A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
of the breath with the stirrings of the mind” (2000, 256). Like heard poetry, concrete poetry—“not a visual but a silent poetry”—pioneered by Ian Hamilton Finlay over the same period also prioritizes form over content (2012, 135). There, the importance conferred upon the arrangement of words on the page draws readers away from jumping to content and instead emphasizes the crucial roles played by formal characteristics.
Despite the obvious dispute with the mainstream, there is nonetheless a common desire to communicate here. In Olson's declaration that “[a] poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it […], by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader,” there is some similarity to Larkin's desire to reproduce an emotional concept in his reader, though in different terms and by different means (240). Likewise, Bunting argues about terminology and method, but also envisions making his audience feel when he writes that poetry “is seeking to make not meaning, but beauty; or if you insist on misusing words, its ‘meaning’ is of another kind, and lies in the relation to one another of lines and patterns of sound, perhaps harmonious, perhaps contrasting and clashing, which the hearer feels rather than understands” (42). Certainly, what is communicated is altered, and the act of communication is more complex, but modernists' statements certainly undermine the caricature of the avant‐garde as willful obfuscators. Denise Levertov brings much of this together. A British poet who has spent her adult life in America and has been involved with Black Mountain and Objectivist schools, she observes that “content determines form, and yet that content is discovered only in form” (1960, 411). This balancing could be said to express something similar to Heaney's craft and technique.
Along with the issue of communication goes the question of audience. Notwithstanding differences, both mainstream and experimental poets often make a claim for the same popular audience. Given Larkin's desire for his poems to reproduce an emotional concept in a reader “anywhere, anytime,” it is unsurprising that he values a popular, nonspecialist audience highly: “poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and if a poet loses his pleasure‐seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth having, for which the dutiful mob that signs on every September is no substitute” (81–82). Such attacks on the academy are widespread and particularly prevalent in poets who address issues of class. Tony Harrison describes his writing as a “quest for a public poetry,” and prefers “the idea of men speaking to men to a man speaking to god, or even worse to Oxford's anointed” (1991, 9). For Simon Armitage, this is a politicized issue: “The appropriation of poetry by the literati can be quite properly compared with the enclosure of common land in England, the Highland Clearances and the hijacking of ancient medicine by Western science” (2000, 254). For Eavan Boland, the fault lies as much with the modernists. She proposes that “20th century poetry took a wrong turning.” Before this period, “the dialect of poetic Romanticism could honour the powerful vernacular of popular joy and memory.” Modernism remade the poem and the reader, and this meant “cutting the reader off from the old popular expectations of the poem and the historic popular audience. […] It meant, above all, compelling the reader […] to sacrifice an ancient and communal contract between poet and audience […]. A centuries‐old, bright partnership between poet and reader has been injured” (2000, 215–217).
While this may be true of the high modernism of Pound and Eliot, it is not always true of later modernists. Bunting is scathing in his attack on the “the worst, most insidious charlatans [who] fill chairs and fellowships in universities, write for the weeklies or work for the BBC or the British Council or some other asylum for obsequious idlers.” Their analysis, he contends, will distract readers from “hear[ing] the meaning, which is the sound” (43). According to Tom Leonard, “the trouble lies in the notion that poetry has to be ‘taught’ in the first place, and that there is a professional caste of people best equipped so to do.” The result is that “Literature shrinks to Teachable Literature. […] In fact the spread of education as a right to the mass of people has paradoxically led to the deprivation, from them, of much they once held to be valid literature” (1989, xvii–xix). Opposing this tendency, Leonard's own poetry mobilizes experimental technique to capture Glaswegian dialect. Late modernism is not the preserve of scholars—its practitioners wish to reach the same popular audience as their more traditional counterparts.
A related issue is that of the social function of poetry, its ability and/or duty to address public themes. There is clearly a weighty inheritance here. Earlier twentieth‐century pronouncements, such as Louis MacNeice's that the poet “is not the loudspeaker of society, but something much more like its still, small voice” (1987, 98), register in more contemporary articulations, such as Levertov's observation that “[i]nsofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock” (412). From the 1970s, Northern Irish poets have been particularly exercised by this question: in the context of the Troubles, they have come under pressure to make political comment in their poetry. Heaney explains that he aspires to write poetry that is socially responsible and creatively free:
Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self‐delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world. […] Which is to say that its power as a mode of redress in the first sense – as agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices – is being appealed to constantly. But in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely, to redress poetry as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means.
(1995, 5–6)
Poetry, he argues, ought to take up an ethical stance but also needs to maintain its autonomy: concentrating on ethics risks overlooking esthetics. Heaney presumably thinks the opposite is true as well, but it may be important that he does not actually say as much. Responding to Heaney's division, Douglas Dunn undermines the distinction, resolving the tension: “in answering to the topical or immediate as well as the timeless, a poet might be doing nothing more or less than being faithful to the impulses of experience.” This is possible because poetry “exists in a lived vernacular crossed with the discoveries of a vivid observation and imagination” (2000, 163–166). Anne Stevenson resolves the impasse with a paradox: “the ideal poem of the [21st] century will […] be written by a very rare person – a poet who is in thrall to nothing but poetry's weird tyranny and ungovernable need to exist” (2000, 183). Unsurprisingly, most poets tend to think of poetry as being in thrall to poetry itself first and foremost. It is on this point that there is perhaps most of a consensus.
References
1 Armitage, Simon (2000). “Re‐Writing the Good Book.” In: Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (eds. W.N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis), 252–255. Newcastle: Bloodaxe.
2 Auden, W. H. (1963). The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays. London: Faber and Faber.
3 Boland, Eavan (2000). “The Wrong Way.” In: Strong Words, pp. 215–218.
4 Bunting, Basil (2000). “The Poet's Point of View.” In: Strong Words, pp. 80–82.
5 Constantine, David (2000). “Common and Peculiar”. In: Strong Words, pp. 226–228.
6 Dunn, Douglas (2000). “A Difficult, Simple Art”. In: Strong Words, pp. 163–166.
7 Eliot, T. S. (1953). Selected Prose (ed. John Hayward). London: Penguin.
8 Evans, Amy and Zamir, Shamoon (eds.) (2007). The Unruly Garden: Robert Duncan and Eric Mottram, Letters and Essays. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang.
9 Fenton, James (1983). The Manifesto against Manifestos. Poetry Review 73 (3): 12–16.
10 Finlay, Ian Hamilton (2012). “Concrete, fauve, suprematist, sequential and kinetic poems.” In: Selections (ed. Alec Finlay), 135. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
11 Flint, F. S. (1972). “Imagisme.” In: Imagist Poetry (ed. Peter Jones), 129–130. London: Penguin.
12 Gunn, Thom (1982). The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography. London/Boston: Faber and Faber.
13 Harrison,