Poetry Notebook (3 page)

When they knew each other back in England before the First World War, Ezra Pound – excellent critic that he was, when not in the grip of mania – could see the essential strength of
the early Frost’s diction. For one thing, it was so classically schooled. (Even today, when so much biographical and critical work on Frost has accumulated, it is often forgotten that it was
Frost, and not Pound or Eliot, who really knew Greek and Latin.) But Pound wanted modern poetry to go in a less formal direction, in which a poem could be sustained by its moments – a
direction in which a long poem made of fragments might be possible. (In fulfilling that plan some of Pound’s later imitators were to be more convincing than he was: Galway Kinnell with
The
Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World
, Christopher Logue with his
War Music
.) We have to make our own minds up whether the evidence of the short poems in
Personae
proves that Pound was really such a master of set forms he could afford to abandon them, but what matters is that he did so, and was prepared to back those who did the same. One of
them was Eliot, who really was a formal master: but his informal poems, especially
Prufrock
and
The Waste Land
, changed everything, and deserved to, because the moments were many and
unforgettable. Alas, one of the side effects was to create the impression that anyone could do it, and that everything could be said by saying anything.

Frost had a keen and worried eye for trends. He was never as nastily jealous of his turf as his most influential later biographer, Lawrance Thompson, made out. But Frost did have a roost to
rule, and he felt it threatened by the runaway vogue for poetry that made a virtue of lacking discipline. How could his concealed discipline be a merit in a field where discipline itself was held
to be an inhibition? By the late 1930s, lecturing at Amherst or at Harvard or just dropping funny remarks at any whistle-stop in his endless tour through the poetry-reading circuit that he
invented, he was ready to trash Pound’s name: politely, but decisively. But Frost the patriarch was all too aware that his lifelong emphasis on craft had become an anachronism, if poetry were
to be measured by the sheer number of people writing it. A great Frost poem like ‘The Axe-Helve’ (even Baptiste’s ethnically flavoured dialogue fits it exactly) was a metaphor for
the poet’s pride in skilled work. Pride in unfettered expression was a different kind of pride, and looked, to him, awfully like unfounded self-approval.

At this distance, Frost’s celebrated gibe about formless poetry – tennis without a net – rings hollow, and not just because it has been repeated too often by solemn
traditionalists. Too many poems without rhyme, without strict shape, without ascertainable rhythm – without almost everything – have been unarguably successful. But within an informal
poet’s work, I think, even those successful poems mainly add up to poetry. Few of them are the choppily well-separated thing. Craig Raine’s
History: The Home Movie
passes every
test for the brilliant moment. It is a universe of brilliant moments. But are its constituent individual poems really self-contained? He might answer that they aren’t trying to be, and indeed
there is no compulsion any more to try any such thing. (There is still an inner, instinctive compulsion, perhaps: take the way that someone as modest as U. A. Fanthorpe, whose poems are usually
shaped by nothing but her unspectacular powers of argument, suddenly writes a lulu like ‘Not My Best Side’ – still formless, but vital in every line.) But if the scope has opened
further for the highly talented, it has not done so without making far too much room for the talentless, who are no longer easily recognizable. Apart from the encouragement offered the poetaster to
become more productive than he has ever been in history, there is the even more reprehensible encouragement offered such a gifted poet as John Ashbery, in his later career as an arts factory, to
turn out a continuous emission of isotropic mincemeat. Still, you can always say that about hamburger: it’s as American as apple pie.

In another instalment, if I don’t get lynched for this one, I would want to mention the famous 1960 Grove Press anthology
The New American Poetry
(edited by Donald M. Allen), which
was instrumental in spreading the American abstract poem across the Atlantic to Britain, and indeed across the Pacific to Australia. Pound (along with William Carlos Williams) gave Charles
Olson’s poetry the courage to be born, and Olson did the same for a generation of freedom-loving bards not just in America but in the entire English-speaking world. Pound had argued –
and Eliot had helped him prove – that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated
jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry, which it could do if the pentameter were rigorously eschewed. Buttressed by the widely shared opinion that his ungovernable output had to be poetry
because it wasn’t prose, Olson acquired imitators wherever in the world English was haltingly spoken. If Hart Crane had lived to see the day, he would have looked for another ship and thrown
himself off the back of that.

As for Frost, he had already foresuffered all, like Tiresias: his streak of paranoia was actually a perception. In post-war America, there would be hold-outs against temptation: Richard Wilbur,
Anthony Hecht. In Britain, the dazzling example of Auden’s formal virtuosity was to hold the advancing blob at bay for a long time, all the way to Larkin and beyond. By now, however, the game
has irreversibly lost its net: you have to
pretend
the net is still there. But let there be no doubt that Olson’s influence was liberating. The question is about what it liberated. I
quote from
The New American Poetry
. Here is the entirety of the sixth of ‘The Songs of Maximus’:

That’s all, folks. I can’t believe it was very hard to do. No wonder so many young poets of the future felt inspired. Perhaps that was a kind of freedom, but I
still think I might have chosen a better course in emulating Hart Crane, who at least required that his epigones should plausibly echo the slurred volubility of dipsomania.

When I wrote ‘Listening to the Flavour’ for
Poetry
(Chicago) and thus inaugurated my Poetry Notebook, I was gripped by the notion that I might use this
approach to sum up my own lifetime of poetry reading, which I had begun by working my way through the constantly varying stack of slim volumes on my cafe table at Sydney University. But it also
occurred to me that the world had changed, and that young beginners of today might think differently about those slim volumes. They might not even have seen any. Even with such a literary subject
as poetry, you can nowadays get a long way without taking your eyes off the computer screen. Hart Crane’s mysteriously lovely poem ‘North Labrador’, for example, is available at a
single click on the PoemHunter site, if you don’t mind dodging a preliminary advertisement on video. But for the young literary enthusiasts that I personally know, the book is not yet dead. I
hope that stays true, for their sake; because I remember too well the thrill of buying those slim volumes second-hand. When the
Wall Street Journal
asked me to nominate my five favourite
modern poetry books, my first reaction was to ask myself why a serious newspaper was behaving like a blog. (Five Favourite Modern Poetry Books; Five New Teenage Celebrities Forgotten Since Last
Week.) But I soon saw an opportunity beckoning: to transmit, for a new generation, my gratitude for the neatness and the concentration of the slight volume densely packed with memorable meaning. A
big ‘collected’ volume can overwhelm you: you might bounce off. The slim volume allows you to feel straight away that you might be getting somewhere. Having reached that conclusion, I
had to admit that it didn’t apply to Robert Frost, whose slim volumes had always appealed to me less than the big collected volume, getting bigger all the time as he grew older. Nor did it
apply to Yeats, whose work, in my beginning days, was available only in the forbiddingly chubby Macmillan collected edition. So really I had two opinions on the matter, even after so long a time.
Anyway, I did my list, and tried to enjoy the tacit contract that anything I said had to fit into a tiny space, like one of the microdots of old-fashioned espionage.

W. B. Yeats,
The Tower
(1928)

Every separate collection of Yeats’s poems from
Responsibilities
(1918) onward is tremendous, but
The Tower
is my favourite. ‘That is no country for
old men. The young / In one another’s arms . . .’ Not a bad start. I’m lucky enough to own a copy of the book – bought long ago as part of a job lot in an Oxford antiquarian
bookshop on its way out of business – but I wouldn’t fancy even the most determined enthusiast’s chances of finding a hardback copy second-hand today. It can be found easily,
though, in the
Collected Poems
, where the groupings of the original individual volumes are sensibly preserved. (This is a good rule, often broken by misguided scholarly editors who restore
the chronological order that the poet himself once carefully avoided in favour of something more interesting.) The only threat that Yeats’s
Collected Poems
offers is that the beginning
reader might get caught up in the Celtic fairyland of the great man’s winsome early days. Cut straight to
The Tower
and you’re in the middle of his full-blown achievement, with
masterpieces arriving one after the other: ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, ‘Leda and the Swan’, ‘Among School Children’ and
(last poem in the book, and one of the greatest poems written in the twentieth century) ‘All Soul’s Night’. In everyday life Yeats stayed young and foolish too long, but in the
full maturity of his art he got such a rich music out of seemingly ordinary speech that the language found and kept its ideal speaker.

Robert Frost,
Collected Poems

Frost’s individual collections are useful to have, but the full
Collected Poems
is the book that matters, because his masterpieces, which were seldom of more than
medium length at most, are scattered evenly throughout his long and fruitful career. The trick with the
Collected Poems
is to avoid the longer poems until the shorter ones have taken over
your mind. The longer poems have good things in them, but the self-contained showpiece poems give you his essence, and his essence is one you should learn to recognize before watching him
distribute it over the framework of an extended edifice. In his case, familiarity breeds reverence: never dodge a Frost lyric just because it is famous. ‘The Gift Outright’ isn’t
any less of an achievement because Frost thought it elementary enough for him to recite at JFK’s inaugural. A public life is one of the things Frost wanted for his poetry. The idea of
obscurity for its own sake repelled him. Though he could play the part of cracker-barrel philosopher, his reputation for folksiness was largely foisted on him by those who had a vested interest in
the oblique and wanted poetry to be taught rather than remembered. Frost wanted it to engage the reader straight away, even when the appeal was subtle. He sets out (the present tense seems more and
more appropriate) to get his lines into your head, and with a short but perfect achievement like ‘The Silken Tent’ he can get a whole poem into your head, even though, because of the
intricacy of its construction, readers will find it almost impossible to memorize what they can never quite forget.

W. H. Auden,
Look, Stranger!
(1936)

Already a giant in his lifetime, Auden has been treated after his death to the monumental splendours of a pharaonic entombment. The posthumous books with his name on them are so
big that you would swear he was occupying his own equivalent of the Valley of the Kings. It would be churlish to begrudge all this scholarly effort (Edward Mendelson is a learned, tactful and often
necessary editor) but the original slim volumes are the form that Auden should be read in, if you can find them. A long search on the web for a copy of the marvellously entitled
Look,
Stranger!
would be well worth it. (In the US the book was called
On This Island
, from another part of the title poem’s first line.) Safely in hand, the light but weighty volume
reminds us that a few individual poems are where a reputation starts from. Actually there are other Auden slim volumes that yield even richer rewards, but only
Look, Stranger!
has poem No.
IX (in a fit of pseudo-simplicity, the rebel angel was avoiding verbal titles in that period), and only poem No. IX starts with the mind-bending line ‘The earth turns over, our side feels the
cold . . .’ When I first read that, I didn’t precisely fall out of my chair, but the chair moved about three feet sideways across the linoleum, propelled by my spasm of delighted awe.
How did he do that? He did it again late in the book, with the last three lines of the almost equally excitingly entitled poem No. XXX: ‘And all sway forward on the dangerous flood / Of
history, that never sleeps or dies, / And, held one moment, burns the hand.’ It seemed so effortless. And so it was, but only for him.

Richard Wilbur,
Poems 1943–1956

If I had to pick the greatest separate book of American poetry since Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur’s
Poems 1943–1956
(published only in Great Britain, by
Faber) would have to be the one, even though it contains elements from three of his separate books,
The Beautiful Changes
,
Ceremony
and
Things of this World
; even though his
Collected Poems 1943–2004
, arranged in reverse so as to track his career from his later days back to the start, is in itself a mighty book; and even though his initial example was so
infectious that at least one of the very best Wilbur poems was written by someone else. (Anthony Hecht’s wonderful poem about Japan would never, I am sure, have been the meticulous miracle
that it is if Wilbur hadn’t set the standard for a filigree stanza.) The truth about Wilbur is that his post-war impact was so big it had to be largely ignored if the race of poets was to
survive. Robert Lowell’s first volume
Lord Weary’s Castle
is easier to take, even when you open it at ‘A Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’. Anyone who doubts this
contention should open Wilbur’s book at ‘A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra’ and note once again the elegant swagger with which a GI could come home from Europe with a
whole cultural heritage in his pocket. On the aspiring poets among his fellow Americans he had the impact of a rococo asteroid, burning up their air with his displays of cool fire. Anyone capable
of appreciating his artistry was helpless not to emulate it, and emulation guaranteed mediocrity. Wilbur’s brand of conscious artistry could be sustained only by his instinct for a phrase,
the impulse ‘that flings / The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings.’ Perfect. Some said just perfect, but they said it in helpless envy. The most corrosive enemy of his
reputation, though, was the silence of critics to whom his clarity left nothing they could add.