The Gilt Edge of Reputation: Twelve Months of New Poetry

by PETER DAVISON

POEMS are peculiar plants, and nobody knows much about what makes them germinate. As W. H. Auden once wrote of the poet in this magazine, “Whatever his future life as a wage-earner, a citizen, a family man may be, to the end of his days his life as a poet will be without anticipation. He will never be able to say: ‘Tomorrow I will write a poem and, thanks to my training and experience, I already know I shall do a good job.’ In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet: the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps for ever.”

The poet must somehow keep his talent watered, and do so without knowing where the seed lies. If poets’ lives have often seemed irregular, they have taken that shape from the poet’s nervous, even frantic, attempts to keep the source of his poetry fertile and accessible. Nothing frightens a poet so much as the prospect or the knowledge that he has lost the way to his own poetry, for, among other things, it turns the knife in his awareness that he has lost the way back to his own youth. Dylan Thomas seems to have been haunted by the fear that he would go dry—and he kept himself very wet perhaps as insurance. Some poets, like so many who teach, have tried to brace themselves by a devotion to literature through criticism, editing, instruction; but poetry is a bit uneasy in the same room with Literature, and may even bolt.

Yet, though we are fascinated by the war between poetry and its rivals for attention, we must never forget that poetry has a life and strength that history has been able to count on. It lasts. Shakespeare was clearly right about marble and the gilded monuments of princes; and a thinking man would consider it a fair bet that Robert Lowell’s poem “For the Union Dead” will outlast the skyscrapers planted in the same year. Poetry lasts because it is rooted deep, and this is one reason why its practitioners are so profoundly attached to it that its withering can sometimes cause death — at least the death of personality. Through poetry they retain touch with the sources of their being.

Poetry lasts because it is rooted deep, but it is not necessarily acclaimed for the same reason, especially not when it is new. For a poet’s reputation to last he must be both good and lucky, though only the latter is essential at the outset. A poet’s work may win sudden acclaim for the same reason as the topless bathing suit, for what it discloses; or because a news-hungry editor finds it “symptomatic of the times,” or because the English departments have suddenly found that it consorts with their current notions. T. S. Eliot, in the forties, became the sudden focus of academic attention and was read, on assignment, by every puzzled English student in America. The magnificent but less typical poetry of Thomas Hardy, on the other hand, has been in perennial repute without ever having been overrated or much assigned. One thing is clear about the reputations of living poets: there is room for only so many growth stocks at one time. Robert Frost’s popularity receded in the forties with the rise in Eliot’s acceptance, but as Eliot ceased writing and Frost kept on to a great old age, Frost’s stock rose again, assisted, of course, by presidential favor.

Pound, Eliot, and others contributed enormously to the language of poetry, and their reputations thrived as a result. It is, however, an egregious (though commonly held) error to believe that the peculiar nature of the twentieth century can be captured exclusively through innovations of form. The late Edwin Muir could hardly have been less interested in technical and linguistic innovation. Yet Muir, at once the translator of Kafka and the interpreter of the Scottish ballad, managed to fill his rural imagery with the nightmare and anxiety of the twentieth century. His immediate reputation lay quiet; but the new, second edition of his Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, $6.00) gives evidence that he was one of the most penetrating of interpreters, and his vision went the deeper for being couched in a language as old as the hills and animals of his poems.

In the fifties Dylan Thomas’ American readings and cautionary death boosted his quotations, and his vocal and other performances engaged a following that had no reason to be attracted by any other poet. William Carlos Williams was never published at all in England until after his death in 1964. Posterity is a harsh mistress: she punishes poets (as in the case of Erasmus Darwin or Alfred Austin) for taking too careful cognizance of contemporary circumstance or (as in the case of Arthur Hugh Clough or William Cullen Bryant) for ignoring it. Then she can reward Milton or Herrick for exactly the same reasons. A good poet’s work gets a reputation in spite of itself, though not without reference to reality, like the easy neighborhood girl who has slept with more men than most people know but not with as many as some people think.

In 1930 John Masefield was made Poet Laureate by King George V, partly out of appreciation of his considerable gifts as a narrative poet, but no doubt even more out of gratitude for his earthiness. His sensibility managed, even at the height of its powers, to avoid grappling with the central issues of twentieth-century poetry as we now see them. In such rattling narratives as “Dauber” and “Reynard the Fox,” Masefield embodied the accepted but rapacious concerns of Britain before the First World War: the sea and the hunt. The two long poems brim full of the sheer narrative excitement that comes from a well-told story. It is, I think, fair to say that Masefield never yearned beyond this achievement to questions of philosophical or lyrical magic. Things as they were were good enough. In his latest collection, Old Raiger and Other Verse (Macmillan, $3.95), the old virtues, slightly dimmed by repetition, persist side by side with the old limitations. Here are glints of the sunlight of Edwardian England; here are narrative poems in praise of life at sea and of the English countryside; here be fairies, cuckoos, and country matters (though hardly in Hamlet’s sense). A few of the poems engage in elaborate self-parody, like a long, sticky, facetious narrative called “The Along-ships Stow.” Yet on occasion Masefield speaks for himself rather than for an age that is past:

Although John Masefield has not gone exploring in his great old age, as Robert Frost did, yet he has remained true to his lights and is still dwelling, with vigor and affection, on the subjects he took to himself sixty years ago.

I THINK Robert Graves is more purely poet than anyone else alive; this in spite of the fact that among living poets he has written more prose than anyone else: novels, essays, scholarly polemics, criticism, and translations — all in their way just as much his as his poems. However, his verses take place in an archetypal world all their own. They have in recent years had no subjects except love. Love, of course, encompasses treachery, fidelity, the dreadful intimacy as well as the delights imposed upon love’s slaves, the appalling services required of the devotee. Yet, while the poems speak of love, the poet is always somehow speaking of something else — of the Muse’s magic, of service to the White Goddess. Graves alone among contemporary poets seems to live, as Coleridge did, in a world of naked-breasted sirens and reptilian enemies, of substitutions and transformations, in a universe of metaphor.

The astonishment a reader discovers in Graves’s Man Is, Woman Does (Doubleday, $3.95) lies in his combining this phantasmagoria with an extraordinary flexibility of rhythm. In one poem, called “ The Dance of Words,” he hints at it:

In another, addressed to his Muse, he tells the secret again:

These two lines (may I say it?) contain the secret of writing the highest poetry, and it is a secret poets seldom learn until their maturity. Yeats learned it, and Graves, and Eliot; and, more recently, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop have likewise exalted their work with simplicity.

But plainness of manner is nothing unless there is lightning to puzzle over. For many years Graves’s output was slender but intense: five poems a year, he once said. Now the stream is swollen: hardly a year goes by but he gives us another collection. In Man Is, Woman Does the sections are already numbered for the next edition of his Collected Poems, which may indeed appear before this review is printed. The pressure to write has evidently become terrific, as witness this short lyric, called “A Last Poem”:

ONE of the most remarkable reputations of the last thirty-live years has been that of W. H. Auden, who has remained amazingly himself while in perpetual change. Radical, nihilist, lover, parodist, Anglo-Catholic, pastoralist, saint, he has successively and simultaneously acted all these roles, while never for long relinquishing what seems to me his favorite: that of Satan or his advocate, courteous and outrageous, standing by the reader’s elbow in a high place, gesturing toward the cities of the plain below. He asks questions so pointed, offers temptations so ingenious, that the answers and refusals come hard. From the early revolutionary poems that galvanized a generation, to the great elegies on Yeats and Freud and the outbreak of war (“O all the instruments agree/ The day of his death was a dark cold day.” “To us he is no more a person/ Now but a whole climate of opinion.” “I sit in one of the dives/ On Fifty-second street/ Uncertain and afraid/ As the clever hopes expire/ Of a low dishonest decade:”), to the quizzical ingenuities of The Sea and the Mirror and The Age of Anxiety, to the Christian paradoxes of For the Time Being, to his most perfect volumes, Nones and The Shield of Achilles, Auden has moved through wave after wave of reputation. Some of those who were tickled by his early outrageousness later turned away in political disgust as religion seeped in; others tired of the wagging forefinger or the wicked gleam in the eye. Many who at first were irritated by his cleverness have become impressed with his wisdom. He himself has faltered. His last collection, Homage to Clio, seemed to me a considerable falling off; but the present book, About the House (Random House, $3.00), is full of exalted achievements, especially in the first half, called “Thanksgiving for a Habitat.” This cycle of twelve substantial poems celebrates a house and all the rooms in it, one by one. Auden’s guise in this cycle is that of Clever Chap, beneath which he hides an immense reserve of humanity, sympathy, and good feeling. He is capable, in one of his wittiest poems in years, about the lavatory, of this:

The Clever Chap is archaeologist, anthropologist, psychologist, engineer, linguist (a reader like me, who must depend on Webster’s Unabridged, loses trace of some of the words Auden trots out from the Oxford Dictionary — depatical, flosculent, neotene, dowly, ubity), but beyond his other roles, he is always poet; and seldom before has so much information been converted from dross into gold. From under the surface, moral questions keep emerging, as in this postscript to the poem on the study, a lovely elegy to Louis MacNeice:

PHILIP LARKIN’S is a reputation that has come on very fast in the last several years, first in England and more recently in this country as well. At fortythree he is the author of three books of verse, all slender, and two novels, which date back to his youth. His poetic gift is delicate, razor-sharp, and very special. His most recent book, The Whitsun Weddings (Random House, $4.00), is a remarkable collection which contains a transforming magic at its best, but a thin, querulous sadness at its worst, like weak tea. The title poem, in which the poet, on a train journey, sees one newly married couple after another board the local for London, mounts to a high pitch indeed, and then:

That “squares of wheat” is characteristic of Larkin — the diminutive image every time. His is a diminutional talent: he can make things clear by making them small; and this trait can be seen especially in his verbs, which never wave their arms about. They are little verbs, like push and come and go and leave and admit. And die. Particularly die.

Larkin’s powers of observation focus sharply, but his observations are by preference those of failure. With few exceptions the poems ferret out weakness, put the finger on smugness, uncover impotence and shame, expose the shortcomings of mortality. His eye has an uncanny gift, too, for looking at the inside and the outside of an occurrence at once (Here is a patient in an ambulance: “Unreachable inside a room/ The traffic parts to let go by”), but he becomes rather predictable in finding emptiness on both sides.

It is heterodox to recommend that a poet respond to actuality with more than a genteel despair; but if Larkin’s vision were more generous, his work might be worthy of warmer appreciation. His talent is undeniable. What other poet could cram as much into a six-line poem as into this, called “As Bad as a Mile”?

It has not been a productive year for American poetry, but Elizabeth Bishop saves the vintage. She is an exquisite lyric poet who can be criticized mainly for one thing: not writing more. Her newest volume, Questions of Travel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, S3.95), is her first in ten years, and doubtless her best by far. With the opening lines of the opening poem, “Arrival at Santos,” we are in knowing hands:

What a lovely movement in the verse! What selfconfidence in that “who knows?” (She docs.) How she communicates that sense of unfamiliarity at the end of a voyage, when land seems artificial and somehow more personable than land has any right to be.

The first section of this collection deals with Brazil, where Miss Bishop lives. If John Masefield writes in the role of the Rusticated Seafaring Man, if Graves writes in the role of the Lover, if Auden is the Clever Chap, if Larkin writes with the distaste of the Librarian for the outside world, then Elizabeth Bishop is the Expatriate, and she writes with an expatriate’s feeling of both her homes: the adopted Brazil, and the native Northeast, New England and Nova Scotia. Her book shimmers with clear-eyed observation, absolute and lovely simplicity, and a gentle flickering humor. The late Randall Jarrell, that most sympathetic of critics, has well said, “In her best work restraint, calm, and proportion are implicit in every detail of metre or organization or workmanship.” Take, for example, the opening of a poem called “Twelfth Morning; or What you Will”:

This poem as a whole is one of description and transformation, showing objects and events transformed by the morning of Epiphany; but the unforeseen shifts in rhythm and point of view arouse the possibility of expectation and make the poem itself, and its transformations, possible. So do the slight eccentricities of punctuation, and the shape of the stanzas. The events of the morning are things the reader cannot see for himself unless he is kept off-balance. It is the job of the poet to keep him so and make him see them.

The clarity and the level, humorous gaze of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems give them not only their charm but their unpretentious profundity. In my opinion she is one of the finest poets writing; and although her reputation has been as quiet and unhurried in the growing as her poems, it deserves more growth, and faster.