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I am imagining some place for our elation. Córdoba. Eindhoven. Isfahan. Some resonant name, you understand. Or Kyoto, the perfect interiors; the sparseness, a low black table. Some music in the name, as if that would be enough. Wherever, we will be shapes there of a satisfaction, will know those strange tastes of each other as our own. But here in a February at one a.m. we are together in Chalk Farm, Jane’s uncurtained windows looking out across the rail-lines, everyone too far away beyond the tracks to see you kneeling nude beside me and not in prayer. In the instants of pleasure, how adroit we are. Chains and visions hold us close, to the end we are foolish, hunting. But we improvise our honesties; we touch, as if we understand them, our griefs and admirations. Is this, at last, a poem about you? Below our windows in Chalk Farm, the all-night goods-trains clash and ache and shuffle. ON IGNORANCE Clive Wilmer English is widely recognised as one of the world’s great literatures. It is also one of the oldest and is unusual among its peers in having an unbroken tradition of nearly five centuries, to say nothing of the substantial but broken tradition which precedes it. Central to that tradition, indeed the constant and binding factor within it, is English poetry. I do not intend the word ‘English’ chauvinistically. Some of the greatest works in the language were written by Celtic and American writers and the later twentieth century has seen an enormous expansion of work in English from all over the world. This points, I think, to the great strength and value of the English tradition: its ability to incorporate so much experience and so many influences that were in their origins foreign to it. It has been able to do so, I would suggest, not because the English are notably open to other cultures but because our uniquely heterogeneous language is hospitable to novelty and because the forms it has borrowed or created tend to be flexible. The great seminal metre of English verse, the iambic pentameter, is a case in point: extremely complex, subtle and demanding on the writer, yet also adaptable and strikingly various. But this is by no means the current myth. The great Modernist poets and many of the critics who have learnt from them have encouraged us to think of our poetry as insular and conservative and of our reading public as philistine and unadventurous. It is a myth that has its origin, like most myths, in the facts. One would have to be pretty blinkered not to notice the way our literary journalists, for instance, are offended by the unfamiliar and unconsciously schooled to ignore any challenge to their orthodoxies: and the really quite ludicrous veneration for Philip Larkin, which I seem to encounter everywhere, has more to do with the middlebrow little-Englandism he affected than the real distinction of several of his poems. Nevertheless, the myth remains a myth. That is to say, it ignores what has actually happened in English poetry. It is not a response to poems, but a tissue of received notions and distorting generalities. It is the product of ignorance (in the strict sense), the effect of which is to promote ignorance (in the loose sense). Let us take a prominent example, the introduction by A. Alvarez to The Faber Book of Modern European Poetry. I shall quote from it fragmentarily: Until quite recently, foreign literature, particularly foreign poetry, has not fared well in Britain… In general, when the first modernists jettisoned traditional metre and rhyme and poetic diction in favour of less predictable forms and a language closer to colloquial speech a good deal of contemporary poetry became easier to translate. In place of the brilliant anomalies which had previously been regarded as masterpieces of translation – such as Gilbert Murray’s transformation of Aeschylus into Swinburne – a new system evolved… Clearly the system worked best with free verse… The more a poet relies on the traditional rhymed and metrically regular forms, the more his weaknesses are exaggerated and his strengths are concealed in translation… Eliot, despite his extraordinary ear for the movement and inner rhythm of verse, seems to have survived translation without major difficulties… I have always believed that the Americans were at the sharp end of Modernism in poetry for two reasons. First, they had nothing to lose; the great tradition from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Milton to Pope to the Romantics was not really their concern, although they paid lip-service to it. Second, they wanted, above all, to ‘make it new’; this meant creating a new poetic language for themselves – a language that expressed American vernacular rhythms, a language not bound by the Shakespearean iambic pentameter… This is at best distorted and at worst simply untrue. It is, alas, only too typical of contemporary punditry. Let us look 32 PN Review 123
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Clive Wilmer at some of the facts. tradition itself. The first sentence quoted, which is also the opening sentence of the essay, is absolutely false. Without the translation of foreign literature, there would probably be no English poetry at all. It is almost true to say that it is founded on translation. Chaucer in his life-time was known primarily as a translator. Without his adaptations of Boccaccio and Le Roman de la Rose, neither his original work nor the tradition it fathered could ever have come about. The same applies to the importation by Wyatt and Surrey of the Petrarchan sonnet. And what are we to make of Milton’s debt to Italian poetry, much of it contemporary, or the imitations of Latin satire that are so central to the Augustan movement? When Keats in his famous sonnet sets out in quest of Homer, where does he turn but to the wonderful Jacobean translation by George Chapman? ‘But come on!’ I hear the Alvarezians burbling. ‘We weren’t talking about ancient history. We were talking about the modern and the contemporary. “Make it new,” as Pound said [quoting a Chinese sage of the 5th century BC]. It is over the past 150 years or so that poetry in translation has been scorned.’ Not so yet again. As Pound freely and frequently acknowledged, the later nineteenth century was one of the great periods of translation into English. The suggestion that the period produced nothing but Gilbert Murray is a grotesque caricature – especially as it was through Murray’s supposed model, the despised Swinburne, and through Swinburne’s friend Rossetti that Pound first encountered the ballades of François Villon. Their translations, it seems to me, are pretty distinguished: of their time, of course, but which good translations are not of their time? Pound also valued Rossetti’s collection of early Italian poetry, which is where he first read the Vita Nuova and the sonnets of Cavalcanti. The truth is that Pound was himself part of a tremendous opening-out to other cultures that occurred between 1850 and 1920: there is Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam, for instance, also admired by Pound, there is William Morris’s work on Icelandic and other northern literatures, there are the mostly failed but courageous attempts at the Persian and Indian epics, and the first gawky versions of Baudelaire and the Symbolists by Arthur Symons and others of his circle. We are often told in casual surveys of modern literature that Pound revived the lost art of translation. Alvarez exploits this legend without examining the truth of it. One can see why. Pound’s translations, at their best, have a verbal and imaginative élan beyond any of his rivals in the field, and this new energy was crucial and generative in the development of English Modernism. That this was so and that the Modernist attention to foreign poetries was renovative are not to be denied – though the claim that the authors of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and the ABC of Reading merely ‘paid lip-service’ to the English tradition is a staggering one. Surely the opposite was the case: they sought to revise the canon and renew it, precisely because it was inescapable. They also saw – as most good poets have always done – that the national tradition is not the only source. Alvarez’s crude brush-strokes perhaps capture the impatience and iconoclasm of the modern movement. One sees the point of that and the Modernists will not suffer from his reading. The same cannot be said for the way he misrepresents the character and achievement of the English As a young man, Alvarez was a poet in the Movement-ish manner. I cannot begin to understand, therefore, how someone who has himself composed in the standard metres, however ineffectually, can speak with such ignorance of their scope and potential. It is, for instance, wholly wrong to say that the Modernists ‘jettisoned traditional metre and rhyme’. The great icon of the modern movement, surely, is The Waste Land. How, I wonder, does Alvarez interpret the prosody of this? The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. There are no deviations from the iambic pentameter there (if we allow ‘requires’ in line seven to be stretched out to three syllables); the rhyme-scheme is as classically exact as that of Gray’s ‘Elegy’; the movement is innocent of anything I can recognise as ‘American vernacular rhythms’; and there is even a hint of elevated diction. Of course, Eliot is being selfconsciously literary in this passage – ‘lip-service’ perhaps? – so let us take a more characteristic moment: Unreal city, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I met one I knew and stopped him crying: ‘Stetson!’ And so on. The passage is in blank verse. It is, that is to say, ‘bound by the Shakespearean iambic pentameter’. Of the lines quoted, three break with the strictest interpretation of that metre: the first line is short, the last is long (with two syllables added to the end of a standard line) and a weak syllable has been dropped from line 5. All these licences are commonplace in the Shakespeare whose pentameter binds the urgent speech of modern Americans. The truth is that most of The Waste Land is in a blank verse imitated from Jacobean drama. There are some passages of free verse, as there are also passages of accentual verse and a good deal of rhymed verse too. It is the combination that is original, rather than any specific prosody. The language of my second quotation is not especially colloquial, though its movement has a naturalness that plainly draws on speech. It is no closer to ‘contemporary speech’, however, than the work of such Victorian poets as Robert Browning and A.H. Clough. Alvarez talks of Eliot’s ‘extraordinary ear for the movement and inner rhythm of verse’. I am not sure I know the difference between an outer rhythm and an inner one. I suppose the suggestion is that Eliot transcends the mechanical order of iambic metre – Pound’s ‘sequence of the metronome’. If PN Review 123 33

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I am imagining some place for our elation.

Córdoba. Eindhoven. Isfahan. Some resonant name, you understand. Or Kyoto, the perfect interiors;

the sparseness, a low black table. Some music in the name, as if that would be enough. Wherever,

we will be shapes there of a satisfaction, will know those strange tastes of each other as our own. But here in a February at one a.m.

we are together in Chalk Farm,

Jane’s uncurtained windows looking out across the rail-lines, everyone too far away beyond the tracks to see you kneeling nude beside me and not in prayer. In the instants of pleasure, how adroit we are. Chains and visions hold us close, to the end we are foolish, hunting. But we improvise our honesties; we touch, as if we understand them,

our griefs and admirations.

Is this, at last, a poem about you? Below our windows in Chalk Farm, the all-night goods-trains clash and ache and shuffle.

ON IGNORANCE

Clive Wilmer

English is widely recognised as one of the world’s great literatures. It is also one of the oldest and is unusual among its peers in having an unbroken tradition of nearly five centuries, to say nothing of the substantial but broken tradition which precedes it. Central to that tradition, indeed the constant and binding factor within it, is English poetry. I do not intend the word ‘English’ chauvinistically. Some of the greatest works in the language were written by Celtic and American writers and the later twentieth century has seen an enormous expansion of work in English from all over the world. This points, I think, to the great strength and value of the English tradition: its ability to incorporate so much experience and so many influences that were in their origins foreign to it. It has been able to do so, I would suggest, not because the English are notably open to other cultures but because our uniquely heterogeneous language is hospitable to novelty and because the forms it has borrowed or created tend to be flexible. The great seminal metre of English verse, the iambic pentameter, is a case in point: extremely complex, subtle and demanding on the writer, yet also adaptable and strikingly various.

But this is by no means the current myth. The great Modernist poets and many of the critics who have learnt from them have encouraged us to think of our poetry as insular and conservative and of our reading public as philistine and unadventurous. It is a myth that has its origin, like most myths, in the facts. One would have to be pretty blinkered not to notice the way our literary journalists, for instance, are offended by the unfamiliar and unconsciously schooled to ignore any challenge to their orthodoxies: and the really quite ludicrous veneration for Philip Larkin, which I seem to encounter everywhere, has more to do with the middlebrow little-Englandism he affected than the real distinction of several of his poems.

Nevertheless, the myth remains a myth. That is to say, it ignores what has actually happened in English poetry. It is not a response to poems, but a tissue of received notions and distorting generalities. It is the product of ignorance (in the strict sense), the effect of which is to promote ignorance (in the loose sense). Let us take a prominent example, the introduction by A. Alvarez to The Faber Book of Modern European Poetry. I shall quote from it fragmentarily:

Until quite recently, foreign literature, particularly foreign poetry, has not fared well in Britain… In general, when the first modernists jettisoned traditional metre and rhyme and poetic diction in favour of less predictable forms and a language closer to colloquial speech a good deal of contemporary poetry became easier to translate. In place of the brilliant anomalies which had previously been regarded as masterpieces of translation – such as Gilbert Murray’s transformation of Aeschylus into Swinburne – a new system evolved… Clearly the system worked best with free verse… The more a poet relies on the traditional rhymed and metrically regular forms, the more his weaknesses are exaggerated and his strengths are concealed in translation… Eliot, despite his extraordinary ear for the movement and inner rhythm of verse, seems to have survived translation without major difficulties… I have always believed that the Americans were at the sharp end of Modernism in poetry for two reasons. First, they had nothing to lose; the great tradition from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Milton to Pope to the Romantics was not really their concern, although they paid lip-service to it. Second, they wanted, above all, to ‘make it new’; this meant creating a new poetic language for themselves – a language that expressed American vernacular rhythms, a language not bound by the Shakespearean iambic pentameter…

This is at best distorted and at worst simply untrue. It is, alas, only too typical of contemporary punditry. Let us look

32 PN Review 123

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