Reading Postwar British and Irish Poetry

Michael Thurston, Nigel Alderman

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118619810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Combining detailed explorations of both mainstream and experimental poets with a clear historical and literary overview, Reading Postwar British and Irish Poetry offers readers at all levels an ideal guide to the rich body of poetic works published in Britain and Ireland over the last half-century.

• Features detailed discussions of individual poems that are widely available in anthologies and selected poems volumes
• Pays explicit attention to how to read the poems, focusing on language and form and the institutional conditions of literary possibility in which poets worked
• Includes poets of all types and styles from throughout the post-war period, including canonical and mainstream poets alongside experimental poets, women, and poets of color

1

Introduction: “Postwar,” “British,” “Irish,” and “Poetry”

History is now and England.

The year is 1942 and Britain has been at war for almost three years. Amidst the wreckage of urban aerial bombardment, some of which he directly witnessed as a volunteer air-raid warden, the poet T.S. Eliot contemplates the role poetry might play in the redemption of a fallen world. At a moment that seems to stand outside time, at a site that seems the margin where world and underworld overlap, he confronts a figure for the literary tradition he has inherited, a “familiar compound ghost” who speaks in the voices of Stéphane Mallarmé, William Butler Yeats, and, most of all, Dante. The news for poetry is not good at this moment. Uttered within the world, inextricable from the world, it is, like the world in which it speaks and is spoken, irredeemably fallen. For Eliot, all it can do is fail and in its failure point the way to the real and living possibility of redemption in destruction of all ties to the world. Eliot’s figure for that redemptive destruction condenses the saving flame in which the Holy Spirit appeared to the Apostles at Pentecost and the dive bomber raining destruction on London and Coventry. Now, and in England, history is the purgative and purifying fire of destruction. And yet, at Little Gidding and in “Little Gidding” – the fourth of Eliot’s Four Quartets – a stillness is created out of ritual, out of repetition, out of things of the world (like language) turned upon themselves to indicate the presence of divinity in empty spaces and silences.

Rhythm is the/symphony/of angels.

The year is 2000. For the moment, Britain’s wars are mostly cultural, with parties, classes, races, and regions vying for power and position. Resident at a London tattoo studio and clothing shop, where the Poetry Society has placed her for the year, poet Patience Agbabi contemplates the relationship of language and divinity. She hearkens to traditions of ­inspiration – the ­literal idea that the poet’s words are infused with the breath of a supernatural source – and condenses classical and Christian references in her figure for poetic language. History is nowhere, explicitly, in this short lyric written to celebrate her residency at the Flamin’ Eights Tattoo Studio, though it appears throughout Agbabi’s work, most often in the form of the same literary tradition (somewhat updated) to which Eliot pays court. In “Off the Shelf,” for example, Agbabi engages Yeats through the mediating figure of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, and in the title poem of her 2000 volume, Transformatrix, she takes on the sonnet by synthesizing many of the form’s most recognizable traditional voices. Once again, the news for poetry is both good and bad. On the one hand, the dominant lyric tradition Agbabi inherits and encounters is one from which people like her – black, openly bisexual – have been largely excluded. On the other hand, the lyric is reenergized as it is reclaimed: the cultural center is rejuvenated as it is occupied by the once marginalized. Agbabi reclaims, revises, and renews the lyric from her particular cultural position. After all, just a few years after her residency at the tattoo studio, Agbabi served as a writer in residence at Eton. “Wings elevate/words into/rhythm.”

Eliot’s “Little Gidding” was first published in The New English Weekly in October 1942. The magazine had also been the first publisher of the ­second and third of the Four Quartets, “East Coker” and “The Dry Salvages.” Descended from the influential New Age, a magazine that had in the 1910s and 1920s published a number of modernist writers, The New English Weekly had been edited by A.R. Orage until his death in 1934 and continued to be a highly regarded review of English politics, arts, and intellectual life. That December, the poem appeared in a pamphlet form. “Little Gidding” made its first appearance as the concluding movement in Eliot’s Four Quartets when the group was published together in the United States in May 1943 and then in the British edition in October 1944. The American edition of Four Quartets was brought out by Harcourt, Brace and Company and the British edition by Faber and Faber; both had long been Eliot’s publishers and he worked as an editor at Faber. Both companies were important mainstream publishers of poetry (as well as work in other genres) from the 1930s forward. Harcourt had been founded in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the firm grew in stature and importance during the 1930s, while Faber, founded in 1929, quickly became a central publisher of poetry in Britain.

Agbabi’s untitled lyric was “published” as a tattoo inscribed by the artist Naresh into the skin of model Joelle Taylor in April 2000. A photograph of that tattoo was reproduced as a postcard and sold by the Poetry Society, the organization under whose auspices Agbabi had been resident at Flamin’ Eights. It has not appeared in any of Agbabi’s books to date; Michael Thurston discovered the poem in an essay by the critic Lauri Ramey, who has been one of the few to write about this poet, and he ­consulted the postcard in the Saison Poetry Library.

We could continue in this vein for quite some time, listing the differences between Eliot and Agbabi, from his monarchist politics and High-Church Anglicanism to her radical feminism and association with S/M style, from his Nobel Prize and the scholarly industry that has, for over half a century, produced detailed exegeses of his poems to her performance art and increasingly frequent appearance in surveys of contemporary poetry, avant-garde poetry, and women’s poetry in Britain. In short, however, Eliot ­represents the beginning of the period covered by this book and also ­certain ideas about poetry and certain institutions and practices involved in the production of poetry, while Agbabi represents the endpoint of this period (the first decade of the twenty-first century) as well as a quite different set of institutions and practices.

The differences are important, of course, but we want also to take note of what the two poets have in common. As even these brief quotations and references suggest, both poets are steeped in the English literary tradition. Both are concerned with the role poetry might play in society. Both are drawn at once to the notion that poetic language is somehow elevated, otherworldly, able to provide access to experience that everyday language cannot capture and to the anxiety that poetic language might distort truth, might mislead readers in unfortunate ways. For all that British poetry has changed since the middle of the Second World War and for all the variety that inheres in “postwar British and Irish poetry,” these continuities will remain, perhaps surprisingly, in view.

As the title suggests, this is a book about poetry produced in Britain and Ireland after the Second World War. More than that, though, it is a book about reading that poetry, about how to parse the difficulty in some of this work, how to describe the pleasures in some of it (difficulty and pleasure are not mutually exclusive), and how to recognize the relationships among parts within a poem and the relationships among poems within this period. In the chapters to come, we hope to show how poets deploy the resources of their medium as well as their attention, care, and passion in their efforts to comprehend their culture and how the efforts of readers to comprehend the poems can open up the texts, revealing their imaginative and linguistic richness and enriching their readers’ imaginative and linguistic resources. If those aims are large (and they are), the steps we take toward them are manageably small. We begin, as we have with these excerpts by Eliot and Agbabi, by attending to the words on the page, by remaining aware of how the pages came to our hands, and by wondering about the significance of specific locutions in specific locations.

It is also useful to acknowledge that we come to poems carrying assumptions and that our assumptions might mislead us. Staying with these opening examples for the moment, we might think for a moment about the question of cultural centrality and marginality. Most readers will have heard of T.S. Eliot. His poems are frequently taught in schools and universities, they appear in major anthologies, and they are often referred to in a variety of cultural conversations. His position at Faber and Faber and his Nobel Prize for Literature, along with the reading and reputation of his work, grant him a central position in most narratives of twentieth-century British poetry. Many readers will not be familiar with Patience Agbabi. This is of course partly due to the simple fact of her youth; she has not been producing poems long enough to have achieved an Eliotic reputation. But Agbabi is also less well known because she writes from a marginal cultural position, as a black bisexual woman interested in the oral performance as well as the print ­publication of poetry.

We tend to assume that one of these poets is central and the other marginal and that these locations are fixed. Let’s try reversing these assumptions as something of a heuristic exercise (a heuristic is a sort of shortcut, a fiction held for the moment to suggest some provisional truths). One of these two poets emigrated to England and was awarded a scholarship at Oxford, while the other was born in England and read English literature there. One spent years working at a bank and wrote before and after business hours until a successful literary career could be launched, while the other from early on enjoyed the support of the state. The “marginal” poet of the pair, Agbabi, has in fact inhabited the cultural center represented by Oxford, the Poetry Society, and Edinburgh’s Canongate press, while the “central” poet, Eliot, came to England after university, intending to stay for a short time, remained partly because of the outbreak of war, published his first books with small independent presses, and became a British citizen more than ten years after he took up residence in England. While our original assumptions remain valid (Eliot really is at the center of many discussions of twentieth-century poetry and, by virtue of his gender, race, and class, had access to the means of literary production in ways unimaginable to most descendants of Nigerian immigrants to England, like Agbabi), the binary oppositions critics and literary historians use to organize and make sense of the ­literary landscape, while useful and important, are rarely as neat as they often appear to be. While we will be offering our own binaries in this book and while we find them useful as readers and critics, we will also be reminding readers that these frameworks are critical fictions whose terms should be only lightly and knowingly held.

Before going further with analyses of poems or narratives of poetic careers, we want to spend this introductory chapter making some clear and explicit definitions of the key terms in this volume’s title. Just like such oppositions as center versus margin, terms like “postwar,” “British,” “Irish,” and “poetry” seem to be simple and intuitive, but in fact they obscure judgments that are often both complex and contested. “Postwar,” for example, seems a simple temporal marker, a convenient way of periodizing twentieth-century literature. There is a body of literary expression that was produced before the outbreak of war in 1939, and another produced after the conclusion of hostilities in 1945. Since this dividing line comes close to cutting the century down the middle and since the Second World War is in so many ways a rupture in the story of the century (­everyday life throughout Europe, Asia, North Africa, and North America changed in numerous ways because of mobilization and conflict), the war provides a handy cutoff. But there are some problems with this simple organizational approach. For one thing, the century’s pie might be sliced in various ways, and it is not at all clear that the Second World War really divides the period down the middle. The First World War brought about crises and shifts in societies’ self-understandings and their structures at least as fundamental as those associated with the 1939–1945 conflict, so that the first half of the century might need to be seen in several parts (­pre-1914, the First World War, and the interwar decades). Similarly, the conclusion of the war in 1945 did not bring about an end to armed and ideological conflicts. The Cold War began in some ways even before the guns fell silent in Europe, and the British Empire engaged in numerous smaller conflicts in and over its own colonies during the decades following the war. In addition, the field of reference of the term “postwar” is not literary at all and so might not be the best way to describe a period of literary production. After all, many of the writers active before 1939 continued their careers after 1945 (and wrote during the years between, as well). Even if we agree that the historical dividing line (Britain was one way before 1939 and another after 1945) really is a useful dividing line, are we right to assume that it applies to ­literature?

There are, after all, more strictly literary (or at least cultural or aesthetic) ways to divide the twentieth century. Chief among these is the shift from modernism, which is seen to dominate the first half of the century, to ­postmodernism, which rose to prominence during the second half. A problem here, however, is that neither of these terms encompasses ­anything like the whole of poetic production in either period. While modernism, represented by such poets as Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Mina Loy (and, in other genres, by writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett), casts a large shadow over the years between 1910 and 1940, plenty of writers during those decades wrote in ways the term does not explain, account for, or include. By “modernism” we ­generally mean writing (and other artistic work) that rebels against the conventions that were widely accepted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, conventions having to do with “realistic” representation, with narrative coherence, with “appropriate” themes in poetry, and with the order and closure provided by traditional verse forms. Confronting the changes wrought upon their world by new technologies (the ­telephone, the radio, the automobile), by new ideas (especially the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, the political theories of Karl Marx, the ­psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, and the philosophical work of Nietzsche and Bergson), and, finally, by the Great War’s destruction of assumptions of social and moral coherence, modernist writers and artists deployed fragmentation, stream-of-consciousness narration, intentional incoherence, free verse and other refusals of traditional form, and, often, the heavy use, both as structure and as texture, of allusion to express and attempt to comprehend the chaos in which they found themselves.

At the very same time, however, many, perhaps most, writers in Britain and Ireland either continued writing as they had, and as a couple of generations had, before the 1910s, or they returned to the conventions that had dominated then as an explicit rejection of modernist tenets, practices, and works. Writers hoping to achieve literary careers through sales of their work in the marketplace tried to deliver what readers wanted, and while The Waste Land, The Cantos, Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and Molloy might be the texts from the period most often read (and assigned in classrooms) now, they were not the big sellers of their day. Those were, instead, books like Gertrude Atherton’s Black Oxen and Warwick Deeping’s Doomsday. In the poetry world, the lists of the mainstream publishers and the contents of the mainstream magazines continued to feature Georgian verse throughout these decades, and even some of the important poets of the 1930s (W.H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and others) reacted to modernism by returning to, revising, and rejuvenating traditional forms. The variety of literary styles in play during this, or any, period is one thing that makes temporal markers drawn from literature just as difficult as any other terms we might use.

That variety is, if anything, even more pronounced in the later twentieth century. For the period covered by this volume, the temporally appropriate term might be “postmodernism,” but that term has, for three decades now, referred much more frequently and powerfully not to the period following the age of modernism but, instead, to a specific set of philosophical insights and associated aesthetic practices. If Nietzsche was one thinker with whom the modernists were coming to terms, careful readers and critics of Nietzsche, perhaps none more than Jean-François Lyotard, are those whose ideas have informed postmodernists. If many modernists sought to rediscover or rewrite the kind of “grand narratives” that had underpinned the social and artistic order before the Great War and that had been ­shattered by the war, many postmodernists have been influenced by Lyotard’s conviction that the age of these grand récits is over. Postmodernism is skeptical not only about the possibility of recovering a coherence that once existed but also about whether that coherence ever existed to begin with. Moreover, postmodernism is skeptical about any singular and incontrovertible truth. There are, instead, multiple truths, their momentary veracity depending upon the circumstances of the moment and the ­position from which they are examined or experienced. If the great novel of ­modernism is Joyce’s Ulysses (and we are not saying it definitively is), then the great novel of postmodernism might be Gravity’s Rainbow, by the American novelist Thomas Pynchon. Where Joyce looks back to the Odyssey as a way to ground the encyclopedic reference and stream-of-consciousness narration in his novel, Pynchon looks around at the momentarily coherent myths of big science and the military industrial complex of and after the Second World War as a way to erode any sense of solid ground beneath his ironic narrative. And if the great poetic monument of modernism is The Waste Land (again, we are not saying it necessarily is), then the great monument of postmodernism is… .

In fact, it is difficult to determine a single great poetic monument of postmodernism, in part because postmodernist poetry (as we will show later in this book) resists the notions of singularity, greatness, monumentality, and, sometimes, poetry itself. Certainly if pushed, we would look to the ironic historical citation of Kamau Brathwaite, to the tricksterish and thoroughly serious slipperiness of Paul Muldoon, or to the experimental or linguistically innovative poetry of J.H. Prynne.

Ultimately, though, we are more interested at this point in explaining why “postmodern” simply will not do as a way to capture poetry produced in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. One reason is simply that the term “postmodern” has come to have such a specific meaning, and the styles to which the term refers, while important, are not the only ones available during these decades. We might point out three useful ways to think about this variety. The first is the continuity of modernism. Some modernist poets continued their careers well into the second half of the century, writing in ways close to, if not identical to, the ways they had before the war. More than this, some of the poetries that we might call postmodernism can also be seen as extensions of modernism itself (indeed, some critics argue that all of postmodernism might more usefully be seen as critically extending ­modernism). Alongside the continuity of ­modernism, we can certainly see a reaction against modernism (and postmodernism, for that matter). That reaction takes a number of forms, and we want here to caution against any simple reading of it as a conservative or formalist retrenchment. From the work of “Movement” poets like Philip Larkin through that of Nobel Laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott and on to such present-day poets as Don Paterson, we can see many poets choosing traditional verse forms, continuous narrative, and the expression of a conventionally realistic psychology that stands against core modernist poetic strategies. Finally, the increased access to publication available to poets who, until the 1950s, had quite little – women, people of color, working-class writers, writers from “peripheral” regions within Britain and from the “peripheral” areas of the British Empire – brought new points of view, new areas of subject matter, and new poetic voices into visibility and, eventually, prominence. If, as Eliot wrote in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the classical literary tradition embodied “the mind of Europe,” poetry in Britain and Ireland in the decades following the Second World War gave voice to multiple minds, both European and not.

“Postmodern poetry,” for these reasons, among others, simply does not do, then, as a way to categorize or describe the work this volume surveys. (Some writers have suggested typographically differentiating terms so that, e.g., “postmodern” might carry the specific philosophical and ­aesthetic meaning the term has come to have and “post-modern” might indicate simply temporal sequence, but as we have suggested, modernism itself still seems to be in operation and temporality is a vexed and complicated thing when it comes to aesthetic and cultural styles.) Why not, then, choose a simple, straightforward, and, perhaps, noncontroversial term such as “late twentieth-century poetry”? Such terms are unsatisfying for two reasons. First, they get very cumbersome very quickly. The title of this book might already be a bit of a mouthful; imagine it with the extra ­syllables of “late twentieth and early twenty-first century.” Second, and more important, the simple temporal descriptors leave out important information that “postwar,” for all its potential insufficiency, usefully brings. For if we think about the less immediate effects of the war on literary culture in Britain and Ireland during the decades after 1945, we find important influences on the poetry produced within that culture.

So let’s return to “postwar” and its utility for our purposes. Just as there are problems with “postwar” as a periodizing term with respect to poetry, we have a number of wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: “Postwar,” “British,” “Irish,” and “Poetry”
• 2 A Brief Historical Survey
• 3 The Literary Landscape
• 4 Histories of Forms
• 5 Poetry of Place
• 6 History and Historiography
• 7 Varieties of the Long Poem
• 8 Subject To, Subject Of
• 9 Anthologies and Groups
• 10 Epilogue: Beyond “British,” “Irish,” and “Poetry”
• References
• Index