The Young English Poets

FOR the last two or three years Stephen Spender,W. H. Auden, and, to a less extent, C. Day Lewis have been the English poets of the younger generation who have received the most critical attention and praise. Spender has been compared to Shelley, Auden has been called a master, and the three of them together are described as the first three poets of contemporary England. Now that their work has been made available for America (Poems, by W. H. Auden,&2.50; Poems, by Stephen Spender, $1.50; Vienna, by Stephen Spender, $1.25; Collected Poems and A Hope for Poetry, by C. Day Lewis, $2.50 —all published by Random House), it is interesting, and for anyone concerned with the future of poetry important, to try to determine whether such high praise is justified.

The three poets have certain surface characteristics in common. They have communistic, or near communistic, beliefs, they have studied the same poetic masters, they are difficult to understand. Day Lewis describes their background and their point of view in his essay ’A Hope for Poetry,’ which is printed in the same volume with his poems. Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, and Eliot, he says, are the three recent poets whose technique has been most useful, Wyndham Lewis has clarified their point of view, D. H. Lawrence has reminded them of some home truths about the deeper levels of consciousness which modern civilization had made them forget. This is the obvious background at present for any serious young English writer, and Day Lewis acknowledges the debt he and his friends owe to it with generosity and charm. Many of his remarks are revealing and interesting, and the intelligence and enthusiasm he brings to the subject should make his essay widely read.

It is on the constructive side that the essay is weak. (How often, alas, must one say this of essays on poetry!) There are two things, Lewis implies, which are necessary to a poet in the complexity of modern life: he is seeking to find and establish a ‘central calm, a point from which he may begin to work outward again,’and he demands a homogeneous community, a common sense of values. How these are to be found in ‘the century of propaganda’ is the question. Day Lewis is here very vague. To the first problem he gives no definite answer, and I am not sure that he is conscious of all its implications; to the second he replies, though not with a thorough conviction, that communism offers a way out. By vigorous political beliefs, which he holds as a man, the poet can, as a poet, alternate between personal and public references; his social convictions will give him a symbolism and an intellectual climate in which he may flourish.

But all this is left rather romantically vague; the hope for poetry expressed in the title of his essay remains cloudy and undefined, bolstered only by certain qualities he admires in the practice of Spender and Auden. If we are to come to a more satisfactory view of this poetry we must look at the poems themselves.

Spender’s writing is on the surface the most obviously ‘poetic’ of the three. His vocabulary, the emotional infusion given to it, the upward surge of his poems, are what we have been trained to find in poetry. He writes of an express train: —

After the first powerful plain manifesto
The black statement of pistons, without more fuss
But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.

That is impressive at first sight because it has the movement, the tone, we are accustomed to. It is because his verse has this impressiveness, I imagine, that Spender has been more enthusiastically acclaimed than his friends. His writing has vigor and earnestness; we feel behind it a personal honesty and integrity, quite apart from its poetic value, which is attractive and memorable. Here is a man, we feel, whose emotions we can trust.

But curiously enough — it is an unusual occurrence — the verbal expression of those emotions is in the long run inadequate. Ordinarily bad writing and bad feeling go hand in hand; one is the natural medium for the other. But with Spender emotion and its expression in poetry are of quite different qualities; the emotional honesty is unquestionable, the poetry that results is either conventional or strained. ‘The black statement of pistons’ at first seems a striking and original phrase, but the effect is superficial, the deeper relationship between the words and their references will not bear investigation; when it is probed it crumbles. I find that true of nearly all Spender’s imagery. It is put together by main force; and when his poems are examined in detail, their phrasing, in spite of some striking individual lines, is found to be fundamentally insecure.

This is even more true of the recently published Vienna than it is of the Poems. The verse is labored and artificial; its obscurity seems almost deliberately imposed upon it, and though we can discover here and there a vivid picture, an effective expression, the structure and the detail of the poem lack that inevitability which we find in even the most unfamiliar kind of poetry if that poetry is the natural expression of its author. I feel about Spender that poetry is not his natural medium, that even if he does sometimes accomplish an individual rhythm or a memorable phrase, it is a triumph of personality, not a triumph of art.

This is not true of Auden. Auden’s poetry is more complicated than Spender’s, he has a great deal more energy of technique, he experiments more wildly with various angles of emotional approach, he is occasionally almost hopelessly obscure. His poetry has also at times a boisterous roughness, a schoolmasterish ‘Come on, boys! It s a tough fight, but we’ll make it!‘ attitude which is annoying, and he too frequently writes what Spender has called ‘buffoon poetry.’ But in spite of all this there is a core of true originality in Auden; objects and emotions which were never joined together before are brought into contact and, when the poem is a success, into fusion with each other; the language is arresting and vigorous, and the rhythms, which are very various, are frequently energetic and refreshing. It is not, however, easy to pick out a poem here or a poem there and say, ‘ This is a good poem or this is a bad one : the good and bad in Auden’s poetry are too closely intermingled for that. But what is interesting and valuable about him is that he has brought, to his poetry an intellect as well as a collection of emotions, as the good poet always does, and the satire that frequently results is as good as anything written in our time. What we hope for from Auden is that his intellect will become more sharply focused without losing its vitality-, and that he will learn to discriminate more carefully than he has done so far between those references and associations which are peripheral to his subject and those which are central. If he can subject himself to this essential discipline, Auden has the talent to become an important poet.

Of the three series of poems included in Day Lewis ’s Collected Poems, ‘The Magnetic Mountain,’ which is the most recent, is the best. As a poet Lewis, particularly in his early work, is more susceptible to influence than either Spender or Auden, and in ‘Transitional Poem’ and ‘From Feathers to Iron’ there are many echoes of Hopkins and of Auden, ‘The Magnetic Mountain’ is, like Auden’s ‘The Orators,’ written from a communist basis; like Auden ’s poem, though it lacks the toughness of Auden, it expresses a somewhat suspicious, neo-Shelleyan optimism: —

On our magnetic mountain a beacon burning
Shall sign the peace we hoped for, soon or late,
Clear over a clean earth, and all men turning
Like infants’ eyes like sunflowers to the light.

This is well written, but I call its content, like the content of the sequence from which it is taken, suspicious because it is based too much on a romantic yearning for the future; though Day Lewis has more concrete images than the cloudier parts of Shelley, his attitude is equally unrealistic.

Day Lewis’s gift is limited; it includes a narrower range than Auden ’s, and his technique and use of words are far less original. His style is a dry style, more competent for statement than for imaginative insight. That is why his utopism sounds forced. His composing intellect is stronger than his supply of emotion, and the attractive warmth on the surface of his poetry does not go very deep. But it is a hopeful sign that Day Lewis has steadily improved with each new book, and his most recent volume, A Time to Dance, which has not yet been published in this country, shows, in my opinion, an advance over ‘The Magnetic Mountain.’ He has not the potentialities of Auden, but he is a poet who is well worth watching.

And the work of all three men is worth careful attention. They not only point to a new style of poetry which will fit the needs of a new emotional generation, such as we have recently entered into; they have also given us a sharper view of the type of emotional responsibilities such a generation brings with it.

THEODORE SPENCER