A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
which a seemingly personal voyeuristic exaltation on the part of the poet in the sexual lives of others modulates in the first line of the ensuing stanza to a broader statement about the persona's awareness of everyone's progression toward death, even the “young going down the long slide” (l. 8) toward a mechanized grim reaper that is itself “outdated” (l. 7). Then, at the very end of the poem, “[r]ather than words comes the thought of high windows” (l. 17), the infinite nothingness beyond. (Also, dare I say, the combine image itself might be more accessible to American than to British readers.)
As in the case of Seamus Heaney, American poets writing in praise of Larkin have been wont to praise his accessibility. For example, in New Criterion, X. J. Kennedy praises Larkin's work by calling it “a poetry from which even people who distrust poetry, most people, can take comfort and delight” (Kennedy 1986, 16). Similarly, another American poet, Alan Shapiro, remarks on Larkin as being “a poet of great and complex feeling” endowing “the most commonplace objects and occasions with a chilling poignancy, [measuring] daily life with all its tedium and narrowness against the possibilities of feeling” (Shapiro 1989). But the cross‐Atlantic admiration was not reciprocal. As reported in the Poetry Foundation's online biography, Larkin “distrusted travel abroad and professed ignorance of foreign literature, including most modern American poetry” (“Larkin,” Poetry Foundation 2015d). Even more impressive is a possible disconnect between Larkin and the American poetry world in his attempt “to avoid the clichés of his own culture, such as the tendency to read portent into an artist's childhood” (“Larkin,” Poetry Foundation 2015d), thus avoiding a source of personal mythology widely popular among American as well as British poets.
By contrast, the attraction of Ted Hughes seems to hinge on a poetry afroth with violence and metaphor. Moreover, not only did Hughes write poetry for children, but his work often seemed to pulsate with a child‐like attention to and acceptance of the world in a manner devoid of the easy answers of society or religion, a world where when Little Red Riding Hood gets eaten, she stays eaten. His animal poems both evoked the frissons of a Darwinistic survival of the fittest and a wonder at the ways that beauty went hand in hand with violence, which evidenced itself in the vibrant imagery and torqued rhythms of the poetry itself. Of especial interest have been his “Crow” poems. This is the beginning of “Two Legends”:
Black was the without eye
Black the within tongue
Black was the heart
Black the liver, black the lungs
Unable to suck in light
(Hughes 1971, 1, ll. 1‐5)
In the beginning was crow and the crow was with crow…. Both creation and anticreation myths, the texts have an almost black hole density to their poetic language. In general, Hughes's work seems anchored in the world of field and pasture, of beast and bird, in a way that made his poems readable within a literary tradition profoundly impacted by Henry David Thoreau and other American nature writers. Of course, Hughes's many years spent in America as well as his complicated marriage with American poet Sylvia Plath have contributed over the years to his high‐profile presence on this side of the Atlantic, though not necessarily to the benefit of his reputation as a poet. Indeed, the succès de scandale that affected Hughes because of his widely suggested blame for Plath's death and early silencing of her work might have put brackets around his poetic reputation in unfair ways.
Nonetheless, in terms of both praise and criticism of his work, American readers have seemed overall to treat him as one of their own, or, at the very least, to point out the differences between him and other English poets. For example, writing in Salmagundi, M. L. Rosenthal asserted not just Hughes's value to American readers, but that he might even be more appreciated here than in his homeland:
Hughes's work … is of the same order as some of the most interesting American work of the age. It represents a formal ordering of a kind that the best American poetry has been after for a long time but that British critical hostility has made it difficult for English poets to pursue. Such a triumph is always internationally significant, and the explosive violence in Hughes's poetry seems especially expressive to Americans at this moment.
(Rosenthal 1973, 61)
Over the decades, Hughes's work has indeed appeared from major publishing houses as well as in literary journals in the United States. For example, several of his Crow poems (appearing in Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, Harper and Row 1971) were originally published in The New Yorker (in fact, earlier, Hughes had published poetry in such well‐known American journals as The Atlantic, The Nation, Harper's Magazine, and Poetry). As a publicity blurb on the back of the first American edition of the book, no less a poet than Anne Sexton proclaimed: “let all the poets of the world bow down their heads in admiration and awe” (Hughes 1971, back cover). The second blurb, from critic Jack Kroll, is in fact a quotation from his review of the slim volume in Newsweek (indeed, the very fact that a collection of poetry would be reviewed in Newsweek was no mean event) that once again strikes the chord of accessibility and outreach: “One of those rare books of poetry that have the public impact of a major novel or a piece of super‐journalism.” Then the reviewer goes on to evoke its elemental, virtually primeval force: “If our own organs—our brains, blood hearts—could speak, this would be their language” (Kroll 1971, 114). But these prehistoric cave paintings in Hughes's own mind were not the subject of universal praise by American poem‐makers. Robert Pinsky wrote in The New York Times Book Review of Hughes's collection: “…for some readers the violence may be justified by deeper rewards; but as for me, I can't find anything under all that ketchup except baloney” (Pinsky 1977, 4–5).
From the generation of Irish poets, after Heaney at least two writers stand out: Paul Muldoon (born 1951) and Eavan Boland (1944–2020). Muldoon, of course, is not only a well‐known poet in America, but, as current poetry editor of The New Yorker, wields additional influence as a gatekeeper within the American poetic scene. A Roman Catholic born in Northern Ireland, Muldoon's work is anchored in place as is Heaney's, but is nonetheless substantially compact in its referential and associational density. As such, Muldoon's work is perhaps not as accessible to a wider audience as was Heaney's, but is still extremely valued within the poetry world itself. Writing of Muldoon's collection Moy Sand and Gravel, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Peter Davison (a prominent American poet who was, moreover, poetry editor for The Atlantic over a span of 30 years) noted how the book “shimmers with play, the play of mind, the play of recondite information over ordinary experience, the play of observation and sensuous detail, of motion upon custom, of Irish and English languages and landscapes, of meter and rhyme. Sure enough, everything Muldoon thinks of makes him think of something else, and poem after poem takes the form of linked association.” (Davison 2002)
Eavan Boland's relationship to her native Ireland is not only complicated, but might in fact be at least partially responsible for “bringing” her to America. Born in Dublin in 1944 and the daughter of a diplomat, Boland spent much of her childhood living in London, though returning to Ireland for college, where her earliest collections appeared. Starting with the collection Introducing Eavan Boland, published by Ontario Review Press in 1981, her work also came to be published on this side of the Atlantic. Until her death, Boland split her time between her native city of Dublin and California, where since 1996 she has been a professor and director of the creative writing program at Stanford University. But it is both Boland's presence as a woman Irish poet as well as her insistence on a more complete and authentic portraiture of women's experience and cultural significance in her poetry that has most markedly defined not just her presence in contemporary Irish poetry but her expanding role among American readers. Although hardly to be reduced to the status of a poetic refugee because of her residency and poetic activity in the United States, in the following interview with the readers of the American literary journal Smartish Pace, Boland herself notes the cultural claustrophobia she felt in her homeland:
I began to write in an Ireland where the word “woman” and the word “poet” seemed to be in some sort