ENGLISH POETRY IN THE PERIOD SINCE 1945 TILL NOWDAYS

ROBERT GRAVES (1895-) made himself known to a huge reading public by his fictional reconstructions of first-century Roman history in Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1934). Graves's poetry is carefully structured rumination. There is no sense of a cultured past (as in Eliot) or of mysteries half glimpsed (as in De la Mare). Indeed there seems to be a conscious deprecia­tion of anything that might add signifi­cance to the locked-in events of the individual's temporal experience ('To evoke posterity / Is to weep on your own grave'). PHILIP LARKIN (1922-) was acknowledged as the leader of the group. His volumes include The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Wedding (1964) High Windows (1974). He sees himself as writing in the tradition of Thomas Hardy in refusing to don the mantle of self-conscious poethood, but fastening without pretension on the commonplace experience, pinpointing its impact on the senses and hinting at its half-glimpsed meaning — or more often its fully glimpsed meaninglessness — for modern man. The feeling recurs that man has lost his footing amid natural and civilizational instabilities. In 'Ambulances' children and women in the street are stopped in their

tracks at the sight of A wild white face that overtops Red stretcher-blankets momently and sense the 'solving emptiness/That lies just-under all we do'.

The sense of 'solving emptiness' is not far removed from cynical disengagement. Scorn of gravity and pretension can easily consort with the shrug of the debunker. Fear of comprehensiveness can turn into blinkered obsession with the limitedly parochial. But Larkin is a highly skilled craftsman. The cultivation of a casual tone that seems to say 'I'm not a poet' was tried by several 'Movement' poets. When juxtaposed with self-consciously literary" utterance, the conversational throwaway can be powerful in effect. KINGSLEY AMIS'S (1922-) "A Bookshop Idyll";illustrates the point:

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart: Girls aren't like that.

D. J. ENRIGHT (1920-) adopted the off-hand stance and low-key idiom to catch the modish air of 'sincerity' in Bread Bather Than Blossoms (1956). While Larkin edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse (1973), Enright edited The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945-1980 (1980) so that 'Movement' biases towards cheerful balladry and versified chat have become institutionalized. Enright's anthology, for instance, is generous in provision of space for the entertainingly witty and polished light verse of Gavin Ewart (1916-): Give me the Daulian bird and Locrian Arsinoe. I want to arrange a protest in high places. I just want to say to a few fat-nippled goddesses: It isn't fair. ('From V. C. a Gentleman of Verona'). It was a poet born in the 1930s, TED HUGHES (1930),who first won acclaim for his thoroughness in rejecting the urbane civilities of "Movement" verse. He injected a shot of percussive aggressiveness into the body poetic, turning to the animal world to tap its resources of raw energy and brutality, and using for backcloths the harsh moors and crags of his native West Yorkshire.

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

In action, no falsifying dream

Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

Or in sleep rehearse the perfect kills and eat.

("Hawk Roosting", The Hawk in the Rain,1957)

Hughes has been a proaucave poet. In several collections he has featured "Crow" (e.g. Crow, 1970; Crow Wakes,1971), utilizing him, on the model of the North American mythological trickster, Raven, as a spokesbird against God in surveying the black comedy of the universe. A more economic and disciplined poet.

GEOFFREY HILL (1932—),has shown that dissatisfaction with the narrowness and banality of much Movement and post-Movement verse can be answered by steady confrontation with the facts of love and death, of faith and suffering, which does not banker after Lawrenrian primirivism and does not cut off the present from the past. Hill is a scholarly poet whose wide-ranging allusiveness, historical and literary, may limit his appeal, but he has been tailed the outstanding poet of his generation', and the claim may be tested by reference to the richly textured poem The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy (1983), to the grim sonnets on the Wars of the Roses, "Funeral Music" (KingLog, 1968), or to the disturbing account of creation in the early work "Genesis" (for the Unfallen, 1959), which pictures the vigorous thrust of new life in dynamic imagery:

And where the streams were salt and full The tough pig-headed salmon strove, Curbing the ebb and the tide's pull, To reach the steady hills above.

A notable feature of the past two decades has been the work of a group of Irish poets. Of the older ones RICHARD MURPHY (1927-),from County Galway, has made sustained and percipient studies of Irish personalities and has recorded the changes and chances of the seaman's lot, (See The Last Galway Hooker, 1961;and New and Selected Poems,1974.) THOMAS KIN8ELLA (1928-) left Ireland for the United States in 1965. Strenuous cerebralism gives his work a density that too often sacrificed surface coherence. JOHN MONTAGUE (1929-) moved in the opposite direction, from the United States to Ireland. He is a sharp observer of life with a keen sense of the past, and he edited The Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974). Selected Poems (1982) at times reflects his worried absorption with his Ulster inheritance. And it is this inheritance which is so powerfully explored in the poetry of SEAMUS HEANEY (1939-),whose emigration has been from County Down to the Republic. In a series of collections (Death of a Naturalist, 1966; Wintering Out. 1972; North,1975; Field Work,1979) Heaney has moulded his highly charged stanzas from terse phrases and telling images that tingle with resonance. In the off-quoted poem "Digging" the poet watches his father digging his potato patch as his grandfather dug the peat, and ends with the inspired climax:

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I'll dig with it.

And dig he does, into the landscape and its past history, with a justly acclaimed exactitude and lucidity, Heaney's contemporary MICHAEL LONGLEY (1939-),from Belfast, knows how to combine traditional metrics with eloquent colloquialism, and has touched movingly on the troubles. Derek Mahon (1941—),also from Belfast, has been defined by a reviewer as 'the least locally attached' of the recent Northern Irish poets, and as working in the 'post-Movement tradition of the poem as anecdote-and-moral’. Certainly Mahon gives the impression of a poet who can turn his hand to any subject that presents itself (see Poems 1962-1978, 1979).

TOM PAUNLIN (1949-),though born in Leeds, was brought up in Belfast and has a way of allowing a superficially fiat verbal line to throw up overtones of personal anguish or overshadowing violence. PAUL MULDOON (1951-),from County Armagh, is more taxingly remote and oblique, often teasing the reader with blank in conclusiveness. Yet his command of word and image has the stamp of authority. In turning to Paul Muldoon we have already touched on a poet born in the 1950s. If it is difficult to be just to the writers of one's own century, it is almost impossible to be just to those of recent decades. It would be invidious and misleading lightly to select for reference a further sample of the poets now writing. The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982), edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, includes selections from seven poets we have already treated and from a dozen others. They include DOUGLAS DUNN (1942—),who first made his name for neatly delineated but flatly dispassionate vignettes of the city scene (Terry Street,1969) but has developed a finer and more assured touch in St Kilda’s Parliament (1981);and JAMES PENTON (1949-),author of The Memory of War: Poems 1968-1982 (1982), whose fullness of concrete detail is teasingly and potently conjoined with defiance of simplistic or conclusive interpretation, and whose cadences and idioms sometimes cany subtle overtones in echo of Eliot. By contrast, the voice-of CRAIG RAINE (1944-) is par excellence that of an innovator whose fanciful imagery is calculated to revitalize our view of the familiar world:

He shakes the air into a paper bag and, eggs pickoocketed inside, trapezes it. (The Grocer)

Set alongside the gnomic profundities of James Fenton's "A German Requiem" (A German Requiem, 1980), such refreshing ingenuities suggest that in respect of both the reliance upon tradition and the need for experiment English poetry is in good shape.