H. Auden in an Oxford abuzz with modern attitude. Auden’s Poems, haunted by the cadences of Eliot, Graves, and, most especially, Laura Riding, had been printed privately by Stephen Spender in the very year Campbell was writing, and Auden had coedited the undergraduate magazine Oxford Poetry in 1926 and 1927. For these allegedly “modernist” poets Campbell has only contempt, observing that their “technical innovations, which are invested with such importance by contemporary critics, are about as likely to influence poetry as the invention of a ‘new style of hairpin’ would be to revolutionise engineering.”22 The linking of the Graves/Riding epithet with Oxford is not coincidental. Graves, a recent Oxford graduate, had spent his first postwar years living on Boars Hill, outside the city, and was now encamped, with Riding, close by. In his autobiography Ruling Passions, Tom Driberg, Auden’s intimate friend in

Stan Smith : : : 61

those years, confides that, “One of my few talents has always been that of the madame; I like introducing or recommending suitable people to each other.”23 One of the more salubrious introductions he effected was that between Oxford and modernism. Not only did he in 1926 introduce W. H. Auden to The Waste Land, but he also introduced Laura Riding to Oxford and, I suspect, an impressionable Auden to her poetry. Certainly Auden’s earliest poems everywhere inscribe Riding’s presence and, on several occasions, verbal and cadential echoes close enough to plagiarism to warrant a forceful rebuke from Graves, to which Graves was still alluding in the 1960s. Driberg is, in a sense, modernism’s madame: When I first met him, Auden was unknown as a poet outside Oxford. With Cecil Day Lewis he edited the slim annual volume Oxford Poetry, in which a few of my poems were published. [Indeed, it is likely that Driberg is the Oxford poet who gave the macho Campbell gravest offense.] But I also made the acquaintance of several established writers. One of the most impressive of these was Robert Graves, who at that time shared a house at Islip, near Oxford, with the American poet Laura Riding. They received me hospitably, and it would seem that the hospitality was returned. . . . This . . . should have been an agreeable friendship. I liked what I had seen of both Graves and Laura Riding. He was already famous for his poetry but had not yet written his first world war memoir. . . . Graves was tall and burly, with a heavy, gipsy-like face that looked in repose, sulky, and a sensual mouth: Riding was slight, pale, and fey, as spare and taut as her verse. As I say, my relations with them should have gone smoothly. . . . Alas, something went wrong — a misunderstanding mainly attributable to my own social ignorance and gaucherie, but also, I think, to unusually thin-skinned touchiness on the part of Graves and/or Riding. Driberg’s faux pas was to enquire of a third party, the poet Norman Cameron, whether he should address Riding as “Mrs Graves,” which produced an intemperate letter from Graves: Look here, Tom Driberg. . . . I wish to God you’d cut it out. It is some months now since I heard from Norman Cameron about your attitude to Laura Riding but it made me feel pretty sick and the effects are still here. You asked him that entirely unpardonable question as to whether you should address her as Mrs Graves, because etc. — I was so sick that I nearly asserted my Elemental, Virile, Sulky personality and came to beat you up.

62 : : : The Descent of Modernism

(Graves sarcastically reproduces here the terms Driberg had used of him in a review of his book Mrs. Fisher.) The letter continues: It is the same sort of attitude which ascribes the word-by-word collaboration of A Survey of Modernist Poetry to Mr Robert Graves alone: and does not hesitate to see Mr Graves’ master-hand behind her individual writings, (the boot being as it happens on the other foot altogether — I contributed nothing to hers and L. R. did a good deal of the difficult work in Mrs. Fisher) and regard this flat as mine not hers.24 There are the hints here of a territorial dispute between trans- and cisAtlantic foster parents as to the ownership, not just of a Hammersmith flat, but of the adoptive love-child of modernism itself. Riding certainly had strong claims on the brat. And in inserting it into the English, Oxford context, Driberg has some claims to being its fairy godfather. According to Geoffrey Grigson, in June 1927, Driberg invited Edith Sitwell to speak in Oxford. Holding up a copy of Eliot’s journal the Criterion (possibly the very one in which he had shown Auden the text of The Waste Land), “he had spoken gracefully, at a small table, of the delights of intellectualism and modernism” (the same verbal link made by Tate in the Fugitive). Driberg introduced Sitwell with fulsome praise for “the synaesthetic poems of our distinguished guest,” and “she returned the compliment handsomely.”25 Sitwell’s performance, according to Grigson, was part of a series at the new English club involving several “eminent and curious ladies,” including as speakers “Miss Laura Riding” on Poe at University (Spender’s) College; Sitwell at Somerville on (of course) the Sitwells; “Mrs V. Woolf,” on A Room of One’s Own, presumably in a room of her own; and “Miss Gertrude Stein,” on “God knows what at Christ Church” (Auden’s college). Significantly, Sitwell, Woolf, and Stein were all at this time friends of the Graves/Riding ménage. Grigson suggests a relation between this whole sequence of events and Driberg’s involvement with the Auden circle: There were poets in the university who were to dominate letters before very long, W. H. Auden, for example, and Louis MacNeice. . . . But it was Thomas Driberg who now appeared to dominate the obvious and outer and smarter intellectuations of the university, who wrote poems in the blend of Eliotese and Edith-Sitwellese which appeared week-by-week in Cherwell. [the student newspaper, not the river] A little later, Grigson records of Stephen Spender, a later popularizer of the term, that by the time he left Oxford he was “almost exclusively interested in . . . the ‘experimental’ modernism of Eliot and Joyce and Ezra Pound and Virginia Stan Smith : : : 63

Woolf and Laura Riding,” adding “‘Modernism,’ then, was working like a mole in spring under the smooth beds of the garden,” though “what was alive in this modernism was kicking hard with life.”26 Kicking with life the idea may have been, but, after its brief Oxford fling, the word seems to have been dropped into the Cherwell (the river, not the student newspaper), and to have sunk without trace. For the next decade, the term is applied hardly at all to those poetic revolutionaries identified in A Survey of Modernist Poetry. There are one or two exceptions. R. D. Charques’s extremely interesting study Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution (1933) uses the word to link Eliot and the new generation of socialist poets. And Wyndham Lewis uses both “modernist” and “modernism” in Men without Art (1934), a concerted assault on the “critical standpoint we associate today with the name of Mr T. S. Eliot and his school.” Significantly, though, his key chapter on “T. S. Eliot (Pseudoist)” moves beyond the “men of 1914” to praise the modernity of Auden’s The Orators, for finally having “really given the coup de grâce to Mr Eliot’s spell” over the younger generation: “at last the spell has been broken. And Mr Auden has done it.” The concept is clearly in flux in Wyndham Lewis’s text, where scare quotes reflect its recent borrowing from other artistic discourses. He defines Hemingway’s reportorial style, for example, as “an art . . . like the cinema, or like those ‘modernist’ still-life pictures in which, in place of painting a match-box upon the canvas, a piece of actual match-box is stuck on . . . a poster-art . . . a cinema in words.”27 The word probably ran a long underground course in more informal contexts, but usually with a fine arts rather than literary significance. Thus Dylan Thomas in a letter of November 1933, says of a thick black squiggle at the end of his letter: “This is not a modernist design but an afterthought on a particular glowing sentence.” However in a jokey poem included in a letter about the same time, he refers to Eliot and Pound, and inter alios, Joyce, cummings, and “young Auden’s chatter,” all of which are above the “middle brow” on “modernist Parnassian heights.”28 Nevertheless, it is only at the end of the 1930s that Graves is dug up and Riding rides again in a more public critical use of the term “modernism.” In 1935 Louis MacNeice had contributed an essay on “Poetry To-day” to Geoffrey Grigson’s collection, The Arts To-day, in which the word is conspicuous by its absence. MacNeice refers instead to such well-established “isms” as Imagism, Futurism, Surrealism, and post-Impressionism, and merely observes that “in 1922 appeared the classic English test-pieces of modern prose and verse — Ulysses by James Joyce and The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot.” He speaks of Graves and Riding as “very conscious moderns and purists” without using their own 64 : : : The Descent of Modernism

1927 term for such self-conscious modernity. If Eliot provides a bridge between the dominant poetry of the early 1920s and the dominant poetry of the early 1930s, it is primarily in his admiration for John Dryden. “Eliot’s influence has been towards classicism,” and under it “Auden, who to start with was very difficult [the Riding influence], is grinding his verse into simplicity.”29 MacNeice’s study Modern Poetry in 1938, however, uses the Graves/Riding term to make a key distinction. Much of the book, like its title, still speaks of “modern poetry,” but it reserves the Graves/Riding epithet for discussions that focus on the disjunctive lineage running from Eliot, through the 1920s, to MacNeice’s own generation and the one that follows it. It is as a historical and changing dynamic that modernism per se is here constituted: “Modernist poetry, as introduced to England by Eliot, inherited its use of imagery from both recent French poets and, among English poets, from the late Elizabethans and the Metaphysicals.” “The younger poets whom I admire, Auden and Spender,” he says, now “write differently” from Eliot and Pound but also from their own successors, William Empson and Dylan Thomas. At Oxford, MacNeice had noted earlier, “I also read Wyndham Lewis’s attacks on the leading modernist writers, subsequently published in Time and Western Man.” It is not Eliot and Co., that is, but the generation affected by “the methods of The Waste Land,” and in particular its most distinctive poet, Auden, who spring to MacNeice’s mind when he discusses modernism.30 Like Wyndham Lewis, MacNeice still gives the word a painterly inflection, observing of his school days that, “misled by a theory about progress, I assumed that the modernist painters were in every sense an advance on their predecessors.”31 By the time, however, that he came to write The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, completed in September 1940, published in 1941, the formula “modernist art”had become a general designation for all avant-garde art forms. MacNeice still, nevertheless, reserves it not for Eliot and Co. but for his own coevals. Discussing the impact of the German invasion of Poland (the subject of one of Auden’s first American poems), which had rendered most artistic concerns “unreal,” “real in a sense to a past order of things,” he comments: The unreality which now overtook them was also overtaking in my mind modern London, modernist art, and left-wing politics. If the war made nonsense of Yeats’s poetry and of all works that are called “escapist,” it also made nonsense of the poetry that professes to be “realist.” My friends had been writing for years about guns and frontiers and factories, about the “facts” of psychology, politics, science, economics, but the fact of war made their writing seem as remote as the pleasure dome in Xanadu. For war spares neither the poetry of Xanadu nor the poetry of pylons.32 Stan Smith : : : 65

Remarking, later, how Yeats’s later work “made such an impression on the younger English poets of the time, who had been brought up on The Waste Land,” MacNeice admits to “a certain snobbery in our new admiration, a snobbery paralleled in Yeats’s own remark: ‘I too have tried to be modern.’” “The word ‘modern,’” he continues, “is always relative. What did Yeats’s modernity — a quality which in his youth he had violently repudiated — consist in?” Having already observed that features of the later, modernizing Yeats “can be paralleled in W. H. Auden,” he repeats the claim here.33 MacNeice’s penultimate chapter, “Some Comparisons,” even attempts what he admits at once to be a “fallacious” distinction between schools of Eliot and of Yeats (among whom he specifically numbers Auden and Spender): “In England about 1930 a school of poets appeared who mark more or less of a reaction against the influence of Eliot. Curiously, in spite of their violently ‘modern’ content, they were not so much in reaction against Yeats.”34 Another complicating dispute over the birthright of “modernism” is going on here, between Anglo-Irish and Anglo-American, with the English Auden, it would seem, the young pretender. Just, however, as MacNeice was squaring up to make his last best claim for cis-Atlantic paternity, Auden resolved the conflict by leaving for the United States, taking modernism’s family silver with him. The “Oxford Poets,” the contributors and editors of Oxford Poetry in 1926 and 1927, it seems, had picked up the mantle trailed for them by Graves and Riding only to write themselves backwards, in elegiac mode, as the heirs of a movement that got christened only on its gravestone. It is, then, the very last years of the 1930s that witness the emergence of a concept of a “modernist” as opposed to a merely “modern” poetry, a concept associated primarily with the Auden generation, but always, it would seem, in terms of the retrospective configuration which that generation makes with its founding fathers, Eliot, Yeats, and Pound. Geoffrey Grigson’s 1939 Preface to his New Verse anthology is tantalizingly ambivalent in its use of the concept. Claiming that, in editing the journal New Verse, “my virtue, or at least my intention, has been to reject mannerism, esotericism, eclecticism, and fraud,” Grigson adds a footnote that leaves unresolved whether the contrast is between Auden’s generation and a generally “bogus modernism,” or between an authentic British variant and a fake American one: I don’t say there is no mannerism, eclecticism, etc. in any of these poems. Something genuine embedded in a stew of literature (e.g. Prokosch) is better than the pure bogus modernism, e.g. of so much American poetry.35 A year later, the newly revised edition of a literary history that had wielded considerable influence throughout the preceding decade uses the word 66 : : : The Descent of Modernism

unequivocally to define a specific literary lineage with a restricted membership, which a talent such as Auden’s is able to turn to full and fruitful account. A. C. Ward’s Twentieth-century Literature first appeared in 1928 and went through six editions before being revised and enlarged in September 1940. It saw another three editions by 1946. The moment of revision, coincident with MacNeice’s study, marks a watershed in the evolution and understanding of modernism. The last two sections of Ward’s chapter on recent poetry, “Innovators and Others” and “The New Metaphysicals,” address contemporary writers, but while they speak of Eliot’s “use in poetry of modern imagery and modern idiom” and of “re-establishing the ‘conceits’ of the metaphysicals in modern dress,” it is to “The young poets of the new generation,” whose “cant phrase” is “Poetry for the Workers,” that the accolade of true modernity falls, and it is of them that the word “modernism” is used. Once again, however, it is deployed only in the context of discussing the configuration this new generation makes with that of its immediate predecessors. If, “as more than one critic has noticed, their voices lack individuality,” Ward observes, “differences of quality can nevertheless be detected and, more especially, differences in the degree of ease with which they accommodate themselves to the modernist manner.” A footnote added to the revised 1940 edition refers to Grigson’s Introduction to the New Verse anthology, and Ward’s conclusion draws conspicuously on Grigson’s usage: Of the leading poets in this group, W. H. Auden alone appears to have found a natural personal language in the modern idiom and to be capable of accepting its restrictive conventions without sacrifice of poetic stature. While MacNeice is a good poet when he escapes from the limitations of modernism, Auden is as often a good poet while within its confines.36 “Modernism,” it seems, consummates a paradigmatic marriage of true minds: American eclecticism (for which, read omnivorous tasteless cultural imperialism) and Oxford cleverness, and it is chaperoned to its bridal bed by that matchless mid Atlantic couple, joining Oxford and New York through the mediation of the Nashville publicity machine, Graves and Riding. changing places, or: modernism’s coming home The story of modernism’s shifting fortunes is not quite over. The twelfth edition of Ward’s study, published in 1956 and reprinted in paperback in 1963, updates this account by dropping the Grigson footnote and all references to “modernism,” acidly commenting instead that “Auden settled in the United States after the beginning of the Second World War, and has since become a part of the American literary scene as T. S. Eliot has of the English,” Stan Smith : : : 67

adding that “at least the title” of his Age of Anxiety “diagnosed the malady of the period” and “offered it a self-pitying name.” A footnote added to the 1963 paperback reprint observes, with equal acidity, “Auden was nevertheless elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1956, succeeding Cecil Day Lewis. He was succeeded in his turn in 1961 by Robert Graves.”37 Auden’s departure for the United States and his assumption in 1946 of American citizenship were generally seen in Britain as the spiritual kiss of death to his poetry, and critics such as Wain and Philip Larkin were keen to distinguish the early English Auden idiom from the etiolated, flaccid conservative who had sold out his birthright, and his idiom, to America (the anxiety revealed in Wain’s review of Steps).38 Ironically, though, it is an American admirer and acolyte of both Auden and Graves who pronounced the funeral rites of both Auden and of the modernist impulse. He is also, on my incomplete assay, the first transatlantic critic to reintroduce Allen Tate’s word “modernist”to describe this tradition, and he introduces it precisely to announce an obituary. Randall Jarrell, reviewing Auden’s first volume written in the United States, The Double Man, in the Nation in 1941, confers the newfound title on Auden at the very moment that he ceases to warrant it, as a lost leader who has forfeited his right to the authority of modernism. As Jarrell sees it, the transit from “modern” to “modernist” has taken a decade, and in using the term he writes both the birth certificate and the obituary notice of a movement to which, previously, no name had stuck. In 1931, he says, when Auden first burst on to the scene, “the decline and fall of modernist poetry . . . were nearer than anyone could have believed”: The poetry which came to seem during the twenties the norm of all poetic performance — experimental, lyric, obscure, violent, irregular, determinedly antagonistic to didacticism, general statement, science, the public — has lost for the young its once obsessive attraction; has evolved, in Auden’s latest poem, into something that is almost its opposite. . . . How fast the world changes! And poetry with it!39 Modernism is dead, long live postmodernism. There are one or two final twists to the story. When Stephen Spender wrote in The Struggle of the Modern that,“the confrontation of the past with the present seems to me . . . the fundamental aim of modernism. The reason why it became so important was that, in the early stages of the movement, the moderns wished to express the whole experience of modern life,”40 he also identified, unconsciously, the key element in the transition of “modern” into “modernist.” Modernism emerged as, centrally, a genealogical concept, and it emerged out of a tug-of-war, on the site of the modern, between the past and 68 : : : The Descent of Modernism

the present, conducted by a generation that sought, in Oedipal terms, both to perpetuate and to dispossess its adoptive founding fathers. But as Spender makes clear in Love-Hate Relations: A Study of Anglo-American Sensibilities, published in 1974 but drawing on his 1966 Clark Lectures, a decade after Graves’s own, it was also a negotiation between English and American cultures in which the rising son, in true Gravesian fashion, slays the waning father, to bed the man-eating goddess of poetry.41 In the 1930s, T. S. Eliot in his plays and such works as The Rock can be seen pastiching the work of his young admirer Auden. But what of Graves, that indefatigable opponent of all that Auden stood for? Auden’s literary debt to Graves and Riding is a matter of public record, on both sides of the transaction, from Auden’s own admissions of influence to Graves’s story of his ultimatum to Auden, chivalrously standing up for Laura Riding as the injured party in a poetic theft. Auden always admired Graves. Less remarked on is Graves’s grudging acknowledgment of Auden, both at the latter’s birthday party in New York in 1958, and when he came to succeed him, with Auden’s keen backing, as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1961. I think, however, there are many instances of Graves’s engaging in tit-for-tat larceny — not so much taking in the other poet’s laundry as stealing it from the tumble-drier in the mid Atlantic laundromat, or snatching it off the poetic line. I can only, here, offer a single example, but a telling one, addressing as they do that very ratio of exile, expatriation, and desire to belong that links both poets in the lineage of modernism. Poems such as “Nocturne I” in The Shield of Achilles in 1955 reveal an Auden whimisically taking up and replying to, with parodic guile, Graves’s cult of the White Goddess, summed up in Steps with Graves’s Housmanish faith in the “poem which is moon-magical enough to walk off the page . . . and to keep on walking, and to get under people’s skins and into their eyes and throats and hearts and marrows.”42 What strikes one most about “Nocturne I,” though, is not the dialogue between Muse worshipper and sceptical modernist, who translates a Gravesian “Mother,Virgin, Muse” into “that bunch of barren craters,” but Auden’s description of the moon as “one who knows where she belongs.”Auden refuses Graves’s self-aggrandizing conceit of being the Muse’s darling. He is only — in a jovial Kafkaesque metamorphosis — “a small functionary” of poetry. But the tone and vocabulary of the ending is close enough to Graves’s hardboiled cynicism in a poem such as “The Blue-Fly” to make one think twice. The moon, unlike Auden and Graves, is “one who knows where she belongs.” Graves and Auden, different kinds of expatriate, share that characteristically modernist deracination that Graves summarized so admirably in “The Cloak.” This poem’s aristocratic fugitive goes “Into exile with only a few shirts,” only to be returned again and again to Sandwich, Deal, or Rye by contrary Stan Smith : : : 69

winds, in the end getting no further than Dieppe — rather like Graves himself, who had to follow up his valedictory autobiography in 1929, Good-bye to All That, with the rueful admission of his 1930 play: But It Still Goes On. “This nobleman is at home anywhere, / His castle being, the valet says, his title,” the poem observes, but the obverse of this is that he is at home nowhere in particular, a condition that Auden explored in England in the 1930s and then, from the 1940s onward, throughout his American residence. Indeed, ironically, almost as soon as he had become a United States citizen, he came back to Europe, to live à la Graves and Riding on a Mediterranean island — amidst a large number of Americans — and then in Austria for the last quarter-century of his life.43 To examine Auden’s poem,“A Permanent Way,” knowing his talents for plagiarism and pastiche, is to presume that it is obviously a rewriting of Graves’s “Here live your life out!”44 The theme is roughly similar: both poems concern what looks like an ideal place to settle down, observed in passing from a nonstopping train. So too are the strategies adopted by each speaker in dealing with the imaginary tension between settling down and moving on, resolved by the good excuse for comfortably mixed emotions that a nonstopping train affords. In fact, Graves’s poem cannot have influenced Auden, since Auden’s was written in 1954 and collected in The Shield of Achilles in 1955, and Graves’s appeared in More Poems, 1961, with the information, in a prefatory note, that the volume was the supplement to Collected Poems, 1959, and contained only four poems (none of them “Here live your life out!”), which were revisions of earlier work. Clearly, there was a lot more surreptitious reading by Graves of his arch-enemy’s poetry than he ever let on, particularly, perhaps, at the moment he was to succeed him as Professor of Poetry in that cradle of modernism where they had first crossed swords, and pens, over the honor of Laura Riding so many years before. What links the two poets in this convergence of themes? Their poems’ separate endings suggest what this is, each of them in different ways confirming the client relationship both these English poets have, as Wain suggests in his 1959 review, to American modernism. What does Auden say but take the money and not so much run as lie back and think of England, with “at least a ten-dollar cheque” in your pocket (about what a poet might have been paid for a poem in a journal in those days): And what could be greater fun, Once one has chosen and paid, Than the inexpensive delight Of a choice one might have made . . . 70 : : : The Descent of Modernism

(There is possibly a dig at Graves’s American friend, Robert Frost, as well here.) Graves is ostensibly more intransigent. But he too eschews the heroism of the “simple-hearted,” lacking the resolution, or perhaps the sincerity, to pull the train’s emergency chain. It is supposedly the scene that withdraws from the would-be traveler, and not vice versa. He could, however, return in a private car, and “sue for possession.” Like Auden, though, he knows this would be pure romantic “folly.” And why? Because the birthright has already been sold. The culture is in the hands of the colonials, those usurpers whose money and influence have bought up all in our native estates, and who now own the language: Too far, too late: Already bolder tenants were at the gate. And, one might add, in the yard, baying at the moon that was soon to wear a rakish American flag. The package deal that is, has given way to the package tour. But the real (which is to say the imaginary) home of modernism is on that train, perpetually in transit. For it is only in perpetual motion that modernism finds its truly “permanent way.” notes

1 2

3 4 5

6 7 8 9

This essay was first published in a slightly different form as “Lineages of ‘Modernism,’ or, how they brought the good news from Nashville to Oxford,” in Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, vol. 20 (1999), special edition on Modernism, ed. Stan Smith and Jennifer Birkett (Zaragoza: Zaragoza University Press, 2000), pp. 29–54. © Dpto de Filologia Inglesa y Aleman de la Universidad de Zaragoza, and the author. John Wain, “A Package Deal,” The Observer (January 1959). Commercial television had been introduced in the United Kingdom in 1955, to much brouhaha from intellectuals on the left and traditionalists on the right, who posited that it would lead straight to the brash Americanization of British culture. Winston Churchill, A History of the English-speaking Peoples, 4 vols. (London: Cassell, 1956–58). Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956); Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1958). John Wain, A Word Carved on a Sill (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956); Robert Graves, Collected Poems, 1938 (London: Cassell, 1938), reprinted in Collected Poems (London: Cassell, 1975), p. 112 (hereafter CP). Robert Conquest, New Lines (London: Macmillan, 1956). John Wain, Weep before God (London: Macmillan, 1961). Robert Graves, Poems and Satires (London: Cassell, 1951), pp. vii–viii. Ezra Pound, “Harold Monro,” Criterion (July 1932), p. 590; Robert Graves and Laura Riding, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1927). I have discussed this particular genealogy more fully in Stan Smith, The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and the Rhetorics of Renewal (London: Harvester, 1994), pp. 1–14. Stan Smith : : : 71

10 Harry Levin, “What was Modernism?” reprinted in Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 271–95; Morton P. Levitt,“The Invention of Postmodernism: A Critical Fable,” in Kevin J. H. Dettmar, ed., Rereading the New (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 87–96. On this, see Michael Coyle, “A Present with Innumerable Pasts: Postmodernity and the Tracing of Modernist Origins,” Review 18 (1996): pp. 117–34. Levin may have picked up the term from Wyndham Lewis, who in Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography ([London: Hutchinson, 1950]; new edition ed. Toby Foshay [Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1984]), inveighs against Levin’s James Joyce (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), for misrepresenting — and possibly plagiarizing — him on Joyce in Time and Western Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927). Lewis does not, however, use the word “modernism” in that book, though he does use it in Men without Art (London: Cassell, 1934). See also n. 11 below. 11 Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), pp. xi–xii, 71ff. 12 A year earlier, Philip Larkin, in his 1960 article “The Blending of Betjeman” in the Spectator, had observed that “it was Eliot who gave the modernist poetic movement its charter in the sentence ‘Poets in our civilisation . . . must be difficult’” (reprinted in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955–1982 [London: Faber and Faber, 1983], p. 129). Early instances of the word tend to use it as a blanket term for all the arts, but predominantly the plastic ones, only belatedly including poetry. 13 John Middleton Murry, “Art and Philosophy,” Rhythm I, no. I (Summer 1911): 9–12; (reprinted in Cyrena Pondrom, ed., The Road from Paris: French Influence on English Poetry (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 54–57. Murry’s phrasing here echoes fin-de-siècle Symbolism, as presented by Yeats, for example, as well as the Bergsonian/Sorelian vitalism fashionable in the 1900s. This occurrence of “modernism” seems like a one-off usage referring largely to the plastic arts and music, when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the Post-Impressionist Exhibition were making their first impact on London. 14 John Tyree Fain and David Young, The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974), pp. 20–26, passim. On this prehistory of the word “modernism,” see the important study by Langdon Hammer (Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), to which I am generally indebted. 15 John Crowe Ransom, “The Future of Poetry,” The Fugitive 3, no. 2 (February 1924): pp. 2–4. The Fugitive, 4 vols., ed. Walter Clyde Curry et al. (Nashville: Nashville University Press, April 1992–December 1925). 16 Ransom, Future of Poetry, pp. 2–4. 17 John Crowe Ransom, Grace after Meat (London: Hogarth Press, 1924); John Crowe Ransom, Chills and Fever (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924); Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason and Other Studies (London: Cecil Palmer, 1925); Robert Graves, Poems 1938–1945 (London: Cassell, 1946); Robert Graves, The Crowning Privilege: Collected Essays on Poetry (London: Cassell, 1956). 18 Fain and Young, Correspondence, p. 98.

72 : : : The Descent of Modernism

19 Fain and Young, Correspondence, p. 145. This is discounted by her biographer (see Deborah Baker, In Extremis: the Life of Laura Riding [London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993], pp. 75–77). 20 Fain and Young, Correspondence, p. 146. 21 Roy Campbell, “Contemporary Poetry” in Edgell Rickword, ed., Scrutinies (London: Wishart, 1928), pp. 177–79. 22 W. H. Auden’s Poems (1928) was privately printed in a numbered and limited edition by Stephen Spender. For Auden’s contributions to Oxford Poetry (published annually by Basil Blackwell, Oxford) and other Oxford journals, see Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), pp. 59–60. 23 Tom Driberg, Ruling Passions (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977; reprint London: Quartet Books, 1991), pp. 62–65. 24 Driberg’s protestations of innocence about what he calls “this confusing, and surely highly confused letter,” affirming his “general, uncomplicated liking” for Riding, are somewhat disingenuous, given his notorious misogyny and his (tongue-in-cheek?) surprise here, at Graves’s “disrespectful reference to heterosexuality,” which he retrospectively and ever-hopefully attributes, along with “the violence of Graves’s reaction to my olive branch” to the repression of “an unconscious homosexual impulse” on Graves’s part. 25 Geoffrey Grigson, The Crest on the Silver (London: Cresset Press, 1950), pp. 114–15; Francis Wheen, Tom Driberg: His Life and Indiscretions (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990), pp. 55–56. 26 Grigson, Crest on the Silver, pp. 121–22. 27 R. D. Charques, Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution (London: Martin Secker, 1933); Wyndham Lewis, Men without Art (London: Cassell, 1934), pp. 200, 66, 251, 36–37. 28 Constantine Fitzgibbon, ed., The Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas (London: Routledge, 1966), pp. 55, 69–70. Thomas is likely to have got the term from Victor Neuberg, the eccentric literary journalist who had adopted him as a protégé, and published his first poems. Neuberg wrote in September 1933 of Thomas’s poem “That sanity be kept,” that it was “perhaps the best modernist poem that as yet I’ve received” for his newspaper the Sunday Referee. (See Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas [London: Penguin, 1978], p. 88.) 29 Louis MacNeice, “Poetry To-day,” in The Arts To-day, ed. Geoffrey Grigson (London: Bodley Head, 1935), pp. 32–62. 30 Louis MacNeice, Modern Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), pp. 103, 105, 69. 31 MacNeice, Modern Poetry, p. 51. 32 Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 2. 33 Ibid., pp. 178, 163, 169. 34 Ibid., pp. 223–24. 35 Geoffrey Grigson, comp., New Verse: An Anthology (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), p. 26. 36 A. C. Ward, Twentieth-Century Literature (London: Methuen, 1928; rev. and enl., 1940), pp. 198–201. 37 Ibid. (newly revised edition [London: Methuen, 1963], p. 201).

Stan Smith : : : 73

38 Philip Larkin, “What’s Become of Wystan,” in Required Writing (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), pp. 123–28. 39 Randall Jarrell, The Nation, clii, April 12, 1941, pp. 440–41; reprinted in Kipling, Auden, and Co: Essays and Reviews, 1935–1964 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1981), pp. 55–57. John Crowe Ransom, in a series of essays collected as The World’s Body (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), continued to use the words “modernism” and “modernist,” and drew similar comparisons between Eliot and Auden. 40 Spender, Struggle of the Modern, p. 80. 41 Stephen Spender, Love-Hate Relations: a Study of Anglo-American Sensibilities (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974). 42 W. H. Auden, “Nocturne I,” in The Shield of Achilles (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 50. 43 “The Cloak,” first published as “The Exile” in Epilogue III (Spring 1937): pp. 165–66, reprinted as “The Cloak” in CP, p. 95. 44 Auden’s “A Permanent Way” (The Shield of Achilles, p. 48); Graves’s “Here live your life out!” (More Poems [London: Cassell, 1961]), p. 42.

74 : : : The Descent of Modernism

Writing “Without Roots” Auden, Eliot, and Post-national Poetry nicholas jenkins

the exiled auden September 1939 was a month of simultaneous historical accelerations and decelerations in Europe. Some unforeseen events occurred rapidly, while other occurrences, long awaited, failed to happen at all. The month when war was finally declared between Britain and France and Germany and when Poland was swallowed by Germany and the USSR, was the month when enormous Luftwaffe air raids on British cities inflicting hundreds of thousands of casualties were expected but did not occur, but when British authorities began implementing plans for the army to “contain” the expected but nonexistent mass panic.1 With his mind, like everyone else’s, no doubt partly on this faraway political turmoil, W. H. Auden in New York worked on two poems that would become central to his present-day literary reputation: “September 1, 1939” and “In Memory of Sigmund Freud.” The latter is the main subject of this essay. Auden’s elegy for Sigmund Freud is an immensely rich work (E. M. Forster once rather extravagantly called it the “best poem ever written”).2 My emphasis in what follows is on “external” issues rather than on the “internal” psychological processes usually discussed in relation to postromantic elegies; I focus my comments on the poem’s portrait of Freud. But throughout, as I pursue my argument, I am trying to draw attention to an important element of the poem that critics have so far ignored: a statement that the Freud poem makes about the condition of exile, uprootedness, and mobility (poetic and otherwise). “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” has recently been assigned a pivotal position within Auden’s oeuvre.3 It was written during a threshold period, a time when Auden’s cultural identity, and by extension his poetry, were defined by their ambiguous affiliations with two worlds, the Old and the New. While he was writing his elegy for Freud, Auden had already decided to become an

American citizen but he had not begun the bureaucratic processes necessary to do so. So, although differences obviously exist between those driven into exile involuntarily and those (like Auden) who leave their homelands willingly, Auden at this period was a “stateless person,” a member of what Hannah Arendt, writing about the interwar period, was to call “the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics.”4 Auden took on this condition at a time when late modernism had moved into a highly nationalistic phase: “no art is more stubbornly national” than poetry, T. S. Eliot claimed in 1945.5 (In a line he deleted from a lecture that he gave in 1948, Eliot would call himself an “English poet of American origin.”)6 But Auden’s writing sets out to question that assertion about the national-ness of poetry. Instead of suggesting an “English” or an “American” (or an “AngloAmerican”) Auden,“In Memory of Sigmund Freud” and poems like it prompt a search for a “post-national Auden,” and invite us to see what one form of a cosmopolitan poetics, a poetics not Eliotically rooted in or authenticated by reference to the culture of a single country or place, might look like. I anchor my argument in the specifics of Auden’s poem and its historical context, but the implications of understanding him as a “post-national” writer are broad, suggesting one way of resituating modern literary history outside the template of such a frame of reference. Inevitably, Auden’s effort to place his poetry outside the national frame of reference issues in complicatedly mixed results, but the attempt itself is of prophetic importance. He wrote to a friend in Britain a few months after finishing “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”: “To attempt the most difficult seems to me the only thing worth while. At least I know what I am trying to do . . . which is to live deliberately without roots.”7 “when grief has been made so public” The best route into the intricacies of Auden’s tribute to Freud is, paradoxically, by way of that other canonical poem he composed in the month that war broke out: “September 1, 1939.” That is partly because Auden himself created a series of links between the two poems, as if to make understanding one involve remembering the other. Both, written as the “unmentionable odour of death / Offends the September night,” are exploratory forms of elegy — one (“September 1, 1939”) figurative, an elegy for a period, one (“In Memory of Sigmund Freud”) for a historical figure.8 Moreover, the link between Freud’s death, the outbreak of war, and Auden’s own fears and reactions to the prospect of global conflict are closely aligned in his prefatory note to the Freud elegy. Freud, it reads, “d. Sept. 1939,”9 an unmistakable point of contact between the two poems, as if, right at its start, the Freud elegy asked its reader 76 : : : Auden, Eliot, and Post-national Poetry

to allow the haunted “September 1, 1939” in turn to pervade “In Memory of Sigmund Freud.” And, finally, central to both is a hyper-awareness of din — excessive sound, the terrible noise of contemporary history. These poems attempt to find a public language for poetic rhetoric at a time when the public sphere of communication between citizens and governments was overflowing with nauseating quantities of spoken and written language. The air was saturated with appalling bulletins, dire prognostications, belligerent rhetoric, and prim ultimatums — it was a moment when a Babel-like cacophony of public words, whispered, spoken, shouted, sung, was endlessly breaking in on individual lives. Modern broadcasting technology meant that there was no possibility in 1939 of escaping from political and historical selfconsciousness. History was now and England and Germany and Poland and the United States. And as all the nation states were aware, radio messages bound their listening citizens into a mass public, united in the “deep, horizontal comradeship” that for Benedict Anderson constitutes national belonging.10 Few people of the period, wherever they were, could avoid the incursion of state language into even the most private enclaves of domestic space. And wherever they might be, the news brought to them had international dimensions; the global was constantly infiltrating into the precincts of the local. At a time when political developments seemed sublimely vast in scope, radio had collapsed a sense of distance between those inside and outside the national unit, and between being “here” and being “there.” Written in August 1939, in the west of Ireland, Louis MacNeice’s “Cushenden,” for example, ends: in the dark green room beside the fire With the curtains drawn against the winds and waves There is a little box with a well-bred voice: What a place to talk of War.11 But, the point of course is, everywhere at that moment, the “talk” was of war. For, whatever else the conflict was, it also was, and remained, in Asa Briggs’s phrase, “a war of words.”12 The abolition of geographical distance enabled by mass communications also affected Auden in the United States. “There is a radio in this coach so that every hour or so,” he told a friend in a letter at the end of August 1939, as he traveled across Kansas by rail, “one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on.”13 And a loss of normal perceptions of geographical distance could also create the sense of an abolished private self, of the psyche’s walls smashed open by history. In October 1939, in California, Christopher Isherwood wrote in his diary:“The night war was declared,Vernon and I sat listening to our radio Nicholas Jenkins : : : 77

at home. It was as though neither of us were really present. The living room seemed absolutely empty — with nothing in it but the announcer’s voice. No fear, no despair, no sensation at all. Just hollowness.”14 The widely disseminated ideology of tribal and national solidarity inevitably structures many of the period’s literary texts, even those written to defy the call to belong. When Auden writes at the start of “September 1, 1939” about the “Waves of anger and fear” that now “Circulate over the bright / And darkened lands of the earth” (EA 245), the reference is immediate, empirical, tangible. The stanza begins with documentary coordinates of time and place — on the night when Germany has invaded Poland the narrator sits in a dive on “Fifty-Second Street” in Manhattan (just around the corner from Radio City Music Hall). And the “Waves of anger and fear” are emanations with a correspondingly direct material fact: the omnipresent radio “waves” by which so much of the understanding of the war was already being shaped. Auden’s lines contain a direct allusion to a famous icon of modern mass communication, the RKO logo of the period in which a giant radio transmitter towers over the North Pole and pulses radio waves and lightning bolts out over the entire world. The enormous RKO Building was one of Manhattan’s “blind skyscrapers” that use “Their full height to proclaim / The strength of Collective Man.” It housed Radio City Music Hall in Rockefeller Center between Fiftieth and Fifty-first Streets. This is barely a block away from the location of Auden’s Fifty-second Street dive, and thus literally shadows the “uncertain and afraid,” and topographically sensitive, poet. These radio waves were a means of collectivizing feeling and opinion along ethnic and national lines. Auden returns later in the same poem to the same dystopian Babel of the radio, as if to an insatiable and undefeatable enemy, when he writes that “Into this neutral air” of the United States,“Each language pours its vain / Competitive excuse,” and attacks the “windiest militant trash / Important persons shout” (EA 245, 246). Auden’s poems of 1939 continue the attempt to “Flash out” quietly their messages in a kind of literary Morse, searching for the fragmented community of “the Just” whose lights are “dotted everywhere” (EA 247) in the noise-filled darkness of wartime. new york: the “theater of new attitudes” The almost willfully trivial particularities that Auden’s poem for Freud cherishes — the “long-forgotten objects / Revealed by his undiscouraged shining,” or “the Games we had thought we must drop as we grew up,” the “Faces we made when no one was looking” (AT 119) — are consciously at odds with the collective, group definitions produced by war. If Freud succeeded, Auden noted,“the Generalised Life / Would become impossible.” (The 78 : : : Auden, Eliot, and Post-national Poetry

pun on “General” in a time of war is pointed.) “The monolith / Of State,” he claimed, would “be broken” (AT 117). But far from succeeding, Freud died with many problems unsolved, and at a moment when the “monolith of State” was being immeasurably strengthened: Britain’s Emergency Powers Act of August 1939, for instance, had extensively curtailed the civil liberties of all British subjects. And yet it is precisely that open-endedness that makes Freud’s work so important and, Auden implies, that makes it something that can be carried over into other cultural spheres, such as poetry. Why must a particular body of poetry, or a poet, be thought of as belonging to one nation or another, as if, in spite of the massive disembedding, mobilizing powers of modernity, national or local origin were the defining category of a poetic, textual, or personal identity? As long ago as the end of the 1930s, Auden had recognized, as he told a friend, that, “The Machine has destroyed Community, ie the association of people to place, regulated by the discipline of nature.”15 For him, then, New York where he found himself living was not a place of permanent settlement but a “great Hotel” full of travelers, the United States itself was not so much a nation-state as a no-place, not exactly Utopia but what, in a letter to a friend, he called the “Great Void.”16 And when, at around the time he wrote the Freud elegy in 1939, he defined his relation to T. S. Eliot, the modernist poet to whom he was personally closest, he chose a temporal rather than a national antithesis to highlight the differences between their poetic projects. In conversation with the poet Richard Eberhart, Auden commented (as reported by Eberhart): “Eliot sought a truly old world. Auden wishes to become a citizen of what he must consider the theater of new attitudes, a place for growth.”17 Auden’s New World is a place still coming into being and hence it cannot be a venue of fixed cultural or national identities. In mid October 1939, while he was at work on the Freud elegy, Auden told an interviewer:“In America nationalism doesn’t mean anything; there are only human beings. That’s how the future must be.”18 And the same month he wrote with scorn of those who “would be / Lost, if they could, in history.” These people, the poem continues, are self-hostaged to the symbols of the past: Bowing, for instance, with such old-world grace To a proper flag in a proper place, Muttering like ancients as they stump up stairs Of Mine and His or Ours and Theirs.19 Such convictions shape all of Auden’s important poems of the period. The Freud elegy, written the same autumn, also attacks Eliot’s nationalizing of poetry. It is striking to see how carefully “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” catalogs monarchical, national, and even feudal distinctions; it is saturated with Nicholas Jenkins : : : 79

the terminology of European political structures. The founding father of psychoanalysis becomes a patriarch intent on destroying the social configurations of patriarchy. The “ancient cultures of conceit,” the poem says of Freud,“in his technique of unsettlement foresaw / The fall of princes.” And as we have already seen, it goes on to predict that “the monolith / Of State” may be broken by the psychoanalyst’s work; that the tired “in even / The remotest most miserable duchy” have been changed, as has “the tyrant” earlier on in the poem, even if he “doesn’t care for [Freud] much” (AT 118). Auden began the Freud elegy at the end of the month that had started with “September 1, 1939.” But, in contrast to the earlier poem, the elegy is distinctly “cool,” “classical,” and nonimmediate in manner. The Freud poem explicitly debars the poetic “I” and the personal note in favor of a kind of impersonal meditativeness. Unlike many other modern elegies, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” does not attempt to authenticate itself through an appeal to personal feeling and lyric self-expression. It is in many ways a muted, almost aloof poem, perhaps in part because Auden associated Freud’s method and writing with a restrained, sotto voce manner that he alluded to at the end of the 1937 poem “Oxford” as a “low unflattering voice” (EA 230). In an age of political “loud speakers,” Virginia Woolf (writing in the spring of 1940) accused Auden and his fellow 1930s poets of succumbing to “the pedagogic, the didactic, the loud speaker strain that dominates their poetry.”20 But, already, by the time that war broke out, Auden was writing poetry that meandered in a style of highly rhetorical antirhetoric, hesitated sibilantly, whispered its subversively antic speculations, sidetracked itself in baroque displays of wit, divided against its own argument, and spoke out into the “neutral air” of the United States in a language strategically deprived of demotic politically compromising immediacy. auden, the jew To some contemporary readers this antinaturalism looked strikingly odd. Cyril Connolly, commenting in June 1940, on the writing by Auden that he had so far published in Horizon — the poems “Crisis” and “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” — commented that the “two poems by Auden are didactic. The technique is clumsy, and the versification careless, but the thought, the argument, is deeply poetical.”21 As I have suggested, that all-important “thought” centers in the Freud elegy on what the poem wants to see as benighted national allegiances and the heroically stateless or exilic example of Freud, deepened by the importance that the poem attaches to Freud’s cosmopolitan Jewishness. Most scholars and readers today construe Freud’s sig80 : : : Auden, Eliot, and Post-national Poetry

nificance in terms of his origination of psychoanalysis. But when Freud died in Hampstead in September 1939, a fact of immense contemporary resonance in summarizing who he had been and what he stood for was his status as a refugee, a Jewish outcast, a victim of Hitler. Germany’s wholesale antagonism to Jews was of course a matter of open public knowledge by the time that Freud died. On January 30, 1939, for instance, Hitler in a speech had plainly threatened that if war broke out it would lead to the “annihilation of the Jews in Europe.”22 Freud died in exile at his London home just before midnight on September 23, 1939. The news was printed in some American newspapers as early as the following day.23 And awareness of Freud’s Jewishness and his refugee status was hard to avoid at the time of his death. The front-page headline in the New York Times announcing Freud’s demise reads: “Dr. Sigmund Freud Dies in Exile,” a precise analogue to Auden’s phrase in his Freud poem about an “important Jew who died in exile” (AT 116). And the representative quality of Freud’s exile was immediately brought out in many commentaries occasioned by his passing, as, for example, in this remark in the New Republic: “His death at midnight on September 23, in a city darkened for fear of Nazi air-raids, is a parable of what is happening to the intellectual life all over Europe.”24 In considering the contemporary meaning of Freud’s Jewishness, it is important to note here that one term for designating an outsider in period discourse often stood for, or invoked, others. Thus “cosmopolitan” was often a code word for “Jewish” within German and Soviet anti-Semitic propaganda, just as the “Jew” and the homosexual “invert” were often linked together in British culture. The right-wing poet Roy Campbell in his (just-about) rhyming jeremiads against modernity repeatedly lumps Marx, Freud, all Jews, left-wing poets, and homosexuals together as part of a vast perverted and godless conspiracy.25 Writing in a poem published in 1939, the same year that Auden’s Freud elegy was composed, Campbell claims that the purpose of the “racket of the Invert and the Jew” in contemporary Britain is to degrade and tyrannize Christian society: “For the New artist is an Agent priced / To play on Man what Judas played on Christ.”26 Similarly, in Evelyn Waugh’s Put out More Flags, written in 1941 about the phoney war period in Britain in 1939, the main targets of Waugh’s satire are the aesthete Ambrose Silk, self-described as “a cosmopolitan, jewish pansy” and, relatedly, the poets Parsnip and Pimpernell (lightly disguised surrogates for Auden and Isherwood), “two great poets . . . who had recently fled to New York.”27 Auden’s interest, and self-interest, in Freud’s Jewishness cannot be understood properly outside this prejudicial poetic context. And that context invites Nicholas Jenkins : : : 81

a series of specular identifications between stigmatized individuals: the Jew mirrors the “invert” who in turn identified with the liberal or left-leaning poet. In responding to this portrait by Auden of the significance of “an important Jew,” the reader becomes aware of the ways in which the discourse of the time allows the figure of the “Jew” to embrace metaphorically other experiences of social marginality, such as the homosexual’s. Indeed, so close could this identification become, that at the end of 1941, surveying two years of book publication in Britain, Tom Harrisson could declare in Horizon: “This is the day of the right-wing writers. . . . Reading books published now, one finds again and again renovated prejudices and antagonisms of the old and the ultra-conservative.” And he fleshed out his perception by remarking on Auden’s pariah status in Britain at the time: “To judge from most war books, Britain is fighting this war to protect the world against Auden and Picasso, the Jews and any form of collectivism.”28 The elegy for Freud turns the founding father of psychoanalysis into the leader of all whole people, a prophet, a modern Moses of refugee- and exileculture. This is a particularly rich characterization in the historical context because Freud’s final book, the iconoclastic Moses and Monotheism, appeared in the United States just a few months before Auden wrote his elegy.29 Like Moses, Freud is seen by Auden as a guide who will take his tribe — which here surely means those who, like Auden, are his emancipated followers or fellow outcasts — out of psychic and political bondage and toward the Promised Land. But of course the elegy admits that Freud will never reach the Promised Land himself. Moses died on Mount Pisgah in Jordan looking down into Israel from outside. And Freud here goes “back to the earth in London, / An important Jew who died in exile” (AT 116). In these hostile contexts, Auden’s intense awareness of prejudicial notions of the Jews, and the Freud elegy’s struggle to turn these stereotypes to positive effect, account for some of the odder parts of the poem’s characterization of Freud, as in the famous and on the face of it truly bizarre comment that, “He wasn’t clever at all” (AT 116). It helps to recall that Auden was insistently elegizing the superficial sophistication of “cleverness” in other poems at around this time. A poem-portrait of a strangely infantile Voltaire, written in February 1939, calls him the “cleverest of them all” (EA 240). In “September 1, 1939,” the “clever hopes expire” (EA 245). And here the reader encounters the idea of the super-earnest Freud not being “clever at all.”30 But the delicacy of the poem’s comment comes out strongly if we contrast it with Eliot’s far less nuanced remarks on Freud’s intelligence or lack thereof in his review of The Future of an Illusion. If for Auden Freud “wasn’t clever at all,” for Eliot Freud 82 : : : Auden, Eliot, and Post-national Poetry

wrote books that were “shrewd and yet stupid.” Eliot wrote that “stupidity appears not so much in historical ignorance or lack of sympathy with the religious attitude, as in verbal vagueness and inability to reason.”31 Freud himself believed in his own secularizing intelligence and related it to his ethnicity, writing in “The Resistances to Psycho-Analysis” that, “Because I was a Jew, I found myself free from many prejudices which limited others in the employment of their intellects.”32 However, what for Freud was an intellectual freedom was for others an amoral intelligence and cunning. This was a characterization of Jews widely prevalent in the cultivated English circles Auden was moving in by the mid 1930s. In 1945, George Orwell noted the prejudicial connection between Jews and unprincipled intellect: “Thirty years ago it was accepted more or less as a law of nature that a Jew was a figure of fun and — though superior in intelligence — slightly deficient in ‘character.’”33 And one can see exactly the same linkage played out in an incident that occurred on July 11, 1930, when Harold Nicolson and Gerald Heard went to see Leonard and Virginia Woolf. They discussed whether the nomination board at the Foreign Office made it difficult for people without a “good” social background to be proposed. Nicolson wrote in his diary: “The awkward question of the Jews arises. I admit that is the snag. Jews are far more interested in international life than are Englishmen, and if we opened the service it might be flooded by clever Jews.”34 Nicolson here makes an immediate connection between Jews,“international life,” and a threatening, racialized intelligence. To defend Freud against the stereotype of a self-interested Jewish “shrewdness,” then, Auden (himself often targeted by critics of the period for his supposedly flippant or amoral intelligence) makes the strange, exculpatory, would-be philo-semitic comment that Freud “wasn’t clever at all.” But this exculpation generates its own difficulties. It is hard to know how one can be both “rational” and yet not “clever.” The very instability of this definition points to the way in which Freud stands for what the period conceived of as the peculiarly ambiguous, contradictory nature of “the Jew,” a figure both inside and outside conventional categories of belonging and identity. The poem’s subversiveness lies not so much in its portrait of Freud’s intelligence (or lack of it) as with his powerfully enigmatic qualities, with his simultaneous and antithetical roles as a hero who debunks heroic virtues, a “Judas” who, like Christ, harrows the hell of the Unconscious. Auden’s Freud has this curious quality of enigmatic detachment, precisely because that is the position that Auden’s poem is trying to achieve for itself. So Auden in his Freud elegy returns again and again to an idea of internationalism (again, as the Nicolson diary entry shows, an idea with which Jews Nicholas Jenkins : : : 83

were often associated at the period) in opposition to the claims of racial rootedness and local piety that had become so powerful a part of the ideology of late modernism. eliot, auden, and the jews One key linguistic nexus in Auden’s poem is that of “London” and “Jew” — the lines in the poem describing Freud’s death describe how he went “back to the earth in London, / An important Jew who died in exile.” Both “London” and “Jew” are familiar as numinous terms in Anglo-American modernism. “London” is Eliot’s “Unreal city” (CPP 62). But it is also the primary historical site of the early phase of Anglo-American modernist poetry, the place where the first stages of the artistic revolution took place, as Pound realized a few years later when, in canto 80, written in the Disciplinary Training Center outside Pisa, reciting falteringly “the Past / Like a poetry lesson,” he tolled the city’s name elegiacally: “God knows what else is left of our London / my London, your London.”35 As far as “Jew” is concerned, at least since the mid 1930s, there had been intermittant attacks on Eliot’s writing for the comments it contains about Jews and Jewishness.36 Of course Eliot was hardly alone in his snobberies and prejudices. Historians and literary critics have argued that anti-Semitism was systemic in Britain in the period before the Second World War and they sketch continuities between prejudicial attitudes on the “margins” and in the “center” of British society.37 Bryan Cheyette, for example, claims that “Race-thinking about Jews was, in fact, a key ingredient in the emerging cultural identity of modern Britain.”38 And it is certainly possible to identify in the interwar period an extremely wide “discourse of the Jew” within the high and the low, the canonical and the noncanonical literature of the time. Studies of the representation of the Jew within modernism thus often oversimplify the relation of modernist texts to the wider culture by seeming to suggest that only certain modernists were anti-Semitic, or that anti-Semitism was a distinctive feature only of modernist texts. But T. S. Eliot’s hostility to Jews was particularly memorable and insistent for a younger poet such as Auden. Auden’s implicit argument in the Freud elegy with the ideologies of roots and nation in late modernism works not only through his poetic linking of the émigré and stigmatized Freud with “London,” modernism’s center, but also through his emphasis on Freud’s Jewishness. Indeed, the word “jew” in the Freud elegy had never been used so prominently by a major poet in the period between Eliot’s notorious early uses of the word, prejudicially lower-cased in “Gerontion” and “Burbank with a Baedeker; Bleistein with a Cigar” and Auden’s capitalized use of it here in the 84 : : : Auden, Eliot, and Post-national Poetry

Freud elegy two decades or so later.39 (Pound’s poetry has plentiful references to Jews in the intervening period, but these, like Eliot’s, are lower-cased.40) In referring to an “important Jew,” Auden launches an explicit counterattack on Eliot’s prejudicial presentation of Jewishness. And even more to the fore as a pressure in Auden’s phrase about an “important Jew” is the famous passage in After Strange Gods where for reasons of “race and religion” Eliot deprecates the “undesirable” presence of “any large number of free-thinking Jews.”41 Here, it is specifically the intellectually emancipated, secular, postEnlightenment Jewish thinkers, represented perhaps most nobly by Freud, to whom Eliot objects. But to understand the full moral and political force of Auden’s interest in Freud as a way of differentiating his writing from Eliot’s “national” modernism, we need to situate the elegy in a larger, and largely private, debate about Jewishness that had been going on between Eliot and Auden intermittently for some years before 1939. Perhaps the most important moment in that interchange occurred in 1934. Auden’s first major appearance in print had been in the Criterion in January 1930, when Eliot had printed the charade Paid on Both Sides. In the next few years, Auden reviewed regularly for Eliot’s periodical but, perhaps slightly oddly, his poetry only made one further appearance there. In the spring of 1934, Auden had submitted a long, prosaic poem beginning “‘Sweet is it,’ say the doomed, ‘to be alive though wretched’” to Eliot. The poem (Eliotically) posits an ideological and intellectual exhaustion that has overtaken the whole culture of Europe: “the great ordered flower itself is withering.” Auden then introduces a catalog of intellectual healers who promise moral and spiritual renewal. The name that stands at the head of this ragbag collection of heroes is Freud’s — “Yes, Freud who made a new Vienna famous.”42 Auden’s poem praising Freud, as well as Marx and Einstein (the latter two were also amongst Eliot’s bêtes noires: in 1935 he attacked Marx as a “Jewish economist,” while he had earlier referred derisively in print to “Einstein the Great”),43 was rejected by the Criterion’s editor. When he wrote back to Auden announcing his decision he evidently made some perhaps justifiable comments about the prolixity of the piece. Auden, replying, told him:“I quite agree with what you say about my own work, which badly needs a censor.”44 And, with the letter explaining that Auden’s poetry needed a “censor,” Eliot had also evidently sent the younger poet a copy of his most recent book, the censorious After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. Auden replied only after a long interval and started his response awkwardly — “I can hardly now even apologize for not writing before to thank you for the Primer and your letter,” is how his letter, when he finally sent it, begins. While gamely agreeing that he needed a “censor,” as Eliot had said, Auden also Nicholas Jenkins : : : 85

took the opportunity to comment on Eliot’s famous attack on “heresy” in After Strange Gods: “Some of the general remarks, if you will forgive me saying so, rather shocked me, because if they are put into a political scale, and it seems quite likely [they will be], [they] would produce a world in which neither I nor you I think would like to live.”45 He apparently never submitted another poem to the Criterion during its remaining five years of life. What was the nub of Eliot’s distrust of emancipated Jews? It is their supposed unrootedness, their lack of moral and religious (and the correlative national) allegiances that disturbed Eliot, as, clearly, they disturbed many at the time. This is evident in an important exchange of correspondence that Eliot had with a former student, J. V. Healy, in 1940, when Healy wrote to Eliot about Pound, while also complaining specifically about the anti-Semitism of the “free-thinking Jews” sentence.46 Eliot replied, in part: “The Jew who is separated from his religious faith is much more deracinated thereby than the descendant of Christians, and it is this deracination that I think dangerous and tending to irresponsibility.”47 Free-thinking (Jewish) deracination is, for Eliot, a state directly antithetical to that of his own ideal, delimited, social unit, Christian and local. In The Idea of a Christian Society, mainly written between October 1938, and March 1939, Eliot takes as his desirable social “norm, the idea of a small and mostly self-contained group attached to the soil and having its interests centered in a particular place, with a kind of unity which may be designed, but which also has to grow through generations.”48 By way of contrast to this rooted Christian community of the soil, even as late as the beginning of the war, Eliot (himself a strangely unrooted person, who never, during all the years he lived in Britain, owned a house) was holding to his view of the Jew as the primary avatar of a religionless, rootless, non-national modernity — precisely what Auden at the same time was celebrating in his elegy for Freud. For Auden, seeking to move beyond the horizon of nationality as war broke out in Europe between nations, the figure of a heroic Jew offered clear metaphoric possibilities to articulate an alternative to the closed society of the nation-state. unsettlements Much of the intertextual debate about Jews in Eliot’s and Auden’s poetry turns around a mandarin fastidiousness about the connotations of particular, highly loaded names and terms:“J/jew,”“London,”“clever.”As if in contrast to the Freud poem’s apparently forthright eloquence, much of the argumentative charge is in fact conveyed figurally or through the use of highly overdetermined language — poetry as a kind of verbal chess. Auden attributes 86 : : : Auden, Eliot, and Post-national Poetry

to “this doctor” an intense sensitivity to the moments when words, especially in poetry, quiver, shimmer, or are shaken out of their customary meanings: Freud, he writes, “merely told / The unhappy Present to recite the Past / Like a poetry lesson.” What he listened for as an analyst was the moment “sooner / Or later” when the Past “faltered at the line where / Long ago the accusations had begun” (AT 117). Ironically, Freud’s and Auden’s alertness to linguistic frisson looks like a highly Eliotic characteristic, by which I mean that the sensitivity to the expressive possibilities of the dazzling single word redeployed, the picked out and savored term, the poetic mot juste (or, as here, the mot injuste), the cherished injection of abstruseness, as in the “Erhebung without motion” of “Burnt Norton” (CPP 173). Eliot desires to “purify the dialectic of the tribe” (CPP 194) from what The Rock calls “the slimy mud of words” (CPP 164) or, as “Burnt Norton” suggests, to pick out the nuggetlike “Garlic and sapphires” of poetry from the “mud” of sloppy colloquial usage (CPP 172).“Burnt Norton,” the only one of the Four Quartets to have appeared at the time when Auden was writing “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” struggles repeatedly against that dangerous fragility and instability of language: Words there “slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still” (CPP 175). Freud celebrates verbal parapraxes; Eliot seeks desperately to extirpate them. And it is this inability of words to stay in place, to stay immobile and retain their original meanings, that Auden seizes on for his strategy in the Freud elegy. The precision and defined meaning of Eliot’s terms are repeatedly undermined by Auden in the moment when he turns them to new account. The 1939 Freud elegy supplies another instance of this species of subversive verbal back-and-forth. The mobility of free-thinking Jews, never quite organically fixed in any single place, always both inside and outside particular national collectives, is the quality that the Eliot of After Strange Gods and perhaps by extension Four Quartets holds against them, just as Eliot holds that deracinated mobility against language itself. For Eliot, as Maud Ellmann comments, “the bounds of meaning” are identified “with the boundaries of the community, so that the stability of one depends upon the other.”49 Freethinking Jews have, according to Eliot, no religious, national, or local affiliations, and this is objectionable and “dangerous.” For Auden, in contrast to Eliot, it is just this unrootedness that makes the Jew a representative figure of our time. Auden wrote in a review of Kafka’s work in 1941: “The Jews have for a long time been placed in the position in which we are now all to be, of having no home.”50 And Auden, in a slipping, sliding pun, writes in his 1939 elegy about Freud’s legacy as a “technique of unsettlement.” It is, then, a technique Nicholas Jenkins : : : 87

that will disturb our faith in received religious or national pieties. But it is also a technique that will, literally unsettle us, put us into movement, make us eclectic, internationalized in our purview. Here again, as in the redeployments of “London” or “Jew,” the language Auden uses is self-consciously taken over from, and then turned against, Eliot. The word “settle” and its cognates or negations irradiate Eliot’s writing for prose and poetry of the mid 1930s, as Auden would certainly have been aware. In the second chorus of The Rock, for example, the text attacks the “life that is not in community” by way of satire on the car: “all dash to and fro in motor cars, / Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere” (CPP 101–2). Elsewhere, in After Strange Gods, we find Eliot lamenting that people today are born into an “unsettled society” and, later, that this is an age of “unsettled beliefs” (ASG 27, 67). In a piece written only slightly later, Eliot asserts that a desirable arrangement of society such that “whatever ought to be preserved exactly as it is, will be in no danger” will require “a healthy, settled agriculture.”51 And in 1938 he argues that “it is necessary that the greater part of the population . . . should be settled in the country.”52 To “unsettle,” then, as Auden praises Freud for doing, is to connect modernity and movement, a state emblematized for both Eliot and Auden by the phenomenon of Jewish deracination, as against Eliot’s old neofeudal and agricultural order of “settled” attachment to the soil and purely internal religious “exploration.” “Settlement” and “integration” for Eliot are preconditions of a religious civilization; “unsettlement” for Auden is a precondition for a paradoxical at-homeness in the deterritorialized, emancipated modern world where all genuine community takes the form of a temporary gathering of exiles. freud, the poet If Auden’s poem for Freud sets out to be honorific, it also allows space for Freud’s obstinacies and foibles to be raised into view. His “paternal strictness,”for example, is commented on, as well as the fact that “often he was wrong and at times absurd” (AT 118). And the poem does not slight the religious controversies that engulfed Freud in his last years of life, admitting that he had to “bear our cry of ‘Judas’” (AT 119). The uttering of the archetypal religious traitor’s name is the most intense moment in what generally strives to be an emotionally cool, unruffled poem. But “Judas” is an epithet that might very well have come naturally to mind in connection with Freud at the very end of the 1930s, as Jewishness did, especially after the publication early in 1939 of Freud’s last book, Moses and Monotheism. In that intensely polemical volume, which Jewish leaders around the world had pleaded with Freud not to publish, he con88 : : : Auden, Eliot, and Post-national Poetry

tentiously tackled both “race and religion” head on, de-Judaizing Moses and suggesting that the Jewish faith was Egyptian in origin. In correspondence Freud himself had likened what he had done in Moses and Monotheism to the writing of a “historical novel.”53 But, if the late Freud imagined himself as writing fiction, Auden, who emphatically Judaizes Freud in his elegy, briefly imagines the psychoanalyst as analogous to a writer working in a different, older, and competing genre — poetry. The poetic argument that the Freud elegy makes is enriched, then, by the analogies drawn between Freud, “this doctor,” and the poet Dante, both of them seen by Auden as engaged in harrowings of the hell of the social and psychological Unconscious. In making this comparison, Auden reads Dante psychoanalytically and Freud poetically, a conceptual chiasmus that is licensed by the attention that both poetry and psychoanalysis pay to linguistic slippages and overdeterminations. That was perhaps why Freud himself could claim that the poets had arrived at one of his fundamental concepts before he had: “Not I, but the poets discovered the unconscious.” Auden’s own intuition of this point must, in part, be why Freud, the poem says, encourages the Present to “recite the Past / Like a poetry lesson.” A little later, the comparison between a poetic text and a psychoanalytic “case,” is extended when Auden adds that Freud “went his way, / Down among the Lost People like Dante” (AT 118). To compare Freud to Dante, as Auden did, is not just to produce an unlikely but suggestive collocation of cultural heroes. It is also to move again into the orbit of political and ethical issues crucial to late modernism, and in particular to the later, more classicist, modernism of Eliot. For, given Eliot’s widely influential readings of Dante, it would have been hard for a writer such as Auden at this period to think about Dante’s work and not to think about, or invoke or struggle with, at the same time, Eliot’s own writing. Thus, the imagery of travel in Auden’s poem, here represented by Freud/Dante’s heroic journey into the lowest reaches of Hell, reflects an immediate poetic contrast between Eliot’s Dante and Auden’s. For Eliot, Dante was the point of origin for the European vernacular literatures, the poet of total orthodoxy and of the “still center.” Conversely, Auden’s Dante is in motion here: an explorer, a traveler, a disenchanter, an empiricist (with just an eccentric hint of the paternalistic Victorian philanthropist, such as Henry Mayhew, on foot in the depths of a hell much like darkest London). The competitiveness and specificity of the differences between Eliot’s Dante and Auden’s are made more pointed by the ways in which Auden uses here the translation of Dante that Eliot had made canonical for a whole generation of readers, poets, and acolytes. This was the “Carlyle-Wicksteed” translation of Nicholas Jenkins : : : 89

the Commedia, first published at the turn of the century and still widely available in Britain in Auden’s time as the Temple Classics edition and in the United States (from 1932 onward) in the Modern Library edition.54 Thus the elegy’s phrase the “Lost People” is borrowed from Carlyle-Wicksteed’s the “people lost” (for “perduta gente”) at the start of canto 3 of the Inferno. Obvious enough, one might think; perhaps an accidental resemblance? But consider that when, in Auden’s poem, Dante/Freud is said to go down to “the stinking fosse where the injured / Lead the ugly life of the rejected,” Auden draws the distinctly unlikely and uncontemporary word “fosse” from CarlyleWicksteed’s preamble to the translation of canto 18 in the Inferno, the description of the foul-smelling sinners, including the “Flatterers immersed in filth” who are trapped in Malebolge, a place that has “ten deep fosses or chasms, resembling the trenches which begird a fortress.”55 Even as Auden brings an Eliotic linguistic milieu to mind, then, he subtly separates himself from Eliot’s ideas about the relationship between poetic language and social realities by presenting a counterversion of Dante, a Dante who is an explorer not a mystic, a pragmatist not a dogmatist. And, as he does this, Auden uses this idiom of translationese, borrowed from Carlyle-Wicksteed, to push his poetic style into new placeless or denationalized linguistic spaces (by 1939 “fosse” was an abandoned, archaic word in contemporary speech) within the English language. a “rational voice”? As “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” turns away from authentication through the link with a national or local culture, its attempt to rethink identity within an internationalized context also goes with a new kind of poetic tone. What looks at first like the sign of the poem’s search for a contemporary updating of neoclassical restraint, is in fact something more like a historical innovation. Auden’s elegy is a deliberately “public poem,” that, unlike most twentieth-century elegies, conspicuously does not depend for its effects on the fiction of personal grief for Freud as an individual. For Auden, Freud is truly “no more a person / Now but a whole climate of opinion” (AT 118). Part of the reason for this experiment in rational distance from the dying subject must stem from the poem’s insistent downplaying of origins (we are told where Freud died but not where he was born or lived for most of his life). But the speaker’s identity remains almost as enigmatic as the subject’s. The place from which the poem is spoken, as well as who exactly is speaking it, are slightly vague and undefined. And this leads to a curiously affectless, hovering quality of voice, one that has recently become familiar in poetry for which a convenient shorthand term is “postmodern.” Auden’s turn away from modernism’s ideologies of national rootedness is bound up with poetry’s gradual 90 : : : Auden, Eliot, and Post-national Poetry

ironization of the self-disclosures of the emotive lyric voice. Auden’s elegy for Freud can be read as a demystifying dirge for the romantic psyche and the romantic national subject that Freud had spent his life anatomizing. Freud himself points out that mourning is not just a process centering on an absent person, but can also reflect a historical change or passing, the “loss of some abstraction, which has taken the place of [a loved person], such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”56 This tonal neutrality is also related to Auden’s equivocal desire to escape from the very duplicities of language that allow him to turn words like “clever,” “London,” and “settle” against Eliot. While relying for some of its effects on irrational linguistic slippages, Auden’s poem celebrates an intellectual obsessed by the work of analysis, the “undiscouraged shining” of the rational Ego and the “bright circle of his recognition” (AT 116). As it does, the elegy seems to be declaring its own wish for a purely argumentative, analytic poetry, as if that pragmatic, analytic Ego could conquer or colonize the territory formerly occupied by the duplicitous poetic Id, the anarchic, tropologically slippery world of the unconscious from which myth, image, and metaphor surge up. “When there are so many we shall have to mourn . . .” it begins hopefully, “Of whom shall we speak?” (AT 116). As if by “speaking” it could leave behind or root out the suspect history of poetic visions, the magically irrational logic of images, linguistic feints, and undeclared ambivalences and could instead, “serve enlightenment” by turning to the clear, discursive world of reason.57 But of course, this attempt to write a purely rational poetry is only a partial success, for reasons that are inherent to the psychology of mourning. As Freud emphasizes in “Mourning and Melancholia,” the path of successful mourning is most frequently a visual one, as recollections of the lost loved one are called into memory, like images projected onto a screen, in order to be experienced and dismissed.58 So, the elegy may want to claim that Freud’s work has made “the tired in even / The remotest most miserable duchy” feel “the change in their bones” (AT 118), as if the lessons he taught were spoken once and for all, as if they were irreversible. But it also has a countermessage to deliver. That is that the old, prerational (visual) modes survive, as does the place of divination and speculation in poetry: “he would have us remember most of all / To be enthusiastic over the night” (AT 119). The death of Freud is also imagined as marking the death of his legacy, his rational and materialistic hopes for human emancipation. “One rational voice is dumb,” the poem declares mournfully, ambiguously (AT 120). And at a point where the “rational voice”turns “dumb,”the poem’s language drives us away from surface meanings and toward subterranean verbal “echoes.” One such echo is of the relation between “voice” and “dumb” in Nicholas Jenkins : : : 91

Auden’s own “September 1, 1939,” where he had asked, “Who can speak for the dumb? / All I have is a voice” (EA 246, my emphasis). And, second, it powerfully echoes Matthew Arnold’s dirge in “Memorial Verses,” which contemplates the possibility that, with Wordsworth’s death, poetry itself has come to an end:“The last poetic voice is dumb.”59 For Arnold, a certain kind of inspired utterance had died with Wordsworth; for Auden, a certain representative kind of rational argument (but not necessarily a “poetic” one . . .) might be dying as war breaks out and as Freud expires. When the patriarch of rational analysis vanishes into the grave, language in Auden’s elegy reasserts its anarchic and subversive powers: the language that Auden turned against Eliot can also turn against Auden. There is, for instance, something conflicted in the phrase about a “rational voice” that is, in the obvious American colloquial sense, “dumb.” (This, in the wake of the declaration that Freud “wasn’t clever at all” [AT 117].) Ramazani comments acutely in The Poetry of Mourning that Auden’s elegies are most distinctive in “his technique of homolinguistic imitation: he writes a Yeatsian elegy for Yeats, a Freudian elegy for Freud, and a Jamesian elegy for James, bridging the gap between himself and the dead in the very style and conception of his elegies.”60 This is certainly true. But one could also turn the argument around and stress the ways in which, as they die, Auden’s poetry temporarily Audenizes Yeats, Freud, and James. He becomes them, but they also become him. We have seen already how Auden consistently relates Freud to poetry, and especially to Dante. At the poem’s most memorable moments an unvarnished plainness of assertion, the “bright circle,” seems to give way to baroque figurativeness: Freud is constantly being likened to something by Auden. In the crucible of the poet’s imagery he can be turned into almost anything; at different moments he is like the old, like children, like Dante, like the weather, or, we may infer, like Auden. The poem’s prosaic lucidity at the opening thus gives way to a series of hyperbolic declarations and highly imagistic scenarios, all culminating in the emotional but statuesque tableau with which the poem concludes: “Over a grave / The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved” (AT 120). There, as rationality is lost, maternal “feeling” is given back to the “son,” as Auden says Freud had hoped it would be, but in a situation of what seems to be perpetual mourning. In later Greek mythology Eros was commonly described as the son of Aphrodite (and of either the god of war, Ares, or, her own father, Zeus, with an implication that, as Graves puts it, “sexual passion does not stop short at incest”). And Eros, Aphrodite’s son, is also sometimes figured as her erotic companion.61 In Auden’s poem, then, the restoration to the Greek son of the Greek mother’s richness of feeling occurs precisely as a result of the death of 92 : : : Auden, Eliot, and Post-national Poetry

the Jewish father figure and the consequent passing of the paternalistic Enlightenment dispensation for which Freud had worked. Here, the hopes for a rational voice in poetry and the aspirations of Freud, the “important Jew,” are ostentatiously buried in a grave over which Eros and Aphrodite preside, marmoreally frozen in an eternal moment of incestuous closeness between mother and son, a perpetual, Marvellian enactment of public weeping underwritten by incestuous private passions. (The “household of impulse,” consisting of Zeus, Aphrodite, and Eros, thus conceivably contained a woman whose lover was the son she had had with her own father.) It is a scenario that looks appropriate to what Ramazani calls the endless, modern, and anti-Freudian form of “melancholic mourning.”62 At the poem’s end, Auden’s Greek tableau of a neoclassical grave seems at first to set the seal on, and control, “Jewish” modernity and rational liberation. Does that mark the poem’s failure to believe in its own vision of rational speech and a cosmopolitan world of “human beings” and not “nations,” the world that in mid October 1939, as he was writing the Freud elegy, Auden had told a Time interviewer he hoped for and had faith in? The hint of an incestuous and sterile relation between Eros and Aphrodite, the Greek gods mourning Freud, is important. For, in spite of the gods’ weeping, as Auden was later to write in “Memorial for the City,” in the postclassical world “Our grief is not Greek” (CP 592). The stylized and slightly synthetic final Greek tableau cannot satisfactorily complete its gesture of closure on and farewell to the Jew any more than Homer’s Odysseus can contain or fix Joyce’s Bloom. During the passage toward extinction that is Freud’s life, his words have been put into circulation. They become detached from their origins and are inserted into an uncontrollable space. “Like weather,” Auden writes, “he can only hinder or help” (AT 118). The neoclassical closure of the Freud elegy is therefore strangely ineffectual: the poem’s earlier sentiments about the change wrought by Freud’s work can no more be called back than time or storms can be stopped; “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” flows over its own supposed limits: “individual death” does not terminate the powers unleashed by Freud’s body of work. One of the chief theorists of nationalism, Benedict Anderson, cautions that in the modern world, “everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender.”63 At moments, Auden’s text perhaps comes close to endorsing this determinism, even as it struggles against the suspicion that in the modern world subjecthood and nationality are inevitably created together. Freud cannot simply escape from the patriarchal culture he critiques: “something of the autocratic pose, / The paternal strictness he distrusted, still / Clung to his Nicholas Jenkins : : : 93

utterance and features,” the poem admits (AT 118). And Auden’s poetry cannot simply escape from the figurative character of language into the abstract, any more than it can entirely sever its ties to a poetic movement or a national tradition. Similarly, the very intensity of Auden’s poetic hostility to Eliot and the agendas of late modernism in 1939 is predicated on his uneasy closeness to Eliot’s project and to his continuing engagement with the ideological debates of the Old World. But that very closeness exposes these ideologies to “critique.” Freud’s emancipatory work, the elegy warns, was left incomplete, as its own work is too. He “closed his eyes / Upon that last picture common to us all,” Auden writes, describing the scene at Freud’s deathbed, where the threatening “picture” has already begun to usurp the language-based clarities of speech and reason. The “last picture” Freud sees is “Of problems like relatives standing / Puzzled and jealous about our dying” (AT 116). The “creatures” of the night still remain “exiles who long for the future / That lies in our power” (AT 119). But at the same time that the poem acknowledges in its own movement the powerful pull of nationalizing ideologies and irrational visions, the dividedness of “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” alerts us to the historically demarcated and limited experience of nationhood and nationality. This is a condition, the poem hints, that will ultimately prove as perishable as the individuals who, like Freud,“every day . . . die / Among us,”those individuals whom every day poetry buries and remembers (AT 116). In 1939, as a war after the “war to end all wars” broke out, Auden wrote a poem that elegized a heroic individual by affirming the idea that, however short lives may be, borders, unlike graves, can never be truly sealed, and by showing that, unlike lives, history, poems, and dreams (utopian or otherwise) can never truly end. notes Grateful thanks for generous (and, at times, benevolently ruthless) help with an earlier version of this essay are due to Mark Ford, Siri Huntoon, John Kelly, Edward Mendelson, Jahan Ramazani, and Helen Vendler. Thanks are also due to Renée Allyson Fox for research assistance. 1 Jose Harris, “War and Social History: Britain and the Home Front during the Second World War,” Contemporary European History 1, no. 1 (1992): p. 22; E. S. Turner, The Phoney War on the Home Front (London: Michael Joseph, 1961), p. 12. 2 Recorded in P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, vol. 2, Polycrates’ Ring, 1914–1970 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1978), p. 228. 3 Outstanding recent readings of Auden’s Freud poem itself, to all of which I am gratefully indebted even when I occasionally differ from them on points of detail, include Jahan Ramazani’s in Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 192–97; Rosanna Warren’s in “Alcaics 94 : : : Auden, Eliot, and Post-national Poetry

4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

in Exile: W. H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud,’” Philosophy and Literature 20, no. 1 (April 1996): pp. 111–21; Edward Mendelson’s in Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), pp. 85–88; and John Fuller’s in W. H. Auden: A Commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 294–95. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new editon with added prefaces (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 277. T. S. Eliot,“The Social Function of Poetry,” reprinted in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), p. 8. T. S. Eliot, cited in Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), p. 407. Autograph Letter Signed (thereafter ALS) to E. R. Dodds, January 16, 1940, Bodleian Library. W. H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 243. Hereafter EA; references subsequently in main text. W. H. Auden, Another Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1940). Hereafter AT; references subsequently in main text. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), p. 7. E. R. Dodds, ed., The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 165. Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 3: The War of Words, rev. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1995). ALS to E. R. Dodds, August 28, 1939, Bodleian Library. Christopher Isherwood, Diaries, vol. 1: 1939–1960, ed. Katherine Bucknell (London: Methuen, 1996), p. 46. ALS to E. R. Dodds, January 16, 1940, Bodleian Library. Auden’s “Hotel” comment is cited by Benjamin Britten in an April 4, 1940, letter to Kit Welford (Benjamin Britten, Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, 1913–1976, eds. Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed, et al., vol. 2 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991], p. 794). The “Great Void” comes from Auden’s ALS to Naomi Mitchison, November 14, 1943, collection of Mitchison. In a transcript by Richard Eberhart, “W. H. Auden,” Berg Archive. “Noonday & Night,” Time, October 30, 1939, p. 66. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, rev. ed., ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 276. Hereafter CP; references subsequently in main text. Virginia Woolf, “The Leaning Tower” (1940), reprinted in A Woman’s Essays, vol. 1, Virginia Woolf, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London: Bowlby Penguin, 1992), p. 172. “Comment,” Horizon 1, no. 6 (June 1940): p. 390. Cited in R. A. C. Parker, Struggle for Survival: The History of the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 266. See, for instance, “Dr. Sigmund Freud Dies in Exile: Founder of Psychoanalysis Theory Succumbs at his Home Near London,” New York Times, September 24, 1939, p. 1. “Giant in the Earth,” New Republic, October 4 1939, p. 226. See also similar comments in “Sigmund Freud,” New York Post, September 26, 1939, p. 12. Nicholas Jenkins : : : 95

25. See Roy Campbell, Flowering Rifle: A Poem from the Battlefield of Spain (London: Longmans, Green, 1939), p. 33. 26 Ibid., pp. 108, 109. 27 Evelyn Waugh, Put out More Flags (London: Penguin, 1942), p. 34. 28 “War Books,” Horizon 4, no. 24 (December 1941): p. 420. 29 On Freud’s own identification with Moses, see in particular Jack J. Spector, The Aesthetics of Freud: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Spector Praeger, 1973), pp. 64–68. 30 Empson noted “this curious line of sentiment about the word ‘clever,’” in a review of Another Time in Life and Letters Today, August 1, 1940, reprinted in John Haffenden, ed., W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 306–7. 31 Review of The Future of an Illusion, The Criterion, 8, no. 31 (December 1928): p. 350. 32 Cited in Peter Gay’s A Godless Jew (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 137. 33 George Orwell, “Antisemitism in Britain” (1945), reprinted in The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 17, I Belong to the Left, 1945, eds. Peter Davison, Ian Angus, and Sheila Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), p. 67. 34 Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, 1930–1939, ed. Nigel Nicolson (New York: Athenaeum, 1966), p. 53. In 1940 Nicolson questioned Auden’s “exile” and the propriety of “our most liberated intellectuals” refusing “to identify themselves . . . with those who fight” in “People and Things,” Spectator, 5834 (April 19, 1940): p. 555. 35 Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (hereafter CEP) (New York: New Directions, 1996), p. 516. 36 The bibliography is enormous. The most prominent and exhaustive recent study is by Anthony Julius in T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 37 See Andrea Freud Loewenstein, Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women: Metaphors of Projection in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams, and Graham Greene (New York: New York University Press, 1993), p. 25. 38 Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “The Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. xi. 39 See T. S. Eliot’s The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). Hereafter CPP; references subsequently cited in main text. 40 See, for instance, canto 52: “jews, real jews, chazims, and neschek” (The Cantos of Ezra Pound [New York: New Directions, 1996], p. 257). 41 T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), p. 20. Hereafter ASG; references subsequently cited in main text. 42 Written March 1934, first printed in W. H. Auden, “Five Early Poems,” ed. Edward Mendelson, Times Literary Supplement, January 16, 1976, p. 53. 43 “A Commentary,” Criterion, April 1935, p. 433; “London Letter,” Dial 71, no. 2 (August 1921): pp. 213–17. The latter comment is cited in Cheyette’s Constructions of “The Jew,” p. 249. 44 ALS, April 26, 1934, to Eliot, Faber Archive. 45 Ibid. 96 : : : Auden, Eliot, and Post-national Poetry

46 Healy published a review-essay called “The Pound Problem,” in Poetry 57, no. 3 (December 1940): pp. 200–14. 47 May 10, 1940, cited in Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 44. See also Julius, T. S. Eliot, pp. 203–5. 48 T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), pp. 29–30. 49 Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 51. 50 “The Wandering Jew,” New Republic 104, no. 1367 (February 10, 1941): p. 186. 51 “A Commentary,” Criterion 14, no. 54 (October 1934): p. 89. 52 “A Commentary,” Criterion 18, no. 70 (October 1938): p. 60. 53 Ernest L. Freud, ed., Letters of Sigmund Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), p. 418. 54 The Inferno translation by John Aitken Carlyle, the Purgatorio by Thomas Okey, and the Paradiso by Philip H. Wicksteed. Auden’s own copy of the Modern Library Dante is now in the Harry H. Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. 55 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (New York: Modern Library, 1932), p. 101. 56 Sigmund Freud,“Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–) p. 243. 57 Cf. Freud’s comment on reading the proofs of The Interpretation of Dreams: “What I dislike about it is the style, which was quite incapable of noble, simple expression and lapsed into facetious circumlocutions straining after metaphors” (to Fliess, September 11, 1899: The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess: 1887–1904, trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson [Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985], p. 371). 58 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Standard Edition, vol. 14, p. 245. 59 Matthew Arnold, “Memorial Verses,” The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 2nd ed., ed. Kenneth Allott and Miriam Allott (London, Longman, 1979), p. 239. 60 Ramanzani, Poetry of Mourning, p. xii. 61 See for example Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 3–4, and Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, vol. 1 (Baltimore: Penguin, 1955), pp. 58–59. 62 Ramanzani, Poetry of Mourning, p. xi. 63 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 5.

Nicholas Jenkins : : : 97

“A Whole Climate of Opinion” Auden’s Influence on Bishop bonnie costello

We tend to think about influence in terms of the family tree, but there is no deep tap-root uniting Elizabeth Bishop and W. H. Auden. Auden’s ties are to a civil tradition derived from Chaucer and Pope. Bishop’s line is meditative and descriptive, drawn from the metaphysicals, the romantics, and most immediately, from the symbolist element of modernism. Auden’s influence on her work, while pervasive, is more horizontal, something like an atmosphere or a climate: dispersed, changing, felt rather than perceived. Consequently, while Auden’s importance to American poets such as Randall Jarrell, John Ashbery, and James Merrill has been widely acknowledged, his role in Bishop’s development has received little attention. But for Bishop, I want to argue, Auden provided a crucial counterpoint to the modernist poets whose legacy she had inherited.1 He helped her find ways to distinguish herself from her literary parentage, by offering an authoritative example of what contemporary poetry might look like. Bishop may be partially responsible for the gap in critical commentary on this influence. When Ashley Brown asked her about Auden, she remarked, “I bought all his books as they came out and read them a great deal. But he didn’t affect my poetic practice.”2 She turned the discussion toward Wallace Stevens, and a number of Bishop critics have followed that lead. But Bishop would not be the first poet to cover her tracks. To George Starbuck she was more forthcoming about Auden’s importance. When asked to recall, from her youth, “who, among the poets in the generation ahead of [her]” did she know she would have to “come to terms with,” her answer was Auden. “All through my college years, Auden was publishing his early books, and I and my friends, a few of us, were very much interested in him. His first books made a tremendous impression on me.”3 And in her contribution to the Harvard Advocate tribute to Auden a few years before, in 1974, she had written: All through the thirties and forties, I and all my friends who were interested in poetry, read him constantly. We hurried to see his latest poem or book,

and either wrote as much like him as possible, or tried hard not to. His then leftist politics, his ominous landscapes, his intimations of betrayed loves, war on its way, disasters and death, matched exactly the mood of our latedepression and post-depression youth. We admired his apparent toughness, his sexual courage — actually more honest than Ginsberg’s say, is now, while still giving expression to technically dazzling poetry. Even the most hermetic early poems gave us the feeling that here was someone who knew — about psychology, geology, birds, love, the evils of capitalism — what have you? They colored our air and made us feel tough, ready, and in the know, too.4 Bishop seems to have had difficulty analyzing Auden’s impact. In general, after a few precocious college pieces, she abandoned critical writing. Her Advocate essay reverts, after a few remarks, to a page and a half of quotations, concluding: “These verses and many, many more of Auden’s, have been part of my mind for years — I could say, part of my life” (HA 47). Those verses worked their way into Bishop’s poetry as well, not only in timely themes, but also in form and idiom. Her imagination is more skeptical, more observational, less didactic and epigrammatic than Auden’s. Her impersonal mode is more drawn to external particulars than to general truths of human nature. So his influence is oblique. But we can recognize it nevertheless, diffused through the texture of her work. Bishop was publicly reticent concerning Auden, but the evidence of her enthusiasm is readily available in her archive from the 1930s. Her slim Key West Notebook (1937–38) contains at least five references to Auden, and on February 25, 1937, she writes to Marianne Moore that she is working on a review (“my first”) about Auden’s Look Stranger! (which appeared in the United States as On This Island). Brett Millier’s biography of Bishop thought the piece lost, but an incomplete draft, entitled “Mechanics of Pretense,” has since been located in the Vassar Special Collections.5 As with the Advocate piece, the essay lapses into quotation after only a few paragraphs. Yet one point from the unfinished essay is clear: Auden created a language appropriate to the world in which Bishop lived. Marianne Moore provided a personal role model and mentor, encouraging Bishop’s penchant for descriptive accuracy; T. S. Eliot suggested ways to represent consciousness and its alienation; Wallace Stevens stood as the modern romantic who could reimagine and thus rehumanize reality. But Auden was the poet who, for Bishop, confronted reality as it was, and developed a language that echoed, in order to expose, the hypocrisies, evasions, and falsehoods of his time. He offered Bishop’s generation, as well, a way out of the impasses of modernism, its crisis mentality, its withdrawal from history, and Bonnie Costello : : : 99

its fetishizing of technique. Auden represented the successful integration of “dazzling technique” with “real world” psychological, social, and political experience. Bishop writes in “Mechanics of Pretense”: In his earlier stages the poet is the verbal actor. One of the causes of poetry must be, we suppose, the feeling that the contemporary language is not equivalent to the contemporary fact; there is something out of proportion between them, and what is being said in words is not at all what is being said in “things.” To correct this disproportion a pretense is at first necessary. By “pretending” the existence of a language appropriate and comparable to “things” it must deal with, the language is forced into being. It is learned by one person, by a few, by all who can become interested in that poet’s poetry. The world conducted its business, Bishop thought, through a rhetoric formed of moral and emotional cowardice, repression, self-deception, escapism, rationalization, and inhumanity. The impersonal rhetoric masked facts that impinged on real lives: economic collapse, brutality, emotional hunger, failures, and betrayals of all kinds. Auden developed a poetry that could catch that rhetoric as it faltered against fact. He could thus, as Bishop says in the draft, quoting Edward Gibbon, “raise the imagination to a higher pitch” so that it imitates “real service.” Auden had to “pretend” that self-conscious language into being: this process explains his transitional resemblance to the Modernists, and the obscurity of his early works, which groped to express what had no prior lexicon. The Greek scholar E. R. Dodds, writing to Auden upon receipt of his early Poems, also recognized this incipient language. “I recognized the tones of a new, completely individual voice and the presence of some highly compressed message which was trying to force its way into expression.”6 Once uttered, though, the language takes on a power over things, brings them into being, or rather becomes the terms in which we see and experience the world. Bishop writes: “Now the language arouses an independent life in things.” Bishop and her generation, she implies, see and experience the world of the 1930s through the language Auden invented. She writes of “the tendency, described by William Empson, of what a poet writes to become real; the tendency towards ‘prophecy’; obscurity and influence are all of this original act of pretense.” Bishop did not carry on a profound dialogue with Auden, as she did with Wordsworth in “At the Fishhouses” or with Herman Melville and Thomas Hardy in “The Imaginary Iceberg.” Rather, Auden represented the very atmosphere of a vital new poetry, and she took it in globally, so that it entered her early work in palpable sounds and phrases, attitudes and idioms. I don’t mean to contradict the conventional view that modernism, and Eliot in particular, had a major influence on Bishop’s early work. Her examination 100 : : : Auden’s Influence on Bishop

of consciousness and perception, and of experience in time, owes a great deal to Eliot and his generation. But the 1930s were defined, at least in the minds of Bishop and her schoolmates, by the Auden generation. Like many young poets, like Auden himself turning to Hardy, Bishop looked for a language to represent disappointed, unconsummated, and disillusioned love, love in the environment of the actual, contemporary world of social and material constraint. The conditions of human connection had changed, and so must its language. The courtship tradition could not address the failures of modern intimacy. Eliot’s abjection and dissociation, Stevens’s idealism and reduction, or Moore’s ironic detachment were less compelling than Auden’s acknowledgment of transitory “human love” with its unease, excess caution, perversion, petty betrayals, and compromises, and its tendency to withdraw into wounded isolation. Auden’s poems represented love in its modern condition, shaped by social contingencies and set in industrial landscapes. Bishop’s poem “Chemin de Fer” (1946), while it may not sound obviously Audenesque, indicates how, in the first ten years of her publishing career, she had absorbed the themes, imagery, and diction of Auden’s poems. Even his early “Control of the Passes” (1928), part of which Bishop copied out in her “Mechanics of Pretense,” may underlie some details in “Chemin de Fer.” Auden’s poem begins: Control of the passes was, he saw, the key To this new district, but who would get it? He, the trained spy, had walked into the trap For a bogus guide, seduced by the old tricks. At Greenhearth was a fine site for a dam And easy power, had they pushed the rail Some stations nearer.7 Bishop’s speaker, like Auden’s describes an industrialized landscape that maps an unstated emotional tension: Alone on the railroad track I walked with pounding heart. The ties were too close together or maybe too far apart. The scenery was impoverished: scrub-pine and oak; beyond its mingled gray-green foliage I saw the little pond Bonnie Costello : : : 101

where the dirty hermit lives, lie like an old tear holding onto its injuries lucidly year after year. The hermit shot off his shot-gun and the tree by his cabin shook. Over the pond went a ripple. The pet hen went chook-chook. “Love should be put into action!” screamed the old hermit. Across the pond an echo tried and tried to confirm it.8 Of course “Chemin de Fer” differs from “Control of the Passes” in most respects: the narrative is different, the landscape is more descriptive and less allegorically contoured than in Auden. But in Auden’s pervasive mapping of love’s geography, with its guarded borders and silent waters, its mixture of natural and industrial images, and its use of transportation as figure for the transitory, threats of violence remain. Did Bishop read Auden’s “new district,” which the public strove to control, as an allegory of homosexual love: so afraid, so uncertain of its way, that it fails in consummation? The modernists had little to say on this subject, which could only be, for them, a symptom of spiritual collapse. More broadly, both poems portray a failure to love. The hermit clings to his abjection, shouting exhortations that “love should be put into action,” while scaring off all passersby. The irony in his immovable “iron way” has precedent in Auden, who could not resist a pun (as in the “trained spy” in “Control of the Passes” who recommended extension of the “rail” and “stations,” figures of the transitory). Bishop’s “lying” pond recalls Auden’s frequent use of the pun, as in “let the living creature lie.” Her iron railroad “ties” display a failed intimacy, similar to that between the two who are “parted easily” because “never joined” in “Control of the Passes.” Bishop’s “iron way,” like Auden’s (“they would shoot, of course,” he writes at the end of the poem) further expresses itself in the double barrel of the shotgun, which creates no dialogue but only a faint echo and satiric “chook chook” from the hen. Prosodically, “Chemin de Fer” has more in common with later Auden poems, such as those in Look, Stranger! One can hear “As I Walked Out One Evening” in Bishop’s end-stopped, trimeter quatrains, and one can detect Auden’s style in her suspect maxim, her detached observer and shifting perspective, and especially in her closing turn to water as a sign of hidden emotional life. 102 : : : Auden’s Influence on Bishop

Auden challenged the modernist prototype of the alienated consciousness, recovering the imperatives of social and historical connection. “As I Walked Out One Evening” answers “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with its own turn on the carpe diem motif, in which the hero’s negations are not the poet’s. Bishop employs aspects of “As I Walked Out One Evening” more playfully in “Letter to N.Y.” (published as “Song: Letter to New York”), and we might recall here Auden’s special fondness for the “Letter” title and its implications for the poem as a social document. “A magic lantern threw the nerves” of Eliot’s Prufrock “in patterns on a screen” (CPP 16), but the “you” he addresses is a shadowy figure.9 Auden’s city walker comes to recognize his loneliness as his own, not the world’s, failure. And in “Letter to N.Y.” Bishop addresses her friend Louise Crane in a mock disdain for urban decadence that hints at a certain vicarious pleasure in the city’s diversions. The famous first lines of Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening” with Bristol Street crowds like “fields of harvest wheat” (EA 227) become, in Bishop’s “Letter to N.Y.,” buildings rising from the watered street like “a glistening field of wheat” (CP 80). The moral voice breaks in on hedonistic distractions, just as in Auden. Bishop’s cab meter that “glares like a moral owl” in “Letter to N.Y.” bears some resemblance to Auden’s hortatory clocks that break in on the sordid rendezvous. (“Oh, let not time deceive you / You cannot conquer time” they respond to the lover’s shallow hyperbole.) Bishop remonstrates: “Wheat, not oats, dear, I’m afraid / if it’s wheat it’s none of your sowing.” That “dear,” too, is an Auden trademark, and a term of endearment that gay culture was already encoding as its own in this period. Collectively these echoes indicate that the language Auden created — especially its lexicon and imagery — was, for Bishop, an essential part of contemporary poetry. She may have “tried [ . . . ] not to” imitate Auden, but she had learned his language well and it expressed attitudes she shared. Auden’s poetry of the 1930s was particularly concerned with the dangers, delusions, and excesses to which the human affections are prone in a world of constraints. What made his work seem so “real” to the young writers at Vassar was its recognition that matters of the heart were entwined with matters of economics and politics. Living in New York after college, Bishop felt this connection most intensely. The sphere of love seemed circumscribed by a powerful sphere of commerce, to which even personal commitment and intimacy were subject. In “Varick Street” (1947) Bishop writes: . . . Our bed shrinks from the soot and hapless odors hold us close. Bonnie Costello : : : 103

And I shall sell you sell you sell you of course, my dear, and you’ll sell me. (CP 75) The italicized refrain, with its dark, cynical message, is anticipated in Auden’s “O who can ever gaze his fill” (1936) with its dance of death, “Break the embraces, dance while you can, / [ . . . ] dance, dance, dance till you drop”(EA 205). Bishop’s “Love Lies Sleeping” (1938) evokes both T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore, yet its swerve from these forerunners suggests again Auden’s influence. The poem shares with Auden’s “The Watchers” a point of view, a set of images, and even a structural outline. Bishop’s personification of Love, here and elsewhere, is also Audenesque, and a relenting of modernist prohibitions against such archaic tropes. Bishop’s “Love Lies Sleeping” begins: Earliest morning, switching all the tracks that cross the sky from cinder star to star, coupling the ends of streets to trains of light, now draw us into daylight in our beds; and clear away what presses on the brain: put out the neon shapes that float and swell and glare down the gray avenue between the eyes in pinks and yellows, letters and twitching signs. Hang-over moons, wane, wane! From the window I see an immense city, carefully revealed, made delicate by over-workmanship, detail upon detail, cornice upon façade, reaching so languidly up into a weak white sky, it seems to waver there. (CP 16) “Preludes” is a likely model for this poem in which, as Eliot put it, “morning comes to consciousness” after a night of “sordid images” flickering against the ceiling, but Bishop’s poem is open to daylight, and to other persons, as Eliot’s is not. Moore, too, haunts the poem. Bishop was in close correspondence with Moore at the time of writing, and acknowledged certain borrowings as she sent new poems. Bishop would know that the “Danger” she warns of later in “Love Lies Sleeping”would recall Moore’s signpost of “Danger”in “The Steeple-Jack,” 104 : : : Auden’s Influence on Bishop

where a fragile aesthetic image is similarly threatened by a corrupt world; and she would certainly have been aware of her mentor’s early poem “Roses Only” as she put down, toward the end of “Love Lies Sleeping,” the imperative “Scourge them with roses only,” her plea to love for a stay of violence. But Moore took a defensive stance against an imperfect world: “your thorns,” she tells the rose in “Roses Only,”“are the best part of you.”10 Neither Eliot’s withdrawal into abstraction and irony nor Moore’s detached moral and aesthetic standard provided Bishop with a stance appropriate to her world. Auden’s sympathetic gaze indicated another way to look at things. Auden’s “The Watchers” (1932) begins in a setting similar to that of “Love Lies Sleeping.” He presents the solitary poet looking out on a slumbering residential scene, reflecting on the social pressures that work their way into the unconscious mind, and asking benediction for a fragile, undisciplined humanity. The poem begins: Now from my window-sill I watch the night, The church clock’s yellow face, the green pier light Burn for a new imprudent year; The silence buzzes in my ear; The lights of near-by families are out.11 (Bishop, while in college, would have read the earlier version: “The jets in both the dormitories are out” [EA 115].) Neither poet addresses the world directly; their isolation is almost a precondition of their sympathetic vision. As the “lights of nearby families are out” Auden addresses the “Lords of Limit” to impose their principle of finitude gently on the dreamers. Here again we have the crossing between night and day, with the same word play evoking “trains” crossing in consciousness. Here again we have danger barely kept at bay. Of the Lords of Limit Auden writes: “Whose sleepless presences endear / Our peace to us with a perpetual threat.” Lords of Limit, training dark and light And setting a tabu ’twixt left and right, The influential quiet twins From whom all property begins, Look leniently upon us all to-night. (ACP 63) The language of “The Watchers” echoes both the beginning and the ending of “Love Lies Sleeping.” Bishop, too, offers benediction for the day to be gentle. “Scourge them with roses only” she says to Love; protect the sleepers not only from the industrial hazards, but also from the emotional violences to which they are so prone. Auden’s “perpetual threats” can be felt in the explosions of Bonnie Costello : : : 105

“Love Lies Sleeping,” which vaguely disturb the slumbering populace. Where Eliot would withdraw from the failure of human love (“Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh . . .” [CPP 23]), Auden, and Bishop after him, turn their gaze to the faulty world and their thoughts to the possibility of survival within it. “The Watchers” ends, as “Love Lies Sleeping” does, with an anxious vision of an unredeemed state of being, a vision of passions and excesses sending humanity into a tailspin,“lunging, insensible to injuries / Dangerous in a room or out wild- / ly spinning like a top.” Like Auden, Bishop accepts the ambiguity of experience. A benediction is not an accomplished state. On the contrary, the image of disaster presses on the mind. Bishop turns, as Auden did, to imagine a fate beyond the protections for which her benediction calls: for always to one, or several, morning comes, whose head has fallen over the edge of his bed, whose face is turned so that the image of the city grows down into his open eyes inverted and distorted. No. I mean distorted and revealed, if he sees at all. (CP 17) Bishop shares here Auden’s penchant for enigmatic conclusions. Outcome is never clear within experience, which is why we repeatedly encounter moral challenges and cannot displace them with merely mental paradox. Auden writes, at the end of one poem, of “something fulfilled this hour, loved or endured,” and elsewhere he concludes “with love’s fidelity and with love’s weakness.” Auden’s uncertainties of this “human” world clearly touched Bishop’s more than aesthetic absolutes or visionary flights. What can “Love Lies Sleeping” tell us about the nature of literary influence? There is no strong misreading or anxious swerve from a single precursor here, but rather a response to an earlier generation (modernist), aided by a later one (Auden’s). Bishop scrutinized modernism’s worldview with her individual talent, but not as a solitary poet struggling with precursors. Her vision was shaped by the world of the 1930s, a world Auden had addressed more powerfully than any other poet. “Like weather he can only hinder or help,” Auden said of Freud’s influence. Auden clearly helped Bishop as she sought to cultivate the poems that would describe her experience. Auden’s poetry of the 1930s recognizes not only how the moral violations of the age infect the individual but also how the private life’s withdrawals and compromises serve to legitimize public wrong. The spread of fascism in par106 : : : Auden’s Influence on Bishop

ticular marked an ominous turn in human affairs. Auden’s “Bride in the 30’s,” which Bishop praises in her Advocate piece, suggests a confrontation with these issues. She quotes these lines: Easily, my Dear, you move, easily your head And easily as through the leaves of a photograph album I’m led Through the night’s delights and the day’s impressions, Past the tall tenements and the trees in the wood; Though somber the sixteen skies of Europe And the Danube flood. (HA 47; EA 152) Auden’s geographical reference links the personal and the political, as the bride questions her own withdrawal into the domestic and her participation by evasion in a corrupt, tyrannical state. The romanticized personal and the sequestered domestic can “easily” glance past the ominous signs of public storm. However, at the end of the poem the bride hears the moral challenge, which is surely also Auden’s warning to his generation: Trees are shaken, mountains darken, But the heart repeats though we would not hearken: “Yours is the choice, to whom the gods awarded The language of learning and the language of love, Crooked to move as a moneybug or a cancer Or straight as a dove.” (APC 112) (The first line of this passage was revised from “Wind shakes the tree; the mountains darken,” [EA 154].) Bishop’s most direct poem of social protest, “Roosters,” responds to public indifference and denial that allowed the German invasion of Norway. In it she makes a link like Auden’s between private and public corruption and between female domestic submission and male worldly aggression. Randall Jarrell’s comment on Bishop’s poem, which reflects the affinities between two poets he admired, could apply to any number of Auden poems of the 1930s: She understands so well that the wickedness and confusion of the age can explain and extenuate other people’s wickedness and confusion, but not, for you, your own; that morality, for the individual, is usually a small, personal, statistical, but heartbreaking or heartwarming affair of omissions and commissions the greatest of which will seem infinitesimal, ludicrously beneath notice, to those who govern, rationalize, and deplore.12 If the Gospel according to Matthew provided the religious analogy for Bishop’s poem (Peter’s tears are evoked at the end), if Picasso’s Guernica provided some Bonnie Costello : : : 107

of the visual inspiration, its moral inspiration may come from Auden: “that power that corrupts, that power to excess, / the beautiful quite naturally possess.” Of the “Roosters,” figures for the glorification of aggression, Bishop writes: “Yes, that excrescence / makes a most virile presence, / plus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence” (CP 37). The poetry emerging from and following after World War I tended to represent the crisis in terms of its effects: spiritual emptiness, cultural collapse, horror and despair. As Auden saw another war on its way, he looked for moral and social causes and presented challenges to a populace inclined to evasions. Bishop’s closing, like Auden’s in “Bride in the Thirties,” leaves the reader in a morally uncharted world: The sun climbs in, following “to see the end,” faithful as enemy, or friend. (CP 39) The depersonalized maps of “Roosters,” over which aggression stabs with its expansionist pins, may also borrow from Auden’s early experiments with aerial views.“Journal of an Airman,”with what Bishop called in “Mechanics of Pretense”its “terrible plans”for devastation, and The Ascent of F-6, to which Bishop refers in her letters, expose the coarseness with which lives are reduced to territory and strategy. We can also hear these in Bishop’s “12 O’Clock News,” published in Geography III but drafted in the 1930s. Again, Auden provided a way to look not only at how we suffer, but also at how we might understand the causes of war and recognize our complicity in its terrible, impersonal practices. Auden’s formal influence on Bishop’s prosody is also apparent in “Roosters,” and shows again the usefulness of his example in resisting modernism’s prescription. Bishop’s mentor, Marianne Moore, objected to the crude triple rhymes and raw diction, but these can both be found in Auden’s Look, Stranger! “Brothers, who when sirens roar” (from Look, Stranger!) suggests a specific model for “Roosters.” Let fever sweat them till they tremble, Cramp rack their limbs till they resemble Cartoons by Goya: Their daughters sterile be in rut, May cancer rot their herring gut, The circular madness on them shut, Of paranoia. (EA 123) Bishop’s aesthetic mimesis of the roosters/warmongers is equally grotesque: 108 : : : Auden’s Influence on Bishop

and what he sung no matter. He is flung on the gray ash-heap, lies in dung with his dead wives with open, bloody eyes, while those metallic feathers oxidize. (CP 37) But it is only later, in “Pink Dog” (1979), that Bishop would risk Auden’s unsettling sarcasm in her triple rhymes: Yes, idiots, paralytics, parasites go bobbing in the ebbing sewage, nights out in the suburbs, where there are no lights. (CP 190) Bishop’s imagination did not tend toward Auden’s most didactic social criticism. Her world is morally dark, like Auden’s, but she is not the bearer of a Diogenes lamp or an “affirming flame.” She did not adopt his penchant for epigram and epithet. Perhaps this is why she preferred his early works to his “later, preachy ones.”13 She was most drawn to those poems by Auden that voice dismay at human barbarity, but nevertheless locate themselves helplessly within that grotesque and pitiable human world. So, for instance, she valued “Refugee Blues,” which, through imagery and form, anticipates features of her “Songs for a Colored Singer,” a poem examining public themes of poverty and war in terms of personal lyric. She quotes these lines from Auden in her Advocate essay: Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin, Saw a door opened and a cat let in: But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews. Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay, Saw the fish swimming as if they were free: Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away. Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees; They had no politicians and sang at their ease: They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race. (HA 47; APC 210) Like Auden, Bishop often used popular, “subliterary” forms, especially songs — ballads, lullabies, nursery rhymes, blues, calypso, samba — to convey complex modern themes. Modernism withdrew lyric from the popular realm, appropriating the demotic, if at all, into an abstract cognitive field and an intricate Bonnie Costello : : : 109

aesthetic surface. In embracing popular forms Auden refused a high aesthetic position and expressed a spiritual and political alliance with the common man. Bishop too seems to have been drawn to popular songs for their political, as well as their aesthetic, evocation of the common. “Songs for a Colored Singer,” with its dream of armies, its lullaby, its question/answer ballad format, its poignant images of abundance denied, recalls the Auden of the 1930s, particularly his collection of “Ten Songs,” of which “Refugee Blues” is one. Bishop writes here not as a German Jew but as a poor black wife and mother in a time of war: A washing hangs upon the line, but it’s not mine. None of the things that I can see belong to me. (CP 47) Auden went beyond the realism of the form to explore the impact of hard facts in the realm of spirit. As “Refugee Blues” continues, it moves into dream vision: Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors, A thousand windows and a thousand doors: Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours. Stood on a great plain in the falling snow; Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro: Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me. (ACP 210) Bishop’s poem, too, moves into dream imagery. And her dream, like Auden’s, discloses a disturbing reality of mass suffering and death: What’s that shining in the leaves, the shadowy leaves, like tears when somebody grieves, shining, shining in the leaves? [...] Like an army in a dream the faces seem, darker, darker, like a dream. They’re too real to be a dream. (CP 50–51) Other sections of the poem recall Auden’s “O what is that sound,” which, Bishop wrote in her Key West Notebook, “sounds like banjo playing.” O what is that sound which so thrills the ear Down in the valley drumming, drumming? 110 : : : Auden’s Influence on Bishop

Only the scarlet soldiers dear, The soldiers coming. (EA 125) Bishop writes: Hear it falling on the ground, hear, all around. That is not a tearful sound, beating, beating on the ground. [...] It is a face. [ . . . ] (CP 50) I am not suggesting that Bishop consciously imitates Auden here, or that her work is merely derivative, only that since she was reading him “constantly” in her formative years she absorbed his style and took up aspects of his approach to topical themes. Through him, she widened her sense of lyric’s range without recourse to the more radical poetic technique of her modernist predecessors. Furthermore, certain topics and themes became associated, through Auden, with certain stylistic moves. He brought aesthetic variety and formal virtuosity to the service of “real world” concerns, especially economic themes of the “late-depression and post-depression youth” (HA 47). It cannot be merely coincidence that Bishop writes a sestina about hunger and plenty, “Miracle for Breakfast” (1936), just a few years after Auden’s publication of the depression-era sestina later called “Paysage Moralisé”(1933). Both poems contrast landscapes of real poverty with landscapes of plenty elsewhere. Both place pastoral nostalgia, passivity, and neglect against the spectacle of hunger. The poems each compare impoverished conditions to passive dreams of paradisal fulfillment. Bishop’s “A Miracle for Breakfast” stands somewhere between Auden’s insistence on the fact of hunger and ruin and the need for worldly action, and Stevens’s aesthetic “poverty,” cured by the imagination. But Bishop would certainly have noted with pleasure the echo of her beloved Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland at the end of Auden’s poem. Auden’s imitation hints that Hopkins’s divine intervention must be replaced by some human choice of positive agency. Auden writes: It is sorrow. Shall it melt? Then water Would gush, flush, green these mountains and these valleys, And we rebuild our cities, not dream of islands. (ACP 105) Like Auden’s, Bishop’s ending is unresolved; attainment is deferred. In a similar deferred epiphany, Bishop concludes her sestina: “A window across the river caught the sun / as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony” (CP 19). Bonnie Costello : : : 111

Auden (Bishop commented in her “Mechanics of Pretense”) invented the “forsaken factory school of literary landscape painting.” This is probably a description of “Paysage Moralisé,” from the volume she is reviewing, but it recalls other Auden poems, such as “The Watershed,” and “The Summer holds.” If Bishop’s own landscapes are more Wordsworthian, she certainly passed through Auden’s school. One thinks not only of Bishop’s urban poems, but also of the closed schoolhouse in “Cape Breton,” the foundered beach house of “Twelfth Morning; or What You Will,” the rusty capstan in “At the Fishhouses,” the “broken gasoline pump” of “Questions of Travel” (CP 94). While in Bishop these signs of neglect and decay become absorbed into the picturesque, their social implications are never forgotten. The symbolist landscapes of modernism tended to convert such registers of decay into spiritual signs; Auden showed Bishop how to abstract a scene without erasing the sense of its social and geographical location. More generally, travel and geography, especially as they intersect with the axis of history, are central preoccupations for both poets, in contrast to the primarily mental space of modernism. There are indications that Bishop learned from Auden a number of ways to manipulate tropes even as she moved away from mapping toward description. In particular, Auden’s distancing technique, what he called the “hawk’s eye view,” is evident in many of Bishop’s early poems. The initial descriptive language in Auden’s “The Summer holds” (1934) has some of the same images and the same political tension we find in Bishop’s “The Map” (1935). Auden writes: The Summer holds: upon its glittering lake Lie Europe and the islands; many rivers Wrinkling its surface like a ploughman’s palm. Under the bellies of the grazing horses On the far side of posts and bridges The vigorous shadows dwindle; nothing wavers. Calm at this moment the Dutch sea so shallow That sunk St. Paul’s would ever show its golden cross And still the deep water that divides us still from Norway. (EA 281) While the language of “The Map” is less explicit in its reference to world events, readers of North & South (1946) would have read the poem in terms of national conflicts. And it may be from Auden that she recognized, even in 1935, the desperate efforts of Norway to evade the Nazi aggression that she would condemn in “Roosters.” The “shadows”/“shallows” assonance (“shadows, or are they shallows,” writes Bishop) seems also to be suggested by him: 112 : : : Auden’s Influence on Bishop

Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is, lending the land their waves’ own conformation: and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation, profiles investigate the sea, where land is. Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors? (CP 3) Bishop’s telescoped peninsulas, which later in the poem “take the water between thumb and finger / like women feeling for the smoothness of yard goods” provide a female version of Auden’s rivers “wrinkling [the] surface of Europe like a ploughman’s palm” beneath a horse’s belly. Again, each poet links the artistic imagination to the sensibility of the common man. Bishop had learned, perhaps from Auden, to use description as a means to engage the imagination in the political lay of the land. Similarly, Bishop’s posthumously collected poem, “Pleasure Seas” (1938), employs a number of Audenesque features — personification of Love and Grief, the hawk’s-eye view, the use of landscape to suggest an uneasy social calm. Like “The Summer holds,” “Pleasure Seas” exposes the unpleasant and “poisonous” within escapist settings (CP 195). And Auden’s “Look, stranger, on this island, now,” with its sea-mirrored clouds, its movement out from the familiar, enclosed landscape into the crashing sea, “Where the chalk wall falls to the foam”(EA 158) may have suggested particular lines and images for “Pleasure Seas,” which moves from the “walled off swimming-pool” with its flat surface to the coral reef where the water “throws itself ” into the oblivion of “cold white spray” (CP 195, 196). The descriptive activity of both poems, engaging the mind in delights and warnings, is reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” with its search for personal solace and fidelity in the midst of the general chaos of abandoned faith. For Bishop, as for Auden, there is no simple retreat from “ignorant armies” into the private sphere. In a letter to Joseph Summers, Bishop reveals how distinctly her themes overlap with Auden’s. The graphing of geography to history was the same for both: I like what you say about history and geography. There’s a sentence in Auden’s book — is it “Journal of an Airman”? something like that, and I can’t remember the figures now; I should know it by heart. “If recorded history is__ years long and the world is __ miles away from the nearest planet (sun)?, then geography is __ times more important to us than history.” That’s all wrong, but the general idea. I didn’t read this, however, until after I’d begun publishing poems — so can’t say I was “influenced by it.” I just thought, that’s a silly notion but I think I agree with it.14 (blanks in original) Bonnie Costello : : : 113

She made this comment in 1967, but her denial of influence may be a lapse in memory, since it is clear from notes in her archives that she had read “Journal of an Airman” as early as 1937. In fact, she had read the 1932 edition of the work, since the passage she refers to was deleted from the 1934 edition. (Bishop’s first published poem, outside Vassar, was 1935.) The passage in Auden reads:“A man occupies about 6 ft. in space and 70 years in time. Assuming the velocity of light to be 186,000 miles a second, then geography is just about a hundred thousand million times more important to him than history” (EA 420). The poet of North & South, Questions of Travel, and Geography III is likely to have been drawn to such a remark, probably from her first encounter with it.“More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors,” she writes in “The Map,” the poem she chose to open her Complete Poems, a poem she began in 1934 when “Journal of an Airman” would have been fresh in her mind. A full account of Auden’s influence on Bishop must certainly take up matters of prosody more thoroughly than I have done here. In the broadest sense, Auden reinforced Bishop’s decision to eschew modernist poetics for a variety of more traditional English forms, literary and popular. Like Auden, she exploited the reiterative and recursive possibilities of lyric: anaphora, sestina, double sonnet, refrain, and, of course, rhyme, especially in repeated and extended form. It could be merely coincidence that one of Bishop’s most famous rhymes is anticipated in Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron” (part III stanza 26), but Bishop certainly knew the poem well. Both the rhythm and the colloquial, sardonic manner of Auden’s poem anticipate Bishop’s “Pink Dog,” as does the rhyme so familiar from her “One Art.” Auden writes: But artists, though, are human; and for man To be a scivvy is not nice at all; So everyone will do the best he can To get a patch of ground which he can call His own. He doesn’t really care how small, So long as he can style himself the master: Unluckily for art, it’s a disaster. (EA 186) Bishop’s poem, too, is a kind of apology for poetry, poetry that owns nothing and makes nothing happen, that thrives in inverse ratio to bourgeois and even personal comfort. Giving up, among other things, three houses, she declares: “the art of losing’s not too hard to master / Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster” (CP 178). When Bishop began writing, Auden’s was the language that described “things”; he therefore defined the purpose and direction of descriptive poetry 114 : : : Auden’s Influence on Bishop

for her generation. Of course many of Bishop’s poems, indeed most of them, bear little resemblance to those of Auden. She found her own direction, increasingly descriptive and phenomenological rather than allegorical and rhetorical. But it is clear from her letters and journals that she continued, throughout her life, to find in Auden an exemplary standard not only of artistic practice, but also of moral and personal value as well. More to the point, she found in Auden a standard for discriminating merely personal from artistic identity. As Brett C. Millier records, “Reading Auden on January 6, 1967, [Bishop] copied out passages of inspiration”: do not forget this first quote . . . most important of all: “The drunk is unlovely to look at, intolerable to listen to, [and] his self-pity is contemptible. Nevertheless, as not merely a worldly failure, but also a [willful] failure, he is a disturbing image for the sober [citizen]. His refusal to accept the realities of the world, babyish as it may be, compels us to take another look at this world and reflect upon our motives for accepting it.”15 Readers of Bishop will recall the drunken vision in “Love Lies Sleeping,” “inverted and distorted. No. I mean / distorted and revealed.” This was not a mere trope for Bishop, or Auden, but an alcoholic’s self-description and an exhortation. Her notebook continues quoting from The Dyer’s Hand: Much more important and from now on — Jan. 6, 1967 — never forget this: “One ceases to be a child when one realizes that telling one’s troubles does not make it any better.” Cesare Pavese. . . . Auden adds: “Exactly. Not even telling it to oneself. [Most] of us have known shameful moments when we blubbered, beat the wall with our fists, cursed the power which made us and the world, and wished we were dead or that someone else was. But at such times, the I of the sufferer should have the tact and decency to look the other way.”16 Auden’s example probably bolstered Bishop’s resistance to the modernist example and to confessional poetry (“you wish they’d keep some of these things to themselves”), which by 1967 had become the dominant aesthetic of the day. Indeed, in her letters to Robert Lowell she often quotes Auden’s warnings against autobiography and notes his resistance to biography. Auden developed a voice that could generalize but would not sterilize; he presented a subjectivity that was authentic but not narcissistic. It may be because we in America don’t know Auden well enough that this profound atmosphere, if not foundational influence, of Bishop’s early years, Bonnie Costello : : : 115

has largely escaped comment. As Bishop herself complained in the Advocate in 1974: I find it sad that the young students and poets I have met in the past four years usually seem to know only a few of his anthology pieces, rarely read him at all, and apparently never for pleasure. One reason for this may be that Auden, the most brilliant of imitators himself, has been or was, so much imitated that his style, his details and vocabulary, the whole atmosphere of his poetry, seems over-familiar, old hat. (HA 47) Bishop herself, we know, was fond of “exchanging hats,” making a new one out of an old one. We might imagine an allegiance with Auden in her lines about the odd role of the poet, especially the gay and alcoholic poet, in a world that requires disguises of us all: Or you who don the paper plate itself, and put some grapes upon it, or sport the Indian’s feather bonnet, — perversities may aggravate the natural madness of the hatter. (CP 200) As with any poet, Bishop’s influences were many and varied. We value her lyrics not because they carried forward particular practices of her predecessors, but because they offer something distinctive. Yet we can better understand Bishop’s distinctive talent if we recognize the materials from which it drew. Perhaps more than anyone else living in her time, Auden represented for Bishop what it meant to be a modern poet, at odds with society, yet expressing its conscience. So much of what we currently admire about Bishop — her psychological insight, her political consciousness, her manipulation of tone, her inventiveness with form — has antecedents in Auden. And perhaps through Bishop American readers can discover aspects of Auden’s work they have hitherto neglected. The “climate of opinion” about poetry, as about everything else, has changed since Auden’s time. Indeed, the front that moved in for the last decades of the twentieth century was largely influenced by Bishop herself. Her interest in gender and geography, her integration of narrative and description, her “art of losing” are among the qualities that have been widely imitated in recent years. She offered a younger generation an antidote to the excesses of confessional poetry and free verse, just as Auden offered one to certain modernist excesses. Both poets last, despite the vicissitudes of literary history, precisely because they brought poetry out into the weather, and “forced into being” a “contemporary language . . . equivalent to contemporary fact.” 116 : : : Auden’s Influence on Bishop

notes 1 I am persuaded by James Longenbach’s argument that the “breakthrough narrative” from modernism to postmodernism is exaggerated and that continuities are more significant (Modern Poetry after Modernism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 22–48). Nevertheless, I want to show that in her effort to be contemporary Bishop turned to Auden’s work as an alternative to modernist models. 2 Ashley Brown, “An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop” (1966), in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil Estess (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), p. 294. 3 George Starbuck, “‘The Work!’: A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop” (1977), reprinted in Schwartz and Estess, Elizabeth Bishop, p. 319. 4 Elizabeth Bishop,“A Brief Reminiscence and a Tribute,” Harvard Advocate, 108, nos. 2–3 (1974): pp. 47–48. Hereafter HA. 5 See Brett Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 121. “Mechanics of Pretense,” Vassar Special Collections, Series IV. Hereafter VSP. 6 Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 83. 7 W. H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 25. Hereafter EA. 8 Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), p. 8. Hereafter CP. 9 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1963 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969), pp. 12–13. Hereafter CPP. 10 Marianne Moore, Poems (London: The Egoist Press, 1921), p. 13. I am grateful to Fiona Green for reminding me of these allusions to Moore. 11 W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 63. Hereafter ACP. 12 Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), pp. 234–35. 13 Starbuck, “The Work!,” p. 319. 14 Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, Selected and Edited by Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), p. 477. 15 Millier, Elizabeth Bishop, p. 384. 16 Ibid., pp. 384–85.

Bonnie Costello : : : 117

The American Poetry of Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill langdon hammer

Very early in their careers, Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill found stylistic models with complex implications in poets from the second generation of American modernists: Yvor Winters for Gunn and Allen Tate for Hill. This essay explores the uses the British poets made of the Americans. It is also concerned with the distinctive constructions of twentieth-century American poetry those uses imply. Gunn and Hill inherit modern American poetry differently (to an extent, they inherit a different American poetry) from most American poets of their era. As a result, one chapter in postmodern American poetry, one elaboration of what is possible after and in response to modern American poetry, is being written by British writers. Winters and Tate are conspicuous influences on Gunn and Hill.1 To investigate Gunn’s or Hill’s debts to the Americans, therefore, is not to discover buried sources, in the manner of Harold Bloom’s poetics of influence;2 it is in each case to observe a poet willfully adapting the language and ideas of an older, established poet, as if testing the imaginative value of an available poetic role or “pose” (a word Gunn liked to use in the 1950s). Both were thoroughly visible and deliberate: that was, in a sense, their point; and they were no less consequential or authentic because they were studied. One might say of Gunn and Hill what Gunn said of Elvis Presley in a poem from 1957: “Whether he poses or is real, no cat / Bothers to say: the pose held is a stance,” indeed a “posture for combat.”3 Of course Gunn and Hill have long since grown out of those “poses.” But Winters and Tate remain orienting points of reference even in their recent poems because the Americans suggested to them ways of placing themselves in literary history from which their careers have continued to unfold. Belonging to the cohort of American poets Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams, who published their first books immediately following The Waste Land and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Harmonium, and Spring and All, Winters and Tate modeled critical but engaged responses to modernism that were also, for Gunn and Hill,

alternatives to the antimodernism of the new English writing of the 1950s known as the Movement.4 Turning to Winters and Tate, Gunn and Hill turned away from their English contemporaries. Yet they borrowed from American poetry without defining themselves as American poets. Rather, they placed the American poetry they read in the context of other traditions: for Gunn, the tradition of plain-style lyric from the traditional British ballads to Thomas Hardy; for Hill, a poetry of devotion and witness from the Spanish baroque to Paul Celan. Gunn and Hill altered what they took from Winters and Tate (and other American poets they read through or alongside them) by situating American poetry outside American tradition. Winters and Tate, interestingly, were unpromising models. Remembered today more often as critics than poets, they were both figures of thwarted or curtailed poetic ambition whose criticism focused on (as Tate put it) “the limits of poetry,” and whose poetic output was small.5 Gunn and Hill saw in Winters and Tate something larger than their bodies of poetry, however; they saw models of honorable poetic work, definitions of poetry and the human purposes it might serve. And even in the ways that they were limited, Winters and Tate were generative. Following the implications of positions derived from Winters and Tate, Gunn and Hill opened their own work, over time, to possibilities Winters and Tate had renounced or foreclosed. They converted deadends into fresh points of departure. In Winters and Tate, a skeptical rationality constrains lyric power to the point of impasse, expressed in the limits they place on the language, subjects, and attitudes suitable to poetry, as well as in the truncated shape of their oeuvres. The tension between lyricism and skepticism in their work is an early version of the general conflict between the proponents of “closed”and “open”form that crystallized in the late 1950s during the period of the “anthology wars” and that still structures practice and discussion of American poetry, under various guises. Gunn and Hill came to American poetry indifferent to that conflict, recognizing no obligation to choose sides. We can attribute their impartiality partly to temperament, partly to circumstances: as poets born and educated in Britain, who published their early work there, Gunn and Hill developed at a remove (a far one in Hill’s case) from the social milieus and literary markets in which the aesthetic disputes that dominate American poetry after modernism are rooted. Working through the impasses Winters and Tate reached, then, Gunn and Hill suggest alternatives to those disputes. They oblige us to rethink the nature and legacy of mid twentieth-century American formalist poetics. Despite differences in their literary tastes and preoccupations, Winters and Tate have a great deal in common. They are both associated with the Langdon Hammer : : : 119

New Criticism, and both had a part in the creation of that distinctive twentiethcentury literary role, the academic poet-critic. They are also linked by their troubled relations with a third figure, Hart Crane. They knew Crane personally (he introduced them to each other), and both were drawn to, then recoiled from, Crane’s romantic modernism.6 In letters and essays, they praised his daring appropriation of Renaissance heroic styles. But Crane quickly came to represent, for both Tate and Winters, the perils of rhetorical excess and undisciplined experience, a lesson his suicide in 1932 seemed to confirm.“Orpheus,” Winters’s elegy for Crane, depicts the drowned poet as a modern Orpheus who sacrifices reason for emotion, reference for resonance. His severed head sings “unmeaning down the stream.”7 Imagine Winters’s feelings in 1954, then, when a recent graduate from Cambridge came to study poetry-writing with him at Stanford and declared his special admiration for Robert Lowell (this would be the prophetic Lowell of Lord Weary’s Castle) and Hart Crane. Winters, Gunn recalls in a tribute to his teacher, merely “grunted” (SL 199). He would undertake to guide Gunn away from his identification with Lowell and Crane by elevating reason over emotion.“Write little; do it well,”Winters advises in a poem from 1930,“To a Young Writer” (its three-beat rhymed quatrains exemplifying the craft and concision it holds up for emulation): “Your knowledge will be such, / At last, as to dispel / What moves you overmuch” (WCP 73). Poetry is seen in this poem as a means of gaining knowledge, and knowledge is defined as the power to resist emotion’s claims. The young Gunn, too ready to be moved too much, was “still a romantic,” Winters told him, implying that “a romantic” was something Gunn would one day find it necessary not to be (SL 210). Winters’s disapproval of Gunn’s romanticism implied disapproval of his other choices too. When, in a letter to Crane, Winters criticized his friend’s openness to experience, he found fault with the homosexuality, which he saw as part of Crane’s intellectually unregulated cult of sensation.8 Gunn, who came to the United States to be with his American lover as well as to study writing, would have felt the same criticism, or at least the threat of it (although at the time Winters was probably unaware of such a sexual orientation).9 In effect, Gunn took up, in relation to his teacher, a version of the position Crane had occupied, in which intellectual and sexual issues are subtly, or not so subtly, implied in each other. “I can see now,” Gunn reflects, “that in his criticism of me he pinpointed a certain irresponsibility, a looseness, a lack of principle — a promiscuous love of experience, perhaps — which I know I need to keep going, lacking his theoretic firmness. He had been right that first evening: I am still a romantic, thinking with Keats that ‘nothing ever becomes real until it is 120 : : : Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill

experienced. — Even a Proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it’” (SL 210). Gunn made those comments in 1982. They remind us that, even as he opened himself to Winters’s teaching, he retained his youthful romanticism, including an appreciation of Keats. Writing about him and Coleridge in “Keats at Highgate,” a poem published in 1982, Gunn might have been writing about himself and Winters. The poem mocks what we might call Coleridge’s own “theoretic firmness” (“the talk talk talk / Of First and Second Consciousness”) and quotes his dismissive diary entry on Keats, the “cheerful youth”who comes to Highgate to learn from him: “‘Loose,’ noted Coleridge, ‘Slack, and not welldressed.’” Then the poem follows Keats on his way back across the heath to his home in Hampstead, where, although the poem does not mention it, Gunn himself had grown up and first read Keats: He hardly passed the small grey ponds below Or watched a sparrow pecking in the dirt Without some insight swelling the mind’s flow That banks made swift. Everything put to use. Perhaps not well-dressed but oh no not loose. (GCP 350) What appears “loose” in Keats, Gunn is saying, is his openness to “the mind’s flow.” But there is also intellectual rigor in that openness, constraining “banks,” which make the waters “swift.” Clive Wilmer, in a helpful overview, describes Gunn’s equal dedication to the competing principles of “definition” and “flow.”10 Throughout his career Gunn has tried to preserve a Keatsian openness to experience alongside Winters’s insistence on rational definition as a tool of moral evaluation. The continuity of Gunn’s aims and self-image is striking, especially when we view his development in a larger context. The last century of American poetry is typically narrated as a contest between “definition” and “flow,” closure and openness, technique and authenticity. The story tends to look like this: Turning away from the explorations of chaotic psychic process in modernist writing (for all its protestations of representing a new classicism), new poets of the 1920s and 1930s, in a kind of retrenchment, stress technical control, wit, and rational argument. Then, resisting this move, new poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Confessional and “New American” poets, seek liberation from the constraints of form and decorum, a renewal of modernist innovation.11 Gunn’s career does and does not conform to this conventional narrative. He increasingly affirms the values of openness and “flow,” but there is never any liberation from poetic form and decorum in his writing; there is only an Langdon Hammer : : : 121

enlargement of their reach, a new sense of what those terms might imply or enable. The point can be made about Gunn’s use of free verse. Whereas his earliest work was exclusively metrical, in the 1960s he moved into syllabics and then into free verse in order to deal with new subject matter: LSD and the utopian energies of 1960s San Francisco. In effect, Gunn recapitulated, but just in reverse, the technical development Winters had followed from his free verse poems of the 1920s to the strict stanzas and couplets of the 1930s and 40s. But when Gunn began to write free verse, he did not also abandon meter, as Winters had abandoned free verse. Rather, Gunn added free verse to meter in his technical repertoire. He could do so because he did not invest either form of prosody with intrinsic values, inimical to the other. Gunn saw both free verse and meter as tools; they were appropriate to different tasks, but equally usable. He understood free verse as a specific mode of poetic form, not an escape from it.12 Gunn’s sense of poetic form as an epistemological tool for dealing with experience comes directly from Winters’s teaching and criticism (SL 186). Writing in praise of a sonnet by Tate and with skepticism toward the “overexcited” poetry of Crane, Winters asserts,“the creation of a form is nothing more nor less than the act of evaluating and shaping (that is, controlling) of a given experience.”13 Gunn takes up this idea but applies it in his own work differently from the way Winters did in his. Gunn’s mature poetry thus restores to his version of formalism possibilities that Winters himself had rejected — the openness to experience that Keats and Crane affirm, and the lyric freedom of Winters’s own early free verse.14 We may feel that Gunn understood Winters’s concept of poetry, or that he understood its potential range and power, better than Winters himself. Gunn’s debt to Winters and his distance from him can both be felt in the early poem, “To Yvor Winters, 1955.” Winters appears here as a Sartrean hero holding off the darkness that is death and madness (to which Crane succumbed, in Winters’s view) by the force of rational will: Where now lies power to hold the evening back? Implicit in the grey is total black: Denial of the discriminating brain Brings the neurotic vision, and the vein Of necromancy. (GCP 69) The poem is Gunn’s attempt to interpret the relation between the gruff moralist he met in 1954 and the friend of Crane who wrote the apocalyptic short story “The Brink of Darkness” and visionary free verse poems such as “The 122 : : : Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill

Rows of Cold Trees.” What Gunn admires and models in his own couplets is Winters’s poise, defined as the sustaining of contending pressures: You keep both Rule and Energy in view, Much power in each, most in the balanced two: Ferocity existing in the fence Built by an exercised intelligence. (GCP 70) Wilmer, in his Introduction to The Occasions of Poetry, aptly speaks of Gunn’s poetry as “contained energy” (OP 12). That is Winters’s formal ideal also. But in Winters the point is to hold back, whereas in Gunn it is to hold onto (that is, to absorb and sustain), potentially anarchic energies. As a reader of Winters, Gunn perceived, and prized, the “ferocity in [his] fences.” “To Yvor Winters” is a poem of praise, then. But there are other currents in it too, as if Gunn were saying to the older poet, “when your intellect gets ‘exercised,’ you fence yourself off from too many things, too many possibilities; the point (as you taught me) is to keep both ‘Rule and Energy’ in view.” The point can be extended to Winters’s notion of poetic tradition. Probably no important critic is as violent and eccentric in his inclusions and exclusions as the later Winters. But the tradition in which Winters educated Gunn was strikingly supple and various. Two poets he helped Gunn to care about were William Carlos Williams and Fulke Greville. At their best, Gunn came to believe, Williams and Greville are plain-style lyric poets whose work expresses a generalized sympathy with humanity, rather than the force of individual personality.15 Gunn fitted this idea into a concept of poetry he had brought with him to California, which had been powerfully embodied by The Poet’s Tongue (1935), an anthology edited by W. H. Auden and John Garrett that Gunn read in wartime Britain, with formative effects (OP 175). The Poet’s Tongue, organized by theme rather than period, gives the names of the authors of poems, when they have specific authors, at the back. The book suggests that the best poems are in a sense anonymous; including (in Gunn’s own summary) “mnemonics, popular songs, mummers’s plays, nonsense poetry, songs by Blake, medieval fragments,” and other kinds of texts, it envisions tradition not as the best that has been thought and said by a line of famous individuals, but as the shared work of a community of speakers present to each other across time. In contrast to his attitude toward The Poet’s Tongue, Gunn has angrily complained about Helen Vendler’s exclusion of both “the Open and the Closed,” indicated for him by Charles Olson and J. V. Cunningham, from The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry. There is, he insists in his review of the anthology, quoting Donald Hall, a “need for ‘all possibilities’ in poetry, even contradictory ones, to exist together” (SL 25); and he has made a point, in his Langdon Hammer : : : 123

criticism and poetry, of expressing his admiration for contraries in American poetry: Cunningham and Olson, Winters and Robert Duncan. “I have sometimes said to myself,” Gunn jokes, “‘I am the only person in the world ever to have dedicated poems to both Winters and Duncan.’ They hated each other” (AP 171). It would be hard, in fact, to think of an American poet or critic of comparably wide sympathies. But it is important, again, that Gunn comes to American poetry from outside it. His poetic contraries are united by a general quality — “humaneness” — that transcends national contexts.“Humaneness”is what, in Gunn’s view, the traditional ballads and the plain-style or “reflective” lyric share (OP 101), forms that prize economy and impersonality and that subordinate the poet’s self to the representation of other people or of things. About Williams Gunn writes: “His stylistic qualities are governed . . . by a tenderness and generosity of feeling which make them fully humane. For it is a humane action to attempt the rendering of a thing, person, or experience in the exact terms of its existence” (OP 35). That is so even (or even especially) when that effort makes for “awkwardness” (technical, rhetorical, or emotional) — an effect Gunn finds in (another unlikely pair) both Hardy and Ginsberg.16 These tastes and discriminations all enter into Gunn’s most important single volume, The Man with Night Sweats. In the context of this essay, the book can be read as a complex meditation on the powers and limits, moral and aesethetic, of “Rule and Energy.” Gunn, as a student of Winters, insisted on a balance of those principles, praising the poet who is able to effect and maintain it; in The Man with Night Sweats, he faces the inadequacy of both terms. The speaker of the title poem, who once celebrated sexual exploration like a Gunn hero from Moly (1971), has been undone by “Energy,” and “Rule” is not equal to the crisis: now HIV-infected, he is sick, and anticipating the next round of fever. The setting recalls “To Yvor Winters,” where the “discriminating brain” holds off the night, “the vein / Of necromancy.” Now night has come, and the man speaking to us is fearful and alone. Here is the first half of the poem: I wake up cold, I who Prospered through dreams of heat Wake to their residue, Sweat, and a clinging sheet. My flesh was its own shield: Where it was gashed, it healed. I grew as I explored The body I could trust 124 : : : Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill

Even while I adored The risk that made robust, A world of wonders in Each challenge to the skin. The skin, seal and “shield,” may perhaps, by analogy, be seen as protecting the questing hero as poetic form does the poet, for Winters. But it is not proof against every “challenge.” In the second half of the poem, the “shield” the body offers is “cracked.”At the same time, the poem’s form subtly gives way. The self-contained quatrains and couplets of the first half of the poem are succeeded by stanzas that run on from one to the next, and the integrity of line- and stanza-endings in this half of the poem is further compromised by Gunn’s choice of rhymes. I cannot but be sorry The given shield was cracked My mind reduced to hurry, My flesh reduced and wrecked. I have to change the bed, But catch myself instead Stopped upright where I am Hugging my body to me As if to shield it from The pains that will go through me, As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off. (GCP 461–62) In “To Yvor Winters” rhyme is a formal emblem of self-containment and the power of the will (as it is throughout Winters’s later work). In “The Man with Night Sweats,” Gunn’s rhyming cunningly evokes the decay of the speaker’s self-defenses and physical integrity, a crisis imaged as his failing effort to “hug” his own body to him and hold himself together. Gunn moves from clear full rhymes in the first two quatrains to partial rhymes in the fourth (sorry and hurry, cracked and wrecked) as the effects of the virus are felt. Then, in the fifth quatrain, describing the present moment of crisis, the rhymes are either too close together (to me and through me) or too far apart (am and from) to be counted as rhyme at all. The concluding couplet, in a rhyme that is merely approximate, acknowledges the inability of poetry, as much as the speaker,“To hold an avalanche off.” In short, Gunn’s poem quietly but decisively gives up the ideal of “contained energy.” This is accomplished with great subtlety and skill, of course. Langdon Hammer : : : 125

But the unsatisfactoriness of his rhymes avoids the sort of virtuosity that would display the poet’s superior technical control of the poem just at the moment the speaker whom he wants to represent is losing control of his body. Gunn is well known as a kind of anti-Confessional poet, always reluctant to dramatize his own life. It is easy to overlook how reluctant he is, for similar reasons, to presume to speak for other people. “The Man with Night Sweats,” the only dramatic monologue in the book and a relatively rare form in Gunn’s work, ventures to do so, but not in a way that foregrounds his power as a poet. Instead, in those “cracked” rhymes, Gunn enacts a partial, symbolic sacrifice of formal mastery, in sympathy with the speaker’s suffering. It is a version of the “awkwardness” that is present in Gunn’s most characteristic and moving work, and that he singles out for praise in other poets as a sign of “humaneness.” It is unusual to find Gunn and Hill discussed in conjunction. Although they are two of the most important living British poets, their careers have never intersected; I understand that they have never met. Hill is the great contemporary example of a distinctively English high style, and he displays something like contempt for the protocols of ordinary speech and common interaction: his difficult style expresses a hostility toward potential readers that is precisely contrary to Gunn’s fine sociability. But Gunn and Hill find sanction for their work in the second generation of American modernist poets. Tate has for Hill the kind of importance Winters has for Gunn: he gives the young Hill an ethical program and a style to go with it — what Vincent Sherry calls Tate’s “fierce rhetoric: his controlled harshness of diction, imagery, and rhythm” (UI 28) and Tate mediates Hill’s approach to other American poets — John Crowe Ransom, Pound, and Eliot — in the same way Winters influenced Gunn’s readings of Williams and Duncan. Moreover, like Gunn, Hill has never repudiated his early model. Instead he developed by activating possibilities that were canceled, but evidently still implicit, in the poetics he assimilated from Tate. As a result, Hill moves over time toward hermeneutic indeterminacy and an awareness of historical contingency — qualities typically claimed for Language poetry or other experimental work, and that emulation of a New Critical poet such as Tate is supposed to foreclose. Hill encountered Tate rather earlier than Gunn did Winters, and at much greater distance. Tate was never Hill’s teacher or friend, only figuratively so. At fifteen Hill discovered Tate’s work in Oscar Williams’s Little Treasury of Modern Poetry (1946), a gift from his father that he carried, Hill remembers, in his “jacket pocket all over Worcestershire for several years until it disintegrated: I think there was probably a time when I knew every poem in that anthology by heart” (V 78). Williams’s Little Treasury (like The Poet’s Tongue, which Gunn 126 : : : Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill

read at about the same time) is suggestive in several ways. For one thing, its full title, The Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, English and American, brings the two national poetries together, making modern poetry seem like a shared enterprise, the possession of neither. For another, The Little Treasury gives Tate, from the point of view of readers today, unusual prominence: there are eight of his poems in the book and one by William Carlos Williams.17 Moreover, in Hill’s memory, the volume is linked by association with his father and his birthplace in then-rural Worcestershire. It is a reminder that, like Tate the Southern Agrarian, Hill came to modern poetry as a self-consciously regional writer whose sense of the cultural marginality of his home tied him to the past and to a feeling of lost heroic promise (as seen, for example, in his Mercian Hymns). The Tate poem that most affects Hill’s imagination is clearly “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” This is at once an inaugural poem and a valedictory one that encodes, among other things, the vexed history of Tate’s relationship with Crane, which in many ways resembles Winters’s relationship with him. What the “Ode” inaugurates is the astringent, oratorical style of Tate’s mature poetry and criticism. What it gives up is the possibility of recovering the romantic idealism it attributes to the “Confederate Dead” — an idealism that is a displaced form of the heroic feeling with which Tate himself came to poetry, and which he saw and admired in Crane. Tate, who began his work on it at an early turning point in his career, when he and Crane quarreled, continued to work on it five years after Crane’s death. In his essay on its composition, “Narcissus as Narcissus,” which effectively completes the self-scrutinizing activity that is both the poem’s method and its subject, Tate quotes Crane’s comment on it in a letter. What the dead soldiers represent, Crane explains, speaking for Tate, is the loss of “a tradition of excess (not literally excess, rather active faith) which cannot be perpetuated in the fragmentary cosmos of today.”18 Tate, who is identified with the skeptical, ironic speaker at the gate, is equally shut off from the heroic dead and the romantic poet Crane (that is, shut off from his imaginative daring, his rhetorical richness and risks). From For the Unfallen (1959) to The Triumph of Love (1998), Hill repeatedly assumes the stance of the man at the gate, because Tate elaborates the role, essential to Hill’s work, of the observer, survivor, and heir. Jon Silkin describes how, in Hill’s “Funeral Music,”“the battle of Towton, and its murderousness, is not encapsulated as dramatic action, but brooded on after the event, thereby allowing the external state of the field and the state of the mind experiencing and responding to it to meet.”19 Hill’s battle scenes, like Tate’s, are simultaneously historical sites and psychological spaces where the dramatic struggles represented in heroic literature, while they lie in the past, retain a hallucinatory Langdon Hammer : : : 127

presence, having been internalized in the poet’s imagination and renewed, in another form, in the acute self-consciousness and daunting technical demands — what Hill calls the “exemplary ordeal”20 — of his poetic method. The analogy present in Tate between the soldier and the poet reappears in Hill’s poems about poets who were soldiers in the First World War: Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Péguy, Ivor Gurney. In Hill’s poems of the Second World War these figures join the Holocaust victim Robert Desnos, the survivor Paul Celan, and others. Hill identifies with these figures and speaks for them, but his role as their advocate and heir also separates him from them. These soldier-poets are martyrs to an unspecified “faith” Hill gazes on and venerates but (like Tate) cannot fully share. Standing at the gate, Tate’s poet is positioned at the margins, also, of modern society. The ethical implications of that stance, Hill’s lifelong preoccupation, are the theme of a short, early essay, never reprinted,“The Poetry of Allen Tate” (1958).21 The modern poet, as exemplified by Tate, is a figure of resistance who “refuses to be pacified by the many managerial bodies of this world” (PT 9). Rather, as Tate writes in a passage from “The Man of Letters in the Modern World” that Hill quotes with approval, “His task is to preserve the integrity, the purity and the reality of language,” a task the poet can approach only “through the letter,” which “is in the long run our one indispensable test of the actuality of our experience” (PT 8). But modern society does not provide the shared moral categories that the poet requires for this work. “Blasphemy,” Hill complains,“which was once accessible to the medieval Christian, and may be accessible still, to a strict Marxist, is one way of affirming truth that our world of Commodity cannot know” (PT 10). Describing the modern poet’s powerlessness, Hill quotes a passage from Fletcher Pratt’s narrative of the Confederate army’s final charge. This restatement is also a comment on Tate’s ode; loosely quoting Crane’s interpretation of the poem, Hill equates the Union soldiers and the forces of capital: “The Confederates, ‘the exemplars of active faith,’ have broken like ‘gray moths’ against the solid wall of militant commerce. The Union cavalry . . . are like Milton’s angels, who cannot be injured. Parting before the blow, they flow together again. The self-healing properties of Capitalism are, of course, renowned” (PT 10). As Hill recognizes, Tate took refuge in his doomed war against “the provident and self-healing gods” — a phrase from “Of Commerce and Society,” a poem contemporaneous with the essay that seems like an extension of it22 — by retreating to the limited but secure redoubt of his formalism. Unable to exercise moral power in public discourse, he asserted mastery in the domain of poetic technique, which always entailed for Tate command of rhyme and 128 : : : Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill

meter. “‘Form,’” Hill declares, “for the modern poet, is indeed both triumph and concession” (PT 11). Triumph, because Tate’s “insistence on the authority of ‘form’” defends the poet from “the pernicious easiness of self-destruction in art” (represented by Crane, for Tate as much as Winters), and it provides the poet with “his own moral world, his own pattern and order,” within “a chaotic society” (PT 11). But poetic technique, mastered for its own sake, is “a claim to bourgeois respectability” (PT 11), a “concession” hard to distinguish from the self-regarding professionalism Tate jokes about uneasily, as if to ward it off, in the title of his essay on his own poem, “Narcissus as Narcissus.” For the most part, American readers have noticed the concession, rather than the triumph, in Tate’s poetics. In the late 1950s, Robert Lowell, Tate’s protégé, initiated the mature phase of his career by rejecting his mentor’s prosody and the apocalyptic view of modern culture that went with it (the key elements shaping Lowell’s, like Hill’s, early style). In the Confessional sections of Life Studies, composed in free verse and prose, Lowell gave up Tate’s demand for technical mastery and made, he hoped, a “breakthrough back into life.”23 Strangely, given Lowell’s example, Hill grew in just the opposite way — by keeping faith with Tate’s clenched poetics and apocalyptic sensibility, refusing to relax. Hill, no less than Lowell, saw that “form” was fetishized in Tate’s work: that is what his inverted commas around the word mean. But Hill did not respond to that fetishization of form (and the limits it set for poetry) by subordinating “the letter”to the greater authenticity of “life,”as Lowell did. Rather, Hill turns the screw tighter. He preserves Tate’s intent while transforming his practice. Eliot’s remark about the modern poet’s burdened consciousness — “Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know”24 — can be applied to this case. Even while he emulates Tate and other moderns, including Eliot, they remain remote from Hill because he knows something more than they do; he knows them. In particular, Hill knows that modernist poetry was not simply ineffectual or aloof in the face of European fascism and anti-Semitism, but variously complicit with or contaminated by those forces. This historical knowledge repeatedly works its way into Hill’s poems. It means that, when he seeks to purify “the letter,” renewing the modernist program for literature, Hill does so fully aware of its impurity, and foreknowing his own failure.25 Thus his work turns on itself continually, obliged to acknowledge its own lack of innocence. Hill interrupts his memorial for an unnamed Holocaust victim, “September Song”: “(I have made / an elegy for myself it / is true)” (HNCP 55). It is a characteristic move. As Neil Corcoran puts it, speaking of Hill’s strategies Langdon Hammer : : : 129

generally, “The poem can be given its permission only by the scrupulous scepticism of its unease before its own powers of appropriation and exploitation.”26 In his essay on Tate, Hill praises “the magnificent objective irony of ‘Ode to the Confederate Dead’” in contrast to the “‘mandarin’ or ‘self-communing’” idiom of other Tate poems (PT 9). In order “to rinse and clarify the moral obfuscations” (PT 9) and avoid the pitfall of self-communion, irony must be wounding, and self-wounding first of all. Thus, in Tate’s “Ode to Our Young Pro-Consuls of the Air,” “it triumphs by penetrating the under-belly of its own most passionate loyalty” (PT 10). Hill, not content with “form” as a source of value, pushes this principle further. He subjects Tate’s modernist ironies to ironization, removing from his own work, in the intensity of his selfexamination and mistrust, the pretense to verbal mastery that was Tate’s last resort. It is as if Hill had applied so much pressure to his words that his handle on them has broken, and they are allowed to float free. In the lines just quoted from “September Song,” for example, does the phrase “it / is true” confirm Hill’s admission of self-interest (an apology that falsifies, or greatly complicates, the poem’s pathos), or does it convert that admission into something like a boast (“I have written this for my own satisfaction, and I say it is true”)?27 Typically, Hill does not allow us to decide on one reading but forces us to include both. Hill’s recent free verse poems raise interpretative problems of this kind repeatedly. “September Song,” being fourteen lines, written in free verse with traces of meter, is a kind of broken sonnet (as if the paper on which a metrical poem was written had been shredded and reassembled with bits lost). As such it lies somewhere between Hill’s earlier and later practices. Until “September Song” in Hill’s New and Collected Poems, the work is usually metrical, often rhyming, and organized into stanzas.28 Modeled on Tate’s, this versification foregrounds the poet’s control over language through devices of closure; it invites us to see the density of words on the page as a figure for density of meaning. Purifying “the letter,” here, means regulating it by fitting it into uniform blocks (“encasing” it, as Sherry suggests [UT 31]). Contrast Hill’s free verse poems in Canaan (1996). With minimal punctuation and flexible lineation, suspended in the page’s white space, Hill’s words in “Cycle” swivel, as if double-jointed, moving forward and backward between different syntactic connections and semantic options: So there there it is past reason and measure sustaining 130 : : : Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill

the constancy of mischance its occlusion a spasm a psalm29 “Cycle” is a poem dedicated to William Arrowsmith, translator of Eugenio Montale and other poets important to Hill. The indefinite “it” in these lines is probably that unnameable thing, “the absolute,” which Hill describes in an essay on Pound as the writer’s proper goal: “The absolute is brought back to become a part of the relative and conditional, the not quite it and the not quite not it; but, so circumstanced, is all the more fully and directly affirmed. Lyric utterance stands as witness to a faith in ‘sheer perfection’ even while it is standing scrutiny as a piece of evidence in the natural history of such belief.”30 Hill permits “Cycle,” his “lyric utterance,” to “stand” in this double way: “witness to a faith in ‘sheer perfection’” and “a piece of evidence in the natural history of such belief,” it is “a spasm” and “a psalm.” We feel the proximity of these contraries in the reversal of the letters “s” and “p” that begin the two words. Neither one cancels the other.31 The interaction of Hill’s free verse and syntax emphasizes a general reversibility of terms. Is “it”“past / reason and measure,” in the sense of beyond and above them, or is “it” simply “past,” vanished and unavailable to us, and now “reason and measure” are alone “sustaining”? The equivocation expresses Hill’s refusal either to invest in “reason and measure” or not to. His free verse is not, as in Lowell,“a breakthrough” beyond formalism, “back to life.” Nor is it an addition to a poet’s repertoire of forms, as in Gunn. It is, rather, an extension of Tate’s poetics of self-scrutiny to a point at which the poetic forms that were essential to Tate have been dismantled.32 In Hill’s reworking of them, Tate’s poetics of closure, at the far reach of their logic, yield an openness, something more like dispersion than compression. In the same way, Hill’s demystifications of verbal art (“a spasm”) renew the potential for “innocence of first inscription,” as the poet proceeds “clause upon clause / with or without assent / reason and desire” — those mortal enemies in modern poetry — “on the same loop.”33 How close this still remains to Tate is evident in a poem such as “Sorrel.” Hill’s epigraph explains that the plant is “Very common and widely distributed . . . It is called Sorrow . . . in some parts of Worcestershire,” which places the churchyard described in Hill’s native region. Full of regional grief and aware that nature is indifferent to our feelings, it is like a fragment of Tate’s ode set in the English countryside, with the same wind (a parody of romantic inspiration) “lapsing and rising” in both poems. But Hill’s tone is harder to fix

Langdon Hammer : : : 131

than Tate’s. The spiritual terms of Tate’s poem are fully ironized: wind drives the dead leaves, a “casual sacrament,” “to their election in the vast breath”; “They sough the rumor of morality.”34 Tate’s poem insists, in short, on the dominance of “natural history” over “faith.” In “Sorrel” the ivy that “makes carved shapes crumble” also decorates them, as if to honor, not only undermine, the traditional faith they embody: “the ill-weathering stone / salvation’s troth-plight, plumed, of the elect” (HNCP 40). “Sorrel” should be read in relation to the poems of political dissent in Canaan — for example, the two called “To the High Court of Parliament,” dated “November 1994.” In these poems, which open and close the book, Tate’s anger is renewed in Hill’s disgust at members of Parliament who took money for speaking in the House. Against this degradation of civic speech, Canaan poses, among other heroes, William Cobbett, the romantic man of letters and reformer. In “To William Cobbett: In Absentia,” Hill begins: “I say it is not faithless, to stand without faith, keeping open / vigil at the site.” The “vigil” is the one Cobbett held at “the site” of public discourse, which is always for Hill also a “battle site.” The poem shows us Hill, again, as Tate’s man at the gate. But that position, having been held, has been revalued. Hill is “without faith” because he knows that Cobbett’s labor ultimately “brought to pass / reborn Commodity with uplifted hands / awed by its own predation.”35 Hill understands the “self-healing” powers of capital in historical perspective. But being “without faith” is also to want it, in the double sense of lacking and desiring it, and so to keep “open” vigil (an expectant and ongoing witness, not an empty one). “So what is faith,” Hill asks in The Triumph of Love, “if it is not / inescapable endurance?”36 In “Duncan,” the poem that introduces Boss Cupid, Gunn’s most recent volume, rhymed iambic pentameter stanzas honor the vatic free-verse poet Robert Duncan. Gunn tells of the young Duncan carried away by an “unstopping flood” of inspiration while he rides the Berkeley–San Francisco ferry back and forth across the bay, discovering in the process “a new mode . . . in which past purposes unravelled.”37 The back-and-forth movement of Gunn’s metrical lines are freed from any simple association with closure and allied to Duncan’s poetics of process and openness — an art Winters would have rejected as irrationalist. At the same time, what Gunn gains from Duncan — the principle that “You add to, you don’t cancel what you do” — allows him, over the course of his career, not to reject Winters’s rationalism, but “add to” it Duncan’s example. In the end, this is not a matter of adding free verse to meter in a technical repertoire, but of transforming the possible uses and 132 : : : Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill

meanings of meter — indeed, the potential uses and meanings of both free verse and meter, and therefore of poetic form as such. We can say something similar of Hill. Silkin calls Hill’s poetry “A conjunction of intensities, sometimes sensuously rich, and nearly always scrupulously evaluative” (PGH 150). Hill achieves something that seemed impossible in American poetry when he began to read it: He maintains Tate’s scrupulous evaluations without, however, sacrificing the “intensities” and sensuous richness of a poet like Hart Crane — “reason and desire / on the same loop.” In doing so, Hill, like Gunn, makes of the truncated, self-divided oeuvre of a minor modern American poet a point of departure for his own poetic project, which proceeds not by rejecting that model but by pursuing rhetorical and imaginative options which that model purposely suppressed and on a deep level still contains. Gunn and Hill succeed in this by relocating the American poets they read in other traditions, activating in them resonances and affiliations obscured by most American accounts of American poetry. In their hands, Winters’s formalist ethos and Tate’s prophetic anticapitalism are retooled to do new kinds of poetic work in social and political circumstances very different from those in which they were formulated. It is not an accident that Hill’s reputation is, if anything, higher in the United States than in Britain, or that Gunn’s American readers sometimes find him too British, and his British readers find him too American.38 Reading Gunn and Hill may make us feel that these national traditions are constraining fictions whose apparent dead-ends merely lead us in directions in which we are unaccustomed to looking. But then it is only because national traditions are also durable and real, and such things as English and American poets do exist, that Gunn and Hill have been able to understand American poetry in the ways that they have, and to write their own versions of it. notes This essay first appeared in a slightly different form in Contemporary Literature (xliii, 4), pp. 644–66. I am grateful for permission to reprint it. 1 Gunn has written about his relationship with Winters in some detail. See “On a Drying Hill: Yvor Winters,” collected in Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 197–212. Hereafter SL; Clive Wilmer, Poets Talking (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994), p. 5; “The Art of Poetry LXII,” Paris Review (1997): pp. 159–60. Hereafter AP. Hill is the author of “The Poetry of Allen Tate,” Geste 3 (1958): pp. 8–12, and the entry for Tate in Stephen Spender and Donald Hall, eds., The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry (London: Hutchinson, 1963), pp. 302–3, and he speaks of Tate in John Hoffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 85. Hereafter V. The best discussion of either relationship is Vincent Sherry’s on Hill’s use of Tate in his The Langdon Hammer : : : 133

2

3 4

5

6 7 8

9 10

11

12

Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987) passim. Hereafter UT. In Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: Seabury, 1976), Bloom writes: “The merely extrinsic influences on Hill’s early verse are mostly American; I can detect the fierce rhetoric of Allen Tate, and the visionary intensities of Richard Eberhart, in some places” (p. 234). (Eberhart, another poet from Tate’s and Winters’s generation, is an influence Hill openly acknowledges (see Haffenden, V, p. 78). Bloom, x-raying Hill’s work, continues: “Yet the true precursor is always Blake” (p. 234). In this essay I will take Hill’s and Gunn’s “merely extrinsic influences”seriously, as constituting the literary historical field in which they begin to write poetry, and out of which they develop their senses of tradition, including their relationships to major (or in Bloom’s terms, “strong”) poets such as Blake. Thom Gunn, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), p. 57. Hereafter GCP. Gunn is usually seen as a Movement poet, although he dislikes the identification: “my contention is that the Movement didn’t really exist: what we had in common was a period style” (SL 219). Hill is not a Movement poet, but his early work, particularly the few undergraduate-era poems contained in his first book, could be classified with the “New Romanticism” or Apocalypse poetry of the 1940s. Bloom may be right that Tate’s influence on Hill is a screen for Blake’s, but if so, Tate is also a screen for British Bardic poets of the 1940s — out of which, arguably, Ted Hughes, another contemporary with whom Hill could be discussed, also emerges. “On the Limits of Poetry” is the title of one of Tate’s books of essays (New York: Swallow Press, 1948). Robert Lowell remembers of Tate: “He said that he always believed each poem he finished would be his last,” in Collected Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), p. 59. See my Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Yvor Winters, Collected Poems (Denver: A. Swallow, 1952; rev. ed., Denver: Swallow Press, 1960), p. 87. Hereafter WCP. Winters’s letter to Crane was destroyed, but we can infer its content from Crane’s reply. See Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber, eds., “O My Land, My Friends”: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997), pp. 335–40. Gunn has commented: “He would have been appalled at the idea I was queer” (AP 159). Clive Wilmer, “Definition and Flow: Thom Gunn in the 1970s,” in Peter Jones and Michael Schmidt, eds., British Poetry since 1970: A Critical Survey (Manchester: Carcanet, 1980), pp. 64–74. For versions of this literary historical narrative, see James E. B. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Walter Kaladjian, Languages of Liberation: The Social Text of American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); or, more recently, Hank Lazer, Opposing Poetries, vol. I, Issues and Institutions (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996). On the relative merits of free verse and meter, see Gunn, AP 160–61, and especially The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography (San Francisco: North Point,

134 : : : Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill

13 14

15

16

17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24 25

26 27

28

1985). Hereafter OP: “there are things I can do in the one form that I can’t do in the other, and I wouldn’t gladly relinquish either” (p. 189). Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (Chicago: A. Swallow, 1947), p. 23. For discerning readings of Winters’s early poetry and prose, as well as the whole of his career, see Terry Comito, In Defense of Winters: The Poetry and Prose of Yvor Winters (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). These ideas are suggested in Gunn’s memoir of Winters, as well as, more amply, in his essay on Williams: “His stylistic qualities are governed . . . by a tenderness and generosity of feeling which make them fully humane. For it is a humane action to attempt the rendering of a thing, person, or experience in the exact terms of its existence” (OP 35). See Gunn, “Hardy’s awkwardness, whether completely deliberate or inadvertent or a funny mixture, comes from a concern for authenticity” (OP 98); and “In his attraction to inherently awkward material, Ginsberg resembles Hardy” (SL 104). Sherry makes this point (UT 2). In 1946, Tate was entering the height of his reputation. Allen Tate, Essays of Four Decades (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1968), p. 599. Jon Silkin, “The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill,” in British Poetry Since 1960: A Critical Survey, ed. Michael Schmidt and Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Carcarnet, 1972), p. 152. Hereafter PGH. Geoffrey Hill, The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984), p. 3. “The Poetry of Allen Tate,” Geste 3 (1958): pp. 8–12. Hereafter PT. Geoffrey Hill, New and Collected Poems, 1952–92 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 40. Hereafter HNCP. Robert Lowell, Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), p. 244. See the chapter “Robert Lowell’s Breakdown” in my Hart Crane and Allen Tate, pp. 211–32. Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), p. 40. Sherry writes: “Granted, the poetics of total control settle into atavistic politics; to ignore Hill”s inclination in this regard is naïve, or dishonest. But to deprive him of the lesson of history is wrong, too, for he has learned it” (UT 25). This phrasing may seem to separate too readily Hill and the moderns. History teaches precisely that its “lesson” cannot be learned, sufficiently, that is, to protect poetry from settling into one form or another of moral failure, according to Hill. Neil Corcoran, English Poetry since 1940 (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 122, 126. Silkin wrings these and other nuances from the lines (PGH 146). Christopher Ricks is equally sensitive to this type of doubleness throughout Hill’s work: for example, commenting on “Two Formal Elegies,” “There is simultaneous delight and fear in ‘This world went spinning from Jehovah’s hand’: spinning effortlessly in its ordained arc, or spinning away for ever from his hand?” The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 291. Even the prose poems of Mercian Hymns have this characteristic density, from their terse syntax to the block formatting of them on the page. Hill draws on the modernity of the prose poem, as a form, but he makes no naïve claim for it as a technical advance Langdon Hammer : : : 135

29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38

over meter and rhyme. On Hill’s conscious evocation of Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscripts in Mercian Hymns, see Nicholas Howe,“Praise and Lament: The Afterlife of Old English Poetry in Auden, Hill, and Gunn,” in Peter S. Baker and Nicholas Howe, eds., Words and Works: Studies in Medieval Language and Literature in Honor of Fred C. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 303. Geoffrey Hill, Canaan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), p. 38. Geoffrey Hill, The Enemy’s Country: Words, Contexture, and Other Circumstances of Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 101. “Incantation or incontinence — the lyric cry?” Hill asks in The Triumph of Love (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 79. In The Triumph of Love, Hill even makes such an ascetic, penitential stance a means to create something Tate’s work is positioned exactly against: a long poem in free verse, that, moreover, contains and explores all manner of impurity (of diction, generic form, rhetoric, and motive). “That Man as a Rational Animal Desires the Knowledge Which Is His Perfection,” Triumph of Love, p. 2. Allen Tate, Collected Poems, 1919–1976 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), p. 27. “To the High Court,” Canaan, p. 9. The Triumph of Love, p. 64. Boss Cupid (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), p. 3. Gunn remarks that, “People used to ask did I feel I was an English poet or an American poet and I would always be wishy-washy about it. Then a few years ago I came across a reference to myself as an Anglo-American poet and I thought, ‘Yes, that’s what I am. I’m an Anglo-American poet.’ So that resolves the question!” (SL 218).

136 : : : Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill

The White Room in the New York Schoolhouse tony lopez

This is a poem from Lee Harwood’s book The Man With Blue Eyes, published in New York by Angel Hair Books in 1966:

rain journal: london: june ’65 sitting naked together on the edge of the bed drinking vodka this my first real love scene your body so good your eyes sad love stars but John now when we’re miles apart the come-down from mountain visions and the streets all raining and me in the back of a shop making free phone calls to you what can we do? crackling telephone wires shadow me and this distance haunts me and yes — I am miserable and lost without you whole days spent remaking your face the sound of your voice the feel of your shoulder1

The poem seems to be an autobiographical episode that is fixed in place and time by the title “rain journal: london: june ’65.” The frankness of the matterof-fact description and the casual, unofficial quality established by the lowercase voice, is complicated right away by the fourth line, “this my first real love scene,” because the past event is visualized as a film scene, presented in the present tense, casually and naively direct, with the speaker included (“sitting naked together” with a sort of adolescent wonder in the tone), and because (picking up again on “scene”) those “sad love stars” are to be located in a filmic rather than a celestial firmament. Then there is the transition, “but John,” which is crucial to the poem, and which makes it special because the lover is named and addressed directly as a man, just as the present time of writing is established. After mountains and love scenes there is separation and lonely streets, a mundane job in a shop, lovers keeping in touch by cheating on phone calls: “What can we do?” The poem narrates and updates a seemingly ordinary situation in the conventions of lyric poetry with contemporary details: vodka, phone calls, international love affairs. The poet writes to an absent lover, imagining their times of passion together. Emotion is attributed to objects and situations: telephone wires “shadow,” distance “haunts.” The poet is “miserable” and “lost” without the lover, and the present time is a “come-down,” with the suggestion of a drug-induced high wearing off, leaving the speaker blank and depressed. The literal “come-down” from high altitude combining with a come-down from an equivalent high of sexual excitement, and the three kinds of high compress into the line “the come-down from mountain visions.” But all this gauche and adolescent yearning has a special quality because it is directly addressed from one man to another: “but John,” “to you,” and “without you.” The “first real love scene” puts a particular accent on “real love” here, claiming for homosexuality a different meaning from that which was current in 1965 in the era of scandals and queer spies in league with the communists. The very directness has a value because it is not camp and because it allows a vulnerability to be established. Queer emotion is here presented by the speaker as the “first real love” and not as a kind of brittle imitation lacking in authenticity, nor indeed as a kind of illness requiring aversion therapy. The book, The Man With Blue Eyes (dedication “For John”), narrates a love affair with John Ashbery in 1965–66, including (for Harwood) trips from London to Paris where Ashbery had lived on and off between 1955 and 1965, and journeys that they made together by train to the French Alps and to Switzerland in 1965. Many of the poems are printed with locations and dates of writing (the first poem, for instance, London, 11–21 October, 1965). They are not printed in date order, however, so that recognizable events and movements 138 : : : Lee Harwood

need to be reordered, if a record of these journeys is to be followed and comprehended chronologically. The first visit to Paris recorded in this book is dated June 9, 1965, by the poems “The White Cloud” and “Before Schulz the Kiteman.” Next is a train journey from Paris to Grenoble on June 11, 1965 (“Train Poem”), and on June 12, the location given is Lans-en-Vercors (near Grenoble and the editorial address of Locus Solus magazine, editor 1960–62 John Ashbery) from the poem “For John in the Mountains.”2 Then back to London June 22 (“The Sun Burning in its own Fur”), and there again June 5, 1965 (“Green Light — for Michel Couturier”). Then Paris July 19: “For d. s. h.,” then date location and title combine for “Lausanne 26 July 1965,” and then back to Paris for July 27: “Train Love Poem.”3 London in August 1965 is given for “Summer,” and London is the location from then on with “Poem for Peter Ruppell,” “Letter Poem,” “London — New York” (in which Ashbery’s return flight to New York is imagined) up to January and February 1966: “Landscape with 3 People.” Sometimes the date is absolutely specific and sometimes not, and the effect (in a book published in the 1960s in New York) is of a self-conscious wish to be seen as someone from elsewhere, as traveled and European. There is also the impression of factual information, almost like evidence, as if a case were being built. And again, the very specificity adds to the wide-eyed and youthful feel of the book as a document — as if to be in London, Paris, and Lausanne were something to be noted and put on record.4 Feelings about this kind of annotation are no doubt a function of age and class, and just such discriminations are very much the matter of The Man With Blue Eyes, which does seem to have a strand of gleeful excitement in luxury, like a child let loose in a sweet shop. Here are some examples: walk with equal calm through palace rooms chandeliers tinkling in the silence as winds batter the gardens outside formal lakes shuddering at the sight of two lone walkers dinner parties whose grandeur stops all conversation and the train’s restaurant-car with knowing smiles exchanged over the wine I would take a thin book of poems & read till he brought me my dry martini5

Tony Lopez : : : 139

We need to read this against the “free phone calls” in “Rain Journal,” the “pained tube-rides” in “Black Curtains,” the “cafes & juke-boxes” in “The White and Blue Liner,” as another, quite different social world. Lee Harwood was employed between 1964 and 1966 as a bookshop packer and then sales assistant for Better Books in Charing Cross Road, London: so traveling around in Europe and visiting Alpine resorts must have seemed very grand indeed.6 This is well before the mass-market package holiday made European travel seem commonplace to the English working and lower-middle class. In The Man With Blue Eyes, the stately home or French chateau is a backdrop, with imaginary grand banquets, for the current romance; as is the deluxe restaurant dining-car of an international train moving through Swiss scenery, and also the fantasies of living a sophisticated expatriate life in some huge South American colonial estate. There are images of romantic fiction embedded in a collaged surface that is more disjunctive than my account has so far shown. As your eyes are blue you move me — and the thought of you — I imitate you. & cities apart. yet a roof grey with slates or lead. the difference is little & even you could say as much through a foxtail of pain even you when the river beneath your window was as much as I dream of. loose change & your shirt on the top of a chest-of-drawers a mirror facing the ceiling & the light in a cupboard left to burn all day a dull yellow probing the shadowy room “what was it?” “cancel the tickets” — a sleep talk whose horrors razor a truth that can walk with equal calm through palace rooms chandeliers tinkling in the silence as winds batter the gardens outside formal lakes shuddering at the sight of two lone walkers of course this exaggerates small groups of tourists appear and disappear in an irregular rhythm of flowerbeds you know even in the stillness of my kiss that doors are opening in another apartment 140 : : : Lee Harwood

on the other side of town a shepherd grazing his sheep through a village we know high in the mountains the ski slopes thick with summer flowers7 The first poem, “As Your Eyes Are Blue,” moves quickly from direct address (thoughts of the loved one) to the city surroundings (the lover’s surroundings and those of the speaker) and then to a declaration of pain at separation, a memory of being let pleasurably alone in a shared room, and then a sudden transition to some kind of unspecified fear present in “sleep talk” and held below full consciousness. The “palace” backdrop (mentioned previously) becomes a place invaded by “small groups of tourists” (which is not the image that the speaker has of the lovers themselves). Then a city interior love scene transforms into a pastoral interlude: a shepherd moving his flock through a village toward grazing, and we are for a moment back in the mountain scenery with alpine flowers on ski slopes. The transitions are a version of consciousness itself. The punctuation is rough-cut to make the cognitive and writing processes visible: phrases are built up into a collage with gaps and incomplete sentences so that the writing seems casual and unfinished in the way it has been put together. This impression is definitely enhanced by the design and production of the book, which is litho-printed from typewritten copy with hand-made transfer type here and there out of alignment and with letters sometimes unevenly spaced. The hand-drawn cover by Joe Brainard perfectly complements these design values. The cover in hand-drawn mostly capital letters with variation of size and weight between different words reads: “The man with blue eyes by lee harwood.” There is a thin hand-drawn black single-line box around the lettering and four stars decorate the design, printed in black on blue mold-made paper. It might be the cover of a school exercise book with stars awarded for good work, and some of this quality was lost when most of these poems were collected into Harwood’s next book, The White Room, in 1967. It is characteristic of Lee Harwood that as a young English poet he should be most strongly influenced by French and American precedents — and precedents as disparate as T. S. Eliot and Tristan Tzara. It is part of Harwood’s style, and of his remarkable sort of “negative capability,” to bring different things and motives together in unique and very unstable, but marvellous emulsions. This singular encounter with poetry, like that of any true poet, is a paradigm of Harwood’s encounter with the world, and vice-versa. In all things he seems to function by catalysing the air around him into a tighter, faster, more volatile substance. It is as if he read, cogitated, loved and created, not conceptually but passively, through his nerve ends, each electrical event drastically revising the balance of everything.8 Tony Lopez : : : 141

It was a surprise to me to read Peter Schjeldahl’s preface recently when looking at a copy of The Man With Blue Eyes, because I would not have expected Lee Harwood, when making a connection to American precursors, to have mentioned T. S. Eliot. In fact I can remember a number of conversations and letters in which Harwood has let me know quite clearly that he does not like Eliot’s poetry or criticism at all. So I was taken aback to see that the writer of this preface (probably ten years or so before) was allowed to set up these comparisons in this way. So often Eliot is read as an English poet, which is ludicrous. But my point here is that the younger Lee Harwood of twenty-six was happy or least not unwilling to be presented as a kind of heir to T. S. Eliot and Tristan Tzara as well as Keats, given that the work prefaced is so clearly but yet not explicitly declared to be an imitation of John Ashbery. As your eyes are blue you move me — & the thought of you — I imitate you. And Eliot does seem relevant. For to bring “different things and motives together in unique and very unstable, but marvelous emulsions” could obviously be an account not only of the Dada practice of Tzara, but also of aspects of Eliot’s The Waste Land, with its rapid conjunctions of different ventriloquized speakers focused on the city but involuntarily pronouncing out of an insistent and mythic and historical past. I suppose that John Ashbery is just too-much present in the book of poems that follows to have featured prominently in the preface — and the job being quickly and effectively done there is that of making the strikingly contemporary and even raw-seeming writing of Harwood’s poems fit into an established poetic tradition that is neither the Movement nor A. Alvarez’s New Poetry. The target audience for this book is the New York poetry scene: five hundred copies of a stapled pamphlet that would have had no trade distribution would not have traveled much further. The “catalysing power” claimed for Harwood’s poetry would refer knowing readers back to Eliot’s “objective correlative” just as clearly as “negative capability” would invoke Keats. And Eliot’s complex and indirect representations of subjectivity and sexuality, together with the brief and highly charged inclusion of personal, even pathological matter, do end up giving us a version of Eliot’s obscure emotional life, even if it is not on display as Harwood’s is in most of these poems. But that very display is cut into and complicated by the collage method (derived from Tzara, Eliot, Burroughs, and Ashbery) that Harwood uses in these poems. “Landscape With 3 People” imagines the break-up of a relationship at the start of a fanciful narrative of adventure. The break-up itself is narrated as an episode from a western: 142 : : : Lee Harwood

When the three horsemen rode in you left me there was no great pain at your leaving if I am quite honest you disappeared back into the house & I mounted up & rode out with the men The imagined act of breaking away (riding off “with the men”) is prefaced by the accusation that it is the woman who leaves, even though her leaving involves no more than going “back into the house.” Who is leaving whom? “There was no great pain in your leaving” seems an odd statement in this scenario, when the speaker is then imagined riding away into a cowboy dream of exclusively male company. In the next scene a woman is imagined from a long time later, seen in her pink dress, once again going into the house and leaving a screen door banging. The ending of the poem brings to focus the process of self-justification at play in the narrative: And most of this is far from true — you know — we know so little even on this trite level — but he — he was more beautiful than any river & I am cruel to myself because of this & the indulgence it involves. I loved him and I loved her & no understanding was offered to the first citizen when the ricks were burnt. The fictional relationships presented here are distanced because they are set in exotic mythic American scenarios: in the wild west and on a whaling ship that lands on a deserted island beach. Thus “most of this is far from true.” Yet the situation that is narrated here — “he was / more beautiful than any river” (which might well refer to the author of Rivers and Mountains), “I loved him and I loved her,” is personal and is the very core of the book: gun slingers riding in and messing up the whole show “don’t take our father away” (Journal 20 May 65) The glamorous European travel, the fantasy scenarios from films and popular fiction, and the imagined journeys to America (“a meeting planned a year Tony Lopez : : : 143

ahead” — “New York will welcome me”) are all working over the same ground: “don’t take our father away.” The biographical note in Contemporary Poets says, “married Jenny Goodgame in 1961 (dissolved 1967), one son.”9 A young family is broken up, feelings of guilt and the need for escape into traveling, fantasy narrative, and heroin: nothing happening. I don’t do much. fix every so often & a couple more days drift by in cloudy footsteps & me — this scene just one more sad repetition — waiting for the next flash waiting for some part time angel to come fix me up with necessary medicines blasted out of my head so many suns and stars to give you now10 One perfectly plausible explanation of the collaged written surface could be that here it is a way of coping with what is literally and emotionally unspeakable. It occurs to me that this may well be a good reason to compare Harwood and Eliot more carefully and more responsibly, but at present I want to look at the more obvious connection between Harwood’s and Ashbery’s poetry in the context of the New York School. I would propose Lee Harwood’s The White Room as a second-generation New York School book because it arises from a poetics that lasts in his work through the next two volumes, Landscapes and The Sinking Colony.11 Most of the poems from The Man With Blue Eyes are collected into The White Room, including “Train Poem” which is retitled “Train Poem — A Collaboration.” This poem, much closer to French Surrealist practice than any of the other poems except perhaps “Before Schulz the Kiteman,” was written in collaboration with Ashbery. Apart from writing poems together, there is a great deal in common between the work in The White Room section, “Falling,” and John Ashbery’s book, Rivers and Mountains. Harwood, before writing these new poems, had visited America to stay with Ashbery, and thus we find a different kind of knowing local reference in the work: I think there are pine trees in Fire Island but I’ve never been to Fire Island, though I can imagine and we know what could happen12

144 : : : Lee Harwood

Geoff Ward identifies the importance of the New York School of painting in the emergence of the New York School of poetry, which he says arises in a historical relationship to the former.13 He sketches how abstract expressionism itself may be seen as an invention of immigrant ex-European surrealists who had worked on the WPA Federal Art Project. According to Ward, James Schuyler’s poetry is “extremely painterly,”Frank O’Hara’s entire career as curator was bound up with the New York art world, and Ward also points out that O’Hara had a part in organizing the first exhibition of abstract expressionism to tour in Europe. Many of O’Hara’s poems document the New York art scene. Before he became a kind of national treasure of the United States as a poet, Ashbery earned his living as an art critic, informing America on the art scene in Europe for some years before becoming an influential editor of Art News. Harwood’s interests and development tie in very closely with this cultural context since he was translator of Tristan Tzara, Dadaist and Surrealist émigré poet.14 Versions of paintings are often included in his writings. A poem, “For Robert Motherwell,” establishes a direct relationship with New York abstract painting by ekphrasis: the white and then the black oval and then the white and then the black and then the white around the black15 This is an experiment that does not seem to be very hopeful or rewarding. “White” develops this idea into a more interesting poem, building up narrative situations that include the concept of whiteness in different ways that give it an imaginary content. The theme of painting is developed further in Harwood’s later book, Landscapes, where a kind of play with painting is involved in most of the poems. Ashbery, similarly, holds us to the playful written surface of writing, always moving the narrative situation rather than moving within any particular frame. He seems to be much less personally involved in the poems, most of them do not seem to communicate any personal experience (as Harwood’s mostly do). Among the poems in Ashbery’s book that work toward abstraction, “Into the Dusk-Charged Air,” which is made of sentences describing and combining the names of rivers, an assemblage of 151 lines without connection to narrative or personal engagement, is as good an example as could be found: The Amstel flows slowly. Leaves fall into the Connecticut as it passes Underneath. The Liffey is full of sewage, Like the Seine, but unlike The brownish-yellow Dordogne.16 Tony Lopez : : : 145

You get the idea. It is a poem built out of little bits of connecting matter, or local color, in support of nothing else. It is almost a list — a wonderfully achieved structure of contingency, truly incredulous of master-narratives, except that there is the most basic of plots. Just before the last page, some of the rivers mentioned are frozen, and then overleaf this becomes the condition of all of the rivers mentioned — and then a little lower down toward the end of the poem, a thaw begins so there is a change in state, an event, a test of attention that stops the poem being just a list. A passage that shows much more apparent or potential personal engagement is this excerpt from “Civilisation and its Discontents,” where an intimate voice is adopted and the mood of retrospective sadness is tried on for all it can be made to provide: Now I never see you much any more. The summers are much colder than they used to be In that other time, when you and I were young. I miss the human truth of your smile The half-hearted gaze of your palms And all things together, but there is no comic reign Only the facts you put to me. You must not then, Be very surprised if I am alone: it is all for you The night, and the stars, and the way we used to be.17 Even within this passage there are oddly deformed statements, “the halfhearted gaze of your palms” and “there is no comic reign,” which cannot quite be held within the frame. For whether the “palms” are plants or hands cannot be clear, but neither can “gaze” and whichever or both, the emotional stability of the passage has been radically shifted. “Comic reign” likewise interrupts the retrospective sadness bringing in as it does questions of genre and taking away the possibility of even fictional presentation of self. Of course there is a “real” emotional cause of this language-construct, but we have no confidence that it represents the author John Ashbery or any feelings he may once have had. This is a different effect from much of Harwood’s poetry, but there is much in common. The emotional directness of Harwood’s early work is complicated and destabilized by an increasing use of collaged narrative fragments and artificial scene-setting as his work alters over time. One account of that alteration might be that Harwood is taking up writing procedures arising from his friendship and collaboration with Ashbery. Narrative fragments combined into constructions that cannot be quite held together as coherent scenarios are very much characteristic of these two books. My sense is of a practice that goes beyond “Train Poem — A Collaboration”: 146 : : : Lee Harwood

I’d like to illustrate the similarities in their poetic techniques by quoting an early draft of a poem I published in a recent volume entitled Devolution (2000):

The New State But some corners are darker and more threatening than these moonless nights spent as on a raft in the seclusion of a melody heard as though through trees. It is so much a question of isolation and machines and the systems never quite work out — we’re glad of it, or half glad hearing the sounds of the enemy’s navy so that the mainland warded away the big floating ships. the motorcyclist started his machine and putting the bike into gear left and rode fast away along the big highway that led right up to the dock gates “you’re not fooling me or anyone else” The plan was to separate the enemy into two groups with the razor-edged mountains between. The woodland outside at last disappeared and then there was only the blackness broken by the occasional orange light from a farm window Spray bounced off the ends of the small grey waves a great drama was being won — he wanted to turn off the machinery on time as usual. It was late and dusk was just falling scooping snow off the mountains. The east catches the light. We parted at 1st Avenue and 51st street — It was July, he crossed over and then turned to wave quietly moving into the rustic landscape18 The poem takes us through various kinds of uncertainty opening as it does with the communication of a state of fear. Dark “moonless nights spent as on a raft,” hearing a melody “as though through trees” (my emphasis). The experience is unknowable, expressed figuratively through a vocabulary associated generally and remotely with the natural world. The transition to the world of Tony Lopez : : : 147

human experience in work is sudden but an emotional connection between “darkness,” “threats,” “seclusion,” and “isolation” is maintained. The possibility of naval warfare begins to produce a context for the imaginary nights “as on a raft.” There are three mentions of a machine or machinery, one of them a motorbike, one of them perhaps a kind of radar connected with the theme of warfare — yet this is not quite convincing because the machinery mentioned in line 21 is, we are told, usually turned off at a particular time, which makes no sense if it is any kind of warning system. The sudden transition from “snow off the mountains” to “1st Avenue and 51st street” also seems to undercut any sense of a coherent narrative situation being developed. There may, therefore, be no connection between the machines of lines 5, 10, and 21 and no connection between the “enemy’s navy” of line 8 and the enemy “separated into two groups” by “razor-edged mountains” in lines 15 and 16. No connection, that is, except that they happen to appear in this particular poem, where the frequency of occurrence seems to be deliberate in the former case and additional hints of context (“right up to the dock gates,” “spray bounced off the ends of the small grey waves”) help to establish the reading of a threat of naval war. I suppose that there are cities where you could be on “1st Avenue and 51st street” and see snowy mountains, but if we read this as a New York poem we are working on the level of fantasy — quite feasible given what we have seen up to now — and this impression seems to be enhanced by the last line, “quietly moving into the rustic landscape.” So that what we have here is a construction that does not eschew narrative, but which is nonetheless discontinuous and unable to be assimilated into a coherent whole. It is not abstraction as such but that which is signified as provisional and inconsistent. Clearly there are qualities here that we associate with Surrealism but the closest visual links would be with painters like Larry Rivers or Steven Campbell, where different styles of depiction are brought together into the elements of a scene, but cannot without imaginative effort be resolved. Such a resolution remains imaginary, separate from the artwork or text. Yet this poem, “The New State,” is completely synthetic and (we may be sure) based on no desire to communicate actual experience to anyone. It is made entirely of fragments of two poems with lines that have been only very slightly altered, so that the joins either vanish or become staged transitions appropriate to the post-Surrealist fractured narrative style that is adopted here. Cutting up cut-up poems, even those with little episodes of pure autobiography, abstracts the materials more completely into tones and emotional values — the process may be something like color painting — it is the surface continuity and breaks that are of interest. The connection is emotional but the 148 : : : Lee Harwood

emotion is a simulation that covers previous deceptions and abstractions of emotional lives, with events chosen for this quality of incomplete resemblance. Here it is “machines” and “war.” Trompe l’oeil effects promise depth but at the same time hold us to the surface unable to quite relax into what used to be called a satisfying read. Lines from Ashbery’s title-poem in Rivers and Mountains and lines from “The Book” in Harwood’s The White Room have been patched together to make “The New State.” This intertextual process of composition shows just how much there is in common between Ashbery’s and Harwood’s writings in these books published in 1966, when they were for periods living together. That Ashbery’s and Harwood’s works can be combined into a new compound work shows also that there is much less of a personal signature in these poems than we might expect to find. Harwood’s writings register that he was working through this important relationship for some years to come. The effects are obvious right up to The Sinking Colony (1970), when these impulses seem to run out in a beautiful but fading kind of colonial camp. The book is a slender construct of cut-up prose-works, visibly and appropriately running out of steam in nineteen rather sparse pages of text. After this come works like “The Long Black Veil” and “Notes of a Post-Office Clerk,” where the poems take on more extensive serial or open forms and pick up that post-Olson poetics taken up at the same time in different ways by Barry MacSweeney, Allen Fisher, and others. This is another way of saying that the most important influence on these poets at this time was Eric Mottram, and here I think the personal American influence in Harwood’s poetry seems to run out, though there is still American landscape, popular culture, and poetic theory.19 Harwood’s poetry of the mid 1960s was influenced by American culture, not as some remote set of artistic principles, but through his personal relationship with the widely published poet and art critic John Ashbery. Harwood’s own interest in French poetry (especially Tzara) was no doubt encouraged and validated by Ashbery’s enthusiasms and knowledge which had been sharpened by foreign residence. Harwood’s visits to America, sponsored by Ashbery, were the means by which a typically English view of American culture (cowboys, logging camps, fringed leather jackets) was set against more personal experience in a collage poetics that derives from Tzara, Ashbery, and Eliot. The issues of American postwar economic and cultural dominance are still of prime importance in this story, and Ashbery’s very presence in France is an example of that fact. It is as if the twenty-four-year-old Harwood were a temporary and rather belated war bride who brought back with him one aspect of the poetics of the New York School. I think that this personal

Tony Lopez : : : 149

route of poetic influence is likely to be much more important than is generally admitted in discussions of cultural transmission. notes 1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

15 16 17 18 19

Lee Harwood, The Man With Blue Eyes (New York: Angel Hair Books, 1966), p. 15 Thomas Riggs, ed., Contemporary Poets (Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press, 1996), p. 33. d. s. h. refers to the lettrist poet and Benedictine monk Dom Sylvester Houédard. The locations and dates were removed, except where they have been incorporated into titles, when most of the book was reprinted in Harwood’s first major collection, The White Room, published by Fulcrum, London, in 1967. The first two quotations are from “As Your Eyes Are Blue,”pp. 9–10; the third from “Lausanne: 26 July 1965,” pp. 27–28; and the fourth from “Landscape with 3 People,” pp. 39–41, in The Man With Blue Eyes. Riggs, Contemporary Poets, p. 450. Harwood, “As Your Eyes Are Blue,” The Man With Blue Eyes, pp. 9–10. Peter Schjeldahl, from the Preface to The Man With Blue Eyes, p. vii. Riggs, Contemporary Poets, p. 450. The quotations are from “Letterpoem,” p. 36; “London — New York,” p. 37; and “Dear Peter,” p. 38, The Man With Blue Eyes. Lee Harwood, Landscapes (London: Fulcrum, 1969); Lee Harwood, The Sinking Colony (London: Fulcrum, 1970). Harwood, “The Seaside,” in The White Room, p. 60. Geoff Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (London: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 1–9. Here Ward’s argument depends on Dore Ashton, The New York School (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Lee Harwood’s translations include Tristan Tzara, Selected Poems (London: Trigram Press, 1975) and Chanson Dada: Selected Poems (Toronto: Coach House/Underwhich Editions, 1987). Harwood, “For Robert Motherwell,” in The White Room, p. 78. John Ashbery, “Into the Dusk-Charged Air,” in Rivers and Mountains (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. 17. John Ashbery, “Civilisation and its Discontents,” in Rivers and Mountains, p. 14. Tony Lopez, “The New State,” in Devolution (Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 2000), pp. 61–62. Eric Mottram (1924–1995), professor of American Literature at King’s College, London, was very influential both as a teacher and as an editor, in the transmission of American poetics in Britain. His interests might be briefly indicated in his editing of the Penguin Companion to Literature, vol. 3, United States and Latin America, with Malcolm Bradbury and Jean Franco (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), Poetry Review (1972–75), and The New British Poetry, with Gillian Allnut, Fred D’Aguiar, and Ken Edwards (London: Paladin, 1988).

150 : : : Lee Harwood

“Rebellion That Honors the Liturgies” Robert Lowell and Michael Hofmann stephen burt

Robert Lowell, Helen Vendler has written, “could dispense with ideology but never with history”; Lowell himself, that he was “learning to live in history.”1 Now he is part of history, and makes critics uneasy; readers still read him, and teach “For the Union Dead,” but it’s common to meet talented young Americans not so much hostile to, as unfamiliar with, the last books. Lowell is better received now in Britain, where his fame came later. Both the energetic Lowell of the late blank-verse sonnets, and the dejected Lowell of Day by Day, seem to me far more original, more conscious, more powerful poets than most readers now acknowledge. Michael Hofmann — who grew up in Germany, attended schools in England, wrote about Lowell at Cambridge, travels often to Mexico, and teaches in America — has written very good poems close to Lowell’s late sonnet style. I want here to describe the fourteen-line poems Lowell wrote between 1967 and 1973, and then to show what Hofmann has done with their devices, and why they have served him so well. I focus on Hofmann’s second book, Acrimony (1986), which continues to seem to me his most important.2 Ian Hamilton concludes his biography of Lowell with a cascade of quotation: Christopher Ricks quotes words that I myself was privileged to read out at Lowell’s memorial evening. . . . On Lowell’s death, Ricks says, “there came to me the words of Empson on King Lear”: The scapegoat who has collected all this wisdom for us is viewed at the end with a sort of hushed envy, not I think because he has become wise but because the general human desire for experience has been so glutted in him; he has been through everything. We that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.3 David Bromwich comments acidly: “One cannot help noticing how many times this sentiment has to be mediated before it could reach us from a safe

distance: Hamilton on Lowell quotes Ricks quoting Empson on Lear.”4 Bromwich suggests that Lowell’s late poems rely illegitimately on his biographical myth. But Hamilton’s nested quotations also show what kind of thinking Lowell’s work prompts in others, what kind of thinking the poetry — with or without the biography — represents: Lowell’s work presents itself as responsive, reactive, never autochthonous. As Langdon Hammer has put it, Lowell’s own writing “is derivative in this uncontestable and almost overwhelming sense: it continually uses other writers’ words.”5 Lowell’s matrix of retrospect, reference, rebuttal, and response encourages people who talk about Lowell to compare, cross-check, juxtapose, and mediate. Michael Hofmann has (as his reviewers acknowledge) learned much from the later Lowell in general. He has, I hope to show, proven especially sensitive to this referential or revisionist aspect of Lowell’s work in particular. Writing in 1989, Hofmann defended the later sonnets against Philip Hobsbaum’s attacks, while agreeing with Hobsbaum that “Lowell is an adapter, a borrower, a rewriter. When what he had to rewrite was himself, and in fourteen-line units, it is not surprising that the result displeases the admirer of his early work.”6 In his last decade Lowell became increasingly conscious of his drive to adapt, rewrite, refigure — it became his subject. One “fourteen-line unit” imagined Randall Jarrell’s ghost admonishing Lowell: “You didn’t write, you rewrote . . .” (SP 178). The most persistent symbols in Notebook — rivers clogged with “slush-ice,” and the deciduous foliage Lowell termed “leafmeal” and “leaflace” — suggest his endless work on his always-rough drafts, his “carbon scarred with ciphers.”7 Lowell rewrites, but can’t do without, the obstructive cipher of his sources and previous selves, as his winter rivers can’t flow without ice. If part of the strength of the early Lowell was the force with which he attacked his sources, part of the later Lowell’s originality (as Vereen Bell has shown) lay in the ways he forced himself to credit those sources, to insist that we can’t make everything new.8 Lowell once complained that Whitman’s preface to Leaves of Grass was a “magnificent document, but there is not one single predecessor mentioned in it.”9 Against more common ideas that poets can create or re-create themselves, Lowell’s poems propose more or less pessimistic or nihilist models for how little we can transform or escape our predecessors, our sources — ancestral, national, intellectual, cultural, linguistic, biographical, and familial. By the time of the sonnets Lowell has become an acknowledged cultural power, and a father: his sonnets, rewriting and quarreling with their precedents, thus cast Lowell as both the challenger and the paternal authority to be challenged. 152 : : : Robert Lowell and Michael Hofmann

Lowell’s desire to challenge his own authority became the basis for the style on which the sonnets depend. Here are some salient features of Lowell’s late style (with examples from “These Winds” and “Memorial Day,” both quoted entirely): choppy, broken-up, semi-iambic speech rhythms; emphasized words repeated, repetitions used as rhymes; aposiopesis, ellipsis, self-interruptions; insistence on parallels whose content the reader has to uncover — “what do A, B, and C have in common?” puzzles; verbs in the habitual or simple present or past, or counterfactual, almost never future or conditional; hammered contrasts between past scenes and present moments, disarranged chronology; sudden changes of perspective or time-scale; oxymorons and negations — “fathomless,” “inanimation,” “not my father”; double and triple adjectives and adjective-clauses — “whole green cloth of summer”; chains of noun-clauses with no verb — the implicit copula with no clear tense or mood; apposition and parataxis; extended quotation — a whole poem, half a poem, or the first and last phrase, in quotation marks, spoken by someone else. These devices collaborate to give a sense of self-invention balked, of a self frustrated by, and tied to, a turbulent, multivocal history. Lowell’s pasts, presents, and counterfactuals imagine a world where public and personal pasts coexist in a kind of eternal, fatalistic present. Thus anyone who has ever died is dying now, from Marcus Cato to Randall Jarrell, whose death “scene still plunges at the windshield, / apples redden to ripeness on the whiplash bough” (SP 177). In late Lowell “Those Older” “won’t stay gone”: Lowell sees himself and his readers always “approaching nearer, edging out the old,” knocking down boundaries between scenes and times (N 123). “The Nihilist as Hero” makes explicit what Geoffrey Hartman called Lowell’s “temporicide,” his desire to collapse times and periods into the space of the poems: “A nihilist wants to live in the world as is, / and yet gaze the everlasting hills to rubble” (SP 183).10 Late Lowell, Vendler writes, aims “to destroy the very notion of categories . . . which is along with the preservation of sequence, the foundation of normal historiography.”11 Lowell is not attacking historiography with any sense that he can Stephen Burt : : : 153

escape from history; instead his sonnets acknowledge their imbrication in history — they attack, absolve, correct, or argue with the other people and the ancestors they thereby bring into the present time of the poem. Lowell wrote in a sonnet to Berryman, “John, we used the language as if we had made it”; the apologetic sense is that we didn’t make the language but inherited it. As part of history, we too have “to live with what was here” (SP 255, 159). Yet living with the past meant — for Lowell — fighting it. Lowell, Jarrell explained in 1962, “always had an astonishing ambition, a willingness to learn what past poetry was and to compete with it on its own terms.”12 Frank Bidart writes of Lowell’s “conscious sense of being engaged in an argument with the past.”13 The sonnets (along with Day by Day) differ from earlier work in making their Oedipal arguments with Lowell’s past less their projects than their subjects. For Lowell, books, reading, are always close to violent conflict;“each library is some injured tyrant’s home” (N 172). T. S. Eliot asks him, “don’t you loathe to be compared with your relatives?” (N 119). And Allen Tate, Lowell’s most important surrogate father, says to him in one of the sonnets, “I don’t know whether to call you my son or my brother”; three lines later, the southerner Tate is mapping the Battle of Gettysburg with “ashtrays and icecubes,” showing Lowell where “if Longstreet had moved, we would have broke you” (N 121).14 If Tate starts Tate’s quarrels with Lowell, more usually late Lowell quarrels with the fathers he finds in himself. “Few lives contained so many renunciations,” Lowell says of Thoreau and Emerson, quoting Emerson’s “Thoreau.”15 Lowell’s own late poems construe his life as a monumentally long series of rejections, disillusionments, and repudiations. Notebook bombards readers with figures for these attacks on oneself: We are firemen smashing holes in our own house. We will each breath, and make our peace with war, yearning to swoop with the swallow’s brute joy, indestructible as mercy — the round green weed slipping free from the disappointment of the flower. (N 47) Lowell’s “I” and “we” depend for their identities and energy on what they oppose — as weeds flower-beds, or fire-fighters blazes. Moreover “I,”“we,” are always incomplete, if not growing — “we” resemble the green weed, not the completed flower. This version of identity — present throughout Lowell’s career — grows clearer from Notebook on, when no psychoanalytic or religious conceptions still occlude it; and it ties Lowell to a sense of himself in time: his “life by definition breeds on change” (SP 183). If he stops changing his mind, he would disappear — on his evergreen Christmas tree, “the thorny 154 : : : Robert Lowell and Michael Hofmann

needles / catch the drafts, as if alive — I too, / because I waver, am counted with the living” (SP 245). The Lowell of these poems, then, has to keep moving, but to no real destination — no future; his grammar maps his odd predicament. His overlapping clauses can often point either backwards or forwards: “the air is snow-touched, fans our streaming backs, / blows in and in, a thousand snow-years back; / we were joined in love a thousand snow-years back”(N 126). The lines seem to swing backwards in time before they can go forwards: elsewhere boustrophedon (backwards-then-forwards; right-to-left, then left-to-right; literally ox-tread) becomes Lowell’s figure for his own relation to history. “I’m counterclockwise,” he remarks to Caroline Blackwood;“I come on walking off-stage backwards”(SP 231, 237). Elsewhere boustrophedon figures political change, or its failure: college students graduate and “turn with the tread of an ox to serve the rich” (N 132). Writing between 1968 and 1970, Lowell used his stacked lines’ built-in tensions — which governs, which is tenor, which vehicle? — to stand for generational conflict: The pale green leaves cling white to the lit night; this has been written, and eaten out on carbons; incendiaries strike no spark from this moonlight; nothing less nutritive than the thirst at Harvard. Like the generations of leaves, the race of man; their long hair, beads, jeans, are early uniforms, rebellion that honors the liturgies. (N 44) These generational, even Oedipal, fights resemble a writer’s rebellion against his sources (which thereby “honors” them), his verbal attempt to make something old into something new. Lowell’s thrashing skepticism about political progress in turn reinforces his skepticism as to whether he himself, a writer “who only learn[s] from error,” has made any “progress” beyond his sources and models (SP 216). In “The March I,” Lowell’s successive, conflicting lines suggest the literal lines of protestors and guards around the Pentagon: the narrator, with his wet glasses and shaky hand, feels out of place “march[ing] absurdly locked” with youth, even before confronting the “Martian” soldier with his “new-fangled rifle”; the soldier in turn looks equally out of place defending the Establishment and the draft (N 54). In a Lowell sonnet each line, like each generation, has to decide what to do with, how much to resist, the line just before; the only relation each line cannot have to its predecessors is complete independence. This is a situation adolescents commonly face with parents. We associate adolescence — as Patricia Stephen Burt : : : 155

Meyer Spacks and George Trow have phrased it — with “exploration, becoming, growth and pain”; many psychologists and social thinkers define it is as a time of rebellion, of testing out or trying on relations to one’s family and culture.16 The popular sociologist Edgar Z. Friedenberg, writing in 1959, called adolescence “the period during which a young person learns who he is . . . and differentiates himself from his culture, though on the culture’s terms”; such definitions, and arguments with them, pervade the social and cultural criticism of the 1960s.17 The adolescent can be in a relation of rejection to father and mother, to society and culture, but never in no relation, not simply without. And this is how Lowell regards and addresses history — his own and that of his culture. W. B. Yeats said that poetry emerges from our “quarrel with ourselves”; Lowell says he is examining, over and over, “what I really have against myself ” (SP 228).18 If the adolescent is the kind of person characterized by rebellion and reaction; becoming rather than being; challenging and testing rather than trusting, knowing, or believing, it is no wonder that for Lowell,“Poets die adolescents, their beat embalms them” (SP 227). To be a Lowellian poet is in this sense to be adolescent. His classroom remarks show an interest in the topic; he told students: “There’s no childhood or adolescence in Arnold,” and remarked that John Clare’s “Secret Love” was “about adolescence.”19 For Bell, Lowell’s lines in “Night Sweat”—“Always inside me is the child who died / Always inside me is his wish to die”—“indicate an imperfect transition between childhood and maturity and an arrested suspension between them” (SP 134).20 His interest in adolescence as such — visible already in Life Studies — may have been rekindled by the student revolts taking place at Columbia University and elsewhere in 1967–68, the years in which he composed the first drafts of the Notebook sonnets. In “The Restoration,” a Columbia professor returns to his office after the 1968 student takeover: “The old king enters his study with the police; / it’s much like mine left in my hands a month” (N 185). Lowell does to his own private space what the student radicals did to the professor’s. The strain and lack of progress we feel in the sonnets is the fiftyish Lowell identifying and rejecting himself as both father figure and as youth: Sometimes I sink a thousand centuries, bone tired or stone asleep, to sleep ten seconds — voices, their future voices, adolescents go crowding through the chilling open windows; fathomless profundities of inanimation. And we will be, then, and as they are here. 156 : : : Robert Lowell and Michael Hofmann

But nothing will be put back right in time, done over, thought through straight again — not my father revitalizing in a single Rhineland spa, Mussolini’s misguiding roosterstep in the war year, just before our War began. . . . Ah, ah, this house of twenty-foot apartments, all the windows yawning — the voices of its tutees, their fortissimo Figaro, sunk into dead brick. (N 195–96) It is as if the “house of twenty-foot apartments,” which this sonnet, “Memorial Day,” imagines contained rooms for fathers and sons, for teachers and students, and Lowell, wished to be confined to none. The sonnets that are more clearly involved with national politics imagine the same unresolvable quarrel between generations; almost their only hero is Robert Kennedy, whose death placed him permanently between generations, or permanently adolescent, “forever approaching your maturity” (SP 182). A real, named, adolescent also inhabits the sonnets, Lowell’s daughter Harriet, who turned thirteen in 1970. The poems about Harriet have, I think, been overshadowed by the ethical disasters surrounding the poems about Elizabeth Hardwick.21 I wish they had not been: they rehearse Lowell’s obsessions with self-revision and inheritance from a gentler, less topical, perspective. “These Winds” relies on an armature of repeated words and syllables (“these,” “winds,”“upright,”“all”) and on abrupt, boustrophedon alternations between harshly enjambed lines and heavily end-stopped ones. The poem seems to me unusual in its complicating tenderness: I see these winds, these are the tops of trees, these are no heavier than green alder bushes; touched by a light wind, they begin to mingle and race for instability — too high placed to stoop to the strife of a brush, these are the winds . . . Downstairs, you correct notes at the upright piano, twice upright this midday torn from the whole green cloth of summer; your room was once the laundry, the loose tap beats time, you hammer the formidable chords of The Nocturne, your second composition. Since you first began to bawl and crawl from the unbreakable lawn to this sheltered room, how often winds have crossed the wind of inspiration — in these too, the unreliable touch of the all. (SP 111) Stephen Burt : : : 157

Harriet’s mixed feelings about her piano playing finally parallel Lowell’s mixed feelings about his and all human projects. Harriet is Lowellesque in that she doesn’t compose, or perform, her piano piece — she “corrects,”rewrites it. The generations of trees struggle unstably upwards as children learn to crawl, then walk. Lowell as poet identifies, speaks for, both upstairs poet and downstairs child, as he does for both trees and winds. Now imagine the poems this Harriet might have written back to her father — poems of child to parent, descending from this style — and you will see what Hofmann succeeded in creating, especially in the second book, Acrimony, half of which concerns his own father, the German novelist and playwright Gert Hofmann. In Michael Hofmann’s best poems, one poet describes his quarrels with his past and his father by adapting the style another poet developed in order to describe his quarrels with himself. Most reviewers acknowledge Hofmann’s debt — Hugh Haughton even speaks of Lowell as “Hofmann’s poetic father.”22 But Hofmann — in particular the Hofmann of Acrimony — is a uniquely good derivative writer, because he derives from Lowell an unequaled awareness of what it means to derive, to descend, to inherit — and also how to resist, to “cross,” to “correct” one’s patrimony. Hofmann’s Acrimony can seem structurally modeled on Lowell’s poems about his parents in Life Studies; but the line-by-line feel, the technique, and the immediacy of the events related, make the volume at least as clearly a response to later Lowell. Hofmann likes negative and triple adjectives — he calls himself “unselfsufficient, cryptic, / grown-up,” and Gert “baffling and incommunicable, / the invisible man” (A 73, 70). Like Lowell’s sonnets, Hofmann’s poems use choppy, speechlike, semi-iambics, vertiginously paratactic, hyper-referential. Like Lowell’s, Hofmann’s phrases bristle with repeated words, negations, and ellipses; like Lowell’s, they rely on past, present, and counterfactual verbs, piled-up adjectives, and cumulative, stacked-up nouns and noun-clauses. But Hofmann adapts Lowell’s style to his more novelistic, more extroverted, psychological interests. His time-scales shift between remembered incidents, but not back before Hofmann was born. His blocklike stanzas (instead of unbroken sonnets) suggest his poems have “rooms” for several people, or mean to contrast them. Acrimony thus shows how Lowell’s style — concerned already with adolescent resistance and with generational tension — may be adapted and altered when it is used to tell stories about that resistance, and to examine that tension. The second half of Acrimony presents scenes and periods from Michael’s and his mother’s lives with and without his father, from 1966 (when Michael was nine) to the early 1980s. Gert comes across as at once dominating and distant, demanding and alienating, hard to talk to and impossible to ignore. Hof158 : : : Robert Lowell and Michael Hofmann

mann tells him, with atypical directness, in a poem that might serve to gloss others, You call each of us child, your wife and four children, three of them grown-up. You have the biblical manner: the indulgent patriarch, his abused, endless patience; smiling the absent smile of inattention . . . (A 58) Hofmann’s father seems to wish to control his son from an emotional, and an international, distance. When father and son, aged nineteen, speak on the phone, I asked him about his conference, but he wanted something else: to have me at the end of a telephone line, an alibi, proof of my harmlessness — (A 65) The narrator of Acrimony seems still to be resisting that control, to be proving himself not harmless, who had as his father’s young child been “Provoking and of no account,” treated less like an independent agent than like another of Gert’s works (A 77). If Lowell asks “what I really have against myself,” Hofmann replays and rewinds his life in order to ask what he really has against his father. He therefore ascribes to his “individual, overwhelming, impossible” father some of Lowell’s characteristics, parceling out between father and son the flaws and talent Lowell saw in himself (A 56). “The Nomad, my Father,” from Hofmann’s first book, ends in this way: “What was the centre of your life-interests? / You said your family; your family said your work.” Fiction is in some sense Gert’s other family, and encourages Gert to imagine he lives in a house apart: For a long time, you thought of having a work-hut put up in the garden — the satellite existence of the writer made flesh. You could turn it round to be in the sun. . . . It’s a standard dream that maybe you still have, though imperceptibly it’s become absurd, like having a pleasant evening at home. (A 69) This nation-hopping Gert resembles the transoceanic Lowell of “Flight”: a writer still free to work at home all week, reading revisions to his gulping wife. Born twenty years later, I might have been prepared Stephen Burt : : : 159

to alternate with cooking, and wash the baby . . . I am a vacation-father . . . no plum — (SP 244) Gert’s central flaw seems to be his self-centeredness, his aspiration as artist and human being to a hubristic and callous independence: he wants to control “The Means of Production”, as the poem of that title has it, and views human relations, vulnerability, listening, as “an unacceptable risk” (A 59). Gert once followed a “marvellous single-minded regime . . . of getting up at four or five, / and writing a few pages ‘on an empty stomach’ / before exposing himself to words” (A 71). Gert behaved as if he believed he created his novels ex nihilo, though his son knows, as readers of Lowell know, that all works of art begin as human situations, contexts, others’ words. The son’s poems correct the father’s arrogance, as Lowell’s poems seem meant to correct his own. Hofmann adapts the negations, oxymorons, and self-hampering phrases, like “faithless copies” which in Lowell characterize Lowell’s distinctively uncomfortable and unstable subject-positions. But in Hofmann these devices can also be signals that someone has placed someone else in an impossible position — they characterize Gert, who in “Author, Author” is “uninhibited, inhibiting,” his “breathing more snorting than breathing,” his father’s girlfriend’s “sweet name not a name at all” (A 74). The poems about his father seem to tell a story of his becoming English; of his discovering how he feels toward the older man; and of Hofmann’s becoming “his own,” becoming original. But we end it conscious that Hofmann may not consider himself English, may not know what he thinks of his father, and hasn’t freed himself of whatever damage and knowledge has been imparted by that relation. The poems tell an unfinished story, and present mixed feelings, rather than full explanations. And the father in Acrimony — like the authorities in Hofmann’s political poems, like the tyrants and culture-heroes in Lowell’s — seems both present and absent, potent and impotent, the subject of a fight that seems futile, but keeps on nevertheless. Readers learn nowhere in Acrimony whether Gert was alive or dead when the volume was published in 1986. (In fact, Gert died in 1993.) Grinding and gritting against an intractable past, the poems in Acrimony enact an inquest into Hofmann’s personal history, but find few causes or answers, terminating instead when the narrator gives up and decides to look somewhere else: Amplitude is for the future, it needs confidence. I stay on home ground — cageyness, stasis, ennui — but even that’s untenable. . . . When you left me again, I took out a pipe-cleaner and caught a drop of tar 160 : : : Robert Lowell and Michael Hofmann

on its thin, fleecy tip — as if that caused the impediment! (A 21) There is no single cause for the “friction” in “Friction”: the poems show a mind in the act of failing to find one. Hofmann’s best endings often resemble this one: like Lowell’s, they sound conclusive but do not conclude or redeem. Often they serve as apparent distractions, changes of subject; sometimes — as in Lowell — they are lists of things: “import restrictions and fowl-pest”; a set of razors; the “tiny, sad, colorful bottles” in a minibar; “the heraldic plum tree” in Gert’s garden,“its small, rotten fruit” (A 51, 61, 57, 55). Hofmann’s objects are tied together by, and debilitatingly tied to, their origins: they add to, even incarnate, what Lowell called “the horrifying mortmain of / ephemera” (SP 210): For a whole month, the one soiled bedsheet was supposed to knit together, to join in matrimony the shiny blue tripartite mattress, borrowed or looted from a ruined office, but good as new. Small wonder I hugged it in sleep! On the floor lay the door that was to have made me a table. (A 62) In “Withdrawn from Circulation,” the “bedsheet” that barely holds the “tripartite mattress” figures the trio — Gert, Michael at eighteen, and Michael’s mother — living for a summer in the Berlin apartment this poem describes. The “door” still looks like a door, but serves as neither door nor table — it is not, I think, over-reading to see in it Hofmann’s adolescent frustration, his sense of being stuck-between or going nowhere. Like Lowell, Hofmann cannot imagine a worthy alternative to the orders he resents: that door on the floor doesn’t open or lead anywhere. Authorities malfunction, even get kidnapped — “Withdrawn from Circulation” indeed — but can neither be forgotten nor replaced: A few doors down was the cellar where the RAF kept the Berlin Senator they had kidnapped and were holding to ransom. From time to time, his picture appeared in the newspapers, authenticated by other newspapers in the picture with him. He was news that stayed news. (A 63) That Lowellesque chiasmus, past words returning to fence in present ones, and the quotation from Pound, who defined poetry as “news that stays Stephen Burt : : : 161

news,”23 define the Berlin of Hofmann’s eighteenth year as a place where captive authority figures, neutralized older powers, were all the news, power, or authenticity on show. These aesthetic correlatives for belatedness, frustration, touchy reactiveness, graph the partial failures of Hofmann’s projects, their irresolution or “Impotence” — the title of the first poem in Acrimony, and the common theme of Hofmann’s political poetry, which focuses on “The Out-of-Power” — a kidnapped German senator; the disgraced ex-President of Mexico; Trotsky; or the Labour Party of 1980s London in “From Kensal Rise to Heaven”: Old Labour slogans, Venceremos, dates for demonstrations like passed deadlines — they must be disappointed to find they still exist. Halfway down the street a sign struggles to its feet and says Brent. (A 34) The street “sign” stands up to be counted, but all it can say is “Brent.” London has dissolved into local place names, and corresponding collections of onceimportant, now-impotent names and debris: “my education is back to haunt me: Dickens House, / Blake Court, Austen House, thirteen-storey giants”(A 34). If Gert can resemble Lowell’s Lowell, the young Michael resembles Lowell’s Harriet in collecting and building up a tentative art out of debris that adults reject, as Harriet “packrat[s]” a dead insect “off with joy.” (SP 210). In “The Machine that Cried,” the young Michael pursues “building-projects” that are “as ambitious as the Tower of Babel,” listens obsessively to new phonograph records, and tries to reinvent himself as a boy who will belong in England once his parents leave him in school there: I imagined Moog as von Moog, a German scientist. His synthesizer was supposed to be the last word in versatility but when I first heard it on Chicory Tip’s “Son of my Father,” it was just a unisono metallic drone, five notes, as inhibited and pleonastic as the title. What helps is not a “synthesizer,” but English, which seems to Michael versatile and multiethnic compared to German: My first-ever British accent wavered between Pakistani and Welsh. I called Bruce’s record shop just for someone to talk to. He said, “Certainly, Madam.” Weeks later, it was “Yes, sir you can bring your children.” It seemed I had engineered my own birth in the new country. (A 53) The boy listening to his record player remakes himself by listening, by a kind of Gombrichian making and modeling. His birth in the new country is an 162 : : : Robert Lowell and Michael Hofmann

unstable impersonation, a trying-on or trying-out. It is also his acquisition of masculinity, since it coincides with his voice changing. When Michael’s voice changes, he claims to have had children — as if English had made him a father himself. And when Hofmann at age “twenty-odd” again lives in Germany — “on your territory,” he tells Gert — “what I represented / was not myself, but a lawnmower manufacturer” (A 57). Hofmann cannot be himself in German — he can only be the “inhibited, pleonastic” “Son of my Father.” Since the poems in Acrimony are arranged in chronological sequence, the last poem seems to depict Hofmann’s last important encounter with his father.“Old Firm” becomes also a surprisingly calmed, reconciled poem about leaving (as if for good) Germany, the family unit, and German, the father’s language: Father, the winter bird writes bird’s nest soup — a frail, disciplined structure, spun from its spittle with bits of straw and dirt, then boiled with beaten eggs . . . It kept us fed till we were big enough to leave the nest. We walked, à trois, to the end of the road, for my bus to Riem, and the plane to Gatwick, seemingly chartered by the Bierfest . . . a sudden thunderstorm turned us into a family group: mother under her umbrella, you hiding in a phone-box, kindly holding the door open, and me, giving no protection, and pretending not to seek any either, wet and deserting and plastered, like the hair making itself scarce on your bad head . . . That morning you played me an interview given in French, a language you hadn’t spoken in my lifetime, literally not since my birth, when you’d been in Toulouse, on French leave . . . Now, we joked about it — you were easier to understand than the interviewer! Who else understood? Your edgy, defeated laugh? The modest, unhopeful evangelism of your final appeal to the people of Montreal not to stop reading? (A 79) The “bird nest soup” — dry noodles that go limp in water — is of course the empty “nest” of older parents, whose children “desert,” and the makeshift details these lines gather; it is also the “hair” on Gert’s “bad” or balding head. It takes a thunderstorm, an act of God, to reconstitute the family “nest” — which then dissolves like noodles: the mother covers only herself, and the son refuses to enter the “phone-box” shelter with the father, who had, in an earlier Stephen Burt : : : 163

poem, held him on “the end of a telephone line” (A 65). (What could be more adolescent than to stand in pouring rain rather than obey, or be protected by one’s father?) This last poem includes all the devices Hofmann learned from Lowell — hammered adjectives, rhetorical questions, appositive nounphrases, the oxymoron “unhopeful evangelism,” the use of others’ words — to arrive, like Lowell, at a final uncertainty. The last main verb in Hofmann’s book is the conciliatory “understood” (on which the phone-box scene puns, since Michael refuses to stand under it). But that last line is itself a kind of revenge — because of it, no one can read all of Acrimony without disobeying Gert: once you have read his appeal “not to stop reading,” you have come to the end of the book. At the same time, having joined the “Old Firm” of professional writers, Hofmann implies that he has become enough like Gert to understand Gert — or at least to understand him in French, a neutral ground between German and English. Only this third language — which Gert has not spoken since Michael was born — allows for some stab at mutual recognition, rather than repeated attempts at domination or flight. The psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin argues that we require such recognition in order to construct a satisfactory sense of ourselves: everyone needs, in her words, to “come to feel that . . . ‘I am the author of my acts,’ by being with another person who recognizes her acts, her feelings, her intentions, her existence, her independence.”24 For Benjamin this ideal of mutual recognition ought to replace the older — and, from her perspective, sexist — ideal of psychic health as self-sufficiency: selves, like poems, depend on other selves in ways that ought to be given the high regard now often reserved for separation and autonomy. A believer in Benjamin’s schema who admired Hofmann’s poem could argue that his characteristic frustration, the sense he gives of dilemmas that have no solutions, answers, critiques, even discredits the old, male, model of stable adulthood as total self-sufficiency, a model to which Gert seems to subscribe. The stacks of details in “Old Firm” notably do not solve the puzzle of how Michael should think about Gert, or tell him what to do next. They do, however, place him in the finally tenable, and empowering, position of making new contexts for his father’s words — neither escaping his father’s influence entirely, nor being subsumed as one of his father’s works. (In life, Michael Hofmann has translated into English several of his father’s novels.) Hofmann like Lowell attacks the temptation to pretend one’s art, or one’s life, is autonomous, or autarkic: in “Old Firm” the son-as-victim, and the belated imitator, becomes the imitator-as-interpreter, aware, as Gert was not, as late Lowell is, of the debt any person, and any work of art, owes to a nest of models and precedents. 164 : : : Robert Lowell and Michael Hofmann

Walter Jackson Bate argued in 1970 that the task supposedly facing postromantic poets was uniquely difficult: In no other case are you enjoined to admire and at the same time to try, at all costs, not to follow closely what you admire. . . . In this dilemma the arts mirror the greatest single cultural problem we face . . . how to use a heritage . . . how to grow by means of it, how to acquire our own “identities,” how to be ourselves.25 Bate’s “cultural problem” is a psychological problem, in which poems are proxies for persons. And the originality Bate says we expect of the lyric “I” is, far from being unique to poetry, the individuation modern people — especially perhaps Americans — expect or demand of persons in general. The philosopher Charles Taylor writes: We can talk without paradox of an American “tradition” of leaving home. The young person learns the independent stance, but this stance is also something expected of him or her. . . . Each young person may take up a stance which is authentically his or her own; but the very possibility of this is enframed in a social understanding of great temporal depth, in fact, in a “tradition.”26 Poems in their uniqueness stand for persons in theirs: poems, like adolescents, have to learn from their parents, and then to leave them to become themselves.27 It might even be argued — Lowell and Hofmann would both make good examples — that contemporary poems tend, more often than poems from before (say) 1930, to be proxies for adolescent persons. Such an argument might link changes in British and American youth culture (the rise of the rockand-roll the young Hofmann sought out, the university revolts Lowell’s sonnets depict) to changes in poets’ ideas of what poems do, and to changes in theorists’ theories about them.28 If this analogy holds, then the paradox of Hofmann’s having written good poems, effective poems, memorable sequences of poems, in a style that doesn’t sound wholly his own — the problem of the poems’ incomplete separation from Lowell — really shows how completely the poems track and describe their subject, Hofmann’s incomplete quarrels with, incomplete separation from, his father: the poems, and the Hofmann they describe, seem uniquely and self-consciously adolescent. The kinds of aggression, the interests and desires, worked out in styles that Lowell and Hofmann share, are uniquely appropriate, at the least, to male adolescence, and constitute poetic versions of it. (Other poets’ dissents from this gendered model, starting with Marianne Moore’s “The Student,” would make up another essay entirely.) Stephen Burt : : : 165

Moving by boustrophedon, imbrication, acknowledgment, adaptation, Hofmann found in Lowell’s Life Studies and late sonnets the model for his own projects and subjects: descriptions of inheritance, patrimony, ways to describe resentment against one’s father and one’s country, and ways to indict them while acknowledging their power. Hofmann has written that Lowell’s “sonnets are less provisional than” critics take them to be, and that Lowell’s “‘material’ is not always ‘intransigent,’ but on occasions ‘compliant’” — in other words, the late style turns their raw material into coherent, usable new forms.29 The collection Acrimony proves his claim. For readers who haven’t seen how Lowell’s late style could prove fertile, or his methods “compliant” or helpful for future poets, Hofmann’s own work can show us how. notes 1 Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 4. Robert Lowell, Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 202. Hereafter SP. 2 Hofmann’s volumes of verse are Nights in the Iron Hotel (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), hereafter NIH; Acrimony (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), hereafter A; Corona, Corona (London: Faber and Faber, 1993); and Approximately Nowhere (London: Faber & Faber, 1999). The last-named volume appeared after this essay was substantially complete, as did Hofmann’s selection of Lowell’s poems for British readers, Robert Lowell, Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), which begins with Lowell’s Life Studies and devotes about half its space to the sonnets. Part I of Approximately Nowhere consists almost entirely of new poems about Gert Hofmann, written about and apparently after his death. Some readers have seen it as a substantial revision, and softening, of Acrimony. My own view is that the later poems (which I admire) do not represent a great change in Hofmann’s poetics, however much they may record a change in his life; for my reasons, and a brief extension of the arguments here to the later book, see my “Roads to Dejection,” Times Literary Supplement, June 11, 1999, p. 25. 3 Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 474. 4 David Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 244. 5 Langdon Hammer, Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 214. 6 Michael Hofmann,“Guides and Assassins,”Times Literary Supplement, May 26, 1989, p. 578. 7 Robert Lowell, Notebook (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), p. 173. Hereafter N. 8 See, generally, Vereen Bell, Robert Lowell: The Nihilist as Hero (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). 9 Helen Vendler, “Lowell in the Classroom,” Harvard Advocate 113 (November 1979): pp. 22–26, 28–29, especially 28. 10 Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 268. 11 Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), pp. 20–21.

166 : : : Robert Lowell and Michael Hofmann

12 Randall Jarrell, The Third Book of Criticism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), p. 333. 13 Frank Bidart, In the Western Night (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), p. 237. 14 Several critics have considered Lowell’s more-or-less Oedipal relations with Tate. One important treatment is the last chapter of Hammer’s Hart Crane and Allen Tate. Another is the only whole book on the subject, William Doreski, The Years of Our Friendship: Robert Lowell and Allen Tate (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990). 15 Lowell would later decide (in “New England and Further,” 1977) that Emerson’s “masterpiece is the extended prose elegy on Thoreau”: “Emerson knew Thoreau as Thoreau knew Walden.” Collected Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), p. 187. 16 Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Adolescent Idea (New York: Basic, 1980), p. 3, citing magazine journalism by George W. S. Trow. In his own, contemporaneous, Within the Context of No Context (1980–81; reprint, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), Trow uses several concepts of adolescence to argue that America after the 1960s lacks credible versions of adulthood: instead there is an “adolescent orthodoxy . . . of growth, of becoming, of awkward search” (55). The psychoanalytic, sociological, and social-historical literature on adolescence is vast: one recent survey focused on social history is Elliot West, Growing Up in Twentieth Century Teen Culture by the Decade: A Reference Guide (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999). 17 Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent (1959; reprint, New York: Dell, 1962). Friedenberg’s book — introduced by the well-known sociologist David Riesman — went through more than nine printings between 1959 and 1967. 18 W. B. Yeats, “Per Amica Silentia Lunae” (1917), in Later Essays, ed. William H. O’Donnell (New York: Scribner, 1994), pp. 1–33, especially 8. 19 Vendler, “Lowell in the Classroom,” pp. 24, 26. 20 Bell, Robert Lowell, p. 73. 21 Lowell arranged his sonnets into three books in 1973, History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin (all New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973). New sonnets in the last of the three quoted and sometimes altered letters to Lowell from Elizabeth Hardwick. Lowell had recently left Hardwick, and America, for Caroline Blackwood, his third wife, and Britain. Many readers, some of them Lowell’s close friends, felt that he should not have used her letters, or should not have altered them, in published poems; Elizabeth Bishop advised against it in private, and Adrienne Rich attacked the poems (as misogynist) in a widely discussed review. On the whole controversy, see Hamilton, Robert Lowell, pp. 420–35. Hofmann mentions the dispute in the introduction to his selection of Lowell’s poems, pp. xiii–xiv. 22 Hugh Haughton, “Not at home in the house,” Times Literary Supplement, March 20, 1987, p. 30; Michael Hulse, “Acting Sincerity,” Poetry Review 89, no. 2 (Summer 1999): pp. 87–89, especially 88. 23 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934; reprint, New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 29. 24 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (New York: Pantheon. 1988), p. 21. 25 Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 133–34. 26 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 39.

Stephen Burt : : : 167

Authority, Marginality, England, and Ireland in the Work of Susan Howe alan golding

Born of an Irish mother, possessed by that transitional passage of identity through which (New) English people became Americans, the American poet Susan Howe has throughout her career used figures from American, English, and Irish literary and political history to address issues of colonization, authority, and marginality. Recent critical emphasis on Howe’s use of American history has tended to obscure a career-long concern with Ireland that begins with her use of Irish landscape and her invocation of an ancient, mythic Ireland in such early work as Hinge Picture (1974), The Western Borders (1976), and Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978). The prose preface to the recent gathering of those books, Frame Structures (1995), places them in an autobiographical context that fills in Howe’s Irish ancestry.1 The Western Borders and Secret History of the Dividing Line also juxtapose, within themselves, the Irish and North American colonial contexts, while Cabbage Gardens (1979) apparently addresses itself to Irish colonization. In The Liberties (1980), Howe treats gender formations past and present through her attention to an AngloIrish literary patriarch, Jonathan Swift; to the historically and literarily marginalized mistress Hester Johnson; and to her own roots as an American poet of Irish descent looking on herself as a “semblance / of irish susans / dispersed” and “a pendulum swung between two countries.”2 (The earlier “irish susan” is her grandmother Susan Manning, to whom the book is dedicated.) The Defenestration of Prague (1983) calls up the Irish Protestant–Catholic conflict by reference to an earlier such struggle, the 1618 defenestration of two Catholic officials that sparked the Thirty Years War. And most recently, in “Melville’s Marginalia” (1993), Howe puts the noncanonical nineteenth-century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan at the center of the extended meditation on marginality, exclusion, and a cultural authority embodied in the figure of Matthew Arnold.3 In this essay, then, I will suggest some of the ways in which one American poet constructs a provocative critique of literary and social authority, what on an expanded definition may still be termed Anglo-American rela-

tions, and her thematic preoccupation with North American and Irish colonial history. I will do so by passing briefly through some of Howe’s earlier work before lingering a little longer on “Melville’s Marginalia.” What has Ireland meant for Howe autobiographically? She recalls the family library (and her father’s study) of her childhood as divided between her mother’s Irish books on one side and her father’s American ones (along with classics and dictionaries) on the other. More significantly, she says, “I remember that the Irish books represented freedom and magic. The others represented authority and reality.”4 Commenting in the preface to Frame Structures on her father’s biography of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, she writes: He called the first chapter “The Stars and the Plough” probably because that’s the title of The Plough and the Stars. Sean O’Casey’s play about the Easter Rising, named for the symbol on the flag of the Irish citizen army, is one of my mother’s favorites. The stars are the ideal, the plough reality. I guess my father meant to put reality first. (FS 17) Putting “reality” first, of course, is exactly what her father does not do with this chapter title; more to the point is the view of her parents that Howe’s minor misreading makes clear here, with her father the voice of mundane reality and American scholarship in contrast to her mother’s association with “the ideal,” with expressiveness, with Ireland and the arts. Granted the risk Howe runs here of romanticizing or stereotyping the “freedom and magic” of Ireland, this set of associations still connects Ireland and mother in conflict with a patriarchal authority represented by father and Harvard, and later, I shall argue, by Matthew Arnold and England. In Hinge Picture (1974), Ireland is primarily present in the short final section, where it first appears in an Irish proverb — “All roads lead to rooms” — juxtaposed with a line from “Hansel and Gretel”: a juxtaposition that underscores an association between Ireland and the world of fairy tale, myth, and ancient story that runs throughout Howe’s writing.5 Yet even in this early work I do not think it too far-fetched to hear a veiled threat against the colonial center — the kind of threat that later becomes more and more prominent — couched in Howe’s variation on a nursery rhyme: “Oarsmen, oarsmen, / Where have you been? / I’ve been to Leafy, / I’ve dismembered the Queen” (FS 52). One can hear “Irishmen” behind “oarsman” and Liffey behind “Leafy,” while the more explicit “I’ve dismembered the Queen” oddly anticipates the deconstruction of cultural hierarchies in a line written close to twenty years later: “I will dismember marginalia” (NM 146). Further, it is through sound that Howe encodes her sense of Irish ancestry in much of her work: “eras and eras encircled / the barrows of my ancestors have spilled their bones / across Alan Golding : : : 169

the singing ear in hear or shell” (FS 54). Such lines are saturated with aural echoes and variations of the name of Eire: era, ear in, hear or.6 After a riddling nursery-rhyme epigraph projecting nostalgia for a lost or missed place — “Oh would I were where I would be! / There would I be where I am not” — The Western Borders (1976) begins with an uppercase “IRELAND” that connects visually with the next uppercase word in the sequence, “SONG,” establishing a connection common in Howe between Ireland and the poetic. Various colonial contexts are then invoked by moving from Ireland to the colonization of New England and incorporating references to Egypt and to the conquering of Greece by Philip of Macedon, against whom Demosthenes, the seashore speaker of Howe’s poem, declaimed against Philip (WB 5, 8).7 Particularly striking is the juxtaposition of a mythic poem of Ireland, “Fallen Jerusalem Island,” that draws simultaneously on Gaelic legend (Lir, the “King who wears surge of the sea on his forehead”) and Christian legend (bringing “other small gifts for the baby”), and a poem apparently of the colonization of New England, “The Plains of Abraham”: new pilgrims have begun their task the dense forest will be cleared away they are building an ancient colony (WB 14) These uppercase lines are followed by another uppercase phrase that visually recalls the opening “ireland,” “boston harbor” (WB 19) — another form of “western border” colonized by the English. In this way The Western Borders fits Howe’s remark in the preface to Frame Structures, that “my early poems project aggression” (FS 29): in the case of the 1979 Cabbage Gardens, that involved in the colonization of Ireland. In the epigraph from Boswell, Samuel Johnson snorts at the possibility of writing something called “The Cabbage-garden,”but then changes his mind to observe that one could say a great deal about cabbage. The poem might begin with the advantages of civilised society over a rude state, exemplified by the Scotch [or, might we say, the Irish?], who had no cabbages till Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers introduced them; and one might thus shew how arts are propagated by conquest. (FS 74) Following on this causal relationship between colonization and culture, the poem begins in a history of invasions that seems to have lasted for “aeons” — “The enemy coming on roads / and clouds / aeons” before alluding to one specific battle: “Cashel has fallen” (FS 75). Subsequently one dominant strand in the poem concerns the efforts of the “people of the / Land / darkened / Per170 : : : Susan Howe

ilous” (FS 77) to construct defenses. On that land “I plough the earth / till ruts are ramparts” (FS 78). Later we hear of the castle windows that “provided / light / and / served / as / watchtowers / overlooking / the / surrounding / countryside” (FS 82) and the sea from which invaders would come: “stood on the ramparts of the fort / the open sea outside” (FS 86).8 In Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978) — published before Cabbage Gardens but written after it — Howe juxtaposes Irish and North American colonial experience as she does in The Western Borders. While Howe has insisted that “Secret History is American” just as “Defenestration is Irish”;9 while it constitutes an extended play around the meaning of Mark, the name of her father whom she always associates emphatically with her American side; and while the source text is her father’s edition of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Civil War letters and diaries; while all this is so, this American history passes indirectly through Ireland, as the sequence moves early from Holmes’s letters and historical information on New England (“the first english child born in new england was named peregrine or the wanderer” [FS 91]) to an ancient Irish town that is a longstanding site both of invasion from the outside and of civil war: “We enter the ancient town of SWORDS. . . . According to ancient records, swords was burnt by the Danes in 1012, 1016, 1030, 1138, 1150, and 1166 A.D.; and in 1185 it was taken and sacked by O’Melaghlin, King of Meath” (FS 92). Through fragments of echoing sound that call up Ireland’s name, Howe suggests an analogy between her groping for connection to this ancient history and her address to her father: “O / where ere / he He A / ere I were / wher / father father”(FS 93). (Here, in a complexly intertextual moment, “father father”echoes the dedicatory poem of Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, after Howe has used early in her sequence Olson’s well-known formulation from that book, “the last first people” [FS].)10 The history of American migration dominates the sequence — partly under the sign of Olson, another radical Irish ex-Harvardite, with the early allusion to Call Me Ishmael and the working with a central theme of that book, in Howe’s words,“the journey first / . . . / westward and still westward” (FS 95). Nevertheless the Irish context still haunts the background, via, for example, “the old, wild, indomitable sea-kings / vikings” (FS 105) who invaded Ireland and reached North American shores: “all my fathers were / horned sages sailing in ships / icy tremors of abstraction” leaving herself, her literal father, or perhaps both now “stranger and sojourner” (FS 109). Conflating autobiography and national history, Howe concludes both Secret History of the Dividing Line and Frame Structures by framing them in a restlessly dispersed Irishness — “sh dispel iris sh” — and a truncated Americanness, “Americ” (FS 122), with the hush (“sh”) of her own initials. Alan Golding : : : 171

The Ireland of Howe’s early life and work is simultaneously an ancestral home and a place of myth, legend, and fairy tale. In this poet obsessed with history, Irish resonances often constitute an imaginative Other to the documentarian. As Peter Nicholls argues, “it was her mother’s Irish background that first offered Howe clues to what she calls a ‘wildness’ somewhere outside history.”11 Remember that The Western Borders connects “ireland” with “song,” poetry. In commenting on Edmund Spenser, one of the figures behind The Defenestration of Prague, Howe observes that “in The Faerie Queene Ireland may be the uncodifiable spirit of Poetry,”12 but I would also argue that this “‘wildness,’ somewhere outside history” never leaves behind the material past, including the Irish history to which she feels so connected. In The Defenestration of Prague, Howe calls Ireland her “myth sanctuary,” a place where — in an image that projects her recurrent concern with the untraceability of historical origins — “my Picts / Ride unutterable / Oldest chronicle”; yet it is also a place where this “Visionary soul / remembering Rebellion” can track the “Massacre pattern in history” (ET 146, 131, 134). In The Liberties, which makes extensive use of Gaelic myth, that pattern takes the form of parallels between narratives of gender and colonization, with “their common entanglement in systems of domination and oppression in which language plays a key role,” as Lynn Keller has demonstrated.13 Ireland as “the uncodifiable spirit of Poetry,” then, never comes separate from the codes that it seeks to violate. It is in The Liberties that the mythic and autobiographical most obviously meet in Howe’s use of Irish subject matter: The subject of Swift, Stella, and Vanessa was mythic for my mother and many other Irish writers. I grew up on it. It was another Grimm’s fairy tale. But real. So when I began this time, I was really trying to paint that part of the landscape of Dublin in words. I was trying to get the place, a foreign place that was home to my mother, on paper. I thought I could understand my mother that way — I might go back to my grandmother. (BM 166) All the while, however, pulling against her Irish roots is Howe’s sense of her outsider status as a half-Irish poet who has, after all, lived nearly all her life in the United States: “I hope to return to Ireland someday but will always be a foreigner with the illusions of a tourist” (NM 108). In a 1986 interview, Howe also describes herself in the terms that she uses for Swift in The Liberties: “One of the problems I have always had has been the pull between the countries. A civil war in the soul.”14 A few years later, she speculates that Swift’s being “constantly wrenched between England and Ireland when he was a small child . . . helps to explain the fracturing of language in his writing” (BM 166). It is not 172 : : : Susan Howe

too hard or far-fetched to substitute “Howe” for “Swift,” given other similar comments. For some years, then, Howe associated Ireland with the poetic, the marginal, the anti-authoritarian, the “uncodifiable,” and all of those — in a way similar to French feminism, especially Kristeva — with the female.15 Around the early-mid-1980s Howe is commonly understood to have entered a more noticeably “American” phase with the work gathered in Singularities, with My Emily Dickinson and her essays on Dickinson, The Birth-mark, and “Melville’s Marginalia.” But even the latter sequence is an extended investigation of issues of “minority,” cultural authority, and marginality: the colonial relationship between England and Ireland is explored through the figures of the elusive minor poet Mangan and the English cultural law-giver Arnold. The impetus of the sequence will presumably be familiar to most readers: “I thought one way to write about a loved author would be to follow what trails he follows through words of others” (NM 92) — specifically, the marginal notes that Melville wrote in his books and that are preserved in the scholarly text that gives Howe her title, Wilson Walker Cowen’s Melville’s Marginalia. The sequence is not “about” Melville in the sense that My Emily Dickinson is “about” its eponymous subject, but is as much concerned with Howe’s Mangan (and, in a concealed but very real way, of Arnold) as it is with her reading of Melville and Melville’s reading. Its central preoccupations may be seen as marginalia and marginality, distinctions between major and minor, and the central and the peripheral. Howe establishes these concerns succinctly by beginning with a headstonelike epitaph memorializing the Jacobean playwright, Philip Massinger, as an alienated “stranger” (NM 83). (Later we learn that “a quotation from Philip Massinger opens [Mangan’s] Fragment of an Unfinished Autobiography”: “. . . A heavy shadow lay / On that boy’s spirit: he was not of his fathers” [NM 87].) There follows, under the title “Parenthesis,” a “Brief Chronology of James Clarence Mangan” that furthers in various ways the notion of the marginal or the secondary. Proposing Mangan’s life as a “parenthesis,” Howe suggests how it has come to be seen as a dispensable part of a longer (historical) sentence. Furthermore, with the exception of some added details and the last entry, which connects Mangan to Melville’s Confidence Man and Bartleby through brief quotations from those two texts, Howe bases her chronology almost directly on another peripheral text, the Appendix to David Lloyd’s critical book on Mangan, Nationalism and Minor Literature.16 By the end of the chronology, however, we have the main contours of the sequence in place: the political activism in Ireland of a canonical English poet, Shelley, and of a noncanonical Irish one, Alan Golding : : : 173

Mangan; and the marginal or “isolato” characters of a canonical American novelist, Melville, with their capacity for cultural resistance and commentary and for a dispersed subjectivity that itself constitutes a form of such recalcitrance. The common feature among these “widely disparate anglophone authors” is that they “represent political resistance and mass appeal that stand in opposition to British cultural elitism, embodied by someone such as Matthew Arnold.”17 Aside from her choosing to begin with a parenthesis, Howe’s repetition of “What is a parenthesis?” makes it clear that the question is of more than passing (or marginal) grammatical interest to her. She devotes most of a page to a passage in which the schoolboy Mangan is the only one in his class who can answer the question:“I should suppose a parenthesis to be something included in a sentence, but which might be omitted from the sentence without injury to the meaning of the sentence” (NM 93). Later Howe repeats the question immediately after observing that Mangan “has been all but forgotten by serious literary criticism” (NM 105) — he has himself become a parenthesis, that “which might be omitted” from the canon “without injury to” it. Then the question arises a third time in the context of an insistent undermining of authenticity, of origins, conducted from the parenthetical position characteristic of minor literature. The line “What is a parenthesis?” concludes the first half of a fourteen-line poem apparently constructed of fragmented and often punning phrases from Mangan’s prose. Through her selection of quoted materials, Howe suggests that Mangan is writing “half-whimsically,” in “derision half-seriously” (NM 130); a punning reference to “what is Moore” alludes to the Orientalist-Celtic mix of Thomas Moore’s popular poem, Lalla Rookh, the authenticating footnotes of which Mangan parodied in his own work.18 “If the reader please” turn “to his originals,” then that reader may find only untraceable origins. Howe reinforces the question of dubious authenticity by intercutting these two phrases with “house” and “hovel” (NM 130). The previous “house” and “hovel” was a fictional one in which Mangan claimed to have lived, until the editor of his autobiography observed, “This is purely imaginary; and when I told Mangan that I did not think it a faithful picture, he told me he dreamt it” (NM 97). How appropriate, then, that the second half of this fourteen-liner, following on from “What is a parenthesis?” should begin with the line “Long passage on fallacy” (NM 130). So what does all this have to do with England, Ireland, and cultural authority? In “Melville’s Marginalia,” Ireland is the parenthesis to England’s sentence, the margin to England’s page, just as Mangan is the margin or province to Arnold’s center and Melville’s Bartleby (whom Howe speculates is modeled on Mangan) is the margin to that center of capital, Wall Street, and its concern 174 : : : Susan Howe

with a different margin, that of profit. Indeed, Howe moves between Melville’s Arnold and Melville’s Mangan. She describes how, having spent a day examining Melville’s marginalia to Arnold’s Essays in Criticism, she turned to a “heavily scored paragraph” from John Mitchel’s introduction to Mangan’s Poems that stands in “marked contradiction”(NM 106), presumably to Arnold. Noting, somewhat hyperbolically, “how completely British criticism gives the law throughout” the English-speaking literary world, Mitchel describes Mangan’s resistance to such claims to cultural authority, in a passage Howe quotes at length: For this Mangan was not only an Irishman, — not only an Irish papist, — not only an Irish papist rebel; — but throughout his whole literary life of twenty years, he never deigned to attorn to English criticism, never published a line in any English periodical, or through any English bookseller, never seemed to be aware that there was a British public to please. He was a rebel politically, and a rebel intellectually and spiritually, — a rebel with his whole heart and soul against the British spirit of the age. (NM 106–7) This is embedded within quotations from “The Literary Influence of Academies,” with Arnold’s comments on the historian A.W. Kinglake specifically recast into two poems, with some excisions: A style so bent on effect and the expense of soul so far from classic truth and grace must surely be said to have the note of provinciality (NM 96: fig. 1) To describe such failures of taste Arnold uses two terms that Howe also quotes, “baneful” and (from the French) “bête.” Transposed into the context of “Melville’s Marginalia,” these snippets work to describe not Kinglake but Mangan, to explain from the point of view of the cultural center why “he could not storm the alphabet of art.” The phrase, “and social weakness,” picks up further from a point where Arnold distinguishes the sustained or recurrent stylistic excesses that mark provinciality from a merely “momentary, good-tempered excess, in a man of the world, of an amiable and social weakness.”19 “Provinciality” is perhaps the key term here, for Arnoldian terms like “province” and “centre” are part of a colonial discourse. And outside the left margin of this short poem, separated from the text by a firm (upright?) vertical line, we find capitalized and slanted the word “noncompatibles” — surely a term for Mangan and strikingly reminiscent of Arnold’s “incompatibles,” the title of an 1881 essay, referring to what is elsewhere termed “Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism.” Alan Golding : : : 175

A related recasting of Arnold occurs a couple of pages later. The phrases “rapidity without ease / effective without charm” (NM 100; fig. 2) are again clipped from Arnold’s comments on Kinglake’s style, which has “glitter without warmth, rapidity without ease, effectiveness without charm” (PC 277), and so falls far short of the Attic graces exemplified in the classic, as expounded in the essay “On Translating Homer.”20 Howe playfully stands these on their end like parodic Greek columns: “The pure lines of an Ionian horizon / The liquid clearness of an Ionian sky” (NM 100). The flaws that Arnold is criticizing in Kinglake extend beyond “what the French mean by fatuity” (PC 278) and into the realm of the “bête” that Howe has cited four pages earlier. But as the phrases “rapidity without ease” and “effective without charm” are visually crossed with a citation of their source, Arnold’s 1865 Essays in Criticism, they come to apply as much to Arnold as to his subject. It is Arnold who becomes “effective without charm,”and in a transposition from verb to adjective,“mean by [his] fatuity.” Elsewhere in “Melville’s Marginalia,” Howe constructs poems, their sources openly acknowledged, from two other Arnold texts: “a speech at eton,” and “a french eton or, Middle-Class Education and the State” (NM 98). The second of these poems, “a french eton” (fig. 3), is most relevant to my argument here, in splicing material from Arnold’s 1864 essay by that title with material from “The Function of Criticism.” The quotation from Edmund Burke on government as “a contrivance of human wisdom / to provide for human wants’” derives directly from “a french eton.”21 Howe’s citation seems intended both ironically — the English could hardly be said to have adopted this view of government with regard to Ireland — and as a reminder of the conflicts involved in culturally or state-mandated control of language, with “dictionaries” overwritten at right angles to “Government” as if ambiguously in collusion and contradiction with each other. The scrutiny of Arnoldian authority continues in “The Function of Criticism.” In that essay, Arnold sets the voice of the practical person embedded in his or her social interests against that of the disinterested critic. The former voice cries, in a phrase that Howe cites,“We are all terrae filii, . . . all Philistines together.” Faced with this position, “the critic’s duty is to refuse, or, if resistance is vain, at least to cry with Obermann: Périssons en resistant” (PC 251). Mangan has already ironically co-opted the anti-Arnoldian “Philistine” position, however, in taking “Terrae Filius” (NM 86) as a pseudonym — the phrase itself deriving from an attack on Arnold’s perceived elitism, which Arnold has sought to turn against his accuser. Howe’s goal here is to offer a “crit[i]que” through her “radical radical visible subsurface” (NM 98) of the cultural authoritarianism buried in Arnold’s promotion of “good taste Prose.” This is Howe’s version of 176 : : : Susan Howe

laying bare the device: making the subsurface visible by exposing the roots of its object, with the “i” missing from “critque” as a parody of Arnold’s disinterestedness. When Arnold reiterates his famous claim — “I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world” (PC 257), he reiterates this covert authoritarianism. When Howe reverses the first phrase to read “I am bound by a definition / of criticism” (NM 125), the definition has become explicitly not her “own” but “a definition,” an institutional one with the spectral authority of Arnold behind it. Howe is not, of course, arguing with or using Arnold as if he remained a contemporary intellectual influence, nor seeking to reanimate his cultural authority through her appropriation of his texts. While Arnold’s particular authority may be defunct, however, the cultural imperialism symbolized by much of his work lives on and constitutes one central object of Howe’s critique. Further, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s influential theorizing of a minor literature is useful for understanding Howe’s treatment of Mangan and Arnold. Their specifically non- or anti-Arnoldian definition of the “minor” makes a political virtue out of a relative paucity of talent and sees the “minor” less in terms of individual quality than in terms of its potential for collective social action. A minor literature defined in this way may have isolated major writers, but generally the lack of talent in a minor literature reduces the possibility for individual “enunciations” separate from the collective, in positive ways: “scarcity of talent is in fact beneficial and allows the conception of something other than a literature of masters” so that “literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation.” The minor frames itself in an oppositional relationship to the major (and usually colonial) language in which it is written: Kafka’s German, and the English of Joyce, Beckett, and Mangan. Deleuze and Guattari do not propose Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett as “minor” in the conventional sense of “slight” or “of little significance.” Rather, the sense of critical dislocation produced by discussing such canonical writers as “minor” aids their effort to complicate ideas of what constitutes a major literary language (and therefore a major literature) and to rearticulate the triad of language, literature, and nation. In this formulation — a version, from the American point of view, of the canonization of the antinomian tradition with which Howe aligns herself — literary “masters” (traditionally understood) may well resist their own literature’s cultural mastery, resulting in the anomaly of what one might call the major minor writer. The pun in “a literature of masters” suggests what a minor literature like the nineteenth-century Irish of Mangan resists: “There is nothing major or revolutionary except the minor. To hate all languages of masters.”22 Alan Golding : : : 177

At this point, David Lloyd, one of Howe’s central resources for “Melville’s Marginalia,” diverges from Deleuze and Guattari by seeing the literature of nineteenth-century Irish nationalism as “minor” in the more conventional sense of a fledgling literature aspiring to become major through “the production of an authentic Irish identity” rather than resisting claims to essential identity at all levels, from the individual to the national. But he sees Mangan as continuing a writing that remains programmatically minor in the Deleuzian sense. In ways that should help our reading of Howe, Lloyd points to Mangan’s effort “to undermine the priority given to distinctive individual voice in canonical criticism”; his “questioning the principles of originality and autonomy that underwrite the concept of the subject”; and his persistent “refusal of identity” — or at least that assigned to him under a nationalism inseparable in its models of subjectivity from the imperialism it would resist.23 All of which really does relate to “Melville’s Marginalia,” for as the penultimate line in the sequence has it, “Obedience we are subjects Susan” (NM 150). Howe consistently highlights those aspects of Mangan’s life and work that problematize ideas of authenticity, identity, and national identity: his bogus translations of nonexistent texts, the fictional moments in his before autobiography (NM 86, 93, 97), his multiple pseudonyms and biographical elusiveness. In Mangan,“originality dies out”; we get “an author-evacuated text,”“the subjectless abject”; or an author who produces “a polyglot anthology / out of no materials,” out of nonexistent poems, who “was not the polyglot / he pretended to be,” who resignedly remarks, “I will ‘do’ the song / out of the Jacobite / Counterfeit” and who openly admits to translations “of questionable authenticity” (NM 124, 129, 113, 128, 133, 94). Howe quotes James Joyce’s comments on “all the names and titles that [Mangan] gives himself,” and then immediately turns to the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry that describes Mangan’s work “lying buried . . . under so many pseudonyms” (NM 108–9). One of these was “The Man in the Cloak” (Mangan made up a German poet, Selber, notable for his cloak), and Howe foregrounds the veiling motif as an aspect of his resistance to the identity that Irish literary nationalism would assign him. Like Hawthorne’s Reverend Hooper, “he put a veil on his face,” a “voiceless reclusion veil” (NM 113, 149). If the veiled statue at Sais is conventionally an image of truth, Mangan treats it in terms of counterfeit and masking, compressed by Howe into the remark “Counterfeit when you / look artist of Sais” (NM 133). She cites Mangan making fun of contemporary myths of origin that claimed spurious etymological connections between Gaelic and various ancient Oriental languages: “According to / Vallency every Irishman is / an Arab” (NM 135). At the same time all joking — or cloaking — aside, we find the unattributed assertion that “no cloak smothers 178 : : : Susan Howe

my mirth” (NM 143). It is from this position of elusive but mirthful self-marginalization that Howe finds an Irish poet mocking cultural identity as did her beloved Melville, to the point where the sequence might well be called “Melville’s Manganalia.”24 One risk here is of reducing Howe’s poetry to a predictable anticolonialist argument. The interest and strength of her work, however, lie in its textual uncovering of multiple interlinked forms of authority, most of which are themselves textually reinforced: the patriarchal authority of Harvard and the father, as well as the colonialism not just inscribed in such oppositions as “province” and “center,” but generated by that center. As a citizen of an imperial power (“complicity battling redemption,” in her words25), as a poet whose tone often suggests vatic authority, who positions herself as minor in the Deleuzian sense, Howe’s position is complex; this is not simply a case of the empire writing back. Howe’s concern with margins, both social and typographical, is a longstanding one, and her investigation of the term is driven as much by a poet’s associative imagination as it is by a thematized politics. Mangan is “the man with the name so remarkably [visually and aurally] like margin” (NM 105), and sound play is a site for hearing the links among isolation, marginality, gender, and silence: “strond strund stronde strand. The margin submerges phonic substance. A mother’s thread or line is ringed about with silence so poems are” (BM34). Self-consciously an Irish American poet, Howe uses an Irish poet and Ireland as tropes to destabilize the power relations and forces of marginalization inscribed both in canonical colonial texts and in the “text” of colonialism itself. notes My thanks to Lynn Keller for her responses to an earlier version of this essay, and to Suzette Henke, David Kellogg, and Beth Willey for helpful information. References are to the work of Susan Howe unless otherwise noted. 1 The Western Borders (Willits, Calif.: Tuumba, 1976). Hereafter WB. Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974–1979 (New York: New Directions, 1996). Hereafter FS. Including Hinge Picture (1974), Chanting at the Crystal Sea (1975), Cabbage Gardens (1979), and Secret History of the Dividing Line (1978). 2 The Europe of Trusts (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1990), p. 213. Hereafter ET. Including Pythagorean Silence (1982), The Liberties (1980), and The Defenestration of Prague (1983). 3 “Melville’s Marginalia,” in The Nonconformist’s Memorial (New York: New Directions, 1993), pp. 83–150. Hereafter NM. The term “noncanonical” as applied to Mangan admittedly marks my, and Howe’s, writing as located within an Anglo-American sense of canonicity or national tradition. In the Irish tradition, Mangan stands larger, taken seriously by writers from Yeats and Joyce to Thomas Kinsella, and deemed worthy of a Alan Golding : : : 179

4 5

6

7 8

9 10 11 12

multivolume collected writings from a university press. The young Yeats published two short essays on Mangan in 1887 and 1891 (in Thomas Kinsella and W. B. Yeats, Davis, Mangan, Ferguson? Tradition and the Irish Writer, ed. Roger McHugh [Dublin: Dolmen, 1970], pp. 21–27); Joyce delivered two talks on Mangan, both under the title of “James Clarence Mangan,” in 1902 and 1907; they are collected in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1959), pp. 73–83, 175–86. Howe cites the second of the talks. Kinsella includes a poem in Mangan’s voice, “Clarence Mangan,” in his 1962 volume Another September (Dublin: Dolmen, 1962, p. 24), and devotes a section to him in his historical overview of Irish poetry, The Dual Tradition: An Essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995, pp. 49–54), where he describes Mangan as having produced, amid much that is “miscellaneous and often trivial in impulse,” “the most important poetry written in Ireland in the nineteenth century until Yeats’s The Rose.” (p. 49). “Speaking with Susan Howe,” with Janet Ruth Falon, The Difficulties 3, no. 2 (1989): pp. 28–42, especially 40. See George F. Butterick, “The Mysterious Vision of Susan Howe,” North Dakota Quarterly 55 (1987): pp. 312–21; Nicky Marsh, “‘Note on my Writing’: Poetics as Exegesis,” Postmodern Culture 8, no. 3 (May 1998): n.p.; Marjorie Perloff, Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990); and Andrew Schelling, “Articulations of Sound Forms in Time,” Jimmy and Lucy’s House of K 8 (1988): pp. 60–66. Howe’s April–July 10th 1974 notebook — from the year of Hinge Picture, her first book — contains her resolution to read “ancient Irish history this summer” (Mandeville Department of Special Collections, University of California, San Diego). Compare the aural play on “air ha” / “-ear” / Eire” in The Liberties: “whistling would in air ha / nameless appear” (ET 176). Earlier in The Liberties, the phrase “edan eaden” (p. 161) provides an aural association between Gaelic and the Edenic, and perhaps echoes the end of The Defenestration of Prague (which Howe claims as an Irish sequence), “eden or ebb of the sea” (p. 146). For ease of reference I have supplied pagination for the unpaginated original publication, using the first page of text as p. 1. Some subsequent references in the sequence to ramparts, castle windows, and battlements may refer to Cashel; the town’s defenses on the 358-foot Rock of Cashel date to the fourth century c.e. The phrase “the open sea outside” (FS 86), however, suggests that Howe has other fortifications in mind, since Cashel is an inland town. “Speaking with Susan Howe,” p. 40. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (New York: Grove Press, 1958). Peter Nicholls, “Unsettling the Wilderness: Susan Howe and American History,” Contemporary Literature 37 (1996): pp. 586–601. “The Difficulties Interview,” with Tom Beckett, The Difficulties 3, no. 2 (1989): pp. 17–27, especially 25; a remark that may be set next to “maybe margins shelter the inapprehensible Imaginary of poetry” (in The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History [Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993], p. 29. Hereafter BM).

180 : : : Susan Howe

13 Lynn Keller, Forms of Expansion: Recent Women’s Long Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 187–238, especially 198. 14 “Speaking with Susan Howe,” p. 37. 15 On the ambivalent effects of such allegorization, see Catherine Nash, “Remapping the Body / Land: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender, and Landscape in Ireland,” in Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, eds., Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (New York: Guilford, 1994), pp. 227–50. Nash goes on to connect the nineteenth century Ordnance survey mapping of Ireland, on which Mangan worked, with control of the feminine. “Melville’s Marginalia” moves through complex layerings of unwitting complicity whereby Mangan, with his “feminine softness” (NM 107) works on a project designed by the colonial master whom he resists to regulate his own feminized nation. 16 David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 17 Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 86. 18 Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature, p. 119. 19 Matthew Arnold, Complete Prose Works, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–1977), III, p. 283. 20 Howe also uses a phrase from Arnold’s “On Translating Homer: Last Words”: “Subject of the idea (to quote from The Excursion).” The vertical placement of this phrase anticipates that of Arnold’s other commentary on Homer’s classic style (NM 100); it puts the pastoral monologue of Wordsworth’s Excursion at cross-purposes with “MiddleClass Education”; and it prefigures the pun on “subjects” (as subjectivities and as regulated citizens) with which Howe ends the sequence (NM 150). 21 Arnold, Complete Prose Works, II, p. 302. 22 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 17, 26. 23 Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature, pp. xi, 23, 25, 22. 24 Compare Howe’s observation that Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana “could be called ‘Marginalia’ Christi Americana” (BM 30). 25 Singularities (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990), p. 55.

Alan Golding : : : 181

“The Circulation of Small Largenesses” Mark Ford and John Ashbery helen vendler

Writers influenced by John Ashbery more often imitate his manner than grasp his import. They can scramble a metaphor, write a melting close, insert pop icons, make a comic allusion. But the essence of Ashbery does not lie in these tricks. When in 1992, I read, with instant joy, Mark Ford’s Landlocked, I found a poet who had internalized the inner, more than the outer Ashbery. But, as I hope to show, Ford’s poetry, even while benefiting from Ashbery’s example, retains its own different quirkiness, both in that first volume and in the recent second collection, Soft Sift (2001).1 Ashbery’s importance, to my mind, lies in his being the first notable American poet to free himself, stylistically and thematically, from nostalgia for religious, philosophical, and ideological systems. His modernist predecessors thought such systems necessary to human dignity, and they either remained Christian, like Marianne Moore; returned to Christianity, like T. S. Eliot and John Berryman; adopted an alternate political ideology (fascism in Ezra Pound, political conservatism in Robert Frost, a quasi-socialism in William Carlos Williams, feminism in Adrienne Rich); turned to Buddhism like Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder; or to science as a substitutive omni-system, as in the case of A. R. Ammons. Many poets who have tried to do without such systems — Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Charles Wright — nonetheless have expressed explicit imaginative regret for the loss of religious sublimity. One feels the pull, in all these poets, toward a system of belief or an organized form of collectivity, a wish for a way to give honor, dignity, and greater-than-personal significance to human life. Only within and by means of such systems, it seems to many writers, can the human subject be situated and understood. Ashbery, by contrast, is wholly without a religious creed or a political ideology. And — more crucially — he gets along without the nostalgia for credences, or, to be more precise, he includes systems and creeds in his general mild nostalgia for everything transient, from sunsets to Popeye. But in Ash-

bery’s work a comedy of plenitude and inception, both in theme and language, is constantly — and effortlessly — canceling out the general wash of nostalgia. His little two-line poem says it all: “The Cathedral Is,” says the title; “Slated for demolition,” says the poem.2 Sturdy architectural existence in the title; then a white space; then the one-line glee of the wrecking ball. The diction of cathedral-destruction is neither tragic nor sublime, but pragmatic and demotic. What such a poem honors is the human capacity for change (a Stevensian value) and the equally human delight in demolition (which is not a Stevensian value: Stevens prefers, as we can see from the beautiful late poem, “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside,” the coexistence of the emergent new with the declining old). Even when “demolition” is in view, Ashbery usually avoids ringing closure (though lingering closure pervades his volumes). He is more likely to start up a new poem in the last several lines of the old than to let the old come to a complete halt. As he writes in “Grand Galop,” But we say, it cannot come to any such end As long as we are left around with no place to go. And yet it has ended, and the thing we have fulfilled we have become. Now it is the impulse of morning that makes My watch tick. As one who pokes his head Out from a under a pile of blankets, the good and bad together, So this tangle of impossible resolutions and irresolutions: The desire to have fun, to make noise, and so to Add to the already all-but-illegible scrub forest of graffiti on the shithouse wall.3 Genial though this ending may sound, it is also savage in implication: the monumentum aere perennius is unmasked as a “shithouse wall,” and the “formèd trace,” to use Ezra Pound’s phrase,4 has become a scribble of “graffiti” growing as lawlessly and stuntedly as a scrub forest. Yet, the impulse to write, however denigrated, is affirmed: And one is left sitting in the yard To try to write poetry Using what Wyatt and Surrey left around, Took up and put down again Like so much gorgeous raw material. (SP 176) If the “raw material” is “gorgeous” enough, it will remain so when embodied in our forms as it was in those of the sonneteers. The quest, for instance, is one Helen Vendler : : : 183

piece of that perennial “gorgeous raw material,” one of the inescapable modes in which life presents itself. In Ashbery then, Childe Roland will approach the dark tower yet once more, but this is how it happens in “Grand Galop”: So it is that by limping carefully From one day to the next, one approaches a worn, round stone tower Crouching low in the hollow of a gully With no door or window but a lot of old license plates Tacked up over a slit too narrow for a wrist to pass through And a sign: “Van Camp’s Pork and Beans.” (SP 178) The characteristic postmodern pratfall of anticlimax is here, as Ashbery represents the lyric tradition by the “license plates” of former poets, and he parodies the way we say “Spenser’s Faerie Queene” by signing the location “Van Camp’s Pork and Beans.” But also visible is the ever-present, if often comically occluded, Ashbery pain: one “limps carefully” from one day of the quest to the next. And the sickening anti-aesthetic of a new order is always rising to view: Morning saw a new garnet-and-pea-green order propose Itself out of the endless bathos. (SP 178) Yet the implied task of the poet, bafflingly enough, has not changed: it is to find a way of raising human beings to a larger exponential power: Impossible not to be moved by the tiny number Those people wore, indicating they should be raised to this or that power. But now we are at Cape Fear . . . (SP 179) We can say, then, that in existence as we find it in Ashbery, nothing is to be taken seriously for long; everything is to be taken seriously in essence as “raw material”; and pain and bathos are forever setting the poet new aesthetic conundrums in “garnet” blood and “pea-green” bile. What is it that Wyatt and Surrey left lying around? Love and pain, scenery, and an order of archetypes (such as the quest). Ashbery is a poet of all of these. As he holds the Petrarchan inheritance up to the light, Laura and Stella morph into vulgarly named contemporary girls, just as inherited philosophical questions metamorphose into journalistic banalities: How to explain to these girls, if indeed that’s what they are, These Ruths, Lindas, Pats and Sheilas About the vast change that’s taken place In the fabric of our society, altering the texture Of all things in it? (SP 182) 184 : : : Mark Ford and John Ashbery

There is nothing for the poet to do but drag the clichés into plain view and, like Wyatt and Surrey before him, “babble about the sky and the weather and the forests of change,” seeking a contemporary texture of words to match the altered texture of society. “Aloof, smiling and courteous” like life in “Haunted Landscape” (SP 263), this poet who admires everything and wonders at nothing babbles on, naïveté and sophistication his changes of garments. There is in his poetry a persistent sense of plot aborted, of journeys on circular tracks, of aspiration engaged in and mocked, of synapses of allusion constantly making electrical sparks and then fizzling out. Human meaning is made and exploded, and no larger backdrop of sustained systematic thought or belief guarantees either its fittingness or its permanence. Yet the intelligence that understands itself and its own evolving forms raises human biological organisms to a higher power, even as they helplessly undergo the vicissitudes of their physical being in love, fear, and pain. Is this what life feels like in Mark Ford’s rendering? As I read Ford, I answer “yes” and “no” and “sometimes.”Yes, there are, as in Ashbery, many parodic and inconsequential moments, and yes, there are, as in Ashbery, forms of suffering, usually understated, subtending the comic anticlimax. But let me take an example of “No.” While Ashbery tends to write within explicitly human terms, Ford is more allegorical in his protean changes. He can be a “misguided angel” (the phrase is the title of a recent poem [SS 17]) or a “huge green amphibian,” who in the cartoon-poem “Outing” follows his girlfriend as she shops: If only it were truly impossible, and less like being a huge green amphibian made to inch my home-sick coils between the different counters of your favourite store, taking all these fancy cautions to keep my head down, and out of other shoppers’ way. Your ankles I can just make out . . . The dusty floor is cool, like a fountain, worn smooth and comfortable by so many feet. . . . Now as I glide towards the whirr of sliding doors, I half-hope its electric eye won’t respond to my irregular approach. Another spanking clean threshold! “Open Sesame,” it cries, “Hold tight!” (L 51) Ford’s interjection of the clichéd cries, “Open Sesame” from The Arabian Nights, and “Hold tight” from The Waste Land exhibits the tag-ridden overload of the Ashberian literary synapse, but the comic film of the self as a homesick dragon about to confound the high-placed electronic sensor of the automatic doors has more fairy-tale jollity and more consistency of plot than is natural to Ashbery. Ford’s lyrics frequently rest, then, as Ashbery’s do not, Helen Vendler : : : 185

on a story line — but of course an absurd and allegorical one. The inventiveness in a characteristic early Mark Ford poem — “A Swimming-Pool Full of Peanuts” will be my example — lies in its comic-strip sketches of the protagonist’s successive Chaplinesque efforts to deal with a single unexpected situation — coming across a swimming-pool full of peanuts. First the scene is set, in a paratactic style partly borrowed from another influence on early Ford, Frank O’Hara: I come across right in the open a whole swimming-pool full of peanuts I think I’ve gone mad so I shut my eyes and I count to five and look again and they’re still resting there very quietly an inch or so I suppose below the high-water mark they’re a light tan colour and the tiles around are a lovely cool aqua-blue only there’s no water just these peanuts. There follow the speaker’s attempts to deal with the anomalous contents of the pool: Well this is a hoax . . . / unless they’re painted . . . / so I kneel down / and with a loud snigger I dip in my finger / just to see it sinks into small grainy nuggets. Queasiness sets in at the thought of what the peanuts might be hiding (piranhas, perhaps?), but he continues his exploration: when “fistful after fistful”of peanuts uncovers nothing underneath, he takes a nine-iron from his golf bag and after fruitlessly swinging away “reckless in that peanut bunker” he jumps in, but there’s more and more always / so I say let sleeping dogs lie / and I crawl to the side and haul myself out and . . . / angrily I throw my nine-iron into the middle of the pool where it sinks / without trace and I storm back to my car and . . . Ashbery often makes use of a comparable paratactic style but would not have pursued the anecdote so consistently. The deadpan detail includes the saltiness and greasiness of the peanuts, the masculine bravado in the brandishing of the golf club, the intimation of a dark conspiracy between the constructor and the filler of the pool, and so on. The poem is a perfect mimicry of the absurd medieval trial, the protagonist rising to a furious zeal; but the knight of the swimming pool, in lieu of finding victory, succumbs ingloriously to collapse. Such a parabolic poem — applicable to any persistent, heroic, deranged, and deranging effort to make sense of the confounding world — aims to make 186 : : : Mark Ford and John Ashbery

us believe entirely in its frustration while disbelieving its farcical story. It asks us to remember the enormous and angry strivings of youth while judging them, from our later perspective, as absurd and demeaning. The means of Ford’s poem are its dogged Disney animation, its lively successive verbs, and its despair of finding — even for a single incident — coherent similes, whether for self (“like a madman . . . like one possessed . . . like a good soldier”) or for peanuts (“like sand-flies . . . like golf- / balls . . . like buff-coloured hail”). The Ashberian comic perplexity at the resistance of life to articulated description, and the equally Ashberian drive to describe it nonetheless, compete in Ford. And though the initial premise is absurd, nothing that follows is: Ford makes us believe in the quixotic heroism of our efforts to cope, even though our plight may extort ridiculous self-exposure. “A Swimming-Pool Full of Peanuts” could not have been written without the example of Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, but the young Ford had his own comic élan, more orderly than that of Ashbery, more aggressive and metaphysical than that of O’Hara. One of Ashbery’s most constant attitudes — underlying his display of intelligence and self-mockery that raises us to a higher power — is that of being of (at least) two minds. Dividedness drives almost every Ashbery poem, and is visibly manifest in the vertically split pages of his “Litany.” A comparable doubleness — but in interestingly altered and much-condensed form — can be seen in Ford; my example is a three-stanza poem from Landlocked called “Then She Said She Had to Go,” in which the two halves of each stanza of the poem, left and right, are separated by a columnar mid-gutter of white space. Here, to show the gutter, is the first of the three stanzas: The drawing room was full. At last the angry hostess approached and whispered black into my unsuspecting ear

The commuters half-turned to wave good-bye to their friend. About their feet fell the words of their evening newspapers. (L 43)

On the left side of the gutter there appears a scene and there is a matching scene on the right, of precisely equal shape. The first left-hand scene, given above, is located in a “drawing room” where a party is taking place; in the second stanza, the left shows a pastoral field enclosing a wandering cow; in the third, the left gives us a seaside village being drenched by a large sea-swell. In the first right-hand scene, given above, “commuters” wave good-bye to their friends; in the second, the protagonist eats lunch in a hall full of birds; in the third, his girlfriend angrily stalks out of the relationship. We are instructed to read these scenes across as well Helen Vendler : : : 187

as down, because the scene on the left always holds its fifth line in common with its partner on the right. In each case, however, the shared line changes meaning, depending on whether we insert it into the left scene or the right. In the first stanza, for instance,“black words” is the phrase shared by the two matched scenes: although in the left-hand narrative snippet the phrase “black words” has sinister psychological import, the identical phrase, read into the more routine right scenario, has only innocent visual significance. This is an Ashberian demonstration of the comic slipperiness inherent in language. Read separately in either scene, the phrase held in common is in no way ambiguous; but just as “black words” shifts its meaning like a chameleon as it moves from left to right, so does the shared phrase in each of the subsequent two matched sets of stanzas. In the second set, a cow swishes “away flies” on the left, while on the right “away flies” a carrot in the beak of a bird. In the third set, after the ocean floods on the left, “salt water” is found far inland, while on the right, the lover tries to imagine the “salt water” of tears in his girlfriend’s eyes. Whereas the pieces of Ashbery’s bicameral mind in the two columns of “Litany” never become pervious in this way to each other, Ford wants to insist on the way language leaks across from one mental compartment to another. The first of Ford’s puns here is lexical (as “black” is first moral then visual); the second is grammatical (as “flies” is first noun and then verb); and the third zooms from the macro- to the microcosmic (as “salt water” is first oceanic then lachrymal). Such puns suggest how language shimmers in a poet’s consciousness, where a word, as it enters into different combinations, behaves with quantum variability — a wave one minute, a particle the next. And it is characteristic of Ford’s practice that this lyric is so firmly condensed: he has shown no disposition toward Ashbery’s characteristic constantly digressive expansiveness. In fact, Ford has located his writing in the line of the sonnet, saying, Every form I try is a variation on a sonnet, or rather an attempt to disguise the fact the poem secretly wants to be a sonnet. . . . In the end they simply end up squashed or stretched sonnets, elastic sonnets, sonnets that have stayed on the train a couple of stops past their destination.5 Ford’s more recent poetry is less indebted to the Ashberian comic, but continues to practice the silent Ashberian undermining of the ground one stands on.“I plunge” says Ford in a poem entitled “Penumbra,”“Towards remote vanishing points, where one man’s / Loss unravels and becomes another man’s / Devastation” (SS 34). We had expected that one man’s loss would become another man’s gain, but we were second-guessed — both men lose out. The passage from “loss” to “devastation,” by the undertow of circumstance, unset188 : : : Mark Ford and John Ashbery

tling our clichés in the process, is pure Ashbery. Here as in Ashbery’s verse, the “Discordant Data” — to quote the title of a recent Ashbery poem dedicated to Ford6 — will not add up. Even so, the frustrating wish to create order persists. As Ford puts it in “Living with Equations,” “as I emerged from my hip-bath it suddenly dawned / The facts might be remarshalled and shown to rhyme,” but the poem nevertheless comes to grief in a very Ashberian way: after a time of more reassuring equations, The remainder can only imperceptibly dwindle, retreating Backwards until their long lost premises turn inside out. (SS 13) The Möbius strip of the human, like a Yeatsian gyre, can only undo itself; but we are at least enabled, by our ability to take the long view, to track the dimensions of our own undoing. Ford’s ending here, in its equal avoidance of the comic, the tragic, the sublime, and the just, places his poem in the human-scale aesthetic defined by Ashbery. Yet one aspect of Ford’s work especially differentiates him from Ashbery. Ford includes in his writing a physically sensuous documentation that is not present in the ever-theatrical, ever-virtual John Ashbery. One could say that Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins, with their sense of skin against wind, breath against earth, lie behind the moments of natural presence we come across in Ford. In the very poem, “Penumbra,” where we found the Ashberian satiric bon mot that one man’s loss is another man’s devastation, we see that Ford brackets that piece of Ashberian dark comedy with bleak scenic passages: I lean into the wind that blows Off the lake, and scours the sodden fields; the sky’s Reflections ripple between ruts and bumps . . . Crops, Sludge, restless drifts of leaves absorb The haggard light. (SS 34) The depressive moods of the body, one could say, frame in Ford the comic aphoristic verdict of the mind. And the poet’s micro-noticing of “ravaged spores” and “downy nettles” manages to hover, in its adjectives, on the border between the real and surreal without losing a grasp on the actual scene. In this way Ford belongs to the line of British poets, from Shakespeare to Hardy and Hopkins, who are willing to describe unlovely moments in nature; but he differs from them in giving the introspective reflections arising from such depressed physical moments an Ashberian inconsequence and ironic comedy.

Helen Vendler : : : 189

In a recent essay, Mark Ford praised in James Tate qualities that can be found in his own work: the “refusal to elide the illogic of experience,” the “treacherous instability” of meditation, and the ways in which poems work by “collaging disparate materials into a seamless fluency.”7 And the kind of lyricism that Ford finds in Tate — one both “intimate and impersonal” — is the sort he delights in in Ashbery and desires, I think, for himself. Poetry must be “intimate,” or it would scarcely be true to itself; yet it must be “impersonal,” so that it can be true for others. Writing in the New Republic on Mina Loy, Ford praised a poem that, he said, “embodies a devastating critique of outdated rhetorical conventions and ossified belief-systems,” one that “anticipates the decentering fluidities of post-modern poetics.”8 There is perhaps something a little too pat about the approval extended here to something called “postmodern poetics” as though the Shakespeare of Hamlet and the Shelley of “The Cloud”were not aware — as they surely were — of “decentering fluidities.”Ford is on surer ground when he speaks of every major poet’s war on “outdated conventions and ossified belief-systems.” Ashbery’s war on them has proved, especially in its comic attachment to those very “conventions” and “belief-systems,” buoyantly liberating for many younger poets, in England for Ford especially. I have said one of the aspects distinguishing Ford from Ashbery is the felt presence of the body in an actual landscape. Ford is also likely to set himself in a recognizable location or to narrate a stable incident. Where Ashbery is protean, an absent center through which all discourses move, Ford lets us see himself in a given posture and location, irritated (in a poem called “Plan Nine”) by the “dreadful telephone again,” facing every morning a supervisor whose “reign of terror / And mind like glue” are relentlessly present (SS 8). Horrible twentieth-century prescriptions for good living are, in the same poem, imposed on a “case” resembling, we are sure, the poet’s own, as a “caustic voice” says to “a clutch of bright-eyed interns,” “No mohair, no alcohol, / Lots of plain yoghurt certainly, no foreign languages, no tête-à-têtes.” One can see, from that parodic mockery of medical discourse, why Ashbery appeals to Ford; and yet such a passage is more firmly located in an actual event — here a medical consultation — than Ashbery’s work tends to be. Ford, though impersonal, is also confessional in a way closer to Hart Crane than to Ashbery. There are recognizable lyrics of disquieting self-exposure, such as “Misguided Angel,” which begins with a mock-Miltonic self-challenge: Where will you ride in this minute that stretches Its wings, and soars aloft, and turns into An unplanned, devilish interval? (SS 17) 190 : : : Mark Ford and John Ashbery

Upon this taunt, the “ossified belief-systems” and confusing bewilderment of the flesh immediately put in their appearance: Serial Misadventures have shattered the grip Of barbed rubric and corporate logo; enigmas Swarm at the brink of the five senses. Finally, the poet’s initial hyperbolic self-challenge — “Where will you ride in this minute?” — becomes a more actual one, almost a vow, in which the poet admits the three inescapable unfreedoms of the creative mind: one cannot censor one’s thoughts, one cannot deny one’s wounds, and one cannot escape the “inflexible etiquette” of art. That “inflexible etiquette” — the phrase, in its combination of the necessary and the decorative, could have come from Hart Crane — demands that gesture be brought to coincide with memory: There is no controlling One’s renegade thoughts, nor striking The fetters from blistered limbs. Inflexible etiquette Demands every gesture be also a memory: you stare Into space where fractions and figures still pursue Their revenge. (SS 17) An unknown frontier lies ahead in which the misguided angel is to stake a claim, but Whoever claims A stake out there must rise and speak in guttural tones Of all they mean — or meant — to do, and why, and where. (SS 17) We have moved entirely out of the pose of ultimate inconsequence and charming dissolution that is Ashbery’s own, and into a Stevensian and Crane-like seriousness in which the poet’s muttering will be judged by an exacting ethical standard, at once internal and social. Hart Crane’s verse, as Ford commented in a review of his Selected Letters,9 was motivated by the poet’s “need to embody the physical, the mundane, the fleeting.” The “mundane” and the “fleeting” are amply present in Ashbery, but the “physical” less so. And it is the “physical,” with its irruptions of sensuous transcendence, that appeals to Ford in Crane — what he, quoting Crane, calls the poet’s “blanket-like absorption in experience.” The quintessential Ford can be found in the grafting of a felt physical ambience on the Ashberian metaphysical one, as well as the grafting of a Fordian allegorical story line on the Helen Vendler : : : 191

Ashberian aslant angle of incidence. A recent Ford poem, “Twenty Twenty Vision,” remarking centrally that “my doom is never to forget / My lost bearings,” opens in a mode of cartoon metaphysics learned from Ashbery: Unwinding in a cavernous bodega he suddenly Burst out: Barman, these tumblers empty themselves And yet I persist. (SS 29) Very shortly “Twenty Twenty Vision” turns into a wonderfully exact lyric autobiography, reminiscent by turns of Wordsworth, Eliot, and Crane, but dominated by no one influence. The fact that we can read such an oblique poem with understanding is due to our training by Ford’s precursors in modernism, including Ashbery. But the memorable lyric itself — its story line, its alternately understated and overstated emotional vicissitudes, its surreal scenic vividness — is all Ford’s own. I want to quote its closing lines, prefacing them by saying that the Ford narrative departs from the usual Wordsworthian plot by ending, as well as beginning, in medias res by framing both beginning and ending in a setting sun; by symbolizing birth as a death-wound; and by representing the awakening to life as coterminous with the terrible thirst with which “Twenty Twenty Vision” will end: In medias res we begin And end: I was born, and then my body unfurled As if to illustrate a few tiny but effective words — But — oh my oh my — avaunt. I peered Forth, stupefied, from the bushes as the sun set Behind distant hills. A pair of hungry owls Saluted the arrival of webby darkness; the dew Descended upon the creeping ferns. At first My sticky blood refused to flow, gathering instead In wax-like drops and pools: mixed with water and a dram Of colourless alcohol it thinned and reluctantly Ebbed away. I lay emptied as a fallen Leaf until startled awake by a blinding flash Of dry lightning, and the onset of this terrible thirst. (SS 29) Although the posture here is not heroic, one feels the poet’s sheer joy at the discovery of language, even in its most primitive forms of childish response: “but” (the objecting mind);“oh my oh my” (dismay one day, wonder the next); “avaunt” (the first thrill of the literary). For the “terrible thirst” parching the 192 : : : Mark Ford and John Ashbery

poet’s throat from the onset of his vocation, no words, of course, will ever be entirely adequate — but the mind has nevertheless begun to amass its lexicon. Michael Hofmann once called Mark Ford’s work “unmistakably midAtlantic,” and yet Ford’s verse is also “unmistakably” — to this transatlantic reader — English in its attachment to the line of English romantic and modern lyric.10 In an interview with Graham Bradshaw, Ford repudiated the contemporary genre of the literally autobiographical poem: I can’t bear poems about grandfathers, or fishing expeditions, or what it’s like to move into a new house, unless they’re very very good poems. . . . I start off prejudiced against them because I find the subject-matter so boring. . . . I guess basically I’m always looking for gaps, little fissures where “a thought might grow,” to use Derek Mahon’s phrase.11 I associate the literal lyric with the United States, where it has lately been thought that specification of gender, ethnicity, class, and family relations adds authenticity to a poem. The classic lyric, from which Ford derives, has in the past engaged in various sorts of despecification so as to make its voice assumable by many readers, and Ford assents to that despecification as he reinvents himself as alligator, angel, or body unfurling into language. In the lyric of the past, the generalized speaker was, however, expected — by an invisible convention — to pursue his thoughts along normal logical lines. Pound, Eliot, Moore, and Crane, by allowing more wayward associations, created a modernism that curved the rails of thought in lyric, while Ashbery, disciple of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, dared to create actual gaps along the length of the rails. Ford, too, makes such leaps in logic native to his poems. But the enthralling thing about Ford’s lyrics is that although he has adopted the newer techniques of curves and gaps in “looping the loop” of consciousness — his phrase (SS 5) — he has allowed these techniques to remain wonderfully hospitable to the old — to Wordsworth, Hopkins, Hardy — not always in the parodic Ashberian way of knowing allusion, but often in the way of natural capacious memory. As Ford said in his Bradshaw interview — using a metaphor for tradition that might have surprised Eliot but not Wordsworth or Hopkins or Ashbery — “You scoop up a bucketful and enjoy as much as you can the various life-forms that happen to be in it.”12 We have the privilege of watching Ford scoop up, from the tide pools of both America and England, the life-forms and language-forms of our era. They are not tabulated by creed or system or ideology into any already known taxonomies of culture, but they group themselves happily in fleeting new convergences of the imagination. Helen Vendler : : : 193

In bringing Ashbery into the precincts of English verse, Ford has loosened the aspects of the English imagination that had remained within the stricter borders of Audenesque intellectuality, Movement dourness, and Larkinesque gloomy comedy. For a long time it seemed inconceivable to represent Englishness except within certain contained formal postures; the wilder postures belonged to the provinces, and were tacitly regarded as savage. With his irreproachable literary sophistication, Ashbery has out-Englished the English; but with his Whitmanian expansiveness he has introduced a loose-limbed provincial slouch into the drawing room of Wildean wit. Ford, with comparable parodic savoirfaire, delights in the slippery and the farcical — those mischievous disruptions of the intellectual, the taciturn, the morose, and the well behaved. His cinéma vérité of contemporary English life accompanies his renditions of a postmodern and eclectic sensibility. Ford is at once a veteran of pop culture and a connoisseur of the desperation of high culture, an indoor reader of the past but also an outdoor breather of physically felt atmospheres. His generation of English poets is still in formation but I believe Ford is to be one of its eventual definers, as Ashbery was crucial to postwar writing in the United States. And in that defining of the contemporary human being, Ford agrees with Ashbery that everything amenable to experience is in perpetual circulation, that culture cannot come to any definitive stability. Yet what circulates, being human, is never merely small: what Ashbery calls the circulation of small largenesses is given its largeness by speculation, reflection, mockery, and irony; by a dédoublement in which one is at the same time an angel but misguided; a body, but a penumbra; a bleak connoisseur of facts but at the same time one who “remarshalls” them into a rhyme that raises all the figures in the equation to a higher (that is, larger) power. Most of all, the contemporary awareness we find in Mark Ford is made large by the vigilant sense (mocked in the twocolumn scenes of “Then She Said She Had to Go”) that any word can come usefully to hand as a particle or a wave, and that the consequent combinatorial potential of language guarantees its ability to represent everything from the sublime to the ridiculous. This is a largeness amply put into circulation by Ashbery, and one that survives translation into Mark Ford’s England. notes 1 Mark Ford, Landlocked (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), p. 51. Hereafter L. Soft Sift (London: Faber and Faber, 2001). Hereafter SS. 2 John Ashbery, As We Know (New York: Viking, 1979), p. 93. 3 John Ashbery, Selected Poems (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), p. 175. Hereafter SP. 4 Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 178. 5 Transcript of a letter from Ford, January 31, 1998. 194 : : : Mark Ford and John Ashbery

6 7 8 9 10 11

John Ashbery, Wakefulness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), pp. 40–41. Mark Ford, Times Literary Supplement, August 29, 1997, p. 26. Mark Ford, New Republic, May 26, 1997, p. 39. Mark Ford, Times Literary Supplement, September 19, 1997, p. 27. Michael Hofmann, Times Literary Supplement, March 6, 1992, p. 23. Mark Ford talking to Graham Bradshaw, in Talking Verse, ed. Robert Crawford, Henry Hart, David Kinloch, and Richard Price (St. Andrews and Williamsburg: Verse, 1995), pp. 54–58, especially 57. 12 Ford, Talking Verse, p. 58.

Helen Vendler : : : 195

Bibliography Acheson, Dean. 1970. Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. London: Hamish Hamilton. Acheson, James, and Romana Huk, eds. 1989. Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Alderman, Nigel. 1994. “‘The Life with a Hole in It’: Philip Larkin and the Condition of England.” Textual Practice. 8.2, pp. 279–301. Alvarez, A., ed. 1962. 2nd ed. rev. 1966. The New Poetry: An Anthology. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Allen, Donald, ed. 1960. The New American Poetry. New York: Grove Press. Allen, Gay Wilson, and Ed Folsom, eds. 1995. Walt Whitman and the World. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. London: Verso. Anon. 1939. [Unsigned]. “Dr Sigmund Freud Dies in Exile: Founder of Psychoanalysis Theory Succumbs at his Home Near London,” New York Times, September 24, p. 1. ———. 1939. [Unsigned]. “Sigmund Freud,” New York Post, September 26, p. 12. ———. 1939. [Unsigned]. “Noonday & Night,” Time, 34.18, October 30, p. 66. ———. 1939. [Unsigned]. “Giant in the Earth,” New Republic, October 4, p. 226. Antin, David. 1982. “Modernism and Post-modernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry,” in The Avant-Garde Tradition in Literature. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, pp. 216–47. Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Armitage, Simon. 1989. Zoom! Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. ———. 1995. “Simon Armitage interviewed by Jane Stabler,” Talking Verse: Interviews with Poets. Ed. Robert Crawford et al. St. Andrews and Williamsburg: Verse, p. 22. Armitage, Simon, and Robert Crawford, eds. 1998. The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945. London: Viking. Arnold, Matthew. 1960–77. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1979. The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 2nd ed. Ed. Kenneth Allott and Miriam Allott. London: Longman. Ashbery, John. 1962. The Tennis Court Oath. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 1966. Rivers and Mountains. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ———. 1975. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. New York: Viking. ———. 1979. As We Know. New York: Viking. ———. 1985. Selected Poems. New York: Viking Penguin. ———. 1989. Poets at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Ed. George Plimpton. Penguin: New York. 387–412.

———. 1995. See Roussel. ———. 1998. Wakefulness. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. 2003. John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford. London: Between the Lines. Ashton, Dore. 1979. The New York School. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Auden, W. H. 1928. Poems. Oxford: privately printed by Stephen Spender. ———. 1934. Autograph Letter Signed, April 26. Faber Archive. ———. 1934. ALS, April 26. Faber Archive. ———. 1935. The Poet’s Tongue. London: G. Bell. ———. 1939. ALS to A. E. Dodds, August 28. Bodleian Library. ———. 1940. ALS to E. R. Dodds, January 16. Bodleian Library. ———. 1940. Another Time. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1940. ALS to E. R. Dodds, January 16. Bodleian Library. ———. 1941. “The Wandering Jew,” New Republic, 104.1367, February 10, p. 186. ———. 1959. The Shield of Achilles. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1963. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1976; rev. ed., 1991. Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber and New York: Random House. ———. 1976. “Five Early Poems.” Ed. Edward Mendelson. Times Literary Supplement, January 16, p. 53. ———. 1977. The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber. Baker, Deborah. 1993. In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding. London: Hamish Hamilton. Barry, Peter. See Hampson. ———. 2000. Contemporary British Poetry and the City. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bartlett, C. J. 1992. The Special Relationship: A Political History of Anglo-American Relations since 1945. London: Longman. Bate, Walter Jackson. 1970. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. New York: Norton. Baylis, John, ed. 1977. Anglo-American Relations since 1939: The Enduring Alliance. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bell, Vereen. 1983. Robert Lowell: The Nihilist as Hero. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds of Love. New York: Pantheon. Berryman, John. 1989. Collected Poems, 1937–1971. Ed. Charles Thornbury. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bidart, Frank. 1990. In the Western Night. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bishop, Elizabeth. “Mechanics of Pretense.” Vassar Special Collections, Series IV. ———. 1974. “A Brief Reminiscence and a Tribute.” The Harvard Advocate, special issue on Auden, CVIII, 2 and 3, pp. 47–48. ———. 1983. The Complete Poems 1927–1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1994. Elizabeth Bishop: One Art; Letters. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

198 : : : Bibliography

Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. 1985. Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O’Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and Merrill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloom, Harold. 1976. Figures of Capable Imagination. New York: Seabury. Bornstein, George. 1990. “Romancing the (Native) Stone: Yeats, Stevens, and the Anglocentric Canon.” The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture. Ed. Gene W. Ruoff. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, pp. 108–29. Bowie, Malcolm. 1987. Freud, Proust, and Lacan: Theory as Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bradbury, Malcolm. 1995. Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel. London: Secker and Warburg. Breslin, James E. B. 1984. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Britten, Benjamin. 1991. Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, 1913–1976. Ed. Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed et al., vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bromwich, David. 1989. A Choice of Inheritance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brown, Ashley. 1983. “An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop.” In Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 289–302. Brown, Dennis. 1994. The Poetry of Postmodernism: Anglo-American Encodings. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bull, H. See Louis. Burt, Stephen. 1999. “Roads to Dejection.” Times Literary Supplement, June 11, p. 25. Butterick, George F. 1987. “The Mysterious Vision of Susan Howe.” North Dakota Quarterly 55: pp. 312–21. Caddel, Richard, and Peter Quatermain, eds. 1999. Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press. Campbell, Roy. 1928. “Contemporary Poetry.” In Scrutinies. Ed. Edgell Rickword. London: Wishart and Company, pp. 177–79. ———. 1939. Flowering Rifle: A Poem from the Battlefield of Spain. London: Longmans, Green. Caplan, Gerald, and Serge Lebovici, eds. 1969. Adolescence: Psychosocial Perspectives. New York: Basic. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1981. W. H. Auden: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and London: George Allen & Unwin. ———. 1988. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber. Charmley, John. 1995. Churchill’s Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relationship, 1940–1957. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Channing, Edward Tyrell. 1815. “Reflections on the Literary Delinquency of America.” See Rawlings, I, pp. 29–36, 23–28. Charques, R. D. 1933. Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution. London: Martin Secker. Cheyette, Bryan. 1993. Constructions of “The Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bibliography : : : 199

Churchill, Winston. 1956–58. A History of the English-speaking Peoples. London: Cassell. Clark, Steve. 1999. “‘Uprooting the Rancid Stalk’: Transformations of Romanticism in Ashbery and Ash.” In Romanticism and Postmodernism. Ed. Edward Larrissy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 157–78. ———. 1999. “‘The Lost Displays’: Larkin and Empire.” In New Larkins for Old. Ed. James Booth. London: Macmillan, 1999, pp. 166–81. Clark, Steve, ed., with Mark Ford. 1999. Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations. 3:1. Clarke, Adrian, and Robert Sheppard, eds. 1991. A Floating Capital: New Poets from London. Elmwood, Conn.: Poets Press. Cockcroft, Eve. 1985. “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War.” In Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. Ed. Francis Frascina. London: Harper and Row, pp. 125–33. Comito, Terry. 1986. In Defense of Winters: The Poetry and Prose of Yvor Winters. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Connolly, Cyril. 1940. “Comment.” Horizon. 1.6, June, p. 390. Conquest, Robert. 1955. Poems. London: Macmillan. ———, ed. 1956. New Lines. London: Macmillan. Corcoran, Neil. 1993. English Poetry since 1940. London: Longman. Coughlan, Patricia, and Alex Davis, eds. 1995. Modernism and Ireland: The Poets of the 1930s. Cork: Cork University Press. Coyle, Michael. 1996. “A Present with Innumerable Pasts: Postmodernity and the Tracing of Modernist Origins.” Review. 18, pp. 117–34. Crawford, Robert. 1992. Devolving English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2001. “Men, Women, and American Classrooms.” In The Modern Poet: Poetry, Academia, and Knowledge since the 1750s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 223–66. ———, ed. 1998. The Scottish Invention of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. See Armitage. Crossman, Richard. 1964. “The Making of Macmillan.” Sunday Telegraph. February 9, p. 4. Crozier, Andrew, and Tim Longville, eds. 1987. A Various Art. London: Carcanet. Danchev, Alex. 1992. “In the Back Room: Anglo-American Defence Cooperation, 1945–51,” in British Intelligence Strategy and the Cold War. Ed. Richard J. Aldrich. London: Routledge, pp. 215–35. ———. 1997. On Specialness: Essays in Anglo-American Relations. London: Macmillan. Dante, Alighieri. 1932. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Trans. John Aitken Carlyle, Thomas Okey, and Philip H. Wicksteed. New York: Modern Library. Davidson, Michael. 1997. Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davie, Donald. 1973. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1976. Older Masters: Essays and Reflections on English and American Literature. Manchester: Carcanet. ———. 1989. Under Briggflatts. Manchester: Carcanet.

200 : : : Bibliography

———. 1998. With the Grain: Reflections on Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. Manchester: Carcanet. Davis, Alex. 1995. See Coughlan. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dickie, John. 1994. Special No More: Anglo-American Relations: Rhetoric and Reality. London: Weidenfield and Nicholson. Diggory, Terence. 1983. Yeats and American Poetry: The Tradition of the Self. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dobson, Alan P. 1995. Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century: Of Friendship, Conflict and the Rise and Decline of Superpowers. London: Routledge. Doreski, William. 1990. The Years of Our Friendship: Robert Lowell and Allen Tate. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Driberg, Tom. 1977; 1991. Ruling Passions. London: Jonathan Cape; reprint, London: Quartet Books. Eberhart, Richard. 1939. Transcript. “W. H. Auden.” Berg Library. Ellmann, Maud. 1987. The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Eliot, T. S. 1919. “A Foreign Mind.” August. Reprinted in Jeffares, pp. 231–32. ———. 1921. “London Letter.” Dial. 71.2, August, pp. 213–17. ———. 1928. Review of The Future of an Illusion. Criterion. 8.31, December, p. 350. ———. 1934. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1934. “A Commentary.” Criterion. 14.54, October, p. 89. ———. 1935. “A Commentary.” Criterion. April, p. 433. ———. 1938. “A Commentary.” Criterion. 18.70, October, p. 60. ———. 1940. The Idea of a Christian Society. New York: Harcourt Brace. ———. 1953. To Criticize the Critic. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1957. On Poetry and Poets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. ———. 1969. Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1975. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber and Faber and New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1988. The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1: 1898–1922. Ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1996. Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917. Ed Christopher Ricks. London: Faber and Faber. Emig, Rainer. 1995. Modernism in Poetry. London: Longman. Empson, William. 1940; 1983. Review of Another Time. In Life and Letters Today. Reprinted in John Haffenden, ed. W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 306–7. Enright, D. J., ed. 1980. The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse, 1945–1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Erkkila, Betsey. 1989. Whitman: The Political Poet. New York: Oxford University Press. Erikson, Erik H. ed. 1963; 1965. The Challenge of Youth. New York: Anchor. Estess, Sybil P. See Schwartz.

Bibliography : : : 201

Eysteinsson, Astradur. 1990. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fain, John Tyree, and David Young, eds. 1974. The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Falon, Janet Ruth. 1989. The Difficulties. 3:2: pp. 28–42. Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. 1958. A Coney Island of the Mind. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Ferris, Paul. 1978. Dylan Thomas. London: Penguin. Forbes, Peter, ed. 1999. Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry. London: Penguin. Ford, Mark. 1992. Landlocked. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1992. Times Literary Supplement, March 6, p. 23. ———. 1995. “Mark Ford Talking to Graham Bradshaw.” Talking Verse. Ed. Robert Crawford, Henry Hart, David Kinloch, and Richard Price. St. Andrews and Williamsburg: Verse, pp. 54–58. ———. 1997. New Republic. May 26, p. 39. ———. 1997. Times Literary Supplement, August 29, p. 26. ———. 1997. Times Literary Supplement, September 19, p. 27. ———. 1998. Transcript letter from Ford, January 31, 1998. ———. 2001. Soft Sift. London: Faber and Faber. Ford, Mark, ed. 1999. See Steve Clark. Foster, Roy. 1997. “Writing a Life of W. B. Yeats.” Irish Review. 21: Autumn/Winter, pp. 92–101. Frazer, Sir James. 1911–1915. The Golden Bough. 12 Vols. London: Macmillan. Friedenberg, Edgar Z. 1959; 1962. The Vanishing Adolescent. New York: Dell. Freud, Sigmund. 1953–1974. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1985. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Fuller, John. 1999. W. H. Auden: A Commentary. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Furbank, P. N. 1978. E. M. Forster: A Life. Vol 2: Polycrates’ Ring. 1914–1970. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Gantz, Timothy. 1993. Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gay, Peter. 1987. A Godless Jew. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Ginsberg, Allen. 1956. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books. ———. 1986. Howl: Original Draft Facsimile. Ed. Barry Miles. New York: Viking. Goodman, Paul. 1960. Growing up Absurd. New York: Vintage. Gould, Warwick. 1993. “The Unknown Masterpiece: Yeats and the Design of the Cantos.” In Pound in Multiple Perspective: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Andrew Gibson. London: Macmillan, pp. 40–92. Graham, Jorie. 1987. The End of Beauty. New York: Ecco Press. Graves, Robert. 1925. Poetic Unreason and Other Studies. London: Cecil Palmer. ———. 1937. Epilogue III. Spring. ———. 1946. Collected Poems, 1938–1945. London: Cassell. ———. 1951. Poems and Satires. London: Cassell. 202 : : : Bibliography

———. 1955. The Greek Myths. Vol. 1. Baltimore: Penguin. ———. 1956. The Crowning Privilege: Collected Essays on Poetry. London: Cassell. ———. 1961. More Poems. London: Cassell. ———. 1975. Collected Poems. London: Cassell. ———, with Laura Riding. 1927. A Survey of Modernist Poetry. London: Heinemann. Grayling, C., and C. Langan. 1997. Just another Star: Anglo-American Relations since 1945. New York: Harraps. Gregson, Ian. 1996. Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism: Dialogue and Estrangement. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Grigson, Geoffrey. 1939. New Verse: An Anthology Complied by Geoffrey Grigson. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1950. The Crest on the Silver. London: Cresset Press. Guattari, Félix. See Deleuze. Guilbaut, Serge. 1983. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gunn, Thom. 1985. The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography. San Francisco: North Point. ———. 1993. Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1993. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber; reprint, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1994. ———. Interview. 1994. In Clive Wilmer. Poets Talking. Manchester: Carcanet. Hall, Donald, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, eds. 1957; 1962. New Poets of England and America. New York: Meridian. Revised as New Poets of England and America: Second Selection. Ed. Donald Hall and Robert Pack. New York: Meridian. Hall, James, and Martin Steinmann, eds. 1950; 1961. The Permanence of Yeats. New York: Collier, pp. 97–104. Hammer, Langdon. 1993. Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hammer, Langdon, and Brom Weber, eds. 1997. “O My Land, My Friends”: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Hamilton, Ian. 1982; 1993. Robert Lowell: a Biography. New York: Random House; reprint, New York: Vintage. Hampson, Robert, and Peter Barry, eds. 1993. New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harris, Jose. 1992. “War and Social History: Britain and the Home Front during the Second World War.” Contemporary European History. 1.1. Harrisson, Tom. 1941. “War Books.” Horizon. 4.24, December 1941, p. 420. Hartman, Geoffrey. 1970. Beyond Formalism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Harwood, John. 1991. “The Hollow Man.” In Yeats Annual 8. London: Macmillan. Harwood, Lee. 1966. The Man With Blue Eyes. New York: Angel Hair Books. ———. 1967. The White Room. London: Fulcrum. ———. 1969. Landscapes. London: Fulcrum. ———. 1970. The Sinking Colony. London: Fulcrum. ———. 1975. Tristan Tzara, Selected Poems. London: Trigram Press. Bibliography : : : 203

———. 1987. Chanson Dada: Selected Poems. Toronto: Coach House/Underwhich Editions. ———. 1988. Crossing the Frozen River: Selected Poems. London: Paladin. Haughton, Hugh. 1987. “Not at home in the house.” Times Literary Supplement, March 20, p. 30. Healy, J. V. 1940. “The Pound Problem.” Poetry. 57.3, pp. 200–14. Heaney, Seamus. 1969. Door into the Dark. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1979. Fieldwork. London: Faber and Faber. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Hewison, Robert. 1981. In Anger: Culture in the Cold War. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Hill, Geoffrey. 1958. “The Poetry of Allen Tate.” Geste. 3, pp. 8–12. ———. 1963. “Allen Tate.” In The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry. Ed. Stephen Spender and Donald Hall. London: Hutchinson, pp. 302–3. ———. 1981. Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1984. The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas. London: Andre Deutsch. ———. 1991. The Enemy’s Country: Words, Contexture, and Other Circumstances of Language. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1994. New and Collected Poems, 1952–92. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 1997. “The Art of Poetry.” Paris Review LXII, pp. 159–60. ———. 1996. Canaan. London: Penguin. ———. 1998. The Triumph of Love. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hitchens, Christopher. 1990. Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies. London: Chatto and Windus. Hofmann, Michael. 1980. Nights in the Iron Hotel. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1986. Acrimony. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1989. “Guides and Assassins.” Times Literary Supplement, May 26, p. 578. ———. 1993. Corona, Corona. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1999. Approximately Nowhere. London: Faber and Faber. ———, ed. 2001. Robert Lowell: Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber. Homberger, Eric. 1979. The Art of the Real: Poetry in England and America since 1939. London: Dent. Howe, Nicholas. 1998. “Praise and Lament: The Afterlife of Old English Poetry in Auden, Hill, and Gunn.” In Words and Works: Studies in Medieval Language and Literature in Honor of Fred C. Robinson. Ed. Peter S. Baker and Nicholas Howe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Howe, Susan. 1976. The Western Borders. Willits, Calif.: Tuumba. ———. 1989. “The Difficulties Interview.” With Tom Beckett. In The Difficulties. 3:2, pp. 17–27. ———. 1990. Singularities. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England. ———. 1990. The Europe of Trusts. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon. ———. 1993. The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England. ———. 1996. Frame Structures: Early Poems, 1974–1979. New York: New Directions. 204 : : : Bibliography

———. 1997. “Melville’s Marginalia.” In The Nonconformist’s Memorial. New York: New Directions, pp. 83–150. Hughes, Ted. 1957. The Hawk in the Rain. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1960. Lupercal. London: Faber and Faber. Huk, Romana. See Acheson. Hulse, Michael. 1999. “Acting Sincerity.” Poetry Review. 89:2, pp. 87–89. Isherwood, Christopher. 1996. Diaries. Vol 1: 1939–1960. Ed Katherine Bucknell. London, Methuen. Jancovitch, Mark. 1993. The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jarrell, Randall. 1941; 1981. Nation, clii, April 12, pp. 440–41. Reprinted in Kipling, Auden, and Co: Essays and Reviews, 1935–1964. Manchester: Carcanet, pp. 55–57. ———. 1946; 1972. Poetry and the Age (Partisan Review). Reprint, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 234–35. ———. 1969. The Third Book of Criticism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Jeffares, A. N. 1977. W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Joyce, James. 1959. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking. Julius, Anthony. 1995. T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaladjian, Walter. 1989. Languages of Liberation: The Social Text of American Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press. Kaye, Jacqueline, ed. 1992. Ezra Pound and America. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Keller, Lynn. 1997. Forms of Expansion: Recent Women’s Long Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kelly, Joseph. 1998. Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon. Austin: University of Texas Press. Kennedy, David. 1996. New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry, 1980–1994. Bridgend: Seren. Kenner, Hugh. 1971. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1988. A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers. New York: Knopf. Kinsella, Thomas, and W. B. Yeats. 1970. Davis, Mangan, Ferguson? Tradition and the Irish Writer. Ed. Roger McHugh. Dublin: Dolmen. ———. 1962. Another September. Dublin: Dolmen. ———. 1995. The Dual Tradition: An Essay on Poetry and Politics in Ireland. Manchester: Carcanet, pp. 49–54. Kipling, Rudyard. 1963. A Choice of Kipling’s Verse. Ed. T. S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber. Kirby-Smith, H. T. 1996. The Origins of Free Verse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Koch, Kenneth. 1985. Selected Poems. New York: Vintage. ———. 1995. See Roussel. Kuisel, Richard F. 1993. Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lacorne, Denis. 1990. Amérique dans les têtes: The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bibliography : : : 205

Laity, Cassandra. 1996. H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Langan, C. See Grayling. Larkin, Philip, ed. 1973. The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1983. Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955–1982. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1992. Selected Letters. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. London: Faber and Faber. 2001; rev. 2002. ———. 2001. Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements, and Book Reviews, 1952–1985. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1988; rev., 2003. Collected Poems. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. East Saint Kilda and London: The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber. Lazer, Hank. 1996. Opposing Poetries. Vol. 1. Issues and Institutions. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press. Lease, Benjamin. 1981. Anglo-American Encounters: England and the Rise of American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lebovici, Serge. See Caplan. Lehman, David, ed. 2003. Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present. New York: Scribner. Lentricchia, Frank. 1994. Modernist Quartet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levenson, Michael H. 1984. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levertov, Denise. 1946. The Double Image. London: The Cresset Press. Levitt, Morton P. 1992. “The Invention of Postmodernism: A Critical Fable.” In Rereading the New. Ed. Kevin J. H. Dettmar. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 87–96. Levin, Harry. 1944. James Joyce. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1966. “What Was Modernism?” In Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 271–95. Lewis, Wyndham. 1950; 1984. Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography. London: Hutchinson; new ed. Ed. Toby Foshay. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press. ———. 1927. Time and Western Man. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1934. Men without Art. London: Cassell. Lodge, David. 1975. Changing Places. London: Penguin. Loewenstein, Andrea Freud. 1993. Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women: Metaphors of Projection in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams, and Graham Greene. New York: New York University Press. Lloyd, David. 1987. Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Nationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Longenbach, James. 1988. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1997. Modern Poetry after Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Longley, Edna, ed. 2000. The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry from Britain and Ireland. Newcastle: Bloodaxe. 206 : : : Bibliography

———. 1994. The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books. ———. 1996. “It Is Time That I Wrote My Will: Anxieties of Influence and Succession.” Yeats Annual 12. Ed. Warwick Gould and Edna Longley. London: Macmillan, pp. 117–62. ———. 2000. “Something Wrong Somewhere? Louis MacNeice as Critic.” In Poetry and Posterity. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, pp. 134–66. Longville, Tim. See Crozier. Lopez, Tony. 2000. Devolution. Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures. Louis, W. R., and H. Bull, eds. 1986. The Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations since 1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lowell, Robert. 1970. Notebook. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1973. History. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1973. For Lizzie and Harriet. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1973. The Dolphin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1976. Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1987. Collected Prose. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mark, Alison. 2000. Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry. Tavistock: Northcote House. Mathy, Jean-Phillippe. 1993. Extrême-Occident: French Intellectuals and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacDonald, Gail. 1993. Learning to Be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University. Oxford: Clarendon. McHugh, Roger, ed. 1970. Davis, Mangan, Ferguson? Tradition and the Irish Writer. Dublin: Dolmen. MacInnes, Colin. 1961; 1993. England Half English. London: Chatto and Windus. McKercher, B. J. C. 1999. Transition of Power: Britain’s Loss of Global Pre-eminence to the United States, 1930–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacNeice, Louis. 1935. “Poetry To-day.” The Arts To-day. Ed. Geoffrey Grigson. London: Bodley Head, pp. 32–62. ———. 1941; 1967. The Poetry of W. B. Yeats. London: Oxford University Press; reprint, London: Faber. ———. 1938; 1968. Modern Poetry. London: Oxford University Press; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1967. The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice. Ed. E. R. Dodds. New York: Oxford University Press. McRobbie, Angela. 1994. Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Marsh, Nicky. 1998. “‘Note on My Writing’: Poetics as Exegesis.” In Postmodern Culture. 8:3: n.p. Massa, Ann, and Alistair Stead, eds. 1994. Forked Tongues? Comparing Twentieth-century British and American Literature. Harlow: Longman. Matthiessen, F. B. 1937. “W. B. Yeats and Others.” Southern Review. 2:4, pp. 815–34. Meisel, Perry. 1987. The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Menand, Louis. 1987. Discovering Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press. Bibliography : : : 207

Mendelson, Edward. 1999. Later Auden. London: Faber and Faber. Merrill, James. 2001. Collected Poems. Ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. New York: Knopf. Middleton, Peter, and Tim Woods. 2000. Literatures of Memory: History, Time, and Space in Postwar Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Millier, Brett C. 1993. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mitchell, Adrian. 1964. Poems. London: Jonathan Cape. Moore, Marianne. 1921. Poems. London: The Egoist Press. Morrison, Blake. 1980. The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1987. The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper. London: Chatto. Morrison, Paul. 1996. The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Paul de Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Motion, Andrew. 1980. The Poetry of Edward Thomas. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mottram, Eric, with Malcolm Bradbury and Jean Franco. 1971. Penguin Companion to Literature. Vol. 3: United States and Latin America. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———, with Gillian Allnut, Fred D’Aguiar, and Ken Edwards. 1988. The New British Poetry. London: Paladin. Muldoon, Paul. 2001. Poems, 1968–1998. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Murphy, Francis, ed. 1969. Walt Whitman: A Critical Anthology. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Murry, Middleton. 1911; 1974. “Art and Philosophy.” Rhythm. I:I, Summer, pp. 9–12; reprinted in The Road from Paris: French Influence on English Poetry. Ed. Cyrena Pondrom. London: Cambridge University Press, pp. 54–57. Nash, Catherine. 1994. “Remapping the Body / Land: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender, and Landscape in Ireland.” In Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. Ed. Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose. New York: Guilford, pp. 227–50. Neal, John, preface and unpublished preface to Rachel Dyer. 1828. See Rawlings, I, pp. 118–29. Nicholls, Peter. 1995. Modernisms. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———. 1996. “Unsettling the Wilderness: Susan Howe and American History.” Contemporary Literature. 37, pp. 586–601. Nicolson, Harold. 1940. “People and Things.” Spectator. 5834, p. 555. ———. 1967. Diaries and Letters, 1930–1939. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. London: Collins. Nolan, Emer. 1995. James Joyce and Nationalism. London: Routledge. O’Brien, Sean, ed. 1999. The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland since 1945. Picador: London. O’Hara, Frank. 1971. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Ed. Donald Allen. New York: Knopf. Olson, Charles. 1958. Call Me Ishmael. New York: Grove Press. Orwell, George. 1949; 1984. Nineteen Eighty-four. Ed. Bernard Crick. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 208 : : : Bibliography

———. 1945; 1998. “Antisemitism in Britain.” Reprinted in The Complete Works of George Orwell. Vol. 17. Ed. Peter Davison, Ian Angus, and Sheila Davison. London: Secker and Warburg. Ovendale, Ritchie. 1998. Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century. London: Macmillan. Pack, Robert. See Hall. Parker, R. A. C. 1989. Struggle for Survival: The History of the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paulin, Tom. 1992. Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State. London: Faber and Faber. Perloff, Marjorie. 1990. Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1994. “What to Make of a Diminished Thing.” Parnassus. 19:2: pp. 9–29. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1845. “Editorial Miscellany.” The Broadway Journal. 2: pp. 199–200. Poirier, Robert. 1977. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press. Pound, Ezra. 1914; 1977. Reviews of W. B. Yeats, Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (1914) and Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916). In Poetry Chicago. May 11. Reprinted in Jeffares, pp. 186–89. ———. 1932. “Harold Monro.” Criterion (July). ———. 1934; 1960. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions. ———. 1954. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1968. Collected Shorter Poems. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1987. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1996. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions. Prynne, J. H. 1962. Force of Circumstance and Other Poems. London: Routledge. ———. 1963. “Figments of Reflection.” Cambridge Review. 84, pp. 281–82. Quatermain, Peter. See Caddel. Rainey, Lawrence. 1998. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ramazani, Jahan. 1994. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ransom, John Crowe. 1924. Grace after Meat. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1924. Chills and Fever. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 1924. “The Future of Poetry.” The Fugitive: April 1922–December 1925. 4 Vols. Ed. Walter Clyde Curry et al. Nashville: Nashville University Press. 3.2: pp. 2–4. Rasula, Jed. 1996. The American Poetry Waxworks Museum: Reality Effects, 1940–1990. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English. Rawlings, Peter. 2002. Americans on Fiction, 1776–1900. 3 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto. Reynolds, David. 1991. Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the Twentieth Century. London: Longman. Rexroth, Kenneth, ed. 1949. New British Poets. New York: New Directions. Richardson, Louise. 1996. When Allies Differ: Anglo-American Relations during the Suez and Falklands Crisis. London: Macmillan. Ricks, Christopher. 1984. The Force of Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bibliography : : : 209

———. 1988. T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. London: Faber and Faber. Riding, Laura. 1927. See Graves. Riggs, Thomas, ed. 1996. Contemporary Poets. Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press. Robinson, Peter. 1992. In the Circumstances: About Poems and Poets. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosenthal, M. L. 1965. The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ross, Andrew. 1986. The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press. Roussel, Raymond. 1995. How I Wrote Certain of My Books. Ed. Trevor Winkfield, with translations by John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. Boston: Exact Change. Ruthven, K. K. 1990. Ezra Pound as Literary Critic. London: Routledge. Schneider, Barbara, and David Stevenson. 1999. The Ambitious Generation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Schuyler, James. 1998. James Schuyler: Selected Art Writings. Ed. Simon Pettet. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Sheppard, Richard. 1976; 1991. “The Crisis of Language.” In Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. London: Penguin, pp. 323–36. Sheppard, Robert. See Clarke, Adrian. Sherry, Vincent. 1987. The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sigg, Eric. 1989. The American T. S. Eliot: A Study of the Early Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silkin, Jon. 1972. “The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill.” In British Poetry since 1960: A Critical Survey. Ed. Michael Schmidt and Grevel Lindop. Manchester: Carcanet. Sillars, Stuart. 1999. Structure and Dissolution in English Writing, 1910–1920. London: Macmillan. Simpson, Louis. See Hall. Sinclair, Iain, ed. 1996. Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology. London: Picador. Smith, Stan. 1986. Edward Thomas. London: Faber. ———. 1994. The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and the Rhetorics of Renewal. London: Harvester. Smith, Sydney. 1820. Review of Adam Seybert’s Statistical Annals of the United States of America. Edinburgh Review. 33, p. 79. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 1980. The Adolescent Idea. New York: Basic. Spector, Jack J. 1974. The Aesthetics of Freud: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: McGraw-Hill. Spender, Stephen. 1963. The Struggle of the Modern. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 1974. Love-Hate Relations: A Study of Anglo-American Sensibilities. London: Hamish Hamilton. Spiering, M. 1992. Englishness: Foreigners and Images of Identity in Postwar Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 210 : : : Bibliography

Starbuck, George. 1977. “‘The Work!’: A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop.” Reprinted in Schwartz and Estess, pp. 312–30. Stead, Alistair. See Massa. Stead, C. K. 1986. Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and the Modernist Movement. London: Macmillan. Stevens, Wallace. 1954. The Collected Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Stevenson, David. See Schneider. Tate, Allen. 1942; 1961. “Yeats’s Romanticism: Notes and Suggestions.” Southern Review. 7:3: Winter. Reprinted in Hall and Steinmann. Permanence of Yeats, pp. 14–37. ———. 1948. “On the Limits of Poetry.” New York: Swallow. ———. 1968. Essays of Four Decades. Chicago: Swallow. ———. 1976. Collected Poems, 1919–1976. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Thomas, Dylan. 1966. The Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas. Ed. Constantine Fitzgibbon. London: Routledge. Thomas, Edward. 1980. “A Language Not to Be Betrayed”: Selected Prose of Edward Thomas. Ed. Edna Longley. Manchester: Carcanet. Thomas, R. George. 1985. Edward Thomas: A Portrait. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tolley, A. T. 1985. The Poetry of the Forties. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Treece, Henry. 1942. Collected Poems. New York: Knopf. Trow, George W. S. 1980–81; 1997. Within the Context of No Context. New York: Atlantic Monthly. Tuma, Keith. 1998. Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. ———, ed. 2001. Oxford Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press. Turner, E. S. 1961. The Phoney War on the Home Front. London: Michael Joseph. Vendler, Helen. 1979. “Lowell in the Classroom.” Harvard Advocate. 113, pp. 22–26, 28–29. ———. 1988. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. ———. 1995. The Given and the Made. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Von Hallberg, Robert. 1985. American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Wain, John. 1956. A Word Carved on a Sill. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1959. “A Package Deal.” The Observer. January. ———. 1961. Weep before God. London: Macmillan. Ward, A. C. 1928; rev. and enlarged 1940 and 1963. Twentieth-century Literature. London: Methuen. Ward, Geoff. 1993. Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets. London: Macmillan. Warren, Rosanna. 1996. “Alcaics in Exile: W. H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud.’” Philosophy and Literature. 20:1, April, pp. 111–21. Watt, D. Cameron. 1984. Succeeding John Bull: America in Britain’s Place, 1900–1975. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waugh, Evelyn. 1942. Put Out More Flags. London: Chapman and Hall. Weber, Brom. See Hammer. Bibliography : : : 211

West, Elliot. 1999. Growing up in Twentieth-century Teen Culture by the Decade: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Wells, Robert. 1987. “Edward Thomas and England.” In Jonathan Barker, ed. The Art of Edward Thomas. Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, pp. 61–74. Wheen, Francis. 1992. Tom Driberg: His Life and Indiscretions. London: Chatto and Windus. Whitman, Walt. 1975. Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems. Ed. Francis Murphy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Williams, William Carlos. 1983. Paterson. London: Penguin. ———. 2000. The Collected Poems. Vol. I, 1909–1939. Ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. Manchester: Carcanet. Wilmer, Clive. 1980. “Definition and Flow: Thom Gunn in the 1970s.” In British Poetry since 1970: A Critical Survey. Ed. Peter Jones and Michael Schmidt. Manchester: Carcanet, pp. 64–74. Wilson, Edmund. 1931; 1961. “W. B. Yeats.” Originally published in Axel’s Castle. New York: Scribner’s. Reprinted in Hall and Steinmann. Permanence of Yeats, pp. 14–37. Winters, Yvor. 1947. In Defense of Reason. Chicago: Swallow. ———. 1952; rev. ed. 1960. Collected Poems. Denver: Swallow. Woods, Tim. See Middleton. Woolf, Virginia. 1940; 1992. “The Leaning Tower.” Reprinted in A Woman’s Essays. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. London: Penguin. Yeats, William Butler. 1917; 1994. “Per Amica Silentia Lunae.” In Later Essays. Ed. William H. O’Donnell. New York: Scribner, pp. 1–33. ———. 1936. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1936. A Vision. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1954. The Letters of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Allen Wade. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. ———. 1961. Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan. ———. 1970. Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, 2 vols. Ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson. London: Macmillan. ———. 1970. See Kinsella. ———. 1986. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Ed. John Kelly and Eric Domville. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1989. Yeats’s Poems. Ed. A. Norman Jeffares. London: Macmillan. ———. 1994. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Young, David. See Fain. Zabel, Morton D. 1937. “Poet as Anthologist.” Poetry. 49:5, February, pp. 273–78.

212 : : : Bibliography

Notes on Contributors Edna Longley is professor emerita in the School of English, Queen’s University, Belfast. She is the author of Poetry in the Wars (1986), The Living Stream (1994), and Poetry and Posterity (2000) and is editor of The Bloodaxe Book of 20th-Century Poetry from Britain and Ireland (2000). Stan Smith holds the Research Chair in Literary Studies at the Nottingham Trent University, and previously occupied the established Chair of English at Dundee University. Current projects include studies of modernism and of contemporary poetry, and editions of W. H. Auden’s The Orators (1932) and Storm Jameson’s In the Second Year (1936). He is editing the Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden, a volume on Globalization for the English Association, and a special issue of Studies in Travel Writing on modernism and travel writing. He is chair of the Fellowship Committee of the English Association. Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island: W. H. Auden and the Making of Post-national Poetry will be published soon. He teaches at Stanford University, is the general editor of the Princeton University Press translation series Facing Pages and coeditor of the Oxford University Press series Auden Studies. He has written for, among others, the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, the London Review of Books, and the Yale Review and is literary executor of the ballet impresario and poet Lincoln Kirstein. Bonnie Costello is professor of English at Boston University. Her publications include Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery and Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry. She is at work on a new project about still life and lyric entitled Planets on Tables. Langdon Hammer is professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism (1993) and, with Brom Weber, the editor of “O My Land, My Friends”: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane (1997). He is currently working on a biography of James Merrill, for which he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, 2003–04. Tony Lopez’s most recent collections of poetry are Devolution (2000) and Data Shadow (2000). He is included in the Oxford Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (2001), edited by Keith Tuma. He is professor of poetry at the University of Plymouth, United Kingdom. Stephen Burt is assistant professor of English at Macalaster College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he teaches poetry, poetry writing, and modern literature; his writing appears regularly in the Boston Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Yale Review, Poetry Review, and the London Review of Books. His critical study Randall Jarrell and His Age appeared in 2003; his book of poems, Popular Music, won the Colorado Prize for 1999.

Alan Golding is professor of English and director of undergraduate studies at the University of Louisville, where he teaches American literature and twentieth-century poetry and poetics. His book From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry won a 1996 CHOICE Best Academic Book Award. He has published extensively on avant-garde poetic formations from the Objectivists to Language writing and on issues of reception and canonicity. His current projects include Writing the New into History, which combines readings of individual poets with essays on the dissemination and reception of experimental writing, and Isn’t the Avant-Garde Always Pedagogical, a book on avantgarde poetics and/as pedagogy. Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard. Her many books include The Music of What Happens (1988), Souls Says (1995), The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997), Seamus Heaney (1998), and Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath (2003). Steve Clark is currently visiting professor at the University of Tokyo. Previous publications include Paul Ricoeur (1990); coedited with David Worrall, Historicizing Blake (1994), Blake in the 90s (1999), and Blake Nation Empire (2004); Sordid Images: the Poetry of Masculine Desire (1994); and edited Travel-Writing and Empire (1999). Mark Ford teaches in the English department of University College London. His critical biography, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams, was published in 2000 and reprinted by another publisher in 2001. Other publications include a selection of the poetry of Frank O’Hara (2003), a book-length interview with John Ashbery (Between the Lines), and two collections of poetry, Landlocked and Soft Sift.

214 : : : Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments The authors and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint copyrighted material as follows: From Selected Poems by Simon Armitage, reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. From “Into the Dusk-Charged Air,” and “Civilization and Its Discontents,” from Rivers and Mountains, by John Ashbery, copyright © 1962, 1963, 1964, 1966 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the author and Carcanet Press Limited, Manchester. From Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery, copyright © 1972, 1973, 1972, 1975 by John Ashbery. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., and Carcanet Press Limited, Manchester. From “On the Circuit,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith, and Monroe K. Spears, executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden; “The Secret Agent,” copyright © 1928 by W. H. Auden; “The Watchers,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith, and Monroe K. Spears, executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden; “Ten Songs,” copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith, and Monroe K. Spears, executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden; “Letter to Lord Byron,” copyright 1937 by W. H. Auden from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, used by permission of Random House, Inc., and by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. From “Two Organs,” from Collected Poems by John Berryman, copyright © 1989 by Kate Donahue Berryman, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and Faber and Faber, Ltd. From The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Methfessel, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Bonnie Costello’s essay, “A Whole Climate of Opinion: Auden’s Influence on Bishop” is reprinted from volume 5, number 1 of Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, © 2003. Used by permission of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. From “Burnt Norton” in Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt, Inc., and renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of the publisher and by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd. From Landlocked by Mark Ford published by Chatto and Windus, used by permission of the Random House Group Limited. From Soft Sift, copyright © 2001 by Mark Ford, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc., and by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd. From Collected Poems by Thom Gunn, copyright © 1994 by Thom Gunn, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

From “rain journal: london: june 65” by Lee Harwood. Copyright © by Lee Harwood. Used by permission of the author. From “Cycle,” from Canaan by Geoffrey Hill, copyright © 1996 by Geoffrey Hill, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, all rights reserved. From “Bogland,” from Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 by Seamus Heaney, copyright © 1998 by Seamus Heaney, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd. From Acrimony by Michael Hofmann, reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd. From “To Robert Conquest—13 August 1959,” from Selected Letters by Philip Larkin, copyright © 1992 by The Estate of Philip Larkin, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd. From “The New State” by Tony Lopez. Copyright © 2000 by Tony Lopez. Used by permission of the author. From Notebook by Robert Lowell, copyright © 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970 by Robert Lowell, copyright renewed 1998 by Harriet Lowell. “These Winds” from Selected Poems by Robert Lowell, copyright © 1976 by Robert Lowell, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd. From “Canto LXXX” by Ezra Pound, from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright © 1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1966, and 1968 by Ezra Pound, used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, and by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd. Stan Smith’s “‘A Package Deal’: The Descent of Modernism” was published under a different title in volume 20 of Miscelánea (Zaragoza University, departmento de filología inglesa y alemana, Spain). Reprinted with permission of the journal and of Stan Smith, who retains the copyright.

216 : : : Acknowledgments

Index abstract expressionism, 145 Acheson, Dean, 6–7 adolescence, 155–58, 165, 167n16 aesthetics: modernist forms of, 43–44 Airstrip One: Britain as, 24n29 Alderman, Nigel, 29n76 allegory, 185 Allen, Donald, 9 Alvarez, Al, 5, 12 America, 6–7, 79 American poetry: British influences, 10–12, 14; character of, 182, 193; cosmopolitan influences, 15–16; “definition” and “flow,” 121; Middle Generation, 17; regional literary diversity, 11, 127; Southern Agrarian poets, 125 American Renaissance, 2 Amis, Kingsley, 13 Anderson, Benedict, 77, 93–94 anti-Americanism, 56–57 anticlimax, 184 Antin, David, 10 anti-Semitism, 81–87, 129 Aphrodite, 92–93 Arendt, Hannah, 76 Ares, 92–93 Armitage, Simon, 12–13 Arnold, Matthew, 168, 173–77; “Dover Beach,” 113; Essays in Criticism, 175; “Function of Criticism,” 176–77; “Memorial Verses,” 92 Arrowsmith, William, 131 art and poetic style, 43–44, 65, 72n12, 72n13, 140, 142–49 artists and poets: roles of, 114, 116, 128–29 Ashbery, John, 20, 137–41, 182–89; as art critic, 145; on Auden, 12; influence on British poetry, 21; influence on Ford, 185–89; poetic themes, 182–83. Works

cited: “The Cathedral Is,” 183; “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 146; “Discordant Data,” 189; “Grand Galop,” 183–84; “Haunted Landscape,” 185; “Into the Dusk-Charged Air,” 145–46; “Litany,” 187–88; Rivers and Mountains, 143, 144; “Tenth Symphony,” 1; Three Poems, 17 Atlanticist culture: components of, 15–16; transfer of power, 26n45, 27n57; volumes concerned with, 25–26n37 Auden, W. H., 75–94; commercialization of, 70–71; and Eliot, 79, 85–90, 94; as expatriate, 18–19, 27n55, 67–70, 96n34; and Graves, 69–71; impact on American poetry, 10–11; influence on Bishop, 98–116; landscape poetry, 112–14; at Oxford, 62; poetic style, 80, 110; social protest poetry, 106–14. Works cited: “As I Walked Out One Evening,” 103; The Ascent of F-6, 108; “Bride in the 30’s,” 107; “Control of the Passes,” 101–102; The Double Man, 68; The Dyer’s Hand, 115; “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” 19, 75, 78–84, 86–90, 94; “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” 4; “Journal of an Airman,” 108, 114; “Letter to Lord Byron,” 114; Look, Stranger!, 108; “Memorial for the City,” 93; “Nocturne I,” 69; “On the Circuit,” 10–11, 12, 27n55; The Orators, 64; Paid on Both Sides, 85; “Paysage Moralisé,” 111; “A Permanent Way,” 70–71; Poems, 61, 100; The Poet’s Tongue, 123; “Refugee Blues,” 109–10; The Sea and the Mirror, 17; “September 1, 1939,” 75–80, 82, 92; “The Summer Holds,” 112–13; “The Watchers,” 104, 105–106

authority: sources of, 168, 173, 175, 179 autobiographical poetry, 172, 192–93 avant-garde, 9–10, 16, 49n5 Bate, Walter Jackson, 165 Beat poets, 15, 28n69, 56 Bell, Vereen, 152 Benjamin, Jessica, 164 Berryman, John, 15, 17 bicameral poetry, 187–88 Bidart, Frank, 154 Bishop, Elizabeth, 98–116; and Auden, 19, 98–116; and Eliot, 99, 100–101, 104–105; landscape poetry, 112–14; legacy of, 116; and Lowell, 167n21; and M. Moore, 99, 104–105, 108; poetic style, 106, 110, 114; social protest poetry, 106–14. Works cited: “At the Fishhouses,” 100; “Chemin de Fer,” 101–102; Harvard Advocate tribute to Auden, 98–99, 109, 116; “The Imaginary Iceberg,” 100; “Key West Notebook,” 99, 110–11; “Love Lies Sleeping,” 104–106, 115; “The Map,” 112–14; “Mechanics of Pretense,” 99–100, 108, 112; “Miracle for Breakfast,” 111; “One Art,” 19, 114; “Pink Dog,” 109; “Pleasure Seas,” 113; “Roosters,” 107–109; “Songs for a Colored Singer,” 109–11; “12 O’Clock News,” 108; “Varick Street,” 103–104 Black Mountain School, 15, 28n69 Blackwood, 2 Blackwood, Caroline, 155, 167n21 Bloom, Harold, 20, 118, 132n2, 132n4 Bornstein, George, 41 boustrophedon poetic style, 155, 166 Bradshaw, Graham, 193 Bradstreet, Anne, 1 Briggs, Asa, 77 Britain, 6–7 British poetry: American impact on, 10, 12–17; American views of, 9–10; Ashbery influences on, 21; avantgarde, 9–10, 16, 49n5; character of, 218 : : : Index

23n17, 193–94; exclusivity of, 12; First World War poets, 128 Bromwich, David, 151–52 Brown, Ashley, 98 Burke, Edmund, 176 Caddel, Richard, 27n54 Campaign for Nuclear Development (CND), 56 Campbell, Roy, 61, 81 Campbell, Steven, 148 Cashel, 170–71, 180n8 Channing, Edward Tyrell, 2 Charques, R. D., 64 Cheyette, Bryan, 84 Churchill, Winston, 55 Cobbett, William, 132 Cold War/Cold War poetry, 6–8, 24n29, 25n33, 56 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 121 collage writing style, 140, 142, 144, 148–49 Collins, Billy, 16 colonialism, 20, 168, 170–80. See also geopolitical contexts Columbia University, 156 committed artist doctrine, 42–44 community: Auden and Eliot on, 88 confessional poetry, 16, 17, 116, 121, 126, 190–91 Connolly, Cyril, 80 Conquest, Robert, 7, 13 copyright protections, 2 Corcoran, Neil, 129–30 cosmopolitan: as character of poetry, 76; as code word, 80–81 Coughlin, Patricia, 34 Cowen, Wilson Walker, 173 Crane, Hart, 120, 122, 127, 129, 190–92 Crawford, Robert, 50n23 creative writing courses, 11–12, 27n53 Criterion (magazine), 85–86 culture poetry, 7 Danchev, Alex, 24n29 Dante, 89–90, 92

Davidson, Donald, 58–59 Davie, Donald, 6, 8 Davis, Alex, 34 Deep Image poets, 15, 16, 28n69 Deleuze, Gilles, 177–78 derivative writing, 152, 158 Deutsch, Babette, 37, 38 Diggory, Terence, 35, 41–49 Dodds, E. R., 100 dream imagery, 110 Driberg, Tom, 61–63, 73n24 Duncan, Robert, 124, 132 Eberhart, Richard, 79, 134n2 Edinburgh Review, 2 Einstein, Albert, 85 elegy, 76 Eliot, T. S.: anti-Semitism, 84–87; and Auden, 79, 85–88; on Dante, 89–90; and English literary scene, 26n41, 67; on Freud, 82–83; geopolitical context of poetry, 8, 22n12, 40; Harwood compared to, 141–42; influence on Bishop, 99, 100–101, 104–105; on Joyce, 39; on Lowell, 154; and modernism, 57, 58, 64–65, 72n12, 76, 129; on poetry readers, 31; and Yeats, 39–40. Works cited: After Strange Gods, 85–86, 87; “Burnt Norton,” 21, 87; “Dry Salvages,” 21; The Idea of a Christian Society, 86; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 103; “Preludes,” 104; The Rock, 69, 87; The Waste Land, 142 elitism, 175–77 Ellman, Maud, 87 Emergency Powers Act (British), 79 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 154, 167n15 Empson, William, 96n30, 100 experimental writing, 9–10, 11 Eysteinsson, Astradur, 30, 33 fascism, 106–107, 129 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 56, 57 Fisher, Allen, 149 Ford, Mark, 21, 182–94; as

autobiographical poet, 192–93; bicameral poetry, 187–88; compared to Ashbery, 185–89; as confessional poet, 190–91; on Crane, 191–92; on James Tate, 190; on Loy, 190; lyric style of, 193; M. Hofmann on, 193; place in British poetry, 189–90; sonnet style, 188. Works cited: Landlocked, 182; “Living with Equations,” 189; “Misguided Angel,” 190–91; “Outing,” 185; “Penumbra,” 188–89; “Plan Nine,” 190; “The She Said She Had to Go,” 187–88; Soft Sift, 182; “A SwimmingPool Full of Peanuts,” 186–87; “Twenty Twenty Vision,” 192–93 form/formalism, 16, 43–44, 46, 122, 128–29 Foster, Roy, 37 France/French poetry, 6, 15–16 Frazer, James, 8 free verse: excesses of, 116; and future of poetry, 59; Gunn’s use of, 122, 132, 134–35n12, 136n32; Hill’s use of, 130, 131; Lowell’s use of, 129 Freud, Sigmund, 76, 80–91, 97n57, 106; Auden elegy on, 19, 75, 78–84, 86–90, 94; as exile, 80–82; as poet, 88–90. Works cited: Moses and Monotheism, 82, 88–89; “Mourning and Melancholia,” 91; “The Resistances to Psycho-Analysis,” 83 Friedenberg, Edgar Z., 156, 167n16 Fugitive (magazine), 18, 58–60 Futurism, 64 Gaelic language, 180n6 Garrett, John, 123 generational poetry, 155–58, 165 gentility, 5, 12 geopolitical contexts, 1–21; “Americanness,” 1–4, 50n23, 53–57, 68–71, 149; Cold War, 6–8, 24n29, 25n33, 56; colonialism, 20, 168, 170–80; “Englishness,” 5–6, 9, 53–56, 126, 189–90, 193–94; imperialism/ postimperialism, 4, 7–8, 22n12, Index : : : 219

geopolitical contexts (continued) 178; internationalism, 31, 83–84; “Irishness,” 13, 17, 30–34, 49n5, 179–80n3; nationalism/national identity, 76, 79, 84–86, 93–94, 133, 177–79; social protest poetry, 106–14, 132, 162, 174–75; sovereignty, 1, 7–8, 14–15, 29n76, 31–32, 39; World War I poets, 128; World War II poets, 65, 75, 77–78, 79, 81 Germany/German poetry, 16, 81 Ginsberg, Allen, 15, 56, 57, 100, 135n16 Graham, Jorie, 7 Graves, Robert, 53–71; commercialization of work, 53–56, 70–71; compared to Auden, 69–71; as expatriate, 69–70; on Greek mythology, 92–93; and Laura Riding, 18, 57–71, 62–63, 73n24; publishes in the Fugitive, 59–60. Works cited: “The Blue-Fly,” 69; But It Still Goes On, 70; “The Cloak,” 69–71; “Contemporary Techniques of Poetry,” 61; “Here live your life out,” 70–71; On English Poetry, 59; Steps, 53, 68, 69; A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 57 Greville, Fulke, 123 Grigson, Geoffrey, 63–64, 66, 67 Guattari, Félix, 177–78 Gunn, Thom, 19–20, 118–26, 132–33; compared to Hill, 126–27, 133; “definition” and “flow” in, 121–22; on Hardy, 135n16; poetic style, 120–21, 125–26, 132–33, 134–35n12, 136n38; on Williams, 124, 135n15; and Yvor Winters, 118–26, 132. Works cited: Boss Cupid, 132; “Duncan,” 132; “Keats at Highgate,” 121; The Man with Night Sweats, 124–26; “To Yvor Winters, 1955,” 122–23, 125, 135n15 Hall, Donald, 23n17, 123 Hamilton, Ian, 151 Hammer, Langdon, 152 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 157, 167n21 220 : : : Index

Hardy, Thomas, 100, 135n16 Harrisson, Tom, 82 Hartman, Geoffrey, 153 Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (Vendler), 123–24 Harwood, Lee, 20, 137–50; compared to Eliot, 141–42; influence from Ashbery, 146–47; landscape poetry of, 137–48; use of painting themes and techniques, 140–49. Works cited: “For Robert Motherwell,” 145; “Landscape with 3 People,” 142–43; Landscapes, 145; “Long Black Veil,” 149; The Man with Blue Eyes, 20, 137–44; The New State, 147–48; “Notes of a Post-Office Clerk,” 149; The Sinking Colony, 149; “Train Poem—A Collaboration,” 144–46; “White,” 145; The White Room, 141, 144, 149 Haughton, Hugh, 158 Healy, J. V., 86 Heaney, Seamus, 13, 34 Hill, Geoffrey, 19–20, 118–20, 126–33; and Allen Tate, 118–20, 126–33; compared with Gunn, 126–27, 133; as confessional poet, 17; free verse use, 130, 131, 135n32; on Pound, 131; prose poems, 135–36n28; social protest poetry, 132. Works cited: Canaan, 130–31, 132; “Cycle,” 130–31; For the Unfallen, 127; “Funeral Music,” 127–28; “In the High Court of Parliament,” 132; Mercian Hymns, 127, 135–36n28; “November 1994,” 132; “The Poetry of Allen Tate,” 128, 130; “September Song,” 129–30; “Sorrel,” 131–32; “To William Cobbett in Absentia,” 132; The Triumph of Love, 127, 132, 136n31, 136n32; “Two Formal Elegies,” 135n27 Hitler, Adolf, 81 HIV/AIDs, 124–25 Hobsbaum, Philip, 152 Hofmann, Gert, 158–64 Hofmann, Michael, 20, 158–66; as derivative writer, 158; on Ford, 193;

and Lowell, 151, 152, 158–62, 164, 166; political poetry, 162. Works cited: Acrimony, 20, 151, 158–64; Approximately Nowhere, 166n2; “Friction,” 160–61; “From Kensal Rise to Heaven,” 162; “The Machine that Cried,” 162–63; “The Nomad, My Father,” 159–60; “Old Firm,” 163; “Withdrawn from Circulation,” 161–62 Hogarth Press, 60 Holmes, Carter. See John Neal homosexuality: attitudes toward, 81, 82, 103, 120, 134n9; and modernist writing, 102, 124–26, 137–41 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 111 Howe, Susan, 20–21, 168–79; authority sources as subject matter, 168, 173, 175, 179; as autobiographical poet, 172; colonialism as subject, 20, 168, 170–71, 172, 175, 180; compared to Arnold, 175–77; gender issues, 172, 173; “Irishness” of poetry, 168–75, 180n5; use of sound, 169–70, 171. Works cited: The Birth-mark, 173; Cabbage Gardens, 168, 170; The Defenestration of Prague, 168, 172–73, 180n6; Frame Structures, 168, 169–71; Hinge Picture, 169; History of the Dividing Line, 168, 171; The Liberties, 168, 172; “Melville’s Marginalia,” 168, 173–79; Melville’s Marginalia, 20; My Emily Dickinson, 173; “The Plains of Abraham,” 170; Singularities, 173; The Western Borders, 168, 170, 172 Hughes, Ted, 8 humaneness in poetry, 124, 126 iambic pentameter, 132 identity and recognition: sense of, 154, 164–65 Imagism, 32–33, 44, 59, 64 imperialism/postimperialism, 4, 7–8, 22n12, 178 Inferno (Dante), 89–90 influence: Oedipal theories of, 20

internationalism, 31, 83–84 Ireland/Irish poetry, 13, 17, 30–34, 49n5. See also Howe, Susan; Yeats, W. B. Irish Literary Revival, 34 Irish poets, 179–80n3 Isherwood, Christopher, 77–78 Japan/Japanese poetry, 16 Jarrell, Randall, 68, 107, 152, 154 Jenkins, Nicolas, 12 Jews, 80–82, 87–88 Johnson, Samuel, 170 Joyce, James, 31, 72n10, 178, 179–80n3 Keats, John, 121, 122, 142 Kees, Weldon, 13 Keller, Lynn, 172 Kelly, Joseph, 31 Kennedy, Robert, 157 Kenner, Hugh, 31 Kingslake, A. W., 175–76 Kinsella, Thomas, 179–80n3 Kipling, Rudyard, 4 Koch, Kenneth, 15 landscape poetry, 112–14, 137–48, 185 language: literary, 33, 177–78; poetry as public language, 76–78, 90–94, 100; and recognition, 164 Language writing. See West Coast Language writing Larkin, Philip: on Auden, 12, 27n55, 68; on diaspora, 13–14; as New Formalist poet, 17; on poetry and sovereignty, 1, 7–8; on Robert Conquest, 13; on Vaughan, 13–14. Works cited: “Ad Parnassum” (adaptation), 23n22; “At Grass,” 5–6; The Less Deceived, 6 Lentricchia, Frank, 31 Levin, Harry, 58 Levitt, Morton P., 58 Lewis, Wyndham, 46, 64, 72n10 Lloyd, David, 173, 178 Lodge, David, 27n57 London, 11, 26n41, 84 Index : : : 221

Longenbach, James, 41, 50n16 love: modernist expressions of, 101–106, 137–41 Lowell, Harriet, 157–58, 162, 167n21 Lowell, Robert, 120, 151–66; and Allen Tate, 134n5, 154, 167n14; boustrophedon as poetic style, 155, 166; British influences on, 15; as cultural power, 152–53; as derivative poet, 152; on Emerson, 167n15; generational poetry, 155–58; influence on M. Hofmann, 20, 158, 164, 166; publication of sonnets, 167n21; relation to history, 153–57; sense of identity, 154. Works cited: Day by Day, 151; “Flight,” 159–60; “For the Union Dead,” 151; Life Studies, 16, 129, 156, 158, 166; “The March I,” 155; “Memorial Day,” 153, 156–57; “The Nihilist as Hero,” 153; Notebook, 152, 154, 156; “The Restoration,” 156; “These Winds,” 153, 157–58 Loy, Mina, 190 lyricism/lyric poetry, 16, 19, 119, 123, 124, 193–94 MacNeice, Louis, 36, 64–66; “Cushenden,” 77; Modern Poetry, 65; The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, 35–37, 48, 65; “Poetry To-day,” 64 MacSweeney, Barry, 149 Majorca, 53 Mangan, James Clarence, 168, 173–79, 179–80n3 marginality, 168, 173–79, 180n12 Martianism, 27n51 Marx, Karl, 85 mass media, 71n2, 77–78 Massinger, Philip, 173 Matthiessen, F. O., 38 McDonald, Gail, 31 McKercher, B. J. C., 4 Meisel, Peter, 33 Melville, Herman, 173, 174 Mendelson, Edward, 12 Merrill, James, 17 222 : : : Index

meter, 122 Millier, Brett C., 115 Mitchell, John, 175 mnemonics, 123 modernism: American character of, 18, 31, 50n23, 53–60, 65, 70–71, 118–33, 134n2, 149; Anglo-American canons, 6–8; characteristics of, 183–85; decline of, 67–71; development of, 61–67; and expressions of love, 101–106; influence on Bishop, 106; language of, 33; literary context, 57–61; lyric style in, 193; MacNeice on, 64–66; nationalistic phase, 76, 79, 84–86, 133; and Oxford University, 61–64; Yeats’s place in, 40, 49n5. See also geopolitical contexts; poetry “modernist” writing, 43–44, 57–59, 63–65, 68, 72n12, 72n13 Moore, Marianne, 99, 104–105, 108; “Roses Only,” 104–105; “The SteepleJack,” 104–105 Moore, Thomas, 174 Morrison, Blake, 7 Morrison, Paul, 48 Mottram, Eric, 149, 150n19 Movement, 15, 16, 18, 27n51, 119, 134n4 Muldoon, Paul, 17 Murray, John Middleton, 58 mythology, 92–93 Nashville Prize, 60 nationalism/national identity, 76, 79, 84–86, 93–94, 133, 177–79. See also geopolitical contexts Neal, John (a.k.a. Carter Holmes), 2 Neuberg, Victor, 73n28 New American poets, 9, 121 New Criticism/New Critical poets, 15, 35, 120, 126 New Formalist poets, 17 New Generation, 27n51 New Historicism, 8 New Poets of America (Hall, Pack, and Simpson), 4–5, 9, 23n17

New York City/New York School, 15, 20, 78–79, 142, 144–45, 149 Nicholls, Peter, 31, 172 Nicolson, Harold, 83, 96n34 nihilism, 152 noncanonical poets, 179–80n3 Norton poetry anthologies, 26n45 O’Casey, Sean, 169 O’Hara, Frank, 145, 186, 187 Olds, Sharon, 16 Olson, Charles, 171 Orwell, George, 7, 83 Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Yeats), 18, 36–38, 44–45, 49 Oxford Poetry (magazine), 61 Oxford University, 61–64 painting and poetry, 145–49 pastoralism, 5–6 Perloff, Marjorie, 17 Picasso, 107 plain-style lyric poetry, 119, 123, 124 Plath, Sylvia, 15 Poe, Edgar Allan, 2 poetic devices: bicameral structures, 187–88; mnemonics, 123; page design, 130–31, 141, 175, 176; songs and ballads, 109–10, 119; sound, 169–70, 171, 180n6 poetic genres: allegory, 185; autobiographical, 172, 192–93; confessional, 16, 17, 116, 121, 126, 190–91; elegy, 76; generational, 155–58, 165; landscape, 112–14, 137–48, 185 poetic styles: of Allen Tate, 119, 126, 127, 134n2; and art, 43–44, 65, 72n12, 72n13, 140, 142–49; of Auden, 80, 110; of Bishop, 106, 110, 114; boustrophedon, 155, 166; collage writing, 140, 142, 144, 148–49; derivative writing, 152, 158; dream imagery, 110; experimental writing, 9–10, 11; of Ford, 188, 193; form/formalism, 16, 43–44, 46, 122, 128–29; free verse, 59, 116, 122, 129–32, 134–35n12, 136n32; of Gunn, 120–21,

125–26, 132–33, 134–35n12, 136n38; of Harwood, 140–49; iambic pentameter, 132; Imagism/Symbolism, 32–33, 44, 59, 64; of Lowell, 155, 166; lyricism/lyric poetry, 16, 19, 119, 123, 124, 193–94; prose poems, 17, 135–36n28; rhyming styles, 114, 125–26; sonnets/sonnet style, 167n21, 188; West Coast Language writing, 12, 28n69 poetry: avant-garde, 9–10, 16, 49n5; commercialization of, 8, 54–56, 70–71; connection with art forms, 145–49; cosmopolitan character of, 76; culture poetry, 7; future of, 59; historical contexts, 76–80, 129–30, 168–75, 171, 180n5; inclusionary character of, 123–24; the Movement, 15, 16, 18, 27n51, 119, 134n4; noncanonical, 179–80n3; prejudicial contexts, 81–84; as prophecy, 100; as public language, 76–78, 90–94, 100; Puritan influences on, 2; rational/irrational voices in, 90–94; role of tradition and form, 16, 39–40, 43–44, 122–23, 128–29; Yeats on, 43–44, 46, 156. See also geopolitical contexts; modernism poets: Beat, 15, 28n69, 56; Deep Image, 15, 16, 28n69; diaspora of, 12, 23n20, 31; as expatriates, 18–19, 27n55, 67–71, 96n34; New American, 9, 121; New Critical, 15, 35, 120, 126; New Formalist, 17; New York School, 15, 20, 78–79, 142, 144–45, 149; noncanonical, 179–80n3; postromantic, 165; roles of, 114, 116, 128–29; Southern Agrarian, 125; World War I, 128 Polk, James, 3 pop culture, 118, 194 post-Impressionism, 64 postmodernism, 58, 90, 190. See also modernism Pound, Ezra: Donald Davie on, 8; Hill on, 131; on London, 84; and modernism, 57, 58, 183; on poetry, 31, 161–62; Pound-Yeats relationship, 32, 41–49, Index : : : 223

Pound, Ezra (continued) 50n16; on professionalism, 26n40; on Synge, 41. Works cited: A Draft of Thirty Cantos, 36, 45, 46–47; Pisan Cantos, 46–48; “The Return,” 41 Presley, Elvis, 118 professionalism, 8, 26n40 prose poems, 17, 135–36n28 Pulitzer Prize, 17 Quartermain, Peter, 27n54 Quinn, John, 34 radio, 77–78 Rainey, Laurence, 49n5 Ramazani, Jahan, 92–93 Ransom, John Crowe, 58–59, 74n39 rational/irrational voices in poetry, 90–94 Rexroth, Kenneth, 28n69 Rhymers’ Club, 41 rhyming styles, 114, 125–26 Rhythm (magazine), 58 Rich, Adrienne, 167n21 Ricks, Christopher, 133, 151 Riding, Laura: Nashville Prize, 60; and Robert Graves, 18, 57–71, 73n24; A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 57 RKO Building, 78 Rockefeller Center, 78 romanticism/neoromanticism/ postromanticism, 28n69, 120, 165 Rosenthal, M. L., 17 Ross, Andrew, 8 Russell, George, 32 Schuyler, James, 9, 145 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 173 Sheppard, Richard, 33 Sherry, Vincent, 126, 130–31, 135n16 Silkin, Jon, 133 Sitwell, Edith, 63 Smith, Gregory, 39 Smith, Sidney, 2

224 : : : Index

social protest poetry, 106–14, 132, 162, 174–75 sonnets/style, 167n21, 188 sound: as poetic device, 169–70, 171, 180n6 sovereignty and poetry, 1, 7–8, 14–15, 29n76, 31–32, 39. See also geopolitical contexts Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 155–56 Spain/Spanish poetry, 16 Spanish-American War, 4 Spender, Stephen, 58, 63–64, 68–69 Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queen, 172 Starbuck, George, 98 Stead, C. K., 32–33 Stein, Gertrude, 63 Stevens, Wallace, 14, 98, 99 Surrealism, 16, 64, 148 Survey of Modernist Poetry (Graves and Riding), 57–58, 59 Swift, Jonathan, 168, 172–73 Symbolism, 32–33 Synge, J. M., 41 Tate, Allen: on Eliot, 59; and Hart Crane, 127; influence on Hill, 118–20, 126–33; influence on Lowell, 154, 167n14; on Lowell, 16; on modernism, 58–59; poetic style, 119, 126, 127, 134n2; on Riding, 60–61; on Yeats, 35. Works cited: “The Man of Letters in the Modern World,” 128; “Narcissus as Narcissus,” 127, 129; “Ode to Our Young Pro-Consuls of the Air,” 130; “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” 19, 127–28, 140; “Of Commerce and Society,” 128–29 Tate, James, 190 Taylor, Charles, 165 Taylor, Edward, 2 television, 71n2 Thomas, Dylan, 64, 73n28 Thomas, Edward, 5, 23n20 Thoreau, Henry David, 154, 167n15 Trow, George W. S., 156, 167n16

Tuma, Keith, 9–10, 14, 23n22, 25n33, 26n45 Tzara, Tristan, 141, 142

World War II, 65, 75, 77–78, 79, 81 WPA Federal Art Project, 145

Vendler, Helen, 34, 123–24, 151, 153 Voltaire, 82

Yale Younger Poets Award, 10 Yeats, W. B., 18, 30–49; on American poetry, 39; American response to, 35–38; Auden elegy on, 4; cultural context, 36, 38, 40, 42–43, 49n5, 179–80n3; and Eliot, 39–40, 44–45; on poetry, 43–44, 46, 156; Pound-Yeats relationship, 41–49, 50n16; role of tradition and form in poetry, 39–40, 43–44. Works cited: The Cutting of an Agate, 39–40; “Lapis Lazuli,” 18, 42–44; “The Municipal Gallery Revisited,” 48; Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 18, 36–37, 41, 44, 49; A Packet for Ezra Pound, 45–46; “A Prayer for Old Age,” 49; The Rose, 179–80n3; A Vision, 35, 46 youth culture, 165

Wain, John, 13, 53–57, 68; “A Package Deal,” 53–57; “A Song about Major Eatherly,” 56–57 Ward, A. C., 67–68 Waugh, Evelyn, 81 West Coast Language writing, 12, 28n69 Whitman, Walt, 57; Leaves of Grass, 2–4, 152; “Song of Myself,” 3 Williams, Oscar: Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, 126–27 Williams, William Carlos, 14, 123, 124, 127 Wilmer, Clive, 121, 123 Wilson, Edmund, 35 Winters, Yvor, 118–26; “To a Young Writer,” 120 Woolf, Virginia, 63, 80 Wordsworth, William, 92, 100, 192

Zabel, Morton: on Yeats, 38 Zeus, 92–93

Index : : : 225