I can only attend to these things occasionally and I think Iıve been asked
to respond several times, some of which Iıve lost... But what Alison said--
>I also think poetry can be distinctively British or Irish and yet absorptive
>of influences from elsewhere. In fact, I think that is characteristic of
>the best of any poetry from anywhere.
Yes exactly. The American influence in poetry has been too much of a fetish
in this country, as if it were the only way of being modern. The other
development I mentioned involving Dylan Thomas is only nativeı in this
context. It acknowledged a lot of foreign poetry: Stevens, Crane, the
Symbolistes, Lorca, Rilke, some Surrealists... without becoming an import
business. In fact Philip Larkin specifically dismissed it as un-English,
English as of Hardy that is, deriving more as he saw it from Eliot
(American), Yeats (³Celtic²) etc. Itıs also true that a significant number
of the poets involved were in fact not English, though people like Thomas
and Graham canıt be appropriated to regionality. (I notice that Hardy, who I
always thought deserved better than to be co-opted to the Larkin genealogy,
translated Schiller, Heine and Hugo).
To find these poets other than Thomas and Graham youıd have to go to the
library for publications of the 1940s, such as the three ³New Apocalypse²
anthologies, magazines, and books, mostly small press, by JF Hendry, Dorian
Cooke, Thomas Good, John Singer, Henry Treece, Lynette Roberts etc.
>I wonder how much "alternative" poetries , when they are reactive, might be
>simply expressions of dissatisfaction against that noble Anglo-Saxon
>tradition of anti-intellectualism, that contempt for complexity which ends
>up distorting various realities, to all our detriment. That tradition is
>certainly alive and well and thriving here.
Well if weıre both talking about the same thing itıs a traditionı of no
substantiality, a casual chat-poetry with very little antecedence before the
1970s. I donıt think we should attach remote ancestors to it. Though it
also occurs to me that lyrical poetry is by its nature anti-intellectual, or
turns aside from conceptual complexity in extrapolation from a moment or a
condition, and we donıt object to that, in Audenıs plain ³songs² nor in
madrigals... We donıt ask them questions. The poetry Iım thinking of isnıt
lyrical and is a mis-use of the licence or immunity of a lyrical tradition
for a debased formulation. (I take it you use the word nobleı
sarcastically).
I think Trevor might have meant that Iım reacting against the innovativeı
as such and thus in danger of creating a prejudicial imbalance. But I think
rather Iım trying to avoid a reactive position of any kind. It wouldnıt do
any harm at present to direct people to a poet such as Binyon, to see how
well he wrote, what a fine technique he held -- which Pound recognised, and
what did Pound have but technique, in the end, anyway?
/PR
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