An era of rising property prices: Conservative poetry
It's impossible to grasp the relationship of intelligent poetry to the cultural scene as a whole unless we realise what a minority taste it is. Conservatism is the dominant voice of the age, which is one of steadily rising property prices and ostentation. In poetry, the great fear of radicalism (a kind of taxpayers' revolt against the destruction of chartered intellectual property) found an outlet in a mixture of infantile regression and stylistic regression, in which inane and artificially irresponsible tones were mixed with a conscious and discreet return to outdated forms fragrant of "old money", to Auden, Betjeman, and Larkin. The Christians' profound problems with linguistic dating seemed to have affected the poetic culture (so recently emerged from Anglican domination) as a whole; and poetry seemed stuck in a Christian youth club of 1955, with teenagers sneaking puffs on fags and a guitar-playing "relevant' vicar. At the same time, moral gravity and the surrender to the sublime seemed to offer a way out of the domination of light verse. Adrian Mitchell, with his use of popular song forms with constant irruptions of Christian imagery (he was raised in a fundamentalist family), offers a transition between the two kinds of conservatism, and was one of the founders of the third—the "pop" poetry reading.
Oxford
When people write about the conservatism, shallowness, and inauthenticity of English poetry, what they really mean is Oxford poetry. The visible face, what for the general public, the media, and readers abroad stands for poetry in this country, is largely a list of names from Oxford. If we mention, for the period since the First World War, Graves, Prince, Betjeman, Auden, MacNeice, Day Lewis, Spender, Larkin, Amis, Jennings, Hill, (John) Fuller, Adrian Mitchell, (Craig) Raine, Motion, Fenton, it might seem that few memorable names had been left out. The 1958 anthology Modern Verse in English, by Cecil and Tate, has 17 Oxford graduates out of 55 poets in its British section; Lucie-Smith's 1970 collection of British poetry since 1945 has about 22 out of 88. (It is harder for a number-crunching critic to do counting in recent years, since the egalitarian temper of the times has made poets wary of admitting to a privileged education. A number of the NewGen poets basked in the anti-Oxbridge propaganda surrounding this marketing scheme while concealing their Oxbridge degrees.) However, the kindest examination of this list will show the domination of light verse and the avoidance of serious subjects, innovations of language, intensity, or any kind of experimentalism. We might well think that there is another kind of poetry, and that this crew of genial successes are engaged in a parlour game, an ingenious and cultivated playing for time. Almost identical sets of 18-year olds end up with such different aesthetic plans because those hothouses have intensely powerful local poetic myths, the heroes enkhorioi speak with mighty voices. We could term the Oxford and Cambridge myths as styles to try on, as art students might go through a phase of doing Expressionism or doing punk; or as the loyal capitalist consumer tries on being George Michael or Kylie Minogue or whoever it is this month. This triability is essential to art and yet pure play, impersonal and yet able to be captured and appropriated and loved. There is by the Isis a geographically located fantasy of tinkly, theatrical, narcissistic, clever, artexed, showbiz poetry swanning around in seventeenth-century rhetorics, and this gobbles up young talents and spits out their bones. After all it suits the British book-buying public very well: in fact, part of its emptiness is its eagerness to please. In 1960, just about the last time you could be au fait with the poetry world without reading the little magazines, Betjeman sold 100,000 copies of Summoned by Bells (imitated by 1000 poets writing about their childhood and parents, the basic model for Motion, Tony Harrison, and Hugo Williams). Comforting, witty, nostalgic, anti-modern narrative without introspection. I think it's unfortunate that Auden got closer to Betjeman almost week by week, for the last thirty years of his life, and worked out how to sell the commodity which Betjeman had, in almost a camp moment of the 1920s, invented. I think the style works rather badly, stiffly, unless you're gay, public school, and Anglican. But the tills go ting-a-ling. And it's terribly touristy.
The conservative backlash of the 1980s used Auden as its artistic hero, and claim to modernist legitimacy. Today, the voice of Auden is influential among a large group of well-known poets, central for some, although for others they are a nostalgic pastiche, a bag of toffees. The Oxford manner has spread, through the popularity of these poets; the mainstream nearly is the Oxford style. The English acceptation of Ashbery tends to strip out the more difficult and mysterious elements and end up with what Ashbery got from Auden in the first place: a re-nativization in the garb of a stripy blazer. English attempts to be selfconscious and modernistic tend to skimp the difficult bits and retain only a certain fluency, satirical jauntiness, and evasion of emotional commitment.
A story told about Kenneth Tynan is that he delivered a speech, around 1948, at the Oxford Union where the whole front row was filled with his ex-fiancees. I don't know if this is true (it was part of childhood mythology, or of my parents' myth of Oxford); if it is, it certainly implies a concerted plan among the young women in question to make a story worth the telling. Another part of the story is that Tynan's middle name was Peacock, and that there was a chain of menswear shops around Birmingham, a source of family money, which he would never admit to. Such feats of self-display, of manipulating anecdote, define what public success is. Tynan went on immediately from Oxford theatricals to Fleet Street and, eventually, to the West End theatre. Oxford is the home of a cult of success, where pressure is brought on talented undergraduates to do successful things rather than retire into their gardens and write experimental verse. Oxford poetry expounds the conventional desirable. If there are good clothes, good restaurants, fast cars, good theatres, pleasant places to go on holiday, desiring them is obvious, and a life which excludes them is, at first blush, perverse. The simplest theory of the media is that people want to see desirable experiences which they themselves lack; the appeal of beautiful things happening to beautiful people in poetry is so obvious that a lurch of doubt attends attraction to poets with other schemes. If one supposes that appealing to women is important in the success of male poets, prosperity takes on another value; poverty is unappealing because it implies insecurity, a less comfortable house, no car, no smart clothes, no exotic holidays, etc. The proposition that a (poet) man does not need these trappings puts a great deal of stress on his qualities as a man; which may appear as arrogance rather than idealism. How can poverty be aesthetic? how can constraint develop intellectual freedom? I am not sure the public wants a poet who lives in a tumbledown house and does a low-paid job. It is simpler for poetry to plug into the system of overt prestige. Poetry of theatrical address puts the figure of the poet at the centre of everything; the suggestion is that you develop a crush on the poet, as you might have a crush on Doris Day. Such poetry puts male upper middle class narcissism on display, offers the attractions which it offers, exhibits the shortcomings which it exhibits. Television and cinema are blatant about presenting the most good-looking men and women; poetry is not a visual medium in that way, but can present social privilege and its accompanying self-admiration and self-confidence. People find success appealing because it represents freedom from anxiety. They find failure stressful to think about because it represents anxiety and the lack of freedom. Success showing in a conventional and material way is the most clear-cut. Much of this book describes problems with authority figures; but the problems could disappear if you were the white-haired boy of the authority figure, if you were the prize-winning poet, prefect, captain of the cricket team, etc. We tend to define success in terms of the approval of authority figures, and undergo conflict and frustration because they withhold approval for our actions. Naturally it's attractive to identify with a figure who gets validation and approval for everything he does.
Rejecting the suave aura of privilege and self-confidence is where radicalism starts. Can you be politically radical without being linguistically radical? But of course, the hopes of a radical potential in art may have been just a passing phase, a false alarm in a deeply conservative market.
Difficult experimental poetry doesn't make a coup, it doesn't exert the glamour of success, it doesn't get people gossiping about you and doesn't make splendid anecdotes. It doesn't propel you into showbiz.
The Oxford ideal in literary self-presentation owes a lot to the great charm of certain 1920s prose writers: Waugh, Powell, Betjeman, Connolly; Claud Cockburn was a rebellious exponent of the same quality. There are few more amusing writers. We could add Robert Byron, Henry Green, and Jocelyn Brooke. This prose was enviable because of its success with a wide audience, as well as its literary qualities. Its comic nature predisposed students to light verse; poetry could not exert the same prestige because of its lack of external success. Auden only became successful when he gave up writing serious poetry, Betjeman outsold almost any other poet by versifying light-comic nostalgia. The realistic element of Auden, so far as it was ever there, has faded away in his progeny; John Fuller and James Fenton are bright young things with the vaudeville manner. Jocelyn Brooke described his type of 20s Oxford man as futilitarian; this inability to deal with the workaday world stemmed at least partly from an excessive attraction to the good company offered by Oxford aesthetes, who brought the art of conversation to a very high level; the appeal of books from that world is not, I would say, their depiction of privilege, as in novels of High Society by Ouida, but the amusing quality of the prose. It takes a certain humility to be so witty; which derives after all from being exposed to other very intelligent people, to the damage of one's self-regard.
There is a similar literary streak in Paris. That the source of a great deal of this glittering, film-thin, satirical style is in Tarr, published in 1914, suggests that it might be Modernism … l'anglaise. Aldous Huxley's novels, probably based on Tarr to some extent, emphasize this; Huxley published in Wheels and was one of England's few Modernist poets during the great period of modernism. Whatever his politics, Powell is the local heir to both Proust and Wyndham Lewis. The style dates to the 1920s, at least as an idea, and its satire was for a while part of a merciless critique of society as inherited from the Victorian era, loaded with revolutionary and subversive potential. Both achievement and limitations are highlighted if we compare Aldous Huxley to Alois Musil. Lewis' politics were erratic; Powell and Waugh migrated back to conservative values. Huxley anticipates later excesses of British rebels, foretells the sixties in his interest in sex, eastern religion, and psychopharmacology; rock band The Doors were named after his book The doors of perception. A failed modernist, he was subversive around 1915-20. If we trace English modernism through a hundred voyages, some bizarre and elusive, of failed and defected crews, we can see why there was such a prejudice against it by the sixties, and why it simultaneously seemed like something new and unexploited.
The ambition and intelligence involved in A Dance to the Music of Time and The Sword of Honour suggest to these ears that a poet who takes on the frivolity and disconnectedness without managing the large-scale symbolic structures may end up with something unpleasant and forgettable. There is a certain aggressive empty-headedness about much of Auden, or Fenton and Fuller, for example. We are supposed to be anxious about thought, so that brainlessness is entertaining and relaxing. How can poetry be made intelligent? The question is still open, whether the vacuum left by the collapse of religious faith can best be filled by sceptical frivolity or by a seriousness, aspiration, and purposefulness as involving as religion. But a book which systematically denounces the usefulness of the intelligence can only evoke a thousandth part of the curiosity and alertness released by asking the intelligence to wake and act. Even if the splendid structure of analogues and hypotheses turns out at the end not to be the structure either of the universe or of some real thing, its demands on the memory and on the pattern-making faculty were exalting in themselves. Frivolity is likeable, but almost everyone dislikes cynicism.
Oxford has for long been attracted to the theatre world, drawing poetry into the sphere of the revue; we can note how close Betjeman's early lyrics are to a song in some musical comedy, look at much of Auden's poetry, look at Sandy Wilson's 1950s pastiches of 1920s musicals ("The Boyfriend"), Adrian Mitchell's career in theatre, James Fenton's writing the lyrics for a musical in the eighties. The revue plays a permanent role in the student world, and the Oxford poem has been constantly affected by the song tradition; it likes to avoid anything serious or heavy. Sandy Wilson is by far the most gifted of these; the elements of nostalgic pastiche, camp, and frivolity in his work illuminate other Oxford writers, while his commercial success influenced them.
Never far away from the voice speaking the poem is the smart actor in a revue, pushing smartness and lightness of manner, offering the audience insouciance and success but careful never to strike a graver tone even for a minute. The traditions of light music are old; the involvement of intellectuals with comic music in Germany starts with a cabaret tradition around 1900, memorable for Wedekind, who leads on to Brecht; the triviality of Auden compared to Brecht owes something to the native traditions, which had nothing like political cabaret, but, around the same time (according to Ronald Pearsall's interesting Edwardian Popular Music) were making great strides in inventing the musical comedy, an adaptation of the Viennese operetta. The musical comedy young chap-part silly ass, part romantic hero-was made familiar to a mass audience. The Oxford revue tradition owed nothing either to the avant-garde cabaret or to Weimar political satire. English song, aspiring to American achievements,has suffered from stylistic uncertainty, corrupting poetry based on song. Irreverence, humour, association with dance, marriage with the pop song-all are vital to twentieth century poetry; but England has not done well in either musical or chanson.
Life as a chorus boy is unprosperous, but for a long time, probably from the later 1940s up to the early eighties, media jobs were very attractive as a career for graduates, and the BBC, for example, could command the best people that Oxbridge had to offer; because of this glamorous image, (replaced in the eighties by a career in a merchant bank), qualities identified with media people became a turn-on for members of the graduate class, who could aspire to such a world even if they were working as teachers or managers. Poetry was drawn towards the standards of Fleet Street, advertising agencies, and light entertainment, just as in a previous set-up for the professional classes it had been drawn towards the standards of the Church of England. The figure of the poet as seeker after truth and critic of society was less attractive, because someone like that was obviously not going to be popular or prosperous; intelligence and thought were a turn-off. A certain poetry was as scared of ideas as a television programme or a disk jockey. Light entertainment retained its charm by rigorous evasion. The theatre or television demand the personality as product, alarmingly exposed to the audience yet also reassuringly in control, assuring the situation so that moments unflattering to the star/personality do not appear. Introspection is replaced by a cynical awareness of one's appeal and its limits.
The revue style is not, as a matter of fact, anti-populist; although its appeal is an insouciance which implies privilege, it still takes on popular forms. Betjeman sold so many books because he consciously set out to please; it's quite misleading to label the antiquarian-Anglican interest as elitist. In fact, I was disturbed, when examining the sixties, to pick up Summoned by Bells as the decade's best-seller and realise how close to the pop, song-style, unserious "new" poetry of the time it was. A comparison of Betjeman and Adrian Mitchell is rewarding. The specific function of rhyme in Oxford poetry is elusive: it can either represent submission to the rules of popular song, signalling its own triviality; or be an advertisement of cleverness; or represent adherence to the Christian religion, and its hymn forms; or, related to the Christian witness, a testifying to conservative principles in art, a lofty attack on the twentieth century and attempt to claim the unperished assets of the seventeenth.
Another group habit is the attack on seriousness, its lines of argument, and the scorn for serious writers: a whole critical system for disqualifying demanding poetry. Ideas, emotions, experiment, commitment, politics, are all defined as boring, unacceptable in the salon and on the cocktail circuit. Do we not find these tinkly little prejudices are an important part of the English literary system as displayed in book reviews and dust jackets? that the light entertainment ethos has reached the national stage and captured many of the sources of influence? It is not possible for the brain to engage very far in something which is notoriously inconsequential. But to become consequential demands that one drop the anyone-for-tennis, West End manner, write with effort, ask the awkward questions, project overall seriousness. Perhaps what the social butterflies are mocking is their own works-which they were too light-hearted to write. The light comedy manner produced masterpieces, but has not produced any significant new talents since about 1930, and is lethal to literary endeavours of other kinds.
The other tradition in English poetry is close to the Nonconformist set of intellectual and cultural ideals, and to what may be its twentieth century equivalent, the Left. The whole hatred of seriousness is a reaction against theology, against serious calls. There is a latent opposition between these two traditions when it comes to what the reader expects, although a calm consideration will show that one would want Ronald Firbank and A.S. Byatt. Undoubtedly, hard work and emotional integrity are valued at Oxford as much as anywhere else; but an influential local tradition of personality cults, worldliness, and light verse has made it hard for Oxford poets to be serious or innovative, in a larger culture which after all favours conservatism and show business. Significant work has, nonetheless, been created by such poets as FT Prince, Christopher Middleton, Geoffrey Hill, George MacBeth, Robert Crawford, Andrew Lawson, WN Herbert, and Robert Smith.
Unsophisticated postmodernism
Paul Muldoon, Quoof (1983); James Fenton, Out of Danger (1993); Andrew Motion, Selected Poems 1971-97 (1999)
Paul Muldoon published the influential verse narratives Why Brownlee Left (1980), and Quoof (1983): slick, repulsive, and rather sick anecdotes in which the point is that there is no point. The effect is rather comforting; life is meaningless, there is no point trying at anything, and we can all just sit in the bar, drinking and telling anecdotes. His poems, devoid of artistic interest, were the starting-point for a vast swathe of poetry of the last two decades, modish, pointless, fanciful, disconnected, and inept, but not irrelevant to some excellent poetry by John Goodby or Ian Duhig. When English poetry critics speak of "post-modernism", what they actually mean is Muldoon.
James Fenton (1949-) worked for many years as a journalist, an environment which encourages cynicism, smartness, compression, a know-it-all superiority, slick witticism, avoidance of sentiment, obsession with fact. Much of his tone can be understood as the joking of a man in a group of intelligent, sharp, easily bored males, competing to be the least emotional and the most tough and black in humour. Legend has it that he was also a member of the trotskyite IMG, and repented quite sharply, veering in the opposite direction. He was a student in 1968, when becoming a Marxist was the order of the day. Fenton dates his collected poems as starting in 1968; The Memory of War collects poems from then until 1982; it has been followed by Partingtime Hall, a light verse collaboration with John Fuller, Children in Exile (1983), Out of Danger (1993).
'Letter to John Fuller' resembles Auden's banal epistles, such as the quite dreadful 'Letter to Lord Byron'; a comic, rhyming romp through poetic characters as Fenton conceives them, it is excusable in someone drunk and bored, but publishing it in a book is hubristic. It is shallow and inane. At such times, Fenton seems, not only to have a low opinion of his own talents, but of the possibilities of poetry. 'The Manila Manifesto', too, is petulant, snittish, and would admirably suit a wastepaper-basket.
Fenton seems to start afresh each time he writes a poem. This makes it hard for him to escape his artistic models; it also points to an amazing lack of continuity of impulse; it also contributes to a missing author feel, a separation between the writing wit and the real man which drains the work of its psychological impact. Most volumes of poetry by one person have a cumulative weight, whether one likes the poet's character or not; Fenton's books are held together by nothing but the glue on the binding.
The sequence 'Out of Danger' which opens the book of that name is frustrating, because where the author is apparently writing personal poetry, and appearing on stage, the coldness of technique actually squeezes out the personal element; the poems are unmemorable, banal as rock song lyrics. The separation occurs between line and line, a lack of cumulative sense presumably encouraged by the rhyme-based technique where the line is the functional unit, so that lines tend to become self-contained, and continuity is missed. 'The Mistake' a confessional poem, a morbid self-revelation of guilt and regret, and yet it leaves no impression behind. None of the confessional poets wrote in rhyme, because in rhyme it all sounds too stagy, knowing, factitious; as here. The crushing banality and off-handedness of 'Don't talk to me of love. I've had an earful' (p.12) seem more indicative.
'Jerusalem' might be about politics in Palestine, but is a sequence of unconnected facts, atomistic lines, without any emotional or intellectual synthesis; and this in fact may be the key to Fenton, his distaste—dandyish, traumatized, superior, immature, supercilious, inept, journalistic, or whatever it is—for getting away from facts and progressing to meaning. If things don't speak for themselves, he refuses to speak for them; if they do, they are predictable and familiar. The obsessively one-clause sentences, the primary unqualified nouns, of 'Jerusalem' are like the speech of someone emotionally damaged: missing emotional nuances because he is cut off from the feelings of other people, which cause situations to be nuanced, descriptions to become complex and qualified. Perhaps this is supposed to be like the autonomy of a finished artwork, which exists in the round and sustains endless interpretations. What it feels like is someone more concerned with syllable counts and sound variants than with human beings. Much of the book reads like song lyrics; perhaps this is supposed to be tough, primary, and true, like Brecht, but it feels retarded. You can't treat Third World politics in the style of an Oxford revue. 'Don't go fellating fellahin', he enjoins us. These poems are reminiscent of the ones which Christopher Logue was writing in the 1950s, but presumably that is the sound of Brecht. Most of the book is a kind of re-take of 'Surabaya Johnny'.
The Memory of War is systematically better than Out of Danger. The component modules of pastiche, dissociation, light verse, jauntiness, rhyme, and occasional violence are not yet so mechanical. Between angry mocking, and pastiche, of other writers, there is a thin vein where a real Fenton might be visible. 'A Staffordshire Murderer', deliberately drained of feeling, which almost attracts us as a spoof, a late-sixties fantasy like some photo shoot with a pop group rigged out in period dress: 'By the Floral Clock, by the footbridge,/ The pottery murderers in jackets of prussian blue.// "Alack, George, where are thy shoes?"' Fenton's tone here reminds us of the pop group Procul Harum, with their lyrics by Keith Reid.
The nineteen pages of 'Exempla' (probably 1968-70) seize material from the outside world, typically from a museum, which is deliberately irrelevant to the poet. This resembles the documentary preoccupation of conceptual art, but lacks all political value; he is amused but no more. He fights against the surplus of meaning in the human world. Other people integrate the elements of the world supplied by their senses to make a synthesis, an integrated sensibility which generates its own meanings and is the overall subject hidden and revealed behind the poems; Fenton exhibits only a dissociation of sensibility. His poetry is observed by an eye with nothing behind it; like a camera. He is good at framing squares of the visible world. The untouched quality of these squares is a fear of commitment; repression of associations; fear of ideology even where the personality is this. He is always walking away from involvement. His refusal of mental acts higher than bare perception is lockean. He describes how a frog's eye can only detect movement, and does not move separately from the body; an equation of awareness with the mechanical limits of the perceptual system as a data-gathering device which points towards phenomenology and the critique of human awareness and perception; but Fenton seems blithely unaware of any analogy, refuses to make any models for hypothesizing, closes off the chains of possibilities by neat metrics, and seems unconcerned by anything except a clever, detached tournure of line endings. Hundreds of poets have, since 'The Pitt-Rivers Museum', written poems using the data of science; there is surely a difference of intellectual order between those who simply accumulate bizarre facts in a kind of cabinet of curiosities, and those who are interested in ideas, the laws of deduction, the nature of perception, the interaction between the observer and the observed, human nature, cognition as a series of continuously modified hypotheses, and so forth. Fenton's bizarreries are pre-scientific in temper, they are mere touristic curios, as a sixteenth-century collector might exhibit them; very few British poets show any understanding of science. He wants to be intelligent, but does not want to use his intelligence for anything.
The poem about the anthropological exhibits in 'The Pitt-Rivers Museum' does not associate the artefacts with their source societies, does not look through the objects to imagine alien mentalities and geographies, does not walk outside the banalities of an afternoon in a museum in an English city; we seem to have found a poet who lacks imagination altogether, and this is perhaps a more remarkable exhibit than a head-dress made of feathers. Who else could walk through that wonderful museum without having their imagination fired? Fenton's capacity for cutting off associations is astounding; and conjures up the problems of excessive control, how phobic neatness prevents the swimming and oscillation of meanings which I associate with the poetic.
It is unfair to examine Fenton's inability to connect things without recalling the hyperdeveloped connectedness of the Marxist world-view, so prominent around 1968-75. For them everything meant everything else: buying American records meant condoning the actions of American capitalism in Vietnam. History was one story, and a mysterious subject entity lived continuously from the Stone Age to the twentieth century. All social struggles were part of one big struggle. These connections, eye-bulging when you first realised them, did not have the advantages of being true; or, not being wholly untrue, they were unfollowable by someone reading a poem, who was tired at making so many leaps. Other people went into hyperassociative states, on LSD this time. Fenton is reacting away from this, and so his work is, at a level beneath conscious intention, a criticism of left-wing art and of counter-cultural poetry.
His best poetry is in The Memory of War, specially in the sequence 'A German Requiem' (published 1981). The dwelling nature of this has the effect of compassion for other people's suffering, which he is not as usual sending up; the giggling superciliousness of his later work has tended to flavour reception of this, turning the ambiguities into monotones. Reticence is a problem, the details pile up but their emotional value is uncertain; perhaps it would be enough to sound concerned to release an emotional reaction from us. Fenton feels no more need to know about the Korean alphabet than we do. Perhaps the studied nonchalance of poems like 'A Nest of Vipers' is like the self-disengaging paradoxes of Prince Hamlet, or of Jacques in 'As You Like It', an occluded reference to melancholy and estrangement. In 'Chosun', a poem about mediaeval Korea, the details are consciously exotic and deliberately point away from the poet's self; solemn and elaborate nonsense is perhaps meant to be a recuperation from personal problems. Perhaps Fenton's indifference comes from the School of Wittenberg; or perhaps he finds that mixture of sense perception and identification or projection, which we call sensibility, repugnant.
Andrew Motion's Secret Narratives (1983) is deliberately oblique about pointing the line of the story, the relevance of parts. This is supposed to be sophisticated; it is in line with what the contemporary reviewers describe as such, the textbook definition of "postmodernism". These poems are genuinely understated, and genuinely complete, after a second reading. But because the texture of the poetry has not been adjusted to allow for contemplation of the unknown, the effect is simply of nervousness, a shyness which may disguise apathy or anxiety.
Philip Toynbee's narrative poem Pantaloon, which ran to four volumes between 1960 and 1968, starts with a framing scene (the narrator is talking, many years after the events, to a Norwegian-American student who is researching his life), and a modal statement putting everything else in doubt: the narrator admits he is 'half-crazy'. This piquant aside adds nothing to the text; it seems to me that nothing would be different if it were omitted. Presumably, Toynbee (1915-81) found it easier to work with a narrative mask which was subjective and not strictly truthful. I am not convinced that this was a novel device in 1960; it seems to me rather common in 19th century fiction. Browning and Wilkie Collins used it all the time. Mention of the latter reminds us that the detective story descends, partly, from his great thrillers of the mid-century, and that the simultaneous existence of different hypotheses, only one of which can be true, is a staple of that genre. If poetry gets into uncertainty and unreliable evidence, it may be mutating, not towards modernist masterpieces, but towards a second-rate genre which people read in heaps and quite inattentively. The claim is that the unreliable narrator is a new and underlying device, which raises the poem to a new pitch by enabling us simultaneously to enjoy the poem and to contemplate the nature of poetry; that is, to theorize. For the poets under discussion, this claim is quite mistaken. In volume 1 of Pantaloon, there is a scene between the teenaged hero, Richard Abbeville, in disgrace, and his father:
"Let me remind you of the exact occasion. We were sitting in your pleasant drawing-room; the great bowl enamelled with yellow dragons; satchets of rosemary; tall glass-fronted book-cases, well-filled with the English poets; the knight's head gleaming nobly from his circumambient darkness, confronting the bright blue Virgin of Bellini on the other wall."
A detailed recollection; which is undermined, in the following pages, by a dialogue between the narrator and the memory-shade of his deceased mother, where she corrects his mis-memories while he admits the strenuous activity of self-regard in editing memories as they re-appear in later years; "And he said, sometime afterwards, that he'd seen the Madonna on the wall behind him. He can't have seen it! (...) For I'd moved it—oh, six weeks before!—and hung it in my bedroom." Richard remembers the Bellini because he imagined his own mother's eyes upon him during the traumatic interview (his father is a "gaunt, importunate shaman (...) A presumptuous and sickly vulture(.))" She mis-remembers where the hyacinths were; "Quite wrong! Quite wrong!/ The pink was to the left,/ The blue to the right of me./ And all the time I smelt their debilitating odour(.)' This is far more evocative than the tenuous sketches of Fenton and Motion; yet Toynbee, an avant-garde novelist of the 1940s, was not breaking new ground but following the far greater effects of self-deception analysed by Proust, several decades before. The "postmodernism" of the 1980s is not, then, offering us a new literary sensation or a new idea to nourish our intellects on.
The qualities of being fashionable, by carrying out the dictates of academic books about postmodernism, and of being intelligent, therefore cognitively critical, inclining us to contemplation of the rules of perception, are equally prized but quite separate. Although I do not think these writers are intelligent, I think that Toynbee was quite unlike anyone else writing at the time, and he does make one wonder about the nature of poetry; but his work is not aesthetically intense enough for me to evoke it at length. He is one of the genuinely marginal figures of modern English poetry.
It has been claimed that Hitchcock, in making 'The Birds' (1963), was influenced by the Continental mystery film, a genre to whose rules he was, for commercial reasons, conforming. 'The Birds' is perhaps a reply to L'Avventura, La Dolce Vita, and L'année dernière à Marienbad. The vogue for these films lasted till at least 'Blow-Up' (1967). They were the supreme intelligent, fashionable, art film hits of their day; too popular not to have spawned many tedious imitations, but doing so only by being classics of cinema. My taste is perfectly conventional in admiring them; what is more in doubt is the artistic interest of reviving the enigma narrative, the incomplete story, so many years later. I see Muldoon, Fenton, and Motion as poets who, faced with an indifference to poetry which only gives token space or attention to it, exploit this brevity by staging artistic ideas which no-one needed to have explained; their poems are easy to talk about or review, chiefly because of their perfect banality and tenuousness. It is clear to me that a narrative does not need to be complete, or to offer figures easy to identify with, or to be constantly full of incident, or accountable and reassuring, in order to be great art; what I am unhappy about is poets in the 1980s or 90s recycling ideas brilliantly developed in the sixties, or even the late fifties, with an apathetic and conventional facture, and being hailed by poetry critics as challenging and innovative. One of the rules of the literary world today is that the most idea-free and mainstream poets are wrapped up in a critical or publicity discourse saying that they are dissonant, subversive, and post-modernist.
There is an interesting resemblance between Motion and Fenton on one point: inability to express emotion. Emotion is supposed to be felt in the reticence—i.e. uttered by the negation of utterance. This paradoxical and peculiarly English absence of the very thing is hardly likely to impress the reader. Perhaps the argument is that "people in deep emotion don't talk emotionally (or, poetically)", but the effect is of evasiveness, low affect, and incomplete command of language. The most significant parts of the poems have been left out. The lack of resolution commended for postmodernist texts may, in these cases, be an ideological mask for traditional English diffidence. The feminist argument is that men don't like talking about their feelings (and dislike women talking about their feelings); this seems to hold true. The hope of the traditional reading audience is that poets are supremely good at what most people find supremely difficult, i.e. talking about intense emotions; one might expect that traditional and restorative poets would fulfil this hope, but in fact it seems that evasiveness, diffidence, and certain compensatory mechanisms to draw attention away from these, are prevalent in the most prized mainstream poets. Here is the connection between the new mainstream of the 1980s and the Movement; a central inarticulacy and inability to connect. It is only fair to say that Fenton is not connected with the Movement style, although he probably likes being compared to Auden.
It is incorrect to say, as so many partisans have done, that Motion and Fenton are remarkably bad poets. In fact, they stand out from the rest of the mainstream, their work is well edited and pleasant to read. It would be truer to say that they have been weak-headed and cautious.
One of the structuring events inside these texts is an impersonation of the avant-garde precepts of indeterminacy (theorised, for example, by Roman Ingarden in 1964) and detachment from plodding realism. The mainstream is, through these writers, to close the gap which had emerged in the repressive consensus, steal the assets of the subversives, and exclude them again, claiming that they are merely formal variants of Muldoon and Motion, but without lucidity and showmanship. The failure of these profoundly unintellectual artists shows, with didactic clarity, some of the artistic rules of the modern style. The worth of emptiness, the resonant vacuity opened by indeterminacy, is to take out the poet and allow us to possess the text in fantasy; also, it is like the questions at the end of a chapter full of information, which let us use our brains and memories actively. It is also like the inexplicitness of song. The worth of suspending the relation of the poem to reality is to disrupt perceptual habits, to protect a hypothesis to the point where the reader starts to speculate about the nature of social being, and about the effects of the initial premise. This also resembles something that happens in education: where we are taught to develop hypotheses. The artistic power of the conjecture is a kind of indeterminacy: the equal possibility of both outcomes; the tension of the exercise slackens as soon as it is obvious that one answer is right. It is not—I suggest— sufficient merely not to tell the reader what is going on. To sample the external trappings of modernity without updating the rhythmic, psychological and informational structure of your poem is to produce a fake composite anatomy, a kind of phoniness never before seen. Modernity of technique is not something you can buy at an airport and put on your mantlepiece.
The problem of mainstream poets, and their backers or publishers, is how to maintain a presence both in schools, where the imperative is to be easy and youth-oriented, and in higher education, where people demand a certain density of language and conformance to the most recent update of modernist canons. The result has been a good deal of impersonation, where it emerges that avant-garde (Left Modernist) poetics have a potent prestige, even in places where the poets themselves are completely unacceptable.
Christian poets
Come Deck my Body in the Finest Array: Spectrum Shift, by Isobel Thrilling (1991)
What is at stake in Thrilling's quite brilliant second book (there was The Ultrasonics of Snow in 1985) is the old-style Anglican version of the parish as long-term physical community in which every event has long-term results, and is a result, and the poem takes place inside this huge set of relationships. The alternative is, I suppose, the poem which takes place in a self-referential linguistic box, whether of ideas or emotions, that may extend beyond the individual to a very small group. The problem which put people off the Christian poem was the draining of intensity by the vast timescales involved; or possibly it was that you can't write this kind of a poem if you aren't a good person. A lot of people find people, their personalities, their quirks, their emotional problems, their characteristic ways of moving, profoundly boring; my reply is that ideas and textual tricks are just as boring, but I don't have space to prove this here. Poetry is dissolved inside the education system, which is upwardly mobile, tests people only as isolated individuals, and is competitive; in the world of work, people who carry out those values are quite unbearable, and this ethical failure makes much poetry unreadable. So much of modern aesthetics start from the rule that attachment is bad and sentimental; whereas in art, as in the real world, having attachments is the most precious thing.
So many poets are spending so much effort trying to prevent A from reaching B. But the reader knows perfectly well that actions have consequences, even if the poem is frantically disconnected. You can reach more calm and untouchability and balance by accepting that actions do have them.
Three of the poems here ("Mugger' "Head Teacher" "Hostess") are about being a bad person. This crosses one of the basic rules of the modernist system. It also seems out of date, in that odd convergence between low-affect aesthetics and the tone of the times. But, after all, the main thing in poetry is to project onto the poet; and it is inevitable that you will project affection onto someone good; and it is impossible to project onto someone who you know does not care about other people. Language is so much part of dialogic faculties that it is impossible to achieve moral insensitivity without reaching aesthetic insensibility at the same time. I think a lot of feminist poets are carrying roughly this message. A poem that is beautiful like a soul is several orders of magnitude more complex than one which is beautiful like the neck of a bottle.
Now that the socialist project has been disassembled and its parts sold off, it is clear that it is similar to the Christian endeavour; the myths of reason and owning the future were just appropriated power objects, unbearably rich and exciting, but evanescent. Wanting society to be good without your being good yourself, to other real people, was at best a delusion and at worse criminal.
I don't know what denomination Thrilling belongs to, but it's obvious she's a Christian. I also don't know the history of Christian poetry in the past thirty years; while reviewing Canaan I became interested in the subject, but I haven't found the right sources. As you already know, the shift between the 40s and the 50s in poetry was caused by a shift of Christian emphasis, away from the supernatural and prophetic strain which issued forth in Apocalyptic poetry, and towards something more sober and constructive, if also more authoritarian; the typical poetry reader of the 1950s was Anglican (as well as middle class), and the crisis of this group was also the crisis of poetry in the 1960s. The small numbers of the Anglicans are still vast in comparison to the headcount of poetry readers. Whether the shift of poetry into live performance and simple forms was just an offshoot of the Church's wish, in the 1950s, to go into youth clubs, and give witness among the underprivileged, and cast off its inheritance of learning and fine language (as elitist), and be "relevant", I'm not sure; but it doesn't seem that poetry led and the Church followed. If you read a poem from the 1980s which tries to deal with Third World cultures, it's easy to see it as a reflex of a drive of the Church in the 1950s, something which Paul Tillich, for example, was much involved in during the last decade of his life. Purely formalist poetry does have a claim to be outside the shadow of the Church.
If you read De Waal's Chimpanzee Politics, you find out that all the troop is preoccupied with watching interactions between other troop members, and have a perfect capacity for associating behaviour with individuals. This in fact is the basis for self-defence: because there is a memory of bad and aggressive behaviour, individuals cannot escape the consequences of their actions, and bad behaviour is avenged by a withdrawal of trust and support. The individual, dissolved by various decentralising theories, is thus real as a category in which we inevitably store our memories of behaviour. These stores, this connecting, differentiate a mind from a mere perceptual apparatus. The Anglican concern with equity, character, and the parish as the "stage" in which equity is obeyed or abused, thus draws on ancient preoccupations. It is not artificial and cannot get dated. The person is the central value in poetry because the world of a primate is dominated by recognisable individuals, and the software which relates a new interactive moment to years of other interactions with that individual is too powerful ever to be switched off.
Our skill at reading character is what allows us to translate the low-energy gestures of poetic style into psychological facts, and so generate half of the meaning of the poem. Human gestures do not exist without humans. We only perceive style as a consequence of our concern with character.
Her style is Imagist in a certain sense: short lines, precision. But it is dominated by analogies and metaphors. I associate this with the conceit or concetto, brought within the treasury of Anglicanism by 17th C hymns. The concision of the images reminds me of Quarles. The whole book converges into one poem, the product of deep artistic calm. This coherence leads us to map an abiding structure of perception, above the poem itself as the individual moments of perception it records are lower than it.
Christmas
settles over me like
a dream,
the paper-lantern spills
its shining seraph,
safely hitched
to his parachute of light.
Falling, blazing; the sky; stars in the sky as a 3D space in which reactions are staged. A spectrum shift of light is the key symbol of transformation by which outer becomes inner.
Words slipping
their colours through voices,
speak about snow.
A mighty pane of sky cracks
into silver,
trees ring with crashed crystal,
a death of mirrors
breaking to sharpest quiet.
The course of a meteor through the sky, as a bright line which animates a much wider and more passive space, is a response to another person, as the elementary unit of language. Depth of dialogue. Duration and repetition. This becomes the family. Bad interactions within the family make people unhappy. This points to what good language and good behaviour are. The basic task of humans is to form reactions to other people; a precious talent and skill slowed down and emphasized by many images. The person is their reactions to other people.
Dusted with sky
we gather
pale fur of light,
gold and cinnamon
ashes from solar
fission
sift into skin.
Within,
nerve-fibres
kindle stalks of bone,
ignitions lift
heads heavy as wheat.
The mind is a fictile 3D space where a central object is modelled. The spectrum is the richesse of the cognitive reaction; a mutation of let there be light and of the star over Bethlehem. It is valid both at the level of what links our selves to the universe, and at the level of theology, where we need to perceive the creation of God in order to praise Him fittingly. A cry of resentment ("After") at the sociologically conditioned inability of English people to speak their deepest emotions in appropriate language is typical for an Anglican at this moment in time; the keyword display is used. But, the fear of display is overcome at the level of style, by conscious and tranquil ornateness:
Words are the mind arrayed,
a ghost on the page,
torn velvets and threads,
lost dusks
and darknesses spiked
on a pen,
sentient colours exposed,
patterns and whorls
spread wide.
The 1950s brought a crisis of the relationship of the living Anglican to the majestic Anglican language of the past (touched on here perhaps with the archaic and even aristocratic word "array"; come deck my body in the finest array, the ballad says). The fitness of language, that is of a whole-person ethical approach sustained through life, is warranted for us:
Flowers illumine
the borders of conversation,
the ghost of a palace floats
half-conjured,
membranes from glass,
ribs revealed against light,
skin letting in sky.
("Kew Gardens")
The language which is both miraculous and wholly accurate acts out the limits and depth of being together. A visit to the world's oldest wooden church (she tells us), at Greensted, may say why strident language is not the deepest; the durability of this wooden thing (associated here with ships, that are sustained on all sides by what would mean their destruction) is shown to have outlasted the pride and prestige of the royal panoply at Sutton Hoo (also involving a buried ship, we may recall). The war-gear of the Suffolk howe is shown as barren declarative rhetoric. Frequent images of bereavement and grief are gainsaid by images of floating, or gently falling, with a mixture of lightness and serenity.
Some words are like stones,
conglomerations,
wounds, rifts,
edges of cliffs and hidden ranges,
nuances from clashes
ground to a fistful of sound(.)
She keeps comparing language and rock. Is this in fact gravestones and churches? the visible imprint of the Church in a settlement, an almost coarsely palpable metaphor where the substance attests to the durability of the Word embodied in it. More difficult is the use, at a slant angle to this, of stone as an image for deep language gone deeply wrong:
She walked on darkness,
exits blocked in
tunnels, caves
she knew the strata;
families lay fuses,
wired shocks
("Quarry")
where feeling acquires monumental form (the lake of a slate pit, visibly the product of human hand), and the landscape is no less than the result of ethical and selfish impulses.
Who are the Godly Warriors? Geoffrey Hill, Canaan (Penguin, October 1996, 71 pp., £7.99, ISBN 0-14-058786-1); Agenda (volume 34, no.2; A Tribute to Geoffrey Hill, 176 pp., Summer 1996, ISSN 0002-0796, £4.50)
Canaan, Hill's first new book since 1981, is more distinctive, more modern, more concerted, more shimmering with witness, than his previous books; since there is an epigraph set over the whole of it, we can suspect an overall scheme; If there is this unifying subject, it must be an England where faith is kept; outside which we are wandering in the wilderness. His political views slide home like a stanley knife in the opening four lines:
Where's probity in this—
the slither-frisk
to lordship of a kind
as rats to a bird-table?
Hill was one of many Oxford poets who adopted, in the 1950s, the New Criticism, the Metaphysicals, conservatism, and civic address; formal verbal acts revealing fitness for high office. He is difficult and intense: not qualities of any other Penguin poets, but which are found far from the High Street in poets like Prynne, Roger Langley, Allen Fisher, Crozier, Denise Riley; he is not only the most personal of mainstream poets, but also the most public and straightforward of small press poets. My contemporaries have attributed both authenticity and inauthenticity alternately to writing for a wide public and writing in an intensely personal and meaning-rich style, which are Hill's practices. Recent taste has compared 'Pavana dolorosa' to 'Thoughts on the Esterhazy Court Uniform' and found Hill overshadowed by Prynne. Hill is also the latest in a series, in disarray, of Anglican poets. In Canaan the apostolic, historicist forms are thrown away; it has short floating lines, sometimes broken up by linebreaks in the middle, the occasional non-sentences, such as other poets adopted, along with exilic politics, in 1970, or in 1960.
We could consider Hill's conservatism through the terms of law and hierarchy; equity preserves the latter, which is also in-iquity, but staves off general violence. Boundaries—to behaviour as much as of property—are defences: a shared law, moral and commercial, makes everyone secure, as it codifies unequal access to resources. Hill is a Christian, believing in peace, who believes that social peace perpetuates oppression; he is a conservative, enthusiastic for the social advance of the poor and working-class. His artistic pleasures lie in a sphere of small precise effects based on shared conventions which allow great weight to very fine discriminations; they are suited to a geologically and politically stable country. What seems to be happening in Canaan is that the measure of oppression and iniquity has been filled to the point where someone who has spent their life guarding the boundaries is ashamed to speak: the system has lost its mandate of staving off the catastrophe, of all against all. He sums up Parliament with: For they know not to do right, saith the LORD, who store up violence and robbery in their palaces.
In other primate species, too, high rank is granted, by public acclaim, not to the merely strongest individuals, but to the strong who are also kind and non-irascible. My country sometimes appears like a vast refugee camp, without shared symbolic structures, patrolled by officers alien to their subjects; any rebel who can talk convincingly for five minutes can achieve more following and reputation than the camp authorities. Because Hill can talk convincingly about moral issues, he is a threat to the powers that be: an attainted prince. Because of who he is, it's disturbing to hear him denounce as oppression the oppression which founds us; or describe privatization in tones of withering scorn:
England—now of genius
the eidolon—
unsubstantial yet voiding
substance like quicklime:
privatize to the dead
her memory:
let her wounds weep
into the lens of oblivion.
This appears to refer to the selling-off of cemeteries by the Tory Council of Westminster. Eidolon I take to be the tenuous phantom of genius, the national genial-congenial spirit bringing cheerfulness, fecundity, and tradition.
The peace-keeping settlement preserves the nuances of relations established in the past. The testing of leaders is central to their ability to keep the peace; their fitness is measured by fine discriminations, which are then preserved. If you are unfit for high rank, you may be more contented with your low one. Hill is strong on recitation of faults and flaws, even if this is generally what makes us miserable and traps us inside a character instead of inside fulfilment. He isn't perceptive of the possibility that someone might have too little self-esteem.
When I picked up this copy of Agenda, what fell out of it was a letter from two associate editors resigning because of "the editor's attempt to whitewash and justify the tyranny of Mussolini and the Rome broadcasts of Pound". I think it would be quite possible to have an admirable policy while also believing in fascism; one of these two qualities is lacking in Agenda. It was founded in 1959, just before the Sixties—not the best time for the non-populist Right. The Agenda look has been as finicky fossils frozen in horror at modernity, mouths engrossed by a rictus of terror and disdain. The reader hunching through the hushed sodal sacrosanct catacomb is buffeted by a chill wind of disapproval for infringing countless secret laws of aesthetic conduct; he skids on bones which may either be auratic relics of martyrs or simply the detritus of rash left-wing poets. Not all people retain the ability to form new aesthetic responses in adult life. Their staple still is poetry conforming to the standards of the 1950s. The fastidiousness of Hill may coincide with that of Agenda, for whom it is instead the symptom of palsy and nausea. It was a pleasure then, made sordid by our clinging. The avant-garde of the (former) counter-culture may now, too, be retreating to defend past advances made by not defending. Volume 34, number 2, is a half-pounder of boring poetry and boring literary criticism. It is redeemed by a few helpful pages, also by a lecture by Hill, where he suggests that with its crudeness of public address 'Four Quartets' may have caused the collapse of Anglican poetry ever since. Hill is again testing leaders; the followers plunged into ruin. In an exciting footnote, Hill disinvests the last stained rags of Larkin's reputation, before nimbly flicking Christopher Ricks' head into touch.
'De Jure Belli et Pacis' (eight poems) is a memorial to Hans-Bernd von Haeften, a diplomat executed for his part in the 20th July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. The title is a 17th C book by Hugo Grotius, proposing to bring relations between nations within a framework of law: a stay against megalomania in populous nations. The recognition is that what belongs to someone else does not belong to you. Haeften's "Kreisau circle", linked by Pietism and the date of their deaths, were interested in a European Community, pressed as were the builders of the Common Market by the need to avoid another European war. Closely related is the poem to Stefan George, 'Algabal', his early (1891) cycle about Heliogabalus. Losing the kingdom and the parish, Christianity falls, in the forties and fifties, with vigour onto personalism, temporal "commitment". The Widerstand are pin-ups because they were so isolated and outside institutions; not wonder-workers but socially relevant; above all, not communists.
The contents of Anglican doctrine and the ripeness of reason are claimed to be one and the same. The first 'Dark-Land' accounts for Thatcher in terms of Nonconformist self-righteousness, exemplified by Bunyan at Elstow; Hooker does indeed warn us against pirate revelations not validated by 'strong and invincible remonstrance of sound reason' and monetarism was one of those. 'Private Judgment is no Safe Guide', he warns us, and a partial revelation, clenched and clung to though the wise and grave in consistory are wrong, may be blinding, not only sectarians, and the religious Right, but also the Daughter of Grantham, Our Lady with a slate slid. Reason is strong against rage and distress, but what we find reasonable, and reason from, is hierarchy and private property.
Canaan seems to me poetry within the terms of mere Anglicanism; the text would be ideally realized in an annual public service, as a liturgy. 'Rose-douched ammoniac/ arch goddess/ of intimate apparel,/ brutal and bijou': Hill's diction is like one of those recipes of gin makers which list coriander, allspice, juniper berries, clear runnings of distilled grain, burnt feathers, lanolin, old red sandstone, Chinese dandelions, wild lettuce, moths' eyes, pepper and chicken spleen; nubby and exotic, it reminds us of those qualities in the Prayer Book and Authorized Version. We take it that the title of 'A Song of Degrees' refers, not only to the steps to the altar, but to the antiphonal singing by the laity of the psalms so labelled in our Bible: the poem concerns darkened voices outside the Church:
It is said Adonai your hidden word
declares itself
even from obscurity
through energies dispersed
fallen upon stasis
brought by strangers to interpretation,
aspirant to the common plight.
We owe to John Stevens remarks on the very close attention to texts which the reformed sixteenth-century hymnody brought: the ears are the only tool of a Christian, Luther said: lights have been driven through the walls of Canaan's diction until stone soars and air carries an abiding truth. Perfect intellectual attention is part-way to divinity; raptness of listening is a solution of the continuity of egoism. We take it that Thatcherism came over this One Nation conservative like a bout of TB of the bones. 'Concerning Inheritance' suggests that inherited wealth is wrong, jeering at the moralists in office who
grant inequity from afar to be in equity's covenant,
its paradigm drawn on the fiducial stars,
its aegis anciently a divine shield
over the city.
This Church owed its origin to a contract with a kingdom, an access of mighty secular power; its crisis points have been the link with capitalism and with warfare, and the withdrawal of the whole nation from its ecclesia; Hill is not just fighting for the soul of the Conservative Party, but for the political and social mission of the Church thirled to
a spectral people
raking among the ash;
its freedom a lost haul
of entailed riches.
In 'Scenes with Harlequins', the speaker is Blok, in a Saint Petersburg, entranced then by commedia dell'arte, where the eyes of statues are compared to the eyes of Symbolists, dreaming of a future where the world-mind brings about harmony; they are seen in negatives, searing flash visions as if glimpses of a new organ of sense. The Blok-speaker refers to his poem 'Retribution' (Vozmezdie), and to the Beautiful Lady (Krasivaya Dama) cycle.
Begone you grave jewellers
and you spartan hoplites
in masks of foil.
Orthodox arcane
interpreters of repute,
this is understood.
Why should I hear
further what you propose?
Exegetes may come
to speak to the silence
that has arisen. It is
not unheard of.
Blok and George complete, as emblematic figures, Bunyan and Thatcher; the cycle on 'Mysticism and Democracy' says that some balance between the public and the visionary must be struck, the incompatibles settling on a boundary hedge. Hill stages the bizarre and extreme to find the liminal light where the psychotic processes give way to reason, clearing a field for the socius. Almost all the poems here are based on prose texts; most recount ecstatic experiences: Hill set out from the Metaphysical paradox, the irrational as touchstone of wit, and both shows the limits of reason and its space-stringent power to lay out symbolic order.
He disproves the words of rulers only to assert that a good society is thinkable. A sequence is called 'Psalms of Assize', the titles of three poems apostrophize parliament as the "highest court": the answer sought affects guilt within a legal process which converges on real past events in recreation, rather than facing a new situation; Hill is quite remote from the poetry of the here and now, experimentalism as the practice of freedom. European (but not Confucian) legal argument chops and channels the chaos of everyday life to recognize in it valid analogies to the frozen verbal forms of a law-code: even to name a crime is to win a convergent intellectual victory. The poems are like the brilliant phrases of a lawyer, sensibility is subordinated to acuity within the civil duties of proof and reproof. Religion is also a form of law, where the recognition of analogy between scripture and our lives gives us our duty; Hill's use of recognition and analogy typifies him.
Hill's dual hoarding and honing of the language of law and of the Bible, commemorates the constitutional link of Church and State, both claiming his fealty; the beauty of art also persuades the disaffected that the society they live in is worth joining. Being disaffected is surely one of the greatest miseries there can be. To adorn the process is to help legitimate it, which is why Hill's new fury at the makers of laws:
You; as by custom unillumined
masters of servile counsel.
Who can now speak for despoiled merit,
the fouled catchments of Demos,
as 'thy' high lamp presides with sovereign
equity, over against us, across this
densely reflective, long-drawn, procession of waters?
("To the High Court of Parliament')
may have lead him to throw out the soothing high-calory isometric diction of previous books. (The lamp is the Parliament building, just before evoked as a "storm-lantern"; catchment associates the sewage-carrying quality of water, its swallowing of all dirt from higher up, with its quality of always falling; a poem in Hill's 1953 pamphlet also evokes the Thames, via William Dunbar.)
In the poem for Christopher Okigbo, an Ibo English-language poet of startling talent, final chords of forgiveness and atonement weakly assist recovery from a diction which fuses the divine, the psychotic, and the butcher's shop. I could ask how we can stand to see re-created an era of national history which, in its occurrence, was unbearable. What 'Sobieski's Shield' discreetly says is that the stars go on shining during the day time even if we can't see them, and so too Justice and Equity are still there above us despite the iniquity of the instated:
Brusque as the year
purple garish-brown
aster chrysanthemum
signally restored
to a subsistence of slant light
; a witness of Anglican cordial geniality and hopefulness, bringing a pang of relief. Du führst die Sache meiner Seele. Jan Sobieski is one of the godly warriors of the book, to go with Stauffenberg, Churchill, and perhaps Okigbo. A friend suggested marketing Hill's Lachrimae, a tear-shaped paste of prussic almond kernels coated in very bitter chocolate and with a God-shaped hole in the middle, for the Christmas of Anglicans. But he does purvey the luxuries and splendours; his curious finickiness only serves to prolong the experience.