English Poetry Since 1940

Neil Corcoran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138177086
• eBook ISBN: 9781317902355
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Neil Corcoran's book is a major survey and interpretation of modern British poetry since 1940, offering a wealth of insights into poets and their work and placing them in a broader context of poetic dialogue and cultural exchange. The book is organised into five main parts, beginning with a consideration of the late Modernism of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden and ranging, decade by decade, from the poetry of the Second World War and the `New Romanticism' of Dylan Thomas to the Movement, the poetry of Northern Ireland, the variety of contemporary women's poetry and the diversity of the contemporary scene. The book will be especially useful for students as it includes detailed and lively readings of works by such poets as Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin.

Part One

(Dis)continuities and (Dis)placements After Modernism

Introduction

The history of poetry since 1940 is in large part the history of reactions to the high Modernist moment of writing in English from the turn of the century up to the end of the 1930s. At various points in this study I describe some of the ways in which the assumptions of Modernism maintain a persistence in later poetry; some of the reactions against it; some of the varying subsequent accommodations made with it; and some of the results of the recognition that it has, now, a definite literary and cultural past whose genealogy and heritage can be, at least approximately, classified and clarified. I also suggest that the term ‘postmodern’ may be invested with real content and taxonomic usefulness, and propose that the neglected term ‘neo-Modern’ be newly applied. In this preliminary section I want to consider the later work of those poets who continued to publish well into the period and whose work influentially focuses some crucial points in this debate. I omit any account of two such poets: Robert Graves, whose large lyric output persisted deep into the period and whose prose work The White Goddess (1947) has been, as I suggest elsewhere, variously influential, but the continuities of whose lengthy career are such as not to demand any separate treatment of his later work in a history of this kind; and of William Empson who, although influential on poetry of the English 1950s in some of the ways I describe in Part Three, ceased to publish poetry after his volume The Gathering Storm in 1940.

Chapter 1

Eliot or Auden

T.S. Eliot, addressing an audience in his home town of St Louis, Missouri on the subject of ‘American Literature and the American Language’ in 1953, made a wry comparison of himself and W.H. Auden. ‘I do not know,’ he said, ‘whether Auden is to be considered as an English or as an American poet: his career has been useful to me with an answer to the same question when asked about myself for I can say: “whichever Auden is, I suppose I must be the other” ‘.¹ The point of comparison here is that of national identity: Eliot, born an American, had taken British citizenship in 1927, the year in which he was baptised into the Church of England, and was to progress to an Order of Merit and a grave in Westminster Abbey; Auden, Yorkshire public schoolboy and Oxford graduate, had notoriously left England for America in 1939, a move coinciding with such an alteration in the nature of his poetry that numerous critics think reflexly of two virtually opposed phases of the career, and his earlier work has been posthumously edited as The English Auden.

If Eliot and Auden are ‘other’ in their later national identities and affiliations, they are opposed in much else too. By 1953, when he made these remarks, Eliot had already long since assumed his late poetic near-silence, interrupted only by those poetic dramas which gave him a strangely metamorphosed later career in London’s West End. Auden, on the other hand, maintained an extremely fertile later career, producing a vast number of poems of great formal and metrical variety. Both Eliot’s later silence (which is in some ways programmed by or inscribed in his final poem Four Quartets) and Auden’s later volubility may also be regarded as opposed modes of withdrawal from an earlier commitment to some of the principles, presumptions and structures of Modernism. In the Quartets Eliot brings Modernist free verse and Mallarméan symbolism to their ultimate pitch in English writing, even in the act of chastising their inadequacy; Auden in his later work wilfully insists on a discursive model of pre-Modernist, even Augustan formal and technical civility, accompanied by a startlingly mechanistic theory of poetry as ‘contraption’ (only in the bath is he tempted to ‘retreat from rhyme and reason into some mallarmesque / syllabic fog’, he tells us in the sequence ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’). Where Eliot cites and attempts the Mallarméan effort to ‘purify the dialect of the tribe’, Auden revels in the impurities of lexical variety, arcana and neologism, and reverses all symbolist principle by revising himself in public, attempting to make his earlier work proteanly coincident with his later beliefs, regarding poetry as an element of honest behaviour. In their withdrawals from Modernism, Eliot develops a poetic of lack, Auden one of plenitude; Eliot is a metaphysician, Auden a moralist. In these antithetical reactions, Eliot and Auden, figures of large and unpredictable influence, provide opposed models for other poets of the period; and their opposition may in some ways be read as a tension within individual poets and within the larger history of the period itself.

Eliot’s Four Quartets is a poem in which the symbolism of his earlier work is disciplined and placed by alternative and oppositional discourses. Prominent among these is an altogether less private and hermetic mode desired as appropriate to a poet addressing a nation in a time of war. Apart from the earliest poem in the sequence, ‘Burnt Norton’ (1935), the Quartets were composed and published during the early years of the war, and their local imagery, metaphor and allusion frequently concern the circumstances of the time. Beyond this, however, the whole poem holds up the idea of an England worth defending. It celebrates specific places whose near-anonymity is newly named with resonant familial, personal or historical association; it offers a vision in ‘Little Gidding’ of the capital city enduring the German air-raids of 1940; it proposes an idea of a national identity and solidarity developed as an alternative to a faction-torn history of civil war. England in the Quartets is also the location of a lovingly evoked rural antiquity whose cultural persistences are incarnate in the liturgy and architecture of the Anglican Church. The patriotic figuring of this England has all the hallmarks of some of the quasi-propagandist work of the time, such as the Powell and Pressburger film A Canterbury Tale (1944) for instance, which includes imagery of urban devastation and rural and agricultural continuity, and climaxes in one of the greatest shrines of English Anglicanism, Canterbury Cathedral (the location of the first performances of Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, 1935, leftover fragments of which initiated ‘Burnt Norton’). Four Quartets both is part of and helped establish and define the Christian literary revival of the war and post-war period (in the work of Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis, among others).

This quasi-propagandist inspiration in the poem was clearly visible to its earliest critic, Eliot’s friend John Hayward, when he said, prior to the publication of ‘Little Gidding’, that it is ‘the kind of work that consolidates one’s faith in the continuity of thought and sensibility when heaven is falling and earth’s foundations fail’.² It is, therefore, virtually the opposite of what The Waste Land had been widely taken to be: evidence for the ‘collapse of a civilisation’; and the Quartets may be read as Eliot’s construction of a valuable continuity as an adequate response to the ‘humiliation’ he felt in September 1938 (the time of Munich), according to an uncharacteristically personal passage from his book The Idea of a Christian Society (1939). This humiliation, he says there, ‘seemed to demand an act of personal contrition, of humility, repentance and amendment’:

We could not match conviction with conviction, we had no ideas with which we could either meet or oppose the ideas opposed to us. Was our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premisses, assembled around anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends?³

The note of personal penitence combined with public responsibility is very much the dual note sounded by Four Quartets itself: the ‘idea of a Christian society’ is to be founded in the individual soul as well as in the public realm, and the ‘idea’ in relation to both is, for Eliot, expressed by the finest, and most ascetic, traditions of the Anglican Church, which are to be discovered above all in the writings of seventeenth-century divines: which is why, in ‘Little Gidding’, ‘while the light fails / On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel / History is now and England’.

One of the major aims and ends of the poem is therefore a religious or metaphysical idea of the English patria formulated in time of war by this American poet who had, in 1928, declared his ‘general point of view … classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion’.⁴ The poem’s evocations of England, meditating the history of a sensibility out of the associations, affiliations and affections of specific English places, are made all the sharper by the fact that this American-born poet is consciously seeking a new identity, and declaring an older ancestry, as an English Anglican and a British citizen; the one quartet with a partly American setting, and an American placename title, ‘The Dry Salvages’, places this intention in some relief. The megalopolitan and European-cosmopolitan genesis of high Modernism could hardly have undergone a stranger metamorphosis: the deracination of a waste land is supplanted by the chthonic rootedness that is now and England, beginning and end, ‘nourishing the corn’. The poem’s patriotism is therefore the enemy of Eliot’s early symbolist manner: it insists on acknowledgements and recognitions, on decorums of public tact and accountability, which the symboliste hermeticisms, fragmentations and obliquities of The Waste Land, and of The Hollow Men and Ash-Wednesday, were, it might be thought, almost designed to avoid. The symbolist and the discursive therefore jostle each other in the poem in an anxious and self-chastising or self-corrective mobility. The characteristic movement of the Quartets is a wavering oscillation between modes; of The Waste Land it is the absolute authoritative fiat of judgemental Modernist assurance: ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future’, but ‘April is the cruelest month’. Four Quartets becomes thereby a poem in which the high Modernist moment of writing in English apologises for and reduces itself: ‘That was a way of putting it, not very satisfactory: / A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion’; ‘You say I am repeating / Something I have said before. I shall say it again. / Shall I say it again?’; and, in ‘East Coker’, with an allusion to his own earlier work of a kind not untypical of the Quartets, in this case the opening of ‘Gerontion’:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years –

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’ entre deux guerres –

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it.

The sharp regretfulness of that is slightly undermined by its oscillation between ‘I’ and ‘one’ as personal pronouns, between an apparently genuinely confessional Eliot and an Eliot rather primly observing some of the dictates of his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. The self-corrective modes and styles of the Quartets sometimes have this unsettling tendency to lurch and lapse between tones, as Eliot reaches for a form that will both contain his own distresses and establish relationship with a realm of public discourse. When the impersonal personal pronoun ‘one’ starts repeating itself in these lines Eliot is not far from the lecturer’s or preacher’s tone; and the portentous or pontifical is never altogether out of earshot in the final three Quartets. The tone of ‘The Dry Salvages’ is so odd indeed that it has prompted a notorious essay from Donald Davie (following a hint from Hugh Kenner) suggesting that the entire quartet is a parody;⁵ and it is the element guyed by Henry Reed in his well-known ‘Chard Whitlow’. At the very least, Eliot’s withdrawal from Modernist obliquity and ‘invisibility’ leads to an uneasy alternation between the Mallarméan-symbolist and the Arnoldian-discursive in the Quartets. The occasional pomposity to which this gives rise makes the poem, for many readers, less completely realised and satisfying than Eliot’s earlier work.

Four Quartets is, nevertheless, alert to its own deficiencies, inscribing them as elements of the constantly revised ‘attempts’ of writing (‘For us there is only the trying’) and saving itself from dogmatic assertiveness by the quality of its own painful misgiving. It is, in the end, that strangest of all poetic kinds, the poem which seeks to replace aesthetic delight with ascetic purgation; and it is peculiarly appropriate that it should have ended Eliot’s poetic career twenty years before his actual death. In Eliot, the fate of the modern in its symbolist mode is to be subsumed by a contrite Christian apologetics. The poem’s numerous paradoxes hinge on this central one: that this poetry is a poetry which insists that ‘the poetry does not matter’. In its self-cancelling audacity it manifests, it may be, an exhaustion with style which is itself a new but, in the Eliot oeuvre, a terminal style; and its truest note is that of a melancholy serenity which bids farewell to its symbolist origins and sources, to that poetic of luminous intensity, pleading a recourse to other personal, familial, national and religious pieties and fidelities:

Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

Along with the various ascetic renunciations of his last poem, Eliot dramatises, in what is frequently considered its finest episode, an ack...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Editors’ Preface
• Longman Literature in English Series
• Author’s Preface
• Dedication
• PART ONE: (DIS)CONTINUITIES AND (DIS)PLACEMENTS AFTER MODERNISM
• PART TWO: FROM THE FORTIES
• PART THREE: FROM THE FIFTIES
• PART FOUR: FROM THE SIXTIES
• PART FIVE: SINCE 1970
• Chronology
• General Bibliographies
• Individual Authors
• Index