Conquest's introduction speaks of the "corruption [of] the general attitude to poetry in the last decade": "The debilitating theory that poetry *must* be metaphorical gained wide acceptance. Poets were encouraged to produce diffuse and sentimental verbiage, or hollow technical pirouettes ..." The general approach of this new group, he writes, "is not new, but merely the restoration of a sound and fruitful attitude to poetry, of the principle that poetry is written by and for the whole man, intellect, emotions, senses and all." Their poetry "submits to no great systems of theoretical constructs nor agglomerations of unconscious commands. It is free from both mystical and logical compulsions and -- like modern philosophy -- is empirical in its attitude to all that comes." In techniques, "we see a refusal to abandon a rational structure and comprehensible language, even when the verse is most highly charged with sensuous or emotional intent."
Finally, he adds that the most obvious influences to be seen are Yeats, along with Robert Graves and Edwin Muir. "Auden, too, casts an obvious shadow here and there: who can escape that large and rational talent? But in his case it is mainly a matter of technical influence. There is little of the Auden tendency to turn abstractions into being in their own right."
SO here then is a brief anthology from this anthology, omitting Philip Larkin, John Holloway, and Robert Conquest.
A WAY OF LOOKING
It is the association after all
We seek, we would retrace our thoughts to find
The thought of which this landscape is the image,
Then pay the thought and not the landscape homage.
It is as if the tree and waterfall
Had their first roots and source within the mind.
But something plays a trick upon the scene:
A different kind of light, a stranger colour
Flows down on the appropriated view.
Nothing within the mind fits. This is new.
Thought and reflection must begin again
To fit the image and to make it true.
-- Elizabeth Jennings
HUMAN CONDITION
Now it is fog. I walk
Contained within my coat;
No castle more cut off
By reason of its moat:
Only the sentry's cough,
The mercenaries' talk.
The street lamps, visible,
Drop no light on the ground,
But press beams painfully
In a yard of fog around.
I am condemned to be
An individual.
In the established border
There balances a mere
Pinpoint of consciousness.
I stay, or start from, here:
No fog makes more or less
The neighboring disorder.
Particular, I must
Find out the limitation
Of mind and universe.
To pick thought and sensation
And turn to my own use
Disordered hate or lust.
I seek, to break, my span.
I am my one touchstone.
This is a test more hard
Than any ever known.
And thus I keep my guard
On that which makes me man.
Much is unknowable.
No problem shall be faced
Until the problem is;
I, born to fog, to waste,
Walk through hypothesis,
An individual.
-- Thom Gunn
SOMETHING NASTY IN THE BOOKSHOP
Between the Gardening and the Cookery
Comes the brief Poetry shelf;
By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology
Offers itself.
Critical, and with nothing else to do,
I scan the Contents page,
Relieved to find the names are mostly new;
No one my age.
Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
Landscape Near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
So does Rilke and Buddha.
"I travel, you see", "I think" and "I can read"
These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,
Poem for J.,
The ladies' choice, discountenance my patter
For several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
A moral beckons.
Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
Or squash it flat?
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;
Girls aren't like that.
We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
Can get by without it.
Women don't seem to think that's good enough;
They write about it.
And the awful way their poems lay them open
Just doesn't strike them.
Women are really much nicer than men:
No wonder we like them.
Deciding this, we can forget those times
We say up half the night
Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,
And couldn't write.
-- Kingsley Amis
ON THE DEATH OF A CHILD
The greatest griefs shall find themselves inside the smallest cage.
It's only then that we can hope to tame their rage.
The monsters we must live with. For it will not do
To hiss humanity because one human threw
Us out of heart and home. Or part
At odds with life because one baby failed to live.
Indeed, as little as its subject, is the wreath we give --
The big words fail to fit. Like giant boxes
Round small bodies. Taking up improper room,
Where so much withering is, and so much bloom.
-- D. J. Enright
REMEMBERING THE THIRTIES
I
Hearing one saga, we enact the next.
We please our elders when we sit enthralled;
But then they're puzzled; and at last they're vexed
To have their youth so avidly recalled.
It dawns upon the veterans after all
That what for them were agonies, to us
Are high-brow thrillers, though historical;
And all their feats quite strictly fabulous.
This novel written fifteen years ago,
Set in my boyhood and my boyhood home,
These poems about "abandoned workings", show
Worlds more remote than Ithaca or Rome.
The Anschluss, Guernica -- all the names
At which those poets thrilled, or were afraid,
For me mean schools and schoolmasters and games;
And in the process someone is betrayed.
Ourselves perhaps. The Devil for a joke
Might carve his own initials on our desk,
And still we'd miss the point, because he spoke
An idiom too dated, Audenesque.
Ralegh's Guiana also killed his son.
A pretty pickle if we came to see
The tallest story really packed a gun,
The Telemachiad an Odyssey.
II
Even to them the tales were not so true
As not to be ridiculous as well:
The ironmaster met his Waterloo,
But Rider Haggard rode along the fell.
"Leave for Cape Wrath to-night!" They banged away
On Fleming's trek or Isherwood's ascent.
England expected every man that day
To show his motives were ambivalent.
They played the fool, not to appear as fools
In time's long glass. A deprecating air
Disarmed, they thought, the jeers of later schools:
Yet irony itself is doctrinaire,
And, curiously, nothing now betrays
Their type to time's derision like this coy
Insistence on the quizzical, their craze
For showing Hector was a mother's boy.
A neutral tone is nowadays preferred.
And yet it may be better, if we must,
To find the stance impressive and absurd
Than not to see the hero for the dust.
For courage is the vegetable king,
The sprig of all ontologies, the weed
That beards the slag-heap with its hectoring,
Whose green adventure is to run to seed.
-- Donald Davie
REASON FOR NOT WRITING ORTHODOX NATURE POETRY
This January sky is deep and calm.
The mountain sprawls in comfort, and the sea
Sleeps in the crook of that enormous arm.
And Nature from a simple recipe --
Rocks, water, mist, a sunlit winter's day --
Has brewed a cup whose strength has dizzied me.
So little beauty is enough to pay;
The heart so soon yields up its store of love,
And where you love you cannot break away.
So sages never found it hard to prove
Nor prophets to declare in metaphor
That God and Nature must be hand in glove,
And this became the basis of their lore.
Then later poets found it easy going
To give the public what they bargained for,
And like a spectacled curator showing
The wares of his museum to the crowd,
They yearly waxed more eloquent and knowing,
More slick, more photographic, and more proud:
From Tennyson with notebook in his hand
(His truth to Nature fits him like a shroud)
To moderns who devoutly hymn the land.
So be it: each is welcome to his voice;
They are a gentle, if a useless, band.
But leave me free to make a sterner choice;
Content, without embellishment, to note
How little beauty bids the heart rejoice,
How little beauty catches at the throat.
Simply, I love this mountain and this bay
With love that I can never speak by rote,
And where you love you cannot break away.
-- John Wain
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