Poetry Notebook (10 page)

As a reciter of his own work, James Fenton has the precious double gift of speaking with unaffected naturalness while retaining all the rigorous construction of his verse forms.
The exemplary counterpoint comes in especially handy when he recites ‘Jerusalem’, which is composed of verbal fragments, and would easily seem to fall apart if his voice failed to match
the control of tone that holds it together. Many of the phrases come out of those areas of contemporary experience that unsettle us all by threatening to bring us into the firing line. ‘Who
packed your bag?’ Fenton, who has actually seen the firing line from close up, is very generous in supposing that his readers might be as concerned as he is about a world in conflict, and his
poetry in general can be said to arouse the disturbing possibility that history will give us a poetry more interesting than serenity.

‘The Red Sea’ by Stephen Edgar

Stephen Edgar is the Australian poet who most convincingly, and most rewardingly, continues and enriches the line of the orderly lyric that was established after the Second
World War by Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, but Edgar has a range of pinpoint registration exceeding even theirs, mainly because he doesn’t hesitate to avail himself of a scientific
vocabulary. In ‘The Red Sea’, the poem is into its second stanza before we realize the yachts are toys, and there is a new revelation at least once per stanza until, in the end, the
threat of the real world arrives in the form of Macbeth’s bloodlust. The vast scale of argument packed into small melodic stanzas is typical, as is the quiet voice, which reminds us that only
a carefully schooled detachment could possibly see so much.

‘Machines’ by Michael Donaghy

The late Michael Donaghy was a renowned reader of his own work. He had his poems by heart and recited them without a hint of histrionics, relying always on the natural music of
the colloquial American voice. As a consequence there was an often striking contrast between the ease of the delivery and the intricacy of the construction. ‘Machines’ is an artefact at
least as well built as either the harpsichord or the bicycle celebrated in the narrative, the two miracles of construction being brought together in marriage in the final lines, which are
understated in the writing, and even more so when he reads them aloud. As his fine critical writings continually emphasize, Donaghy was a great believer in the formal element, but he always left
room for the reader to discover it.

When talking about Michael Donaghy’s poem ‘Machines’ I made the large assumption that a poem’s form can be appreciated while the work is being recited.
My own view is that if the recital is careful enough, it can; but the contrary view is easier to hold, because bits of the poem, unless we already know the poem well, will snag the attention and
divert the concentration. Such diversions, indeed, can be called a key requirement. What is a poem whose single moments do not arrest you? It sounds as if it might be pabulum. Nevertheless, no
matter how brilliant the fragment, we are not likely to attribute poetic virtue to its author until we get some structural evidence that he or she is not writing prose. Usually, for evidence, we
need a stanza; and it has always been my own conviction that you need the ability to build a stanza if you are to get into the game. A stack of stanzas would be better; but failing that, one stanza
is the necessary minimum. By that measure, the author of the scurrilous ‘Ballad of Eskimo Nell’ was a poet but Jack London was not. They both wrote poems about the deadly rigours of the
frozen North, but Jack London, though he longed for success as a poet, never wrote a stanza that anyone wanted to remember: his whole gift was for prose. Thus, poor guy, he was condemned to fame
and wealth: a fate that most poets avoid.

At a time when almost everyone writes poetry but scarcely anyone can write a poem, it is hard not to wish for a return to some less accommodating era, when the status of
‘poet’ was not so easily aspired to, and the only hankering was to get something said in a memorable form. Alas, we would have to go a long way back. Samuel Daniel (1562–1619)
certainly wanted to be thought of as a poet – it was his career, even when he was working for nobles as a gentleman servant – and there must have been critics who wanted to deny him the
title, or they would not have attacked him for too often revising his work, and he would not have defended himself thus:

The battle was fought out more than four hundred years ago, and Daniel won it. Unless we are scholars of the period, we might have small knowledge of his work in general, but
this one stanza is quite likely to have got through to us. It is often quoted as an example of how there were poets much less important than Shakespeare who nevertheless felt that they, too, might
be writing immortal lines to time, and were ready to drub any popinjay who dared to suggest that they weren’t. But clearly the stanza did not get through to us just because of the story it
tells or the position it takes. It got through by the way it moves. Within its tight form, it is a playground of easy freedom: not a syllable out of place, and yet it catches your ear with its
conversational rhythm at every point.

It would be tempting to say that any poet, in any era, needs to be able to construct at least one stanza like that or he will never even join the contest. Daniel’s technique was so
meticulous that it can teach us how words were pronounced in his time. The opening line of one of the sonnets in which he complains about harsh treatment from his vainly adored Delia runs
‘Fair is my love, and cruel as she’s fair.’ Thus we can tell that the word ‘cruel’ was probably pronounced with a full two syllables, or there would be a syllable
missing from the line. (If he had written ‘she is’ instead of ‘she’s’ we would have known that he scanned ‘cruel’ as one syllable, and perhaps even
pronounced it that way too, as we do now.) Unfortunately Daniel seldom wrote an entire poem – not even his beautifully entitled ‘Care-charmer Sleep’ – in which every line
was as vivid as that. But he did compose that one stanza, and we only have to read it once before we are drawn in to see how it is held together, and to start asking why we put up with so much
unapologetic awkwardness from poets now. Limping numbers from poets writing in free verse are presumably meant, but limping numbers from poets who are avowedly
trying
to write in set forms
must be mere clumsiness. The perpetrators might say that they are getting back to the vitality of an initial state, in which Donne demonstrated the vigour that roughness could give before the false
ideal of smoothness arrived. But Daniel was already writing before Donne, and we have at least one stanza to prove that lack of vigour was not his problem. All too often his lines lacked semantic
pressure, but they always moved with a precise energy, and he could put them together into an assemblage that danced.

Perhaps to ask for a whole stanza is asking too much, and just a few lines will work the trick. The drawback there, however, is that the few lines tend to break free not just from the poem, but
from the poet’s name. Very few readers of poetry now, however wide their knowledge, would be able to give a name to the poet who wrote this:

As a thought experiment, I see myself presented with this fragment in a practical criticism class of the kind that I took in Cambridge in the mid-sixties. Even with the benefit
of the knowledge that I have acquired since, I might still be at a loss to name its author, partly because it could have had so many authors. Almost certainly it stems from a period when free-form
modernism was already being reacted against: all the scrupulous tension of modernist diction is in it, but there is also a conscious heightening, as of a return to well-made elegance, so we are
probably, at the very earliest, somewhere in the years after 1945, when the American formalists were already operating and Britain’s phalanx of Movement poets were on their way up. The line
‘The drained-off retrogressive sea’ might have been turned by Philip Larkin, who was fond of coupling his adjectives into a train. The fresh fish on the market stalls might have come
from ‘The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World’, the long poem in which Galway Kinnell took out the patent on fish imagery. Except that Elizabeth Bishop took out a
rival patent when she, too, got into the seafood business. Could it be her? With my supervisor looking at his watch and pressing for an answer, I would have to say that the watery departure towards
the moon sounds like Richard Wilbur writing just after the end of the Second World War, or perhaps James Merrill a bit later, or perhaps Stephen Edgar writing last year, or perhaps . . . But the
flock of names, mere shorthand for a flock of tones, would only mean that I had found a single voice unidentifiable. And indeed the poet’s name is probably still unidentifiable when I reveal
it: Dunstan Thompson.

I would have liked to say that Thompson (1918–1975) is the missing man from the post-Second World War poetic story, but the sad truth is that he has gone missing for a reason. Born and
raised in America, he had an enviably cosmopolitan education that culminated at Harvard, from which he went into the army. During the war, his poetic career started off brilliantly with his
collection
Poems
(Simon and Schuster, 1943) and continued after the war with
Lament for the Sleepwalker
(Dodd, Mead and Company, 1947). These were big-time publishing houses and he
won big-time recognition, his name often included in the magic list of voices built to last. Stephen Spender gave Thompson a papal imprimatur, thereby, perhaps, signalling that there might be a
fertile context waiting for Thompson across the Atlantic. When Thompson’s second book came out he had already resettled in England, and there he began the long business – difficult, for
one so prominently placed in several of the ‘war poets’ anthologies – of ensuring that he would be forgotten. There was quite a lot to forget, and how exactly he managed to
translate prominence into oblivion raises some unsettling questions. He wrote one poem, ‘Largo’, whose qualities should have been remembered, even though it runs to some length and not
all of it is in tight focus. Here is a sample stanza:

This majestic form, one of his own devising, is continued through all ten stanzas of the poem, with a scarcely faltering interplay between the hexameters, tetrameters, and
trimeters – everything except pentameters, in fact. Anywhere in the poem’s wide panorama, the half rhymes are handled with an infallibly musical tact: the modular balancing of
‘well’, ‘wall’, and ‘will’ in the quoted stanza is only a single instance of a multiple enchantment. You would say that a man who could build such an exquisite
machine could do anything, technically. But even though bringing all this mastery to bear, he couldn’t do anything definite with the subject matter. From what thin biographical evidence
exists, it is possible to conclude that Thompson was one of those gay male poets trapped between the urge to speak and the love that dare not speak its name. Auden escaped the trap by scarcely
dropping a hint until the safety whistle blew decades later. But Thompson wanted to spill the beans, not just about Damon and Pythias and Richard II and A. E. Housman – whether named or
merely alluded to, they all crop up during the poem – but about himself and his lover, evidently a fellow serviceman. Unfortunately he could spill only a few beans at once. There were limits
to what he could say, and the result is a flurry of tangential suggestions, a cloud of innuendo. ‘Largo’ was a clear case – the only clear thing about it – of a poem written
before its time, and by the time its time had come, the poem was gone. Oscar Williams, the best anthologist of the post-war years on either side of the Atlantic, published it in his invaluable
A
Little Treasury of Modern Poetry
, but I have never seen it anywhere else. I would like to call the poem magnificent. But it gives only flashes of the total effect it might have had, and there
lay the problem that dogged Thompson’s poetry for the rest of his career, and eventually buried him.

In England after the war, Thompson went on writing poems, most of which were collected posthumously in
Poems 1950–1974.
The book has an impressive physical appearance, rather along
the lines of a Faber collection of the shorter poems of Auden or MacNeice. But the publishing house was an off-trail outfit called Paradigm Press, who can’t have printed many copies. During
decades of haunting secondhand bookshops all over the world, I only ever saw a single copy, and that was in Cambridge in 2006. I picked it up, wondering who he was, read the lines about the
seashore quoted above, and took it home to read it through.