A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
ideas but he also demonstrates the repackaging of them and the lineage they pass through. Heaney's phrasing, gesturing toward the unconscious and psychoanalysis, translates “emotion” into a specifically twentieth‐century terminology. Though Heaney rebuffs Eliot's poetics of impersonality, he also echoes Eliot's idea of craft. In the inclusion of craft, he moves away from the romantic idea of the inspired poet creating ex nihilo (which comes more from Coleridge, in his poems devoted to the imagination, than Wordsworth). Auden—who emphasizes craftsmanship and observes that “every poet […] requires a training in the poetic use of language” with which he/she might act on “a crowd of recollected occasions of feeling”—is also an influence here (1963, 61). Most important for Heaney, after Wordsworth himself, is W. B. Yeats who he quotes in his explanation of technique. For Yeats, “a poet writes always of his personal life” by projecting his concerns through adopting “masks.” By this method, the poet becomes “more type than man, more passion than type” (1997, 379). From these influences, Heaney finds craft and technique to be related but awards primacy to the latter.
Heaney is one of a triad of now canonical writers who follow romantic leads in focusing on poetry's ability to recuperate experience and feeling. The other two are Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin. Hughes's “Words and Experience” (1967) at first stresses the separation of the two titular items—“our experience of life” is embedded in us “quite a long way from the world of words”—before turning to the process of giving expression: “Words are tools, learned late and laboriously and easily forgotten, with which we try to give some part of our experience a more or less permanent shape outside ourselves” (1967, 119). Hughes shares with Heaney a vision of poetry reaching what is deeply felt but inarticulate. Hughes's description gives the process a more elemental than unconscious sense: “[t]he struggle truly to possess his own experience, […] to regain his genuine self, has been man's principal occupation, whenever he could find leisure for it”; and to do this men “have invented art—music, painting, dancing, sculpture, and the activity that includes all of these, which is poetry” (124). In this long view, poetry is a primal, almost sacred act. The poet thus accrues cultural capital when capturing experience is a fundamental human activity from prehistory onward.
Larkin's figuration of the same process is much more prosaic than Hughes's (in keeping with the radical differences between their poetries), but it comes to something similar. Larkin “write[s] poems to preserve things I have seen / thought / felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake.” Like Hughes, Larkin sees this as a universal practice: “the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art” (1983b, 79). The terminology of preservation is also employed by Thom Gunn when he suggests that the impetus for poetry comes from wanting to “preserve [people] on paper in the best way I knew, […] getting my feeling for them into my description of them” (1982, 152). For Larkin, like Keats, the recreation of emotion in the reader is the important communicative point: the poet “construct[s] a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, anytime” (1983a, 80). Constructing a poem might involve both craft and technique as Heaney would define them, and Larkin's poetry has an equally distinctive voice as Heaney's, but here universal recognition is important. The implied poetics of Larkin's position is one that might downplay the specific details of the poet's life in order to represent widely applicable experiences that the reader will recognize. More recently, David Constantine has similarly observed that poetry “puts us in living touch with our shared realities” (2000, 226). Clearly there is variety here—Heaney, Hughes, and Larkin have their own particular takes on this set of concerns—but there is nonetheless a discernible shared romantic inheritance across these stalwarts of mainstream poetry. Their statements are all concerned to describe the ways in which poetry expresses felt experiences and perceive this to be its primary function.
The alternative, modernist inheritance that intercepts this romantic lineage is less straightforward to chart when the focus is specifically British and Irish poetry. The North American poetry scene has played a large part in transmitting the modernist esthetic through the mid‐twentieth century and beyond. The association of experimentation with North America and England with its opposite was firm enough for Amiri Baraka (previously known as LeRoi Jones) to declare in 1960 that “[a]ccentual verse, the regular metric of rumbling iambics, is dry as slivers of sand. Nothing happens in that frame anymore. We can get nothing from England” (1960, 425). William Carlos Williams, influenced by Pound and in turn extremely influential for those who followed him on both sides of the Atlantic, elaborates alternative positions for poetry. He draws a likeness between the ways in which our lives “have lost all that in the past we had to measure them by,” and the way “our verses, of which our poems are made, are left without any metrical construction of which we can speak.” From this position, Williams incites his contemporaries: “We must invent new modes to take the place of those which are worn out” (1954, 337–339). In practice, Williams calls for poets to pay less attention to the profundity of what is said, and more how it is said:
Most poems I see today are concerned with what they are saying, how profound they have been given to be. So true is this that those who write them have forgotten to make poems at all of them. Thank God we're not musicians, with our lack of structural invention we'd be ashamed to look ourselves in the face otherwise.
(338)
This, then, is the classic mid‐century American modernist call for more attention to formal invention, though Williams is not throwing out content but rebalancing it with mode and measure. The same is true of Charles Olson's famous manifesto, “Projective Verse” (1950). Olson, leader of the experimental Black Mountain poets and theorist of open field poetics, avers that “[v]erse now” must “catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings” (1997, 239). Like Williams, Olson indicates that this attention to formal considerations is not separate from poetry's subject, for “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT,” with the corollary that “right form, in any given poem, is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under hand” (1997, 40).
It is with lines of thinking that the modernist‐inspired British Poetry Revival of the 1960s and 1970s sought to pollinate domestic poetry. Eric Mottram, whose poetry was influenced by the cut‐up and collage techniques of Black Mountain and Beat experimenters, took on the editorship of Poetry Review in 1971. In this post, he published the work of the American avant‐garde and set up Poetry Information—a series of weekly colloquies on contemporary American, French, and East European poetries (Institute of Contemporary Arts, April–July 1971)—with the aim, he wrote to Robert Duncan, of “counter[ing] establishment biases here, and ignorance about major poetry in the States” (Evans and Zamir 2007, 35). Alongside cultivating international awareness, the British Poetry Revival also sought out neglected British modernist figures (David Jones, Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting), often themselves in dialogue with North American figures. Bunting, friend of Pound and Louis Zukofsky, has been extremely influential since his “rediscovery” (after decades in obscurity) by Tom Pickard and other young poets in the 1960s. Bunting's Briggflatts (1965) provided a model poem—Poundian in scope, drawing on sonata form, and Wordsworthian in theme—and “The Poet's Point of View” (1966) is a short but powerful manifesto.
Here, Bunting shifts the terms in which poetry is discussed away from the mainstream's single‐minded and limiting fascination (as he saw it) with formulating meaning out of recuperated experience:
Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sound – long sounds and short sounds, heavy beats and light beats, the tone relations of vowels, the relations of consonants to one another which are like instrumental colour in music. Poetry lies dead on the page, until some voice brings it to life, just as music, on the stave, is no more than instructions to the player. […] Poetry must be read aloud.
(2000, 80)
Bunting clearly shares common ground with Olson. The latter is concerned with composition according to the breath, and the former with the conveyance of the aural qualities that this method