In 1932 the critic F. R. Leavis proclaimed that T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound had between them brought about a significant reorientation of literature. Twenty years later he took most of it back again, blaming the anti-critical workings of the London literary circuit and the decay of an educated reading public. He may have been perfectly justified in crediting the metropolitan litterateurs with setting up so many false gods. But the relative failure of talent is another matter entirely. So is the manner in which so much of the talent that has arrived has been misused. The London old-boy circuit may often be stupid, conceited, and parasitic, but I don’t believe that it is a deliberate conspiracy against good work.

I once suggested (in Stewards of Excellence, 1958) that the experimental techniques of Eliot and the rest never really took on in England because they were an essentially American concern: attempts to forge a distinctively American language for poetry. Certainly, since Eliot removed himself into another, remote sphere of influence by proclaiming himself “Anglo-Catholic in religion, royalist in politics, and classicist in literature,” the whole movement of English verse has been to correct the balance experimentation had so unpredictably disturbed. Sometime in the 20’s Thomas Hardy remarked to Robert Graves that “vers libre could come to nothing in England. ‘All we can do is to write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than those who went before us.’” Since about 1930 the machinery of modern English poetry seems to have been controlled by a series of negative feed-backs designed to produce precisely the effect Hardy wanted.

The final justification of experimentalism lay, of course, beyond mere technique. The great moderns experimented not just to make it new formally, but to open poetry up to new areas of experience. The kind of insights which had already been substantiated by the novelists—by Melville, Dostoevsky, Lawrence, and even at times, by Hardy himself—seemed about due to appear in poetry. The negative feed-backs came into action to stop this happening.

The literary historians perhaps would see the process differently; and the English scene is peculiarly amenable to literary history: it is savage with gang-warfare which, at a distance, can be dignified as disagreements between schools of verse. So maybe a little potted, though rather partial, literary history would be in place.

The 30’s poets reacted against those of the 20’s by asserting that they had no time to be difficult or inward or experimental; the political situation was too urgent. W. H. Auden gave them the go-ahead because he combined the extraordinary technical skill in traditional forms with an extraordinary feel for the most contemporary of contemporary idiom. When he began, it must really have looked as though he were about to do something quite new in English. In a poem like “Sir, No Man’s Enemy,” for example, he used the new, difficult language of psychology with a concentration that was almost Shakespearian; or even in an unambitious piece like “Lurcher-loving collier, black as night” he managed triumphantly to recreate a traditional lyric—its ancestor is “Mistress mine, where art thou roaming”—in terms of the contemporary, unromantic, industrial scene. His trouble was that he was too skillful; he found both the art of verse and the art of success too easy. So he was able to channel his deep neurotic disturbances into light verse—much of it, admittedly, very fine—while his contemporary knowingness, his skill with references, with slang, with the time’s immediate worries, went into the production of a kind of social, occasional verse, mostly traditional in form, but highly up-to-date in idiom. His example encouraged a whole swarm of poetasters who believed, apparently, that to be modern was merely a matter of sounding modern; it had precious little to do with originality. (I would exclude from this Louis MacNeice, whose social-political verse was mostly more effective and certainly more deeply felt than Auden’s own.) By the end of the 30’s experimental verse was out and traditional forms, in a chic contemporary guise, were back in. That was the first negative feedback.

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The reaction to auden took the form of anti-intellectualism. He was thought to be too clever and not sufficiently emotional for the extreme circumstances of the 40’s. The war brought with it a taste for high, if obscure, rhetoric. The log-rolling 30’s were followed by the drum-rolling 40’s. The new master, of course, was Dylan Thomas. But Thomas was not only a fine rhetorician, he also, in his early poems, had something rather original to say. Admittedly, he was under constant pressure from the literary Public Relations Officers to continue at all costs less with his poetry than with his act as the blindly inspired poet; which meant that his rhetoric eventually ran on when the reasons for it had faltered. But the talent was there, however self-destructive it eventually became. His followers, however, used his work as an excuse to kiss all meaning good-bye. All that mattered was that the verse should sound impressive. This was the second negative feed-back: a blockage against intelligence.

The third stage was yet another reaction: against wild, loose emotion. The name of the reaction was the Movement, and its anthology was Robert Conquest’s New Lines. Of the nine poets to appear in this, six, at the time, were university teachers, two librarians, and one a civil servant. It was, in short, academic-administrative verse, polite, knowledgeable, efficient, polished and, in its quiet way, even intelligent. What it had to offer positively was more difficult to describe. Even the editor found he could define it only in negatives: “It submits to no great systems of theoretical constructs nor agglomerations of unconscious commands. It is free from both mystical and logical compulsions and—like the modern philosophy—is empirical in attitude to all that comes. . . . On the more technical side . . . we see the refusal to abandon a rational structure and comprehensible language. . . . It will be seen at once that these poets do not have as much in common as they would if they were a group of doctrine-saddled writers forming a definite school complete with programme and rules. What they do have in common is, perhaps, at its lowest, little more than a negative determination to avoid bad principles.”

Mr. Conquest is, I think, exaggerating when he says that his poets have nothing very much in common. For example:

Picture of lover or friend that is not either
Like you or me who, to sustain our pose,
Need wine and conversation, colour and
    light;
In short, a past that no one now can share,
No matter whose your future; calm and
    dry,
In sex I do not dither more than either,
Nor should I now swell to halloo the names
Of feelings that no one needs to remember:
The same few dismal properties, the same
Oppressive air of justified unease
Of our imaginations and our beds.
It seems the poet made a bad mistake.

Perhaps the logic seems a little tenuous? The shifts a little hard to follow? The content too fine-drawn? So they should. The piece is synthetic; it contains eight of the nine New Lines poets. I have omitted D. J. Enright since he rarely sticks to the metrical norms on which the rest insist. Otherwise I have not cheated in compiling the poem. I have taken the poets in the order in which they appear in the anthology, without using more than two lines from any one and without changing the punctuation except, in a minor way, between quotations. Yet though the poem may not be quite comprehensible, it is perfectly unified in tone. Wouldn’t the impartial reader be hard put to know where one quotation ended and another began? Wouldn’t he find a considerable similarity in the quality both of the language and of the experience? A kind of unity of flatness? The pieties of the Movement were as predictable as the politics of the 30’s poets. They are summed up at the beginning of Philip Larkin’s “Church-going”: “Hatless, I take off/My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.” This, in concentrated form, is the image of the postwar Welfare State Englishman: shabby and not concerned with his appearance; poor—he has a bike, not a car; gauche but full of agnostic piety; underfed, underpaid, overtaxed, hopeless, bored, wry. This is the third negative feed-back: an attempt to show that the poet is not a strange creature inspired; on the contrary, he is just like the man next door—in fact, he probably is the man next door.

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Now, I am wholly in favor of restoring poetry to the realm of common sense. But there is always the delicate question of how common common sense should be. All three negative feed-backs work, in their different ways, to preserve the idea that life in England goes on much as it always has, give or take a few minor changes in the class system. The upper-middle-class, or Tory ideal—presented in its pure crystalline form by John Betjeman—may have given way to the predominantly lower-middle-class, or labor, ideal of the Movement and the Angries, but the concept of gentility still reigns supreme. And gentility is a belief that life is always more or less orderly, people always more or less polite, their emotions and habits more or less decent and more or less controlled; that God, in short, is more or less good.

It is a stance which is becoming increasingly precarious to maintain. That the English have succeeded so long owes a good deal to the fact that England is an island; it is, literally, insulated from the rest of the world. But since the First World War, that insulation has slowly been broken down. Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, for example, shows perfectly how powerless the orthodox defenses ultimately became under extreme conditions. When the level of misery was normal, the defenses worked efficiently enough. His childhood at preparatory and public school meant loneliness, philistinism, lewdness, insensitivity, and unhappiness. These were all to be expected, and Graves duly countered them in the orthodox ways: games, toughness, asexual love, wit, and a clipped, dry, you-can’t-touch-me manner. He developed, in short, a stiff upper lip. This got him through the first two years of the war, then gradually it broke. The horror of the trenches was too great. What he saw and what he went through was beyond the bounds of anything his training had prepared him for. Physically he survived, but emotionally he could no longer properly cope. The result was a kind of shell-shock which, he says himself, stayed with him for ten years. And even then he had to exile himself from England and erect the elaborate barricade of White Goddesses and classicizing through which his genuine poetry has only slowly and painfully filtered.

In the same way, George Orwell felt he had to purge himself of his governing-class upbringing by deliberately plunging into the abjectest poverty and pain partly, at least, because what he saw in Burma gave the lie to the whole ethos in which he had been raised.

The only English writer who was able to face the deep, uncompromising forces at work in our time was D. H. Lawrence. And he was born in the working class and spent most of his life outside England; so he had almost nothing to do with middle-class gentility. “In those days,” he wrote, “they were always telling me I had genius as though to console me for not having their own incomparable advantages.”

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But these forces I have invoked are beyond mere shell-shock and class guilt. They are general and concern us all. What, I suggest, has happened in the last half century is that we in England are gradually being made to realize that all our lives, even those of the most genteel and en-islanded, are influenced profoundly by forces which have nothing to do with gentility, decency, or politeness. Theologians would call these forces Evil; psychologists, perhaps, libido. Either way, they are the forces of disintegration which destroy the old standards of civilization. Their public faces are those of two world wars, of the concentration camps, of genocide, and the threat of nuclear war.

I do not wish to overdramatize the situation. War and cruelty have always existed, but those of the 20th century are different in two ways. First, mass evil (for lack of a better term) has been magnified to match the scale of mass society. We no longer have local wars, we have world wars, which involve the civilians quite as deeply as the military. Where once, at worst, regiments of professional soldiers were wiped out, now whole cities go. Instead of the death of individuals, we have mass extermination. Instead of individual torture and sadism, we have concentration camps run scientifically as death factories. The disintegration, to put it most mildly, has reached proportions which make it increasingly difficult to ignore. Once upon a time, the English could safely believe that evil was something that happened on the Continent, or further off, in the Empire, where soldiers were paid to take care of it. To believe this now requires at best an extraordinary single-mindedness, at worst stupidity.

The second, and specifically modern difference in our attitude to the problem is this: the forceable recognition of a mass evil outside us has developed precisely parallel with psychoanalysis; that is, with our recognition of the ways in which the same forces are at work within us. One of the therapeutic purposes, for example, of Bruno Bettelheim’s psychoanalytic observations when he was in Dachau and Buchenwald was to educate himself into realizing how much of what went on around him expressed what went on inside himself. Another analyst has suggested that the guilt which seems to dog the refugees who escaped from Germany may in part be due to the fact that the Nazis fulfilled the deepest and most primitive drives of the refugees themselves, killing fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and children. Be this as it may, it is hard to live in an age of psychoanalysis and feel oneself wholly detached from the dominant public savagery. In this way, at least, the makers of horror films are more in tune with contemporary anxiety than most of the English poets.

But just as England was not affected by the concentration camps, so it has remained, on the whole, contemptuously impervious to psychology. Primitivism is only generally acknowledged in this country when it takes a peculiarly British form: the domestic sex murder. Then the gloating is public and universal. Had Freud been born in London instead of Vienna, he would probably have finished not in psychoanalysis but in criminology.

I am not suggesting that modern English poetry, to be really modern, must be concerned with psychoanalysis or with the concentration camps or with the hydrogen bomb or with any other of the modern horrors. I am not suggesting, in fact, that it must be anything. For poetry that feels it has to cope with predetermined subjects ceases to be poetry and becomes propaganda. I am, however, suggesting that it drop the pretense that life, give or take a few social distinctions, is the same as ever, that gentility, decency, and all the other social totems will eventually muddle through.

What poetry needs, in brief, is a new seriousness. I would define this seriousness simply as the poet’s ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience with his full intelligence, not to take the easy exits of either the conventional response or choking incoherence. Believe in it or not, psychoanalysis has left its mark on poetry. First, the writer can no longer deny with any assurance the fears and desires he does not wish to face; he knows obscurely that they are there, however skillfully he manages to elude them. Second, having acknowledged their existence, he is no longer absolved from the need to use all his intelligence and skill to make poetic sense of them. Since Freud, the late-Romantic dichotomy between emotion and intelligence has become totally meaningless.

This position had, I think, already been partially assumed by T. S. Eliot when he wrote The Waste Land. The poem follows, with great precision and delicacy, the movement of a psyche, not just of a society, in the process of disintegration. Eliot’s talk of classicism, like his use in the poem of literature and theology, was an elaborate and successful defense which forced impersonality on a deeply personal and painful subject. But during the later 20’s and 30’s in America, Eliot’s technical achievements and the radical revaluation of literary tradition that went with them seemed so bewilderingly impressive that the urgently personal uses this technique was put to were overlooked. A whole school of criticism was developed to prove technically that there was no necessary or even significant connection between art and its roots in the artist’s life. During the 40’s, however, when English poetry was at its nadir, there arose in America a new generation of poets, the most important of whom were Robert Lowell and John Berryman. They had assimilated the lesson of Eliot and the critical 30’s: they assumed that a poet, to earn his title, had to be very skillful, very original, and very intelligent. But they were no longer concerned with Eliot’s rear-guard action against the late Romantics; they were, I mean, no longer adherents of the cult of rigid impersonality. So they were able to write poetry of immense skill and intelligence which coped openly with the quick of their experience, experience sometimes on the edge of disintegration and breakdown. Robert Lowell’s latest book, Life Studies, for example, is a large step forward in this new direction. It may contain no single poem as impressive as the “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” but the total impact of the book as a whole is altogether more powerful. Where once Lowell tried to externalize his disturbance theologically in Catholicism and rhetorically in certain mannerisms of language and rhythm, he is now, I think, trying to cope with them nakedly, as they arise, in all their ugliness and pain.

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It is to the point that the two Englishmen who are most concerned to write at this kind of depth have spent the better part of their poetically formative twenties in America. I mean Ted Hughes and Thorn Gunn. So they have been less open to pressures which would flatten both their intelligence and the sharp violence of their experience into a socially more acceptable middle style. If you compare, for instance, Larkin’s “At Grass” with Hughes’s “A Dream of Horses,” the creative advantage of being three thousand miles away from the fog of English gentility becomes peculiarly clear. “At Grass” follows:

The eye can hardly pick them out
From the cold shade they shelter in,
Till wind distresses tail and mane;
Then one crops grass, and moves about
—The other seeming to look on—
And stands anonymous again.

Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps
Two dozen distances sufficed
To fable them: faint afternoons
Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps,
Whereby their names were artificed
To inlay faded, classic Junes—

Silks at the start: against the sky
Numbers and parasols: outside,
Squadrons of empty cars, and heat,
And littered grass: then the long cry
Hanging unhushed till it subside
To stop-press columns on the street.

Do memories plague their ears like flies?
They shake their heads. Dusk brims the
   shadows.
Summer by summer, all stole away,
The starting-gates, the crowds and cries—
All but the unmolesting meadows.
Almanacked, their names live; they

Have slipped their names, and stand at
   ease
Or gallop for what must be joy,
And not a fieldglass sees them home,
Or curious stop-watch prophesies:
Only the groom, and the groom’s boy,
With bridles in the evening come.

Larkin’s poem, elegant, unpretentious and rather beautiful in its mild way, is a nostalgic recreation of the Platonic (or New Yorker) idea of the English scene, part pastoral, part sporting. His horses are social creatures of fashionable race meetings and high style; emotionally, they belong to the world of the ASPCA. It is a long way from Hughes’s “A Dream of Horses”:

We were born grooms, in stable-straw we
   sleep still,
All our wealth horse-dung and the comb-
   ings of horses,
And all we can talk about is what horses
   ail.

Out of the night that gulfed beyond the
   palace-gate
There shook hooves and hooves and
   hooves of horses:
Our horses battered their stalls; their eyes
   jerked white.

And we ran out, mice in our pockets and
   straw in our hair,
Into darkness that was avalanching to
   horses
And a quake of hooves. Our lantern’s little
   orange flare

Made a round mask of our each sleep-
   dazed face,
Bodiless, or else bodied by horses
That whinnied and bit and cannoned the
   world from its place.

The tall palace was so white, the moon was
   so round,
Everything else this plunging of horses
To the rim of our eyes that strove for the
   shapes of the sound.

We crouched at our lantern, our bodies
   drank the din,
And we longed for a death trampled by
   such horses
As every grain of the earth had hooves
   and mane.

We must have fallen like drunkards into a
   dream
Of listening, lulled by the thunder of the
   horses.
We awoke stiff; broad day had come.

Out through the gate the unprinted desert
   stretched
To stone and scorpion; our stable-horses
Lay in their straw, in a hag-sweat, listless
   and wretched.

Now let us, tied, be quartered by those
   horses,
If but doomsday’s flames be great horses,
The forever itself a circling of the hooves
   of horses.

The poem, by the standard of Hughes’s best writing, is not all that good; it is less controlled than Larkin’s and has a number of romantic, quasi-medieval trappings which verge on the pretentious. But it is unquestionably about something; it is a serious attempt to recreate and so clarify, unfalsified and in the strongest imaginative terms possible, a powerful complex of emotions and sensations. Unlike Larkin’s, Hughes’s horses have a violent, impending presence. But through the detail which brings them so threateningly to life, they reach back, as in a dream, into the depths of fear and sensation. Their brute world is part physical, part state of mind.

They have, of course, their literary antecedents: the strange, savage horses which terrorize Ursula Brangwen at the end of Lawrence’s The Rainbow. But this is part of their wider significance. Dr. Leavis has come, apparently, to believe that Lawrence and Eliot represent the two warring and unreconcilable poles of modern literature. The best contemporary English verse, however, shows that their influences can be creatively reconciled. In the seriousness of what I have called the new depth poetry, the openness to experience, the psychological insight and integrity of D. H. Lawrence combine with the immense poetic skill and formal intelligence of T. S. Eliot. At its best, it is work which fulfills Coleridge’s definition of the Imagination as the force which reconciles “a more than usual state of emotion with a more than usual order.” If this is to be the new direction of verse, we might be in for an exceptionally fine creative period.

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