CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Also by Michael Schmidt
Praise
Dedication
Title Page
Preface
Introduction
THOMAS HARDY (1840–1928)
The Darkling Thrush
Thoughts of Phena
“I look into my glass”
Drummer Hodge
A Broken Appointment
In Tenebris (I)
The Man He Killed
Channel Firing
The Convergence of the Twain
The Going
The Voice
His Visitor
After a Journey
Places
The Voice of Things
Heredity
The Oxen
During Wind and Rain
In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”
Afterwards
A. E. HOUSMAN (1859–1936)
Reveille
“Farewell to barn and stack and tree”
“When I watch the living meet”
“On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble”
“Into my heart an air that kills”
“Crossing alone the nighted ferry”
“Here dead we lie because we did not choose”
RUDYARD KIPLING (1865–1936)
The Dykes
The Broken Men
Mesopotamia
from Epitaphs of the War 1914–18
A Servant
Ex-Clerk
The Coward
Common Form
Journalists
Mandalay
The Way through the Woods
Harp Song of the Dane Women
W. B. YEATS (1865–1939)
No Second Troy
The Coming of Wisdom with Time
September 1913
The Magi
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
The Cat and the Moon
Easter 1916
The Second Coming
Sailing to Byzantium
Leda and the Swan
Among School Children
Byzantium
An Acre of Grass
The Circus Animals’ Desertion
CHARLOTTE MEW (1869–1928)
Fame
The Quiet House
Not For That City
Rooms
ROBERT FROST (1874–1963)
Mowing
Mending Wall
The Road Not Taken
Birches
“Out, Out –”
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Acquainted with the Night
Desert Places
Provide, Provide
The Gift Outright
EDWARD THOMAS (1878–1917)
Swedes
As the Team’s Head-Brass
The Glory
Adlestrop
October
Rain
Lights Out
“I never saw that land before”
Old Man
Roads
WALLACE STEVENS (1879–1955)
The Snow Man
Sunday Morning
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
The Idea of Order at Key West
The Sun This March
Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
MINA LOY (1882–1966)
Der Blinde Junge
Brancusi’s Golden Bird
On Third Avenue
Jules Pascin
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883–1963)
Portrait of a Lady
To the Shade of Po Chü-i
“so much depends”
Brilliant Sad Sun
Question and Answer
Poem
Nantucket
This Is Just to Say
The New Clouds
The Dance
Paterson, Book V: The River of Heaven
The Yellow Flower
D. H. LAWRENCE (1885–1930)
Discord in Childhood
Piano
Green
Song of a Man Who Has Come Through
Snake
Bavarian Gentians
EZRA POUND (1885–1972)
The Tree
Speech for Psyche in the Golden Book of Apuleius
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Canto XXX
Canto XLV
Canto LXXXI
HILDA DOOLITTLE (H. D.) (1886–1961)
Evening
The Pool
Hippolytus Temporizes
from The Walls Do Not Fall
from The Flowering of the Rod
ROBINSON JEFFERS (1887–1962)
Shine, Perishing Republic
An Artist
Hurt Hawks
Return
The Stars Go Over the Lonely Ocean
MARIANNE MOORE (1887–1972)
The Steeple-Jack
Poetry
Silence
What Are Years?
The Paper Nautilus
Nevertheless
EDWIN MUIR (1887–1959)
Ballad of Hector in Hades
Troy
The Myth
The Late Wasp
JOHN CROWE RANSOM (1888–1974)
Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter
Piazza Piece
Vision by Sweetwater
Dead Boy
T. S. ELIOT (1888–1965)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
La Figlia che Piange
Sweeney Among the Nightingales
from The Waste Land
from Four Quartets: Burnt Norton
IVOR GURNEY (1890–1937)
Bach and the Sentry
Song
After War
The Silent One
Behind the Line
Old Dreams
The Not-Returning
The Mangel-Bury
ISAAC ROSENBERG (1890–1918)
Chagrin
On Receiving News of the War
August 1914
Break of Day in the Trenches
Returning, We Hear the Larks
Dead Man’s Dump
HUGH MACDIARMID (1892–1978)
The Bonnie Broukit Bairn
The Watergaw
The Innumerable Christ
At My Father’s Grave
Of John Davidson
Light and Shadow
Poetry and Science
Crystals Like Blood
EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY (1892–1950)
“Time does not bring relief; you all have lied”
Passer Mortuus Est
Inland
Wild Swans
“I being born a woman and distressed”
On the Wide Heath
WILFRED OWEN (1893–1918)
The Parable of the Old Men and the Young
The Send-Off
Dulce et Decorum Est
Futility
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Hospital Barge at Cérisy
Strange Meeting
E. E. CUMMINGS (1894–1962)
“in Just-”
“what if a much of a which of a wind”
“a wind has blown the rain away and blown”
Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr Vinal
“pity this busy monster, manunkind”
ROBERT GRAVES (1895–1985)
The Cool Web
Sick Love
In Broken Images
Warning to Children
On Portents
Down, Wanton, Down!
Nobody
The Cloak
Recalling War
To Evoke Posterity
To Juan at the Winter Solstice
The White Goddess
Counting the Beats
DAVID JONES (1895–1974)
A, a, a, Domine Deus
from The Anathemata: Angle-Land
HART CRANE (1899–1932)
Forgetfulness
Sunday Morning Apples
Repose of Rivers
At Melville’s Tomb
To Brooklyn Bridge
To the Cloud Juggler
BASIL BUNTING (1900–85)
from Briggflatts
Ode 17: To Mina Loy
Ode 37: On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos
“A thrush in the syringa sings”
YVOR WINTERS (1900–68)
The Realization
The Slow Pacific Swell
On a View of Pasadena from the Hills
Time and the Garden
LAURA RIDING [LAURA (RIDING) JACKSON] (1901–91)
A City Seems
The Mask
One Self
The Troubles of a Book
The World and I
Poet: A Lying Word
Divestment of Beauty
The Reasons of Each
LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–67)
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
The Weary Blues
Cross
Old Walt
I, Too
STEVIE SMITH (1902–71)
Dirge
Not Waving but Drowning
The Jungle Husband
Tenuous and Precarious
A House of Mercy
The Donkey
LORINE NIEDECKER (1903–70)
Poet’s Work
Thomas Jefferson
PATRICK KAVANAGH (1905–67)
Shancoduff
Stony Grey Soil
The Long Garden
Memory of Brother Michael
Epic
Come Dance with Kitty Stobling
JOHN BETJEMAN (1906–84)
Slough
City
A Shropshire Lad
In Westminster Abbey
Before the Anaesthetic or A Real Fright
WILLIAM EMPSON (1906–84)
Rolling the Lawn
Villanelle
Legal Fiction
This Last Pain
Missing Dates
The Teasers
Let It Go
W. H. AUDEN (1907–73)
The Wanderer
Paysage Moralisé
Our Hunting Fathers
On This Island
Lullaby
September 1, 1939
If I Could Tell You
In Praise of Limestone
A New Year Greeting
A. D. HOPE (b. 1907)
The Wandering Islands
Imperial Adam
On an Engraving by Casserius
LOUIS MACNEICE (1907–63)
Snow
The Sunlight on the Garden
Bagpipe Music
Evening in Connecticut
Prayer Before Birth
House on a Cliff
Selva Oscura
E. J. SCOVELL (1907–99)
Past Time
The Ghosts
Shadows of Chrysanthemums
The River Steamer
The Sandy Yard
Listening to Collared Doves
Water Images
THEODORE ROETHKE (1908–63)
The Premonition
Mid-Country Blow
Root Cellar
Orchids
Big Wind
All the Earth, All the Air
Otto
GEORGE OPPEN (1908–84)
“No interval of manner”
Product
Psalm
Penobscot
Confession
STEPHEN SPENDER (1909–95)
“My parents kept me from children who were rough”
“What I expected, was”
“I think continually of those who were truly great”
NORMAN MACCAIG (1910–96)
Climbing Suilven
Feeding Ducks
No Consolation
Crossing the Border
So Many Summers
Toad
CHARLES OLSON (1910–70)
The Kingfishers
At Yorktown
The Moon Is the Number 18
ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911–79)
The Fish
Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance
The Shampoo
Questions of Travel
First Death in Nova Scotia
One Art
ALLEN CURNOW (b. 1911)
Country School
This Beach Can Be Dangerous
You Get What You Pay For
On the Road to Erewhon
Continuum
Pacific 1945–1995
SORLEY MACLEAN (1911–96)
Am Buaireadh
The Turmoil
Ban-Ghàidheal
A Highland Woman
Ceann Loch Aoineart
Kinloch Ainort
Hallaig
F. T. PRINCE (b. 1912)
An Epistle to a Patron
False Bay
For Fugitives
Cœur de Lion
R. S. THOMAS (b. 1913)
Song for Gwydion
The Village
Taliesin 1952
In a Country Church
Period
Pavane
Navigation
Evening
GEORGE BARKER (1913–91)
Summer Song I
“Turn on your side and bear the day to me”
Morning in Norfolk
To Whom Else
JOHN BERRYMAN (1914–72)
Winter Landscape
Scholars at the Orchid Pavilion
He Resigns
Dream Song 4
Dream Song 8
Dream Song 14
Dream Song 26
Dream Song 29
Dream Song 61
Dream Song 255
HENRY REED (1914–86)
A Map of Verona
The Door and the Window
Philoctetes
RANDALL JARRELL (1914–65)
The Island
The Märchen
90 North
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Next Day
C. H. SISSON (b. 1914)
The Un-Red Deer
A Letter to John Donne
The Person
The Usk
The Herb-Garden
The Red Admiral
In Flood
Tristia
DYLAN THOMAS (1914–53)
The Hand that Signed the Paper
“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
Fern Hill
“Do not go gentle into that good night”
JUDITH WRIGHT (b. 1915)
At Cooloolah
Australia 1970
Lament for Passenger Pigeons
from Notes at Edge: Brevity
from The Shadow of Fire: Ghazals
ROBERT LOWELL (1917–77)
Mr Edwards and the Spider
Skunk Hour
The Flaw
Night Sweat
For the Union Dead
Waking Early Sunday Morning
Epilogue
W. S. GRAHAM (1918–86)
The Thermal Stair
Imagine a Forest
Johann Joachim Quantz’s Five Lessons
ROBERT DUNCAN (1919–88)
“Among my friends love is a great sorrow”
Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
Bending the Bow
The Torso (Passages 18)
The Sentinels
KEITH DOUGLAS (1920–44)
The Prisoner
Egypt
Cairo Jag
Vergissmeinicht
How to Kill
Desert Flowers
GWEN HARWOOD (1920–95)
Carnal Knowledge II
Andante
Bone Scan
Cups
Long After Heine
EDWIN MORGAN (b. 1920)
Siesta of a Hungarian Snake
A View of Things
Columba’s Song
Itinerary
Cinquevalli
Sir James Murray
The Glass
RICHARD WILBUR (b. 1921)
Parable
Someone Talking to Himself
Advice to a Prophet
Leaving
Hamlen Brook
DONALD DAVIE (1922–95)
Remembering the ’Thirties
Time Passing, Beloved
Rodez
Epistle. To Enrique Caracciolo Trejo
The Fountain of Cyanë
Their Rectitude Their Beauty
PHILIP LARKIN (1922–85)
At Grass
Deceptions
Next, Please
I Remember, I Remember
Church Going
MCMXIV
High Windows
The Trees
The Old Fools
PATRICIA BEER (1919–99)
The Flood
Middle Age
John Milton and My Father
Ninny’s Tomb
Ballad of the Underpass
Millennium
JAMES K. BAXTER (1926–72)
The Bay
Morning and Evening Calm
Lazarus
Thief and Samaritan
The Buried Stream
from Jerusalem Sonnets
ALLEN GINSBERG (1926–98)
Howl
Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters
ELIZABETH JENNINGS (b. 1926)
Song for a Birth or a Death
My Grandmother
The Resurrection
After a Time
Christ Seen by Flemish Painters
The Child’s Story
JAMES MERRILL (1926–95)
Swimming by Night
David’s Night in Veliès
Clearing the Title
CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON (b. 1926)
Anasphere: Le torse antique
Saloon with Birds
FRANK O’HARA (1926–66)
Animals
Aus Einem April
In Memory of My Feelings
Ave Maria
JOHN ASHBERY (b. 1927)
“How much longer will I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher”
For John Clare
Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape
Pyrography
What is Poetry
At North Farm
Forgotten Song
Hotel Lautréamont
CHARLES TOMLINSON (b. 1927)
More Foreign Cities
Prometheus
Against Extremity
After a Death
For Danton
Weather Report
THOMAS KINSELLA (b. 1928)
Soft, to Your Places
Another September
The Laundress
Downstream
Brotherhood
Talent and Friendship
A Portrait of the Artist
BURNS SINGER (1928–64)
Still and All
Your Words, My Answers
Corner Boy’s Farewell
IAIN CRICHTON SMITH (1928–98)
Old Woman
from Deer on the High Hills (I–VI)
The Exiles
Listen
THOM GUNN (b. 1929)
Tamer and Hawk
The Allegory of the Wolf Boy
In Santa Maria del Popolo
Touch
The Idea of Trust
The Hug
The Man with Night Sweats
ADRIENNE RICH (b. 1929)
“I Am in Danger – Sir –”
The Burning of Paper Instead of Children
Diving into the Wreck
Splittings
Delta
Amends
Late Ghazal
KAMAU BRATHWAITE (b. 1930)
The Journeys
Calypso
Caliban
ELAINE FEINSTEIN (b. 1930)
At Seven a Son
Mother Love
The Magic Apple Tree
Bathroom
Getting Older
Lazarus’ Sister
Prayer
ROY FISHER (b. 1930)
Toyland
As He Came Near Death
The Thing About Joe Sullivan
The Least
Occasional Poem 7.1.72
The Supposed Dancer
TED HUGHES (1930–98)
Wind
Snowdrop
Her Husband
Full Moon and Little Frieda
Wodwo
Crow and the Birds
Crow’s Last Stand
Bones
That Morning
DEREK WALCOTT (b. 1930)
The Schooner Flight
GEOFFREY HILL (b. 1932)
Genesis
Ovid in the Third Reich
September Song
The Pentecost Castle
Tenebrae
SYLVIA PLATH (1932–63)
Soliloquy of the Solipsist
The Manor Garden
Morning Song
The Bee Meeting
Lady Lazarus
PETER SCUPHAM (b. 1933)
The Nondescript
Birthday Triptych
Pompeii: Plaster Casts
The Beach
After Ovid, Tristia
The Key
Service
R. F. LANGLEY (b. 1936)
Mariana
Jack’s Pigeon
GILLIAN CLARKE (b. 1937)
St Thomas’s Day
Les Grottes
Border
Overheard in County Sligo
Lament
TONY HARRISON (b. 1937)
Heredity
On Not being Milton
National Trust
Timer
Art and Extinction
LES MURRAY (b. 1938)
An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow
The Broad Bean Sermon
The Quality of Sprawl
Satis Passio
It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen
Burning Want
The Last Hellos
SEAMUS HEANEY (b. 1939)
The Peninsula
Anahorish
Westering
Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication
The Guttural Muse
The Harvest Bow
The Haw Lantern
from Seeing Things
ROBERT PINSKY (b. 1940)
Braveries
Shirt
From the Childhood of Jesus
DEREK MAHON (b. 1941)
Consolations of Philosophy
The Snow Party
A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford
Going Home
The Hunt by Night
JOHN PECK (b. 1941)
“Vega over the rim of the Val Verzasca”
Anti-dithyrambics
Campagna
End of July
Archeus Terrae
Monologue of the Magdalene
From the Viking Museum
LOUISE GLÜCK (b. 1943)
The Edge
Firstborn
The Magi
Nativity Poem
The Letters
Illuminations
Happiness
Hawk’s Shadow
Lamium
Vespers
MICHAEL PALMER (b. 1943)
from Series
Ninth Symmetrical Poem
Seven Forbidden Words
The Theory of the Flower
Autobiography 2 (hellogoodby)
EAVAN BOLAND (b. 1944)
The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me
The Achill Woman
What We Lost
Distances
That the Science of Cartography is Limited
Love
The Huguenot Graveyard at the Heart of the City
Story
DAVID CONSTANTINE (b. 1944)
“You are distant, you are already leaving”
Watching for Dolphins
Lasithi
“He arrived, towing a crowd, and slept”
JEFFREY WAINWRIGHT (b. 1944)
Thomas Müntzer
The Apparent Colonnades
WENDY COPE (b. 1945)
Waste Land Limericks
On Finding an Old Photograph
Rondeau Redoublé
Bloody Men
I Worry
BILL MANHIRE (b. 1946)
On Originality
The Distance Between Bodies
Brazil
VERONICA FORREST-THOMSON (1947–75)
Michaelmas
Phrase-Book
Pfarr-Schmerz (Village-Anguish)
Sonnet
JOHN ASH (b. 1948)
Them/There
Poor Boy: Portrait of a Painting
Ferns and the Night
Desert Song
Following a Man
JAMES FENTON (b. 1949)
A German Requiem
The Skip
The Possibility
Jerusalem
JORIE GRAHAM (b. 1951)
Tennessee June
History
The Region of Unlikeness
The Surface
PAUL MULDOON (b. 1951)
The Electric Orchard
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Mules
Gathering Mushrooms
Long Finish
MARK DOTY (b. 1952)
The Ware Collection of Glass Flowers and Fruit, Harvard Museum
A Letter from the Coast
Homo Will Not Inherit
Aubade: Opal and Silver
ANDREW MOTION (b. 1952)
Anne Frank Huis
One Life
Close
Reading the Elephant
ROBERT MINHINNICK (b. 1952)
Twenty-Five Laments for Iraq
CAROL ANN DUFFY (b. 1955)
Foreign
Girlfriends
Small Female Skull
The Grammar of Light
Prayer
SUJATA BHATT (b. 1956)
Muliebrity
A Different History
Understanding the Ramayana
White Asparagus
The Stinking Rose
MICHAEL HOFMANN (b. 1957)
By Forced Marches
Eclogue
Pastorale
Postcard from Cuernavaca
GWYNETH LEWIS (b. 1959)
Six Poems on Nothing
Herod’s Palace
Walking with the God
GLYN MAXWELL (b. 1962)
Mild Citizen
Poisonfield
SIMON ARMITAGE (b. 1963)
Zoom!
Poem
Robinson’s Resignation
Becoming of Age
SOPHIE HANNAH (b. 1971)
The Good Loser
My Enemies
Two Hundred and Sixty-Five Words
The Norbert Dentressangle Van
Acknowledgements
Index of Poets
Index of Titles and First Lines
Copyright
About the Author
MICHAEL SCHMIDT is a poet, critic, and translator. He edits the leading poetry journal PN Review, is the editorial director of the Carcanet Press and director of the Writing Programme at Manchester Metropolitan University. He was born in Mexico in 1947, and educated at Harvard and Oxford. His Lives of the Poets, a survey of English poetry from the fourteenth century to the present day, “distinguished him as among the most vigilant of critics” (The Times).
Also by Michael Schmidt
LIVES OF THE POETS
“It is hard to see who could have done the job better than Schmidt”
ROGER CALDWELL, Times Literary Supplement
“The selections from the greats are generous and well chosen”
PETER FORBES, Guardian
“Readers who delight in the sheer diversity of 20th-century poetry in English are richly catered for”
STEPHEN LOGAN, Spectator
“In a poetry scene which sometimes seems so anxious to be pluralist and inclusive that it loses sight of true quality, the Harvill anthology is a salutary reminder of the radical and experimental energies of the mould-breakers of 20th-century poetry”
HARRY EYRES, Express
“A satisfying selection that reminds us that Lawrence didn’t just write about animals, Betjeman wasn’t always jolly and Plath is more interesting for her collapsed perspectives than her self-exposure”
LAVINIA GREENLAW, New Statesman
“A useful and judicious selection, a good present for interested sixth-formers prepared to delve more deeply on their own”
GREY GOWRIE, Daily Telegraph
“Schmidt gives us a chance to settle down with poets we wish we had known better”
TOM PAYNE, Daily Telegraph
“There is no such thing as ‘poetry’ in the abstract, only the individual poems that make it up. Some poems are good; some are not. Michael Schmidt’s anthology is most valuable in reminding us of these truths – apart, that is, from putting so many good poems in front of us”
LACHLAN MACKINNON, Independent
for Joan McAllister with love
PREFACE
Thom Gunn is one of the most conservative and at the same time one of the most radical British poets of his generation. He has made himself at home on the American West Coast, with its disparate cultures and languages, without losing his original bearings. He argues for a “spectrum” approach to modern American poetry. There can be spectrums of colour, of sound – and of language. Although remote from one another in conception and intent, the experimentalism of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, and the inventive traditionalism of the old and new formalists, share a medium. It has rules that one can observe or break, rhythms one can regularise or disrupt. Gunn’s “spectrum” approach acknowledges this diversity, yet also this inescapable commonality of resource. It can apply beyond America, to all English-language poetries.
This alert tolerance is of value to anyone trying to make sense of modern poetry. It insists not on plurality but continuity, it suggests a republic of poetry rather than an irreconcilable anarchy of factions or a severe state of canonical closures. Factions inevitably come about when poets are finding their feet in a difficult “culture of reception”. Such factions are points of redefinition, but the critical factions that sometimes grow up in their wake can prove reductive and impoverishing.
Gunn’s approach has little to do with subject-matter, ideology, ethnicity or gender, and everything to do with the development of poetic language and form, the extension of the realm of the expressible, and the way poets depend on one another and upon the poets of the past. It proposes definable points of departure, whatever the variety of destination.
The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English takes as its province a whole century and the whole of the English-speaking world. It features work by over a hundred writers. In general it presents poems which, however rooted in a locality and a particular “speech”, survive the crossing of decades, seas and continents.
The century provides no coherent pattern. Its contradictory beginnings are with the poems of Thomas Hardy and Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot (initial poets in two senses), Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. It can be a pitiless and forgetful age, abandoning important writers like H. D., Isaac Rosenberg, Charlotte Mew, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Basil Bunting, Laura Riding, Sorley MacLean, and only later trying to make amends. It piously honours, say, Carl Sandburg and Cecil Day-Lewis, Rupert Brooke and Edith Sitwell, but at last dumps them at the roadside, alongside substantial figures like Edwin Muir and George Barker.
Such seeming fickleness is inevitable: poets never know when their hour will come. George Herbert and John Donne were dusted down after long neglect in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively; Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins are – ironically – twentieth-century phenomena. What crowded them out was a fashion that did not relish their difficult originality, any more than the eighteenth century could properly value Christopher Smart or Thomas Chatterton.
Of the many younger poets who have a claim to be included in a book of this kind, I can only say that their century will be the twenty-first, their best work (one hopes) is yet to come. Every anthology proposes a canon and the canonisation of the young can be damaging. It damaged W. H. Auden and has damaged others. Had a book like this been published in 1899 featuring the work of Hardy, Kipling and Yeats, it would have done itself and them no service.
Hardy comes first in this anthology: where else does the century’s poetry start if not with his paradoxically unmelancholy thrush? And how better to end than with a poem which, a hundred years on, celebrates and parodies the forms and tones of that resourceful piece? Sophie Hannah is in no danger of being canonised in this book: the twenty-first will certainly be her century. But she has written at my request a new poem, “The Norbert Dentressangle Van”, to show how the formal resources that Hardy possessed survive, but also illustrating how Modernist elements inform and extend them, so that they can deal with new subject matter, the new velocities, joys and sorrows of a different fin de siècle. The Thrush and the Van are, equally, harbingers.
I am grateful to Christopher MacLehose for entertaining this unlikely project, to Ian Pindar for readying the book for press and tackling editorial and technical challenges with skilful equanimity, and to Harvill tout court. I am much indebted to Penny Jones who helped me assemble the text, and to my Carcanet colleagues Pamela Heaton, Joyce Nield, Chris Gribble and Gaynor Hodgson. The incomparable Dennis Enright may have sown a seed of this book years ago with his Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945–80, and I was introduced to many of these poems by Peter Jones, with whom I set up Carcanet Press in 1969.
INTRODUCTION
Modernism in its various forms is the defining movement of the twentieth century: a call-to-arms, to make it new. Modernism – but also reactions to it. In order to appreciate what “new” means in modern poetry, we should briefly sketch in the context of the old, not forgetting that poets have been “making it new” in one way or another from the very beginning. After all, Modernist renewal did not happen ex nihilo: it involved finding energies and resources from the past and from alien cultures. Ezra Pound, who loudly voiced the call-to-arms, later declared: “If we never write anything save what is already understood, the field of understanding will never be extended. One demands the right, now and again, to write for a few people with special interests and whose curiosity reaches into greater detail.” If it works, in following generations those “few people” will become the many – perhaps, for a time …
On the day that Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years’ hard labour in 1895, Richard Garnett, editor of the British Museum Catalogue, predicted that British poetry would be dead for fifty years. Respectability and real poetry – poetry that makes a difference to the language, to tradition and to the reader – are seldom comfortable bedfellows. Poetry in Britain was doomed to be what it had already largely become, a minor art: the Rhymers and then the Georgians, with only Hardy and Kipling to suggest that it might be something more. (Yeats gave quality time to the experimentalists, but he had declared himself Irish.)
As the century progressed, poets in English got busy doing all sorts of things they had never done before. At the same time, many of them were busy forgetting things their predecessors had done incomparably well. The century’s poetic revolutions begin in polemical experiment and end in polemic plain and simple. Imagism is first a discipline and then a repetitive school; New Formalism an articulate reaction and then a prescriptive orthodoxy. Those young poets who stand aside from revolution maintain a wary distance: they group together for the treacherous journey to Parnassus, draw their wagons round in a circle at night and guard the perimeters. But the scouts – who are often the best poets – move off ahead of the wagon train, sometimes out of sight.
The century’s poetry is not set characteristically in the big outdoors of Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, or even the literary outdoors of A. E. Housman, populated by common men and women. If there is a landscape, it is often unpeopled. Then there is the thronging city – the real city of Roy Fisher and Frank O’Hara, the unreal city of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and H. D.’s Trilogy and the surreal city of Hart Crane and John Ashbery. Modernism, cosmopolitan in its origins, remains metropolitan in its aftermaths.
Also common is a poetry concerned with itself, poetry about poetry, and poetry that is so wedded to the paradoxes of its medium that it stops in language. The decadent, experimental legacy of the last fin de siècle, “Art for Art’s sake” (deflected by the Wilde affair and the philistinism it licensed) eventually re-emerged, without the taint of decadence. It came back with larger philosophical and political pretensions. Yeats made no bones about it: poetry was not primarily a civic activity. Art can initiate a process of understanding only by understanding itself. This can involve singling out one or two resources or techniques (metre, syntax, metaphor, image) and foregrounding them, experimenting. Among the fin de siècle artists, Swinburne (whose legacy is still underestimated) was obsessed with the properties of metre and rhythm. He is as Modern as the early Modernists. Poets were not alone, however, in feeling the need to reinvent their medium. Aubrey Beardsley was fascinated with line, and not only with line but with line on varied textures of paper. He never allows the viewer to forget the mediums employed, even while an image struggles in its louche web of ink. Henry James perfected an increasingly nuanced syntax, each extension reaching into deeper crannies of character and motive, where action declines into a patient catalepsy before such discriminating exactness.
Experimental poetry was not intended to foreground the poet, but because they exaggerated some elements and excluded others, and contrived to reveal the contrivance, they became objects of curiosity. After the Modernist revolution, experiments were received by consumers (the age of the consumer arrived with the decline of literary journalism) without new understanding: less “What is being done?” than “What sort of crackpot is doing it?” (Among those “crackpots” were a number of Americans.) Journalistic opprobrium gave radical new work a kind of notoriety, but the poet was denied that initial (Coleridgean) critical courtesy, which inquires after intention, appraises the work’s success within the terms it proposes, and then appraises the validity of the intention. The new work didn’t sell. While in the century’s teens, Georgian anthologies sold in their tens of thousands, Imagist anthologies sold in their dozens. In The New Poetic, C. K. Stead demonstrates how criticism sometimes tried not to extend but to limit understanding: the word “no” replaced “how” and “why”. What the poet meant literally was interpreted in outdated ways. The weird lyric narratives of Hardy, Frost and Eliot were taken up in the same spirit as the narratives of Crabbe or Wordsworth and found morally obnoxious – or ambiguous – and put down again. Was not the inspiration for such things often foreign, in particular American, or French? And those “schools”: Imagists, Vorticists and the rest of them, with their Bohemian lives – Bohemian, a deplorable middle-European model, generally imported via Paris? Was there not rather too much of the love that dares not speak its name in those circles, too little respect for the hierarchy and mechanisms of transmission and appraisal? When Edward Thomas had the temerity to praise Pound’s early work, he was dragged over the coals by Gordon Bottomley and others who controlled the economy of literary journalism. A free-minded critic could face unemployment if he bet on the long shot.
Established critics, some of them astute and eloquent men (all of them men) missed the jokes and misunderstood the radical investigations that were under way. For them art and morality were indissoluble, and poetry for poetry’s sake was irresponsible. The unconventional was per se unpalatable. Change and renewal had to insinuate themselves subtly, quietly, minutely, from unexpected places and undefended flanks. A Trojan horse was required, and one arrived, carrying in its belly a Cambridge philosopher-mathematician, a working-class Midlands lad, a gang of Americans and some Irish.
The horse’s first droppings were hard and curious:
I was bound
Motionless and faint of breath
By loveliness that is her own eunuch.
It is unpromising minor poetry, self-parodying in its absence of tone. The poet, Thomas Ernest Hulme, is an enigma. For T. S. Eliot he was a talisman, “the author of two or three of the most beautiful short poems in the language”. Michael Roberts (the best modern verse anthologist) admired Hulme’s critical work and adopted many of his ideas. If modern readers know Hulme at all, it is usually as a philosopher rather than a poet. Like Coleridge he teased his ideas out of other writers, in this case Henri Bergson, Remy de Gourmont and Théophile de Gaultier. Nevertheless British poetry (and British culture more widely) needed a clear-headed outsider to begin diagnosing its infirmities, to prescribe remedies, and to encourage debate between British and non-British writers of English. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, H. D., T. S. Eliot, Edgell Rickword and several others are in his debt.
Hulme reacted against the facility and self-indulgence of the 1890s poets and was equally unfriendly to the popular “new” Georgian verse of the day. He discussed oriental forms with young writers: tanka and haiku, vers libre (“free” or unmetered verse), French poetry of the immediate past and present, and “poems in a sacred Hebrew form”. He preferred precise brevity to what he saw as prolixity, and rejected the “vacuity” of his contemporaries in favour of vivid, tightly phrased imagery. He insisted on “absolutely accurate representation and no verbiage”. At first his attitude to language and reality seemed refreshingly naive, but his conviction that our very sense of the world is inferred through language proved to be genuinely radical.
Although he was killed in action in 1917, Hulme’s influence on the century’s risk-taking poets cannot be overestimated. Where common sense ignores the jumps and gaps in perception, he affirmed discontinuity, the possibility of making unexpected connections that would hold, and hold true. This altered perception of the world led to the possibility – indeed, the necessity – of new forms. In this context “image” implies that objects and feelings not usually associated with each other can be significantly juxtaposed. Hulme calls for a neoclassical poetry, free to find or to forge associations, without reference to “continuous contexts”: accurate, hard, intellectual, precise and pessimistic (for man is small, displaced from the centre of the world, no longer underwritten by religious certitudes).
Hulme argues against metre: “It enables people to write verse with no poetic inspiration, and whose mind [sic] is not stored with new images.” At first the word “inspiration” might seem an unpurged residue from the ideologies he rejected, but not if we redefine it from within the disciplines he proposes. What he says of metre is crucial. Metre is a facilitator, and poetry is not a facile art. Metre and the rhetorics that go with it can inflate a poem, can impose a lax diction and deform ideas if unskilfully handled. In a poem, if a thought is true it must cut its own path through language; the existing pathways, because sanctioned by convention, are already clichéd.
The unit of sense in a poem is not the word but the phrase or sentence; a poet should consider the effect of a whole poem, not local felicities. Here is the germ of William Carlos Williams’s “variable foot”, which instinct rather than rule legitimises, and of Charles Olson’s “breath” theories which have proven so puzzling to critics who want to systematise a poetics that is repelled by system. If not the word, then the line becomes the crucial unit, a poem is a construction made less of words than of lines, each with a dynamic which harmonises or contrasts with those that precede and follow. Rhythm, in short and long measures, displaces metre; and the appraisal of rhythm becomes a matter of nice discrimination, not a standard measurement against a yardstick. “As regarding rhythm,” Pound declares, “to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.” We must distinguish intellect from intuition. Intellect analyses and is the language of prose; intuition, the language of poetry, places the artist “back within the object by a kind of sympathy and breaking down … the barrier that space puts between him and his model”. Pound gets his “Make It New” from Hulme, who takes from de Gourmont the notion that language is constantly shedding resonance and must be regularly reinvigorated through the creation of new metaphors.
Pound’s idea of the image (“that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”) was not new, but it had never before become the basis of a poetic movement. Previously it had been one ingredient among many in the complex thing called poetry. Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria had written that images “have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant”. Despite the romantic implications, this defines better than Hulme or Pound what an image is and isn’t, what it can and cannot do. It appears in the context of an argument about language and the scope of poetry that is much broader than Hulme ever envisaged.
That Hulme’s and Pound’s axioms could bring together an apprentice school of poets reveals how disorientated younger writers were at the time, how they hankered for liberation but also for rules, how some of the outstanding imaginations of the century lacked the broader perspectives that earlier poets took for granted. Their irrepressible imaginations and hunger for formality extended these early theories in a dozen directions. Pound, again, is exemplary: there is a coherence in his development; to the very end he retained the crucial lineaments of his early discipline, but he made them more capacious; the Cantos, although incomplete, are one of the defining works of the century.
Had we only the early, aesthetic work of the Modernists to set in the scales against Kipling’s compelling rumbustiousness, Hardy’s hard, traditional stanzas and the popular, accessible work of the Georgians, the whole movement would seem a thin, rarified digression, a footnote to the values of the decadents. Those Modernists who managed to develop survived, and Imagism, in retrospect, was an apprenticeship.
In Hulme’s “Images” one poem reads in its entirety:
Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.
A past and a present are juxtaposed. The effect is more resonant than in much strictly Imagist verse because it has a chronology, it does not exist (as “I was bound” does) in a perpetual timeless present. William Empson, the subtlest of poet-critics, says that Imagist poetry is poetry that has lost the use of its legs – it does not move, it does not evoke time, existing only in space. This is one way in which it resists the tyranny of continuity, of cause-and-effect. Committed to the image alone, it strips it from its contexts.
The introvert passions of T. S. Eliot, the extrovert passions of Pound and the classical purity of H. D. characterise a generation of American writers who made it their business to create new spaces in English poetry. They thought that they might break through the conventional façade of the host literature to gain access to the empowering tradition behind.
One Englishman of genius, as much of an outsider in London as the Americans were, identified with their programme. David Herbert Lawrence was not a pure radical. He contributed verse to both Georgian and Imagist anthologies. Conflicting voices are heard in his early poems. The more popular is dramatic, telling stories, interposing moral comment, loosely formal in approach. The Georgians could hear such verse, though the presence of Lawrence’s apprentice work in staid Georgian compilations only highlights its erotic power and the conventionality of much of the poetry that surrounds it.
Amy Lowell, for her Imagist anthology, chose terse, imagistic and – crucially – unmoral poems by Lawrence. The images are left to speak for themselves, though we can infer a narrative. These poems are less immediately appealing than those in the Georgian book. “Green” was published in 1915:
The sky was apple-green.
The sky was green wine held up in the sun.
The moon was a golden petal between.
This verges avant la lettre on surrealism. In another poem Lawrence wrote: “The street-lamps in the twilight have suddenly started to bleed.” He may have been writing to order for the Imagists but, as he gained confidence in his ability to create images to convey different shades of feeling, he moved towards a personal, and then a vatic, idiom. Eventually he came to sound like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: big-voiced, assertive, with less emphasis on delicacy but with abiding precision. He never settled for one particular style, but each poem bears his inimitable voice-print.
His letters and essays are full of arguments useful to other writers. In 1913 he wrote to Edward Marsh that he saw his poems more “as a matter of movements in space than footsteps hitting the earth”. There is an emphasis on movement, away from the footfall of prescriptive metre towards expressive cadences and the stops and starts of natural speech; later it is the incantatory, often Biblical movement inspired by Walt Whitman. “It all depends on the pause,” Lawrence wrote, “the lingering of the voice according to feeling – it is the hidden emotional pattern that makes poetry, not the obvious form.”
He advocated a poetry of process, without goal, wedded to “the immediate present”, where “there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished”: open poetry. “Consummation” is a key word, suggesting that his poems deliberately defer or avoid dramatic climax. Such climaxes set the artist outside the artifact, casting him in the role of constructor or orchestrator. For Lawrence, Whitman is the master poet of the “present”, whose Leaves of Grass (1855) has neither beginning nor conclusion – but this, Lawrence reminds us, does not mean he has no past or future. The voice of the “present” tends to be rhapsodic, celebrating “the urgent, insurgent Now”.
Reading Lawrence’s statements about poetry, we might have expected from him long poems like Whitman’s or William Blake’s, or, among his successors, Charles Olson’s or Robert Duncan’s. Though he learned from American poetry, his sensibility remained thoroughly English, he seldom outruns the lyric or lyric sequence. Long runs are found in the prose, and often the prose is truer to the spirit of his poetics than the poems.
For Lawrence, free verse is essential to poetic utterance. A poetry without preconceived metre, stress patterns or syllable count, which involves “the whole man”, his passions, conflicts and contradictions, is a poetry of integrity. Nevertheless, for all his ambition to explore new spaces, his free verse is ultimately restricted by his “I”. Subjectivity, the wilful attribution of personal meanings to certain words, images and rhythms, is his principal limitation. Yet unlike his imitators, who labour to achieve a voice unique to themselves, there is a Wordsworthian legacy still at work in Lawrence: a man speaking to men. What matters is not idiosyncrasy of voice but integrity and fidelity to the moment.
The impact of free verse on twentieth-century poetry can be felt as often in a poet’s choice of diction as in his or her prosody. Formal traditional diction, tending towards archaism, available off-the-peg for a poet working at half-energy, sounds quite silly in free verse. (After free verse, conventional diction becomes less serviceable in traditional metrical verse as well.) The Modernist revolution in prosody revivified diction even for those writers – like Robert Frost or Philip Larkin – who stand aloof from it. Lawrence took this experiment further than Hulme and the Imagists. He wrote an accessible poetry which was immediately appealing and the product of authentic experience; a kind of poetry which, although with entirely different techniques, the Georgians were crafting in more conventional ways. He sloughs clichés like his famous snake sloughs skins, and makes a fresh language: new wine in new bottles. He tells us (in a characteristically eroticised phrase) that in free verse, “we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment”. We are to expect “no satisfying stability” because the “pure present” is a realm we have never conquered. And he, too, fails to conquer it, for there is a stability in his poems – though it is not always “satisfying”. It is not the stable meaning of the moralist, though Lawrence is often intrusively didactic, delivering his message in a paraphrase alongside the images. In the end, it is his rhythmic phrasing that supplies stability, his free verse is rarely as free as he claims: in many poems a cadence pattern is repeated with minimal variation.
Lawrence identifies those elements in his work which conventional readers will note as faults, and champions them as necessary virtues. The poet James Reeves writes of Lawrence: “He had not the craftsman’s sense of words as living things, as ends in themselves. Words were too much means to an end.” And so they were. Lawrence would have said, and so they should be. This is why he sits uneasily alongside the Georgians. He was never “craftsmanly”. Reeves adds: “He can seldom have conceived a poem as a whole before he sat down to write it. It grew under his pen.” The same could be said of the poems of William Carlos Williams and – we may guess – some of Pound’s. The freedom of free verse has something to do with tolerating surprise, inviting chance and randomness into the process of making.
After their deaths, writers suffer a revaluation. Since he died in 1965, T. S. Eliot’s reputation has undergone a serious and excessive devaluation. His politics, usually presented in a form so simplified that he would not have recognised them, have been made to tell against him. There are shadowy areas in his biography, into which prurient critics have pointed their torches. The pre-Four Quartets poems and essays remain controversial in ways they were when they first appeared, as though the paint has not yet dried on them. Eliot created the critical space: he effected a radical change in the ways in which the intelligentsia thought about poetry and literature generally, but the impact in Britain is not as fundamental as it once seemed.
Eliot makes play of the poet’s impersonality, yet it would be hard to confuse even his least-known lines with those of another poet. His images, cadences and tones are entirely his own. Why did he advocate “impersonality” and recoil at the idea of a biography? He may have wished to protect his poems from the higher gossip of biography, which tends to read each work as an act of self-disclosure. He was right to fear the worst. Biographical sensationalism is a modern vice.
Eliot insists that “the emotion of art is impersonal … The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality”. His language borders on the religious (the poet as martyr to his art), and these terms he employed before he became a committed Anglican. What occurs in his work is an extinction of biographical referents; but his personality, for all its reticence, is palpably present in every line. We might say the same of Elizabeth Bishop or Charles Tomlinson.
For Eliot, tradition is a kind of accretion. Each individual talent relates to and subtly alters the work that has come before. A writer acquires tradition through dedicated reading, application and a sharpening discrimination. Writers and readers develop an instinct for both the “pastness” and the presence of tradition. In this way, all literature remains contemporary and no poet can be judged outside the context of this living tradition. But some resources are no longer, or not immediately, serviceable; forms, registers and elements of diction can belong specifically to their period, and though the works still speak, their resources are not available today. This description of tradition has been satirised by his critics: Tradition as a carefully modulated, self-regulating system, like the stock exchange.
Eliot’s later career took him into the thick of publishing. The task of editing other people’s work, appraising manuscripts for publication and engaging in the actual trade, diverted him from his own writing. He became an influential member of the establishment. His forcefulness as a critic, the patrician authority of his style, defined one possible route for English literature this century; but when he became established, he began a recantation, manifested in his plays, his later poems and criticism, and in the poetry he published at Faber & Faber with its sins of omission and commission. He qualified and undermined the challenges he had thrown down in his early works. He changed ground on Milton and on Goethe, poets he had once criticised with severity. The later Eliot hardly diminishes the early firebrand. Prufrock may have grown into the Elder Statesman, but Prufrock remains our contemporary.
Eliot’s poetry has a comparable importance within the tradition to Dryden’s and Wordsworth’s in earlier centuries. He effects a renewal in poetic language. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land remain more “contemporary” in feel than much work produced in the last decade, or last year. Like all great poems, they remain present and available, lodging in our aural memory. In the first half of the century, Eliot and Pound thoroughly unsettled our poetic and critical language, our sensibility. Against the rigour of Eliot’s considerable body of work, the hectic fiddlings of postmodernism can appear facile and pointless. Much anti-Modernist polemic is earnest and reactionary by contrast: again the chilly hand of conventionality grips firmly. Even Eliot in his long last years breathed the same air as lesser poets.
But Ezra Pound didn’t. His engagement with other languages is more important than the movements with which he associated himself. From Ernest Fenollosa he learned something of the dynamic of Chinese, a language entirely alien to English, its writing ideographic and in his view Imagistic. In his translations, Pound’s Chinese-influenced measure is not the syllable or stress count, but the fulfilment of the grammatical movement of the sentence – a contained rhythm of syntax. “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave,” he said.
In Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), he managed to discard the remnants of the 1890s. Eliot read the poem as the “document of an epoch”. The quatrains break down in the fourth section, and in vers libre Pound writes one of the great war poems, prefiguring the clarity and anger of his Cantos. Mauberley brings into focus the political, cultural and spiritual England after the war, the poverty of spirit, the coarse materialism and vacuity of those who make and those who promote “value”. It is a poem of bankruptcy: it was only a matter of time before Pound abandoned England for good as irreparable. Mauberley is the last poem by Pound which a majority of Pound-tolerant English readers enjoy. Many part company with him after this point, seeing the later work as wildly aberrant in its form, language, allusiveness, and – of course – in its politics.
As Donald Davie remarks, for those who value the Cantos, the poetry “has to survive a self-evidently and perilously wrong understanding of history, and hence of politics”. It also has to survive the huge wealth of reference, of apparently disparate traditions, which inform it – such as Chinese ideograms, quotes from Thomas Jefferson, from the Provençal, Italian, Greek, and a host of other cultural “zones”. Pound’s poetry illustrates the transformations of Tradition that occur when the centre no longer holds, when the English that was exported to the Colonies comes home with its own luggage.