At Home in Time: Forms of Neo-Augustanism in Modern English Poetry 9780773564848

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Forms of Neoclassicism: Modern Continuities and Discontinuities
1 Eliot's Classicism, Pound's Symbolism, and the Drafts of The Waste Land
2 The Reader in W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter"
3 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal
4 A.D. Hope: A Poetics and Poetry of "Counter-Revolution"
5 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism in Six Epistles to Eva Hesse
Conclusion: World Enough, and Time: Recent Negotiations between Poetry and History
Notes
Works Cited
Index
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D
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At Home in Time

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At Home in Time Forms of Neo-Augustanism in Modern English Poetry PATRICK

DEANE

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo

© McGill-Queen's University Press 1994 ISBN 0-7735-1215-2 Legal deposit third quarter 1994 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in the United States on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Western Ontario and from Foundation Western.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Deane, Patrick At home in time: forms of neo-Augustanism in modern English poetry Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1215-2 i. English poetry - 2Oth century - History and criticism, i. Title. FR6oi.D42 1994 821'.9109 094-900466-9 Typeset in Palatino 10/12 by Caractera production graphique, Quebec City Acknowledgments are due to the following publishers and individuals who have kindly granted permission for the inclusion of material in this book: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., for permission to reprint material from V. by Tony Harrison (Bloodaxe 1989), and from Tony Harrison edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe 1991). Carcanet Press Ltd., for permission to quote from In Two Minds: Guesses at Other Writers by C.H. Sisson (1990). Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd., Sydney, for permission to reprint the work of A.D. Hope from The Age of Reason (1985) and Dunciad Minor (1970). David R. Godine, Publisher, for permission to reprint lines from Poems and Epistles by John Fuller, copyright John Fuller 1973. Faber and Faber Ltd., for permission to quote from The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (1969); from New Year Letter (1941), For the Time Being (1945), and Collected Poems (1991) by W.H. Auden; from Selected Poems 1964-1983 (1986) by Douglas Dunn; and from the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (1966), and Autumn Journal (1939) by Louis MacNeice. Harcourt Brace and Co., for permission to reprint excerpts from "The Waste Land" in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace & Company, copyright © 1964,1963 by T.S. Eliot; and from "Burnt Norton" in Four Quartets, copyright 1943 by T.S. Eliot and renewed 1973 by Esme Valerie Eliot. London Magazine Editions, for permission to reprint lines from Six Epistles to Eva Hesse by Donald Davie (1970). Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd., for permission to reprint lines from Epistles to Several Persons by John Fuller (1973) Oxford University Press, for permission to quote from Collected Poems (1985) and The Way of a World (1969) by Charles Tomlinson. Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd., for permission to reprint lines from "Letter to John Fuller"in The Memory of War and Children in Exile: Poems 1968-1983 by James Fenton (1983). Random House, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from Collected Poems (1991) by W.H. Auden: "Ode to Terminus/'copyright © 1968 by W.H. Auden; "In Memory of W.B. Yeats/'copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W.H. Auden; from "The Sea and the Mirror,"copyright © 1944 by W.H. Auden; from "New Year Letter/'copyright © 1941 and renewed 1969 by W.H. Auden. Tony Harrison, for permission to quote from Tony Harrison/Selected Poems (1987). University of California Press, for permission to quote from French Symbolist Poetry (1958) translated by C.F. Maclntyre, copyright © 1958 The Regents of the University of California.

For Sheila, Petra, and Colin

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Forms of Neoclassicism: Modern Continuities and Discontinuities 3 1 Eliot's Classicism, Pound's Symbolism, and the Drafts of The Waste Land 31 2 The Reader in W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter" 56 3 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

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4 A.D. Hope: A Poetics and Poetry of "CounterRevolution" 121 5 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism in Six Epistles to Eva Hesse 161 Conclusion: World Enough, and Time: Recent Negotiations between Poetry and History 203 Notes 225 Works Cited Index 249

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Acknowledgments

My wife, Sheila, has given me not only support and encouragement, but also the kind of perspicacious and concrete advice only an astute colleague can provide. William Blissett and Don McKay will, I hope, be pleased to know how persistently I feel the influence of their (very different) examples as critics and readers of poetry. I am also grateful to the following people who have read parts of the manuscript, offered suggestions, or been helpful in some other way: Stephen Adams, Sue Desmond, Michael Groden, Gerald Harnett, Michael Kirkham, Thomas Tausky, Thomas Whitaker, and Lisa Zeitz. The list should certainly include members of my 1992 graduate seminar, with whom I discussed many of these texts and ideas, and whose independence of mind was for me a spur to self-scrutiny. During the early stages of research I benefited greatly from the assistance of Kevin McGuirk and John Rupert. At McGill-Queen's University Press in Montreal, Peter Blaney's enthusiasm for the project has seemed as unwavering as his grasp of its premises has been firm and shrewd, and I thank him very much for that. Judy Williams and Joan McGilvray have been helpful in a host of practical ways. I am indebted to the Government of Ontario for the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature, which I received in 1988, and which enabled me to begin research for this book. Work at that stage was also facilitated by Thomas J. Collins, Provost in the University of Western Ontario, who generously provided me with relief from teaching. Thanks are also due to James M. Good, Dean of Arts, and

x Acknowledgments

to Foundation Western, for the grant of a subvention in aid of publication. Parts of chapters i and 4 appeared, respectively, in Journal of Modern Literature and Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada; I am grateful to the editors of these journals for permission to reprint. In an earlier form, material from chapter 2 and from the Conclusion was published in Contemporary Literature (copyright 1991 and 1994), and is used here with permission of The University of Wisconsin Press.

At Home in Time

What are days for? Days are where we live. - Philip Larkin, "Days" Time is not, Time is the evil ... - Ezra Pound, Canto LXXIV The bliss of Man (could Pride that blessing find) Is not to think or act beyond mankind; No pow'rs of body or of soul to share, But what his nature and his state can bear. - Pope, "An Essay on Man"

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INTRODUCTION

Forms of Neoclassicism: Modern Continuities and Discontinuities

"For us classicism is a paradise lost": thus the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in his 1981 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. In a remarkable argument, Milosz manages first to define classicism as implying "a community of beliefs and feelings which unite poet and audience," then to concede that such "communities" have been historically very rare and also undesirable in their exclusivity, and finally to define "the poet of today" as someone nevertheless nostalgic for a classical sense of "belonging" (65). In its inner contradictoriness, its sense of a close interdependence between literature and society, and its striking detachment of the term from any single epoch, Milosz's attitude to classicism is a typically modern one. A previous Charles Eliot Norton professor, T.S. Eliot, wrote wistfully in 1944 of "the age of relative unity and of generally accepted assumptions" which produced Samuel Johnson ("Johnson as Critic and Poet" 184), and in his social criticism argued that "continuity and coherence in literature and the arts" cannot be expected "unless you have a certain uniformity of culture" (Idea 40). That "uniformity of culture" was for Eliot, as for Milosz, indispensable to the "classic." Surprisingly - given that Milosz writes at the apparently more chaotic end of our century - Eliot was perhaps more sceptical about the viability of the classical ideal as he understood it: "we have no classic age, and no classic poet, in English" ("What is a Classic?" 121). "Classicism" - variously defined, but invariably invoking such abstractions as communality, stability, clarity, and discipline - was a term hotly current in English literary and philosophical writings in the early decades of this century. It was Eliot, of course, who in his essay "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" (1923) linked the word to the "mythical method" of Joyce, reformulating as "classicism" the

4 At Home in Time

influential view that the proper task of the artist is to impose control and order upon the intractable and anarchic materia of history. Three years later he was to note that a "forerunner" of twentieth-century classicism had been T.E. Hulme ("A Commentary" [1924] 231); and until recently criticism has tended to endorse this view, citing Hulme's 1911 essay "Romanticism and Classicism" as a representative and seminal document in what he himself labelled the new "classical revival" ("Romanticism and Classicism" 125). In A Genealogy of Modernism (1984), however, Michael Levenson has pointed out that in Speculations (1924) - where "Romanticism and Classicism" appears - Hulme accords classicism no more emphasis than he does other rival aesthetic possibilities, and indeed subjects it to "enduring explicit attack" (208). Levenson argues furthermore that Hulme's commitment to classicism waned rapidly after 1912; by 1914 we find him dismissing "the conception of a classical revival" as a mistake ("Modern Art i" 341). The case of Hulme, Levenson's study suggests, is typical of the modernist movement at large. Classicism - as an idea rather than a body of specific works from antiquity - enters artistic and literary speculation in the early part of our century as merely one of a number of possibilities to be explored. In fact, what we see in Hulme and others is less a revival of classicism than an appropriation of the concept, frequently as part of a self-defining dialectic with nineteenth-century romanticism. Ultimately, the aesthetic which in literature carried the day - the so-called "high" modernist tradition for which Ezra Pound was principal ideologue - will sustain the adjective "classical" in only a rather attenuated and specialized sense. Ron Thomas has discussed what he calls "Pound's Hellenic (GraecoRoman) animus," and has argued that the poet's adoption of the "masks" of classical Latin poets, like his interest in Eleusis and Homer, must be seen as part of an attempt to construct for himself a Hellenic identity in reaction "to what he sees as a decadently Hebraic Western Culture" (2). To be Hebraic, Thomas furthermore asserts, is to seek "redemption through time," and the very process by which Pound "finds, and also hides, himself in masks from the past" indicates a desire to escape time. If this is true, Pound's Hellenism stands diametrically opposed to the "classical" attitude as the present study will come to define it. Perhaps "classicism" is not a word one should expect helpfully to apply to Pound, whose own use of it is in any case usually cautious and hedged: in ABC of Reading, for example, he applauds the neo-Hellenic Anatole France for writing methods that are "sometimes termed 'classicism'" (70).

5 Forms of Neoclassicism

Pound's free "translations" of the Latin poets are by now fairly secure against the sort of literalist attacks made, for example, by W.G. Hale on Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919). But interestingly, the critical rehabilitation of that last work has involved a general agreement with Male's basic point that Poundian translation does not, in any real way, give us the classical original. Pound himself wrote of Propertius "that there was never any question of translation. ... My job was to bring a dead man to life, to present a living figure" (Selected Letters 148-9) - which means that faithfully reproducing either the first-century milieu or the Latin style of Sextus Propertius was intentionally ruled out. Pound's translations from the Latin accordingly placed to one side, his principal experiment in a "classical" style is generally taken to be Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). But in that poem we have classicism at two removes: as John Espey was one of the first to show, the real stylistic debt there is not to Horace or Virgil (both of whom Pound dismissed in "How to Read")1 but to Gautier, Anatole France, and the French Parnassians. And classicism, as derived by Pound from that source, amounts to little more specific than "rhyme and regular strophes" ("Harold Monro" 590) - and, even more vaguely, "hardness" ("The Hard and Soft" 285). It is not surprising that Gilbert Highet, who admits to The Classical Tradition only those works which reveal some clear and direct influence of Greek and Roman literature, finds himself forced to point out that the key texts of modernism are classical neither "in their form, [nor] in their logic" (503); he writes that their debt to antiquity "is difficult to assess" (517). Interestingly, such a blurring of terms was intrinsic to Hulme's vision of the classical revival; he predicted that "when it does come we may not even recognise it as classical." Accordingly he argued that his new classicism would not resemble previous revivals. In particular, it would be most unlikely to involve "a return to Pope" ("Romanticism and Classicism" 125). This seems to have beeen confirmed by literary event: whether by subordination, rejection, or what Highet calls a radical "transformation" of classical tenets and forms, the principal works of the modernist movement certainly bear little obvious resemblance to those of that previous and pre-eminent age of English neoclassicism, the Restoration and eighteenth century. However receptive Pound was to the the French classical revival, his views on the English Augustans were consistently - and sometimes extravagantly - critical: in his essay on Johnson he dismisses "the WHOLE of i8th century literature ... [as] a cliche" (Guide 180). Such pronouncements, no doubt, have done much to discourage

6 At Home in Time critics from even looking for the sort of continuities with the Augustan age which, since those two landmark works of 1957, John Bayley's The Romantic Survival and Frank Kermode's Romantic Image, we now generally acknowledge to exist between modernism and the nineteenth century. But such links there are, and they have become more visible in the light of current revaluations of modernism, particularly those which lay stress on the worldly - social and economic - "power" of modernist discourse, a power not played out by 1945 and still very influential "within the tacit paradigms and routine functioning of institutions that once seemed and may still seem its polar opposites" (Robbins 231). That complicity between literature and the historical moment is for this study one of the most important links between our century and the Augustan age. Another appears, as I have already implied, in the influential figure of Eliot, who differed from Pound not only in the degree of his nostalgia for an explicitly classical ideal, but also in being able to concede that the "qualities of the classic are most nearly to be illustrated, in English literature, in the eighteenth century" ("What Is a Classic?" 121). This was a side of Eliot's taste and judgment that Pound repeatedly denigrated and sought to reform through his own criticism, and also the crucial instance - through his comments on Eliot's drafts for Th Waste Land. The evidence of Eliot's interest in eighteenth-century literary works and modes is everywhere in his essays and poems, and yet it is a measure of Pound's success as a propagandist that, even as we enter the mid-1990s, this aspect of Eliot - and the possibility of there being an identifiable and sustained neo-Augustan movement in twentieth-century English literature - remains obscure and largely unacknowledged. With characteristic acuity, Hugh Kenner drew attention to the issue on the fiftieth anniversary of The Waste Land, but it has not found a firm place in the universe where scholars of Eliot or of modernism tend to roam. Kenner's submissions about the Augustanism of "The Fire Sermon" were not expanded but dismissed, as John Tucker has recently reminded us (219). A curious phenomenon of recent provenance is the discovery, by critics, that in this period of the postmodern, we seem to be in the midst of yet another classical revival - or, at least, a rediscovery and recycling of the language and motifs of classicism. In the visual arts, and in architecture, the evidence is readily available and quite overwhelming. Charles Jencks's comprehensive book, Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture (1987), finds its examples everywhere: from David Ligare's Poussinesque paintings on classical subjects, and Robert Graham's sculpted figures for the Olympic Stadium in Los Angeles, to the "Michelangelesque urbanism" (266) of

7 Forms of Neoclassicism

Ricardo Bofill. Jencks makes the point that the classicism of postmodern architecture derives from the "repressed" or "cryptic" classicism of modernist architects such as Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius (177), and perhaps it is inevitable that with the postmodern revival of interest in classicism will come a widespread "rediscovery" of classical motives in all of modernism's various incarnations. A notable indication of such a trend was the 1990 exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London, On Classic Ground: Picasso, Leger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930. In the catalogue, Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy chart the rapid spread after the First World War of what is often referred to as "the call to order" (11) and argue that the avant-garde of that period retained a deep loyalty to the classical principles with which they had been raised. But, "believing that it was the essential principles of classicism that were lastingly valuable, [they] took a much more liberal view of formal invention" than did the academics who taught them (19). This purports to explain why the classical affinities of the modernist avant-garde, though very strong, are not always as obvious as they are in Picasso's 1917 Portrait of Olga, for example. In that picture, Cowling and Mundy remark, Picasso was "pretending to be Ingres" (11). The signs of a classical revival in postmodern literature are less dramatic than in the visual arts, but they are certainly visible. In A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), Linda Hutcheon draws numerous parallels between current work in literature, on the one hand, and in painting, sculpture, and architecture on the other. In her insistence that literary postmodernism is "resolutely historical and inescapably political" (4) she appears to concur with Bruce Robbins's assertion that postmodernism "wills for itself ... a 'new public and political poetry'" (243); and as I argue in the following chapters, this represents a partial but very obvious return to classical ideas about the status of literary texts. Hutcheon's book is subtitled "History, Theory, Fiction," and her consideration of poetry - where we might expect to see the strongest signs of a classical revival in literature - is naturally very slight. But critics who are centrally concerned with poetry have begun to notice such signs. James Tulip, writing in Australia where modernism continues to be opposed by a tenacious and self-conscious neoclassicism, has commented on the way in which the postmodern literary climate, with its "emphases on reason and discourse," might be expected to accommodate - if not encourage - a classical revival (476-7). In the United States, the Conference of Editors of Learned Journals declared the best new journal of 1991 to be Hellas, published by the Aldine Press in Pennsylvania, and a self-proclaimed forum for "The

8 At Home in Time

New Classicism." Its poets, critics, and theorists (runs their advertisement) "have yoked the energy of the contemporary imagination to the verbal elegance, moral seriousness and good order of neoclassical tradition. The result: a renaissance, and a revolution." That last phrase brings to mind Eliot, who wrote in 1924 that "classicism is in a sense reactionary, but it must be in a profounder sense revolutionary" ("A Commentary" [1924] 232). From an essay by Gerald Harnett the editor of Hellas, it emerges clearly that the revolution in which his "new classicism" is implicated is not merely literary. "Cosmopolitan and international," he writes, "[classicism] is the perfect poetics for the global culture now developing. Under its aegis, other literatures have full 'equality of opportunity' to earn a place in the canon." However, this apparent generosity is circumscribed in a way bound to provoke challenge: "The canon will remain Eurocentric, but the way is genuinely open for its gradual, slow enlargement on principles which, because they are universal and rational, not political, can command respect" (6). Here again is the Eliotic aspiration to "a certain uniformity of culture," similarly (yet still surprisingly) imagined to be apolitical. Harnett formulates his position in opposition to "the relativists," which suggests that the neoclassicism of Hellas - as distinct from the sort envisaged by Tulip in Australia - is unfolding as a reaction against the postmodern climate. In The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Traditions (1976), Robert Pinsky drew attention to "the discursive aspect" in recent American poetry, and offered the following very eighteenthcentury definition of discourse: "It is speech, organized by its meaning, avoiding the distances and complications of irony on one side and the ecstatic fusion of speaker, meaning, and subject on the other. The idea is to have all the virtues of prose, in addition to those qualities and degrees of precision which can be called poetic" (134). Behind such writing, Pinsky says, is the desire to communicate directly with - and thereby in some sense to educate - the reader. The centrality of that ambition in contemporary writing has been penetratingly explored by Willard Spiegelman in his recent book, The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry (1989). And combining the discursive mode with overt didactic intention we arrive at something like the position adopted by that great neoclassicist, John Dryden, in his preface to Religio Laid (1682): "The expressions of a poem designed purely for instruction ought to be plain and natural, and yet majestic" (227). Spiegelman argues that "from Horace to Robert Frost... the major current of Western poetics has flowed from the wells of pleasure to the depths of instruction" (3). He remarks that "in the panorama of

9 Forms of Neoclassicism

literary culture, it increasingly appears that modernism was an aberration"; "the altar of symbolism at which the great moderns worshipped seems in retrospect to have been a temporary and perhaps fragile structure" (4). Citing Pinsky with approval, Spiegelman asserts that "like discourse, both philosophy and pedagogy have returned beneath the poetic mantle" (5); and although he concedes that this tendency may be a "poetic equivalent of political conservatism," or the peculiar result of poets since the war increasingly placing themselves within the academy, he prefers to suspect a deeper "cultural cause." The suggestion is that in our culture there is a "fundamental identity of teaching with writing and of learning with reading" (5). Horace's dictum thus is taken to be an accurate expression of what drives our whole literary tradition: "aut prodesse volunt, aut delectare poetae" (Ars 66). Both Pinsky and Spiegelman discover the reassertion of this classical view primarily within the realm of American poetry. However, in Britain and the Commonwealth the Horatian poetic has been a more refractory and obvious presence. The unwritten history of neoclassicism in twentieth-century British and Commonwealth poetry might well begin with Rudyard Kipling, who after the age of thirty rarely travelled unaccompanied by one of his many editions of Horace. Writes Charles Carrington, his biographer: "in his later years [it was] the handsome, vellum-bound volume which he 'grangerized' with glosses, translations, parodies, and comments beautifully written in the margins" (554). Beginning in 1917, and in collaboration with A.D. Godley, the Public Orator at Oxford, Kipling perpetrated a hoax which Pope would surely have admired: he claimed to have discovered a missing fifth book of Horatian odes, and published these (his own poems translated by Godley) in 1922 under the title Q. Horatii Flacci Carminum Librum Quintum a Rudyardo Kipling et Carolo Graves Anglice Redditum. ...2 Robert Conquest has linked Kipling to Horace and Dryden through the claim that all three practise what Lionel Trilling once called a "poetry of low intensity"; the critical underestimation of Kipling, he would therefore claim, is in part at least the result of that same "parochial defect in contemporary taste" which inhibits our understanding of the Augustan mode (100). After Kipling, there is A.E. Housman, whose great admiration for Horace is well known - and who is reputed to have left a Cambridge classroom on the verge of tears after reading "Diffugere nives" (Odes 4:7) (Richards 289). While Housman's poems are sometimes didactic and discursive (he would not concede "that there are any such things as poetical ideas," as distinct from prosaic ones [243]), they do not imitate the neoclassical forms of the eighteenth century, for him an

io At Home in Time

"age of unsound or unsatisfying poetry" (245). Roy Campbell, on the other hand, deliberately chose to couch his translation of Horace's Ars Poetica in verse patterns derived from the English Augustans. His literary preaching and politicking frequently - as in The Georgiad (1931) - took the form of neo-Augustan satires composed in deftly managed and explosive rhyming couplets. Indeed, works like The Georgiad (written to attack the English literary establishment of the late twenties) have emerged periodically during our century, as diverse but self-proclaimedly "classical" sensibilities have felt the need to assert the continuing viability of reason and common sense in poetry. The didactic aims of the thirties poets led to the adoption of other forms favoured by the Restoration and eighteenth century, such as the verse epistle and the journal poem. Sylvia Townsend Warner's fascinating but unfortunately little read Opus 7 (1931) is a narrative with a socialist lesson, written in decasyllabic couplets reminiscent of George Crabbe - "Pope in worsted stockings," as he was once called, and a poet also much admired by Cecil Day Lewis for his interest in the poor and his moral endorsement of the "kind of normality to which every civilized being should aspire" (Day Lewis 9, 14). And above certain figures from the thirties, such as W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, the example of Horace looms as it did above Dryden and Pope. In "The Horatians," for instance, Auden adopts consciously and lovingly what Monroe Spears has called "the Horatian role of rural urbanity, retired but worldly satirist and sage." Indeed, throughout the sixties "the mode of life and the poetic themes [which he cultivates] ... resemble strikingly those pursued by Horace in retirement on his Sabine farm" (Spears, "A Sabine Farm Near Kirchstetten" 463). In the late fifties we find the poets of the Movement hankering for what Blake Morrison calls "the lost environment of eighteenth-century poetry," not so much aiming at formal imitation of the Augustans as attempting to rediscover "the [original] Augustan qualities of discipline and urbanity" (162). Donald Davie, whose work appeared in the earliest Movement anthologies, went so far as to describe himself, in "Homage to William Cowper," as "a pasticheur of late-Augustan styles" (Collected Poems i), and in two significant critical works of the period - Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952) and Articulate Energy (1955) - argued for the value and efficacy of neoclassical poetic techniques. A contradictory figure who, as Martin Seymour-Smith notes, is "fascinated and influenced by modernism ... [but] fundamentally a neo-Augustan" (92), Davie has drawn attention to other contemporary writers in the Augustan mould. He has found Charles Tomlinson, for example, "sternly tra-

ii Forms of Neoclassicism ditional, classical, almost Augustan" ("Introduction" xvi), and in a review of C.H. Sisson's poems and translations has elaborated upon the considerable debt which that poet owes to Dryden ("An Appeal" 274). In a very recent and relevant essay, "Some Aspects of Horace in the Twentieth Century," Tomlinson has returned the favour by pointing out the extent to which Davie's poem "Wombwell on Strike" - his response to the miners' strike of 1984 - "follows the turns of the Horatian Ode" (248). Besides Davie and Sisson, several other contemporary British poets aspire to what Eric Homberger calls "the discursive social ease of neo-classic verse." In an indication of how neoclassicism in poetry continues to be overlooked or disparaged, Homberger dismisses this motive as "one of the least engaging qualities of contemporary formalism" (183). Interestingly, though, the poets he has in mind almost all turn to classical forms in order to produce what Homberger would most like to see - an "art of the real," "an art that would acknowledge the existence of contingent values, other people, history itself" (215). His list of examples is quite extensive, including John Wain's Letters to Five Artists (1969), Davie's Six Epistles to Eva Hesse (1970), James Fenton's "Open Letter to Richard Grossman" (1971), and John Fuller's Epistles to Several Persons (1973), that last reproducing the title which Pope intended for the work now known as his Moral Essays (1731-5). Fenton - descended, incidentally, from Elijah Fenton, one of Pope's collaborators on the Odyssey - has also published a verse letter to Fuller in which his critique of the British literary scene in 1972 achieves a trenchancy matched only by Campbell's Georgiad forty years before. The "Open Letter to Richard Grossman," in contrast, attacks the decline of spirit, imagination, and integrity on the political left and is thus rather more typical of this poet, on whom the claims of history and politics have pressed powerfully and consistently. "Children in Exile" (1983) he has described as "a pastoral eclogue with political content," and again it is a work with an eighteenthcentury model, Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (i75i).3 Fuller, who taught Fenton at Oxford, works under a similar complex of influences - notably the English Augustans and Auden - and in his return epistle to Fenton (1973) acknowledges that poets have an obligation to history and society, that at some point "in the street" the "suffering" of history and the "truth" of art "must meet" (89). Edward Mendelson has noted that Fuller's verse epistles are "verse essays of a kind that tended to disappear from English poetry after the eighteenth century: essays on the arts, public affairs, the condition

12 At Home in Time of England, all firmly rooted in their moment of composition and the interests and knowledge of their audience" ("John Fuller" 148). Fenton writes to Fuller and Fuller writes back: for all their interest in "the street/' it is possible to feel that the audience for these poems is quite small, a coterie of already like-minded souls. This is a point made - appropriately in neo-Augustan style - by Clive James, wh has parodied Wain in "John Wain's Letters to Five More Artists" (Other Passports 51-3), written epistles of his own to Martin Amis, Tom Stoppard, and Peter Porter, among others, and also published a mock-heroic in the form and tone favoured by Pope: Charles Charming's Challenges on the Pathway to the Throne: A Royal Poem in Rhyming Couplets (1981). James's position as an Australian expatriate within English metropolitan culture increases the intellectual distance from its object which social satire of the neo-Augustan sort requires, and it does so relatively unproblematically. However, amongst those poets operating at a political distance from the centre of power, and for whom that power is nevertheless an intrusive fact of life, the classical posture is less easily adopted - even though it may be no less attractive. In "A Dream of Judgement," for example, the Scottish working-class poet Douglas Dunn imagines himself appearing before Samuel Johnson: "Licking your boots is a small Scotsman / Who looks like Boswell, but is really me." Johnson wears a small volume of Horace under his wig, and when judgment has been passed it is Pope who ushers the plaintiff "out into the hell / Of forgotten books." The plenitude of a classical ethos has been denied him, and "Nearby, teasingly / In the dustless heaven of the classics, / There is singing of morals in Latin and Greek" (27). The Ulster poet Michael Longley is also driven to reckon with Johnson, whom he imagines in the Hebrides, turning away from the shattering weather into the refuge of his own "waterproof enormous head" (55). Admirable though Johnson's Augustan intellect may be, the implication is that in the context of Ulster in the sixties there is something unsatisfactory about returning to the "dustless heaven" of classical order. The recent poems of Tom Paulin seek overtly for "a form that's classical and secular" (quoted in Potts 26), but in "Going in the Rain" (1980) an eighteenth-century landscape (complete with Adam house and appropriate garden) appears awkward and factitious, an alien imposition on an Irish "state / The rain is washing out of shape" (21). Paulin's work encourages us to plunge "into history," as the revolutionary does in another of his poems, "Trotsky in Finland" (30). But while a poet like Fenton would see this engagement with history as supported by a neo-Augustan aesthetic, the world of Georgian architecture - because it is contaminated by

13 Forms of Neoclassicism

Englishness - becomes "anti-history" in Paulin's Northern Irish context. Even in such problematic cases the attraction to classical forms remains, however, and in works like Derek Mahon's "The Sea in Winter" (1979) - a celebrated verse letter to Desmond O'Grady those forms can seem quite serviceable and at home in the present political moment. It may be that the neoclassical impulse has during this century managed to enjoy a more consistent vitality in British than in American culture. Certainly, neoclassicism in Britain has been unusually well nourished by other persistent currents in the culture at large. For example, the radical empiricism popularized by A.J. Ayer in his Language, Truth and Logic (1936) had at the time "profoundly antiromantic" implications for literature - and, according to Bryan Appleyard, strongly reinforced the endemic, "cooler tradition of English classicism" (48). It may also be, however, that the values and critical biases of modernism have in North America achieved a hegemony so powerful that it has become comparatively more difficult in that field to "see" the viability of opposing poetic traditions. At any rate, Spiegelman's study is a convincing demonstration that in American poetry the classical "current" is still flowing. My brief survey in the previous paragraphs suggests it has flowed even more strongly in Britain and the Commonwealth throughout this century; and yet, surprisingly, there has been no critical assessment of this phenomenon that might be compared with Spiegelman's appraisal of the American scene. No doubt the reasons for this are complex. Alan Brownjohn wrote in 1972 that the "empirical, critical attitudes" we associate with classicism "are the English tradition" (248), but that "English poets are at the moment under increasing pressure to accept a state of demoralised inferiority by comparison with their American colleagues" (240). The context for these remarks was the widespread denigration of "gentility" in English poetry that had been instigated by A. Alvarez in his anthology The New Poetry (1962). It is not at all implausible that critical neglect of neoclassicism in modern British poetry is connected with the climate of inferiority over insular traditions which prevailed not only after 1962, but to some degree ever since the arrival of Pound, Eliot, and modernism in the early years of the century - ever since the "Americanization of poetry," as Louis MacNeice once called it (Modern Poetry 162). Besides literary-critical politics, there are other probable reasons why the history of neoclassicism in modern British poetry remains unwritten. The most obvious of these is evident in the heterogeneity of the works and authors listed in my rapid survey above. We now recognize the dangers of using critical terms, such as "realism," as if

14 At Home in Time

they stand for unitary concepts; we talk instead of "realisms," recognizing that where there is continuity there is also plurality and difference. Similarly one ought perhaps to brave the danger of infelicity and write about "neoclassicisms," for while poets like Housman, Campbell, and MacNeice share a loyalty to antiquity in general and to Horace in particular, their works take very different things from the classical tradition, and on the surface could hardly seem less similar. At first glance it would also appear that if Charles Tomlinson and C.H. Sisson are to be brought together as neoAugustans, the term itself must be so vaguely construed as to be almost useless. A survey which trafficked in such hazy continuities would hardly be worth undertaking. Similar perils attach themselves to all the key terms of this discussion; how are we to define "classical," "neoclassical," "Augustan," or "neo-Augustan"? Using these words in the preceding pages I have tried, so far as possible, to indicate a specific meaning for each; but those meanings have been forced to change with the context of the discussion, and with the author being discussed. Thus we have dealt with classicism as variously understood by, amongst others, Milosz, Eliot, Hulme, and Davie; and to complicate matters I have measured these understandings against Dryden, Pope, and Horace - a historically disparate and not entirely homogeneous group, speaking only of their poetry and poetics. Eliot himself wrote in For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) that the term "classicist" "easily lends itself to clap-trap" (ix) and will have as many meanings as it has contexts. Nevertheless it is true that while neoclassicism in modern poetry does not exist as a singular phenomenon, this century has produced in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth a large number of different forms of neoclassicism, and the need still exists for a study which brings some of these together. This book attempts to provide an answer to that need. Spiegelman's manner of proceeding - of linking diverse writers in terms of a relatively restricted topic, such as "scenes of instruction" - has been rejected because the present study is less concerned than his to prove deep classical continuities at work beneath the diverse surface of Western literature. Naturally enough, many of the works considered here raise similar issues and thereby invite linkage; but there is no desire to privilege similarity over difference - or to imply that in some obscure way the classical impulse is within us all and will inevitably emerge in one form or another. "Classicism" as it is investigated here is not a mysterious constant in the human psyche, but rather a literary-critical construct made anew - and differently - by each poet in response to his or her particular circumstances of writing. Just as the eighteenth-century

15 Forms of Neoclassicism

Augustans read out of antiquity a "classicism" that could serve the needs of their own situation, so the modern poets discussed here have - for their own pragmatic reasons - aligned themselves with different aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary practice. When we read the Australian A.D. Hope, for example, we are dealing with a trenchant classicism at two removes from Horace, a mode of writing and thinking which, though it may resemble that of Pope, is ultimately not a homage to the past but a direct and worldly intervention in the poet's contemporary milieu. W.H. Auden's classicism, as I describe it in this study, is focused not only on the present but also the future; much less nostalgic even than Hope, Auden uses Augustan modes to articulate and proselytize for a socio-political vision that inclines as strongly to the left as Hope's does to the right. Taken together, the two men serve to warn us that where there are "classical continuities" in style and form there may nevertheless be deep discontinuity in motive and ideology. This is one reason why I have chosen to arrange the central chapters as a series of individual case studies, allowing continuity to emerge from chapter to chapter, but starting always with the assumption that when a twentieth-century poet chooses to adopt a "classical" posture, he or she must first discover the lineaments of that posture by personally "reading" the past and choosing models. Then comes an even more interesting process - would Harold Bloom call this tessera?4 - in which the individual appropriates this possibly idiosyncratic vision of the "classic" in his or her own work, often arrogating to the latter the apparently objective and reasonable authority conventionally associated with classicism. My view is that since it is part of the discourse of classicism to deal in apparently objective and timeless verities, the most useful approach to modern works in the neoclassical mould is one which probes the subjective, individual, and temporary uses of that discourse. To approach them otherwise would be insufficiently critical, blinkered to the fact that in our century - as in others before - attempts to "revive" classicism have on occasion been little more than a conscious rediscovery and exploitation of the rhetoric of authority. It seems crucial at the outset to underline that last point, to note that the language of classicism has not always been used to propagate views of a Johnsonian or Audenesque humanism, even though that is generally the case with the writers discussed here. In fact, twentieth-century European history testifies to the measure of truth in Herbert Read's rather intemperate claim that "wherever the blood of martyrs stains the ground, there you will find a doric column or perhaps a statue of Minerva" (Philosophy of Modern Art 107). Carlo

16 At Home in Time

Carra - the painter who with Giorgio de Chirico led the revival of classical motifs in the Italian "Scuola metafisica" (circa 1917) - had long-standing sympathies with the fascist movement, and in 1933 signed Mario Sironi's "Manifesto della pittura murale," which "proclaimed mural painting to be the best vehicle for fascist values" (Cowling and Mundy 58). If fascism is the aestheticization of politics, as Walter Benjamin memorably asserted, its favoured artistic forms are classical. In Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler insisted that the culture of the Third Reich "embraces Hellenism and Germanity together" (631); and prefacing a book on German sculpture of the period, one of his spokesmen declared, "Our time is once more able to be Greek" (quoted in Adam 177). There are few more sinister reminders of the political use to which classical artistic discourse can be put than the refrigerated, sacrificial nudes of the Fiihrer's favourite artists: Adolf Ziegler, Friedrich Kalb, and Ivo Saliger. Less rarely on view today, Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia - Feast of Nations uses the techniques of cinema explicitly to identify naked athletes of the Reich with those of antiquity. How interesting it is that when the Montreal poet A.M. Klein set out in 1942 to attack Hitler, he did so using what he took to be the "universal" form of Augustan verse satire, the "poetry of wit and wrath," as he called it (quoted in Caplan 112). Though remote on the surface from a specifically Jewish perspective, his eight-hundred-line Hitleriad, Usher Caplan has argued, is "profoundly Jewish" in its mixture of humour and horror (114). As Klein evidently perceived, the classical muse can be made to serve diverse cultures and conflicting ideologies. The poets discussed in this book - how moderate they suddenly seem in comparison with Riefenstahl, Ziegler, and the like - have been chosen for the inherent interest and complexity of their appropriation of classical ideas. From certain perspectives they will appear a very mixed group, but from others it will be obvious that theirs is a heterogeneity circumscribed by the fact that they are all the products of white European or colonial culture, for example, and all men. In an engaging argument, Ruth Salvaggio insists that the discourse of classicism is not only uncongenial to women, but constructed "at the expense of the feminine": "woman has haunted classicism, and classicism has kept her suppressed" (xi). According to Salvaggio, "woman" is a figure "repeated, varied, and continually reshaped into 'configurations' of those phenomena that never found a place in England's classical age, but that nonetheless strongly influenced its development through their very displacement" (x). The argument has considerable force in relation to the eighteenth-century milieu with which Salvaggio is exclusively concerned; in the context of twentieth-

17 Forms of Neoclassicism

century neoclassicism her paradigm fits rather less well, and would - for example - need to take into consideration Stan Smith's revisionary reading of Auden, which makes a convincing case for the poet's feminist credentials. In similarly revisionist vein, Kevin Hart has discovered "a thread of feminism" (102) running through the poetry and criticism of A.D. Hope - a writer in whose work disturbing representations of women are not uncommon, but who also at one time planned a critical study of European women poets "who abandoned the male tradition of poetry and wrote quite differently because they were different in themselves" (quoted in Hart 103). So far as this century is concerned, then, I think it important to resist facile assumptions about the kind of political or social ideology which an interest in classical forms might indicate; but I am nevertheless far from blind to the possibility - indeed the probability - that writers who operate comfortably within the same literary mode might be at home in a shared epistemology. Despite my insistence that each of these figures be approached at first individually, and that their understanding and appropriation of Augustan precursors be considered in each case an essentially idiosyncratic act, I do also have a broader concern with the culturally and historically specific tradition of which they are all obviously part. That I have chosen not to force these authors into a factitious "history" of twentieth-century neoclassicism in Britain and the Commonwealth does not mean I am unconcerned with literary history. On the contrary I hope the essays in this book, by demonstrating the continuing vitality of certain classical literary practices and assumptions, will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of poetry in English in our century, one less centred in the modernist experiments of the twenties avantgarde. The topic is a large one, obviously, and the need for a somewhat narrower focus is one practical reason why this study mostly limits itself to consideration of the long poem. But that concentration is in many other ways appropriate, perhaps inevitable. For as Homberger has observed, the long poem has in our century been transformed from the problematic obsession of the "high" modernists, Eliot and Pound, to become "the common poetic medium of the day," the vehicle of choice for poets widely diverging in temperament (183-4). It seems that only extended forms of one sort or another can at present lay claim to centrality in the picture of modern poetry. Thus M.L. Rosenthal and Sally Gall argue that what they call the "poetic sequence" "is actually the modern poetic form within which all the tendencies of more than a century of experiment define themselves and find their aesthetic purpose" (vii). The works considered here

i8 At Home in Time

hold themselves to some extent apart from distinctively modern experiments and purposes, and probably cannot be included in that particular claim for centrality. As exercises in extended poetic form, however, they are typical products of their age. Furthermore, the forms which they imitate are typical of the Restoration and eighteenth century just as they are themselves of the twentieth, and it is unlikely to be a mere coincidence that in this age of extended works we should see a revival of interest in the poetic methods and motives of an earlier one. An enriched understanding of what the two periods have in common - and where they differ - is one important benefit we derive from a concentrated look at neo-Augustanism in the modern long poem. In chapter one, "Eliot's Classicism, Pound's Symbolism, and the Drafts of The Waste Land," I devote considerable attention to Eliot's definitions of the classic, to his readings of specific Augustan figures, and to his prediction, made at least twice, that writers like Dryden and Johnson will come to exert an influence in "the next revolution of taste" ("John Dryden" 316). The drafts of The Waste Land, I then adapt Kenner in arguing, show a consciously neo-Augustan sensibility at work, a poet experimenting with the very same classical ideas he singled out in his essays on Augustan subjects: the discursive common style, the heroic couplet and quatrain, the cultural need for a community of beliefs and feelings, and most important the notion that what Johnson called "edification" - the active cultivation in the reader of certain beliefs and feelings - is proper or even endemic to poetry. The concerns of The Waste Land were at this stage typically neo-Augustan in being worldly and historically specific; like Pope's The Rape of the Lock, which Eliot imitated at length, it was a poem in which the affairs of life in time loomed larger than timeless verity. Its author was the classical poet as defined by Hulme: one who never forgets the "finiteness ... [the] limit of man" ("Romanticism and Classicism" 120). And his view of time was marked less by the "existential historicism" which James Longenbach has argued was the modernist norm (14) than by the more positivistic historicism of the eighteenth century. In the second half of the chapter I offer a detailed examination of Pound's annotations to the drafts, which emerge as consciously and acutely anti-classical. These are then placed within the context of Pound's larger aesthetic, and some meeting is found between the symbolism of Pound and the classicism of Eliot on the question of "edification" or literary affect - the ability of a text to put an idea "into action," as Pound says, in the mind of the reader ("Human

19 Forms of Neoclassicism

Wishes" 182). Partly because of this key point of agreement, I argue, Eliot was able to find Pound's strictures not wholly uncongenial to his original intentions. Thus we may regard the published version of The Waste Land as a work in which what Cowling and Mundy would call "academic" classicism was transformed into the "avant-garde" sort (18-19). Under Pound's influence, though also to some extent despite it, imitation of Augustan forms gave way - in the final version of The Waste Land - to formal experiment founded nevertheless on what were for Eliot enduring classical principles. Yvor Winters, whose name might well have been mentioned in my discussion of American neoclassicism, sensed the classical motive beneath the "neo-Websterian" free verse of Eliot's text; and he included The Waste Land in a list of "fundamentally expository poems, akin to the expository poems of Pope and Dryden, in that they endeavour to give a summary of a contemporary view of life and a criticism of such a view" (144). Turning to W.H. Auden in the second chapter, I first consider the reception of "New Year Letter," which amply demonstrates the continuing vitality - circa 1939 - of post-Poundian antagonism for the Augustan mode. But Auden's allegiance to Dryden and Pope in that work, as in his other writings of the time, is forthright and uncompromising; so "New Year Letter" would seem at first a relatively unproblematic imitation of a classical form. The poem is a Horatian verse epistle, and consequently highly didactic - but this fact needs to be reconciled with Auden's famous assertion from precisely the same period, that poetry can make "nothing happen." Indeed, this apparent demurrer at the possibility of effective "edification" through poetry would normally represent a fundamental divergence from classical principles as stated in Horace, reiterated in Dryden, and revived in Eliot. I argue, however, that in his elegy for W.B. Yeats and the other places in which this view is stated, Auden is in fact reaching for a more complex understanding of the way in which literary texts enter into and affect the world of human affairs. Central to this is his account of the reading act, which involves the adduction of the reader to the ideology of the text, inscribed as that is in the form itself - in rhetoric, syntax, vocabulary, and versification. In terms furnished recently by Hans Robert Jauss's "aesthetics of reception," Auden might be said to have grasped the potential ideological power of "aesthetic distance" (Jauss 25) - the disparity between the reader's "horizon of expectations" and the characteristics of the work read. "The social function of literature," writes Jauss, "manifests itself in its genuine possibility only where the literary experience of the

2O At Home in lime

reader enters into the horizon of expectations of his lived praxis, preforms his understanding of the world, and thereby also has an effect on his social behaviour" (39). In my analysis of "New Year Letter" I demonstrate that what the poem merely invites us to accept at the level of overt proposition, it requires us to experience as "real" in the process of reading. To the extent that the experience remains with us, the text has intervened in the world and history - which Arthur Humphreys reminds us are together the natural element of neoclassical literature (15). Sequential or historical time is in fact absolutely central to the poem: "Time is the life in which we live," writes Auden (49), and even though his principal subject is a post-Einsteinian understanding of temporality, he is consistently aware of the human inability to think outside of linear or sequential models. As I show, he paradoxically exploits the insistent linearity of Hudibrastic couplets to create a sense in the reader of that "field which never closes" which is Einsteinian spacetime. However modern may be the poem's ultimate concern, the form, the didactic motive, and the common-sense acceptance of linear time as the locus of poetic affect are all distinctly and selfconsciously neoclassical. They are certainly the elements Auden admired most in the work of Pope, whom he praised for rejecting the idea of a transcendent, "superior" poetic vocation, and for insisting that poetry should leave time for practical, constructive acts, such as being "a good neighbour," a "useful friend," planting a tree, or (less easy to effect), saving one's soul (Forewords and Afterwords 124). At the end of Autumn Journal, Louis MacNeice asserts that "Time is a country" (93), and like Auden he insists it is a country we are all compelled to inhabit. At the same time he hankers also to "see and touch the pantheon and forget / The means within the end" ("Plurality"), which is a romantic, rather than an Einsteinian, dissatisfaction with clock-time. MacNeice strongly resembles Auden, though, in insisting that transcendence is not available to humanity - to teach which lesson is nothing less than the prime motive of Autumn Journal. In this work he adopts what for Hulme is the typical "classical attitude": neither poet nor reader is permitted "to swing right along to the infinite nothing" ("Romanticism and Classicism" 120). Looking at MacNeice's criticism, I uncover his close affinities with Horace, Dryden, and particularly the classical Eliot, as well as his understanding of the way in which literary texts can exercise an edificatory power. As in Auden, there is in MacNeice a belief that the wishes of the author notwithstanding - poems can only achieve what is "proper" to them: products of history, they operate in time,

21 Forms of Neoclassicism

and are best suited to evoking the character of that temporal "country" and exploring the forms of human action which are desirable within it. Inevitably this means that poems will tend towards that "literature ... of social record" which Humphreys tells us typified the Augustan age (16). MacNeice's title openly acknowledges the social, archival, function of the poem; but my analysis demonstrates that the text is arranged to impart not only an understanding of specific events in time, but also a sense of the inescapability of time itself. In chapter 4 I turn away from my hitherto largely British focus to consider a writer and a body of work perhaps more determinedly and thoroughly neo-Augustan than any to be found in the United Kingdom or America. It is because of the prominence, persistence, and cohesiveness of the neoclassical movement in Australia that I have felt it necessary to include a detailed discussion of its most prominent member, A.D. Hope. Two other factors justify this decision: one is that Hope's neo-Augustan enterprise is by definition an extension of British rather than Australian literary culture, and the other is that, in a peculiar and inverted way, he reaffirms the centrality of T.S. Eliot in twentieth-century neoclassicism. Unlike MacNeice, though, he is a poet who has consistently defined his own classical identity in opposition to Eliot, whom (in a textbook instance of Bloomian clinamen or "misprision") he reads as an unredeemable modernist and ill-fated descendant of late nineteenth-century romanticism. Hope's extensive criticism is thus founded in large measure upon the very antitheses which this study recognizes are problematic: Augustan-modernist, and to a lesser extent, "classic-romantic." In a detailed comparison of Hope and Eliot in their critical writings, I reveal a far-reaching consensus which Hope has so far been unwilling to acknowledge. His vociferous attacks on Eliot, I argue, are part of a literary worldliness much less profound than we have in Auden or MacNeice. Hope's Augustanism may well imply the kind of common-sense attitudes which these poets share to time, for example, but it proselytizes for nothing so strongly and assertively as for itself. The neoclassicism of A.D. Hope is, in other words, less a response to existential or social conditions than a means of selfdefinition within the realm of literary-critical politics. Accordingly, it is in the chapter devoted to his work that I deal at greatest length with neo-Augustanism as a rhetorical construct, an essentially selfreferential and self-serving critical discourse. And I consider more generally the relationships which obtain between neo-Augustanism on the one hand and the discourses of modernism and postmodernism on the other.

22 At Home in Time

Hope's Dunciad Minor is of all the works discussed the most elaborate, thorough, and overt imitation of an Augustan form. In fact, the piece as a whole presents itself as a comprehensive defence of Pope - an intention which is explicit in the poem's substance and implicit in its delighted and extensive use of Popean techniques. This allows for a very detailed consideration of the ways in which specific eighteenth-century modes are made to operate in one pair of twentiethcentury hands, and whatever general observations result - about relations between the classic and the postmodern, for example enjoy the authority of originating in empirical observation. While I suggest that Hope's neo-Augustanism is a posture adopted principally for temporary, literary-political ends, it nevertheless becomes clear that he shares with Auden and MacNeice a fundamental (that is to say, pre-political or epistemological) commitment to linear temporality. In the latter part of chapter four, I trace Hope's foregrounding of what he calls the "one-directional flow" of time in the verseforms of Dunciad Minor, and in the narratives which make up his later work, The Age of Reason. The first of Donald Davie's Six Epistles to Eva Hesse, to which I turn in chapter 5, begins with the poet acknowledging - and promptly dismissing - the claims of non-linear models of time. The "Spacecum-Time continuum" and the notion of temporal elasticity he concedes are "exciting / Stuff, all right" (13), but the poem rejects the excitement of theoretical physics, choosing instead to start from practical experience. Thus Davie writes of time that "some of it seems resistant stuff / Still, and linear enough." In this point - that, theory notwithstanding, we tend to cast our experience of time sequentially - Davie is in agreement with Auden, whose attitude to the new physics was, however, markedly more positive. Also like Auden, he regards this pragmatic, empirical stance towards time as a link between himself and the Restoration and eighteenth century. He cites Swift as a precursor - as Auden does Dry den - but the most important gesture of this sort is his use of the Hudibrastic couplet, familiar of course from Auden's "New Year Letter," where it is used to create a sense of constant process.5 In his fifth epistle Davie makes process a human imperative: "The way to live is on the move," he declares (58). This is very much the final point of MacNeice's Autumn Journal, and in some sense such a willingness to embrace what Davie with mock-disparagement calls "that dumb clockwork Time" (13) is characteristic of all the writers considered in this book. Six Epistles to Eva Hesse brings this attitude together with many of the key issues raised in previous chapters, and thus provides an opportunity to consolidate as well as extend my argument. Even more than for Hope's Dunciad

23 Forms of Neoclassicism

Minor, the terms of reference for this poem are literary and critical. Eva Hesse is the German translator of Ezra Pound and a noted Poundian scholar; and Davie's poem is in essence an essay against Pound and the poetics of high modernism. The same might well be said of Dunciad Minor, except that Hope's choice of the mock-heroic as opposed to the verse epistle means that his poem is less a serious debate with modernism than a lampoon of it. In both works, however, the adoption of an Augustan form is in the first place a literarypolitical gesture, one of the signs of the author's opposition to what he sees as the hegemony of modernist aesthetics. Davie's poem goes beyond gesture to become a witty but fundamentally serious exercise in the tradition of Pope's verse epistles, an explicit working-through of the neo-Augustan poetic which I have found variously evident in Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, and Hope. Not only does Davie commit himself to a "Woefully linear" (16) understanding of time, but he considers the verse forms that are appropriate to it. His favourite metaphor for inappropriate, anti-linear, forms - the cat's cradle - is fortuitously the very one singled out for objection by Hope. Synoptic, atemporal views of human literature and life Davie calls "The mythopoeic waste of Time" (51), and the offence he perceives is not only to poetry, but to humanity as well. In Hope, the literary offence is perhaps more compelling than the human; in MacNeice the reverse is probably true. But in Davie there is a sense of both, of the general loss of human identity which comes with "the flat / Fiat of synopsis that / Makes every goddess the Great Mother / And women types of one another" (37). Davie aligns himself with Swift in preferring individuals to categories, and history to myth; and for that reason he argues that the rhymed, emphatically sequential forms of his Augustan pastiche are paradoxically more "open" than modernist free verse, associated as the latter is with totalizing visions. "Openness" in that sense is a tolerance of historical idiosyncrasy and imperfection, the kind of humanistic attitude exemplified by Pope's assertion that "The proper study of mankind is man" ("Essay on Man" 516). Here the neo-Augustan poetic intersects intriguingly with contemporary developments in political theory. In his influential essay on fin-de-siecle socialism, Martin Jay has argued that, despite periods and movements in recent Western history in which "the lure of totality as a normative goal" (2) has been felt - he is thinking primarily of early Marxism, but that lure is no less a defining element in literary modernism - the intellectual high ground has been held with increasing strength by various kinds of non-totalizing attitudes. That being the case, it is not surprising to find that among a large number

24 At Home in Time

of poets (of whom this book considers a sample) there has been a firm rejection of the "absolute poetry and absolute politics" of the romantic-symbolist tradition (Hamburger 81). In specifically political terms - though "politics, culture, and language [one must remember] are intricately intertwined" - "the loss of hope in so Utopian an outcome has meant a corresponding acceptance of the inevitable imperfections of whatever social order humans might create" (Finde-Siecle Socialism 6 and 10). Jay tells us that socialism in the late twentieth century has, under the "guiding spirit" of Jiirgen Habermas, striven for "a more sober politics of mundigkeit or maturity, in which the Utopian hope of perfect reconciliation and normative totality are quietly laid to rest" (12). The subject of this book might well be described as a corresponding "sober poetics of maturity," and while in figures such as Auden, MacNeice, and Tony Harrison that overlaps with a sober, socialist politics, in others it does not. Whatever their political agendas, the works considered here endorse the epistemological primacy of "calendric time," as Siegfried Kracauer has characterized it (142), with all its attendant and inevitable imperfections. This does not mean, however, that "the strait jacket of the annalistic approach" (Kracauer 150) is not chafed against on occasion. The attraction of the Neoplatonic or romantic iota simul (see Poulet 6-7) - a temporal simultaneity of psychological or spiritual making - is clearly a motive in Davie's late concentration on landscape as the "timeless" backdrop to human history, to name just one example. And this might well be argued to confirm the poet's own argument that all modern writers are in some way "travelstained" by romanticism ("Eliot in One Poet's Life" 233); it might even be said to bear out the view he denigrates in Sir Herbert Read - namely, that "romanticism is the 'real thing/" an innate human attitude not confined to one historical period ("Herbert Read's Romanticism" 296). Yet to recognize Davie's interest in totality does not prevent us from calling him "neoclassical." The "tune that Chronos sings," according to Yeats's Happy Shepherd, is always "cracked" (7); one of the intellectual (as distinct from the literary) forms of neoclassicism is the habit of what MacNeice calls "blended" or dialectical thinking. With the Horatian doctrine of the aurea mediocritas as its principal banner, it has enjoyed an enduring and powerful influence in our literature, culture, and politics. That Davie's Epistles and MacNeice's Journal emerge as "faulted" or "impure" in their commitment to linear time is central to - rather than subversive of their "classical" credentials. The demand for "purity" is itself antagonistic to the classical spirit and a part of the romantic-symbolist axiology. As Michael Hamburger has pointed out, it is "irreconcilable

25 Forms of Neoclassicism

with the exigencies of the public world" (97), within which the neoAugustan artist is concerned to work. A.D. Hope is right to insist that to think and to write in "blended" terms is unexpectedly difficult and exacting, and this is especially so in post-romantic literary criticism, where as Laura Riding and Robert Graves observed many years ago, extremity is a mental habit.6 Jay reminds us that the retreat from "totalizing" thought has, during the past three or four decades, coincided with "a decisive linguistic turn," a "quickening of interest in virtually all disciplines in the question of language" (Fin-de-Siecle Socialism 17). While some of this has concentrated on synchronic relations within language systems, some (in the "English" tradition of J.L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and Wittgenstein) has focused on "language as speech and intersubjective communication" (19). In a further development in this direction, the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Habermas emphasizes "the rhetorical and pragmatic dimension of language as communication" and introduces "an inevitable historical component" into the theory of signs (22). It is especially interesting to note that such "functional" and "relational" approaches to language have been argued by Roland Barthes to be typical of "classical" discourse. Barthes means to indicate a grammar and syntax the elements of which are implicated in a "flow," "a succession of utterances whose density is even" (51), and whose importance is in their interrelationships; but he also extends "relational" to mean that classicism is a "socialized discourse" (54) which always "postulates the possibility of dialogue." Classical language, he writes, "establishes a universe in which men are not alone, where words never have the terrible weight of things" (55). In contrast to "modern poetry," where "the [poetic] Word shines forth above a line of relationships emptied of their content" and is "an act without immediate past, without environment" (52-3), classical discourse is constituted by relationship and mediated by "the forms of History [and] ... of social life" (58). This account of classical discourse Barthes concentrates in a striking metaphor: The words, here, do not reproduce the depth and singularity of an individual experience; they are spread out to form a surface, according to the exigencies of an elegant or decorative purpose. (51, my italics).

How interesting it is to read, in the light of this, MacNeice's five Virgilian eclogues written during the thirties. In general, and naturally by virtue of their genre, they bear out Barthes's claims about the dialogical and essentially conversational nature of "classical"

26 At Home in Time

forms. "Eclogue between the motherless" is particularly relevant, however, because of the way in which the opposition between surface and depth is thematized. Speakers "A" and "B" are reflecting, significantly, upon their personal histories, and weighing up the relative satisfactions of life lived alone or in company with another. Says "B," My wife was warmth, a picture and a dance, Her body electric - silk used to crackle and her gloves Move where she left them. How one loves the surface But how one lacks the core. (Collected Poems 49)

In "Eclogue from Iceland" (1936), cultural memory enters the conversation in the form of Grettir's ghost, whose interlocutors, Craven and Ryan, pronounce themselves "exiles" from the core of meaning within history. Craven was in Spain "before the Civil War / Gobbling the tripper's treats, the local colour," and remarks of the turbulent events he witnessed, "It was all copy - impenetrable surface." Now in Iceland, "What have we found? More copy, more surface ..." (Collected Poems 41-2). From one year before this comes MacNeice's poem, "Homage to Cliches," underlining the self-consciousness with which he situated himself as a writer on the "surface" of things. His ironic "Bagpipe Music" of 1937 articulates the sybaritic temptations which beset such an acceptance of superficiality as the terminus of knowledge: "It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky, / All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi" (Collected Poems 97). If the basic aim of the romantic-symbolist tradition is, as Arthur Symons put it, "to spiritualize literature, to evade the old bondage of rhetoric, the old bondage of exteriority" (8), "Bagpipe Music" runs exactly - and quite perversely - against that tradition. According to Symons, reading poetry should be "a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual" (9), a ritual of penetration beneath linguistic surfaces. Symbolism is a literature "in which the visible world is no longer a reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream" (4). This is an antithesis consciously ruled out in the texts I discuss, less in consequence of theoretical conviction than of tough-minded pragmatism. That we can only reason "from what we know" (Pope) implies that in practical terms there can be no final escape from surfaces and "exteriority." This insight has more or less similar consequences in the content of each of the poets I discuss: most notably, a stress on human actions and their immediate consequences, rather than their more abstruse

27 Forms of Neoclassicism

"meaning." The preoccupation of these works, one might say, is with what kind of conduct - literary, personal, and political - is "proper" in a world refractorily, if not ultimately, superficial. Appropriately, narrative is the mode of default in many of these texts, and musings on "deeper" questions invariably come burdened with authorial guilt and uneasiness. At the same time, though, intellectual reasoning is enjoyed as a superior occupation, perhaps even what Davie might call a "redemption," of the profoundly superficial life. In saying that these poems concern themselves with human conduct I return to the question of didacticism. But thinking of "exteriority" as an attribute of literary texts prompts certain further reflections on the didactic efficacy of "Augustan" forms. A common complaint against overtly didactic poems is that they are in some sense "empty." That, at least, is the accusation against which Eliot defends Dryden, and it is also the most common complaint against MacNeice, whose poetry has sometimes been dismissed as journalistic. In the present context we can easily see that what is missed in such poets is romantic "depth" - in literary practice the intimation, through style, that some mystery is bodied against the visible, readable, universe. What is disconcerting about works such as Autumn Journal is that they resist effacement, that they not only refuse to entertain the possibility of what Pound called a "bust thru from quotidien into 'divine or permanent world'" (Selected Letters 210), but in fact turn us back upon ourselves with a heightened sense of our own role as readers and of the degree to which our mental and other operations are bounded by material circumstances. To a large extent our relationship with all such texts is, as I will show in the case of "New Year Letter," morphological rather than hermeneutic, and in that we learn the first "Augustan" lesson: that "Transcending's fine, but then we might / As well get what's transcended right" (Davie). If such is the basic premise of these "empty" poems, then a certain type of critical approach is called for, one which reads not into the "depths" of the text, but concerns itself with those "exterior" complexities arising in the interaction between the text and its universe of readers, single or collective, immediate or remote. To work in that direction has been my aim in this book. It will be obvious that the sort of approach I outline already has some currency, under various names. Reader-response criticism, for example, lays stress not only on the way in which the reader "actualizes" meanings, but also on the sequential determinants of this process: thus Wolfgang Iser writes that "in every text there is a potential time sequence which the reader must inevitably realize, as it is impossible to absorb even a short text in a single moment" (56).

28 At Home in Time

Other flags under which the sort of inquiry I have pursued might be conducted are Jauss's "reception" theory/ Stanley Fish's notion of "affective stylistics/'8 and also more broadly contextualizing approaches such as Marxism and the new historicism. In fact, the works studied here, with their stress on exteriority and surface, can often seem remarkably at one with the literary-theoretical climate of the last two decades. To say that is not to imply reductive equations between Davie, say, and Derrida - a link that would have to argued ingeniously and at length before, if ever, one ceased to think it preposterous. Furthermore it is not an attempt to advance the cause of the neo-Augustans by simply finding seats for them in a presently fashionable and influential intellectual vehicle. I confess I am concerned to establish what Jauss would call a "horizon" of expectations in terms of which these works can be properly understood, and it does seem to me that the concern with textual surfaces which has dominated criticism since Saussure is in that respect infinitely more appropriate than the late-romantic extrapolations of "high" modernism. Marjorie Perloff is certainly not alone in drawing attention to the way in which non-critical literature in recent years has shown the influence of poststructuralist speculation, but in a passage of particular relevance here she writes that one crucial manifestation of the postmodern spirit of experimentation "makes language the arena of production rather than representation" (Poetic License 68). She quotes the poet-critic Jacques Darras in his assertion that "the art of the poem consists in transposing a fragment of reality into language so as to play against and on top o/the words" (my italics; Perloff 66), and in that emphasis on the resistance of words we have a point on which the postmodern and the modern neo-Augustan coalesce. That link a complicated one, in fact, between the late twentieth, the early twentieth, and the eighteenth centuries - is I think one of the most interesting points to emerge from this study. It is, after all, further confirmation of Jencks's intuition that classicism and postmodernism have lately come together not merely out of the latter's anarchic and subversive caprice,9 but on the basis of real - if sometimes obscured - continuities. If, according to Barthes, one defining aspect of classical discourse is that words are "spread out to form a surface," another is that words are "socialized" - that they always have a "past" and an "environment" (53). The latter point has risen in recent years to become an idee fixe among British poets of the post-war period, and it is to this phenomenon that I turn in my final chapter. There, a number of figures already alluded to in this introduction come under close

29 Forms of Neoclassicism

scrutiny. Charles Tomlinson's poems on political subjects are discussed, and his rejection of extremity in world affairs as well as poetic practice is shown to involve a a disciplined acceptance of clock time. For Tomlinson, any attempt to transcend time will have inhumane consequences, a view which carries with it the corollary that language can never be used, safely, in isolation from "history/' or contingent political realities. In words that must recall Barthes's definition of classical discourse, the poet insists that his writings are built upon dialogue: "the first thing in a world of dialogue is that one person speaks to another, or that one person is silent, while another speaks."10 This leads, obviously, to works that are sometimes dramatic or quasi-dramatic in form, but in Tomlinson "dialogue" is also and especially a metaphor for what happens at the linguistic level, in which the internal relationships generated by rhyme and syntax lead us on to new perceptions. "The chances of rhyme ...," he writes, "say, they signify and they succeed, where to succeed / Means not success, but a way forward ..." (Way of a World 59). One notices that the process here conceived is linear and horizontal, that the reader moves across the "surface" of the text just as Tomlinson's swimmer moves in "Swimming Chenango Lake": "Frogwise across the all but penetrable element." The water in that poem "Replies to the questions his body must frame" (Way of a World 3), implicating them both in a dialogue of mutual definition. That kind of relationship, in which the one "fronts" the other and yet "draws back," is always for Tomlinson a moral imperative, applicable equally "to daily life or to writing a poem" (Rasula 413). His divarication from Pound, Eliot, and the modernist tradition starts with this. In "Antecedents," an early "Homage and Valediction" to his precursors, he formulates his "social" morality this way: "Released / From knowing to acknowledgement, from prison / To powers, you are new-found / Neighbored, having earned relation / With all that is other" (Seeing Is Believing 56). Perhaps more central to the group of contemporary neo-Augustans gathered in the last chapter is C.H. Sisson, whose 1975 translation of the Ars Poetica now stands out as a symptom of its time, a telling critique of the post-war literary scene, and a harbinger of Horatian things to follow. Amongst the latter, and also of great importance for this study, is Geoffrey Hill's rediscovery of Dryden as a model. Always aware, with Auden, that language is not the "private property" of poets (Lords of Limit 15), Hill recently turned to consider the issue in earnest in his 1986 Clark lectures at Cambridge. There, in a discussion which probes the political and economic realities that impinge on all literary activities and maieria, Dryden stands as a

30 At Home in Time paradigmatic figure who drew "circumstance ... not only into his critical strategy but also into the timbre of his writing" (The Enemy's Country 63). What Barthes refers to as "socialized" discourse, Hill characterizes as language caught up inextricably in its "occasion and contexture." As both a theme and an aspect of the "horizon of expectation" within which we read particular texts, this latter idea dominates my last chapter. Two final long poems are discussed, the first being Hill's own Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy (1983), and the second Tony Harrison's now notorious investigation of the poetics, politics, and psychology of class, V. (1985). Written, like Davie's "Wombwell" Ode, during the 1984 British miners' strike, V. shares with James Fenton's "Children in Exile" not only an acute left-wing political consciousness but also a debt to Gray's "Elegy," and in 1987 it caused Harrison to join Auden as one of the few British poets to have been the subject of vehement parliamentary debate. As the century progresses, neoclassicism in verse emerges as the sum of such heated currents and cross-currents. In Harrison's case the exchange between poetry, society, and history has been particularly electric - V^ has entered into the sort of dialogue with its historical moment envisaged by Auden, MacNeice, and Davie, but never achieved by them to the same degree. Harrison is emphatic that whatever efficacy the poem enjoys is ultimately attributable to its author's training as a classicist. The naive interpretation slyly invited by this is that what we learn from the classics is timeless, true, and reliable. However, a more subversive reading - and one licensed by Harrison's irony in such statements - is that the social impact of V. is due to the deft and opportunistic annexation of classical authority by a poet not born to it. Milosz, Barthes, and Eliot all stress that "classical literary art" presupposes a society organized firmly "on a class basis" (Barthes 55); the example of Harrison helps us to see how the apparently reactionary forms of that art might be used, as Eliot (perhaps uncomfortably) predicted, to revolutionary ends.

i Eliot's Classicism, Pound's Symbolism, and the Drafts of The Waste Land

"Classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion": thus T.S. Eliot's now famous characterization of his own "general point of view" in the 1928 preface to For Lancelot Andrewes (ix). In the Eliotic lexicon, "royalist" and "anglo-catholic" are prominent but relatively unproblematic. However, "classicist" and the related word, "classic," are in the league of "tradition" and "culture" - central terms in almost all of Eliot's writings about art and society, and fraught with difficulty. No sooner has Eliot labelled himself "classicist in literature" than he makes the confession that the term itself "is completely vague, and easily lends itself to clap-trap." In "What Is a Classic?" (1944) he notes that "classic" "has, and will continue to have, several meanings in several contexts" (53), but he is able to outline certain definite "qualities of the classic": "maturity of mind, maturity of manners, maturity of language and perfection of the common style" (59). Mind and manners are not primarily literary phenomena, and there we see one of the sources of difficulty - the way in which Eliot's understanding of classicism refuses to be contained strictly within the boundaries of literature. "Classicism" may be essentially a literary characteristic, but in Eliot at least it is deeply involved with extra-literary systems of value, with politics and religion. Hence the linkage with royalism and anglo-catholicism. Indeed, that a text be implicated in the processes of history and human aspiration is for Eliot one of the defining requirements of the "classic."

32 At Home in lime

This becomes clear in "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" (1923), where Eliot proclaims that what he wants is "classicism" (176), arguing all the while that his position is in no way "political." On the surface the latter seems to indicate an inclination to separate artistic from social concerns, but Eliot is demurring, in fact, at literary politics, exempting himself from the long-standing debate between the "classic" and "romantic" in art. "Classicism" in his understanding of the term is not a relative but an absolute literary value: "It is a goal toward which all good literature strives, so far as it is good, according to the possibilities of its place and time" (176). From that last qualification, however, it is apparent that Eliot's conception of the classic is not - nor can ever be - purely aesthetic, and opens upon politics of the more worldly sort. "Classicism" for him describes a particularly close relationship which exists between the work and its historical, social moment. It is the very strangest kind of literary absolute: a perfection of historical contingency. It would be wrong to think of this "classic" relationship between the text and the world as a matter of the one passively imitating the other. Eliot describes the classical "tendency" as "doing the best one can with the material at hand" (177), which suggests some active engagement, on the artist's part, with his or her historical conditions. And indeed this is where the artist, the political animal, and the man of faith become in Eliot plainly inseparable. For the task of the artist, as of those others, is in some sense to respond to and to transform the world in time, quite literally to make the best of what is at hand. In a well-known passage, Eliot describes the method of Joyce which others "must pursue after him": "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (177). While the latter, he implies, is unaccommodating to the more traditional "narrative method" in literature, Joyce's "mythical method" (178) yokes the fugitive and intractable materia of history in parallel to a removed, relatively stable, and "timeless" structure. Now, this is not yet a transformation with directly political or social implications. "Shape and significance" once discovered or conferred reside primarily not in history or the world, but in the text. However, in Eliot's thought the abstraction of art from life is answered by a complementary notion, the modification of life in the light of - and through the experience of - art. Thus, in "Poetry and Drama" (1951), we are told that it is ultimately the function of art, in imposing a credible order upon ordinary reality, and thereby eliciting a perception of an order in reality, to bring us to a condition of serenity, stillness, and reconciliation; and then leave us, as

33 Eliot, Pound, and the Drafts of The Waste Land Virgil left Dante, to proceed to a region where that guide can avail us no farther. (87)

As the comparison with Virgil and Dante reveals, Eliot's grasp on this process is imaginative rather than practical; he is somewhat cloudy on the mechanics of that productive interaction between text and reader, artifact and viewer. In an earlier essay he resorts to edacious metaphor: reading a text, "we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to be or not ... during the process of assimilation and digestion" (Essays Ancient and Modern 102). In "Poetry and Drama," however, the lineaments of the theory are reasonably clear: art participates actively in what appears to be a process of human relief or redemption,1 and though the primary focus here is on matters of the mind and spirit, the envisaged transformation of the individual must have political consequences also. The burden of Eliot's argument in that other relevant essay, "The Social Function of Poetry" (1945), is that the small alterations which poetry can effect in individual sensibilities will ultimately have serious ramifications for society as a whole. In Essays Ancient and Modern of 1936, he insists that reading "affects us as entire human beings" and alters "our behaviour towards our fellow men" (105, ioo)2 - a view not uncommonly held during that decade, and a point of intersection between Eliot and the famously more politicized "Auden Generation."3 This "classical" involvement of literature in the processes of history was, already by the mid-twenties, a recurring theme in the pages of Eliot's journal, the Criterion. John D. Margolis has pointed out that though the magazine was edited by Eliot at first according to the formalist principles he had enunciated in The Sacred Wood (1920), it very soon began to concern itself with the interaction between literature and the world.4 Margolis (71-2) cites Eliot's 1923 note on "The Function of a Literary Review," in which the poet writes that a reviewer should "maintain the autonomy and disinterestedness of literature" but also "exhibit the relations of literature - not to 'life/ as something contrasted to literature, but to all the other activities, which, together with literature, are the components of life" (421). Then three years later we have Eliot arguing the anti-formalist position more energetically: Even the purest literature is alimented from non-literary sources, and has non-literary consequences. Pure literature is a chimera of sensation; admit the vestige of an idea and it is already transformed. ("The Idea of a Literary Review" 4)

34 At Home in Time

It is interesting to note that in the same essay from which these comments are drawn, Eliot declares for the first time that the "tendency" of the Criterion will be towards classicism. To illuminate his understanding of the term, he cites a number of books which for him exemplify the classic approach: these include Irving Babbitt's Democracy and Leadership, Georges Sorel's Reflexions sur la violence, and L'Avenir de I'intelligence by Charles Maurras. As Margolis points out, all of the books named by Eliot are "at least in part works of social criticism" (73). After this, the worldly responsibilities of literature are felt with increasing urgency in the pages of the Criterion until, in 1927, we have the following helpful gloss on "classicist," as Eliot would use it the next year in his preface to For Lancelot Andrewes: If we are to be qualified as "neo-classicists," we hope that "neo-classicism" may be allowed to comprise the idea that man is responsible, morally responsible, for his present and his immediate future. ("A Commentary" [1927] 283)5

It was the neoclassical Samuel Johnson who wrote that "it is always a writer's duty to make the world better" ("Preface" 66), and in his own less pragmatic way, Eliot seems to have come to hold a similar belief. In this his thinking diverged quite markedly from that of Ezra Pound, and in the second half of this chapter we shall see the divergence sharply apparent in their dialogue over the drafts of The Waste Land, that "collaboration on hysteria," as Wayne Koestenbaum has called it. Pound had argued in 1913 that "art never asks anybody to do anything, or to think anything, or to be anything. It exists as the trees exist" ("The Serious Artist" 46). At that stage - before his discovery in 1919 of C.H. Douglas's Economic Democracy - Pound had generally little interest in social or political matters, and his literary statements were correspondingly formalistic. Even in 1927, with the stridencies of the "E.P. Ode" behind him, and having admitted "I am perhaps didactic .... It's all rubbish to pretend art isn't didactic" (Selected Letters 180), he drew back (in theorizing as distinct from poetic practice) from the more forthrightly "social" understanding of art held by Eliot. While he conceded that literature has "a function in the state, in the aggregation of humans," he stressed that "this function is not the coercing or emotionally persuading, or bullying or suppressing [of] people into the acceptance of any one set or any six sets of opinions" ("How to Read" 21). It is an interesting chiasmus in their careers that while Eliot never went even so far as to argue

35 At Home in Time

that such coercion is the function of art, Pound - despite his reservations - went on, in the Usura and Hell cantos for example, to behave as if it is. Peter Nicholls explains this contradiction in Pound by pointing out "a major tension between the visionary Platonism which coloured much of his thought about poetic language, and his strong desire to seize the concrete, to confront directly the material problems of his time" (i). Persisting through to the later cantos, this tension emerges as a conflict between transcendental aspiration ("Time is the evil. Evil." - Canto xxx), and the impulse "To know the histories" for thei social utility ("to know good from evil / ... And know whom to trust" - Canto LXXXIX). Pound was preoccupied for decades with "the unreality of historical time" (Harmon 3) - even while he studied, and even sought to build, what Lawrence S. Rainey recently called "the temple of history."6 A related but not identical tension, "between historicist pluralism and essentialism," was, according to Richard Shusterman (77), characteristic also of Eliot; but in contrast to Pound, Eliot's historicism was "radical and consistent," and he was given to "uncompromising assertions of fundamental plurality" (79). So it would be an error to overlook or minimize the real differences between the two men. But there are also important ways in which they seem to have been in agreement on the relation of literature to society. Pound in the late twenties sees the true social function of literature in terms of "maintaining the very cleanliness of the tools, the health of the very matter of thought itself" ("How to Read" 21), which reminds one of Eliot's later claim that poetry "can and should help ... [a language] to develop, to be just as subtle and precise in the more complicated conditions and for the changing purposes of modern life, as it was in a simpler age" ("The Social Function" 22-3). The poet's "direct duty is to his language," writes Eliot, "first to preserve, and second to extend and improve" (20). Those who might earn his highest approval in these terms would surely be the very writers Pound would applaud as "inventors" or "masters."7 Beyond such similarities, however, the two men diverge significantly on the social function of art. Pound insists that "one 'moves' the reader only by clarity," that rhetoric is synonymous with "loose expression" ("How to Read" 22, 21), that poets should "go in fear of abstractions" ("A Retrospect" 5), and that "presentation" is always superior to explication. Thus, in his well-known formulation, "an 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time," and there should be no attenuation of the complex by elaboration upon it:

36 At Home in Time Don't use such expressions as "dim lands of peace". It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. ("A Retrospect" 4, 5)

This doctrine of the sufficiency of natural symbols is the heart of imagism, and combined with the practice of purportedly "instantaneous" presentation, it constitutes the poetic application of Pound's famous "ideogrammic method" - "the examination and juxtaposition of particular specimens" - always for him a crucial "implement for acquisition and transmission of knowledge" ("The Teacher's Mission" 61). That "transmission" of ideas and emotions through the juxtaposition of natural symbols without "rhetorical din" is in Pound's view "harder and saner" than the method which dominated English verse "from the puritanical revolt to Swinburne." He rejects the tendency of that tradition to treat poetry as "merely the vehicle ... the ox-cart and post-chaise for transmitting thoughts poetic or otherwise/' and in doing so he returns poetry from the realm of social utility to the world of "pure art" ("A Retrospect" 12, 11). As one might have predicted, this makes him particularly unsympathetic to English literature of the very period that Eliot came to find congenial: the eighteenth century. This was an age, Pound writes, in which "they had no ideogrammic method or hadn't erected it into a system" ("Mr Housman" 68). The result was a fondness for abstract statement which had, he remarks a little obscurely, "an effect on verse." Since he dates this poetic malaise from the puritan revolt, he also finds the "effect" in certain figures from the late seventeenth century, Dryden especially. "Mr. Housman at Little Bethel," published by Pound in Eliot's Criterion, January 1934, subjects Dryden to severe attack: "Heaven be my witness that I, at any rate, and of all men, don't want Johnnie Dryden dug up again." Pound stresses the "first syllable of John's patronymic," dismissing the poet's work for its "outstanding aridity." With typical perversity, Pound's salvoes are also aimed at his editor on this occasion: "Mr Eliot's endeavours," he tells us, have served "only to strengthen my resolve never, never again, to open either John Dryden, his works or any comment upon them" (70). Eliot's earliest sustained commentary on Dryden dates from 1921, a crucial year for modernist literary history, since it was then that despite personal difficulties - he was finally concentrated upon his new poem, "He Do the Police in Different Voices." He was also reading Mark Van Doren's study, The Poetry of John Dryden, and writing a review of it - "John Dryden," the essay which concludes with this rebuke to nineteenth-century taste and judgment:

37 Eliot, Pound, and the Drafts of The Waste Land where Dryden fails to satisfy, the nineteenth century does not satisfy us either; and where that century has condemned him, it is itself condemned. In the next revolution of taste it is possible that poets may turn to the study of Dryden. He remains one of those who have set standards for English verse which it is desperate to ignore. (316)

The revaluation of Dryden that Eliot predicts, he also begins. It is a matter of thinking beyond romantic paradigms "into a new freedom" - not an easy thing to do, since "the twentieth century is still the nineteenth" (305-6). But Eliot is able to identify the specific obstacle to this process, pointing out that what interposes between twentiethcentury readers and Restoration or eighteenth-century texts is a nineteenth-century perception of the "poetic," a perception (derived from the precedent of Shakespeare and Milton) "which dwells upon sublimity of theme and action." "The depreciation or neglect of Dryden," he continues, "is not due to the fact that his work is not poetry, but to a prejudice that the material, the feelings, out of which he built is not poetic." As illustrations of this prejudice Eliot quotes Hazlitt and Matthew Arnold, and his apparent aim in the whole essay is to rebut Arnold's famous indictment of Dryden and Pope - an indictment also satirized, incidentally, by Auden in his "Letter to Lord Byron"8 - that "they are not classics of our poetry, [but] ... classics of our prose" (300). A typical post-romantic, Arnold believed that "genuine poetry is conceived in the soul," and Eliot deprecates him for his underestimation of poetic wit. But his own ideas about the "poetic" are not entirely pre-romantic either, for he loudly applauds Dryden's ability to make the trivial sublime, "the prosaic into the poetic" (310). In the main, however, Eliot shows a striking appreciation for the radical ways in which poetry and poetics in the Restoration and eighteenth century differ from those in the romantic and post-romantic periods. In his appraisal of Dryden he shows sympathy for the discursiveness, the emphatically denotative style, and even the empirical - or "commonplace" - mentality (314), which mark Dryden's poetry as typical of its age. Pound, however, was led by these same characteristics to label the poet "a lunk-head" ("Mr Housman" 70), but Eliot finds real poetic value not in imagist "suggestiveness," or romantic sublimity, but in Dryden's "satisfying completeness of ... statement" (316) and the "pure magnificence of [his] diction" (313). He applauds a poet "whose style (vocabulary, syntax and order of thought) is in a high degree natural" (310). Eliot's interest in Dryden persisted over four decades from 1921 onwards, the earlier poet consistently serving as a critical and poetic

38 At Home in Time

"touchstone" (Macaree 44). But Dry den was not the only figure from this period to hold his attention. Eliot also owed a debt to Samuel Johnson, as David Perkins has reminded us; and like his essay on Dryden, the much later "Johnson as Critic and Poet" (1944) seems to arise out of an awareness of the Augustan poet's suitability as a model for present or future poetic practice. "It remains to be seen," writes Eliot as he starts out, "whether the literary influence of Johnson ... does not merely await a generation which has not been born to receive it" (163). Again, Eliot is concerned to set aside nineteenth-century prejudices and to rehabilitate for the modern reader certain tenets of Augustan poetics. Most important among these is "edification," the originally Horatian idea that poetry should not only please, but instruct as well. Edification "has become the object of derision," writes Eliot, "though what the term means may be something from which we can never escape" (182). His point is that all poetry is in some way concerned with the propagation of ideas: Even the doctrine of "art for art's sake" is only a variation under the guise of a protest; and in our time, the defence of poetry as a substitute for religion, and the attempt, not always successful or beneficial to poetry, to express or impose a social philosophy in verse, indicate that it is only the content of "edification" that changes. (183)

Especially interesting is Eliot's assertion that "what interests Johnson is the edifying power of the poem, rather than the deliberate intention of the poet." This ideological compulsion exerted willy-nilly by the formal elements of a text is something Eliot does not question; in fact, he makes the point that even if disinterested judgments of aesthetic value were possible, they would be unnatural. That they are desirable he does not doubt: "We endeavour, and in our time must endeavour, to discount this attraction or repulsion [of the text], in order to arrive at a just valuation of the artistic merit." But since ideology is unlikely ever to be wholly discountable - either in writing or in reading - it may be that a "purely literary criticism" is possible only when a particular textual ideology is already generalized and universal. Thus in Eliot's view Johnson has remained unsurpassed as a critic "because he was able to assume that there was a general attitude towards life, and a common opinion as to the place of poetry within it" (184). In all of this we see Eliot acknowledging what Johnson and the eighteenth century took for granted, and what Pound categorically rejected - that writing and reading poetry always involve "edification," that the aims of poetry are in part at least the aims of rhetoric.

39 Eliot, Pound, and the Drafts of The Waste Land

Here it should be remembered that Eliot's fondness for Restoration and eighteenth-century works ran to include some that spoke directly to political issues. Dryden's The Hind and the Panther, for example, he described as "first-rate oratorical persuasion," the rhetorical intention dignified by - and not antagonistic to - poetic form (John Dry den i/).9 For Dryden, the assumption that poetry must teach and persuade led naturally to a high valuation of the middle style. Thus, in the passage from Religio Laid which I quoted in my introduction, he writes that "the Expressions of a Poem, design'd purely for Instruction, ought to be Plain and Natural, and yet Majestic." Eliot praised Dryden for the magnificence of his natural style, and in the Johnson essay Eliot's discussion of edification leads him back to the same issue. What we have to do, he tells us, is "to learn to recognize the benefits to the writer and to his critic of common style in poetry" (187). Eliot's thinking here must be in part Dryden's: the didactic function of poetry is best served by a style that is accessible and unobtrusive, that is the proper and ultimately self-effacing dress of thought. If, however, we link this approach to edification with Eliot's larger desire to bring about that classical "uniformity of culture" described in The Idea of a Christian Society, then the "common style" will appear an obvious and potent means by which to achieve some sort of ideological and cultural homogeneity - hegemony, in fact. But, fascinatingly, as we follow Eliot's argument, the common style is grasped at only first as a tool towards unanimity, and then as a much longedfor symptom of it. Here his situation is evidently very far from that of Johnson, who could take for granted some degree of consensus among his readers. For Eliot, consensus "in our time" is a matter of crisis, so the attainment of a common style would not only mean the possibility of realizing what he elsewhere calls a "community of taste" ("What Is a Classic?" 57), but, more excitingly, also confirm that such a community is to some degree already in existence. And that, precisely, is what he desires. The uncertainty here imparts a decidedly twentieth-century flavour, but the aim itself is quintessentially Augustan: what A.O. Lovejoy called the "uniformitarian" doctrine (79), the belief that taste is uniform and values absolute, is the cornerstone of eighteenth-century aesthetics.10 For all his focus on the idea of edification and on the realization of a "uniformitarian" culture, Eliot in his reappraisal of Johnson still seems at some pains to separate art from life. Some critics, such as D.E.S. Maxwell in his Poets of the Thirties, have stressed this tendency, placing Eliot in opposition to other more obviously "engaged" writers such as Auden, Day Lewis, and MacNeice.11 And it is certainly true that while the theory propounded in the Johnson essay logically

40 At Home in Time

points towards the involvement of literature in questions that are "cultural" according to broader definition, the argument also declares certain limitations to its scope: apparently, it is concerned with purely aesthetic values, with the lack of critical standards in the early twentieth century. One senses the author pulling back from that more thoroughgoing literary pragmatism we find in Dryden, Johnson, and Swift. Having conceded that all poetry is ideologically inscribed, that it will in some way exercise an "edifying" power over its reader, Eliot quickly turns his face from the unpleasant corollary of this thesis: namely, that language and style are in large measure instruments of worldly manipulation. Thus we have his emphasis on the common style not as a calculated choice in the propagation of ideas, but as an emblem or even proof of commonness. The movement is away from disquietening relativism - "the standard of edification has been fractured into a variety of prejudices" ("Johnson" 187) - towards absolutism, in which a "common" style comes to be thought of as a "natural" one. In the Johnson essay, Eliot's paradoxical tendency to hold at once both a rhetorician's pragmatic view of language and an idealist's faith in unchanging values is itself remarkably Augustan. The enshrinement of stylistic "naturalness," however, is evidence also of a post-romantic squeamishness about rhetoric and the unashamed exploitation of words to worldly ends. Even with its residual formalism, "Johnson as Critic and Poet" readmits a distinctively eighteenth-century worldliness to poetry; it accepts that one of the tasks of the art is not to transcend but to teach, to have a more than merely emotional effect in the world which the text must inhabit. And here it is worth noting that as early as The Sacred Wood Eliot was emphatic that poetry should do more than "produce in us a state": "A state, in itself, is nothing whatever." Rather, The aim of the poet is to state a vision, and no vision of life can be complete which does not include the articulate formulation of life which human minds make, (i/o)12

Twenty-four years later in the Johnson essay, "to state a vision" has translated itself into a more forthright didacticism, one consequence of which is that general ideas and arguments must be considered proper matter of poetry. Eliot quotes Imlac in Rasselas: "The business of a poet is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances; he does not number the

41 Eliot, Pound, and the Drafts of The Waste Land streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest ..." (179)

Interestingly, Eliot's sympathetic quotation of these lines coincides historically with one of Pound's most explicit statements of the contrary position. In the Guide to Kulchur he writes that Pope's interest in man was weakened by being "anthropological" and too much shut off "from particulars" (98-9). It is true that Eliot also saw the limits of an excessive concentration on the general. The problem for him, however, was not that exposition is innately unpoetic, but rather that the elaboration of general ideas can lead to "rather loose construction." Thus he finds fault with Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes because "the idea is given at the start, and as it is one universally accepted, there can be but little development, only variations on the one theme" ("Johnson" 181). Nevertheless, Johnson's poem is one for which he feels obvious admiration, and in principle Eliot does not have Pound's difficulty with abstract ideas articulated in poetry, with what the latter calls "thought in full dress uniform". Pound, not surprisingly, thought The Vanity "by and large ... buncombe/' a verdict based on his very simple credo: "The total statement is buncombe. The details acute and sagacious" ("Human Wishes" 180). One hears in this assertion, made twenty-five years on, the very same insistence on concrete detail and on the adequacy of the natural symbol that mark his early discussion of the Image. Pound's hatred of rhetoric and his dedication to a new symbolic poetry were key and enduring elements in his program for an art "free from emotional slither" ("A Retrospect" 12). T.E. Hulme, we recall, had pledged himself to the same goal, and called it classicism. And when, in the writing of Mauberley and earlier, Pound sought inspiration from the "hard" verses of Gautier, he too aligned himself with at least one species of neoclassicism. At the same time, though, it was a rather cryptic species, considerably removed - by virtue of the sentiments contained in Leconte de Lisle's remark, "Le Beau n'est pas le serviteur du Vrai"13 - from the worldly gravitas of the ancients, as well as from the socially aware poets of the English eighteenth century. Eliot's classicism was neither so esoteric nor so far removed as Pound's from those two sources. While it, too, implied a rethinking of the role of "emotion" in poetry - the task of the poet, he wrote early on, is "to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all" ("Tradition" 21) - it was shaped by a sympathetic response to the Augustan age, and it involved an acceptance of poetic attitudes and practices which for Pound had always been anathema.

42 At Home in Time

The two men, and their different versions of a modernist poetic, clashed over Eliot's drafts for The Waste Land, which Pound saw first towards the end of 1921 and then again in January, 1922. Before I say a word about these, let me first acknowledge A.D. Moody's very sensible point that the drafts as we have them, and particularly as they are presented in Valerie Eliot's edition, provide a somewhat perilous basis for criticism (310). Too many mysteries - such as precisely which of the miscellaneous poems were included in the manuscript seen by Pound, and what was the order of composition and revision - remain unsolved. But what I am about to write has little to do with these questions; I am mostly concerned with the style of individual segments, not with the structure and order of the poem as a whole. One practical problem for criticism, however, is that scholars are not permitted to quote passages from the facsimile edition, so perhaps readers will forgive the occasional ellipses and circumlocutions in what follows. My method of combining description with specific line and page references will, I hope, serve as an adequate substitute for direct quotation. The most obvious trace of a "classical" intention in the drafts has often been remarked upon. This is the "Fresca" passage, the pastiche of Pope which at one point made up the first seventy-two lines of "The Fire Sermon." It is hardly necessary to detail the debt. Fresca obviously recalls Belinda, and the situation Eliot describes is precisely that with which Pope opens The Rape of the Lock: the sun enters the heroine's room, and together with the ringing of a bell, awakens her. More striking even than the repetition of events is Eliot's extraordinary care in recapturing the cadences, the characteristic details, of Pope's verse. Eliot writes in rhyming couplets, and in doing so he uses rhymes of distinctly eighteenth-century provenance - "tea" is made to rhyme with "tray," for example (Facsimile 23). Pope's verbal wit in the famous lines "'Twas then, Belinda, if report say true, / Thy eyes first opened on a billet-doux" (Poems 2.2.2) is quite consciously echoed in Eliot's play on the name of the French author and diplomat, Jean Giraudoux (Facsimile 39). If it were nothing more than an imitation of Pope, the Fresca passage would still be remarkable. It has its weak moments, of course, but on the whole it is quite witty, and often does demonstrate that, as Eliot asserted in his "Reflections on Vers Libre" (1917), the heroic couplet "has lost none of its edge since Dryden and Pope laid it down" (36). Its rationale, however, is a good deal more than virtuoso imitation. Like Pope's Rape, it has a very clear satiric intention, and while the butt of Eliot's attack is much the same as Pope's was - a certain human and social malaise - there is in the imitation of

43 Eliot, Pound, and the Drafts of The Waste Land

that particular style of satire a telling complication. After all, what we have in the Fresca passage is not simply "a vast force" being used "to lift a feather" - as Pope describes the mock-epic in his postscript to the Odyssey (Sigworth 198); Fresca is a parody of a parody, her tawdriness and the emptiness of her life accentuated by unflattering comparison with the trivial and idiotic Belinda, who next to her seems positively dignified. We have a measure of the distance between them in their first actions on waking: Belinda repairs to her dressing-table - her "toilet" - where she begins "the sacred Rights of Pride" (Poems 2.2.2); Fresca moves immediately to her toilet - where, apparently, she relieves herself (Facsimile 23). When Pound was shown the manuscript he evidently had great reservations about the Fresca passage as a whole. And his comments on it are thoroughly in keeping with what he has to say in his Guide to Kulchur about the eighteenth- century mode which Eliot was concerned to imitate. In the end, he recommended excision of approximately fifty-five of its seventy-two lines. So far as can be gathered, his grounds for objection vary widely. Jack Stillinger suggests he found the passage "extremely shallow imitation" (129), and was right to do so. Moody argues in like vein that Pound "justly" attacked the section because it was an unredeemable display of "bad writing and bad feeling" (313). But there are also indications of more specific objections: on one page (Facsimile 39) he comments three times on looseness, or what he calls "diffuseness" produced by the rhyming couplet. As Eliot recalls, Pound bluntly told him: "Pope has done this so well that you cannot do it better; and if you mean this as a burlesque, you had better suppress it, for you cannot parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope - and you can't."

Poor Eliot had thought the Fresca episode "an excellent set of couplets."14 Quite obviously, one important aspect of the Fresca episode is that it declares the poem's ideological affinities with the Tory satirists, and with the "higher and clearer conception of Reason" Eliot took to be characteristic of the eighteenth century in general ("The Idea of a Literary Review" 3-4). There may be some element of the burlesque here, but Pound was correct in treating that as a secondary possibility; it is surely clear that the Fresca episode is not a literary satire but a pastiche, its aim not primarily to mock a style but rather to use that style - however unusual and outdated - to mock something else. That Eliot had resort to the satiric mode of Pope is not at all surprising,

44 At Home in Time

given the sympathy for the eighteenth century which we have found consistent in his prose writings from the twenties onwards. With the adoption of an Augustan style comes an implied endorsement of the key neoclassical values: reason, circumspection, moral earnestness, and wit. Eliot's mock-mock-heroic functions the way so many of his allusions in The Waste Land do; it indicts the present by unflattering comparison with the past, a past with its values encoded in a particular phrase or even - as in this case - a particular style. Writing of Pope's Dunciad and The Waste Land, J.S. Cunningham argues that "both poems move us to reflect on the relation between moral ill and the loss of those finer bearings that might still be taken from the artistic achievement and religious faith of a major civilization" (71). One may treat Eliot's imitation of Pope as an aesthetic and personal mistake, or label the entire Fresca episode "a brutal and trifling sketch" (Moody 313), but there is no escaping the fact that while this may not be "significant" as poetry, it is poetry not without significance. Eliot's attempt at an eighteenth-century style tells us much about the didactic motivation and neoAugustan ideology behind what was to become the seminal text of poetic modernism. Critics who incline to dismiss the Fresca section on the basis of taste and presumed value must still deal with the fact that Eliot wrote it, and wrote so much of it, presumably because at the time he thought it important. Koestenbaum's fascinating explanation for this is psycho-sexual in nature: Fresca is the female other, and a type for the poem's "hysterical discourse" used by the poet "to invoke the corrective affections of another man" (139). Does that justify the inference that Eliot's Augustan imitation was written primarily to attract "corrective affection" from Pound? The Fresca narrative certainly did elicit a passionate response from that quarter, but it is ludicrous to imagine that to do so was its conscious and primary rationale. Some desire of the broader, public kind to engage with questions of moral, social, and civilizational ills, for example - must also have been operative in the writing at that stage. Whether or not Kenner will be proven correct in his assumptions about the chronology of composition, his case for the thematic importance of the Augustan imitations in "The Fire Sermon" remains strong: London, perceived through various Augustan modes: that was "The Fire Sermon" originally. It might have been entitled "London: a Poem," or even "The Vanity of Human Wishes." If work on this section was indeed precipitated by the reading of Mark Van Doren's book about Dryden, it may well contain what had gotten on paper by May. ... The rest of the poem seems to have

45 Eliot, Pound, and the Drafts of The Waste Land been planned around it, guided by the norms and decorums of an Augustan view of history. ("Urban Apocalypse" 35)15

As Kenner's closing comments suggest, the drafts for The Waste Land are informed by an Augustanism which extends well beyond the Fresca episode and "The Fire Sermon" as a whole, although that is where it is most obvious.16 Pound, whose ear was especially sensitive to "Gongorism" and those other vices he found in eighteenthcentury poetry ("Human Wishes" 180), was quick to notice this and comment on it. "Exequy," one of the miscellaneous poems that was originally part of the Waste Land package, is an exercise in Eliot's Laforguian style - except for the rhyme which ends the third stanza (Facsimile 101). Next to those last lines Pound has written "This is Laforgue not xvin." The end-rhyme linking the fourth to the sixth line is awkward and forced, but the rhetorical technique is unmistakably Augustan. One remembers, for example, Pope's mastery with that cutting "or"phrase, as in canto n of the Rape, where we consider these dread possibilities: Whether the nymph shall break Diana's law, Or some frail China jar receive a flaw, Or stain her honour, or her new brocade, Forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade.

(Poems 225)

This is the mode into which "Exequy" briefly moves. Eliot's ironic sensibility, at home though it obviously is in the world of Laforguian discourse, seems to find a special comfort in the style of Pope. Pound advised him to omit the whole section. In the latter part of Eliot's draft for "The Fire Sermon," after the Fresca episode, comes a section in unrhymed free verse - which Pound approvingly marked "O.K.," "STET" (Facsimile 27), and on the carbon of the typescript, "Echt." It remains in the published version, followed by the fragment, "Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug / So rudely forc'd / Tereu," and an early form of the paragraph beginning "Unreal city ... " (Collected Poems 67-8). Then, in the drafts (Facsimile 43), there comes an odd section of unsettled form: we have a quatrain, rhyming abab, then a ten-line paragraph in which there is one rhyming couplet (the first line of which has been deleted in the typewriter, leaving an a b a c pattern) and a number of alternating rhymes. Then there is a single line - an apostrophe to Adamantus - after which the writing settles into a consistent pattern of quatrains (rhyming abab, c d c d, efef, etc.), extending for sixty-three lines. The form, as many

46 At Home in lime

have pointed out, is that of Dryden's Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666. But it is also strongly reminiscent of Thomas Gray's "Eleg Written in a Country Churchyard/' the famous late Augustan poem which, as an incident recorded in Richard Aldington's autobiography testifies, was much on Eliot's mind in 1921.17 These lines, one senses, are a stylistic modulation from the earlier rhyming couplets in the Fresca section, and the feeling is reinforced by a clear continuity in diction and tone. The mode is not mockheroic, of course, but it is satire of a distinctly Augustan sort. If Moody (317) is correct, and the lyric "Exequy" did indeed stand between the Fresca couplets and the later quatrains, Pound's "This is Laforgue not xvm" indicates his own clear sense of the Augustan continuities at work in this section of the drafts. The subject in the quatrains is once again modern woman, not getting herself up and ready for the day, but home for tea after work. As in the Fresca episode, the satire consists in a calculated discrepancy between an elevated, formal style, and a squalid subject-matter. Tiresias, the speaker, notices the dirtiness of the woman's underwear and the grease on her lover's hair, and he pronounces them bugs. Yet all of these words take their place in quatrains of great formality and elegance, as for instance in lines 133-6 (Facsimile 45). This passage remains in the published version of The Waste Land (Collected Poems 68), with the important difference that there it is not a separate quatrain, but part of a continuous, much condensed rewriting of Eliot's draft. On the manuscript, Pound had commented that the verse in the original was not interesting enough in itself to justify elaboration to that degree (45), and Eliot evidently took this to heart, cutting out approximately twenty lines. With that, and the unmaking of the quatrain structure, went some of the passage's careful formality, its very obvious loyalty to a reasonable and ordered world-view. But as Macaree notes, the vignette involving the typist and the young man carbuncular "retains the rhythmic pattern and the rhyme scheme of Dryden's work" (37). Alternating rhymes remain to assert the value of decorum, and so does much of Eliot's original diction and word order. In these last two matters Eliot was - on this occasion, at any rate - his own man. Pound had objected not only to the length of the typist passage, but predictably to its rather eighteenth-century use of words. Next to one of the quatrains referred to above, he comments that Eliot's syntactical inversions are not justified by metrical exigency (Facsimile 45). However, the inversion in question was surely not prompted merely by metrical considerations, but rather by the desire to imitate an antique style, particularly a Latinate one.

47 Eliot, Pound, and the Drafts of The Waste Land

In fact, Pound's comments on the passage as a whole indicate that he either did not see that Eliot was again working in pastiche, or and this is more likely - simply did not regard imitation as an economical and therefore valid poetic strategy. That seems to be the obvious message in the changes which he makes to Eliot's ninth quatrain in the series (Facsimile 45, lines 153-6). Reworked to incorporate those changes, the stanza would no longer be poetry composed "in sequence of a metronome" - to use Pound's oftencited formulation ("A Retrospect" 3) - and perhaps it would be more forthright and economical than Eliot's original. But it also would be no longer satire of the same kind, its point-of-view less obviously coloured by the aesthetic and moral values of the Eighteenth Century. Part of the charm of Eliot's lines is precisely the fact that they are enslaved to the metronome, that the pattern is independent of the subject-matter. Indeed, the independent and absolute value of order and reasonableness is nothing less than the point of the whole passage. And Eliot's lines, padded out as they are with redundant adjectives and that ubiquitous "perhaps," affirm this quite ingenuously. To counter this intractable Augustanism in Eliot, Pound enlists the aid of another poet for whom his friend had a high regard: Paul Verlaine. Beside one of the early quatrains in the typist episode, he paraphrases and alters a line from Verlaine's "Art Poetique." The original reads "O qui dira les torts de la Rime!" - or, "Oh, who will tell the wrongs of Rhyme?" (Maclntyre 37). Pound's criticism of Eliot is clear: not only does he believe that a particular rhyme is poor but that rhyming is in general a very dubious element on which to build any poetic structure. The allusion to Verlaine's poem suggests that Pound knew very well what he was dealing with in Eliot - not merely a poet guilty of occasional mannerism, or who occasionally wrote "badly," but one operating within a complex of historically identifiable and consistent poetic assumptions, a latter-day Augustan in fact. This would make his choice of Verlaine's poem wonderfully apposite, because "Art Poetique" is in effect a programmatic indictment of classical principles and forms. It places prime value on the music of poetry - "De la musique avant tout chose" is how it begins - and it argues against the metronome and in favour of uneven rhythm. It attacks the kind of epigrammatic style towards which Eliot inclined at numerous points in his drafts, and it disdains as vulgar satire's concern with the real world: Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine, L'Esprit cruel et le rire impur,

48 At Home in Time Qui font pleurer les yeux de 1'Azur, Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!18

In its sixth stanza, Verlaine's poem warns that rhyme should not be allowed to run away with itself, and it also advises the reader to wring the neck of eloquence - 'Trends 1'eloquence et tords-lui son cou!" Interestingly, much of Pound's irritation with Eliot in the drafts arises over verbal choices and constructions that are "eloquent" not just in the sense that they are the stuff of fine, fluid and elegant writing, but in the specifically eighteenth-century sense - namely, that they have a rhetorical justification, that they are motivated by an intention to "edify" or persuade. When in the drafts he encounters signs of this kind of intention, Pound is impatient to register his disapproval. He instantly denounces a passage rich in rhetorical figures (Facsimile 55), but his attack must wait, he admits, until he receives a typescript. This aversion to all traces of an edifying intent serves well to explain a number of Pound's other comments on Eliot's drafts for The Waste Land. There is, for example, his constant attention to Eliot's use of the vocative. In the published version of the poem very little of this survives, but in the drafts we find familiar passages carrying a very unfamiliar tone. In what became the last section of "The Burial of the Dead," for example, the "Unreal city" is not simply described; it is addressed in a way that reminds one of the apostrophe with which Goldsmith opens The Deserted Village, a poem Eliot placed "higher than any poem by Johnson or by Gray" ("Johnson" i8i):19 "Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain / ... How often have I loiter'd o'er thy green, / ... How often have I paused on every charm ..." (54). In Eliot's draft version of what became line 61 of the final text, "winter dawn" is - like Goldsmith's "green" - preceded by the second person possessive pronoun. "How often have I loitered" has its parallel in a similar phrase of first person recollection (Facsimile 9, lines 114-5). On the typescript, Pound brackets the whole passage and circles the key deictic, "your." When he comes to the second "Unreal city" paragraph - the one in "The Fire Sermon" - he brackets again the personal statement (Facsimile 43, line 93), recommends excision of the deictic "your," and in the margin writes "vocative?", apparently raising the issue for discussion. Some lines further on, he brackets an entire quatrain addressed to the city of London and then writes "vocative?" again, this time beside a paragraph in which "your" occurs twice (43). He recommends removal of both the quatrain and the paragraph. The quatrain he dismisses with a profanity (31), and Moody writes that "the prophet-preacher's apostrophe to

49 Eliot, Pound, and the Drafts of The Waste Land

London ... fully merited" this "rude word" (313). But behind this denigration of the rhetorical mode is a poetic axiology no less contingent than the Augustan one which it seeks to dismiss. To readers who most highly value "impersonal lyricism" (Moody 312), or who, like Pound, insist on the symbolic sufficiency of the natural object, there can be little doubt that the apostrophe to London would seem superfluous; but from an Augustan perspective the objection makes little sense. Pound also frequently objects to the "personal" note in Eliot's drafts, and a similar reply might be made. The creation and delineation of a credible speaking presence is anything but anomalous if we concede the overall intention of the drafts to be rhetorical or edifying. For no matter how timeless and impersonal might be the truths which a poet sets out to communicate, the rhetorical success of a poem like Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes hinges upon its creation of a credible and compelling speaker. The efficacy of satire, too, is connected to the clarity and credibility with which a poet delineates his speaker's point of view. In The Rape of the Lock, for example, the speaker is the self-appointed judge of the people and events he describes. In his personality is invested an entire moral scheme which it is the aim of the the poem to propagate. Patricia Spacks suggests that Pope's career shows a strengthening of this tendency, a deepening commitment "to the crucial importance of judgement," with the Dunciad demonstrating "the devastating energy of the judgemental faculty" (84). Interestingly, she sees a link between that poem and The Waste Land: in both, "the poet's vision provides the clarities" (85). "The Waste Land," she writes, "testifies to and depends on the power of a mind, the only reality to which it is finally committed" (104). In a fundamental way, the personality of the speaker is very much the point of that category of poem. Furthermore, the work is unlikely to succeed in its edifying program unless this personality is coherent. And in linguistic terms that will require consistency in matters such as grammatical point of view, lexical choices, and syntactic patterns. In short, it will require that the process of deixis - of anchoring the speaker in time and place, relative to the reader - is efficiently and clearly done. Eliot's modulation into a clearly "personal" style - which for Pound is a lapse into an inferior mode - is, from an eighteenthcentury perspective, a positive move towards the clearer definition of a single and coherent point of view, and thus towards greater rhetorical efficacy. At a distinctly Horatian moment in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Eliot implies the desirability of such a

5O At Home in Time

move, arguing that the "View of life' presented in a poem" ought to be "one which the mind of the reader can accept as coherent, mature, and founded on the facts of experience," in which case it will interpose "no obstacle to the reader's enjoyment" (96). In light of this, consider the seventh of that series of quatrains discussed earlier (Facsimile 45, lines 145-8). Repeated here, the pronoun "we" has a clearly deictic function. It certainly identifies the speaker as an individual, but what is more important it also indicates something of the nature of the relationship between speaker and reader - always of great interest to Eliot, as Shusterman has shown.20 There is a presumption of collegiality, though not of equality. The common ground is that "we" are none of us like the youth being described; but what divides us is the authority of the speaker, who speaks to us and for us. The point is that this emergence of "personality" in the body of discourse carries with it enormous rhetorical - and one has to say ideological - significance and power. Th disposition of the "speaker" - that creation of pronouns and shifters will necessarily govern the disposition of the reader. We are, in a sense, as we are spoken to. It is little wonder, then, that Pound - always suspicious of eloquence - could accept of this stanza only the second half of the first line. The rest he has circled, marking the second line - with its presumption of agreement - "Personal" (45). If between the "personal" and the rhetorical in poetry there is some kind of close proportion, it is not surprising to discover that when, on Pound's recommendation, Eliot removed the trappings of eloquence, The Waste Land acquired some of its most puzzlingly impersonal - because multivocal - passages. Take, for example, the ending of "The Burial of the Dead." In the draft version (9), we begin with a clear sense of where we are, who is speaking, and to whom. The speaker is addressing the "Unreal city," and the "winter dawn" is not generalized (as in the final version) but specific to that place. Where we are temporally is also quite clear: the second part of line 114 (Facsimile 9) defines a present moment in relation to a past. In the published version, however, this has been excised, and the recollection is of an obscure past without any specific relationship to the present. With the removal of those temporal co-ordinates, our sense of an existing, reacting speaker is diminished. The "voice" of the poem becomes disembodied in space and time, so one more quickly recognizes "I had not thought death had undone so many" for what it is - an intractably alien presence, and alien partly because of its incongruous specificity. In the draft version, the quotation is somewhat more integrated simply because Dante's "I" can be identified with the speaking "I."

5i Eliot, Pound, and the Drafts of The Waste Land

One could detail endlessly the nuances that separate the two versions, but the most important change that comes with removal of the apostrophe to the city which opens this section is that the status and identity of the poem's addressee is cast into doubt. Because Eliot gives us no substitute addressee, the entire closing paragraph, much of which is the peculiar anecdote about Stetson, seems spoken into the void. As readers we "overhear" it, of course, but it does not seem to be addressed to us. The effect, then, is to introduce a radical uncertainty into the position of the reader, an uncertainty only compounded by the babel of voices into which the anecdote declines. The mistake would be to assume that this version of the passage is in the deepest sense any less "rhetorical" than the original one. The old clothes of rhetoric have indeed been stripped away. But linguistic norms are invariably violated for effect: discontinuity and ambiguity, however natural to the project at hand, presuppose a reader upon whom something of their wnnaturalness will register - perhaps as the beginning of a process by which what is felt to be "natural" will itself be altered. Thus it is to some extent self-evident that language has here been arranged to induce in the reader a particular mental orientation.21 That Eliot favoured this rather oblique form of rhetoric has emerged in studies of almost all the genres he pursued. Edward Lobb, for example, has argued that Eliot's prose "aims at inducing a certain temper of mind rather than persuading the reader on particular small points" - an aim in which, he implies, it resembles poetry (96). In her study of "rhythms of involvement" in the plays, Sheila Rabillard points out the way in which Eliot's drama makes use of "patterned cadence and rhetorical stress" to draw his auditors into "analogous actions," both mental and emotional.22 And Gregory Siomopoulos has considered Eliot's affective poetic from a psychoanalytical perspective, arguing that the reader's encounter with The Waste Land "may be viewed as a developmentally advanced edition of the primordial sharing situation" (512). The final version of that poem, perhaps even more than the preliminary drafts, seems to have been composed with the role of the reader in mind. Guided by Pound and the sort of thinking that lay behind the reader-oriented poetics of imagism, Eliot makes us participate energetically in the making of sense, or in the experience of failing to do so. One might well prefer to call this "affective" rather than "rhetorical" writing, but finally both terms point to the same concern: that old and venerable classical idea that a poem exists to bring the reader into sympathy with its own assumptions, its own world-view. Koestenbaum confirms and extends this point in his homoerotic theorizing of the text-reader relationship: "The Waste Land

52 At Home in Time

has always been a scene of implicit collaboration between the male poet and his male reader, in which Eliot's hysterical discourse - by the act of collusive interpretation, by the reader's analytic listening - suffers a sea-change into masculinity" (138-9). The difference between the two passages under discussion, however, is that while the earlier one pursues its didactic goal through logical statement, the later one attempts to bypass logic and provide a reading experience correlative to its world-view. As readers of the later, we find ourselves inducted into an "intellectual and emotional complex" through the "presentation" of efficacious symbols and fragmentary utterances. The process I describe was for Pound part of a consciously articulated poetic program. In his view, the "power" exercised by a text inevitably, as Johnson and later Eliot perceived - lay not in elegance of statement but in discontinuity and fragmentation. Pound had "ultimately a greater trust in rough speech than in eloquence." He writes that the "'often thought yet ne'er so well express't' angle very often means that the idea is NOT thought at all by the expressor during or preceding the moment of expression. It is picked up and varnished, or, at best, picked up and rubbed, polished etc." ("Human Wishes" 181). Typically post-romantic, Pound cannot accept the dualistic attitude to thought and language which lies at the heart of the eighteenth-century style, and which that style - even in the hands of a modern practitioner like Eliot - professes. Here one remembers his insistence that the social function of poetry is that it maintains the health "of the very matter of thought itself" ("How to Read" 21): language and thought are for him inseparable. Pound's objection is also to what is, from the reader's point of view, the closedness of eloquent verse. Truth, for him, involves the "degree and celerity wherewith ... [an idea] goes into action," the way in which language operates to realize an idea - one which is unknowable except through that process. He writes that "a very distinct component of truth remains ungrasped by the non-participant in the action" ("Human Wishes" 182); the reader misses out when style bespeaks the completion, rather than the process, of thought. There is no doubt that between Pound and the Augustans there are radical differences in the matter of linguistic theory. But in questions of poetic practice they agree in focusing on the reader, and on the reader's state of mind. If anything, Pound's notion of putting an idea "into action" through the process of reading is - potentially at least - more profoundly transforming of the extra-textual world than anything imagined by the worldly and rhetorical Augustans. Citing Carol Christ on the way in which Pound "came increasingly to

53 Eliot, Pound, and the Drafts of The Waste Land

depend on heavy doses of the didacticism that, as a young rebel, he loudly eschewed," Willard Spiegelman has in fact gone so far as to suggest that modernism was never as remote from the Horatian tradition as its publicists insisted: "modernism might be, from a different perspective, considered merely the new bottle for old wine - or the jazzy jingo for old saws" (247).23 Perhaps that is one reason why Eliot found Pound's apparently anti-classical strictures congenial to his intentions in The Waste Land. For though apostrophe, the rhyming couplet, and the voices of Eliot's Augustan predecessors proclaim a "classical" intention, they do not constitute it. Its essence is the belief that art exists to "make the best" of what is at hand, to transform the world beginning in the mind of the reader. And that end is conceivably served as well by the affective poetic of Pound as by the rhetorical style of the neo-Augustans. Let me close this chapter with a crucial point, one which in fact opens up the discussion to facets of neo-Augustanism that will be further pursued in subsequent chapters. I have argued that The Waste Land was originally conceived as an "edifying" or didactic poem, and that Eliot was receptive to Pound's corrections because they, too, were based upon a reader-oriented poetic. But this does not mean that the world-view communicated by the draft text is the same as that which informs the revised version. The medium, it is not original to say, has its own message. And, looking back on the preceding discussion, one principal message we are forced to read in Eliot's revised text - in almost direct opposition to his drafts - is that the very notion of unitary selfhood is open to radical and serious challenge. "Eliot's attack on the rational ego," as Levenson (184) has called it, is registered in both the proliferation of speakers in the poem and Eliot's manipulation of grammatical relations in order to destabilize point of view. While early critics tended to view this attack as a sign of disillusion, Levenson and more recently James Longenbach have argued that Eliot's fragmented points of view were part of an attempt to "state a vision" of wholeness in opposition to F.H. Bradley's absolutism (Longenbach 225-37). However critics have sought to explain Eliot's attack on the unitary self, few have disputed its reality or failed to observe the poetic tactics by which it is mounted. One of these which I noticed earlier on was the deliberate obscuring of temporal co-ordinates for specific utterances, an important aspect of the revised text that must also be read as supporting the work's other principal message - about time. In the drafts, as we saw, there is no evident reluctance to locate temporally either the speaker or the events described. Similarly, there is no obtrusive attempt to de-historicize either the text itself or its

54 At Home in Time

subject-matter. Consequently - or so it would seem - there is a matching readiness to embrace both the narrative and discursive modes, and to engage with the problems of the contemporary world in a relatively direct fashion. The stichic forms favoured by Eliot in the drafts - the rhyming couplet in particular - link with extended passages of "realistic" description and narration to justify the view that the poem's primary concern seems to be with the ethical and social life of human beings in time. And those beings are assumed, for all practical purposes, to be unitary and coherent. In all of this lies an abstract but crucial trace of Eliot's Augustanism, one which he openly discussed in those Criterion essays between 1923 and 1927, where we have noticed the repeated insistence that literature cannot escape its historic moment. In the drafts Eliot's satire, like Swift's, "points at no defect, / But what all mortals may correct" (Swift 512). And if we trust Hulme, this refusal to "swing right along to the infinite nothing" is the very essence of classicism. In contrast, the ellipses and discontinuities of Eliot's revised version link with a foregrounding of mythic pattern and recurrence to suggest that coherence is to be found - if at all - in some realm beyond the text, the clock, and human reason. Longenbach has argued that a mystical, anti-sequential understanding of history is at the centre of the published text, and that although "in Tradition and the Individual Talent' Eliot proposed to stop 'at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism' ... in composing The Waste Land he became a pilgrim in that uncharted territory" (202). Longenbach borrows from Fredric Jameson to label Eliot's view of time an "existential historicism," one which "does not involve the construction of this or that linear or evolutionary genetic history, but rather designates something like a transhistorical event" (13; Jameson 50-1). One result of this is that The Waste Land "tend[s] to take the form of a palimpsest rather than a chronological schema" (Longenbach 28). Eliot has instigated a reading experience which is in effect a struggle to escape sequentiality, to reach beyond the conditions of reading itself. And that, if we follow Reed Way Dasenbrock's recent argument, makes The Waste Land in its final version the quintessence of literary modernism - a modernism defined by its attempt to move beyond the limits assigned to literature by neoclassical theory, and by its aspiration towards the simultaneous "condition of painting" (3).24 In general, one is not inclined to dispute either this claim or Longenbach's account of the view of history implied by the final form of The Waste Land. Still less does one wish to demur when Longenbach asserts that that view locates Eliot "in the central tradition of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry" (x). But this gives rise to serious

55 Eliot, Pound, and the Drafts of The Waste Land

difficulties which, perhaps thankfully, it is beyond the scope of the present study to solve. For what we are left to ponder is a poem which, in draft and in its final form, has "stated" two "visions" of time and life which seem to be diametrically opposed: one sequential, social, and "Augustan," the other anti-sequential, mystical, and "romantic." If we can no longer resort to the easy explanation - that Pound's influence purged a deferential Eliot of his classicism, replacing it with an essentially neo-romantic modernism - then what remains to be said? The question offers an obvious temptation to speculate on Eliot's character and deep psychological motives, but it is one which in this context I must resist. Ronald Bush, whose book on Eliot is centrally concerned with such matters, suggests that the poet vacillated for many years "between a drive to represent his inner life and a desire to order it"; his classicism of the early twenties must therefore be read as a sign that "he was willing [during that period] to let the balance tip toward the 'intellect'" (82). One problem is that Bush and Longenbach incline to the view that Eliot's classicism was part of what Bush calls the "revised literary program" the poet began after The Waste Land. Thus Longenbach: "The 'mythical method' had virtually nothing to do with the composition of Eliot's first long poem" (203). That may be so, but the far-reaching neo-Augustanism of the drafts makes it difficult to believe that the more generally "classical" concerns of "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" did not have at least some role in the genesis of The Waste Land - however "romantic" the final product turned out to be. Eliot's later essays testify to the fact that such issues continued powerfully to exercise his mind throughout his career. So even if we allow for some internal vacillation, and for the ability of Eliot's classical poetic to accommodate the readeroriented suggestions of Pound, the ideological discontinuity between the drafts and the final version of The Waste Land still seems so acute, and so enigmatic, as to demand a more subtle psychological account than criticism has so far managed to provide. There is, however, a disconcertingly obvious explanation for Eliot's volte-face; and since it is the necessary deduction to be made from the evidence I have considered, it can be allowed to stand as my conclusion. That Eliot chose finally to give us the work he did - a psychological and metaphysical vision rather than an empirical social critique - is an indication of how his classicism in the 19205, as in the 19405, was subject and servant to neo-romantic longings,25 a recognizably religious aspiration towards some encounter with the atemporal.26

2 The Reader in W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter"

In October, 1941, the pages of Scrutiny registered the appearance of W.H. Auden's New Year Letter with characteristic acerbity. The long poem from which the volume as a whole took its title came in for particular excoriation, Auden's "wit" being described, somewhat condescendingly, as the sort of thing one might expect from "a theological student at a Scottish university" (Haffenden ed 324). The conclusion of the reviewer, Raymond Winkler, was that "another edition of this book omitting the 'Letter' and the notes [to it] would detract less from Mr. Auden's deserved reputation" (327). But even that last concession to the poet's stature evaporates under the heat of what is actually being proposed: the excision of approximately one hundred and forty of the book's one hundred and eighty-eight pages. The attack at times dissipates itself in silly innuendo - as in the comment on Auden's fondness for quoting from "suspiciously fashionable authors like Kafka, Kierkegaard and Rilke" (325) - but it does eventually come to a point: namely, that "New Year Letter" inverts "the usual practice of good verse" by neglecting to "precipitat[e] ... ideas" through "the concrete situation." This means that Auden abjures obliquity in favour of directness, that he does not "evoke" ideas and emotions through an Eliotic "objective correlative" or a Poundian "image," but instead expresses them in apparently abstract terms. Distrust of the abstract was at the base of Scrutiny's divergence from Eliot himself after 1939; and one sign of the journal's consistent animus against "unprecipitated" ideas is the fact that Auden's reviewer was later to write a general article lamenting what Francis

57 The Reader in W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter"

Mulhern has called "the eclipse of the early 'empiricist' criticism by doctrinally induced generalization and abstraction" (211). In 1941 Winkler's attack on "New Year Letter" focused repeatedly on the "simplicity" of Auden's ideas, and the "bludgeoning" directness with which they are conveyed (325, 323). "One is reminded/' he writes, "that the Ministry of Information has lately found the same verseform a convenient vehicle for National Savings Propaganda" (324). What is quite obviously behind this is a hostile understanding of the "poetic," amounting almost to a repugnance for overtly "philosophical" poems, no matter by whom they are written or in whatever age. This aversion comes through especially in the disparaging comment that "it's only a matter of months before ... ['New Year Letter' is] described in one university or another as a 'twentieth-century "Essay on Man"' or 'another "First Anniversarie"'" (323). In fact, the Augustan character of the poem had already been remarked upon six months before and in the pages of the Nation - by Randall Jarrell. In that case the review was a cordial one. Jarrell saw the appearance of Auden's poem as an indication of the new life and direction of twentieth-century poetry, the norm of modernist poetic performance - "experimental, lyric, obscure, violent, irregular, determinedly antagonistic to didacticism, general statement, science, [and] the public" - having finally "lost for the young its once obsessive attraction" (313). "New Year Letter," he perceived as clearly as did Scrutiny, was a poetic performance of almost the opposite sort. It was, he wrote, a happy compound of the Essay on Man and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot... done in a version of Swift's most colloquial couplets. Pope might be bewildered at the ideas, and make fun of, or patronizingly commend, the couplets, but he would relish the Wit, Learning, and Sentiment - the last becoming, as it so often does, plural and Improving; and the comprehending Generality, Love of Science, and Social Benevolence might warm him into the murmur, "Well enough for such an age." (313)

Jarrell praises Auden for leaving behind the obscurities of Pound and the "high" modernists and for making a "thoroughly readable" and accessible long poem "out of a reasonable, objective, and comprehensive discussion" (314). In contrast, Winkler looks at the same thing - the discursive quality of the verse - and announces, puzzlingly, that "the effect is to hang a curtain between author and reader" (324). One is tempted to probe more deeply the ground of this difference of opinion, but of greater interest for the moment is the single point on which these two appear to agree: namely, that the "New Year Letter" is a modern text in the Augustan tradition.

58 At Home in lime

Auden's debt to the Restoration and eighteenth century in this and almost all of his poems has generally been regarded as one of the least problematic aspects of his art - theoretically the least problematic I should say, since there have always been hairs split about precisely which Enlightenment figure is at any point the strongest influence. Eliot, as we have seen, always tended to acknowledge the importance of Dryden and Johnson in an enigmatically impersonal way (remember the possum-like phrasing of "it is possible that poets may return to the study of Dryden"), leaving unanswered the question of direct influence on himself. And even after our detailed exploration of Eliot's Augustan sympathies, the refractory problem of his surprisingly ready and extensive concessions to Pound over The Waste Land leaves the issue in some mystery. In contrast, Auden's recognition of his own debt to the Augustans has always been forthright, one of the few critical "facts" on which it appears possible to found an interpretation. For example, in "Criticism in a Mass Society," an essay more or less contemporary with the "New Year Letter," he includes the name of Pope among the three writers who have been the greatest influence on his own work (132). Some thirty years later, he mentions Pope and Horace together as the kind of poets to whom he increasingly turns "for the kind of refreshment I require" (Forewords and AfterwordsS 124). A rather more pointed acknowledgment is to be found in part i of the "New Year Letter," where the poet imagines Dryden in attendance at Auden's own literary trial: "There Dryden sits with modest smile, / The master of the middle style" (23-4). Such acts of self-criticism have surely encouraged the formation of a kind of consensus on this issue. A. Alvarez wrote in 1958 that "Of all twentieth-century poets Auden would feel most at home in the age of Dryden, the age of informed, satiric, and slightly gossipy occasional verse" (Stewards 102). This was the view adopted and expanded by Monroe K. Spears in his influential study of Auden in 1963, and it remains largely accepted, although "the age of Dryden" is usually extended to include the eighteenth century as well. The Augustanism of "New Year Letter" is overt, and seems on the surface to raise few problems. The poem is a Horatian verse epistle displaying many of the characteristics which typify eighteenth-century adaptations of the form. Its rhyming couplets, its wit, and its discursive style all seem to confirm Auden's temperamental and artistic affinities with the Age of Enlightenment. But they are also poetic characteristics which, as Paul Fussell has shown, are frequently linked to "social commentary or depictions of social or ethical action" (no). That this is the case in Auden's poem is borne out by the responses of some of the early reviewers. Malcolm

59 The Reader in W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter"

Cowley, for example, commented that the poem is marked by "a fanciful but fundamentally serious eloquence," and that its subject is moral (310). Charles Williams, whose The Descent of the Dove was acknowledged by Auden as the source of "many ideas" in "New Year Letter" (New Year Letter 154), wrote that the concern of the poem "is with the building of the Just City," and that "It is, after its own manner, a pattern of the Way; that it dialectically includes both sides of the Way only shows that it is dealing with a road and not a room" (322). If this proposition is true, we have even firmer ground for linking the work with those of Dryden, Pope, and Johnson. What Williams is describing is a poem defined and conceived as rhetoric, a "verbal contraption" - to use Auden's own phrase from the lecture Making, Knowing and Judging (50) - which is intended to construct something beyond itself in the world of human and spiritual action. Or to develop Williams's other metaphor, the poem is a road intended to take the reader towards some perception or state of mind quite different from that in which he or she began reading. This concentration on the text as a vehicle for the edification of the reader is already familiar to us from Eliot's extrapolation of the classical poetic. It is what lies behind Dryden's commitment, in the preface to Religio Laid, to the "middle style" - the language of ordinary, worldly affairs - and it would seem to provide a compelling motive for Auden's preoccupation with the middle style in his poem. Spiegelman writes that "the colloquialism of the middle style assures him a social place" among active humanity (20). The essence of Auden's Augustanism in the "New Year Letter," I would therefore argue, is what Winkler identified when he compared the piece to government propaganda: namely, that the raison d'etre of the poem is to accomplish some sort of mental reorientation in the reader that will have ramifications in the world beyond poetry. At first glance this seems a relatively straightforward claim. It would take a very obtuse reader not to notice that much of the poem is given over to sententious moralizing and that it is very conscious of its audience, and of its effects on that audience. At the end of part i there is the wish expressed that the letter be sent as a "dispatch," in the midst of global turmoil, "to all / Who wish to read it anywhere," and that its message be "En Clair" (27). That last wish accounts for the prominence in the poem of Dryden, "The master of the middle style." But as we consider this passage, we may well reflect that its overt gesture towards the poem's audience is still somehow less active and involving than the kind of thing suggested in Charles Williams's comments on the text, with their gerundial and

60 At Home in Time

present continuous forms, and their preference for metaphors of process - "the Way," "a road and not a room." Related to this discrepancy, and not the smallest problem with the end of part i, is that it runs against the drift of the argument 243 lines earlier. Having been told that "To set in order - that's the task / Bot Eros and Apollo ask" ("Art and life agree in this, / That each intends a synthesis"), we are cautioned that Art is not life, and cannot be A midwife to society, For art is a fait accompli: What they should do, or how and when Life-order comes to living men, It cannot say, for it presents Already lived experience Through a convention that creates Autonomous completed states. ...

(19-20)

If that is so, one might ask, what is the point of sending out a poetic dispatch to the world? And doesn't that phrase "autonomous completed states" contradict Williams's emphasis on Auden's art of process? Faced with this, one clings - with some justice, as we shall see - to the possibility that there is an equivocation in that word "states," a suggestion of some persisting connection between the "true gestalt" of art (19) and the Just City. At the same time, however, one hears Auden's voice from twenty years later warning that "All political theories which, like Plato's, are based on analogies drawn from artistic fabrication are bound, if put into practice, to turn into tyrannies" ("The Poet and the City" 85). We can find a useful gloss on this section of the "Letter" in "The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats," which Auden published in the Partisan Review in the spring of 1939, less than a year before he began work on the poem: art is the product of history, not a cause. Unlike some other products, technical inventions for example, it does not re-enter history as an effective agent, so that the question of whether art should or should not be propaganda is unreal.... the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted, not a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged. (393)

A more familiar, potted, version of this argument is to be found in the famous second section of "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," which

61 The Reader in W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter"

Auden added a month after the poem had first appeared in March of 1939. "Ireland has her madness and her weather still," we are told, "For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its saying where executives / Would never want to tamper" (94). That valley is another version of the autonomous completed state referred to in the "New Year Letter," and the poem appears to be making the same point as the essay: namely, that art, when completed, becomes in some sense detached from history and cannot "re-enter history as an effective agent." Far from relieving the contradiction in "New Year Letter," these two contemporary works appear to aggravate it. We have a Horatian verse epistle, the very form of which bespeaks at least some confidence in the ability of the text to act as an agent in history, which contains within itself both a denial of and a commitment to its own historical efficacy, and also from the same period we have Auden's obiter dicta on the subject, which are often taken to be an uncompromising rejection of the more "engaged" poetic which he had practised during the thirties. The extent to which that rejection was compromised I will consider later, but it is unquestionably true that in the spring of 1939 Auden resolved "Never, never again ... [to] speak at a political meeting" (Carpenter 256), and almost simultaneously made the declaration of independence from politics that we have seen in his writings on Yeats. Given that, there is surely something perverse in his return soon afterwards to the worldly and outwardly directed form of the verse epistle with which he had first experimented in 1937. In that instance, paradoxically, the recipient had been someone already removed from history - Lord Byron - whereas in 1940 the "New Year Letter" was directed at Elizabeth Mayer, still very much alive and well at her home on Long Island. The choice of form appears particularly contrary when we consider that Auden's poetry of his self-confessedly political period was in the main not characterized as we might expect by the lucidites of the middle style, or by a compelling univocality.1 World events enter the realm of those poems obliquely, for the most part, and the perspective is marked by that intractable subjectivity which Lukacs lamented is the distinguishing mark of literary modernism. Even "A Bride in the 3o's" (November 1934) and "Spain" (April 1937) - in which the threat of war is felt relatively strongly - are the work of what Joseph Warren Beach characterizes as a typical "modern" poet, who sedulously avoids the "frontal attack" on his subject, whose thought is characteristically rendered by the "oblique" or

62 At Home in Time indirect method, the terms of his discourse being, not philosophical abstractions and plain statements of fact, but symbols, myths, and implications, and whose effects are complicated by the use of such rhetorical devices as irony, "ambiguity," and dramatic impersonation. (12)

How odd it is to find that, whereas Auden's poetic strategies as an avowedly socialist poet effect what Georg Lukacs would call an "attenuation of reality and dissolution of personality" (26), "New Year Letter," his first major work after his rejection of "engagement," appears by its direct methods and singular perspective to affirm that "unity of the world ... as a living whole inseparable from himself" (Lukacs 39) which in Marxist thinking provides an antidote to the bourgeois doctrine of alienation. The mode of the supposedly engaged work is, in other words, the neo-romantic modernist mode into which Eliot allowed The Waste Land to be cast; and yet after 1939, Auden's poems increasingly make use of a style "classical" in the manner of Eliot's drafts, one which presupposes what John Sitter in his essay on the eighteenth-century long poem has called a "collaborative and corroborative function" (173). And yet there we run aground - unsalvageably, it seems - on the content of the poem, on that idea, expressed very early on in the "Letter," that works of art are "autonomous" and complete - "alienated," in some sense, from the processes of history. All of these contradictions will continue to seem insurmountable so long as we assume that Auden's rejection of a "political" role for poetry necessarily involved the adoption of a formalist aesthetic. Winkler pointed, in his review of "New Year Letter," to reaction as an important element in the content of the work; he argued that the author's "method implies reaction in Mr. Auden's system of ideas" (324). And the point is not invalid, since the adoption of an eighteenth-century style is in some sense atavistic, evidence of a nostalgia for past values. In aesthetic terms, however, it does seem logical that reaction against the failure of political activism in art would be more likely to lead towards formalism than towards the didactic modes of the eighteenth century. But here it is necessary to look beyond the internal logic of criticism and towards certain facts about Auden's attitudes - facts which are often ignored as critics attempt to read the poet's life and career as a kind of "moral fable" (Smith W.H. Auden i), illustrating either the reassertion of bourgeois values and the betrayal of the proletariat, or the inevitable demise of socialist ideas and the triumph of liberal humanism. The first of these facts is that Auden did not, in 1939, cease to hold the political views he had held before that date. Humphrey Carpenter

63 The Reader in W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter" tells us of the poet's answers to a questionnaire completed during that very summer, one of which declares "I believe Socialism to be right," but goes on to express the view that for himself ordinary political activity is no longer productive (Carpenter 256). Another perhaps more important continuity in Auden's work and thought from before 1939 to the "New Year Letter" has to do with his attitude to language. One of his central documents on this subject is the essay "Writing," originally published in 1932 as part of a curious primer for children of all ages, An Outline for Boys and Girls and Their Parents. Edward Mendelson was quite recently the first critic to point out the extraordinary extent to which that essay "offers a premature exposition of the central themes of structuralist literary theory and its successors" (21). Auden sees the origin of language in a sense of absence and alienation; he argues that language, both written and spoken, is an attempt to fill the void, to bridge the gap between speaker and auditor, writer and reader; but then he also makes important distinctions between written and spoken language; and he insists on "the antagonism and difference between language and its objects" (Mendelson 21). "All these," writes Mendelson, "are aspects of a late romantic theory of language, brought to a crisis by modernism, and agonized over by the young Auden a generation before Derrida and Lacan" (21). Mendelson's point is convincing. The poet's views on language clearly have a great deal in common with those that are currently influential, and Stan Smith's recent "re-reading" of the entire ceuvre is exciting testimony to Auden's amenability to poststructural approaches. In his essay, Auden does not imagine a paradisal language in which sign and signified were ever identical. Language instead originates precisely as a result of a sort of internal dissociation of sensibility. We are told that "at some time in human history, when and how we don't know, man became self-conscious; he began to feel, I am I, and you are not I; we are shut inside ourselves and apart from each other." Speech begins as an attempt to remedy the problem: "Words are a bridge between a speaker and a listener" ("Writing" 303-4). This is extended in an interesting way under the rubric "Writing": The urge to write, like the urge to speak, came from man's growing sense of personal loneliness, of the need for group communication. But, while speech begins with the feeling of separateness in space, of I-here-in-this-chair and you-there-in-that-chair, writing begins from the sense of separateness in time, of "I'm here to-day, but I shall be dead to-morrow, and you will be active in my place, and how can I speak to you?" (309-10)

64 At Home in Time

To this idea of language as bridge across space and time, Auden adds another crucial element, which he deals with - rather curiously under the rubric "Meaning," and which he calls "Intention": "Apart from what we say or feel we often want to make our listeners act or think in a particular way" (304). The issue is elaborated under the heading "Why People Read Books": Reading and living are not two watertight compartments. You must use your knowledge of people to guide you when reading books, and your knowledge of books to guide you when living with people. ... Reading is valuable when it improves our technique of living. (310-11).

This stress on the non-literary efficacy of writing and reading is an essential part of Auden's conception of language as a bridge between the limitations of a monadic psyche and the possibility of a fruitful society. Auden's other essay called "Writing," the more familiar one published in The Dyer's Hand exactly thirty years later, differs from the first in many ways, but there is still that original insistence on language as a social agent. Auden talks about the debasement of language in modern culture, and about the particular dangers which this presents to the poet, though not to the composer or the painter. "On the other hand," he continues, he is more protected than they from another modern peril, that of solipsist subjectivity; however esoteric a poem may be, the fact that all its words have meanings which can be looked up in a dictionary makes it testify to the existence of other people. Even the language of Finnegans Wake was not created by Joyce ex nihilo; a purely private verbal world is not possible. (Dyer's Hand 23)

The fundamental point to be made about Auden's theories, then, is that in them language, which is in fact an index of the gap which separates subject and object, tends also be thought of as the nemesis of that gap, the hope of escape from solipsistic subjectivity. One last gloss on this idea is to be found in "The Sea and the Mirror," written between 1942 and 1944.2 In the third and last principal section, "Caliban to the Audience," we have a long disquisition on the conditions and aims of art. And towards the end, Caliban has this to say about the "aim and justification" of a "dedicated dramatist" - surely a type for all writers: what exactly is the artistic gift which he is forbidden to hide, if not to make you unforgettably conscious of the ungarnished offended gap between what you so unquestionably are and what you are commanded without question

65 The Reader in W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter" to become ...? - the more he must strengthen you in your delusion that an awareness of the gap is in itself a bridge, your interest in your imprisonment a release, so that, far from being led by him to contrition and surrender, the regarding of your defects in his mirror, your dialogue, using his words, with yourself about yourself, becomes the one activity which never, like devouring or collecting or spending, lets you down. ... (56)

Caliban's point is that even though art may be eternally isolated from life, and even though it may never be really possible to bridge the gap between writer and reader, it is imperative that we continue to work at bridge-building. In the most basic terms of Auden's belief, no bridge means no society at all, socialist or otherwise. And there we have one reason why Auden's retreat from active politics was not also a retreat into formalism. Some of his poetry in the thirties was written to "serve" socialist ideals, certainly, but that was only part of a more fundamental intention to serve the construction of society in general. When socialism as an active political philosophy was discredited in Auden's eyes, the commitment to a "social" use of language remained unchanged. Indeed, a determination to reassert that commitment may lie behind his almost instantaneous decision - seemingly "perverse," as I said earlier - to adopt the sociable form of the Augustan verse epistle. The poem's own doubts about its historical efficacy may have something to do with what went wrong with European politics in the thirties, but they are certainly connected with the more profound fear, expressed by Caliban in "The Sea and the Mirror," that thinking that "awareness of the gap is in itself a bridge" may be simply a delusion. What remains, though, is the conviction that "your dialogue, using [an author's] ... words, with yourself about yourself, becomes the one activity which never ... lets you down." This points us directly into the rather troublesome realm of the psychology of reading, and so it is to the place of the reader in the poem, and that reflexive dialogue envisaged by Caliban, that I now wish to turn. Here it is necessary to go back to both the "New Year Letter" and Auden's elegy for Yeats, and to notice that in each case the denial of an effective historical role for literature carries with it a description of the way in which a text in its "autonomous completed state" will relate to the world around it. In the "Letter," this is relatively simple. We are told that once art is "realized" and separate from life, it can no longer function as a direct agent of the author's intention. It is, "though still particular," An algebraic formula, An abstract model of events Derived from dead experience, .

66 At Home in Time And each life must itself decide To what and how it be applied.

(20, my italics)

The corresponding passage in the elegy for Yeats is somewhat more colourful, but on the surface probably no more encouraging. Every reader of poetry is probably familiar with the lines, from part i, which tell us that "The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living" (93), very much the point made in those lines from "New Year Letter" which I just quoted - except for the added suggestion that whatever dialogue occurs between reader and text is not purely a matter of the mind. But in the inserted second part comes another relevant passage which, as Stan Smith has rightly commented, is much less frequently quoted. Poetry makes nothing happen, yes, but "it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth" (94). "This strange, dehumanizing metonymy," writes Smith, insisting on the act of speech while simultaneously detaching it from any human hinterland of a speaking subject, catches the paradox of... [the text's] double historicity. A poem can be read at any time, and, in reading, it enters into a precise historical moment, the moment of the reader quite distinct from that of the originating author. (W.H. Auden 4)

This explication of the line seems entirely accurate, and it reveals the thread of hope that remains for Auden once the currents of history are resolved in the "true gestalt" of poetic art. It is precisely because "art is a fait accompli," which is treated on the surface as a matter for grief, that it is able to "survive." And surviving, it presents itself to all humanity not as a spoken thing, with a "meaning," but as a means of speaking. More than that, it provides a way of speaking, and speaking comes to define being, so the poem is "a way of happening" (my italics). This stress on the read text as the source of a subconscious experience rather than a specific "meaning" is supported by Auden's comment in Secondary Worlds (1968) that "in so far as one can speak of poetry as conveying knowledge, it is the kind of knowledge implied by the Biblical phrase - Then Adam knew Eve his wife knowing is inseparable from being known" (130). This line of argument effects a rather surprising refinement to the idea of language as a bridge. Entrenching that concern with the materiality of words which is already very evident in the "Writing" essay of 1932, Auden comes to think of language as something which is most powerful not when you have "decoded" it, but when you are on it or in it. In the idea of poetry as "a way of happening" he is extending in a similar direction what in 1932 he had inappropriately

67 The Reader in W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter"

called the fourth form of "Meaning": the intention "to make our listeners act or think in a particular way" (304). Although the direct line of influence between writer and reader - his power to compel us through the expression of ideas - has become somewhat attenuated, an indirect one still persists. In the process of reading, the text becomes "the other" in a self-reflexive dialogue conducted by the reader, who for the duration will "be" as the poetry "happens." This phenomenon in Auden is adequately but not perfectly rendered by Louis Althusser's term "interpellation," describing the process by which an ideologically fraught discourse constitutes, "recruits," or "transforms" its own subject (48).3 And one important consequence of regarding "New Year Letter" primarily as an instance of interpellation is that the ambiguities and contradictions which ordinarily appear to surround the choice of its form, the Horatian verse epistle, no longer seem relevant. For if Auden wanted in his poem to construct a poetic "way of happening, a mouth," through which a subject position could be realized that was simultaneously ideologically well defined and yet also somewhat open, he could hardly have chosen better. That these two things - definition and openness - were important to him is testified to by a passage in Secondary Worlds, where he moves from a discussion of the sort of person who uses words as "Black Magic" - as "a way of securing domination over others and compelling them to do his will" - to make the point that "politics and religion are spheres where personal choice is essential" (129). Propaganda he defines as an exercise of words without allowance for choice, and in that sense political and religious propaganda are unacceptable in his view.4 But writing in the service of those two human concerns, writing which does exercise some ideological power in the sphere of politics and religion - that is to him acceptable, and probably necessary, provided it makes an allowance for choice. In a verse epistle, the "voice" which we become when we read is quite strictly defined. The reason must partly be the striking occasionality of the form. One is usually prompted to write a letter, even a very literary one, by some sort of external event - and what is more important, by a very specific response to that event, the kind which brings it all to the point of a pen. In Auden's poem the occasion is New Year's Eve, 1939, the night when "a scrambling decade ends" (28). His response is to revive and revolve upon the question of "who and where and how we are" (29). And all of this adds up to a sense in the reader that the "mouth" with which we have begun to speak is not entirely detached - or detachable - from a historical "body."

68 At Home in Time

More important than this, however, is the fact that the verse epistle is, conventionally if not theoretically, univocal. This particular example of the genre is emphatically so. The voice we hear when we set the "mouth" that is the poem in action is one very familiar from Auden's shorter poems: urbane, witty, outrageous - and for all that, remarkably consistent. While Spiegelman contends that "the Drydenic clarity of Auden's 'middle speech' is undone by his own wit" (17), I would argue that the form of the octosyllabic couplet, persisting through over seventeen hundred lines, exerts a powerfully leavening influence on the poet's extravagant and colourful lexicon, and it asserts the continuity of his discourse. Indeed, even the eclecticism and eccentricity of the language seem to entrench our sense of the single voice; this is a powerfully individual speech, and every quirky linguistic gesture makes it less and less possible for us to efface the historically defined subject position of the poem, to make this "mouth" entirely our own. The total effect is a curious one: while the consistent univocality of the text facilitates the adduction of the reader to the position of speaking subject, the very way in which that univocality is realized (through the use of an intractably individual vocabulary and historical references) insists that adduction must also to some extent involve a translation, of the text by the reader but also of the reader by the text. This is a point made explicitly by Auden in Secondary Worlds, where he writes that "every dialogue is a feat of translation" (126). Smith explains the nature of the translation in reading as "an exchange of subject positions" (21), but in this particular case it is perhaps more correct to talk of a mutual modification of subject positions. How profoundly appropriate, one reflects, was Auden's original chosen title for the whole volume - The Double Man.5 Its suggestion of espionage and political intrigue is relevant indeed, for in Auden such exchanges are invariably seen as the ground of polity, a basis for state-making. In his Horatian "Ode to Terminus" (1968), "confident amity" is said to exist only by grace of sane empiricism, and to consist in an ongoing dialogue between individuals, repeating "the pentecostal marvel, / as each in each finds his right translator" (Collected Poems 811). A further important way in which "New Year Letter" entrenches its apparent univocality is through self-reflexive commentary. I have already alluded to numerous instances of this: the discussion of the relation of poetry to history in part i, for example, and the closing lines of the same part, where the speaker expresses the hope that "This private minute for a friend" will be the "dispatch" that he intends "to all / Who wish to read it anywhere" (27). But these are only two of a great many instances, occurring particularly in that first

69 The Reader in W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter"

part. There is, for example, also the ninety-line section in which the speaker imagines himself appearing before "That summary [literary] tribunal which / In a perpetual session sits" (21-2). This, as I said earlier, is a form of meta-poetry, in which the discourse of the poem and discourse about the poem are consubstantial. And then there is commentary on the peculiar tone of the whole piece, that typically Audenesque mixture of flippancy and high seriousness: Though language may be useless, for No words men write can stop the war Or measure up to the relief Of its immeasurable grief, Yet truth, like love and sleep, resents Approaches that are too intense, And often when the searcher stood Before the oracle it would Ignore his grown-up earnestness But not the child of his distress, For through the lanus of a joke The candid psychopompos spoke.

(27)

If Auden's position in the Yeats elegy is valid, and if in reading the poem we are, in some fundamental sense, merely reading ourselves, these moments of overt self-reflexivity both underline and exacerbate the solipsistic condition. "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" talks of individuals imprisoned - poetry notwithstanding - "each in the cell of himself" (94), and in the "New Year Letter" the pervasive tenor of self-awareness does indeed make reading an act concentrated inordinately upon that "self" which the text constructs and which we assume. In all its complexity, that process is the essence of what I have been calling the poem's "univocality": its deliberately cultivated association with a purportedly coherent and exclusive "self." And yet, as the Yeats elegy again hints, the solipsistic experience of reading such a work is paradoxically at the root of whatever efficacy the text may eventually enjoy in history and in human affairs outside of literature. The reason is that although the poem appears on the surface so inseparable from one man's experience at one period in history - and thus of limited application to ourselves and our own time - the subject position defined by the text is so precise and so coherent that the "way of happening" which it provides future readers is quite exactly determined. The text may only exist as a "mouth," but the body which is implied whenever it is made to speak will always in some way be the same. Thus, rather surprisingly, what

jo At Home in lime

Caliban refers to as "an awareness of the gap" between the text and history, between one subject writing and another reading, turns out indeed to be "in itself a bridge" ("The Sea and the Mirror" 56) across space and history, a way in which an author can - albeit obliquely make something intentional "happen." This he does, in Auden's practice, by accepting that while lexical "meaning" will always be subject to alteration by time, significance inscribed in the processes of the text will enjoy greater power and endurance. Thus the work must be constructed in the awareness that once it is complete, it will be less important as a statement made than as "an infinite series of its own self-generating occasions" (Smith W.H. Auden 4). In so far as that is an accurate account of the status of the text of "New Year Letter," a complementary account of the status of the reader is implied. For if the essence of the text is process, and if the process is subject to potentially infinite repetition, the constructed subject-position which "is" the reader (for the duration of reading, at least) must be inseparable from that process, and also infinitely repeatable. And interestingly, this is precisely how "New Year Letter" defines the problematic notion of "self": each great I Is but a process in a process Within a field that never closes ...

(29)

It would be difficult to summarize the reader's position in the text more effectively. However, this passage is doubly important for us, because it so happens that here the content of the poem also comes to its sharpest point. While part i, as we have seen, takes art and its relation to history as its central concern, part n explores our relation to time and space in a more abstract way. And it is here that Auden formulates the Weltanschauung on which the more practical resolutions of the final, third, part of the poem will be based. The passage I have quoted comes very early in part n, and its immediate context is a discussion of the difficulties involved in coping with life in a post-Einsteinian universe. The question of "who and where and how we are" is answered in part: we are "The children of a modest star, / Frail, backward, clinging to the granite / Skirts of a sensible old planet, / Our placid and suburban nurse / In Sitter's swelling universe."6 Auden catches the challenge which that universe poses to us in a characteristic and wonderful paradox. We find it hard, he writes "to stretch imagination / To live according to our station"; we find it difficult to think of ourselves as other than stable, to grasp that our

71 The Reader in W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter"

reality is elastic and subject to constant change, and that "we are changed by what we change" (29). A great deal of what comes before and after this point in the text finds its focus here. All of the intellectual temptations explored in part ii - and they take up almost the whole section - involve false conceptions of stability spurious arguments against the idea of a relativistic universe, self-limiting applications of logic, and crude empiricism. Such things, it is implied, are persuasive to a nerveless people, "The patriots of an old idea, / No longer sovereign this year" (29). For the enlightened, all our intuitions mock The formal logic of the clock. All real perception, it would seem, Has shifting contours like a dream.

(32)

And furthermore, The intellect That parts the Cause from the Effect And thinks in terms of Space and Time Commits a legalistic crime, For such an unreal severance Must falsify experience.

(33~4)

At one point Auden has the Devil argue in glozing and ingratiating fashion a position that is nevertheless taken by the poem to be fundamentally correct: namely, that Eden was lost when "the syllogistic sin took root." Adam and Eve became "Abstracted, bitter refugees," who "fought over their premises, / Shut out from Eden by the bar / And Chinese Wall of Barbara" - "Barbara" being "a mnemonic term for the first mood of the first syllogistic figure, in which both premisses and the conclusion are universal affirmatives" (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed.). Our longing for stability and certainty is thus the greatest impediment to our happiness. Although we are told that to think "in terms of Space and Time" is to commit "a legalistic crime" (33), the poem readily accepts that to think consistently in other, more comprehensive terms is perhaps beyond the present abilities of the human mind. Furthermore, to aspire past the realm of empirical common sense may conversely prove to be the stimulant for real crime, for actions and attitudes detrimental to the health of society. A rather hard-nosed pragmatism

72 At Home in Time

in this regard reveals itself at various places in the text: for example, Auden denigrates the attitude of the zealot, his politics "perhaps unreal," who is tempted to martyr himself for a probably unrealizable dream (26). Smith finds in this aspect of Auden's thought a nascent feminism, and, taking note of the poem's dedication to "a motherfigure," he describes "New Year Letter" as "in one sense a confession of phallic incompetence in a world at war, dominated by the penis rivalries of a patriarchal order" (W.H. Auden 153). In The Sea and the Mirror, Auden has Prospero - a zealot of sorts and a representative of what Smith calls "phallocratic power" (164) - lament "at giving a city, / Common warmth and touching substance, for a gift / In dealing with shadows" (10). In physics, as in politics and ethics, nympholepsy is abjured. In "New Year Letter" we are told that "we are conscripts to our age / Simply by being born, we wage / The war we are"; our task is to learn "how / To be the patriots of the Now" (57). This statement has many meanings, but for the poem it represents an important acceptance of historic time as the apparent medium of our lives and actions: In Time we sin. But Time is sin and can forgive, Time is the life in which we live, At least three-quarters of our time The purgatorial hill we climb, Where any skyline we attain Reveals a higher ridge again.

(49)

Auden goes on at length to develop this analogy between temporal sequence and the hill of Purgatory. The basic position is very clear, however: acquiescence in "the formal logic of the clock" (32) is, in the first place, our only choice; and in the second, it alone offers hope of an escape from this limited conception of time. Notice, though, the paradoxical suggestion that the possibilities for escape (forgiveness of "sin") seem to increase with the endlessness of time. This is a most odd proposition, not at all unlike the kind of theological paradoxes which Auden was in fact shortly to reembrace. But what it means in terms of theology, metaphysics, or indeed the New Physics is not our immediate concern. The point is that at the root of this rather peculiar rapprochement between preand post-Einsteinian conceptions of time, there is a very simple pragmatism: "Time is the life in which we live" (49), and though continuing to think in terms of the clock is "a legalistic crime," it is a necessary one. And throughout "New Year Letter," pragmatism

73 The Reader in W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter"

seems to triumph over theoretical purity in Auden's treatment of this complex relationship. He begins part n, as we have seen, establishing as our context "Sitter's swelling universe" (29), and he not only explores with some relish the full and disconcerting implications of the general theory of relativity but also dwells with amusement on those "patriots of an old idea" who react against the new cosmos thus brought into view. Very soon, however, the dialectic between old and new ideas is translated into much more simple and comprehensible terms. Standing in the way of our advancement is "the Prince of Lies," "the Spirit-that-denies," who encourages us to mourn the passage of time, "claiming it's wicked to grow older" (30). This is not at all an argument against the world-view of the New Physics, but simply a resistance to temporal process, traditionally conceived. In part in, all these ideas come to a focus in the passage which I have already cited, the one dealing with the necessity of our life in time. It will not do simply to argue that Auden's understanding of Einsteinian physics was naive, and that he misread relativity through Heraclitean eyes; on the contrary, we can see in certain lines - such as the reference to the "legal crime" which separates space and time - evidence of a quite confident knowledge of contemporary physics. Indeed, that reference alone tells us that he knew how the theory of relativity had discredited the notion of time as sequential process, replacing it with the more comprehensive, four-dimensional concept of spacetime. The way to resolve this problem is to concentrate on his pragmatic acceptance of clock-time as one of the grounds of our thought. He seems to latch onto the opposition between process and stasis as a more manageable analogue for the relationship between an Einsteinian and a Newtonian conception of reality. He uses temporal process as a rather traditional metaphor for a wider-ranging and more radical press towards indeterminacy and instability. Here I am talking about "use" at the level of content, but Auden also makes a similarly pragmatic "use" of temporal sequence at the formal level. If, as I have been arguing, the poem's commitment to an Einsteinian world-view becomes concentrated (however illogically) on the idea of process, it seems natural enough that one of the non-rational ways in which the poet will seek to communicate that world-view will be through constructing a text that seems in some sense essentially process - or, perhaps, essentially sequence. Whether or not it is pure process is not relevant; what matters is that when we read it we feel ourselves implicated in a linguistic and intellectual movement of potentially infinite extension: "a process in a process / Within a field that never closes."

74 At Home in Time

Precisely how Auden sets out to accomplish this in linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical terms is, of course, a complex question that I can only begin to answer. However, among the formal techniques he employs to evoke in us a sense of inexorable process, perhaps the most important is the rhyming couplet - linked, invariably, to a grammar and syntax of proliferation. Let us look briefly at the passage which immediately follows the introduction of the purgatorial hill as a metaphor for that "Time [which] is the life in which we live": ... however much we grumble, However painfully we stumble, Such mountaineering all the same Is, it would seem, the only game At which we show a natural skill, The hardest exercises still Just those our muscles are the best Adapted to, its grimmest test Precisely what our fear suspected, We have no cause to look dejected When, wakened from a dream of glory We find ourselves in Purgatory, Back on the same old mountain side With only guessing for a guide.

(49)

In terms of "New Year Letter" as a whole, this is a very typical sentence, its length not at all unusual. There are at least four places in this passage where we seem to have arrived at a syntactical terminus. Three of those coincide with a line-ending, so our expectation of closure is especially strong. But in each instance, the momentum flows over and beyond the point of possible arrest. That this happens three times after the first, and that in each case an apparently certain terminus is breached - all of this means that when we do finally reach a period, we can have no confidence in its integrity. This is where the rhyme scheme becomes especially important. It has, of course, participated in the subversion of stasis throughout the passage. For example, although the sense seems to reach a terminus at the word "skill," the rhyme scheme does not. "Grumble" has its "stumble," and "same" has its "game," but "skill" - if we stop there - lacks a partner. The idea of lexical partnership has been so powerfully entrenched in the previous four hundred and sixty-five rhyming couplets that we are bound to look around for a companion to "skill," and by the time we find him at the end of the next line we are already drawn beyond that first periodic structure. What happens at the end

75 The Reader in W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter"

of the passage I have quoted is very similar to this. Although we have a real syntactical terminus in the full stop, and although the end is strengthened by the completed rhyme - "side" and "guide" - the established pattern of rhyming couplets inevitably makes us expect that more will follow, as indeed they do to the number of four hundred and thirty-one. From that example it is plain to see why this particular verse form suited Auden's purpose in the "New Year Letter." The effect is of a reading experience. that is potentially open-ended, and this is true not only of Auden's appropriation of the form but of others' as well. Returning to his memorable discussion of "The Vanity of Human Wishes," we find Ezra Pound, for example, remarking on the sort of confusion induced by rhyming couplets. "The cadence comes to a dead end so frequently," he writes, "that one doesn't know the poem is going on" ("Human Wishes" 180). Perhaps more apposite in the context of Auden is this comment, again on Johnson's "Vanity," but by T.S. Eliot: "We do not ordinarily expect a very close structure of a poem in rhyming couplets, which often looks as if, but for what the author has to say, it might begin or end anywhere" ("Johnson" 181). Paul Fussell is concerned with the same impression when he argues that such couplets can be called stanzas only by courtesy. They could perhaps more accurately be called something like additive units, and perhaps a poem in heroic couplets is best thought of as essentially stichic, with a "line" of twenty rather than ten syllables. (109-10)

Composition by "additive units," rather than strophes, makes simple succession appear to be the principal ground of coherence. The couplets of "New Year Letter" are not heroic but Hudibrastic, and the pointedly crude rhymes and octosyllabic line which typify the Hudibrastic form also contribute strongly to the sense of process as we read. The relative shortness of the line (compared with the decasyllabic heroic, that is) naturally increases the prominence of the endrhyme, something which is then further enhanced by self-conscious and unlikely choices in the end-words themselves. To the reader, the principle of composition by "additive units" becomes in the case of this form even more apparent; the text reads like a potentially endless procession of discrete structures, which complete themselves quickly and disappear into oblivion. Stan Smith makes the further point that while "the stately heroic couplet of Pope and Dry den ... is a spacious enough measure to allow for sense to be repeatedly contained within its formal antitheses," the Hudibrastic form

76 At Home in Time is constantly in its compactness overflowing its couplets, spawning a syntax that can find its resolution only after a proliferation of sub-clauses and amplifications, which seems to move in a permanent future tenseness. Such a style is flexible enough, but its pace is considerably more urgent and impulsive than the pentameter. (W.H. Auden 127)

In those words "urgent" and "impulsive," and in his description of that feeling of a "permanent future tenseness," Smith has caught the quality of affect engendered by the form of Auden's text, and it is very much in harmony with the reification of process which occurs in the poem at the level of content. Smith has also pointed out the destabilizing effect of Auden's play with words. His tendency to make extensive use of foreign words and phrases serves "to break open the closed verbal universe of the poem" (128), and his fondness for puns and other forms of wordplay frequently has the reader moving in two interpretative directions at once. The impulse behind the poem, as we saw earlier, was to approach truth "through the Janus of a joke" (27), and linguistic two-sidedness is one of the text's most distinguishing characteristics. The act of reading is an almost constant negotiation of opposites. At the end of part n the speaker sets himself apart from "The eitherors, the mongrel halves" (44), whom he defines in the notes as "the impatient romantics," romanticism being defined in turn as "Unawareness of the dialectic" (118). And a pervasive construction of dialectical relations is one of the most crucial ways in which the text nurtures our sense of process. At a rhetorical level this is particularly true. Edward Callan is correct to point out that Auden resembles Pope or Dryden in using the rhyming couplet as a vehicle for "reasoned argument" (172), but his method of argument differs from theirs in being dialectical in the specifically Hegelian sense. In the poem we explore contradictions in order to approach a truth that in some way comprehends them all. Thus Auden says of the. Devil: ... he may never tell us lies But half-truths we can synthesize: So, hidden in his hocus-pocus, There lies the gift of double focus, That magic lamp which looks so dull And utterly impractical, Yet, if Aladdin use it right, Can be a sesame to light.

(44~5)

77 The Reader in W.H. Auden's "New Year Letter"

Here we have another angle on the text as an ideologically powerful "contraption." Constructed as it is according to a consistent "doublefocus," it may prove more "practical" than it at first appears. (Remember the Yeats elegy, and its stand on the "impracticality" of art, the assertion that on the surface "poetry makes nothing happen.") Used "right" by an Aladdin-type reader, it can open a way to new perceptions, "Can be a sesame to light." Aladdin, though, did not unlock the secret power of his lamp by intellectual interrogation or by interpretation. He rubbed it, and in that way his experience foreshadows the one which Auden envisages for his reader: a continuous moulding of the mind to the surfaces of the text; a horizontal, and in the best sense superficial, exploration of its inward and outward curves. What is particularly interesting in the case of "New Year Letter" is that the verse epistle is appropriate to Auden's intention not only because of its expressive potential, but also because its characteristic features - its rhyming couplets, its directedness and specificity, its dialectical substance - all seem to work affectively to produce in the reader a non-rational sympathy with the poem's world-view. Thus the poem exercises an ideological power which can potentially be felt even beyond the specific historic occasion which produced it. When we shift our focus from Elizabeth Mayer, the historically specified recipient of the letter, onto that unspecifiable reader who will encounter the poem at some uncertain point in history, we see that the gospel of process, the vision of a new cosmos that the poem seeks to communicate, will to some extent still be available to a reader even after conventional interpretation has become problematized by the alteration of historic circumstances. For the ideational power of the text will continue to be exercised through its form, which as we have seen is peculiarly well suited to provoke in the reader a sense of that temporal "field that never closes," argued by Auden to be humanity's proper place. This last observation requires us to take one step further - which is also, in some senses, a step back to Auden's original proposition that language is the ground of commonality. For if, as George Bahlke has argued (149), Auden partook of Eliot's dismay at the absence in our time of the kind of "uniformitarian" climate enjoyed by Dryden and Pope, then it becomes clear that the Augustan form of "New Year Letter" must also be seen as a means by which the poet is attempting to realize the distinctively Augustan aim of a far-reaching ideological consensus involving the poet, the poem, and its community of readers.

3 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

Auden, we know, was inspired and invigorated by his first reading of The Waste Land. Towards the end of his life, however, he chose to omit Eliot's name from a list of literary figures to whom he owed a significant debt.1 No doubt some of his classical assumptions were derived from - or at least sustained by - aspects of Eliot's poetry and criticism, but Carpenter asserts that such influence was ultimately "limited" (59). In this regard Louis MacNeice - whose debt to Auden himself has been consistently exaggerated2 - provides a striking contrast. MacNeice's contribution to a 1948 symposium on Eliot was called "Eliot and the Adolescent," and it is an essay which offers unequivocal evidence of the "enormous impact" (153) which Eliot's work had on MacNeice when the latter first encountered it, as Auden did, in 1926. Other important essays by MacNeice - notably "Poetry To-day" (1935), "Subject in Modern Poetry" (1936), and his numerous reviews of Eliot's plays and verse - confirm that he felt the influence of the older poet throughout his career. In what was likely one of the last things MacNeice wrote, a statement for the Poetry Book Society Bulletin in September 1963, Eliot is approvingly invoked for his statement that "the essential advantage for a poet is ... to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory" ("Louis MacNeice Writes" 247; Eliot, The Use of Poetry 106). Interestingly, MacNeice is quoting the Eliot of 1933, who sounds Matthew Arnold's criticism in order to clarify the "use" of poetry, to grasp the relation between "a man's theory of the place of poetry ... [and] his view of life in general" (The Use of Poetry 119). Such issues,

79 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

as we shall see, were central and persisting preoccupations of MacNeice. MacNeice's Eliot was a contradictory figure, exclusively neither the poet of urban disaffection nor the secular saint. Rather, he was the Eliot I have attempted to describe in the first chapter of this book, a man in whom we find a "classical" interest in the social and political efficacy of art uneasily cohabiting with a symbolist or "romantic" longing for that which transcends the social, political, temporal world. In another context, MacNeice was quick to attack what he called "the Augustan-Romantic antithesis," arguing that "posterity may find our generations closer to each other than we care to think" ("Lost Generations?" 207). And it is in the spirit of such revaluation that we find him looking back to the original Augustan period and to his dear poet Horace, pronouncing him "far more romantic than Pope" ("Poetry and the Age" 206). His critical attitude to Eliot is informed by a similar acceptance of apparent contradiction, a rejection of what he calls critical "pigeonholing" ("Lost Generations?" 207). Thus, in that crucial essay of 1935, "Poetry To-day," MacNeice credits Eliot with instigating a new classical movement in verse, but appears not to be troubled by the fact that Eliot has done this "more through his criticism than his [poetic] practice," the latter being indelibly marked by a "basic romanticism" (22). "But if Eliot has failed to be classical himself," writes MacNeice, "his influence has been towards classicism." (23) And as he surveys the literary scene in the mid-thirties, he notes that "there is undoubtedly a Drydenism in the air," a "general movement towards clarity and rigour" linked with didactic motives. Mr Charles Madge, he observes, "recently went so far ... as to say that all poetry is didactic" (22).3 As we have seen, Eliot was also to go that far, less than ten years later, in his essay on Johnson - although with the word "didacticism" replaced by "edification" and characteristically hedged. Judging by the vehemence with which MacNeice responded in 1941 to Virginia Woolf's strictures on the didacticism of the thirties in her essay "The Leaning Tower," it is clear that by then he, too, had breathed in a good deal of Drydenism. If the influence of Eliot had been predominantly in that classical direction, it was an influence to which MacNeice had also been strongly subject. Answering Woolf's attack on what she had called an "embittered and futile tribe of scapegoat hunters" - Day Lewis, Auden, Spender, Isherwood, and himself - MacNeice argued that the social and political conditions of England in the thirties made it "inevitable and right that writers should be didactic" ("The Tower That Once" 121). Furthermore, he made a point which, surprisingly, still needs to be made

80 At Home in Time

today: namely, that the poetry of the period was not "solely and crudely didactic" (121). In assuming that this was the case, Woolf contributed not insignificantly to the growth of what Margot Heinemann has called a "selective and devaluing" myth, one which in all its versions teaches that "the poets were mistaken in trying to mix writing and politics, art and life" (103-4). MacNeice stresses that they were not necessarily mistaken; indeed, his discussion of Stephen Spender makes it clear that these apparently antithetical spheres of activity are in practice inseparable. Answering the accusation that "all these writers of the Thirties were the slaves of Marx, or rather of Party Line Marxism," MacNeice concedes that Marx was certainly a most powerful influence. But why? It was not because of his unworkable economics, it was not because of the pedantic jigsaw of his history, it was because he said: "Our job is to change it." (122)

That last is a loose quotation from Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: "Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verscheiden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verandern" (9). As David Margolies has observed (79), this text was commonly invoked during the thirties by critics and theorists on the left, perhaps most notably by Christopher Caudwell in his Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (1937). MacNeice quotes the same passage from Marx quite frequently, but nowhere more interestingly than in an open letter to Auden, published in New Verse in 1937. The general subject is the "importance" of poetry, and MacNeice comes quickly to the issue of what poetry can do in the social and political world: Poets are not legislators (what is an "unacknowledged legislator" anyway?), but they put facts and feelings in italics, which makes people think about them and such thinking may in the end have an outcome in action. ("Letter" 83)

This line of thinking eventually brings in - and provides a gloss on MacNeice's understanding of - the quotation from Marx; it reveals that, in MacNeice's case at least, "didacticism" in poetry was a considerably more complex phenomenon than Woolf would allow. While he elsewhere writes about the style of "thrustful ... preaching" he notices in his contemporaries ("Subject in Modern Poetry" 64), this passage makes it clear that for him the efficacy of poetry resides not in crude rhetoric, but in the nature of the experience a text provides - one which may, in fact, have very little directly to do with politics.

8i Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

The corollary of this view is that every poetic text, not just the overtly "committed" ones, "may in the end have an outcome in action," and perhaps this is why in "Poetry To-day" MacNeice does not immediately demur at Charles Madge's claim that all poetry is didactic. MacNeice has thought himself through to a position very much like the one Eliot would later occupy in the Johnson essay: "it is only the content of edification that changes." But as in Eliot, this does not necessarily commit him to an acceptance of poetry as crude propaganda. Since the power of poetry resides in poetic form itself, the degree of social efficacy enjoyed by any text will paradoxically be proportionate to its degree of formal independence. At the very least, poetry will always hold itself above or apart from "propagandist" concerns: For poetry qua poetry is an end and not a means; its relations to "life" are impossible to define; even when it is professedly "didactic" "propagandist" or "satirical" the external purport is, ultimately, only a conventional property, a kind of perspective which many poets like to think of as essential. ("Poetry To-day" 41)

This passage, placed beside the letter to Auden, amply explains why MacNeice's position on the efficacy of poetry sometimes seems ambivalent, why he is able to endorse repeatedly Marx's injunction to change the world, and yet denigrate simultaneously the Shavian "heresy that the highest work of art is the pamphlet" ("Poetry Today" 36). The open letter to Auden gives an indication of another important strand in the fabric of MacNeice's thought on this matter, one that no doubt also gave impetus to his defence of the thirties poets. Following up on the quotation from Marx, he writes that "if we are not interested in changing ... [the world], there is really very little to describe. There is just an assortment of heterogeneous objects to make Pure Form out of" (84). In fact, the very act of describing effects a transformation of the world: poetry is "inevitably subjective," as he writes elsewhere (Selected Literary Criticism 212), and, in another essay, "it is essential that the poet should do more than give you a drink or tell you to look at the view" ("Poetry To-day" 18). Precisely what that "more" means is clarified in a statement MacNeice prepared in 1952 for the CBS series, "This I Believe": "as a human being, it is my duty to make patterns and to contribute to order - good patterns and a good order" (Selected Prose 188). That, then, is the broadest function of the poet, defined in a way that may well be indebted to Eliot and the ringing conclusion of his "Poetry and

82 At Home in Time

Drama," published in the preceding year (see above, p. 32). In describing the world, the poet makes pattern; and in making pattern he "contributes" to order. This suggests that the writing of poetry is part inspiration, part intellection, and - perhaps most important part social obligation. It is little wonder, then, that MacNeice answers Woolf that in the "mess" of the thirties, it was "inevitable and right" that the didactic aspect of literature should rise to prominence. In a recent essay, "Louis MacNeice: Aspects of His Aesthetic Theory and Practice," Edna Longley has demonstrated that the whole question of didacticism is especially prominent in MacNeice's own writings during that politically volatile decade. There is at least one further reason why MacNeice may have responded to Woolf as he did. This has to do with the idea, which we have already encountered in Auden's literary theory, that language is inescapably social, that because its origins coincide with the origins of society itself (so it is argued) it has the power and the obligation to constitute societies, erode barriers, and by its very nature bring people together. MacNeice does not develop this notion in anything like the detail into which Auden goes in his first "Writing" essay, but there are obvious signs in his prose that he subscribes to some version of that theory. In another defence of the "so-called 'social consciousness school'" of the thirties, this time against criticism from the New Apocalyptics of the forties, he writes that while "on analysis all poetry, even Pope, depends on oneself-and-the-universe [an encounter which the Apocalyptics argued was unmediated by "social worlds"] ... language cannot be divorced from some sort of social world" ("An Alphabet" 142). Ten years earlier, in 1938, this had been one of the recurring themes of MacNeice's influential book Modern Poetry, where its broader implications were spelled out: "Words are essentially a vehicle of communication and so ipso facto have intellectual, emotional, or moral connotations" (5). Two years before that, in "Subject in Modern Poetry," he had made a similar point, then in answer to Andre Breton's Manifeste du surrealisme: We must never forget that poetry is made with words, that words are primarily for communication, that verbal communication is, if you like, a surface ritual. It may not go as deep as other forms of communication, physical or religious, but, if a poet is to write at all, he should be content with results proper to poetry. If he wants yoga he can go elsewhere. (70)

This is a crucial passage, and not only for the insistence that language is "primarily" a means of communication, part of a "surface ritual" aimed at the construction of some sort of community. There

83 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

is also MacNeice's implied criticism of romantic, or what he preferred to call "Symboliste" theories of language ("Poetry To-day" 34): for him, words can only achieve results that are "proper" to themselves and to the communal, practical world which they inhabit. One is struck by the traces of MacNeice's personal unease at being forced as a poet to operate in that world ("It may not go as deep ..."), but the point is clearly made that language cannot provide an escape from the here and now, that it cannot itself become detached from human, social concerns. Transcendent experiences are to be sought in yoga, not in language. "The trouble with words," MacNeice wrote in Modern Poetry, "is that every word is a community by-product" (3). Thus in the same study he labels as "escapism" (7) all theories of "pure" poetry, particularly "Parnassianism and Symbolism in France, [and] the poetry of the nineties in England" (3). So saying, he in effect compiles and then dismisses an ideogram of Ezra Pound's principal early influences. It appears that in their pursuit of the irrational and their attempt to "divorce art from life" (3), the Symbolistes, surrealists, and the New Apocalyptics (all of the same family, MacNeice consistently implies) attempted to make language serve "improper" ends. In each of these groups we have what in his view seems to have been a sort of intractable poetic heresy, recurring throughout time, and always at odds with the nature of language: Literature is made with words, and words are a means of communicating. It is no doubt possible to use words merely for decoration, as the Moors used tags of the Koran to decorate their walls at heights where no one could read them. To do this in literature seems a perversion. ("Subject in Modern Poetry" 59)

This is precisely the kind of "perversion" one expects to hear decried by a poet of the thirties. But it is important to notice that for MacNeice the "proper" operation of language is liable to corruption also from the opposite direction. Words are "community by-products," yes, but their "proper" and ineradicable connection with worldly matters can very easily extend into an excessive involvement with the world, into the realm of propaganda. "You cannot propagand on a Symboliste basis," he observes with admirable common sense ("Poetry To-day" 34); on the other hand, if language is to some extent always an articulation of social relations, propaganda is not only possible but perhaps inevitable in every linguistic act. In his conclusion to Modern Poetry, though, MacNeice sharply discounts simplistic extrapolations from this principle:

84 At Home in Time It is nonsense to say, as many say nowadays, that all great poetry has in all periods been essentially propaganda. The propagandist is consciously and solely concerned with converting people to a cause or creed. If Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, or Milton meant to do this, they were thoroughly bad propagandists. Milton may have converted people to Puritan Christianity but only by the way ... The fact that a poem in which a belief is implicit may convert some whom direct propaganda does not touch, far from proving that that poem is propaganda, only proves that propaganda can be beaten by something other than itself, so that we can admit that poetry can incidentally have effects like those of propaganda though its proper function is not propagandist. (201)

One notices that word "proper" again, only here implying that integral to the writing of poetry is a tendency to regard language as in some way more, or other, than merely a "community by-product." This complicates MacNeice's position a good deal, but the point is nevertheless clear that poetry and propaganda are inextricably related, that the former can "incidentally" have effects like those of the latter, and that perhaps the principal difference between them is less a matter of essence or nature than of function. In substance this is the position MacNeice always took on the question of literature and "engagement": we have already seen it, slightly refined, in his "Letter to W.H. Auden," dating from the same period. And in many ways it is typical of his attitudes at large. Like the Eliot he describes in "Poetry To-day," he is a figure in whom certain contrary ideas and urges are always operative. In mid-career he in fact characterized his "basic conception of life ... [as] dialectical (in the philosophic, not in the political sense)" (Experiences with Images" 156); and in that, incidentally, there is an important confluence with Auden, for whom we have seen "wnawareness of the dialectic" (my italics) was a sort of heresy. MacNeice will not easily consort with what Auden called the "either-ors, the mongrel halves." Accepting the notion that poetry can have an effect in the world of action, and yet asserting that to do so is not its "proper" function: this is the sign of a mind that is part "classical" in its literary predilections, and part "romantic." A pseudonymous poem published by MacNeice at Oxford in 1929 begins with its speaker trapped in "Apollo's blended dream." That key phrase was chosen by William T. McKinnon as the title of his 1971 study of the poet - aptly, for it summarizes the central tension of his career. MacNeice seems to have regarded an Apollonian (classical, rational) conception of poetry as in some way inevitable or necessary, since the language from which poems must be made is

85 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

fundamentally inseparable from our conscious, communal, practical interaction with the world around us. On the other hand, however, he clearly felt the claims of Dionysus, felt reluctant to consign poetry entirely to rationality and pragmatism. Nevertheless, while McKinnon argues that "the whole conflict of the blended dream, with an allegiance possibly divided between the gods" (53) was at the heart of MacNeice's thinking throughout his career, the point has to be made that the division - and thus the blend - was not necessarily equal. We have already noticed the strongly practical and rational bias of MacNeice's attitude to language, and something similar is to be discerned in his treatment of the medium into which language enters by use: time. In "Subject in Modern Poetry" MacNeice writes that the early Yeats "not only practised but advocated escape." He goes on to cite the well-known passage from Yeats's "The Symbolism of Poetry" (1900), which argues that poets should "seek out those wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which are the embodiment of the imagination that neither desires nor hates, because it has done with time." In MacNeice's opinion it is to Yeats's credit that he progressed beyond this attitude, that "as a metaphysician he seems to have recognized the necessity of the descent into time of 'desecration and the lover's night'" (65, my italics). There is a potentially problematic conflation here of psychological and metaphysical timelessness, but the phrasing is nevertheless instructive and, as we have seen, typical of MacNeice: his unspoken longings seem to lie with the world beyond time, and yet the point of the statement is that our involvement in time is simply to be accepted as a "necessity." Those two words, "descent" and "desecration," betray a hidden reverence for the timeless; but there is no real question that for MacNeice the proper sphere of poetic operation is emphatically temporal. The later essay, "Experiences with Images" (1949), puts the point in a slightly different way: "Eternity," wrote Blake (Yeats's favourite quotation), "is in love with the productions of Time" and I have tried to pay homage to both. But the two being interlinked, the two sets of images approach each other. (156)

The sense of moral obligation is striking here: both the timeless and the temporal world must be paid homage to, which makes the poet subject to potentially contradictory claims. But one notices the way in which the quotation from Blake provides a metaphysical sanction for concentrated attention to the "productions of Time." Time is not at odds with eternity, but rather "beloved" of eternity and for that reason it is an error to attenuate or subvert clock time

86 At Home in Time

as either the matter of, or the medium in which we experience, art. Thus, as early as 1935, MacNeice attacks the work of the Sitwells for its "devaluation of the living moment" ("Poetry To-day 18). Chronos - "'passing time' or 'waiting time/" as Frank Kermode defines it in his classic discussion - is never for MacNeice the simple opposite of Kairos, time "charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end" (Kermode The Sense of an Ending 47). The two forms of temporality are not antithetical but complementary, and it is worthwhile to note in passing Kermode's claim that such a failure to make "radical distinction" between the two is a distinctive aspect of the classical (especially Greek, but generally pre-Christian) world-view. MacNeice's position on each of time, language, and didacticism articulates in specific terms a more general attitude which Alan Heuser has called "an Hellenic and pluralistic humanism" (xiv): a rather empirical insistence on the epistemological primacy of reason, concrete phenomena, and human experience - albeit blended, on occasion, with an interest in "the sensuous-mystical element" (Selected Prose 211). MacNeice's attitudes are effectively summarized, as Heuser implies (xiv), in the poem "Plurality," written in August 1940. There, the poet's first move is to discount the monist worldview of Parmenides, whose vision of an existence without change or multiplicity "would smother life for lack of air / Precluding birth or death": No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes, Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights, All your foes are friends and all your days are nights And all the roads lead round and are not roads at all And the soul is muscle-bound, the world a wooden ball.

(243)

Here, the effect of a relentless forward movement is produced by MacNeice's use of rhyming hexameter couplets - a formal protest against the circularity of Parmenides' "wooden ball" world in which "all the roads lead round and are not roads at all." The poem proceeds to attack a wide variety of philosophies which, like the Sitwells' work, devalue the "living moment." The "white / All-white Universal" is a "dead ideal," and MacNeice argues that while timeless perfection "means / Something," it must fall unless there intervenes between that meaning and the matter it should fill Time's revolving hand that never can be still. Which being so and life a ferment, you and I

87 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal Can only live by strife in that the living die, And, if we use the word Eternal, stake a claim Only to what a bird can find within the frame Of momentary flight (the value will persist But as event the night sweeps it away in mist).

(244)

Temporal existence is prime, and without it there can never be access to a transcendent absolute of any kind. In fact, time and process are themselves absolutes, "defiant of the One / Absolute, the row of noughts where time is done" (243). Such direct statements can, however, obscure a crucial point in MacNeice's position: namely that while humanity must define itself by accepting time and imperfection, it will also simultaneously want to define itself in terms of the dialectical opposite. "Man is man," we are told, "in as much as he is not god and yet / Hankers to see and touch the pantheon and forget / The means within the end ..." (244). Earlier I examined MacNeice's insistence that language be used "properly" - that it not be forced to work against its inherent limitations - and that is very much of a piece with his insistence that human beings function primarily in terms of their definition by time. After all, as he tells us so often, language is a "by-product" of human community life; "words are primarily for communication" ("Subject in Modern Poetry" 70), and, like the people who speak them or write them, words operate not on the circular roads that "are not roads" of Parmenides, but on the provisionally real road of linear time. The three issues here - time, language, and the community - are for MacNeice the inescapable concerns of every human being, and a pragmatic acceptance of each and of the interrelatedness of them all is for him a human imperative. Acquiescence in time will have particular ramifications for literary form, and literature will inevitably be implicated in - may even propagate - certain kinds of social relationships. And here, in terms of the last stage in this process, the other (apparently antagonistic) aspect of humanity becomes relevant. While focusing on the imperfections of the "living moment" inevitably means giving due attention to dominant aspects of life in time such as social relations and social justice - the side of humanity which "hankers" for perfection places those aspects under a certain pressure to reform or improve, thus making the didactic impulse "proper" not only in literary activity, but in human life generally. Thus, man must continue, raiding the abyss With aching bone and sinew, conscious of things amiss, Conscious of guilt and vast inadequacy and the sick

88 At Home in lime Ego and the broken past and the clock that goes too quick, Conscious of waste of labour, conscious of spite and hate, Of dissension with his neighbour, of beggars at the gate, But conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour ...

(244)

Passages of this sort make it clear that the defining aspects of what I earlier called MacNeice's "classicism" - his inability to separate poetry from society, his acceptance of a didactic function for literature - arise not only from a rational, pragmatic view of human conditions, but also from a distinctly "romantic" desire to escape or alter those conditions. It is revealing that when, in 1957, he looked back on the so-called "political" poetry of the thirties, he noted that "most of the poems I am conceding to the social-and-or-political category remain, to my mind, highly personal (sometimes too much so) and often even 'romantic' - in the tradition of that earlier 'social-political' poet, Shelley" ("Lost Generations?" 209). In 1948, though, MacNeice had made it clear that while the Shelley of Prometheus Unbound was a powerful influence on him before 1926, Shelley was displaced in that year by Eliot: Shelley's enthusiasms were beginning to seem naive to a child of the Twentieth Century, even to a child who had only fleeting contacts with its overindustrialized, over-commercialized, over-urbanized, over-standardized, over-specialized nuclei. What we wanted was "realism" but - so the paradox goes on - we wanted it for romantic reasons. We wanted to play Hamlet in the shadow of the gas-works. And this was the opening we found - or thought we found - in Eliot. ("Eliot and the Adolescent" 149) II

In MacNeice's Autumn Journal (1939) - and also the much less successful Autumn Sequel (1954) - it is not the spirit of Shelley we see at work, but rather that of the apparently "classical" Eliot. Particularly in the case of the Journal, it is clear that MacNeice is operating in terms of that "Drydenism" he had noticed in the air four years before. Autumn Sequel was to describe itself on the title page as "A Rhetorical Poem in xxvi Cantos," and though Autumn Journal does not go that far, its didactic motives emerge very clearly in the first section. We have, for example, this statement of the world-view already familiar to us from "Plurality": It is this we learn after so many failures, The building of castles in the sand, of queens in snow,

89 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal That we cannot make any corner in life or in life's beauty, That no river is a river which does not flow.

(11)

MacNeice's "Note," published with the poem in the first edition, expresses the hope that the work "contains some 'criticism of life' or implies some standards which are not merely personal" (7), and is to that extent didactic. Interestingly, he had quoted the same phrase from Arnold in an essay the previous year, there arguing that "Like poetry, the drama ought to be connected with life - ought... to be a 'criticism' of life" ("The Play and the Audience" 92). In the light of that last statement, one is perhaps surprised to find MacNeice claiming in the note to Autumn Journal that "The truth of a lyric is different from the truths of science and this poem is something half-way between the lyric and the didactic poem" (7). This statement can be explained as a further manifestation of those subdued but persistent "romantic" reservations we have already seen at work in his other writings about propaganda in literature. But what is perhaps more interesting is that MacNeice appears to regard his refusal to abstract a moral or message from history as the main reason for not thinking of this work as a truly didactic poem: I am aware that there are over-statements in this poem. ... There are also inconsistencies. If I had been writing a didactic poem proper, it would have been my job to qualify or eliminate those overstatements and inconsistencies. But I was writing what I have called a lournal. In a journal or a personal letter a man writes what he feels at the moment; to attempt scientific truthfulness would be - paradoxically - dishonest. (7)

This is an odd position, since it is by no means a given that "proper" didactic poems - even if we construe the category very narrowly "attempt scientific truthfulness," or that "beliefs" need to be abstracted "from their context" (8) in order to have a didactic effect. On the contrary, MacNeice's refusal to "abstract" truth from history is itself a lesson in the world-view he elaborates in "Plurality." The "truth" of events, that poem argues, is inseparable from their temporality; and so it would indeed be a falsification retrospectively to eliminate "overstatements and inconsistencies." Furthermore, a poem in which such things survive, and in which a decision has evidently been made to keep the text "neither final nor balanced" (8), is not necessarily less didactic for that. In fact, its didactic power is perhaps greater because of it. For support in this claim we need look no further than the work of a poet once very influential on MacNeice, and always upheld by him as an antidote to the "escapist" poetics of Mallarme, Valery, and their modernist disciples.4 This is Whitman,

90 At Home in lime

whose "Song of Myself" provided our "dialectical" poet with a most suitable epigraph for Autumn Sequel: "Do I contradict myself? / Very weir then I contradict myself." MacNeice's phrase "neither final nor balanced" particularly calls to mind the Whitman essay "A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads" (1888, but later incorporated as an annex to Leaves of Grass), where we read: "I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme" (579). Whitman's "scheme" is explicitly an affective one, its aim an adduction and transformation of the reading subject: The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought - there to pursue your own flight.

This is a propagandist intention, though of the same subtle sort we have uncovered in "New Year Letter." It is interesting that in Whitman's understanding of the transformative power that can be exercised by a text, intellectual clarity (which MacNeice regards as crucial to a "didactic poem proper") is quite unimportant: the profoundest service that poems or any other writings can do for a reader is not merely to satisfy the intellect, or supply something polish'd and interesting, nor even to depict great passions, or persons or events, but to fill him with vigorous and clean manliness, religiousness, and give him good heart as a radical possession and habit. (579-80)

The androcentrism here is a Whitmanian idiosyncrasy, but the stress on sensibility as opposed to sense is very typical of the essentially romantic poetics within which he writes - and which, as we have seen, exerts a residual influence also on MacNeice. Incidentally, that rejection of "polish" also invites linkage with what Pound had to say about the superiority of "rough speech" over the "picked up and rubbed, polished" ideas of Johnson's Vanity; in fact, Pound's essay on Johnson makes the link itself, when it delineates the "whole of the i8th century" as "The distressing Rousseau etc. ... ending with Whitman" ("Human Wishes" 181). In terms of Whitman's relation to MacNeice, though, what is especially interesting is the way in which the former poet's rather romantic aim - of "giving" the reader "a good heart" - is pursued with a pragmatic, almost "classical" attention to language and rhetoric. His refusal to "round and finish" is part of a carefully calculated manipulation of the reading

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experience, in fact a valorization of the reading experience as both the means by which the poet retains power over his reader, and an embodiment of what is for Whitman an ontological fundamental: process. The Whitman persona typically invites his reader to embark on a journey: "Allons!", he says in "Song of the Open Road," "whoever you are come travel with me! / Travelling with me you find what never tires." There is constant pressure to keep moving: Allons! we must not stop here, However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here, However shelter'd this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here, However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while. (184)

In Whitman, the didactic power of the text is imagined to derive not only from this constant diachronic movement, but also from the "presence" of its speaker. This means - theoretically - that a text might well be "rhetorical" in its persuasive intent, yet peculiarly devoid of conventional rhetorical traces: "(I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes, / We convince by our presence)" ("Song of the Open Road" 185). Just how that last phrase might be read is a complex question, necessarily involving the ways in which a text is able to construct a subject position which is then assumed by its reader. At one level, however, "We convince by our presence" merely means that the text's real power over the reader is not exercised - primarily, at least - through cognition, but rather in some subrational way. Thus, in a crucial section of "Song of Myself," we are told that "Logic and sermons never convince, / The damp of night drives deeper into my soul" (93). What is interesting about this line of Whitman's thought is that here, as in MacNeice, didacticism is bound up with an insistence on concrete experience, a notion that language is most effective not when it excels itself, but when it operates within its "proper" bounds. Like MacNeice, Whitman inclines away from abstraction: All truths wait in all things, They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it, They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon, The insignificant is as big to me as any, (What is less or more than a touch?) ("Song of Myself" 93)

92 At Home in Time

That last line is critical, for it offers yet another instance of Whitman's tendency to regard the senses, rather than the intellect, as the way to "truth." In a passage that in many ways resembles MacNeice's "Plurality," Whitman writes "I accept Reality and dare not question it, / Materialism first and last imbuing. / Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!" ("Song of Myself" 86). As in MacNeice, though, this acceptance of "Reality" also cohabits with the desire to "transcend and flout the human span" ("Plurality" 244). Thus Whitman addresses the positive scientists: "Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling. / I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling" ("Song of Myself" 86). In MacNeice's 1945 poem, "Carrick Revisited," time and place are similarly said to be "our bridgeheads into reality," and by a Whitmanian equivocation we are made to understand that the material world is both the real "and also its concealment" (Collected Poems 224). Nevertheless, the point is made that material "facts" and experience provide an indispensable starting point, and that more abstract goals are only to be approached through the concrete. This is surely what lies behind the form of Whitman's didactic program, in which the reader becomes "convinced," not by explicit statement, but by involvement in the process of the text, by relating to language less hermeneutically than morphologically. And the temporality of that encounter is also crucial, not only because time is inescapable, but because like concrete "fact" it is a means to an end: "I accept Time absolutely. / It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, / That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all" ("Song of Myself" 85-6). It seems that Whitman's poetry was much on MacNeice's mind in the late thirties. He quotes a section from "Song of Myself" in, of all unlikely places, a 1938 essay on animals and pet-keeping ("Wild and Domestic" 50); in "Poetry To-day" (1935), he lists Whitman's name with others whose work provides a possible model for "more stable" free verse (30); and in "Subject in Modern Poetry" (1936) he notes the influence of Whitman first on Eliot (63), then (more obliquely) on the poets of the thirties: "The pity of Owen, the Whitmanesque lust for life of Lawrence, and the dogmas of Lenin are now combining to make possible the most vital poetry seen in English for a long time" (64). In The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941), MacNeice again hints at Whitman's relevance to him personally, only now not in terms of attitude ("lust for life"), but of poetic form. He writes that his generation was afraid of "forms of repetition as well as of refrain," but that these things "if expelled in one form" seem to reappear "in another": "witness Whitman or Eliot or Pound or the free verse of D.H. Lawrence" (145). Even later, in a 1955 review of Poetry and the Age,

93 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

MacNeice devotes considerable space treatment of Whitman. Present purposes do not require us to fathom completely Whitman's influence on Autumn Journal. My aim has been merely to invoke the American poet as a gloss on MacNeice's position in his note to the poem and, by stressing the quite remarkable congruency of their thought on matters such as language, time, and the material world, to use Whitman as a guide to what kind of forms "didacticism" might take in a long poem based on a such a world-view. The most important point to emerge from this exercise is that MacNeice's refusal to "qualify or eliminate ... overstatements and inconsistencies" in Autumn Journal, his insistence that the poem be true to his feelings "at the moment" of composition (7), will not necessarily make it less "didactic" than if his emotions and ideas were retrospectively ordered and abstracted. In fact, the example of Whitman suggests that the opposite is likely to be true: that the more true a text is to its time of composition and to linear time generally as the medium in which it must be experienced, the more power it will exert. "Plurality" comments that "roads that lead round" are "not roads at all"; "Time," goes the complementary passage in Whitman, "alone rounds and completes all." The journal form which MacNeice adopted for his poem - "a man writes what he feels at the moment" (7) - is therefore not necessarily incompatible with a didactic intention or effect; to the extent that the "Note" to Autumn Journal implies this to be the case, it is potentially misleading. Autumn Journal is a poem frequently celebrated for its "topicality" or perhaps just as often dismissed as "journalism": both of which judgments imply that the poem's raison d'etre is simply the unsophisticated recording of historical events as they impress themselves on a single consciousness. I say "unsophisticated," because it is often assumed - perhaps because of MacNeice's own plea that poets should be "able-bodied, fond of talking, ... reader[s] of newspapers" and "appreciative of women" (Modern Poetry 198) - that the poet was rather unreflecting about time, that time was for him an unscrutinized given rather than a deeply problematic issue. From such a perspective, MacNeice might be said to lack "historical consciousness," as Arthur C. Danto defined it in Narration and Knowledge (1985); he is "conscious of living through events," but unconscious "of those events as seen from the outside, by historians for whom they are to be located in narrative structures" (342, 343). It is certainly true that events, large and small, dictate much of the direction of the poem, that the speaker takes his cue, as it were, from historical contingency. But the mistake is to assume that the decision to acquiesce with time

94 At Home in Time

in this way is not consciously taken, and that those historical events, rather than time itself, are the subject of the poem. Margot Heinemann implies that if the text seems to acquiesce too readily in its own temporality, one obvious defence is that it mirrors the condition of human beings, who have no option but to acquiesce in theirs: the growth and structure of the poem consists in the changing situation and the changing ideas and feelings of the poet about it. This is, after all, the order in which people live their history, moving forward untidily into the unknown rather than looking backwards with orderly hindsight and tidying away the mistakes, (m)

MacNeice's "Note" makes it clear that such a mimetic impulse was indeed one of his motives for choosing the journal form. However, in speaking of his text's apparent acquiescence in time, I have wished to imply much more - namely, that the form of the poem indicates a kind of epistemological choice exercised in favour of time and history. The point is not that MacNeice - or anyone else - can really opt in or out of time. But he does have a choice in how he will treat time: whether, like Whitman, he will "accept Time absolutely," or whether, like Parmenides, he will resist it. It is a dilemma which MacNeice worked through in shorter poems like "Plurality" and "Carrick Revisited," and it is memorably evoked in "Stylite," written in March 1940. In that poem an ascetic sits atop his pillar, looking out over a wilderness from which "the world is banned." He slips into sleep, and is about to suffer a final mortification when his eyes open again. Opposite he sees a figure in every way antithetical to himself, to the tradition of Christian contempt for the physical world, and yet similarly posed on top of a column. What he must contemplate is this embodiment of the classical world-view: A white Greek god, Confident, with curled Hair above the groin And his eyes on the world.

(Collected Poems 158)

We are not told that the stylite is moved by this vision to re-embrace time and the sensual world, but the last words said of him - "He has eyes again" - make that seem likely, especially since it is the god's use of his eyes which mark him as a ready participant in creation. There is an obscure and buried narrative in the poem which will not allow us to treat these two figures as equally compelling. The classical figure supersedes the stylite not only in terms of the

95 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

poem's chronology, but in evident authority and value. At the same time, though, the stylite is the poem's subject, and our identification remains largely with him. The poem as a whole strikingly dramatizes what is at stake in the choice between wishing to transcend the temporal world and opting to "cherish existence," as MacNeice puts it in "Leaving Barra" (Collected Poems 87). In Autumn Journal this choice is the central theme, and the general question of human temporality far outweighs in importance the specific historical issues which appear to exercise such dominance over the work. The force of process is strongly felt in the first lines: Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire, Ebbing away down ramps of shaven lawn where close-clipped yew Insulates the lives of retired generals and admirals And the spyglasses hung in the hall and the prayer-books ready in the pew And August going out to the tin trumpets of nasturtiums And the sunflowers' Salvation Army blare of brass And the spinster sitting in a deck chair picking up stitches ... (9)

There is a multifaceted political point being made here, obviously, in the reference to the insulated lives of "retired generals and admirals." Theirs is a life of social privilege; and such insulation from the world at large is in itself a deathly condition (the "close-clipped yew" tells us this). But for all those whose lives are - or might in 1939 soon come - under the influence of the military establishment, the officers' detachment and torpor is especially ominous. MacNeice powerfully evokes the end of an era,5 one in which old pieties and defences (the prayer-books, the spyglasses) are becoming increasingly irrelevant, commemorated anticlimactically by "the tin trumpets" of nasturtiums and by the spinster "picking up stitches" while (as the poem goes on) planes pass overhead "Northward from Lee-on-Solent" (9). The real power in these lines comes from the fact that natural process, the movement into autumn and hence into death, appears not merely as a metaphor for social and cultural decline, but also as an independent force with cosmic ramifications ultimately indifferent to human needs and aspirations. That the imminence of war coincides with this, the promise of a natural - and hence inevitable process of decline, only darkens prospects for the future. The sobering effect on us as readers is thus arguably as much the result of historical accident as of rhetoric; we feel the force of that depressing coincidence in much the same way that MacNeice and his contemporaries did in late 1938. Style and rhetoric do, however, play their

96 At Home in Time

part. MacNeice implicates the reader in a linguistic process almost certainly learned from Whitman: after the opening, declaratory clause, which tells us that "summer is ending" (the present continuous is Whitman's favourite tense in constructions of this sort), MacNeice supplies us with another continuous verb ("ebbing"), which he apposes to the first, and then goes on to allow the last phrase of his third line ("and admirals") to spawn a series of successive clauses, all anaphorically related, all apposed to that phrase in the third line. Grammatical relations become quite attenuated as the process extends itself, but the effect is concerted and compelling: just as the grammar requires the sense of that initial declaration to be applied to numerous subsequent clauses, we feel the force of process and change (the subject of line one) extending itself across all of culture and creation. The construction is a most uneasy combination of contradictory pressures: one towards syntactical closure, the other towards diachronic extension. Its effect is disconcerting because the reader comes progressively into a heightened awareness of periodicity as an attribute of language - this coinciding with a growing sense of things coming to an end in the world "outside" of words. It is appropriate that at the very point when his expansion of syntactical time threatens to undermine sense altogether, MacNeice gives us the poem's first true metaphor for time. Since process allowed to define itself through itself eventually must undermine definition, he now opts for definition by a rather conventional analogy, that "emblem of motion and power" beloved of Whitman ("Locomotive in Winter" 375): a train. While members of the privileged class hear "trucks of the Southern Railway dawdle," the rebels and the young Have taken the train to town or the two-seater Unravelling rails or road, Losing the thread deliberately behind them Autumnal palinode. And I am in the train too now and summer is going South as I go north Bound for the dead leaves falling ...

(10)

Eliot, it will be remembered, makes use of a railway analogy in the third part of "Burnt Norton," where we are told that "the world moves / In appetency, on its metalled ways / Of time past and time future." In that poem, with its contempt for "this twittering world," the track of diachronic time is overwhelmingly negative - notwithstanding the assertion "Only through time time is conquered"

97 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

(Complete Poems 173). In Autumn Journal the speaker does feel regret as he travels north while "summer is going / South/' and there is no doubt that the ways of time future and time past are at times felt by him to be severely constraining. But the posture of the stylite is less natural to MacNeice than it is to Eliot; what we see in the above passage is less contempt for the world than a basically accepting, if wistful, awareness of the passage of time. The negative feelings which attach to the railway because of the poet's personal position are ameliorated by the perception that for his movement north (and into middle age) there is a compensatory movement south, involving younger people. And besides this consolation - that the operation of time and process is in some way "proper" - it is also obvious that the speaker finds the attitudes of the young rebels who "have taken the train" more attractive than those of the landed class who enjoy "all the inherited assets of bodily ease" (9), whose present is defined by the continuing and direct influence of the past. On the train or in the car, we are told, the young are engaged in "unravelling rails or road/' and they lose "the thread deliberately behind them": this surely means that they live for the present, that they not only accept their temporality, but actively assert it. Their actions in the present are a kind of "palinode," a retraction of the past. This section of the Journal is complex indeed. After meditating on the young, the speaker turns his attention to himself, as we have seen, and then to his dog, "a symbol of the abandoned order" lying on the carriage floor. The animal's eyes are inept and glamorous as a film star's, Who wants to live, i.e. wants more Presents, jewellery, furs, gadgets, solicitations As if to live were not Following the curve of a planet or controlled water But a leap in the dark, a tangent, a stray shot. (11)

One grins here at the unlikely eloquence of the dog's eyes and at the flagrant act of projection committed by the speaker. What is shamelessly being attributed to the animal is a distinctively human attitude - the view that life proceeds according to romantic assumptions, that it is primarily a matter of illumination and inspiration. "Plurality" links this kind of attitude to the side of human nature that "would transcend and flout the human span" (244), and though MacNeice here attributes it to his dog, he fools no one: he is in dialogue with a side of himself. The master's is the voice of "classical" reason and logic, implying that life is not a matter of transcendence, but rather

98 At Home in Time

of conformity to certain natural laws: we live "Following the curve of a planet or controlled water." These metaphors from physics function as the train did earlier on, suggesting the way in which life is bound by the limits of space and time. At this point in the poem, after several metaphors have been tried on, we are given the poem's "moral" in an archetypal formulation. This is the passage I have already quoted above, which stresses that "we cannot make any corner in life" and that "no river is a river which does not flow" (11). Time and its surrogate, motion, are pronounced the absolute conditions of human life, and with that we find ourselves back in the train at Surbiton, as a woman gets in, painted With dyed hair but a ladder in her stocking and eyes Patient beneath the calculated lashes, Inured for ever to surprise.

(11)

That last observation breaches a dike. Up until this point MacNeice has not allowed himself to contemplate for very long the negative side of our time-bound existence. But having categorically stated that it is impossible to escape from the flow - or the track - of time, he seems to feel justified in noting just how deadening the journey can be. Thus the painted woman, bound on her monotonous course, is forever incapable of surprise. The rhythm of the train becomes the ad museum repetition Of every tired aubade and maudlin madrigal, The faded airs of sexual attraction Wandering like dead leaves along a warehouse wall.

(11)

That last simile throws us into the world of Eliot's "Preludes," and the style as we move towards the end of this opening section becomes distinctly Eliotic. We have a parodic love song, "I loved my love with a platform ticket" - the "maudlin madrigal," perhaps, "sung" by the train and catching the tenor of urban life. The ending might well have come from Eliot's drafts for The Waste Land: I loved my love with the wings of angels Dipped in Henna, unearthly red, With my office hours, with flowers and sirens, With my budget, my latchkey, and my daily bread.

(11-12)

The first canto concludes after this with another metaphor for temporal process - the "ever-moving / Stairs" of the Underground. The

99 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

image is of an infernal descent, also familiar from Eliot, and the view of urban, temporal life is dark indeed: "a warm wind blows the bodies of men together / And blows apart their complexes and cares" (12).

This vision, it is crucial to grasp, does not in any real way undermine the poem's previous acceptance of temporality and process. Apart from the obvious point that seeing the bleak side of time does not necessarily involve rejecting it, there is also an interesting ambiguity to be noticed in these closing lines. Eliot's subway wind in "Burnt Norton" is cold, whirling "Men and bits of paper" into chaos. Here the wind is warm, and though any city dweller will recognize that as essentially unsalubrious, there inevitably attaches to the idea of warmth a refractory goodness. Furthermore, the wind seems purposeful, and its purpose is to produce a kind of community as it "blows the bodies of men together." This is a claustrophobe's nightmare, but it is also possibly a consolation for the lonely and alienated. And as we read on into the next line there is a similar ambiguity. That the wind "blows apart" the "complexes and cares" of the men may mean it prevents sympathy and empathy even as it drives their bodies together; but at the same time this may mean the wind eliminates or destroys those cares, relieving the men with an uncomplicated sense of human fellowship. In fact, the grammar of the line and conventional idiom would make the latter possibility more plausible than the former - which would be altogether consistent with MacNeice's refusal elsewhere to devalue the human and temporal realm in relation to the "dead ideal of white / All-white Universal." Perhaps the most telling evidence of a consistent commitment to time in this section of the poem is the verse itself, which achieves the effect of elaborate interconnectedness yoked in a relentless forward movement. The a b c b rhyme, which persists throughout and is sometimes quite obtrusive and audacious, binds each group of four lines very tightly together, so much so that they seem at times epigrammatic. That passage, "It is this we learn. ..." (11), is an outstanding example: it is the concentration and authority of the verse form which in part persuades us to accept the lines as the thematic centre of their section. At the same time, though, these fourline units are generally not separated as quatrains; instead, they abut each other rather as rhyming couplets do in a typical passage of Pope, or as Auden's octosyllabic couplets do in "New Year Letter." Such comparisons are useful because they make it possible for us to see how essentially stichic is the overall organization of the verse in MacNeice's poem, as it is in those other works. The unit of composition is not the individual line or the couplet but the four-line group,

ioo At Home in Time

and to call that stichic is perhaps to stretch the term. But the point is that when each such group is complete it falls behind us, as simply one in an ongoing sequence of such self-contained units. MacNeice deliberately avoids strophic form, even though it seems implied by the rhyme scheme, choosing to stress that, whatever "corner" can be made "in life or in life's beauty," such things are only temporary, and must eventually take their place in the forward movement of time: "no river is a river which does not flow." In "Plurality" he makes the point that all epiphanic moments, all revelations of a world beyond time, are themselves subject to time: "if we use the word Eternal, [you and I can] stake a claim / Only to what a bird can find within the frame / Of momentary flight (the value will persist / But as event the night sweeps it away in mist)." The persistent tendency of the verse in canto i of Autumn Journal, one might say, is for immanent strophic form to be "swept away" by ongoing process. This idea the merely provisional stability of poetic forms - is in fact the theme of MacNeice's "Sunday Morning" (May 1933). There we are told that "you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time / A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme." "But listen," runs the moral, up the road, something gulps, the church spire Opens its eight bells out, skulls' mouths which will not tire To tell how there is no music or movement which secures Escape from the weekday time. (Collected Poems 23)

While the rhyme scheme of the Journal asserts the integrity of those four-line units, a number of other phenomena - grammatical, linguistic, and rhetorical - work to undermine it. We might, for example, expect the end of each unit to coincide with a syntactical terminus but this is not usually the case. The first eight lines of the poem represent one long, very attenuated sentence, which is in fact not concluded at the end of line eight - where the resounding rhyme of "brass" and "pass" would reinforce the sense of ending - but halfway through line nine with "Northward from Lee-on-Solent" (9). The effect is of a pause, not a halt, and that is quite in harmony with the poem's emerging insistence on process. One notes also that in these lines the strong b rhymes correspond with no end-punctuation whatsoever, and because of the sheer length of each line (normally fourteen syllables, but sometimes as long as eighteen) end-rhyme generally exerts a less cohesive influence than would be the case in a poem in octosyllabics, say, where the fugitive tendencies of language have less play.

ioi Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal Adding further to the reader's sense of continuous motion is MacNeice's striking preference for verbs in the present progressive form: "summer is ending in Hampshire, / Ebbing away ..."; "August going out ..."; "the spinster sitting ... / Not raising her eyes. ..." (9). This, once again, is a technique we must associate with Whitman, whose "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking" takes it to extreme lengths. The same influence is also discernible in MacNeice's use of anaphora to link together a series of proliferating elaborations upon a single grammatical structure: "And August ... / And the sunflowers ... / And the spinster. ..." It is also worth drawing attention to the way in which polysyndeton ("And whether Stella will marry and what to do with Dick / And the branch of the family ..." [my italics]) discourages the intellectual act of subordination, the making of wholes based on any principle other than simple succession. The conjunction "and," writes Longley, is "a structural means of not pushing connections and generalizations; but rather of presenting things that coexist and letting patterns emerge" (Louis MacNeice: A Study 65). Many of these techniques are also used in the second canto, where the speaker's meditation on time is deepened and extended. The difference here is that while his acceptance of time is finally reasserted in keeping with canto i, it is first tried and interrogated. It is at night, we are told, when the attractions of annihilation - and hence of an escape from time - are most powerfully felt. In expressing this, MacNeice makes use of a rather crude inversion of the gloria in excelsis Deo: "Glory to God in the Lowest, peace beneath the earth, / Dumb and deaf at the nadir" (13). "In the web of night," when he is withdrawn from life but has still not succumbed to sleep, the speaker finds himself afraid. The "window is fingered by the shadows of branches," "the lions roar beneath the hill," and the hazards of the life beyond his room are still strongly felt. There is a pronounced sense of things constantly in motion, even close by: "the meter clicks and the cistern bubbles." Others, he is aware, find such moments positive, and derive a simple animal pleasure from being "happy in the hive of home." But for him removal from the centre of things prompts maudlin thoughts: I wonder now whether anything is worth The eyelid opening and the mind recalling. And I think of Persephone gone down to dark, No more a virgin, gone the garish meadow, But why must she come back, why must the snowdrop mark That life goes on for ever?

(13)

1O2 At Home in Time

"April is the cruellest month," one might say; our speaker feels the attraction of total annihilation without rebirth. Thus "peace" is to be had "beneath the earth" and in the negation of the senses: If you can equate Being in its purest form With denial of all appearance, Then let me disappear - the scent grows warm For pure Not-Being, Nirvana.

(14)

While the speaker longs to bid "Good-bye [to] the Platonic sieve of the Carnal Man" (14), he finds himself reproved very quickly by a spider who, in this section, seems to represent a kind of providential force by which the strands of time are first spun out and then twisted into pattern. The spider's message is that process is right and inescapable: that to-morrow will outweigh To-night, that becoming is a match for Being, That to-morrow is also a day, That I must leave my bed and face the music. As all the others do who with a grin Shake off sleep like a dog and hurry to desk or engine And the fear of life goes out as they clock in And history is reasserted.

(14)

"Fear of life," such as descends on the speaker at night, will disappear as he "clocks in" to history. That makes the life of "desk and engine" seem merely a prophylactic against existential angst, but in fact it is much more. The speaker quickly reads the spider's injunction as a reminder of his own moral obligation: Who am I - or I - to demand oblivion? I must go out to-morrow as the others do And build the falling castle; Which has never fallen, thanks Not to any formula, red tape or institution, Not to any creeds or banks, But to the human animal's endless courage.

(14)

Here one is reminded of those gay rebuilders applauded in Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli" - a poem frequently cited by MacNeice in his prose6 and which he was to single out when he reviewed Last Poems and Plays shortly after writing these lines.7 This stress on "the human

1O3 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

animal's endless courage" is certainly something MacNeice found in Yeats's work generally. In the last chapter of The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, he makes the following point about the poets of his own generation: Whatever their system was, they stood with Yeats for system against chaos, for a positive art against passive impressionism. Where Eliot had seen misery, frustration, and ruins, they saw heroic struggle - or, sometimes, heroic defeat - and they saw ruins rebuilding. (191)

In the present context this passage is most apposite, because the spider's injunction to the speaker to "clock in" to history, to engage in the heroic human struggle, is an advance on the "passive impressionism" with which canto i ends. One might say that the second canto provides a Yeatsian answer to the Eliotic condition adumbrated in that previous part. By the conclusion of canto n we find that sleep, which formerly promised the dubious comfort of Eliot's "forgetful snow," is now embraced for nothing less than its power to restore vitality to those who, recognizing that all things fall, are resolved to build them again: Spider, spider, spin Your register and let me sleep a little, Not now in order to end but to begin The task begun so often.

(15)

Thus canto n ends, and the acceptance of process is made all the more powerful by the fact that as readers we have been implicated in the intellectual process of reaching that conclusion. In a letter to Eliot, MacNeice stresses the "dramatic quality" of his poem, a work in which, he says, different parts of himself are each allowed to speak (quoted by Marsack 43);8 and indeed, the ability of the text to involve us in a Coleridgean "drama of reason" must certainly contribute to whatever persuasive power it ultimately exercises over us. We have also been subject to other linguistic assertions of sequentiality, many of them familiar from canto i. For example, MacNeice makes use of anaphora and polysyndeton in the opening evocation of process going on outside: When the window is fingered by the shadows of branches, When the lions roar beneath the hill And the meter clicks and the cistern bubbles And the gods are absent and the men are still.

(13)

1O4 At Home in Time

The point has to be made, however, that this section of the poem has a different purpose and that its form differs in certain appropriate ways from the form of the first canto. To describe canto i, I have appropriated MacNeice's own phrase "passive impressionism/' and the long, loose lines and sentences we encountered there are very well suited to that kind of descriptive purpose. In canto u we notice that the lines are in general somewhat shorter (twelve syllables or less), and that there is a good deal more end-punctuation. Certainly, MacNeice is quite willing to punctuate the ends of those four-line units, and in many cases these achieve a kind of epigrammatic quality only approached in the first canto by that one passage already discussed. All of these are quite appropriate and necessary stylistic modifications, given that the intention here is not descriptive but argumentative. The speaker is reasoning his way through a complex field of ideas in this section, and a sharper, tighter style is called for. But at the same time it is important to notice one striking innovation that serves to compensate for these other changes. The rhyme has been changed from a b to an a rhyme, so that those four-line units still are not permitted a powerful strophic integrity: Some now are happy in the hive of home, Thigh over thigh and a light in the night nursery, And some are hungry under the starry dome And some sit turning handles.

Here MacNeice avoids the excessive - perhaps factitious - sense of order and structure that would come from a coincidence of endpunctuation and strong end-rhyme. The last line, despite its syntactical function as a terminus, has a very different function prescribed for it by the rhyme scheme so far established: we expect it to act as a transition, to cast forward to another rhyming pair, and that is precisely what it does. The consonantal combination "dl" is answered in the "gl" combination of the following line, "Glory to God in the Lowest," and that line becomes the foundation of a new end-rhyme pairing. This technique is followed consistently through the section, always working as a kind of anti-coagulant to the verse. One feels its appropriateness very clearly in those final lines of the section, where an intellectual conclusion has been reached, something which the a rhyme underlines and supports. At the same time, though, the very idea of conclusion is precisely that which the argument has come to deny, and that denial in turn is stressed by the way in which

105 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

the final line remains intractably unassimilated by rhyme into the preceding whole. With the third canto we return to the rhyming pattern of canto i, which subtly confirms for us the sense that canto n has been something of a deviation, a settling of theoretical questions on the basis of which the journal narrative can be resumed. Thus, while canto i began with an act of dating - "summer is ending in Hampshire" - canto in does so as well: "August is nearly over" (16). The dialectic between history and the timeless universal is still an issue here, as it is throughout the poem, but one of the consequences of the second canto and its acceptance of time is that such questions are explored not in symbolic or abstract but specifically human terms. Thus the speaker begins thinking about workers returning to work after the August bank holiday, and he finds in them that combination of apparent contradictions which for MacNeice is typically human: Most are accepters, born and bred to harness, And take things as they come, But some refusing harness and more who are refused it Would pray that another and a better Kingdom come ...

(16)

What is striking is that despite the allusion to the Lord's Prayer, the "better Kingdom" imagined here is still a temporal kingdom. Those who "refuse harness" are loyal, not to an essentially religious vision of transcendence, but to something like Marx's idea of a world "posthistory," a world still in time but free of the political and ideological contention which for Marx defines history. We are told that the "better Kingdom" now is sketched in the air or travestied in slogans Written in chalk or tar on stucco or plaster-board But in time may find its body in men's bodies, Its law and order in their heart's accord, Where skill will no longer languish nor energy be trammelled To competition and graft, Exploited in subservience but not allegiance To an utterly lost and daft System that gives a few at fancy prices Their fancy lives While ninety-nine in the hundred who never attend the banquet Must wash the grease of ages off the knives.

(17)

106 At Home in Time

That phrase "may find its body in men's bodies" continues the strain of religious allusion we have already noticed in this canto; but paradoxically it points away from transcendence and towards the pursuit of perfection in time and in the physical world. Implied in all of this is the need for people to act positively in the cause of "post-history," and as the canto draws to its close we find MacNeice recommending that we jettison the past and concentrate on a present and future of action. One is reminded of those rebels described in the first section who deliberately "lose the thread" of the past behind them. Here we are told that "the final cure" is not in the "past-dissecting fingers" of the analyst, whose actions assume the continuing relevance of the past in the present, But in a future of action, the will and fist Of those who abjure the luxury of self-pity, And prefer to risk a movement without being sure If movement would be better or worse in a hundred Years or a thousand when their heart is pure.

(18)

Just as the argument here accepts the impurity of human motives as one of the conditions of life, so it accepts time and process. In fact, the "final cure" will come about - if it comes about at all - not despite process, but because of it: ... may my feet follow my wider glance First no doubt to stumble, then to walk with the others And in the end - with time and luck - to dance.

(18, my italics)

That is a ringing conclusion to canto in, the strong, summary rhyme giving us an earnest of the plenitude into which we may come by way of time. It reveals, furthermore, the extent to which MacNeice's consciousness is demonstrably "historical" in Arthur Danto's sense. At the very end of the latter's Narration and Knowledge comes an account of what it means "to exist historically," to "perceive the events one lives through as part of a story later to be told" (343), and its relevance to this section of Autumn Journal is striking indeed: The door of the future is closed, and knowledge of it is a dead option, and this is what makes narration possible and all that narration presupposes: the openness of the future, the inalterability of the past, the possibility of effective action. (363)

107 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

In that last quotation from the poem, the penultimate line "stumbles" in its metrical irregularity (its thirteen syllables seem unable to settle into either an iambic or a trochaic pattern), but the last is pure iambic pentameter. The two caesurae, creating as they do two metrically equivalent units in the first part of the line, contribute a sense of stability and order and at the same time suggest impending stasis. However, MacNeice's gospel of process and movement is not undermined by all this, because the climax of the line and the fulfilment of the sequence envisaged is a verb of action in the infinitive form, "to dance." Also, while the caesurae of the last line produce in its former part an effect of balance, in the latter part of the line the effect is of imbalance. Thus "to dance" both fulfils the pattern of the past and propels us into the future. Semantically, the phrase adumbrates a cessation of linear process, while metrically it instigates the opposite. The unbalanced conclusion leaves us wanting more; it subtly returns us to the journal, makes us "clock in" again to history. And so we find ourselves oddly reassured by the temporal co-ordinates given in the first line of the following canto: "September has come ..." (19). That next section turns our attention to MacNeice's first wife "Mariette," as she is called in The Strings Are False - but there is a greater continuity with canto in than at first seems the case. For the woman is identified with autumn - "September has come, it is hers I whose vitality leaps in the autumn" (19) - and thus with movement and process. As it is to the season, the speaker's attitude to her is mixed. There is first a clear-sighted acknowledgment of her unpleasant side, and then meditation on her defining and most valued characteristic: changeability. "I am glad," writes MacNeice, That life contains her with her moods and moments More shifting and more transient than I had Yet thought of as being integral to beauty.

(20)

This is a crucial moment in the poem's gathering affirmation of process, and it is typical of the way in which personal reflections throughout the work are consistently made to serve, to elucidate and to entrench, a didactic point. MacNeice's devotion to time is sometimes expressed in the abstract manner of canto n, but more often it manifests itself, as here, through the "concrete": in relation to actual persons and events recorded in the poem, and also (as we have seen) in the process of recording itself. MacNeice picks up the subject of his ex-wife again in canto xi, and interestingly suggests that his own predilection for the concrete is

io8 At Home in Time

strengthened by (if not derived from) her example. "Your instinct/' he writes, "Sanctions all you do, / Who know that truth is nothing in abstraction, / That action makes both wish and principle come true" (45). The ex-wife is thus associated with the poem's two governing principles: "truth is nothing in abstraction," and the notion that movement is "integral to beauty," expressed in canto iv. Between the two cantos is a sequence of six others, rich in concrete detail and devoted to the subject of change and transition. Canto vi, for example, recalls the visit to Spain which MacNeice made in 1936 in the company of his friend Anthony Blunt. At Easter, the country was "ripe as an egg for revolt and ruin" (26); and while "all that the tripper wants is the status quo," the forces of change are subtly at work: only an inch behind This map of olive and ilex, this painted hoarding, Careless of visitors the people's mind Was tunnelling like a mole to day and danger.

(28)

In this section MacNeice makes extensive use of polysyndetic constructions, stringing phrases and clauses together with the recurring conjunction, "and." Thus, And we sat in trains all night With the windows shut among civil guards and peasants And tried to play piquet by a tiny light And tried to sleep bolt upright; And cursed the Spanish rain And cursed their cigarettes which came to pieces And caught heavy colds in Cordova and in vain Waited for the right light for taking photos.

(28)

We have seen how frequently - at the level of content - MacNeice associates train travel with a simply linear experience of time; and here the form, the language itself, acts to impress the reader with a sense of uncomplicated linearity. There is no suggestion of causal connection between the events described: even though the rain no doubt precipitated the disintegration of the cigarettes, the two events are treated as curiously separate, related not by cause but by contiguity in time. And carried to this extreme, polysyndeton makes any syntactical terminus - such as the period after "photos" - seem both arbitrary and temporary. The famous seventh canto, which registers the transformation of London during the October crisis, makes use of polysyndeton in

109 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

much the same way. But whereas canto vi was a recollection of Spain in the late thirties, the focus of vn is on the present. As a result, the latter is able to cultivate our sense of temporal movement by a variety of other means as well: progressive verb forms, for example, linked with a rhyme that frequently suggests the necessity of process. So, They are cutting down the trees on Primrose Hill. The wood is white like the roast flesh of chicken, Each tree falling like a closing fan; No more looking at the view from beneath the branches, Everything is going to plan.

(31)

The language here tells us that change is everywhere operative - very much the point of the Spanish section - but the intentionally glib rhyme of "fan" and "plan" adds the suggestion that the necessity of process is sometimes difficult to accept. This difficulty is in certain respects the centre of the three cantos that follow: vin and ix dealing with MacNeice's return to the Midlands to teach classics, and x recalling his own schooldays. His attitude to himself is shot through with irony; as a teacher, he is "impresario of the Ancient Greeks" (37). But the Greeks are attractive because of their hard-nosed attitude to time. They believed in youth and did not gloze the unpleasant Consequences of age; What is life, one said, or what is pleasant Once you have turned the page Of love? The days grow worse, the dice are loaded Against the living man who pays in tears for breath; Never to be born was the best, call no man happy This side death. Conscious - long before Engels - of necessity And therein free They plotted out their life with truism and humour Between the jealous heaven and the callous sea.

(37~8)

This kind of plotting - negotiating a way between one's aspirations and the inescapable facts of temporal life - is a consistent imperative in MacNeice's work. And one might say that the "moral" of canto ii, as of "Plurality," is that whatever "freedom" we enjoy in this regard comes from being "conscious ... of [temporal] necessity." Obviously, then, "The Glory that was Greece" (38) would seem useful "To train the mind or even to point a moral / For the present age" (39).

no

At Home in Time

However, the lessons of the Greeks are paradoxically made difficult to accept because of the action of time itself: "These dead are dead," MacNeice writes of his classical antecedents. An observation of fact, this is also figuratively true, for an ideological gap corresponds to the historical one that separates him from them: "I think of the slaves." And how one can imagine oneself among them I do not know; It was all so unimaginably different And all so long ago.

(39)

A further difficulty attaching to the necessity of process is that time not only renders the past irrelevant to the present - as in the case of the Greeks - but it also erodes our ability to accept that very necessity. That, at least, is MacNeice's point in canto x, in which he recalls the way in which schoolchildren of his generation "did not linger,... [but] went on / Growing and growing, gluttons for the future" (41). Rapidly, though, socialization counteracted this delight in change and process: "life began to narrow to what was done," and the future had to be seen as a repetition of the past. "On that assumption," he writes, "terms began and ended" (43). It is because he has been through this process that MacNeice looks with some envy, in canto i, at "the rebels and the young" he encounters on the train. All of these issues are explored through concrete instances in the cantos sandwiched, as it were, by iv and xi - the two "Mariette" cantos. Perhaps because the difficulties impeding a productive acceptance of process are by this point so complex, MacNeice changes direction in canto xn, another "abstract" canto. Here the two issues associated with Mariette - change and the "truth" of the concrete are considered again in more philosophical terms. "Considered" is perhaps quite the wrong word in this context, because the tone of the canto is assertive; MacNeice is not exploring an idea so much as declaring a position. And the force of his declaration comes in part from the fact that even though it is framed as a dialogue with Platonic ideas, it remains firmly attached to historical circumstances. Thus, before broaching abstract issues, MacNeice catches the tenor of life in England after the events of October, 1938: These days are misty, insulated, mute Like a faded tapestry and the soft pedal Is down and the yellow leaves are falling down And we hardly have the heart to meddle

in

Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

Any more with personal ethics or public calls; People have not recovered from the crisis, Their faces are far away, the tone of the words Belies their thesis.

(47)

The poet is himself caught up in this atmosphere, his apathy and his failure to recover being simultaneously manifested in an attitude of satirical detachment. So, after imagining the steady militarization of his society, he gives us this pithy and ironic bit of wisdom: Remember the sergeant barking at bayonet practice When you were small; To kill a dummy you must act a dummy Or you cut no ice at all.

(48)

The shift towards abstraction occurs when MacNeice tells us that it is the morning of October 25th and that he has been reading Plato. His response - quite an unexpected one given the passages just quoted - is not to mourn but to celebrate the imperfect world he inhabits: reading Plato talking about his Forms To damn the artist touting round his mirror, I am glad that I have been left the third best bed And live in a world of error. His world of capital initials, of transcendent Ideas is too bleak; For me there remain to all intents and purposes Seven days in the week And no one Tuesday is another and you destroy it If you subtract the difference and relate It merely to the Form of Tuesday. This is Tuesday The 25th of October, 1938.

(48)

We have thus been given the date twice in fifteen lines, and though the poem lays general stress on the historicity of writing, such an emphatic gesture is repeated nowhere else. The rhyme of "relate" and "1938" is also striking, particularly because the first twenty lines of this canto tend to make use of very muted half- and "feminine" rhymes. After the second mention of the date, however, the rhyme becomes emphatic, at times unlikely: "Gordian knots" and "dangerspots"; "well-adjusted" and "not distrusted"; "cushy jobs" and "intellectual snobs"; "god" and "hod." This assertive sequence of rhymes

112 At Home in Time

coincides with the speaker's determined recommitment of himself to the sequence of historical time, and the pattern quickly established and underlined is the essentially stichic one we have seen whenever MacNeice has wished to stress temporality and temporal process. The disagreement with Plato is succeeded by an endorsement of Aristotle, who was "better," "who watched the insect breed, / The natural world develop, / Stressing the function, scrapping the Form in itself" (48). Thus we are led to what is for this poem surely a central declaration: All that I would like to be is human, having a share In a civilised, articulate and well-adjusted Community where the mind is given its due But the body is not distrusted.

(49)

This is the common-sense, balanced view we know from "Plurality": pragmatic in its acceptance of human limitations, idealistic in its desire within those limitations. But two things make this statement special to Autumn Journal, one being the very clear commitment to the realization of a particular social dispensation, and the other being the insistence that a balance between "body" and "mind," concrete and abstract, will be essential to that dispensation. Looking back on the first twelve cantos of the poem we see quite clearly that MacNeice viewed such a balance as essential also to the continuing effectiveness of his text, since the gospel of time and process has been not only preached at the semantic, cognitive level, but also asserted through the form. Canto xn repeats a pattern we have seen before in the poem, as rhyme and lineation are varied to ease our sense of involvement in an inexorable movement forward, only to reassert it with greater power soon afterwards. The effect is to make us all feel, for the duration of reading, as much in the sway of "history" as the poem's speaker. Ill

MacNeice's dedication of himself to the idea of a "civilised, articulate and well-adjusted / Community" occurs at the approximate midpoint of Autumn Journal. To deduce from this that the passage also enjoys a thematic centrality in the poem may seem predictable, but it is nevertheless necessary and appropriate. Much of what follows, in cantos xin toxxiv, expands upon the characteristics that would be essential to, and the actions that would be required to bring about,

113 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

such a community. Canto xm, for example, bids a decisive and Audenesque farewell to socially damaging absolutism: ... blow the bugles over the metaphysicians, Let the pure mind return to the Pure Mind; I must be content to remain in the world of Appearance And sit on the mere appearance of a behind. Good-bye now, Plato and Hegel, The shop is closing down; They don't want any philosopher-kings in England, There ain't no universals in this man's town.

(52~3)

In canto xiv MacNeice enters the world of practical politics, a little hesitantly but reminding himself that those who by their habit hate Politics can no longer keep their private Values unless they open the public gate To a better political system.

(55)

He is canvassing on behalf of A.D. Lindsay in the by-election for Oxford City, 27 October 1938: ... from now on Each occasion must be used, however trivial, To rally the ranks of those whose chance will soon be gone For even guerilla warfare. The nicest people in England have always been the least Apt to solidarity or alignment But all of them must now align against the beast That prowls at every door and barks in every headline.

(56)

There is a generalized bitterness, in lines such as these, which we cannot explain with reference only to party politics. In canto xiv one senses that the speaker's contempt for "the beast" is fuelled not only by ideological disagreement, but also more broadly by personal outrage at being forced - against his own partly "escapist" longings - to enter into the world of public action. Similarly, MacNeice's trenchant attack on Ireland in canto xvi - "She is both a bore and a bitch" - shows the poet in conscious disgreement with Irish political life, and also embittered in what one might call a "pre-

ii4 At Home in Time

ideological" way, by its claims upon his mind and emotions. Ireland is "A culture built upon profit / Free speech nipped in the bud, / The minority always guilty" (64), and yet it cannot be disowned: "Odi atque amo" (65). This ambivalent attitude to Irish politics is in fact not unlike Yeats's, and MacNeice's catalogue of typical figures - "The born martyr and the gallant ninny / The grocer drunk with the drum" - reminds one of the list of "vivid faces" recalled in "Easter 1916." In MacNeice, as in Yeats of the late twenties, there is a psychological recoil from the violence of active politics, but the author of Autumn Journal will not allow himself to seek consolation in pondering an escape to Byzantium. Cantos xv and xx investigate and dismiss forms of escapism: xv presents a life of sensual excess ("Give us sensations and then again sensations" [57]), while xx meditates on nostalgic and sentimental temptations of the Christmas season. MacNeice's position is uncompromising as he reminds us that even children are self-conscious escapists at best: We remember our childhood's thrill Waking in the morning to the rustling of paper, The eiderdown heaped in a hill Of wogs and dogs and bears and bricks and apples And the feeling that Christmas Day Was a coral island in time where we land and eat our lotus But where we can never stay.

(79~8o)9

There is no denying MacNeice's evident attraction to escapist temptations, and to this one in particular. What we discover about our speaker in passages like this goes a long way towards explaining the rather resentful undercurrent of those cantos in which we see him resolved on - or resigned to - entering active politics. But canto xx is important for two other reasons: it shows how little lotus-eating MacNeice will actually permit himself, and also what positive form his mental response to social injustice and political instability inclines to take. He has no sooner recalled the sentimental pleasures of a child's Christmas than he quickly turns to consider the social and political impact - in the first century - of the birth of Christ, to the magi "a child born to capsize their values / And wreck their equipoise" (80). The last lines of this canto are very complicated in tone, for MacNeice goes on to present Christmas in his own time - and by implication also in the time of his idyllic childhood memories - as a spectacle of economic and social injustice:

ii5 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal we have taken over the pagan Saturnalia for our annual treat Letting the belly have its say, ignoring The spirit while we eat. And conscience still goes crying through the desert With sackcloth round his loins: A week to Christmas - hark the herald angels Beg for copper coins.

(80)

It is important to notice here the suggestion that we have dramatically fallen away from Christ's original ethical and social revolution. Precisely what that revolution involved is left somewhat hazy, although we are told that Christ "cut the Gordian knot of logical selfinterest, / The fool-proof golden cord." In doing so, he laid the ground for a just society. I do not cite canto xx in order to claim that a specifically Christian agenda directs MacNeice's poem; after all, any appeal to divine sanction would run counter to the text's emphasis on the absolute truth of temporal existence. At the same time, though, the example of Christ is most germane to the concerns and methods of Autumn Journal in its second half. For although the poet does at first seek to bring about his "civilised, articulate and well-adjusted / Community" by political action, the emphasis in the later cantos is less upon politically useful acts than on socially productive values. That is of course the emphasis we find in Christ's own "revolutionary" program; and, furthermore, in MacNeice the values advocated are themselves obviously not unrelated to those propaganded by the gospels. The litotes in that last observation is crucial, for in MacNeice's poetry allusions to the Christian story are often mildly ironic or sceptical, and almost always objective - which is to say that they concede to Christ no more than a historical identity, and admire no more than his superior humanity. We see this clearly in a poem such as "The Springboard" (1942), in which the actions of the suicidal protagonist, "wiping out his own original sin / And, like ten million others, dying for the people," are set against the analogue of Christ, but suffer no attenuation of their human interest or significance by the comparison (Collected Poems 213). Canto xviu gives us Autumn Journal's most extended consideration of God, and although MacNeice's phrasing is at first noncommittal - "Who knows if God, as Nietzsche said, is dead?" (71) it becomes clear that conventional modes of belief are to be regarded as another form of lotus-eating, of avoiding the rigours and obligations of temporal existence. Thus,

n6 At Home in Time God forbid an Indian acquiescence, The apotheosis of the status quo; If everything that happens happens according To the nature and wish of God, then God must go: Lay your straw in the streets and go about your business An inch at a time, an inch at a time, We have not even an hour to spend repenting Our sins; the quarters chime And every minute is its own alarum clock And what we are about to do Is of vastly more importance Than what we have done or not done hitherto.

(72)

Here we notice the implicitly linear understanding of the realm for human life - "go about your business / An inch at a time" - and especially the closing emphasis on what canto in called a "future of action." It will be remembered that in that same canto MacNeice makes use of the discourse of Christian theology to describe the end of action: "a better Kingdom ... [which] in time may find its bodies in men's bodies." But in that formula the incarnation is no more than a metaphor for the realization of earthly potential. In fact, MacNeice's habit in Autumn Journal is invariably to reverse the more common procedure by which the world of time and place is made to supply metaphors for timelessness. That "better Kingdom," despite the aura of religious suggestion, is assumed to be earthly; and so, with the same "despite," are those values and concerns which, in the closing cantos of MacNeice's Journal, are presented as the enduring basis of a civilized and welladjusted community. "What comes out to light," asks the poet in xxi, "what is there of value / Lasting from day to day?" (81). I would like to close this chapter by considering his own answer to this question, for the acceptance of time and process which we encounter so strongly in the early cantos finds meaning and completion for MacNeice in an appropriate code of human conduct. As "London Rain" (July 1939) intimates, it is not action in general which redeems our temporality, but acts of a specifically constructive sort: Whether the living river Began in bog or lake, The world is what was given, The world is what we make And we can only discover Life in the life we make.

(Collected Poems 162)

ii7 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

One very rudimentary requirement for a civilized community, constantly alluded to in the poem, is the equitable distribution of wealth. So, in xin, when the poet dismisses the metaphysicians, he does so acknowledging that for "Dozens of men in the street," if not necessarily for himself, there is "the perennial if unimportant problem / Of getting enough to eat" (52). In the main, however, MacNeice's survey of the ground of community is not quite so mundane. Perhaps the most important suggestion made in the final cantos arises, interestingly, out of yet another meditation on escape - this time, into the soporific world of the bath, where "responsibility dies and the thighs are happy / And the body purrs like a cat" (66). Like those of Christmas, the distractions of "the luxury life" are only short-lived: "this lagoon grows cold, we have to leave it, stepping / On to a check rug on a cork mat." There follows an intriguing passage in which we are told that "Plato was right to define the bodily pleasures / As the pouring of water into a hungry sieve / But wrong to ignore the rhythm which the intercrossing / Coloured waters permanently give." "Intercrossing" is the key word there, for it suggests that some permanent value subsists in the traffic of ordinary life. And within a few lines it becomes clear that for MacNeice connections specifically between people can provide a meaning and motive for existence: Who could expect - or want - to be spiritually self-supporting, Eternal self-abuse? Why not admit that other people are always Organic to the self, that a monologue Is the death of language and that a single lion Is less himself, or alive, than a dog and another dog? Virtue going out of us always; the eyes grow weary With vision but it is vision builds the eye ...

(67)

This passage takes us back to Modern Poetry and its comments on the communal nature of language, and in that regard it obviously also invites comparison with Auden and the "Writing" essay of 1932. But the insistence on an "organic" interdependence of human beings also has its counterpart in "New Year Letter," in part three and Auden's celebration of the small society that gathered around his friend Elizabeth Mayer: I felt the unexpected power That drove our ragged egos in From the dead-ends of greed and sin To sit down at the wedding feast,

n8 At Home in Time And Schubert sang and Mozart played And Gluck and food and friendship made Our privileged community That real republic which must be The State all politicians claim, Even the worst, to be their aim.

(46-7)

This is another form of the "Vision of Agape" which Auden recalls experiencing in 1933, and which is commemorated in his poem "Out on the lawn I lie in bed/' written in June of that year. At the heart of this sense of community, Auden tells us, is an exact understanding of "what it means to love one's neighbour as oneself" (Forewords and Afterwords 69). In Autumn Journal MacNeice records no similar experience, but canto xvn postulates this kind of human interrelationship as not only psychologically valuable but also the necessary basis for any community, large or small. A Whitmanian rhetoric carries this observation somewhat further than MacNeice's hard-nosed common sense will normally allow: A point here and a point there: the current Jumps the gaps, the ego cannot live Without becoming other for the Other Has got yourself to give. And even the sense of taste provides communion With God as plant or beast; The sea in fish, the field in a salad of endive, A sacramental feast. Open the world wide, open the senses, Let the soul stretch its blind enormous arms, There is vision in the fingers only needing waking, Ready for light's alarms.

(68)

The gospel preached here - "Nothing is self-sufficient" - is more temperately stated in the reflective canto xxi, where we have the appeal: Only give us the courage of our instinct, The will to truth and love's initiative, Then we could hope to live A life beyond the self but self-completing.

(82)

ii9 Louis MacNeice and the Lesson of Autumn Journal

That last qualification, "but self-completing," constrains us not to read "beyond the self" as a gesture of extravagant mysticism. Rather, it indicates again that the benefits of treating others as "organic to the self" accrue to the self and to those others in the context of the here and now. Despite MacNeice's increasing use of a style of religious entreaty - supported by allusions to classical deities and to St Francis of Assisi (82) - the poem in its closing stages is less concerned with metaphysics than with personal and social psychology. Canto xxi ends, in fact, by using the absolute finality of death to stress the need for passionate and productive action in life: "A fire should be left burning / Till it burns itself out: / We shan't have another chance to dance and shout / Once the flames are silent" (84). The argument has thus brought us, as xxm remarks, "to a place in space where shortly / All of us may be forced to camp in time"; and the play on those last three words is instructive, for the suggestion is that time is a "place" which eventually we must acknowledge as our natural and only dwelling, and which we must allow to guide our behaviour. "Here and now the new valkyries ride" (92), and in the "country" which the final canto tells us is time (93), there is the opportunity to work for a new dispensation. The goal cannot be "a land where all the milk is cream / And all the girls are willing"; instead the poem exhorts us to dream in earnest "of the real / Future when we wake, / Design a home, a factory, a fortress / Which, though with effort, we can really make." MacNeice's final lines then translate his own "vision of agape/' of a society of individuals "organic to each other," into practical terms. No one will be "debarred his natural music," "the waters of life" will be free of "the ice-blockade of hunger," thought will be free, the worship of power and profit will have disappeared, and the individual will no longer be "squandered / In self-assertion" (95). This is not quite the conclusion of Autumn Journal, and it would be to the poem's detriment if it were. For as the details of MacNeice's dream are listed, one is irresistibly drawn to remind the poet that he is possibly contravening his own injunction that social dreams be realizable. We are forestalled, however, when in the last lines he acknowledges that he has doubts, but declares that the severity of present conditions leaves no room for procrastination: "The new Year comes with bombs, it is too late / To dose the dead with honourable intentions" (96). Even if it seems unlikely to us that individuals in the world at large will ever grasp fully their "organic" interrelationship, MacNeice's passion - driven as it is by empathy for "the dead," those victims of the present dispensation - persuades us that the will to achieve that goal is vital and operative. And that is surely one

i2o At Home in Time

reason why we can read without too much embarrassment the poem's final declaration of faith in the coming of a better kingdom. The language allows us to imagine that kingdom in the manner the poem so far has prescribed: as a time-bound and earthly phenomenon. But thanks to the poet's doubts, to the need for a bold rhetorical gesture, or even to a reassertion of the romantic side of his "dialectical" personality, the wording of the conclusion also seems faintly to imply that plenitude might only follow a resolution of process. What we hear in the ending is not really the confidence of a worldly social reformer, but what, adapting a phrase from MacNeice's "Hidden Ice" (1936), we might call a mild bravado in the service of time: There will be time to audit The accounts later, there will be sunlight later And the equation will come out at last.

4 A.D. Hope: A Poetics and Poetry of "Counter-Revolution

"I was never seduced, as so many of my poetic generation were, by the modish but essentially trivial fame of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound": thus one of the more rebarbative obiter dicta to be found in The New Cratylus (1979), "notes on the craft of poetry" by Australia's senior poet, A.D. Hope (11). It would be difficult to find an attitude to Eliot further removed than this from MacNeice's generous confession of debt. "Trivial" is for Hope a favoured term of opprobrium, applied in the same work to the free verse movement (58); and, significantly for my argument here, it is the one which, in his earlier essay "The Discursive Mode" (1956), he attaches to Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's arguments in "The Poetic Principle," he tells us, hardly deserve "a serious answer" (7), but he allows himself a response all the same. Poe, as is well known, argued that "the phrase, 'a long poem/ is simply a contradiction in terms," and that "the degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so-called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length" (33). This, Hope replies, is like maintaining that "love consists only of brief passages of intense excitement in sexual intercourse, and that, because a man cannot prolong these moments indefinitely, he is never in love except when he is in bed" (7-8). If we begin to quibble - about the equation of love and sex, say - the analogy crumbles, but there is a valid common-sense point being made: namely, that in practice all poems will demonstrate what Hope likes to call a "modulation" of intensity, that "higher flights" occur in relation to some other "middle ground" (5).

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This is a point, interestingly, on which Hope is preceded by Eliot, to whose "trivial fame" he claims to have been indifferent, and whom he habitually links with the "superficial and trivial" aesthetic theories of Poe (New Cratylus 140). The weakness of that linkage shows clearly in the light of "From Poe to Valery" (1948), where Eliot points out that Poe was mistaken in conceiving of a poem as having "a single simple effect": in a long poem some parts may be deliberately planned to be less "poetic" than others: these passages may show no lustre when extracted, but may be intended to elicit, by contrast, the significance of other parts. A long poem may gain by the widest possible variations of intensity. (34)

This view leads Eliot into a general judgment on Poe which Hope would surely find congenial: Poe's is "the intellect of a highly gifted person before puberty" (35). And when Eliot applauds The Vanity of Human Wishes for its use of the "middle ground" of discourse, his approach to the long poem emerges - by that same standard - as distinctly post-pubertal, more circumspect and practical. Indeed, when the "mature" practicality of Eliot does find fault in Johnson's poem, it finds the very fault discovered in Poe - that commitment to a "single simple effect," the absence of stylistic variety. Goldsmith's Deserted Village, Eliot proposes, is the greater work because of its constant modulation from "the descriptive to the meditative, to the personal, to the meditative again, to the landscape with figures" ("Johnson" 181). To judge by his essays in The Cave and the Spring (1965) and The New Cratylus, the Vanity and The Deserted Village are works which Hope would admit to his canon, and for much the same reasons that they are celebrated by Eliot. That Hope's disparaging references to Eliot are contradicted by his own rather Eliotic stance on certain critical questions is a point that has been made before. John Douglas Pringle remarked in 1958 that Hope's contempt for Eliot "is certainly more pretended than genuine," and that Hope and his fellow Australian James McAuley are "more influenced by Eliot than they would admit" (142). Ten years ago, David Malouf implied in a review of The New Cratylus that an adversarial stance is a psychologically necessary part of Hope's literary activities, one that on occasion allows tendentiousness to override logic and consistency. Thus, while Hope's general attack on Eliot and Pound can be read as a piece of self-conscious but "endearing old-fogeyism" (Malouf 151), specific aspects of it can seem - in the context of Hope's own critical statements - contradictory and disingenuous, if not dishonest. For

123 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution"

example Malouf reminds us, in reply to Hope's strictures on "personal expression" in poetry, that no one, not even Professor Hope, is harder than Eliot was on the notion that what a poet writes is a personal expression of the poet's "state of heart and mind." (155)

It is only fair to recall, however, that Eliot's position on this matter is mentioned with approval by Hope on a number of occasions. In his essay "The Sincerity of Poetry" (1965), he tells us that Eliot's view in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is one to which he would "thoroughly subscribe" (71); and in the preface to his Selected Poems of 1963 Hope notes that on the subject of "impersonality" in poetry "I am at one with T.S. Eliot, a poet whose poetry I cannot bring myself to like at all" (ix). That phrase "whose poetry" (my italics) seems carefully chosen, perhaps suggesting - or at least allowing - that Eliot's achievement in criticism and theory is not for Hope as "trivial" as his poetic fame. That Hope is prevented from making such a point directly and positively is no doubt a question of obscure personal motives, but it is likely also a matter of literary politics; and as Julian Croft's recent essay makes clear, both modernism and the reputations of its chief practitioners have for complex reasons been highly politicized in Australian literature from as early as 1920. Hope was involved, on the "traditionalist" side, in perhaps the most memorable assault on modernist poetics, the Ern Malley hoax of 1944. The invention of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, Ern Malley was successfully presented to Max Harris - editor of the journal Angry Penguins - as a deceased, neglected but talented Australian poet in the Apocalyptic mould, the title of whose only volume, The Darkening Ecliptic, loudly proclaimed the neo-romantic and visionary character of his writing. Geoffrey Dutton has gone so far as to argue that Hope played an active role in the hoax,1 but Brian Matthews prefers to see him gleefully complicit in the more deliberate machinations of McAuley and Stewart (308). As Croft has pointed out, however, "the response to modernism was not as polarised as the Ern Malley hoax would seem to indicate," and he notes that Hope's writings of the thirties show some "sympathy for the ideas present in modernism" (419). The rhetoric and the gestures of literary politics were thus, in some crucial ways, out of touch with literary fact. Nevertheless, and even though Hope's position since the thirties has been fraught by such contradictions (it has been evident to some of his critics, for example, that by nature he is, in Malouf's words, "a full-blooded romantic"

124 At Home in Time

[152]), Hope has always been very vocally aligned with that neoclassical "counter-revolution" in Australian letters memorably isolated by Pringle in his Australian Accent (1958). Hope's frequently polemical essays and reviews are enough to situate him as the leading spokesman for neoclassicism in Australian verse, the most articulate opponent of both romanticism and modernism. My intention in the first part of this chapter is to collapse that adversarial position, to blur some of the facile distinctions on which it is based, and more specifically to indicate the ways in which Hope's much-vaunted classicism, far from being a reaction against "modernism" as embodied in T.S. Eliot, is in fact a continuation or even a repetition of key Eliotic ideas. The case which I outline provides unusually striking confirmation of MacNeice's intuition that "pigeonholing" writers according to these categories can be - potentially, at least - even more a game of self-definition among literary critics than a disinterested strategy for analysing literary texts. Add to Hope's comments on the "trivial" fame of Eliot the following statement on free verse, the disease that in his view was spawned in the nineteenth century and became a "destructive epidemic" in the twentieth: A whole generation of poets has followed T.S. Eliot into this waste land of prosody where verse, half-dead, trails its flabby rhythms and dispirited cadences across the page, on the plea that the old forms were dead and that this moribund prosody was a means of resurrecting the divine dance of language. ("Free Verse" 49)

Who has been followed here, one wants to ask, Eliot the poet or Eliot the critic? The latter, it will be remembered, stressed that "the socalled vers libre which is good is anything but 'free'" ("Reflections on Vers Libre" 32), and concluded his argument on the subject with the assertion that formal rhymed verse will certainly not lose its place. We only need the coming of a Satirist - no man of genius is rarer - to prove that the heroic couplet has lost none of its edge since Dryden and Pope laid it down. (36)

Eliot the critic is very cautious on the subject of vers libre, and on the basis of passages such as this might be argued to have had greater reservations about modernist free verse than about the apparently opposite poetic movement, the neoclassical one, which in fact leads to Hope's own work - his Dunciad Minor (1950; 1970), for example. Eliot the poet also refuses to comply with Hope's sweeping categorization

125 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution"

of him: witness the appeal to eighteenth-century stylistic and moral standards in his drafts for The Waste Land. Furthermore, Eliot's extended attempt at a narrative in heroic couplets pre-dates Hope's Dunciad by some thirty years. In dealing with Eliot, Hope makes some distinctions where evidence suggests they should not be made, and fails to make others where perhaps they are required. It is the price of constantly thinking in literary-political terms, of needing to see writers, works, and movements as "modernist" or "anti-modernist," "romantic" or "anti-romantic." Modernism in literature is a phenomenon of style as well as of ideas, and since Hope appears to be repelled by one while sympathetic to the other, the question of his own poetic "ideology" is not nearly as uncomplicated a matter as is often assumed. Recognition of this fact is the strong foundation of Kevin Hart's recent and scrupulous study of Hope in the Oxford Australian Writers Series. Julian Croft makes the point, apropos of early Australian responses to modernism, that "it is worth bearing in mind a simple distinction: that between modernist themes and preoccupations, and modernist styles" (414). He writes that Australian poets of the thirties "turned their attention to the subjects of modernism but the forms and language they used were derived from the traditions of the previous age" (414-15). In Hope's prose it is the modernist style that comes most often under attack; the theory of modernism - as articulated in the literary essays of Pound for example - he does not dismiss so readily. In a typical passage from The New Cratylus we find him making neutral use of a Poundian phrase ("make it new"), and then going on to quote Eliot in support of his own position: the poet "will write, as T.S. Eliot said, 'not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe ... has a simultaneous existence'" (69). Immediately after the quotation comes Hope's characteristic reservation, "This is perhaps demanding too much," an indication of his demurrer at Eliot. But in the next phrase he glides over Eliot to focus his criticism on a body of poetry and poetic theory that, he argues, lies behind the poet: that of "the late Symbolists in France." Eliot, we are told, "was, perhaps, too much influenced" by symbolist practice; the influence of the symbolists on his poetry was "damaging" (69). This bogy is already familiar to us from MacNeice, whose classical eye traces literary corruption to the same source. Hope's estimation of Eliot's poetry and prose declines, it seems, in inverse proportion to the presence in it of symbolist techniques and doctrines. It is that late romantic poetic, rather than its epigone "modernism," which is Hope's real bete noire. In "The Discursive Mode," he calls symbolism

126 At Home in Time

a heresy, points to its origins in Poe's essay on "The Poetic Principle" - a work for which we have already seen his contempt - and goes on to describe the doctrine with unconcealed revulsion: Narrative, drama, excogitation, argument, description were rejected as having nothing to do with the pure essence of poetry. Poetry was music. Poetry was not the thing said, but continual evocation of delicious suggestions of meaning. Poetry was an unconscious crystallization of glittering images upon the bare twig of metre. Poetry, at the nadir of this search for its essence, became the formless babble and vomit of the poet's subconscious mind. (5)

In "The Satiric Muse" (1965), we again find Hope on the assault against symbolism; and he describes it in much the same way, only with perhaps more restraint. His point is to defend satire as a literary form, and in the process he points to "a general suspicion [which he does not share] of what I may call Applied Poetry in distinction from Pure Poetry." Satire is "applied" poetry in the sense that it is "written with a definite social purpose. It is unashamedly and openly didactic" (62). Hope's phrase "pure poetry" alludes to typical Symboliste usage. Thus Mallarme writes that L'ceuvre pure implique la disparition elocutoire du poete, qui cede 1'initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur inegalite mobilises; ils s'allument de reflets reciproques comme une virtuelle trainee de feux sur des pierreries, remplac.ant la respiration perceptible en 1'ancien souffle lyrique ou la direction personelle enthousiaste de la phrase. (366)

The disappearance of the author envisaged here is not to be equated with the kind of impersonality in poetry which Hope has elsewhere applauded; the work is "pure" because of the extreme attenuation of a "speaking" voice. Without the "direction personelle enthousiaste de la phrase," the text becomes apparently non-propositional, an "unconscious crystallization of glittering images upon the bare twig of metre." In that last phrase Hope might well be paraphrasing Mallarme's famous description in the passage above. This seems especially likely, given that in The New Cratylus it becomes clear that Hope's estimation of Mallarme is high - except to the extent that Mallarme shows the influence of the "essentially superficial and trivial theories" of Poe. Of Baudelaire and Mallarme he writes, "It is extraordinary that these two minds, so original, acute and penetrating in their own criticism, should have been so impressed by the specious sophistry of Poe's essays" (140). Although Hope concedes

127 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution"

in "The Satiric Muse" that the doctrine of a "pure" poetry "may be rather discredited today/' he argues that "the general attitude of mind that it promoted still persists" (63) - thanks in part, as he rather surprisingly fails to note, to Eliot's popularization of symbolist techniques. In The New Cratylus, an important part of Hope's attack on symbolism is his discussion of a poem we have already encountered, held up by Pound as a reminder to the "classical" Eliot of his symbolist obligations. This is "Art Poetique," Verlaine's pointedly anti-classical manifesto work in which, Hope tells us, The play of wit and verbal brilliance is banished. Any hint of the comic mode is rejected. Eloquence, that is to say, resort to traditional forms and formulas, is forbidden and even rhyme is suspect. ... (142)

In the new poetic of 1884, apparently, "nothing but the music of verse matters, but it has to be a vague and atmospheric sort of music. Nuance, the overtones of words rather than their direct meanings ... is what counts for poetic effect" (141-2). David Malouf argues that Hope misreads Verlaine's poem, attributing to the French poet a belief in the absolute truth of these ideas that the text does not support (159). Whether or not that is the case, it is certainly clear that Hope uses Verlaine's poem to define an adversarial critical position for himself, one that is fiercely traditional, rational, and "classical." And what is especially interesting, his discussion of "Art Poetique" makes it possible for us to define in a more concrete way his position with regard to T.S. Eliot; for if I have read correctly Pound's motive in quoting Verlaine to Eliot, it would appear that Hope and the author of the Waste Land drafts are allies rather than enemies in the classical cause. At the very least, their peculiar intersection over Verlaine points to the possibility of discovering an agreement between them on poetic theory even more complex and extensive than has so far been noticed. One other point of connection, as we have already seen, is Edgar Allan Poe and his indictment of the long poem as a literary form. My particular interest in what follows will be to compare Hope's views with those of Eliot, not simply on the viability, but also on the nature and possible functions of an extended poetic work. Perhaps the central essay in Hope's "classical" definition of himself is "The Middle Way" (1965), a piece which moves from a sympathetic analysis of a number of figures from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - Waller, Denham, Dryden, Pope - to various "fundamental concepts]" of classicism (60) and that great source of wisdom in the area, Horace. Hope's discussion of the eighteenth-century idea of

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"correctness" in poetry leads him into a consideration of the Horatian via media: This doctrine is extremely important. In the first place it means of course avoidance of excess, it means common sense and urbanity, the great ideals of eighteenth-century literature; but it means much more than this because Horace does not mean that art should be mediocre. It is actually a counsel of perfection and its following makes poetry the difficult and exacting art it is- (57)

Implied in all of this is "the next Horatian canon, that of plainness and clarity and order" (59), and soon we find Hope enunciating the classical doctrine of style: it will be plain, clear and exact and it will by exactness and by the clarity and the order of the whole treatment achieve a miraculous Tightness which is beauty. Such writing will have a deceptive appearance of natural, effortless ease, almost ordinary in its apparent lack of effort. (59-60)

The highest achievement of this style, we are told, is Pope, and the essay closes with the nostalgic observation that from the latter part of the eighteenth century the Horatian ideal began to degenerate. In The New Cratylus Hope presents "the last thirty years of the eighteenth century and the first thirty years of the nineteenth" - the period of the "romantic movement" (129) - as an occasion of momentous human and artistic change, in which something rather like Eliot's famous "dissociation of sensibility" took place. The precarious balance in all matters characteristic of "the middle way" was upset, and particularly damaging to poetry "in the long run" was the view that the important thing in a poem is the "emotion" it generates and that this emotion, which is the raison d'etre of the poem, is an expression of the poet's own feelings and is valuable for what it reveals of his personality. (130)

Since we have seen that for Hope the ideal was a strenuous balancing of intellect and emotion, it is no wonder that, in talking about symbolism and other romantic or post-romantic theories, he frequently makes use of the word "heresy," suggesting not only an affront against accepted doctrine, but also misguided emphasis on one or other element in a dialectic. It is intriguing to notice that in his account of romantic theory, and particularly of Wordsworth's Preface to the second edition of Lyrical

129 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution"

Ballads, Hope resorts to Eliot for clarification. The phrasing, typically, implies that Eliot is a late extension of the Wordsworthian tradition: The subjects of poetry, their presentation of a vision of the world without or within, becomes only a means to generate the emotion, or, as T.S. Eliot was later to put it, to find "an objective correlative" for the transmission of the poet's state of heart and mind to his readers. (130)

In Hope's account of the eclipse of a classical ideal, this carefully judged suggestion of Eliot's fundamental romanticism seems rather perverse. After all, Eliot's own reservations about the romantics are well known, and furthermore it would be difficult to see in what way Hope's remarks on the great poetical shift of the late eighteenth century were not anticipated by Eliot's famous "dissociation of sensibility" essay, "The Metaphysical Poets." Even though "The Metaphysical Poets" sees the "dissociation of sensibility" already operative in the eighteenth century, we have observed that in Eliot's other essays a great deal of favourable attention is given to the period we broadly call "Augustan." It is rather odd to find that none of these - not even the glaringly relevant "Johnson as Critic and Poet" - crop up in Hope's classical polemics; in The New Cratylus there is no reference to an essay by Eliot beyond "The Metaphysical Poets," not even to his essay on Dryden, which is from the same year. And yet that is a piece very much in the spirit of Hope's own essay on "The Middle Way," and might well have been adduced as supporting evidence. It might also have warranted mention in "The Discursive Mode," in which Hope argues explicitly against Arnold's disparagement of Pope and Dryden (something which Eliot does implicitly in "John Dryden"), and by his tone presents himself as a voice crying in the modernist wilderness, like Eliot the lonely founder of a rediscovered classicism. The writing is polemical, one almost wants to say evangelical: The first step in intelligent regeneration of the soil of poetry may well be to re-establish the discursive mode, in particular to restore the practice of formal satire. For good satire not only spreads and encourages an appreciation of basic, simple forms of poetry, it not only nourishes and binds the soil, it is in itself a powerful force to check and eradicate the destructive forms, the noxious and parasitic growths within a civilization, by making them absurd and contemptible. The evil and incoherence and folly in society are also connected. They rely and depend on one another. Wherever the golden derision or the saeva indignatio of satire strikes, it weakens and shakes the forces that corrupt the heart and destroy poetry. (9)

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One of the striking things about these words is the ease with which prescriptions for poetry tumble over into social, cultural criticism. There is an assumption - apparently unproblematic - that poetic forms are involved with the condition of society, and furthermore that certain poetic forms can exert a salutary influence on society at large. In this Hope is taking a characteristically Horatian stance, and he is once again in agreement with Eliot, as even the briefest glance at the latter's "The Social Function of Poetry" will confirm. What is more interesting is that Hope would seem to be in disagreement with himself, for while in "The Satiric Muse" he speaks favourably of this kind of "applied poetry," in another of his essays, "The Activists" (1960), he dismisses as "disgusting" and "tedious" such topics as "The Place of Literature in the Modern World" and "The Function of the Writer in Society" - the latter coming uncomfortably close to the title of Eliot's essay. In fact, Hope's argument in "The Activists" is more subtle than such extravagant and provocative diction leads us to expect. By "activism" in literature he does not mean any and all instances in which literature appears intended to persuade or to alter society; rather he means the critical requirement that any writer who aspires to success must "write in such a way that he promotes something" (29). The point - which is also MacNeice's - is that while promotion and persuasion can be the intention or the effect of certain very "great" works, a persuasive purpose is not necessary for greatness. Reaction against "activist" literary thinking, Hope rightly notes, usually involves falling back on "some form of the theory of Art for Art's sake" (31), but this is a late-romantic response and one for which we might predict he would have very little patience. Instead, in a passage closely resembling the conclusion of MacNeice's Modern Poetry, he negotiates a middle way on the question: The heresy of Activism is not to be combated by asserting that a work of art can or should have no purpose outside itself, which is plainly not true. It is to be combated by pointing out, on evidence, that great art can have every possible kind of social, moral or intellectual purpose, or it can have none at all. To require all writers to have a particular sort of social purpose has nothing to do with the standards or purposes of literature as such. (31)

The effect of this argument is not to negate in itself the idea that literature can perform a social function, but simply to remove social efficacy as a ground of critical judgment. In the suggestion that "great art can have every possible kind of social, moral or intellectual purpose," Hope seems to open a way to the conclusion that, depending

131 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution"

on how subtly we construe that word "purpose," most works can be thought of as having one. Indeed, to suggest that any work could have no purpose "at all" strikes one as a rather bloodless proposition: the very existence of the text is evidence of some purpose, surely. Hope once described the substance of such essays as "The Activists" as opinions and "occasional reflections," not attempts to "argue and demonstrate a truth" (Cave vii). Indeed, the position of that essay as I have traced it so far seems basically unexceptionable precisely because we are not required to read it as other than a matter of opinion. However, once Hope begins to theorize his anti-activist stance - thereby laying some claim to "truth" - difficulties arise. Having observed (with a portentousness rather surprising in our post-Saussurean age) that poetry, and by implication language, "is not merely imitative or representational" (34), and having asserted that activism "considers only the representational function of literature" (35), he concludes that activism is a poetic heresy which fails to take notice of the way in which literature "creates by means of its material something as completely sui generis as music creates" (35). An effective response to this is that, except perhaps in the nai'vest forms of socialist realism, "activist" theories of literature are not exclusively concerned with language as mimesis. Hope tells an anecdote about Karl Marx, "that great nineteenth-century romantic," which indicates that even he saw the limitations of "the cruder sort of Activism" (32). Hope's understanding of the nature and function of "activist" writing is itself, if not crude, then overly restricted. Even Lukacs - a thinker distinguished for the urgency with which, at one time, he argued for the importance of "realism" in art - stresses that in a "realistic" text we are not dealing with an unproblematic imitation of "objective" reality. Instead, he asserts that we are encountering the author's "ideology or Weltanschauung," and what is more important, we are encountering it not only in the picture of reality we are given, but in the "style" of the writing (19). The ideological power of a text does not, therefore, lie exclusively in its mimetic dimension. It is exercised in the operation of its language, and as Lukacs's entire essay on "The Ideology of Modernism" makes clear, language operating in an anti-mimetic way can be as ideologically fraught - and therefore "activist" - as a piece of social realism. That essay of Lukacs now seems itself rather crude next to more recent work on the same subject by Althusser, for example, and Eagleton. But it does at least help to indicate some of the ways in which Hope's suggestion that "activism" is built upon a belief in the "representational function of literature" may be contested as simplistic and unhelpful. Another interesting point to be made is that Hope's

132 At Home in Time

rapprochement in "The Activists" with symbolist poetics is peculiar to that essay. "The Discursive Mode" is more usual, with its vociferous attacks on any and all forms of aestheticism, particularly on the Mallarmean notion of a musical, "pure" poetry. In "The Activists" Hope seems uncharacteristically keen to allow for the drift of the signifier above the signified. In fact, the argument runs directly against his statements about language in the second chapter of The New Cratylus, where he concedes that language is "plainly an arbitrary code system," but insists that for various reasons we use language as if the signified is present in the sign, as if "the word is 'like' the thing" (14). Usually, as we have already seen, he is intolerant of parallels drawn between words and music; but here it suits his rhetorical purpose to point to a connection between music and the non-referential dimension of language, and by holding up for laughter the idea that "a string quartet" could "promote peace," to deride the (purportedly) parallel notion of an engaged or "activist" text. In The New Cratylus, this poetic of oppositions and clear-cut distinctions is undone in a more sophisticated investigation of literary language and its effect on, and interaction with, the reader. Hope elaborates in the penultimate chapter on the idea of ecology, "the interaction of living beings with their whole environment." The previous chapter's investigation of the "ways in which the practice and theory of poetry may be affected by its social or intellectual environment" leads him to declare that "the interaction is mutual, since poetry affects social attitudes and values as well as responding to them" (146). One assumes that no kind of text exists outside of this ecology, that it takes all kinds to make our world, and that in some sense what is envisaged is an active making, a transformation of the world by literature. This is as true of the cruder forms of "activist" writing as it is of "higher" literature, and looking back on "The Activists" we can see from the following passage that even in that essay the two kinds of work are seen involved in a similar process. Non-activist literature may not have as its immediate aim the transformation of society, but it will have a related, though perhaps more obscure, effect nevertheless: This is the task of the arts, then, to grow, to evolve new forms, to spread over the barren landscape of merely social man the mantle of their rich and various vegetation, to transform that world by filling it with a higher order of creation. ("The Activists" 36)

"Activism is the enemy of this process," we are told, "because it tries to substitute for it the task of serving the lower order of creation, and

133 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution"

promoting its ends, political change, education, culture, Christian morals, or Soviet Morale." Activism is the "enemy," then, not because it aims at altering society where "high" art does not, but rather because it propagates a different kind of ideology. In The New Cratylus Hope's perspective is somewhat less romantic, and though he still refuses to endorse theories which reduce poetry to "a purely social phenomenon" (165), he is able to say in conclusion that There is nothing mysterious about poetry. The whole endeavour of this book is to show that it is composed of ordinary materials familiar to us in other contexts and that it works by similarly familiar processes. (164)

It is especially in this focus on the ordinary materials and processes of poetry that Hope's classicism makes itself apparent. The New Cratylus as a whole is a remarkable exercise in common-sense poetics, consistently aware of the complications involved in the encounter between a reader and a text. Hope pays considerable attention to those topics traditionally of great interest to formalist critics - metre and rhyme, for example - but he is interested in them not merely for themselves, but for their part in the "activity" that is language: "a word is not an object, it is an activity; it expresses thought and feeling, or it arouses thought and feeling" (18). The text is thus not only expressive but affective as well, and this means that to read is to lay oneself open to a form of adduction, of transformation: There is a sense in which a poem is a kind of conversation with an unknown person, with a mind which is imagined and projected into space by the poem itself, like the pollen grains of wild-inseminated plants scattered out to find their opposite numbers. On this theory of elective affinities, the poem becomes a series of conversations in the sense in which I have just used the word. (19)

What emerges very clearly from The New Cratylus is that it is not only the "content" of a literary text, or the "images" of reality which it "presents," which exert power over the reader. What Hope calls "the material" of poetry - diction, syntax, rhythm, rhyme, and so on - is the real source of affect. In short, he follows Lukacs in treating style as the crux of literary communication, in seeing that every slight alteration in style profoundly effects the nature of the "conversation" which a text will occasion with its reader. And, since poems lead a "parasitic" life in their readers, since they insinuate their "process[es] of mind" into our own (24), even innocuous nuances of style may

134 At Home in Time

have serious ramifications for our way of seeing and relating to the world, even if only for the duration of reading. By this point we are returned to Hope's essay on "The Discursive Mode," and its resounding conclusion which blurs the boundary between the regeneration of "the soil of poetry" and the regeneration of society at large. "The Activists" notwithstanding, we have seen that his tendency to see poetry as part of a larger human "ecology" is consistent. With this his proselytizing for a revival of discursive styles, of obviously didactic poetry, is very much in harmony. And one has to point out that here again he is in step with Eliot, who not only argues for the discursive mode in his essay on Dryden, but also praises poetry of "oratorical persuasion" in John Dryden: The Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic. Eliot was likely no more willing than Hope to accept what the latter called a "purely social" view of poetry and associated with Giambattista Vico and Thomas Love Peacock (The New Cratylus 165-6); in "Poetry and Drama," for example, Eliot wrote mysteriously of there being, "beyond the nameable, classifiable emotions and motives of our conscious life when directed towards action ... a fringe of indefinite extent, of feeling which we can only detect, so to speak, out of the corner of the eye and can never completely focus" (145). But despite this, Eliot's approach to poetry is frequently "ecological" as Hope's is, a rational consideration of the relationship between social or cultural conditions and the "material" of literature. In this connection the key Eliot text is "Johnson as Critic and Poet," but a striking example which I have not yet considered is the essay on "Religion and Literature" (1935), which begins by setting to one side a key formalist idea - "The 'greatness' of literature," it argues, "cannot be determined solely by literary standards" (388) and then goes on to assert that at certain times "morals are open to being altered by literature" (389). Precisely how this happens is apparently more easy to grasp in the case of fiction than in other forms: "The fiction that we read," writes Eliot in a passage that recalls Auden's explanation of "Why People Read Books," "affects our behaviour towards our fellow men, affects our patterns of ourselves" (393), and it does this by providing models for certain kinds of behaviour. In saying this, Eliot acknowledges a debt to Montgomery Belgion's book The Human Parrot, and perhaps the implied theory of imitation is a little crude; it certainly is the kind of view against which Hope's argument in "The Activists" might have some success. But Eliot's general point is one on which Hope would probably agree:

135 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution" I suppose that everything we eat has some other effect upon us than merely the pleasure of taste or mastication; it affects us during the process of assimilation and digestion; and I believe that exactly the same is true of anything we read. (394)

In what follows, Eliot elaborates a view of the relationship between text and reader that very closely resembles Hope's "parasitic" view as we saw it laid out in The New Cratylus: "What happens is a kind of inundation, of invasion of the undeveloped personality by the stronger personality of the poet" (394). Reading is thus a potentially dangerous experience - especially if we read only one text or one author. On the other hand, if we read widely, the effect - though compounded - can be salutary: in the process of being affected by one powerful personality after another, we cease to be dominated by any one, or by any small number. The very different views of life, cohabiting in our minds, affect each other, and our own personality asserts itself and gives each a place in some arrangement peculiar to ourself. (395)

Eliot's answer to the ideological power of texts is thus to accept that they do exercise power, and that there is no escape from that. Furthermore, he cautions against the assumption that the effect upon us of a literary work can be localized either in time or in a single aspect of our being: "reading never affects simply a sort of special sense: it affects us as entire human beings; it affects our moral and religious existence" (396). Here Eliot makes the point with striking directness, so much so that we are encouraged to accept this as an unproblematic declaration of fact. In this respect it might appear that he goes beyond Hope to view the relationship between text and reader in a more lucid, rationalistic way. But there is still a mystery which attaches to that word "affects," a vagueness similar in kind though not in degree to that we encounter in Hope's treatment of the same issue, his insistence that poetry "transform[s] the world by filling it with a higher order of creation." Both agree that in some perhaps quite attenuated sense all poetry is didactic or propagands a particular world-view. Hope writes that even "the simplest lyric, description or narration in verse may be intensely metaphysical in its effect without putting forward any profound philosophical view" (The New Cratylus 173). Here "metaphysical" is used to mean implying in some way "systems of belief and speculation" (173). How much more satisfactory is this

136 At Home in Time account than his earlier argument that such effects can be achieved only through the mimetic use of language. No doubt the parallels between Hope and Eliot could be pursued even more subtly and at greater length. But the literary-political categories in terms of which Hope has characterized his relationship to Eliot are essentially crude, and enough has been said, I think, to dismantle some of them. Like Eliot's own, Hope's essays in literary neoclassicism point us towards the appreciation and production of long poems in the discursive or narrative mode, texts intended to be "applied" to life in the best Horatian manner. They point us, in other words, to his own Dunciad Minor and his later collection of poetic narratives on eighteenth-century subjects, The Age of Reason (1985). To say this is not an indictment, for Hope admits as much in his introduction to The New Cratylus, which he describes as "a sort of myth in defence of the sort of poetry I admire and try to practise" (x).2 What emerges from the foregoing discussion, though, is that neither Dunciad Minor nor The Age of Reason, nor indeed any other of Hope's exercises in neoclassical poetics, should properly be treated as their author has consistently prescribed - as maverick texts standing resolutely against the grain of any modernist movement we could postulate with Eliot at its centre. C.D. Narasimhaiah wrote in 1975 that Hope's "classicism is his own and refuses to fall into known categories" (9), and while that is certainly the view which Hope's individualistic rhetoric seems to sanction, it is perhaps a little na'ive. Bruce King more recently put the poet in his place in an essay appropriately called "A.D. Hope: Isolation and Reintegration." He correctly links Hope with the trend of "theological Neo-Augustinianism and Christian existentialism" (28) that was particularly strong in English poetry of the forties and fifties, and in which the names of Auden and MacNeice figure prominently. While it is true that the neoclassical "counter-revolution" in poetry has since Pringle's time been seen as an especially Australian phenomenon - one, paradoxically, which turned its back on Australia and looked to Europe for models - it should be clear that the neoclassicism of a poet like Hope is demonstrably part of an international movement. Pringle argued in 1958 that younger Australian painters of that period were making use of contemporary, international styles, but with "an instinctively Australian twist" (138). And it exercises the mind to think of Hope's classical polemics as simultaneously an appeal to international models, and (by virtue of his attack on Anglo-American modernism) an assertion of his own cultural separateness, his "instinctively Australian twist."

137 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution" II

Given what we have seen, we should not be surprised - though we might be appalled - to discover that when A.D. Hope turned his hand to formal satire in imitation of Pope, one of his first and heaviest salvoes was fired at T.S. Eliot. Dunciad Minor begins in the standard mock-epic way, with a statement of subject, and naturally enough this means that the poem's principal victim - the Australian critic A.A. Phillips - suffers the first injury. Thus, "The long-lost Heir of Dullness found, the king / Of pedants at long last restored, I sing" (i). We are told that Phillips, the dunce, "learned at last his pedigree and name," and it is revealing that we rapidly move from this to a statement of the speaker's own pedigree, which aligns him - in opposition to Phillips - with Horace, Dryden, and of course Pope: O thou, whatever title please thee best, Poet or Moralist or Prince of Jest, Homer's Translator, St. John's better part The Lash of Pedants or the Shield of Art, Or English Horace, or great Dryden's heir, Immortal Pope, receive from us, whose care In these last years of the romantic storm It is to keep the classic muses warm, Upon thine altar, roasted whole and fat, Prime in his folly, and self-slain at that, Of all the victims dear to ridicule Thy favourite - a critic and a fool...

(1-2)

The fool is Phillips, and with this dedication Hope enters upon a protracted excoriation of the man which never quite elevates itself to the level of that fundamentally reasonable critique of "theories and ideas" which the poet himself argues in his preface is the essence of neoclassical mock-epic (viii). For the moment it is more important to notice the way in which in this passage the speaker arrogates to himself an authority on which the rest of the poem's judgments and criticisms will depend. By proclaiming his intimate relationship with the "classic muses," the speaker insinuates himself into the company of the four "immortals" - Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay - whom he then immediately elevates to positions of absolute critical authority in the poem. The tone of deference which we notice in his invocatory address to Pope resounds very soon with the hollowness of convention; as he brings before us intimate images of the goings-on in Elysium - "dyspeptic"

138 At Home in Time

Virgil, for example, opting out of the post-prandial port (3) - it becomes apparent that our speaker, too, roams freely there. The milieu - and hence the authority - of the immortals is his, and henceforth their every judgment will seem inseparable from his own. In fact, their perspective on events and individuals will come to seem merely the concrete articulation of his; the immortals, we begin to see, are essentially ventriloquist's tools. This makes Pope a dummy, a thought which admirably catches the real self-importance of this ostensible homage to the Augustan "Lash of Pedants." No sooner has his own authority been established than the speaker, in a striking move, turns it away from Phillips and against the unexpected target of T.S. Eliot. To a reader unfamiliar with Hope's prose this may seem a witty caprice, the sign of a satirical sensibility that is democratic and catholic in its choice of targets. A chasm of difference yawns between Phillips and Eliot, and there seems little reason to link them in the same critical purview. But when we read Dunciad Minor in the context of Hope's essays, the move has about it a certain pointedness and inevitability - an indication of personal motives at work, of old knives being sharpened. At this point in the text we have moved from the introductory references to Phillips to a description of the heavenly port-party, at which, we are told, Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay are examining some "sample verse consigned, / As each ten years the custom is, to show / The state of letters in the world below": Verse without number, statement void of sense Flat verbiage and verbal flatulence, Called Four Quartets, it kept no time or tune. Pope thought it a political lampoon Writ by some parson much bemused in beer; Arbuthnot thought a Bedlam sonneteer; Swift looked and frowned, and looked and laughed again; "God help us all!" he said, "The thing is plain: Yahoos at last have learned to hold a pen This is a Yahoo Eclogue, gentlemen."

(3)

Several things strike one about this, not the least of which is that Arbuthnot and Swift, far from offering the rapier-like responses we might expect, actually seem rather obtuse. Their comments miss the mark quite noticeably, and Hope obliquely concedes this in his note, falsely attributed - as is part of his game - to Ambrose Philips, the eighteenth-century poet and playwright for whom Henry Carey coined the soubriquet "Namby-Pamby." "A.P." writes: "I have perused

139 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution" the work. I can hardly believe it an eclogue but from internal evidence I conclude that its author, a Mr. T.S. Eliot, is in Holy Orders, which agrees best with Mr. Pope's conjecture" (3). There is certainly some point to Pope's comment - lifted, incidentally, from the opening of the epistle to Dr Arbuthnot - but even in his case the dart is to one side of the target: what reason is there to think of Eliot's poem as a political lampoon? Satire of this sort is only as effective as it is apposite; mistaken inferences amuse to the extent that they are logical or credible. Also important in this passage is the date on which these deliberations are supposed to be occurring: "In 1950, at the first full moon / After All Fool's Day in the afternoon." We are told that the sample of verse under discussion in some way represents a ten-year period - 1940 to 1950, perhaps - but it nevertheless strikes one as very odd to find Eliot's poem being held up for this kind of criticism a full fourteen years after the first appearance of "Burnt Norton" in Collected Poems 1909-1935 (1936). In The Poetry of the Forties in Britain, A.T. Tolley notes that by 1944 "T.S. Eliot was no longer a force for literary change," and "the denigration of Romantic poetry, common in the nineteen-thirties, and derived from the critical notions of T.S. Eliot and T.E. Hulme, was replaced by an admiration of Romanticism and visionary poetry" (4-5). Tolley makes the further point that Apocalypse, the movement usually taken to be synonymous with the new romanticism, was in fact begun in the late thirties and had "lost any clear identity," giving way to new developments in the same direction, as early as 1943 (101). The Ern Malley hoax stands as testimony to the fact that by the early forties the new romanticism had become sufficiently influential in Australian letters to invite a neoclassical backlash; and Hope's involvement in the hoax leads us to presume that he, like its principal perpetrators, identified the kind of work then appearing in Angry Penguins as an antagonistic and influential new poetic orthodoxy. While it is odd enough for any critic in 1950 to cite Eliot as the representative poet of the previous decade, it is especially peculiar for Hope to do so, since as a prominent fighter against the dominant (very un-Eliotic) poetic fashion of the forties, he must have known differently. One is left with the faint but persistent suspicion that what the saeva indignatio of Hope's satire seeks to burn away in the figure of Eliot here - as in the prose - is made of easily combustible straw. By suggesting that Eliot is the typical poet of the forties, Hope deprives himself of an important opportunity to comment directly on the increasingly romantic literary climate that really did characterize his own time. But as the essays discussed earlier suggest, and

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as Hope's now famously savage 1944 review of Max Harris's surrealist novel, The Vegetative Eye (1943) must confirm, his antipathy for that climate was considerable. Such opinions will inevitably find an out, and it is interesting to notice that Hope contrives a new opportunity in the funeral games section of Dunciad Minor. There he does focus his attack on a legitimately "representative" figure - Herbert Read, who, though not a powerful poetic force in what he himself dubbed the New Romanticism, was nevertheless one of its most prominent theorists and critical advocates. G.S. Fraser, a member of the Apocalypse Movement, saw Read as "probably the most distinguished disciple of Coleridge" among modern English critics of poetry (15), a man who even today, when in criticism a kind of neo-Johnsonianism is becoming orthodox, continues to take this lofty view of the use of poetry; it is not ... merely one of the props and ornaments, one of the nobler and more necessary diversions of human life; in poetry, rather, a formative principle, which is broadly continuous throughout the universe, displays itself in one of its highest shapes. (16)

That "neo-Johnsonianism" Fraser speaks of here is closely related to what MacNeice preferred to call "Drydenism," and which he saw originating in the essays of T.S. Eliot. It is a recurring irony of Hope's critical enterprise that the very poets and critics subjected to attacks from his neoclassical war-machine are frequently those in whom reaction against classical norms is conceived as reaction against T.S. Eliot. For such figures, as for Pound, Hope and the "yahoo" poet of the Quartets would seem generally of the same party. Herbert Read is surely one who would have seen things this way. Fraser tells us that Read's "admirations are catholic," "apart from a total rejection of the Augustans" (20); and this would be enough on its own to earn him Hope's scornful attention. After all, A.A. Phillips's comparatively mild castigation of Pope on Australian radio is what provoked Hope to the writing of the whole poem under discussion. But Read might appear in Dunciad Minor for a number of reasons beyond his denigration of the eighteenth century. Hope's satire focuses on Read's fondness for applying the concepts of depth-psychology, and his association with the Apocalyptic Movement in England must have made him an especially attractive target. In fact, though, he was also a participant in Australian literary politics, and on a side opposite Hope: he came to be associated with the anti-classical faction in the Ern Malley hoax. His letter to Max Harris pointing out the "undoubtedly poetic" nature of the Malley poems is now well known and

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admired for the way in which it confirms the judgment of Harris, and intimates that the hoaxers deceived themselves by writing too well. Brian Matthews has discussed this letter, and made the valuable point that Read himself had weathered in 1942 a similar critical storm in connection with the Apocalyptics.3 In Dunciad Minor, Hope's explicit target is Read's position as articulated in "Psycho-Analysis and Criticism," an essay originally included in Reason and Romanticism (1926), but reprinted in G.J. and N.M. Goldberg's 1962 anthology of critical writings which Hope tells us he made use of in writing the poem because its contents were very much "in [the] period" of 1950 (x). As we follow Hope we must therefore be conscious that what is under fire is not only a specific critical methodology, but also a broader mental climate in which the claims of the irrational are accorded recognition and a high respect. Thus, albeit obliquely, Hope's attack on Read is also an assault on the neo-romantic system of poetic theory and practice that was indeed pre-eminent in the forties: Come, where is Herbert Read, my whipping boy? Wheel me that Viennese contraption there! Now fetch me Hamlet - handle him with care Now press this button and let in your clutch: The play which Shakespeare wrote in Double Dutch, Which lay dissolved in endless Wilson Knight, Behold! Let Freud appear and all is light! Was Hamlet mad or indecisive? Come, He simply longed to go to bed with Mum: And so did Shakespeare: "to avoid worse rape", He found this mechanism of escape. Good-night, Sweet Prince; to dream, perchance to skid Between your Super-ego and your Id!

(65)

Hope makes it very clear that the approach satirized here is a common one. In fact, Read enters the poem only after the way has been prepared for him by a procession of other like-minded critics "a psychoanalytic rout"; Machines they pushed of every shape and size That mind or myth or madness could devise. Before them, rattling Shakespeare's honoured bones, Lumbers the burly form of Ernest Jones: "Have done with literary chit and chat! What, Bullough come again? No more of that!

142 At Home in Time Ur-Hamlets? Fudge! Old Saxo? Tush and Pish! Castration Fantasies, the dark Death Wish, Oedipus Complex, narcissistic blocks: This Key and this alone his heart unlocks."

(63-4)

It is interesting to notice that Ernest Jones enters the world of Dunciad Minor with almost as much immediacy and importance as Herbert Read; a like-minded figure, he is realized in the poem with striking individuality. This is interesting because Jones, and especially his speculations on Hamlet in Applied Psychoanalysis (1923), may well have come to Hope only second-hand through Read. In fact, while this whole section of the poem purports to be a response to a widespread phenomenon, directly experienced by the speaker and understood in something of its full complexity, investigation of Hope's sources reveals the possibility that the epic army here described may be the poet's own fabrication, based on little more than the twelve or so pages of Read's "Psycho-Analysis and Criticism" in which Jones's theories are investigated for the stimulus which they might provide to literary criticism. It is revealing that Hope fails to note that Read dismisses parts of Jones's hypothesis as "far too limited in conception,"4 and instead chooses to take his lead from Alfred Adler's The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1924). Neither Adler nor Read's quite subtle constructions upon him are alluded to in Dunciad Minor. Also not mentioned by Hope, and yet very much alive in the contentious atmosphere of the poem, is Read's exploration of psychoanalytical factors at work in "the eternal opposition of the classic and the romantic" ("Psycho-analysis" 260). For the purpose of this study as a whole, it will be worth pausing to consider in more detail Read's method of neutralizing the romantic-classic opposition. He begins with Jung's argument, elaborated in Psychologische Typen (i92i),5 that human beings come in two fundamental types, the extraverted and the introverted, determined according to whether the general mental energy of the individual is directed outwards to the visible, actual world, or inward to the world of thought and imagery. (Read's summary, 260) Read argues that these categories "do supply a scientific basis for the description of literary types": The romantic artist always expresses some function of the extraverted attitude, whilst the classic artist always expresses some function of the introverted attitude.

143 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution"

The details and potential difficulties of this are not explored, since Read is more concerned to consider further ramifications of the basic point: namely, that "romantic and classic elements in literature ... [are] the natural expression of a biological opposition in human nature." We thus favour the classical or romantic for reasons beyond - or, to put it more accurately, before - intellectual analysis and choice. By extension, then, we go astray when we treat what is ultimately biological in its significance as a matter of value, of right and wrong. "It is not sufficient," Read argues, "to treat the matter one way or the other as a question of intellectual fallacy; it is a question, for the individual, of natural necessity" (260). This leads him to propose that the critic, like the psychologist, should take up a position above the conflict, and although his own psychological state may lead him to sympathize with one school or the other, ... as a scientific critic he must no longer be content with a dog-in-the-manger attitude.

In his preface to Dunciad Minor Hope dismisses as a "delusion" the ideal of scientific criticism propounded by Northrop Frye (ix), but "scientific" as used by Read in the passage above means something a good deal more modest than Frye ever intended. Read's acknowledgment of the critic's partiality rules out immediately all possibility of purely objective criticism; instead, what we have recommended to us is nothing more grand than a policy of critical circumspection. Although Read comes to it by way of Jung, its validity and usefulness do not rest upon psychoanalytical theory, and might as easily be argued to be a matter of common sense. A dog-in-the-manger statement of psychoanalytic doctrine is precisely what this is not, and one pauses at such moments in "Psycho-analysis and Criticism" to reflect on the disingenuousness, the dog-in-the-mangerishness in fact, of Hope's supposedly "classical" response to Read. After all, the latter's attempt to negotiate a way out of the romantic-classic impasse is an act very much in the spirit of the Augustan "Middle Way" praised by Hope in his essay of 1956. This brings me back to the crucial point that Hope's use of the Augustan mock-heroic, particularly his delineation of its satiric object, has about it a strikingly un-Augustan interestedness. Swift states the eighteenth-century norm during an imagined encomium to himself: Malice never was his Aim; He lash'd the Vice but spar'd the Name. No Individual could resent, Where Thousands equally were meant.

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144 At Home in Time

The orthodoxy of this position is confirmed by a glance at Pope's epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, which stresses the related point that, however venomously the poet is driven to attack an individual, his proper concern is with a truth or "Virtue" beyond the particular. Thus we are told that it is to any poet's praise if he resisted personal temptations - fortune, fashion, wealth, or ambition - and "stoop'd to Truth, and moraliz'd his song: / That not for Fame, but Virtue's better end, / He stood the furious Foe ..." (608-9). The driving force of Augustan literature is towards the maintenance of a system of purportedly objective values, in the name of which personal attacks are waged but to which they must eventually defer. Several crucial notions flow logically from this last point. First is that those objective values must in any work be sufficiently "visible," and that they must in some sense be independent of the poem itself. In the epistle to Arbuthnot, Pope not only makes appeal to values that transcend the poem but also includes gestures which indicate the limits of poetry. For example, his appeal for personal peace concludes with a statement of his own ordinariness, and also of the view that poetry does not, for him at least, suffuse and influence the whole life. That practical, "civilized voice," which Auden so admired in Pope (Forewords and. Afterwords 109), speaks clearly in the lines: I was not born for Courts or great Affairs, I pay my Debts, believe, and say my Pray'rs, Can sleep without a Poem in my head, Nor know, if Dennis be alive or dead.

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That he is able to sleep without a poem in his head tells us that, useful though poetry may be, it is neither the sum nor centre of human affairs; it is ultimately no more than a particularly subtle kind of instrument, relevant but not essential to the basic experiences of life. Here Pope strikes a characteristically Augustan note: deliberate eschewal of the idea of a consuming poetic vocation in favour of what Arthur Humphreys calls "an imaginative sense of the normal" (16). Pope's is one expression of the way in which poetry is always and necessarily transcended by human realities. In Johnson's Vanity we have another. The ending of that poem directs us "Still [to] raise for Good the supplicating Voice," but the point is made that finally prayers and words are insufficient: we must "leave to Heav'n the Measure and the Choice. / Safe in his Pow'r, whose Eyes discern afar / The secret Ambush of a specious Pray'r" (92). In Johnson, as in Pope and Swift, both the motive and the aim of writing are explicitly separate from the writing itself. And that quality of textual disinter-

145 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution"

estedness - of the writing being made to serve an impersonal, extratextual end - is one reason why the excesses of Pope's style in the Epistle to Arbuthnot, say, remain palatable. In Hope's Dunciad Minor there may be certain superficial signs of such a disinterestedness, but on the whole the poem tends to be highly self-involved. The attack that is mounted has, beyond the person of A.A. Phillips, an unclear object - the assault is dispersed and generalized - and it seems to be waged in the name of nothing so much as a system of exclusively literary or poetic values embodied in the style of the piece. Now this is very different from Pope, where the style is instrumental and, though a reflection of the world-view which the poet recommends, not finally identified with that as a goal. Polemic is sustained by Pope in order to be transcended eventually; in Hope it is sustained for the maintenance and defence of the poetic self, never for the sacrifice of the self to something greater. As we perhaps might expect from the author of that essay against "The Activists," this exercise in the Augustan mode may be literature with an intent to "promote," but what it seeks to promote is emphatically not worldly but literary. Thus, writes Kevin Hart, "when one looks at the objects Hope chooses or commends for satire they turn out to be not as straightforwardly political as the word 'propaganda' implies. ... [One] will not find satires exposing political corruption. ... Rather, one finds attacks on contemporary literary criticism, marriage, psychoanalysis, radio, sport, suburban life and tourism" (51). And that, one might suggest, represents too ready and literal an acceptance of MacNeice's theoretical claim that literature should concern itself with no more than its "proper" sphere of operation. In MacNeice's practice, though, there is always that contrary impulse to try the boundaries, to "transcend and flout the human span" - something one misses in Dunciad Minor, which internally seems insufficiently "dialectical." In Dunciad Minor there are many manifestations of literary selfconcern. Most obvious, of course, is the poem's subject: this is criticism, in verse, of criticism about verse. Dunciad Minor is simultaneously meta-criticism and meta-poetry and its system of values, its motives, and its basic terms of reference are all literary. This is in many ways ironic, since one of the grounds on which successive schools of literary criticism are attacked in the poem is their solipsistic self-involvement. Hope takes his stand on common sense, and on the idea that good literary and intellectual health depends upon the avoidance of solipsism. And yet in Dunciad Minor he creates a self-contained universe of neoclassical literary values, which is self-moving and self-justifying in the very way he claims to deprecate.

146 At Home in Time

Looked at in this way, and without reference to the specific literary gospel it preaches, this text appears so absolute in itself, so defiant of "external" claims and allegiances, that one might not wish to call it classical at all. By what other categorization, then, could we assimilate it? James Tulip has suggested that Hope "may indeed be a figure waiting to be taken up in the future by post-modernism with its emphases on reason and discourse" (476-7), and there is no doubt that those emphases represent one window through which classical and postmodern poetics can conduct some sort of conversation. Pinsky's essay on "The Discursive Aspect of [contemporary] Poetry" promises that the conversation, fully articulated, would be an interesting and complex one. But more than anything else, it is the radical self-involvement of Dunciad Minor which might make the work congenial to a postmodern perspective. It is typical of postmodern parody, writes Linda Hutcheon, to appear "distinctly introverted," "only a form of inter-art traffic" (34). This is, though, an incomplete account. Hutcheon argues further that, surface appearances notwithstanding, "postmodernism is ... resolutely historical, and inescapably political" (4), consistently seeking "to open itself up to history, to what Edward Said calls the 'world'" (124). If that is true, there is an unexpectedly fertile common ground between the postmodern and the neoclassical - the latter coincidentally also "introverted," if Jung's diagnosis is correct. In Dryden's "Epilogue to the Second Part of The Conquest of Granada" (1672) we are told that the most successful dramatists are those who have "conformed their genius to their age" (138); and nearly a century later, Samuel Johnson writes in his Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765) that any author's works need to be read in relation to "the state of the age in which he lived" (73). "The presence of the past," Hutcheon tells us, is "an important postmodern concept" (4); and it was also one of the cornerstones of Augustan aesthetic theory. Such congruences render more convincing Jencks's thesis that there is, within postmodernism, "a convergence towards a manner which could be called classical" (33). But if, as Hutcheon and Jencks argue, postmodernism - like classicism - always seeks "a 'worldly' connection for its discourse" (Hutcheon 27), then it seems unlikely that Hope's Dunciad Minor will find a comfortable place under either banner. This is especially true if "the world should leave ... [the poets] alone" ("The Activists" 36) implies its converse: "the poets should leave the world alone." Besides this there is not, in Hope's selfenclosed textual world, the same jouissance, the delight (or ultimately the belief) in pure textuality that is the hallmark of postmodern artifacts. The pointedness of Hope's satire and the uncompromising

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value judgments he makes in the poem are plainly not in what Ihab Hassan calls the "anarchic ... cultural spirit" of the postmodern (59). And if Hassan is correct to claim that Herbert Read, of all critics who "share the broad Modernist view," most "engaged the Postmodern spirit in his anarchic affinities" (44), then any link we could make between postmodernism and Hope is bound to chafe. At the same time, though, one has to admit that while many of Hope's satirical barbs fail to amuse, his play with the status of the text itself is often quite witty and compelling, and the sort of thing we enjoy in Nabokov's Pale Fire, for example, or in the metafictions of Borges. But in any case these, Hutcheon would argue, are not properly postmodern but works of "late modernist extremism" (52). Dunciad Minor, presented without the notes, would be a rather unremarkable piece of literary-critical reaction, an atavistic exercise of little or no interest to an audience outside of Australia or the early fifties. But the notes broaden the significance of the poem by drawing attention to - and therefore problematizing - the material being of the text itself. In fact, they signal to us that even this kind of lucid and reasonable Augustan discourse sometimes requires clarification, and sometimes provokes objection. Thus the notes contribute to our sense of the gap between poem and world by underlining the ways in which the former resists effacement, falls short of what is sometimes called "transparency." This is paradoxical, though, since another function of the annotations is to suggest that the poem is very much a part of the world, an independently existing text which is here being presented in a scholarly edition. The notes therefore simultaneously acknowledge and deny the possibility of an unproblematically direct link between the text and the world of objective phenomena. It is a matter of the poet having his classical cake and eating it, too - a contradiction we have explored in detail in our earlier discussion of "The Activists." The relation between text and world becomes even more complicated when we pause to consider the two purported annotators of Dunciad Minor. We naturally feel some surprise at finding A.A. Phillips ("A.A.P.") annotating this satire against himself, but the situation is not wholly implausible: after all, satire would have no point if it were not intended eventually to come into the hands of its victims. Thus one finds a special piquancy in the idea of Sir Robert Walpole presenting Pope's Dunciad Variorum to George n on the author's behalf (Jack 45). On the other hand, the presence of Ambrose Philips ("A.P.") in Hope's poem is a decisive break with probability and therefore with history and the world outside of the poem. The conversation which the two men conduct in the footnotes to the poem

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is one of the wittiest aspects of the whole piece. For example, "A.A.P." comments that Hope's line "From there laborious, busy, bold and blind" is "so bad that it might almost be by Pope himself," to which "A.P." replies "It is, son, it is" (15). We are amused by the anachronistic presence of Ambrose Philips, naturally, but an added pleasure comes from the fact that his condescending, dull, and pedantic behaviour towards "A.A.P." is entirely in keeping with the picture the poem gives us of the "mighty Namby-Pamby" (8). The last point brings me back to my earlier observation that despite the poem's conventional appeals to an authority beyond itself, Dundad Minor propagates an essentially autotelic value-system. The annotations are not simply a light-hearted addition to the main body of the text - where the more "serious" points are made - but a crucial and ingenious aspect of the overall rhetorical structure. Notes conventionally operate a quite separate discourse from that of the literary works to which they are attached; they usually present themselves as emanating from a different order of reality, not from the world of the imagination, but from the more "real" world in which human beings approach literary texts as objects for investigation and study. In other words, what occurs or is said in the notes unfolds - by convention - in a climate apparently more immediate and objectively "real" than that of the principal text. Now, in Dunciad Minor we have two presentations of A.A. Phillips, one in the text and another in the notes. In the poem itself we have a number of assertions about the man, allegations of his dullness, which we may accept or reject. These are made with great force, and to reject them would be to call down judgment on ourselves; the principal rhetorical strategy is to discourage reservations or dissent through the exercise of a weighty and witty authority. What is required in addition, though, is some apparently objective confirmation of the satirist's allegations - something to make mere statements of opinion seem assertions of probable truth. This is where Hope's use of the quasi-"real" climate of the footnotes is so rhetorically astute, for the portrayal of Phillips there seems to confirm the argument of the poem at large. Besides the aura of correctness, circumspection, and objectivity which convention attaches to footnotes, an important factor in the success of this rhetorical tactic is the way in which the ongoing discussion between Phillips and Philips appears to be much less mediated for us by the consciousness of the poet. In fact it presents itself as a direct written exchange to which the speaker of the poem, now silent after its completion, has no access. If we did not know that Ambrose Philips - by reason of his death in 1749 - could not possibly have written the notes attributed

149 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution" to him, we might well assume that the commentary was legitimate. And even when we know that, Hope denies us absolute certainty by his practice of having each note signed not with a full name but with the barely distinguishable initials "A.P." and "A.A.P." This, combined with the great scholarly authority evident in the notes, keeps the illusion of objectivity alive and effective in the poem's persuasive enterprise. If the kind of intellectual-literary game I have just been describing does not quite warrant the adjective "postmodern," it must certainly stand inclusion with such works of "late modernist extremism" as Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." But though we are often invited by the ideologues of modernism and postmodernism to accept that literary self-consciousness of this extremity is unique to the sceptical, demystifying spirit of the late twentieth century, we do well to remember that literary self-awareness - combined, as in Borges, with a lucid and reasonable style - is one of the signal characteristics of the Augustan age. Hutcheon appears to concede this, placing Sterne's Tristram Shandy in a continuity of self-conscious works running up to and including some of the high points of modernism, where self-reflexivity is "used to undercut representation and viewer identification" (41). She implies that there is a lesser discontinuity between Augustan and modern than between modern and postmodern; in the latter, we have "a more complex and more overt discursive contextualizing," which "goes one step beyond [modernism's] ... auto-representation and its demystifying intent, for it is fundamentally critical in its ironic relation to the past and the present" (41). If this is so, one might again follow Jencks in asserting the remarkable affinity between postmodernism and neoclassicism: after all, a "fundamentally critical" and "ironic relation to the past and the present" is exactly what we find in such Augustan exercises in parody as Pope's Rape of the Lock, and the Dunciad. Pursued, that last thought might well become the basis for a dismantling of the vaguely evolutionary model of literary development followed by Hutcheon. When she writes of postmodernism going "one step beyond" "late modernist extremism," the vocabulary implies a stylistic progression closely linked to chronology. Hope's case must inevitably undermine this paradigm, since in all those aspects of his work which we might want to see as symptomatic of the late twentieth century - self-reflexivity, "ironic relation to past and present," and so on - his obvious and most powerful influence is Pope. Although the title page of Dunciad Minor, with its subtitle "An Heroick Poem," suggests an imitation of Pope's 1728 pamphlet, The Dunciad. An Heroic Poem. In Three Books, the poem is in fact based

150 At Home in Time on The Dunciad Variorum, published by Pope in April of 1729, and augmented (as he wrote to Swift in the previous year) by "Proeme, Prolegomena, Testimonia Scriptorum, Index Authorum, and Notes Variorum" (28 June 1728, Correspondence n, 503). In Dunciad Minor Hope uses Ambrose Philips - and even the pitiable A.A. Phillips just as Pope used his bogus annotators, Theobald and Scriblerus; and in doing so he defends and perpetuates not only certain techniques of neoclassical satire, but also the highly polarized critical discourse which those techniques were intended to serve. Perhaps that last observation opens a way properly to locate Dunciad Minor in terms of the various categories which this chapter has so far explored. John Dennis, the neoclassical theorist and disciple of Horace, argued in 1704 that the ultimate aim of poetry is "to delight and reform the mind, and so to make mankind happier and better" (i, 336). Such an awareness of extra-literary context is what we usually have in mind when we speak of the "worldliness" of neoclassical poetry, and the "world" in that broad sense - more or less the sense in which Hutcheon and Said use the term - is clearly not a compelling presence in Hope's poem. That said, one wants immediately to retract half-way, for "presence" of that sort cannot ever be real, must always be an effect of the text itself. Hutcheon - predictably because she writes as a post-Saussurean - is quick to make this qualification, arguing of postmodern literature that "its relation to the 'worldly' is still on the level of discourse" (128). This point - made in rebuttal of G.D. Kiremidjian's claim that the postmodern establishes "an explicit relation with the real world beyond itself" (238) - should stand also as a caveat against simplistic neoclassical assumptions about the relation between poetry and the world. Hutcheon goes on to argue, though, that even to claim that this relationship only occurs on the level of discourse is "to claim quite a lot" (128). The point is that discourse itself can be the arena in which a powerful dialogue with history - and with historicity - is conducted; and whatever traffic runs thus between the text and the world, it follows complicated, unexpected, and sometimes very oblique routes. Auden's "New Year Letter" bears this out.

in In Dunciad Minor there is, to be fair, an engagement with the "world" which is in some ways quite disinterested - or is at least separable from the cruder questions of literary value and judgment. From Hope's salvoes at critics and poets, as from the form of Dunciad Minor itself, we can glean a vision of the world which

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- whatever misunderstandings and distortions obtain in its relation to that world - is nevertheless quite consistent within itself. In other words the poem gives us, beneath its satirical and contentious surface, a deeper "reading" of the world, with its conditions and determinants, than the poem's pyrotechnical wit will normally allow us to see. And this worldliness, ultimately more compelling than the cruder kind discussed above, manifests itself in two ways: first, in the Weltanschauung to which not only the substance but the form of the poem constantly alludes; and second, in the kind of reading experience which that form seems to prescribe - an experience in which we imbibe the text's underlying ideology in the form, to borrow Althusser's phrasing, "of 'seeing/ 'perceiving' and 'feeling' (which is not a form of knowing)" (174). This is to say that a reading of the text is potentially an experience of mental re-forming, and in that rather specialized sense Dunciad Minor might well be said to fulfil the neoclassical requirement that literature should instruct as it pleases - "reform" as it "delight[s]/' in Dennis's words. At a crucial moment in book v of his poem, Hope has the funeral games interrupted by the arrival of those "Mastodons of Meaning," Cleanth Brooks and William Empson (68). When the Queen of Dullness seeks the meaning of their "pompous dance of Dunderdom," Empson replies: "Our convolutions should be clear as mud; Simplicity, great Queen, is for the birds. Mark this vast structure built of Complex Words; Insert a lucid poem; pause, and see How all dissolves in Ambiguity."

Brooks then, in a combination of deference and rivalry, interjects: "All hail, Semantic Father!" ... "For Adumbrations, let her read my books, Explore that intricate, inane Sublime And play cat's cradle to the end of time."

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If, looking for a gloss on that metaphor of the cat's cradle, we go back to the Goldbergs' Modern Critical Spectrum, Hope's source for critical writings current during the fifties, we find Empson represented by a section from Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), and Brooks by his essay "The Formalist Critic," that statement of the "articles of [formalist] faith" published originally in the Kenyan Review in 1951.

152 At Home in Time Brooks's essay begins with a declaration of certain key formalist principles, by now very familiar. These include a great number which, in the present context, we must read as pointed contradictions of classical tradition. Perhaps the most striking of this sort is the insistence that "the purpose of literature is not to point a moral." Joseph Trapp argues in his Lectures on Poetry (1742) that while there is some doubt about whether pleasure or instruction is the principal aim of art (even Horace, after all, equivocates: "Aut prodesse volunt, aut delectare poetae"), "we should allow that even in verse what improves us ought to be more regarded than what delights us" (24). Dennis, as we have seen, is unreserved in his praise of instruction as the aim of poetry; and Dryden, too, has little difficulty stating that "the chief design of poetry is to instruct" ("A Parallel" 128). The formalist demurrer at this view is unequivocal - except, perhaps, for Allen Tate's concession, alluded to by Brooks, that "'specific moral problems' are the subject matter of literature" (Brooks i). Dismissal of the didactic function of literature implies, or perhaps requires, departure from other classical poetic norms. Thus we have Brooks reducing the literary value of logic ("the formal relations in a work of literature may include, but certainly exceed, those of logic"), and marginalizing the discursive mode ("literature is ultimately metaphorical and symbolic"). Such pronouncements arrange themselves around a further anti-classical notion, this time one that stood in the centre of modernist poetics: "the general and universal are not seized upon by abstraction, but got at through the concrete and the particular" (i). "Go in fear of abstractions" enjoined Pound, and one can see that the grounds from which Hope would attack Brooks's formalist theories are much the same as those from which, as we saw in the first part of this chapter, he launched his salvoes against modernism. There are, as the last paragraph easily shows, many very obvious reasons why Brooks is chosen for attack in Dunciad Minor. "The Formalist Critic" is a thoroughgoing violation of Hope's poetics as they are set out in the essays of The Cave and the Spring and The New Cratylus. For now, though, I want to focus on a less obvious but very crucial point of difference between Brooks and Hope: the formalists' vision of aesthetic unity. Brooks writes that "the primary concern of criticism is with the problem of unity - the kind of whole which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of the various parts to each other in building up this whole." "Formal relations," we have already been told, "certainly exceed" logic, and the picture emerges of an aesthetic unity that is definitely not linear, but rather based on what Joseph Frank has (not unproblematically)6 christened "space-logic":

153 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution" The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time. ("Spatial Form" 49)

Though not explicitly stated, a similar denigration of time as the ground of poetic unity is everywhere evident in Brooks's "articles of belief." That game of "cat's cradle" to which Hope refers in Dunciad Minor - and which was the occasion for this digression - needs to be understood as a metaphor for composition and criticism according to the "spatial" poetic model elaborated by Frank and implied in Brooks. The metaphor also imputes fallacy to the model, for to make a cat's cradle is to shape something which is irreducibly and unalterably linear into the illusion of three-dimensionality. The game is a trick of manipulation, and the string which is its material always reverts to linear form. To "play cat's cradle to the end of time," as Brooks exhorts the Queen of Dullness (69), is thus an ongoing exercise in futility. Hope's wording is especially witty here because what lies behind the making of cat's cradles - in the poetic sense - is nothing less than a desire to accomplish "the end of time," to overthrow linearity. At the same time, however, the language suggests that the attempt can never succeed and must be repeated eternally. This is an important passage in Hope's poem, perhaps even the centre of satirical gravity for the whole work. For when we closely examine those other sections in which critics or theories are ridiculed, we cannot help noticing that Hope's favourite quarry is any theory or paradigm which abstracts itself from the empirical, time-bound experience of literature. As the funeral games begin, we are told that theories and paradigms command the field: As critics now annex the poet's crown, Theory of Games is up and Sport is down. Now every player makes his move in fear With statisticians muttering in his ear; Computers oust onlookers from the field Advising when to strike and when to yield; Hockey or Prisoners' Base, Tip-cat or Chess Run to foregone conclusions more or less ...

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In the suggestion that literature might at other times be "sport," Hope flies in the face of the earnest and "scientific" critical climate of the fifties. The idea, though, is not new at all, being an extension of the Horatian view - so recapitulated by Hope in book iv of his poem -

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that the "true end of verse" is not only "wisdom" but also "delight" (54). Part of the delight of sport is that it offers immediate, active experience; and Hope's analogy implies that reading might legitimately be expected to give similar, practical pleasure. It is also true that sports are conducted not only within the general context of time, but often in specific relation to a stipulated period of time. It would be difficult to imagine a "sport" of reading that was not, in some way, intimately linked to temporal experience, to process or duration. Thus, without having to pursue the issue much further, we can say that Hope's opposition between "Theory of Games" and "Sport" implies an opposition not only between abstract and concrete, or remote and immediate, but also between atemporality and temporality. The latter, he unquestionably believes, is an inescapable part of our experience of literary texts and of the world in general; atemporal or synoptic models, it seems on the other hand, are fictions which in literary criticism - can only "warp the judgement and pervert the mind" (51). "Strangling theories," we are told in another metaphor which implies the natural value of process, "choke the noblest trees" (52). Not surprisingly, there is (amusing) evidence that Hope's quarrel with Northrop Frye involves the violence which Frye's theories do to diachronic experience: Great Frye displays his fearful symmetry; The multitude draw round to hear him speak; He preaches a full hour; it seems a week.

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What I have been describing goes beyond a mere acceptance of time as the necessary and inescapable realm of human action; Dunciad Minor is in some ways a militantly pro-temporal piece of writing, shot through with the poet's common-sense understanding of the world in which poetry must operate and of what it can possibly accomplish in that world. This positive vision of temporality is, perhaps, the essence of Hope's neoclassicism, and as much the "lesson" of Dunciad Minor as it is of Autumn Journal. Supporting this view is Hope's 1985 sequence, The Age of Reason, which makes explicit what Dunciad Minor only implies. The work is a deliberate commemoration of the Augustan age - "one of my favourite periods of history" (Age, vi) and it boldly foregrounds a linear understanding of time. Thus the Preface begins: A characteristic of Time which is a result of its one-directional flow and the infinite variety of the effects of the causal network, particularly in human

155 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution" affairs, is that, while we can easily look backwards it is impossible to look forward with any real certainty, (v)

Undoubtedly the view of a man with a "historical consciousness" as Danto defines it, this formulation could stand as a paraphrase for the conclusion of Narration and Knowledge, cited in chapter three. In that phrase "the causal network" we can see that whatever complications are admitted by Hope, his vision of human affairs is essentially narrative: What affects us as a state of confusion and contradiction in human affairs, a conflict of irreconcilable movements, theories, and aspirations is seen to have settled into an orderly and coherent pattern. The conflicts and the contradictions remain and the actors and theorists confront one another as irreconcilably as before, but the pattern which we cannot see in the present and never divine in the future is seen to have been steadily forming in the immediate past, and the significance of individual lives and events emerges not from themselves but from the place they occupy in the pattern so formed.

To be fair to Hope it is crucial that we notice the stress on perception: pattern "is seen" to have been gradually forming. His point - in this passage, at least - is not that events have absolutely no meaning outside of a cause-effect historical narrative; rather, it is that the only meaning they can have for us is as part of a linear progression. And the narrative view, he makes clear, is always inchoate: the future is absolutely opaque, but even certain aspects of the past remain - or become - obscure. Thus, The further back we go in the past the more detail is seen to have been lost and the room for argument grows as to whether the pattern is a reliable one. Finally the pattern appears with great gaps in it with the total disappearance of the more fragile and transitory evidence preserved only by language, (v)

It is precisely because the narrative pattern generally imposed upon the eighteenth century has shrunk "to the dimensions of an inadequate cliche" (v) that, Hope tells us, he has written the series of "narrative sketches" (vi) which make up The Age of Reason. The intention is to fill some gaps and, by doing so, to destabilize the pattern a little; but interestingly, the sketches provide no challenge to - or departure from - the narrative mode which lies at the pattern's base. While all kinds of misunderstandings with regard to the substance of history can be corrected, it appears, the limitations of

156 At Home in Time

narrative historiography can never be circumvented. Hope's neoclassicisrn is marked by a frank and empirically based acceptance of human limitations, almost all of which seem to be contained in that one insistence upon linear temporality as the necessary realm of thought and action. Hope not only chooses to frame his sketches as narrative, but he also makes use of "a form of verse most favoured in the eighteenth century itself: the heroic couplet modified to accept the rhythms of contemporary English and avoiding all conventional poetic devices apart from those of metre" (vi). It would seem that for Hope - as for Eliot, Pound, and Auden, as we have already seen - the couplet is a form which, despite its use of rhyme, functions stichically, making use of simple sequence as its basic ordering principle. Hope assumes a natural compatibility between the heroic couplet and linear structure. But even while there is this intimidating commitment to "onedirectional" time in the form of The Age of Reason, the content of a number of the sketches seems to have contradictory loyalties. Thus, in "Sir William Herschel's Long Year/' the narrator remarks that Pope "was wrong" to declare that after Newton "all was light": Newton at least enabled men to prove The basic laws by which the planets move; But in what systems, where they might be found, Was still unknown and yet in darkness bound, Where dark divinities beyond our ken Move darkly to direct the lives of men. Beyond the light they sought to conjure with The world lay cloaked in night and fringed with myth.

(96-7)

This passage is particularly interesting in the light of my earlier discussion of Auden. Here, as in "New Year Letter," we have a gesture from within what one might call a "Newtonian" verse form towards a non-Newtonian universe; Auden's poem differs, though, in using the Hudibrastic couplet to impart a positive sense of that universe, while the heroic couplet in Hope helps to define or evoke it negatively, by contrast or opposition. Since one of the aims of The Age of Reason was to challenge commonplace views from and about the period, one is not surprised to find other examples of this sort of criticism in almost every one of Hope's twelve narrative sketches. "Sir William Herschel's Long Year" sustains its attack on the eighteenth century perhaps longer than do any of the others, going so far as to argue that faith in "reason and knowledge" is "our most delusive dream indeed," that even when

157 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution"

directed by these things, we will not arrive at "total comprehension of the whole," but "infinite regress": "No matter what prodigious strides we make, / The mystery deepens with each step we take" (103-4). Such attacks on the cult of reason are very common in Hope's sequence, but they are not always this polite. In "the Transit of Venus," for example, the goddess of love herself points to the continuing force of the sensual in an age of sensibility: "Young bucks of this enlightenment", she said, "Professing Reason, all end up in bed. The beardless Philosophe, with any luck, Finds rational explanations for a fuck, For now, as always, what decides is cunt" (A goddess, on occasion, can be blunt.)

(70)

The general point, memorably made here, is that while devotion to reason was what Hope calls a "real aspect" of eighteenth-century culture (vi), its hegemony was not unchallenged. In "The Bamboo Flute" we are given a fictitious exchange of letters concerning the painter John [Johann] Zoffany (1733-1810) and his travels to India, undertaken - so Hope's account goes - in order to liberate his work from prevailing British conventions. Writing to Tilly Kettle, apparently in late 1786, Zoffany recounts with admiration a lesson on painting he received from an Indian artist ("that gentoo friend of whom you wrote" 87). We hear that when Zoffany asks why Krishna is in one painting "depicted blue," his tutor replies that realism is unimportant in Indian art, "the visible being a means to other ends": Life is a book of pictures. What they mean Is hid but leads the mind to things unseen, Which grow to further meanings day by day. We educate our children in this way And I shall lead you now as they are led: The legend first and, that interpreted, One after one the higher truths emerge.

(88)

There follows a long account of the myth depicted, and as he nears the end, Zoffany's teacher generalizes first about the art of painting and then about the art of poetry: "Each poem is a tryst with the unknown" (90). This follows the statement that "the poet should / View nature, see into the heart of things / And show them to themselves in all he sings." The echo of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" is unmistakable, and Hope makes us realize that Zoffany is here initiated into an

158 At Home in Time

aesthetic that will in many ways spell the end of the neoclassical tradition in which the painter was raised. I noted much earlier that David Malouf has called Hope "a fullblooded romantic" (152), and after our consideration of Dunciad Minor that description will perhaps seem especially in need of qualification. But in The Age of Reason the poet's attraction towards romantic attitudes is clearly apparent not only to his readers, but to Hope himself. In the character of John Zoffany we have a surrogate for Hope, an objectification of his own contradictory loyalties and longings. It is important, however, to notice that although Zoffany has been shown how Indian art can be "a tryst with the unknown," he has not yet grasped how - or even whether - his own work should aim at the same goal. His letter to Kettle ends in confusion: The paintings, I should add, remain with us, Which, at your coming, I hope we may discuss Unless you think this land has turned my head As it is apt to do, Your friend, J.Z.

(90)

Zoffany's dilemma remains perpetually unresolved, for Hope ends the sketch with a brief note from Mrs Mary Kettle, telling Zoffany that her husband has died en route to India, and enclosing the painter's own letter - its account of the revelation and its pleas for guidance never now to be answered. This ending indicates to us that even in The Age of Reason, when to reconsider neoclassical assumptions is Hope's central concern, there is no real abandonment of those assumptions - merely the insistence that they not be too narrowly construed. Indeed, "The Bamboo Flute" is alone amongst the sketches in making so obvious and dramatic a gesture towards romanticism. For the most part Hope's quarrel is not with neoclassicism, but with travesties of it, those "inadequate cliches" (v) which are merely fictions about - and of - the period: The Enlightenment and all its cocksure heirs With their new sciences to conjure with Must bow in time to learn the truth of myth; And men must learn before it is too late, Their "modern mind's" already out of date. Its views are temporary, on the way To others that may well ante-date today.

(96)

Such criticism is no doubt proper when directed at the reductive scientism practised by certain members of the Royal Society in the

159 A.D. Hope and "Counter-Revolution" late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but it certainly does not hold when applied tout court to the whole period. It does not avail against writers like Pope, or especially Swift, whose Gulliver's Travels in fact satirizes the Royal Society in the form of the Grand Academy of Lagado. Pope and his other partners in the Scriblerus Club - Arbuthnot, Gay, Thomas Parnell, and on occasions Robert Harley, First Earl of Oxford - mocked with relish the excesses of the new science. Indeed, C.J. Home writes that "in an age much given to ridicule ... [the new science] provided a fertile subject for burlesque and satire" (142). In other words, Home agrees with Francis Gallaway in seeing opposition to excessive scientific rationalism, rather than doctrinaire scientism itself, as one of the defining characteristics of Augustan literature. "Pure science," writes Gallaway, "was in time regarded as hostile to the type of humanism embodied in Pope's dictum, 'The proper study of mankind is man/ and to the common sense in which all men shared" (7). If that is true, Hope's attack on the "cocksure heirs" of Enlightenment thinking is less a critique of the Augustan age than a defence of its spirit in the tradition of Pope. Hope's insistence on the "truth of myth" is perhaps more difficult to bring into harmony with that tradition, especially since it would seem to run counter to the humanist focus of Pope and Johnson. It is certainly true that The Age of Reason does allow itself what one wants to call transcendentalist gestures, quasi-mystical intimations, that in their degree are somewhat alien to those two writers. Furthermore, Hope's witty comment on the "modern mind" — "Its views are temporary, on the way / To others that may well ante-date today" - is notable as a departure from the insistence upon linear temporality that I have argued is fundamental to Dunciad Minor and the Augustan mode generally. At the same time, though, Johnson's Vanity does quite explicitly conduct its examination of human folly sub specie aeternitatis; and even Pope's Essay on Man, as we have seen, assumes that we live our lives in the context of certain timeless values. In that very specific and attenuated sense one might say that for Johnson, as for Pope, life and art are "a tryst with the unknown." Pope does not ever envisage the mystical communion which Zoffany is told by his Indian teacher is the aim of art, but that does not mean he writes entirely in isolation from absolute truth or even an absolute being. Pope's point is merely that we are bound to time and the known: "what can we reason," run the famous lines from the Essay on Man, "but from what we know?": Of man what see we, but his station here, From which to reason, or to which refer?

160 At Home in Time Thro' worlds unnumber'd tho' the God be known, Tis ours to trace him only in our own.

(505)

For all its focus on time and on the here and now, this is not a view which denigrates the unknown or is oblivious to what "Sir William Herschel's Long Year" calls "the mystery" (104) surrounding empirical fact. Pope would certainly not deny that myth might have its truth. He would only argue that it is not normally available to us. However much the sketches of The Age of Reason may appear to undermine the neoclassical world-view and aesthetic so obviously endorsed by Hope in Dunciad Minor, the fact is that they do not effect any kind of radical revision to Augustan norms. I noted earlier that Hope's insistence on time as a "one-directional flow" is evidence of his continuing sympathy with the world-view of Dryden, Pope, and Johnson; and indeed his choice of both the narrative mode and the heroic couplet tells us that, like Pope, he can conceive of no real knowledge and understanding outside of the cause-effect sequences of linear time. One might call this view "worldly" in the sense that it is resolutely non-transcendent. But of course there is the possibility, adumbrated by Pope, that reasoning "from what we know" can lead to some understanding of the unknown, that only experience in linear time can provide the basis for inferences about timeless truth. And to the extent that the stichic and narrative forms of Dunciad Minor and The Age of Reason provide us with that sort of experience, we can expand the meaning of "worldly" to suggest the manipulative, didactic power of the text. In Hope, as in Auden and MacNeice, Augustan verse-forms imply a very specific reading of the worldorder, and they operate upon us to elicit a powerful endorsement of that reading.

5 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism in Six Epistles to Eva Hesse

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of The Waste Land, we find Donald Davie remarking that T.S. Eliot "has been a presence in my life more insistently influential than any other writer whatever" ("Eliot in One Poet's Life" 230). The bow to Eliot reminds us of MacNeice's in "Poetry To-Day" and "Eliot and the Adolescent," and in fact the two poets are very similar in the details of their assessments of Eliot: both balance admiration with criticism, and both see him as instigating a classical revival of which they acknowledge themselves to be - deludedly or not - a part. Thus while Davie writes that "no one can climb into some lost garden of the seventeenth or eighteenth century except by crossing [the] ... fault-line [of romanticism]," he notes that under the influence of Eliot, he and his "friends" in the 19405 assumed "we not only could but should pretend that the nineteenth century had never happened ... that it could somehow be bypassed as we threaded our way back to Boileau or Pope, to Shakespeare or Donne, ultimately to Dante." Davie calls this a "damaging delusion" and owes Eliot a grudge for "having, more than anyone else, foisted it upon us" (232). To blame Eliot for this youthful error, Davie's phrasing thankfully seems to acknowledge, is not really just; after all, in both "John Dryden" and "Johnson as Critic and Poet," Eliot makes clear that our modern sensibilities are, as Davie will put it, "permanently travelstained from the long trek" through romanticism. What remains important about Davie's comments, though, is the evidence they provide of Eliot's perceived centrality in the classical revival of the

162 At Home in Time

forties - out of which came, paradoxically, the anti-modernist poetics of the Movement. From MacNeice we have learned similarly of Eliot's influential place in the "Drydenism" of the previous decade, and Davie might even be mistaken for a thirties poet when he asserts that "one of the strengths of... [Eliot's] tough-minded criticism is that he never supposes aesthetic judgements are passed in a political or religious vacuum" (233). A further point of interest is that both Davie and MacNeice seem to have shared the view that Eliot's classical pronouncements as a critic are discontinuous with his practice as high modernist poet. Discussing his own early allegiance to the classical Eliot, Davie points to a gap between "what Eliot wrote as a poet ... [and] what he wrote (or was thought to have written) as a critic" (231). Here Davie and MacNeice link up with Hope, whose equally insistent but much more complicated response to Eliot also implies or requires such a separation of critic and poet. And in the light of that particular agreement, other lines of continuity - even more compelling because less abstract - demand to be noticed between Davie and Hope. First is the fact that Davie's naive attempt in the 19405 to follow Eliot into the "lost garden" of classicism coincides historically with the eruption of the classical counter-revolution in Australian letters. Davie's "Homage to William Cowper" - the work of a self-confessed "pasticheur of late-Augustan styles" - comes from roughly the same period, and the same impulse, as the Ern Malley hoax of 1944. Whether or not Davie knew of the hoax in that, his twenty-second year, is difficult to say; but when he came to review the Lansdowne Press publication of Ern Medley's Poems in early 1962, he entered wittily into the spirit of the deception, claiming fresh victims from his own English readership. His article is a review of several books, and in the first half we are given a serious comparison of the treatment of sex in some poems by Hilary Corke, and in others by Ern Malley. Only after several paragraphs, and after the judgment has begun - with very great reservation - to favour Malley, comes the statement: "Yet Ern Malley never existed" ("Angry Penguins" 270). When the story of the hoax has been told, Davie interestingly probes the motives of its perpetrators, pronouncing them "muddled," but nevertheless evincing a very clear sympathy for them. Davie's involvement in the Ern Malley affair is peculiar in being, so to speak, retroactive; but it is no less real for that, and it provides an important link between himself and Hope, whose participation in the hoax was just as positive, and - though in different ways - also remote. Concrete evidence of their like-mindedness is to be found in Davie's review of Hope's Poems (1961). There, Davie applauds Hope's

163 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism

"expert pastiche of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century styles," which he interestingly thinks of as the clearest indication of the poet's Australian identity. To write pastiche "for serious purposes/' he asserts, "requires technical sophistication but historical naivete," the latter being a quality difficult to find - or so he argues - in British or American poets ("Australians" 417). Apparently, only a poet outside of the native British tradition, or from a nation with a relatively short and uncomplicated literary history, could work "in touch with the English poetic past" in so "straightforward and unabashed" a fashion. Davie's phrasing is unfortunate, and the impression of cultural chauvinism at work cannot help but cloud the point. All the same, that there is some connection between Hope's neo-Augustanism and his sense of separate nationality is a paradox I have already endorsed in a previous chapter. In the present context the key word used of Hope is "naivete," for by this account Davie would seem to place the Australian in more or less the same world of deluded neoclassicism which he himself confesses to have occupied - thanks to the influence of Eliot's prose - in the mid-forties. In "Eliot in One Poet's Life," Davie looks back on that period as on a paradise not necessarily lost but outgrown, and his review of Hope is pleased to have found a poet whose milieu will not require him to grow up. I might have written "need not," or even "should not," for Davie says of Hope's naivete that "it will be well for Australian poetry if ... it has something to do with being Australian" ("Australians" 417). In reviewing Ern Medley's Poems the following year, Davie speaks again with the voice of a sympathetic but more mature brother to the Australian neoclassicists. The hoax, he implies, was less effective than it might have been because McAuley and Stewart were confused about their target. Although their expressed intention was to attack "the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece and others," Davie remarks that he can find in Ern Malley's poems nothing of Thomas, very little of Treece, and yet conspicuous traces of other writers the hoaxers did not name, notably Allen Tate and T.S. Eliot. Naivete, in this case, is not a strength but a weakness: "as so often happens with our literary conservatives," observes Davie, McAuley and Stewart "seem to have conjured up a collective bogey, 'the avant-garde,' and proceeded as if Eliot and Treece, Rimbaud and Thomas, stood or fell together" ("Angry Penguins" 271). This is precisely the error which I have argued vitiates Hope's satire in Dunciad Minor, and to a different degree much of his critical writing. In comparison with Hope's, Davie's neoclassicism is patently more circumspect. And perhaps because it is less "historically naive,"

164 At Home in Time

admitting always the possibility of continuity or evolution, it is less prone to operate the sort of simplistic antitheses which are the hallmark and chief flaw of Hope's critical thought. Nevertheless, the two men appear to agree on a large number of crucial issues. Revealing not only the similar terms according to which they define the "classic," but also their comradeship in a historically definable movement, both for example identify Sir Herbert Read as a principal antagonist. Read's alliance with the anti-classical forces during the Ern Malley hoax is interestingly given pointed mention in Davie's review of Ern Medley's Poems: "Herbert Read," he writes in mock-epic style, rallied "to the cause by cable and letter" ("Angry Penguins" 271), which subtly gives Read a portion of the blame for the increasingly militant polarization of classical and romantic attitudes. Yet in the years following the hoax - particularly the decade of the fifties - Davie's own criticism did nothing to lessen the antagonism. Indeed, his two books of the period, Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952) and Articulate Energy (1955), reassert in different ways the values and assumptions of eighteenth-century neoclassicism. Between them, and a concise indication of Davie's attitudes throughout these years, comes his essay "Herbert Read's Romanticism," a review of Read's 1953 study, The True Voice of Feeling. The essay begins with some specific comments on the question of poetic syntax, particularly as treated by Suzanne Langer, whose Philosophy in a New Key (1942) had recently been rediscovered by Read, and whom Davie for some years seems to have considered the most challenging theorist associated with the non-classical party.1 Very quickly, though, the discussion moves from the qualifications and complexities of theory to a recognition of party divisions, very baldly stated in reference not to Langer, but to Read. Taking note of Read's "few cursory and contemptuous references to 'classicism,'" Davie goes on to remark: In the Introduction [to The True Voice of Feeling] ... we learn that classicism is an "alternative and defensible attitude in literature, and in life"; but elsewhere we read of "a formidable false tradition - the tradition of Dryden and Pope, erected to pontifical magnitude by Dr. Johnson." And, for the most part, we might be back with some late-Victorian critic, assuming that romanticism is "the real thing," that English poetry found itself in 1798, and that great or good poets of earlier ages (not Pope, however, nor Dryden) were all Romantics without knowing it. (296)

So Read's neo-romantic bias is forcefully pointed out, and in what follows Davie systematically calls up and then attempts to take apart

165 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism

its key components. The continuing romantic "tradition" postulated by Read Davie would negate by pointing out internal contradictions and conflicts amongst its members. Thus he notes - without acknowledging later modifications to the man's position - that Hulme declared himself against romanticism, was less influential on Pound than Read would have it, and was in fact in "radical disagreement" with Coleridge (296). From our historical advantage, these observations not only work to dissolve the particular tradition constructed by Read in his book but also call into question the viability and defensibility of all constructions of this sort. When Davie writes that the Malley hoaxers weakened their case by assailing a factitious tradition, he shows himself acutely aware of the readiness with which such things can be critically dismantled. But interestingly it is his own tendency to reconstruct Read's romantic tradition in works such as Articulate Energy - where Langer, Read, Hulme, Pound, and others are again grouped together in order to define by opposition Davie's classical ideal - that decisively brings home the literary-political contingency upon which such constructs rest. When his aim is to establish by contrast the unique virtue of "the strength of Denham," the Augustan premium on "close and compact syntax" (Articulate Energy 60), he follows Read in stressing not the classical, but the Bergsonian Hulme of "The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds." It is one of the interesting paradoxes of "Herbert Read's Romanticism" that Davie first challenges the continuity outlined by Read, and then goes on to offer a clearly partisan critique of the neo-romantic view - a view that implicitly has some of the coherence he would wish to deny. In the process he establishes two competing attitudes to language. One, which he insists cannot defensibly be derived from Coleridge but is nevertheless central to Read's new romanticism, is the view "that concrete images are always and everywhere a good thing, all other words in poetry being lumped together and condemned as 'abstractions'" (296). This, he is quite content to say, is an idea directly derived by Read from Hulme. And in his essay on Hulme in Articulate Energy, he points out that it is a view of poetry which "has no use for syntax" (8), which prefers "intensive," nonrational connections, to "extensive" or discursive ones (7). A brief reference by Davie to Pound's equation of "unfoldedness" with "loss" (Guide to Kulchur 279) indicates that the idea is very much the modernist norm (8), and the point is later elaborated: I get the impression that Hulme's views about the nature of poetical language are the ideas most generally current, almost the standard ideas, among poets and their readers today, at least in the English-speaking world. We still

166 At Home in Time generally assume that it is the poet's duty to exclude abstractions in favour of concretions. (13)

Davie's critique of this attitude posits by implication an alternative theory of poetic language - one in which abstraction suffers no stigma, "syntactical structures, such as the grammarian's 'full sentence'" (298) carry a "weight of poetic meaning" (Articulate Energy 63), and a facile insistence on "sincerity" does not preclude the use of conventional forms and metres. In Articulate Energy, this approach is directly identified with eighteenth-century poetic theory. In a bold move, Davie presents Ernest Fenollosa - whose name one would think is linked inextricably with Pound and the poetics of modernism - for co-option into the neoclassical school: "the temper of his mind was Augustan." This generosity is possible because Fenollosa would, in Davie's view, "retain syntax and set great store by it" (56). It is interesting to note, however, that in so arguing Davie must obviously be conscious that he is emphasizing one aspect of Fenollosa's thought at the expense of another: in the earlier Read essay he had made a distinction between the Hulmean ("much less original") side of Fenollosa, which insisted that "the substance of poetic language is 'the concrete image, the thing/" and the "strikingly original" side, which argued "that the movement of the transitive sentence from subject through verb to object reproduced a natural law" ("Herbert Read's Romanticism" 299). Fenollosa was more "original" the more his ideas can be detached from his own century and attached to the eighteenth: it is a peculiarly inverted suggestion, which under scrutiny betrays the literary-political motives at work in Davie's critical enterprise during this period. More interesting, though, is that the issue on which Fenollosa is here said to come into line with "a natural law" is precisely the issue on which he is declared, in Articulate Energy, to be of an Augustan temper. The essence of eighteenth-century poetic theory, as Davie comes to present it in that book, is "strong sense," which means not just a general concentration of significance, but meaning carried in a binding and joining syntax (60). Davie writes that "the whole Romantic movement in poetry tended to minimize the responsibilities of poetry towards what the Augustan critics understood as 'sense,'" and "it was the Romantics who first suggested, by implication, that syntax could only have a phantasmal life in poetry" (61). In the twentieth century, the argument continues, poets have acted on the assumption that "when syntactical forms are retained in poetry those forms can carry no weight." As Davie's historical survey concludes,

167 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism

he reveals that the point of his recovery and explication of the Augustan notion of "strong sense" - and of the real poetic possibilities of syntactical relations in poetry - has been to alter the direction of writing in his own day. Thus, I have sought only to make these assumptions explicit, so that we may know just what we are doing, and what we are turning our backs upon, when we agree with the symbolists that in poetry syntax turns into music. Is Pope's handling of poetic syntax really so irrelevant to the writing of poetry today? And are we really so sure of ourselves that we can afford to break so completely with the tradition he represents? (63-4)

For his part, A.D. Hope would answer this with a resounding no. And Davie's argument as I have laid it out has a great deal in common with Hope's own in essays such as "The Discursive Mode." It concerns itself with similar issues, but on the whole Davie's position is consistently more subtle than Hope's. He insists, for example, on a more precise definition of the "discursive" style - not "an apparently casual musing or meditation" but "what moves from point to point" (Articulate Energy 158) - and thus comes to think of a functional or "authentic" syntax as the proper measure of discursiveness. And thus conceived, the discursive mode need not be the exclusive preserve of poets who believe that poetry "tells us about an experience, instead of presenting it"; Davie writes that in his view "enthusiasts for presentation, for embodiment, have been ill-advised in ignoring the part that authentic syntax can play in bringing about all that they hope for, by miming a movement of the mind or of fate" (158). In this suggestion we have something certainly unavailable in Hope - the possibility of a rapprochement between neoclassical and modernist poetics, between Pope and Pound. Davie's point incidentally offers some clarification of two other issues, discussed elsewhere in this study: first/of the rationale behind his own career's parallel investigations of Augustan and modernist poetry, and second, of what might have made possible that meeting - charted in chapter one - between Eliot and Pound over the drafts of The Waste Land. Davie and Hope do agree in blaming symbolism for the modernist underestimation of eighteenth-century modes. Davie writes that "modern poetry, so diverse in all other ways,... [can be] seen as one" in its characteristically post-symbolist denigration of syntax: "What is common to all modern poetry is the assertion or the assumption (most often the latter) that syntax in poetry is wholly different from syntax as understood by logicians and grammarians" (148). Syntax as "emptied form," Davie argues, is at the core of symbolist doctrine - despite

168 At Home in Time

"the fact that Mallarme and Valery talk of syntax, and appear to lay great store by it, in a way that earlier poets did not": The symbolist poet ... has a choice of two alternatives: either he telescopes his feeling "by a few stenographic strokes" - that is, he abandons even the appearance of syntactical arrangement and merely juxtaposes images; or else he "invents ... a syntax as unfamiliar as the sensation itself" - that is, something that may look like normal syntax but fulfils a quite different function. (149)

The consistent argument of Articulate Energy is that in modern poetry - circa 1955 - these two approaches to syntax continue to hold sway. In his earlier book, Purity of Diction in English Verse, Davie contends that the symbolist influence is visible in the poetry of T.S. Eliot long after it has waned in his criticism: "It is common for poets to know the way they ought to go before they can follow their own advice." Davie argues that Eliot's "'Ash Wednesday' is a poem in the symbolist tradition. Images or symbols are ranged about, and the meaning flowers out of the space between them. Poetry of this sort depends upon the dislocation of normal syntax." By the early forties, it would appear, Eliot had rediscovered some of the possibilities of "normal" syntax in his own verse: Davie cites the opening of part in of "Little Gidding" as an example of poetry which might be said, in Eliot's words, to have "the virtues of good prose" (27). Interestingly, this view of the poet's progress towards classical perfection is shortly retracted: in an argument which he was to elaborate in his 1956 essay, "T.S. Eliot: The End of an Era," Davie tells us that "'Little Gidding' ..., no less than 'Ash Wednesday,' is a poem in the symbolist tradition" (Purity 92). Despite these reservations, Davie does end his chapter on "Poetic Diction and Poetic Strength" by linking Eliot with John Denham, Dryden's contemporary, whose "strength" in verse we have already seen applauded in Articulate Energy, three years later. In Purity Davie is concerned not, as in that other study, with "authentic syntax," but with "chaste or pure diction." Nevertheless, the poetic virtue under investigation is much the same: "strength of statement" (68). And it would appear that such a strikingly Augustan thing can be found, if not in the Quartets as a whole, in certain passages from "Little Gidding," lines which "should engage the twentieth century as [Denham's] ... did the eighteenth" (69). In Purity of Diction, Davie allows himself to suggest even more overtly than in his later book the possibility of a linkage between our century and the eighteenth. The provocative conclusion of his essay on Johnson asserts that there is "a substantial identity of outlook, as

169 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism

to poetic diction, in Dante and Dr. Johnson and certain modern poets. One may go further indeed, and speak of a consistent doctrine in this matter shared by these writers" (90). Davie takes note of Johnson's criticism of Gray - who "thought his language more poetical as it was more remote from common use" - and makes the obvious link with Eliot's claim that "language is not more poetic the further it is removed from the language of prose" (Purity 82). Davie connects Johnson's phrase "common use" with two influential formulations of Eliot: "perfection of a common language" (one of the "qualities of the classic" laid out in 1944), and the compulsion to "purify the dialect of the tribe," acknowledged in the second section of "Little Gidding." "By adopting the twin criteria of literary precedent... and 'common use/" Davie goes on, Johnson is not only in substantial agreement with Eliot, but is also "on the same ground as Ezra Pound" and Dante, whose De Vulgari Eloquentia is the "classical expression" of the doctrine of purity of diction in poetry (83). Here one has to make the point that this "doctrine," as elaborated in Davie's book, is neither strictly derived from Dante nor entirely comprehensive within itself. Davie admits that much in his conclusion to the book's first part: "I put forward no personal systematic view of poetry as a whole, but only one kind of poetry which seems to me to have been neglected" (106). "Purity" of poetic diction is thus a rather hazy and loose combination of the principles to which this paragraph has already alluded. What Davie makes very clear, however, is that in his view those principles have been "renovated" for the twentieth century by Eliot and others (105), and are tending to converge in a manner whose nearest historical precedent is to be found in the Augustan age. Davie underlines the considerable affinity between these periods when he asserts that the notion of "purity in poetic diction ... appears to have been lost to English poetry and criticism between Dr. Johnson and Mr. Pound" (83). In Johnson, as in Dryden, the premium placed upon language in "common use" derives in part from the assumption that one of the fundamental motives for writing poetry is to teach. A most interesting aspect of Davie's recuperation of Augustan principles is that he, too, is led from matters of diction to consider the issue of "edification." But he is characteristically modern in noticing, as Eliot does in his essay on Johnson, that the power which words exercise over their readers can have as much to do with the forms of language as with its more obvious "meanings." In other words, to think about what language teaches - or can teach - leads inevitably to a consideration not just of individual word-choices, but of larger linguistic structures as well. This is precisely the shift in focus which occurs towards the

170 At Home in Time

end of the theoretical first half of Purity of Diction in English Verse, and it is also - though in larger degree - what separates that book from Davie's later investigation of syntax in Articulate Energy. Most interesting is that in both cases the shift coincides with a decisive parting of the ways between Da vie and the high modernists. In Purity, we have no sooner heard of the "substantial identity of outlook" linking Pound and Eliot with Dr Johnson than we are reminded that '"Little Gidding' is less prosaic than The Vanity of Human Wishes/" and that the neo-Augustan "Mr. Eliot, therefore, does not mean all that he seems to say" (91). There is a "gulf that yawns" between Augustan and modern verse (91), and, just as we might predict from having looked first at Articulate Energy, it opens - and widens unbridgeably - over the question of syntax. On that matter, it appears, the divergence between moderns and Augustans is as striking and fundamental as their congruence on diction. "It seems plain," writes Davie, "that the contemporary poet cannot, after all, agree with the late-Augustan poet about the relation of prose to poetry" And a wistful comment tells us that in 1952 Davie, though still attracted by the idea of a return to the "lost garden" of eighteenth-century verse, has begun to accept the impossibility of such a thing: "It may be already too late for poetry to revert to the presymbolist attitude to syntax" (97). It becomes clear, however, that his regret over this situation arises out of something much more complex than merely aesthetic discomfort. How we use language, he begins to argue, has serious moral and social consequences; and those implied or provoked by symbolist poetic procedures are nothing less than dangerous. Davie's first point of dispute with the dislocated syntax of symbolist and post-symbolist poetry is that although it may make possible "an unprecedented concentration of one kind of poetic pleasure," it may well over time produce "flabbiness of thought." The momentary claims of esoteric literary experience must weigh no more heavily than those of the long-term communal good. Rationality and communality are the joint foundation of Davie's neo-Augustan stance, and not unexpectedly they prompt him to attack modernism on the familiar ground that its landmark works are obscure, and - by implication - exclusive: "there is no denying that modern poetry is obscure and that it would be less so if the poets adhered to the syntax of prose" (97). Formulated so simply, the argument against modernism on behalf of an alienated "common reader" is less than compelling; Davie's vaguely adumbrated sympathy for the community, for "congregations" or "publics" (97), does not really amount to a coherent

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politics. So far, the threat posed by symbolist syntax to our moral and social being seems relatively innocuous. As the argument advances, however, Davie's investigation of the relationship between linguistic forms and social behaviour becomes more interesting, because more complex and penetrating. Thus, in the following passage, we are told that language makes and unmakes ideology, and yet we can see that the declaration itself articulates an ideological position: Changes in linguistic habit are related to changes in man's outlook and hence, eventually, to changes in human conduct. Language does not merely reflect such changes; a change in language may precede the other changes, and even help to bring them about. To abandon syntax in poetry is not to start or indulge a literary fashion; it is to throw away a tradition central to human thought and conduct, as to human speech. Pound, at least, knew this and realized what he was doing. (97-8)

"To throw away a tradition": the diction tells us it is an intemperate, wasteful thing to do. And if we ask what that tradition is - what in human conduct is the counterpart to syntax in poetry - the answer must surely be temperateness, moderation, logic, and rationality. These can conceivably do for society what, in Davie's view, "strong" poetic syntax can do: "bind as well as join, not only gather together but fetter too" (Articulate Energy 60). Davie's closing comment on Pound is fascinating, for it links that poet's aesthetic program very directly to his political views. Too directly, perhaps, to be persuasive: there is a naivete - reminiscent of Christopher Caudwell - in the linkage Davie goes on to make between Pound's emphasis on "individual words" and his tendency to "put his trust not in human institutions but in individuals" (99). Of Pound's devotion to Mussolini, Davie writes, It would be too much to say that this is the logical end of abandoning prose syntax. But at least the development from imagism in poetry to fascism in politics is clear and unbroken. From a similar conviction about language and poetry Eliot has developed, not quite so obviously, to Royalism and AngloCatholicism. And yet it is impossible not to trace a connection between the laws of syntax and the laws of society, between bodies of usage in speech and in social life, between tearing a word from its context and choosing a leader out of the ruck. One could almost say, on this showing, that to dislocate syntax in poetry is to threaten the rule of law in the civilized community. (Purity 99)

172 At Home in Time

I wonder whether anyone - including Davie - could read this today without a shudder at the blithe self-confidence of its thirty-year-old author. The rhetorical trappings of modesty and caution are there "it would be too much to say," "one could almost say" - but these are more than balanced by indications of incontrovertible authority. "At least," we are told, the link between Pound's imagism and his fascist politics is "clear and unbroken." But in what sense is this true? Bernard Bergonzi notes that many readers would believe the link far from clear, "and would require much more demonstration and evidence" (32). How much more subtle handling these questions require has been made clear by Leon Surette's recent article, "Ezra Pound's Fascism: Aberration or Essence," which presents Pound not as a person who consciously and coherently integrated poetics with politics, but as an "intellectual sponge," in whom a vast array of ideas, literary and political, were held "without any true assimilation" (620). Then there is Davie's insistence that "it is impossible" not to connect the laws of society with those of syntax, social with linguistic "usage," and an interest in individual words with a predilection for dictators. That last connection is surely one we are unlikely to make, however thought-provoking it may be, once heard. There is undoubtedly a great deal to argue with in these declarations of Davie. And there is also much with which critics continue to agree. That "absolute" poetics tend to imply "absolute" political views was effectively asserted by Michael Hamburger in The Truth of Poetry (1969) - the fifth chapter of which articulates the ideological assumptions of symbolist aesthetics with a lucidity absent from A.D. Hope's fulminations on the subject, and more subtlety than we find in Davie. For present purposes, though, the important point is not at all whether Davie is correct about Pound or the symbolists. It is the very extremity of his stance which is crucial, for it renders all the elements of his critical position plainly visible. His comments on Pound are based on a "prose ideogram" which he quotes from the Guide to Kulchur, and the components of which he says "are on the one hand, certain observations about language, on the other, observations about political conduct" (98). Davie's discussion is itself a "prose ideogram" with components that can be similarly classified, and which it will now be useful, by way of summary, to enumerate. The principal "observation about language" which we encounter in this discussion - as in the essay on Read and in Articulate Energy - is that not only are there conventionally established "laws of syntax" but also the movement of the transitive sentence from subject to verb to object is itself true to "natural law." "First follow nature," goes Pope's injunction in the Essay on Criticism, "and your judgement

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frame / By her just standard" (Poems 146): Davie's consideration of syntax is very Augustan in its invocation of nature as a "just standard" for literature. Indeed, it is difficult to see how either his high estimation of syntax, or especially his extension of this into a prescription - by analogy - for human conduct, could be justified without endorsing in some way that typically eighteenth-century notion of a pervasive law of nature. In Davie's second group of observations - those about political conduct - the talk is again of laws, and the implication is that there is a political just as there is a literary decorum, defined in each case with reference to the same principle. Only by assuming such a deep continuity between literature and life could one make the otherwise tendentious claim that "it is impossible not to trace a connection between the laws of syntax and the laws of society." Their belief in a "natural law," operating alike in art and personal conduct, is one reason why the writers of the eighteenth century Pope, Dryden, Shaftesbury, Goldsmith, and Johnson, amongst others2 - assumed so readily that literature could, and should, influence human behaviour. In Davie, the idea of a "natural" continuity between life and language invests the latter with enormous significance, and the poet with a profound responsibility. "Once one has seen this connection between law in language and law in conduct," he writes, "observations about the nature of language take on an awful importance, and one comes to see potential dangers in attitudes which seemed innocuous" (99-100). Thus we might argue that for Davie a divergence with Ezra Pound and modernism was inevitable - and identifiably neoclassical, not only in its loyalty to eighteenth-century models, modes, and political outlook, but also in the assumptions about life in its relations to literature which make that disagreement possible. Eighteen years intervene between Purity of Diction in English Verse and Six Epistles to Eva Hesse, and I will not argue that Davie's critical attitudes remained static during that period; nor will I insist that since 1970, in works such as Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1972) and Under Briggflatts (1989), they have not altered even further. One certain point is that his divergence from Pound and the modernists has not, in all these years, become as extreme as his two books from the fifties might have encouraged us to expect. In fact, Under Briggflatts closes with an "Afterword" attacking those "who have been persuaded that the British have comfortably opted out from twentieth-century endeavour in poetry" (256), and making through the figure of Charles Tomlinson - a powerful link between Dryden and Ezra Pound (254). "Taking up positions for and against

S

174 At Home in Time

'modernism/" Davie argues, is in the 19805 "an absurd anachronism" (252) - which observation makes it clear that his fascination with modernist poetics, abundantly obvious in both Purity and Articulate Energy, has not suffered from cohabiting with what appears to be a personal and temperamental demurrer at certain key modernist figures, notably Pound. It is Pound's name, paradoxically, with which Davie is perhaps most often associated as a critic: Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (1965) and Ezra Pound (1975) testify to his continuing belief that "the artistic monuments [of modernism] remain, and remain potent," despite the fact that "the flags which once flew over them ... come to seem in time tattered and grubby and irrelevant" (Under Briggflatts 252). Bergonzi's "Davie and Pound" recounts in admirable detail the history of ambivalence and vicissitude which lies behind that last statement. Davie's publications on modernist subjects have tended to be matched by work on Augustan ones. The year 1958 saw the appearance of his edition, The Late Augustans: Longer Poems of the Later Eighteenth Century, heralded in Use of English as "an important event, the rehabilitation of an underrated period."3 And when, today, we read Davie's twenty-five-page introduction to that book, the proselytizing intention is quite unmistakable: we are generously informed, and simultaneously exhorted. At the close, Davie demands a rereading of literary history in which Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is taken to be an extension of key ideas "already implicit" in Johnson, Goldsmith, Langhorne, and Cowper (xxxiii). Then in 1963 Davie published The Language of Science and the Language of Literature, 1700-1740, which carries on the work of Purity and Articulate Energy in arguing against the supposition that "poetry and prose differ not in degree but radically, in kind; so that the conditions favourable to the one may be death to the other." Davie asserts that Arnold's definition of "Dryden and Pope as 'classics of our prose, not of our poetry' [sic]. ... is a position no longer respectable" (8). And his key aim in the book is to dismantle commonplace assumptions about abstraction in eighteenth-century verse, particularly the contention that "philosophical" diction and the "naked and direct" language of science are inimical to poetry: One tends to think that a highly abstract style is a style devoid of images, hence unmetaphorical; but what makes Johnson's style abstract is also what makes it highly metaphorical. (14)

Here again one sees Davie preparing the ground for a reconciliation between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. That closing

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proposition, once accepted, could provide the basis of an argument linking the neoclassical style of Johnson with Pound's poetics of the image. In an essay of 1968, Davie continued his rehabilitation of the eighteenth century by attempting to dismantle yet another (postromantic) critical supposition harmful to a proper understanding of the period. Instead of science and literature, his subject in this case - his contribution to a Festschrift for the political scientist Michael Oakeshott - was the supposedly inimical relation between "Politics and Literature." Oakeshott, he argued, had erred in regarding poetry as valuable but separate from the "enquiry of the human mind into 'ourselves and the world we inhabit'" (395). Comparing John Adams, the second president of the United States, with Dr Johnson, Davie insists that Adams the poet is inseparable from Adams the politician, and that "his fallings short in political sagacity and in poetry are related, so ... we may ... speak simply of a single failure of imagination" (396). It is a fascinating essay not only for what it says about Adams, but for its speculation on the larger question of whether the "Fine Arts" can, in Adams's words, be "inlist[ed] ... on the side of Truth, of Virtue, of Piety, or even of Honour": The question is neither rhetorical nor frivolous; and we know the answer to it no better than Adams did. Certainly I cannot answer it, who would never have read Adams at all, nor Jefferson either, but for the recommendations of that frequently exquisite and always honest poet, Ezra Pound, Fascist and anti-Semite. Is it possible to enlist the Fine Arts? We know how to do so no more than Doctor Johnson when he deplored, in the finest of all tributes to Shakespeare, that Shakespeare's plays did not uniformly punish wicked characters and reward the virtuous. (402)

Aligning himself as he does with Johnson, Davie accepts that literature is inextricably tied to social and moral questions, however blurry and conceptually elusive the ties might be. And yet, as the reference to Pound makes clear, literature is never wholly reducible to politics. Davie follows Adams in being more sceptical than Johnson over the question of "edification," but at the same time the point of the whole essay is that poetry is always to some extent "enlisted" in human affairs, part of the mind's inquiry into "ourselves and the world we inhabit." What Donald Greene calls Davie's "nonconformist conscience" (609) could have it no other way. The passage I have quoted takes us back to the discussion of Pound's fascism in Purity of Diction in English Verse; sixteen years have passed, and still Davie's concern is with the general "connection

176 At Home in Time

between law in language and law in conduct." There are other continuities, too, one of which is particularly worth noticing as we prepare to consider Six Epistles to Eva Hesse. This is Davie's interest in time, an acceptance of which is constantly implied in his early discussions of "authentic syntax." In Articulate Energy, he approves of Fenollosa to the extent that the latter finds the "essential element in poetic form" to be "a sort of significant sequaciousness." His quotations from The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry are revealing indeed: "we do not always sufficiently consider that thought is successive, not through some accident or weakness or our subjective operations but because the operations in nature are successive"; "one superiority of verbal poetry as an art rests in its getting back to the fundamental reality of time" (Articulate Energy 34; Fenollosa 7,9). In the Oakeshott essay it is apparent that one reason for Davie's interest in Adams is the latter's inability to escape, even mentally, that "fundamental reality." On this, we are told, Adams diverges markedly from Johnson, who "rested his whole view of life on a very bleak and agitated but unshakeable faith in the Christian God": Adams and Jefferson, in their letters, are still locked into historical time Adams like his later admirer Pound convinced that only sinister destruction of records has lost the clue which lies somewhere in the historical past; Jefferson, more sanguine and with a more successful career behind him, looking still, though with chastened eyes, for fulfilment in the future. In each case the deistic approval of the Christian ethic simply overlooks the great claim of Christianity - to have redeemed history, and made it meaningful once and for all, by the historical event of the Incarnation. (405)

Davie's closing judgment is that Johnson is "greater" than Adams because the former "could comprehend abysses and exaltations beyond the compass" of Enlightenment culture. He "transcended" his period, "whereas Adams, restive and sceptical though he was, remained in the end bounded by its assumptions" (408) - which makes Adams, paradoxically, the quintessential Enlightenment man, yet also in his limitations the kind of ordinary figure with whom the writers of other ages can easily feel a kinship. In being "locked into historical time" he partakes of that "fundamental reality" which Davie and Fenollosa would assert includes all humanity. II

Six Epistles to Eva Hesse opens with Davie registering the claims of an alternative vision of reality - rather late in the day, one has to

177 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism

observe, since it is the view Auden had not only discussed but embraced at least three decades earlier. In what the introduction tells us is a response to certain comments made by Hesse in her introduction to New Approaches to Ezra Pound (1969), Davie begins the first letter thus: Not, I keep being told, the Time That gets to me in one straight line But (I knew this had to come) A Space-cum-Time continuum; A field of (wouldn't you know it?) force, Not that dumb clockwork Time of course This and not that I should be writing, Everyone tells me.

(13)

Hesse had written of the "pluralistic and relativistic mode of thinking" which, thanks to Einstein, Heisenberg, and others, was "emerging into the foreground in certain fields of modern science": Attention is being focussed upon non-Aristotelian logic, non-Euclidian geometry, "non-grammatical" linguistics. The a priori categories of knowledge, such as space, time, and causality, have all been abandoned. (New Approaches 46)

The ideogrammic method of Pound, Hesse went on to argue, must properly be considered within the context of this conceptual revolution. The ideogram "breaks away from the thin-blooded progressions of occidental syllogization.... Syntax yields to parataxis.... The grammatical link becomes irrelevant" (48). Would it be possible, one wonders, to formulate a position more likely than this to provoke objection from the author of Articulate Energy? The growing irrelevance of "the grammatical link" is precisely what Davie bemoaned in Pound and in the "less original" side of Fenollosa. And to a mind so wedded to the truth of empirical experience, the notion that literary or any other kind of experience might free itself entirely from "that dumb clockwork Time" would obviously seem a fantasy. The pragmatic, empirical side of Davie asserts itself rather pointedly in the thirteenth line of the first epistle, where he writes of time that "some of it seems resistant stuff / Still, and linear enough." The phrasing is important, for Davie's intention is plainly not to bicker about theoretical physics, about the truth or falsity of the Einsteinian "Space-cum-Time continuum." He even concedes - though somewhat wryly - that time thus understood is "exciting / Stuff, all right

178 At Home in Time

... / A sort of poet's plasticine" (13). But he insists nevertheless that "We're trapped in linearity" (15): we cannot help but conceive of time, as we experience it, in sequential terms. So, though Spirals may make the whole thing go, The way we got so fast so far (Boring, I know, but there we are) Must be a linear affair; Like any track from here to there, Evolution is a thing We picture as a length of string.

(17)

That there is no getting around this epistemological obstacle is illustrated by Davie through the analogy of the cat's cradle - for which we have been somewhat prepared by Hope's use of the same in Dunciad Minor. "Cat's cradlers" (15) are poets or thinkers devoted to a synchronic rather than a diachronic model of time, to an elastic "Space-cum-Time" rather than to clockwork time: "Henceforward," as Davie simplistically formulates their position, "a poem [must] twist / Back on itself, or be dismissed" (16). It is because Pound - as Hesse presents him - is an inveterate cat's cradler that we have this provocative statement on the second page of the Epistles: "No, Madam, Pound's a splendid poet / But a sucker, and we know it" (14). And in the following lines, Davie implies - again with a very Augustan deference to what "Nature" seems to prescribe - that when we abandon linearity as a model for time not only do we lose a sense of the real, but "reality" itself becomes especially prone to annexation by aggressive ideologies: Given a set of random pegs Five fingers, or a chair's four legs You can do a lot with string, And turn it into anything: A double helix, say (and that We know we have to goggle at); A Manxman's three free-wheeling legs, Although that asks a lot of pegs; A swastika; a hammer and Sickle; or an ampersand. Come, given fingers deft as Madam's, I'll outmatch Del Mar or Brooks Adams.

(14)

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The verse, as so often in the Epistles, is appallingly mechanical. But that is obviously part of the intention here, where extravagant (and dangerous) visions of history are evoked for us by the swastika and the hammer and sickle, yet simultaneously belittled and indicted by the common-sensical, awkward, and unpresuming style. Thanks to those unlikely but relentless rhymes, combined with the relatively short four-stress line, the argument moves insistently forward, its own inescapable linearity preparing us for Davie's climactic reduction of the cat's cradle: "No, look! Unravel it. the thing, / When all is said and done, is string" (14). The fundamental linearity of our experience of time, so the poem would argue, is inescapable. Thus, "Confound it, history ... we transcend it / Not when we agree to bend it / To this cat's cradle or that theme. ..." (15). That last construction promises completion in a clause beginning "but when," and it is true that Davie does supply his own suggestion of how the effective linearity of time may be counteracted. Not surprisingly, he prefers to speak of "redeeming," rather than "transcending" time - obviously because there is less, in the former, of the notion of evasion or escape. We go as far as we can, he says, "when ... we redeem / This man or that one" - which decisively moves the whole question of temporality from the domain of theory, physics, and ultimate truth into the realm of human action and questions of society, ethics, and politics. It is a turn of the argument that indicates why Davie so casually yet meaningfully allows his discussion of the Poundian cat's cradle to become also a meditation on the symbols of certain political philosophies, Nazism and Communism in particular. Here, as in Purity of Diction, Davie's literary topic plainly derives much of its weight and urgency from the implications he perceives it to have for humanity and society. The first epistle is only halfway through when Davie declares that "What irks me, if I have to pin it / Down," is that in non-linear approaches to time there is a tendency to erode the particular significance of individuals and events: "Everything's news, so nothing's news" (17). To link diverse historical figures in a cat's cradle necessarily subordinates individuals to the larger pattern, a process wittily outlined in the third epistle, where Davie writes of Pound and the high modernists, theirs the flat Fiat of synopsis that Makes every goddess the Great Mother And women types of one another,

180 At Home in Time And Hathor, Circe, Aphrodite One pair of breasts inside one nightie.

(37)

The bathos of that last line strikes against the synoptic view on behalf of ordinariness and the simple but endearing aspects of life lived by the clock. The poem's commitment on this matter is quite explicit, as is Davie's sense that in according importance to the mundane he is aligned with an eighteenth-century attitude: I'm saying, I suppose, that Man Leaves me cold, though Sid and Stan, Distinguished individuals, awe me. (Jonathan Swift said this before me.)

(17)

"Sid and Stan": the alliterating names together resound with ordinariness. By paradoxically calling these two men "distinguished individuals," however, Davie not only insists on their value but also indicates something of the perverse act of will required to perceive value in what - according to the synoptic view - would be unremarkable. Finding some specific and enduring value in ordinary human action, I infer, is Davie's sense when he talks of redeeming "this man or that one," thereby "transcending" history in the only way possible. Thus, when the opening meditation on linear time concludes and we are told that "I give you meaning and not news," it would appear that we are about to witness on the part of the author some such act of redemption. Knowledge turns out, as in MacNeice and Hope, to be inseparable from narration; what we are given is a shift into the emphatically linear mode of narrative. Our protagonist, like all of those whose stories Davie tells in the Epistles, is "of a modest kind" (24): Jean Francois, Comte de la Perouse, A person singularly winning. And to begin with his beginning, It was in Albi, where a square (I first made his acquaintance there) Holds him in effigy. For his Youth, see the French biographies.

(18-19)

Perouse, whose exploits (circa 1782) at Churchill Fort in Hudson Bay are fraught "With no long-lasting consequence," is "worth remembering, none the less, / For something we may call finesse, / And

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that not least in how he treated, / Civilly, those he had defeated" (19). It is typical of Davie's poem to prize a social virtue - civility over individualistic heroism. Perouse is remembered not for transcending his circumstances, but for behaving properly within them. Thus it is appropriate that Davie's act of "redeeming" him from the wastes of history does not go so far as to imply - or require - a real and decisive escape from temporality itself. On the contrary, the commemoration of Perouse is crudely and pointedly linear ("And to begin with his beginning ..."), and his death, as narrated for us, is an absurd anti-climax - not the final event but merely one of a much larger sequence. Thus we have the chronicle of his actions after Hudson Bay: Macao and Manila draw him out, as planned. A strait is named for him, between Hokkaido and Sakhalin. Kamchatka then, Samoa, Tonga, Botany Bay. And then no longer The grizzled admiral stems the seas. He's lost off the New Hebrides.

(19)

The humour in this very Byronic passage humbles but does not humiliate our protagonist. In fact, if we follow Davie's argument in the second epistle, the very ordinary life of Perouse will become memorable and interesting for us only if it is cast as comedy: where Fidelity is the plot, Comedy, we know, is not Conspicuously enthusiastic; She likes her things a bit more drastic So she can smooth them out at last, Lothario's peccadilloes past. Her view is, we are all too human And stand in need of her denouements, As by and large we do of course.

(27)

What is taken for granted here is not merely that art does not resemble life, although that is essential to the point being made. The key assumption is that human nature is not in the main "drastic," or given to the extremities of word and deed on which art tends to thrive. Tragedy and Epic, we are told some lines further on, "are askew" in being "sold / So totally upon the bold / Unbalanced hero"

182 At Home in Time

(28). Real, complicated, and qualified human virtues - such as were embodied in Perouse - are thus implicitly unrepresentable in those forms of art: "human virtues cannot earn / The marble plinth, the sculpted urn." To cast a life as comedy is of course less pretentious, but as Davie insists, it is still an act of distortion: ordinary human motives and actions are neither sufficiently simple nor even notable enough to be "naturally" represented in comic form. Why, then, is the narrative of Perouse's exemplary - because unremarkable - life cast as comedy? And why does Davie write at all if his concern is with such virtues as cannot, by their nature, be accurately depicted in art? The answer to these questions is to be found in the last three lines of the longer passage quoted above. We are "all too human" and "stand in need of ... [comedy's] denouements": at first glance this might seem no more than an argument for art as diversion and escape. But there is surely more to be said, for to be "human" in the terms of this poem is to be locked into an apparently intractable linearity, "in need of" - in the sense of being without - any understanding of how or even whether sequential time can be resolved. I note that Davie does not choose to say "needing," which would suggest a more active longing and also a stronger possibility that the need could or should be met; "in need of" gives some hint of human aspiration, of course, but does not indicate to the same degree that what is needed might in fact be available. Implicit in these lines, then, is yet again the point that our condition appears "woefully linear," without imminent resolution, and - since life tends to no end which we can know absolutely - without the possibility of locating meanings and values, as Tragedy or Epic are argued to do, in extremity. Earlier in the poem we are resolutely denied these, the consolations of teleology, but we are told that "Teleonomy, his cliff- / Hanging cousin" - "Gives us the break we'd waited for." While teleology teaches that "Nature works towards ends," teleonomy contends "It is as if she did"; and the latter, Davie implies, is also the lesson of Comedy (18). Thus it would indeed appear that our need for "her denouements" is to some extent at least a need to be deceived about reality. The comic muse, we are repeatedly told, is "compassionate" and "smiling" (19), and it is possible to argue that the deception she practises is a humane one. Furthermore, the deception is by Davie's diagnosis endemic to tragedy and epic as well, and to a greater degree, so comedy is perhaps in this regard the least exceptionable of all. Davie's brief life of Perouse is furthermore proof against severe criticism on this ground simply because its adoption of the comic mode is so knowing and forthright: the betrayal of Fidelity by Comedy is very close to being the principal subject of the second

183 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism

epistle. But to perpetrate a deception knowingly is by normal accounts a worse crime than to do so naively, and Davie's embracing of the comic muse - an act which he himself insists must be judged according to extra-literary values - needs to be justified on grounds more substantial than humanity's need for consoling illusions. What adds to the complexity of this question in Davie's poem is the poet's pervasive concern with virtue - the ordinary, human kind exemplified by Perouse and by Henri de Tonty, whose story is told in the second epistle. Like Perouse, Tonty led a life neither conspicuously heroic nor tragic: "being trusty, being true, / As Tonty was, will never do" for epic or tragic representation (28). Given his acts, and his name, comedy comes much more naturally: Let me present, my verse still jaunty, Gallicized, Henri de Tonty; Who earned a fate I cannot choose But think much worse than La Perouse In that, true mate and faithful friend, He made too late too mild an end Too quietly.

(24)

Those amusing last lines presuppose comparison with a heroic standard, humbling and yet paradoxically highlighting the example of this most ordinary man. Here Davie does with Tonty exactly what he did with Perouse - and explicitly in full awareness of the breach with Fidelity effected by his presentation. For the anaphora ("too late too mild ... / Too quietly) in a sense redeems the man's innocuous end by imbuing it with a rhetorical significance, making it important within the value-system of the poem as a whole. The process is a more subtle version of Davie's presentation of the mundane and indistinguishable Sid and Stan as "distinguished individuals." This elevation, by rhetoric, of ordinary humanity, is I believe the comic essence of Davie's narratives in the Six Epistles. And it is absolutely intrinsic to the poem's attempt to redeem for its reader the apparently unremarkable virtues of a life lived in harmony with society and within the march of time. So Davie chooses the comic muse not only because her milieu is less drastic than that of epic or tragedy, but also because it is still more drastic than ordinary life - and thus a rhetorically useful realm in which to exhibit and announce the values of ordinariness: we must make the Comic Muse, If reluctantly, infuse The homelier, more homespun virtues

184 At Home in Time With some quality of eclat, A Je ne sais (exactly) quoi. The more so, since we see anew How History's bits of string won't do.

(28)

From this it is clear that the motive behind Davie's comic narratives is didactic; they are intended to advocate "the homelier, more homespun virtues." The price of casting human affairs in comic form departing from strict Fidelity - is thus justified on the ground of rhetorical efficacy. We have noticed in the poem the continual implication that the values basic to a good life are not those with which literature is normally concerned - or even compatible. So merely the decision to articulate them through narrative in this case testifies to a certain urgency or pressure felt by the poet, a didactic compulsion. We feel this, though more enigmatically, in the last two lines quoted above. We have been told that "we must" use comedy to animate the homespun virtues, "the more so" because it would appear that the lessons of history are in some way inadequate: "History's bits of string won't do." This takes us back to the discussion of our need for Comedy's denouements, and to the idea that perhaps we require the illusion of a meaningful telos in order to think and act virtuously. The crucial point to remember, though, is that such illusions in no real way alter our "woefully linear" condition - which is precisely the hard-nosed realization that underlies Davie's complex and always suspicious flirtation with the comic muse. A similar message is repeatedly relayed by the verse of the Epistles, its short lines being moved inexorably along by sometimes outrageously mechanical rhyme. Besides the verse, it is also Davie's decision to "redeem" his heroes in crudely sequential narratives that powerfully asserts the claims of linear temporality. Thus, whatever illusions we make use of in propagandizing and defining human value, the poem insists finally on the determination, exercise, and maintenance of only such values as are compatible with a life in time and in society. "Slogging for the absolute," to borrow the title of Davie's deeply critical 1974 review of Galway Kinnell, is ruled out; as in that essay, the message here is that the poet must "choose [not] to be a titan,... [but] a human being" ("Slogging" 284). And that, in Robert von Hallberg's phrase, is for Davie a "first principle" (82). By choice or necessity, Perouse - or at least the Perouse Davie gives us - was notable for his humanity. And the index of his common human feeling was, we recall, "how he treated, / Civilly, those he had defeated." Civility is a key virtue in Six Epistles, not only held up for our admiration in the narrated lives of such as Perouse and

185 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism Tonty, but offered us as part of the contract instigated between writer and reader. The most obvious indication of this is Davie's hope, expressed in the introduction, "that there's nothing in these poems that isn't immediately comprehensible to the general reader of poetry." That is followed immediately by an explanation of why the poems are addressed to Eva Hesse, which links from the start a desire to write accessibly with the author's argument with Pound and the poetics of modernism. It is a connection not unfamiliar to us from Purity of Diction in English Verse, many years earlier. But the introduction's concern with civility between text and reader is remarkably and calculatedly - far-reaching, for the audience Davie would treat civilly is not entirely faceless or nameless: it includes you and me, of course, but also those whom the poem attacks. Compassionate criticism, I have already noted, is typical of Davie's approach to Pound, and in this regard Six Epistles is no different from Articulate Energy, or Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor. What is striking is that in the Epistles Davie's attacks on Hesse, Charles Olson, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Guy Davenport are all similarly friendly. He talks in the introduction of the "affection behind my mockery" (9), and this is easily and wittily transmitted through the consistently self-deprecating mechanism of Hudibrastic verse. Furthermore, the verse epistle itself is a basically congenial form more so, at least, than the mock-heroic, in writing which A.D. Hope also (vainly or self-deludedly) hoped he would not give serious offence. Of course, its congeniality is always to some degree contrived. Wendy Jones Nakanishi observes that "the tradition of unselfconscious literary letter writing is, by its nature, a contradiction in terms," and that most writers of verse epistles - especially the Augustans - have tended to follow Seneca, rather than Cicero, in writing letters which unashamedly look beyond their immediate addressee and towards posterity. The "element of deliberation," she argues, frequently robs "their letters ... of the charming air of impulsiveness and the intensely human tone" which distinguish Cicero's "genuinely unaffected, unrevised correspondence" (345). If it is true that the verse epistle tradition is one which in the main pays little more than "lip-service to 'naturalness'" (343), Davie's Epistles will necessarily seem quite unusual; for they manage throughout to remain remarkably ingenuous and personable, exploring theoretical questions in an apparent dialogue with personalities whom we consistently feel to be real - or, better still, for whom we can construct coherent identities. From this observation it does not inevitably follow that Six Epistles to Eva Hesse is not written with an eye on posterity, or that its aims

186 At Home in Time

are not essentially didactic. Indeed, Seneca himself suggests that intimacy of tone can be a potent rhetorical device. He implies to Lucilius that "conversation and familiarity" are the true source of edification, and more effective than formal expository discourse (Epistles i, 17; quoted in Nakanishi 349). And this would seem to be borne out by our experience of Davie's text. Although the poem traverses some very abstract territory, it never lapses into pontification; indeed, the personal fallibility of the poet is constantly allowed, observations are presented as opinions rather than unquestionable truth, and abstraction is expressed through memorable and concrete analogies. Again, Seneca: "the way by precept is long and tedious; whereas that of example is short and powerful" (quoted in Nakanishi 349). The "presence" of a fallible speaking subject requires us to adopt the position of a forgiving and sympathetic auditor, which paradoxically means we are more likely to find ourselves in agreement than would be the case if the declarations made were less personal, more peremptory. Typically, Davie favours - as I just have - the first-person plural. Thus, as the poem ends, "we" are brought to reflect on the various figures "we" have considered: Of course we know which one we like: Betrayed, traduced, and with the strike Against him always, Adams. Yet It's Jefferson we can't forget. ...

(70)

More collegial and friendly than Davie's formulation of the same point in "Politics and Literature" (491), this is to the same degree more subtly coercive. Can "we" disagree? The grammar presumes we cannot. Such presumption is to be found everywhere in Six Epistles to Eva Hesse, even while the tone is that of an wnpresuming and considerate house-guest - to borrow a comparison Davie once thought appropriate and positive with regard to Charles Tomlinson (Thomas Hardy 187). Few readers, I expect, would not follow Seneca in the belief that such a "considerate" text is more likely to secure our co-operation than is an mconsiderate one; the self-denigrating tone, the consistent use the collegial first-person plural, and the particularity of address, all enhance significantly the rhetorical efficacy of Davie's poem. "Didacticism dressed to kill with the greatest taste": so one reviewer described the poet's first volume,4 and the Epistles warrant the same description. The various formal characteristics I have just listed help and encourage us to assimilate the lessons which make up the poems' substance. But at the same time - and more important - they are a

187 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism

lesson in themselves. Not merely utilitarian but also significant forms, they teach us through the reading experience the nature and value of civility. And in doing so, they effect a redemption through style of the life and values of Jean Francois, Comte de la Perouse. Von Hallberg puts a name to those values when he argues that "the characteristic form" of Davie's poems - and the "rational discussion" of the Epistles is highly characteristic - "implies a liberal sense of how understanding [between people] is achieved" (92). It takes Davie nearly the whole of the first two epistles to assemble, embody, and articulate what is nothing less than a morality of literature - an account of the proper place of poetry in relation to time, history, human action, and enduring value. Thus, when towards the end of the second epistle he turns to elaborate in earnest his quarrel with high modernism, we are in no doubt that - his flippant tone notwithstanding - the disagreement has roots and ramifications far beyond the realm of the merely aesthetic. One of the first points made is that the poetic "morality" I have attempted to explicate is fundamentally and essentially difficult: though to diddle Both sides is easiest from the middle, Holding the middle ground is harder And asks more judgement, no less ardour, Than to espouse exclusive themes And fly to one of two extremes.

(31)

To talk of the morality of the middle ground is thus perhaps oxymoronic, since nothing is so highly valued in that intellectual realm as the avoidance of absolutes, of all forms of extremity. "Making a distinction" (29) is the defining act of the moderate thinker; and it is Davie's habit throughout the poem - especially in his discussion of history and comedy, say - to perform it. Modernism, in contrast, is one of those "provinces of Letters" where the "troubles" involved in seeing issues in their full complexity "don't beset us" (29): Olson hereabouts is found, Bounding on archaic ground; And Pound and David Jones are planting Glyphs with crucial pieces wanting. Here making a distinction is Nearly the worst of felonies, Only exceeded, it appears, By entertaining clear ideas.

i88 At Home in Time Here the surreal is the true, And hashish may be good for you. And sure enough, this province is The nicest of dependencies.

(29)

Several "provinces of Letters" seem to be under discussion here, the "nicest" and most comforting of all, I would think, not peopled by modernists but by New Apocalyptics and Angry Penguins. Here, as in Davie's criticism, distinctions between the various provinces of poetic experiment are less clearly drawn than between the provinces as a group and the classical, common-sensical centre. Life at the latter tends to be defined by its stresses and tensions, and while this appears to allow no respectable commerce with the hashish-smoking apocalyptics, it does, however, make possible a very modest rapprochement with the modernists. Some sort of continuing relationship is in fact guaranteed by the moderateness of the centre itself, by tolerance and the belief that "the human lot is bettered / When deviant thinkers go unfettered" (30), but Da vie discovers specific reasons for maintaining a place for himself, as he puts it, "among the zanies" (31). Most important is that the modernist cat's cradles made by plaiting the "strings of Time," though "standing-place^]," are also "vibrant" because they owe their existence to tension. The second epistle has no sooner begun than Davie recalls Olson's suggestion that his (Olson's) cat's cradles are trampolines (and thus "means towards ends"); and as it closes our poet concedes, not unwillingly, that a trampoline is a kind of middle ground: "no bounce would have a sequel / If tension both ends were not equal" (31). This is an odd observation, and it is not clear to what degree modernism is thus rehabilitated for us and for the life in time. That word "sequel" implies some sort of linear progression either within, or at least involving, cat's cradle forms. Perhaps the point is that sequentiality is inescapable, even in poetic forms that would resolutely oppose linear time. But to discover this about the key works of modernism does not, for Davie, automatically bring them home from the provinces of intellectual ease and self-deception. At best it means that he can find some place for himself to be comfortable "among the zanies." And here we have another possible explanation for his long and continuing sojourn in the territory of Ezra Pound. As the second epistle ends, Davie's cerebral and theoretical reconciliation with modernism flags under instinctively felt demands not from the zany but from the ordinary. Although he is drawn to the modernist mode, reservations assert themselves strongly:

189 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism And yet, I don't know how it is, Tonty and his infidelities ... Some more common sense position Is needed, for their recognition. So, to resume ...

(31)

One notices with interest that "common sense" appears to drive the argument, and furthermore that with the reassertion of the claims of Tonty comes a self-conscious attempt to resume the poem's forward movement. What actually does follow, though, is a brief meditation on the larger poetic project of which the Tonty story is a part: "Some narrative, and then a moral. ..." The ellipsis - the third in ten lines testifies to the poet's tentativeness, which is evident also in the comment that whatever moral Tonty "prompts is rather dry." Dry or not, the poet states it in the closing lines of the second epistle. And however cautiously it is phrased, the strong rhymes, summary position, and final anaphora show the moral - and the act of pointing a moral - to carry the weight of considerable conviction: pledges being given for keeps, Whatever just reproach one heaps (Or might) on fast-cemented love, Its bargain, though repented of, Is not aborted by that token; One's word, once given, 's not unspoken.

(32)

Here, as so often in Davie's prose, we find ourselves confronted with the notion that language is in some inescapable - though possibly quite obscure - way bound to, and binding upon, human action. Recent British poets, as we shall see in the next chapter, have moved the idea into a position of even greater centrality, both worrying it as theme and attempting to answer it in their practice as writers. For now, the bond of language is our bridge to the third of Davie's Epistles, where the poet turns to consider the spurious freedom within which, he argues, Poundian modernism purported to work. The crucial point is that in poetry (and also, as the poem goes on to insist, in life), Total freedom in the fiction Is of all the worst constriction, For every licence to surprise Turns out, in your reader's eyes, To constitute just one more norm

190 At Home in Time To which he asks that you conform. Thus rules we keep and rules we flout Change places and turn inside out.

(36)

A superficial reading might find in this denigration of "total" freedom a rather sinister conservatism; perhaps its rather fatalistic acceptance of constraint and authority is just what one might expect of a modern neoclassicist. But while those last lines tell us that there is no escape from rules, they also imply that no rules are absolute. Or to put it another way, they concede that rules and norms are contingent, interdependent, relative - an insight that is fundamentally sceptical, not in the least naive or doctrinaire. In fact, Davie's position on rules is very close to his attitude to linear time: while fully aware of the universe of indeterminacy within which his decision is made, he pragmatically opts - for human and social reasons - to write and behave in accordance with what is stable "enough." The move is familiar from Auden and also from MacNeice; but perhaps in Davie the decision is motivated even more powerfully by a desire to be faithful to ordinary human experience. The question of freedom is raised in the context of a discussion of rhyme. Rhymed forms, we are told, are by comparison with modernist free verse the "open ones," Open enough to see at once Tonty the doughty and the dunce, Or, while revering common sense, Do it with jokes at her expense.

(36)

"Open" is here rescued from that abyss of apparently meaningless abstractions into which the poem will shortly cast "freedom." "Open" is redefined to mean not "without closure or boundary," but "accommodating to human foibles": typically, Davie insists on construing language in terms of knowable human experience rather than theory. Quite why rhymed forms should - even on this basis - be the "open" ones is unclear. One possible reason is that the constraints everywhere felt in rhymed verse are essential to properly express the inevitably constrained nature of all human experience. The rest of the poem leads me to assume that such a proposition would not be uncongenial to Davie, even though he does not make the point himself. However, his own reasons for insisting on the "openness" of closed forms emerge with most clarity in the following passage: rhyme in less licentious mode Ensures a wavering switchback road

191 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism Which, I aver, I trust much more Than five-lane free-verse highways for Egotists to roar along In self-enclosed unmeasured song.

(36)

"Egotists," "self-enclosed," and "unmeasured" are the key words here, for they reveal the great extent to which Davie's poetic values are social values. Self-enclosure - self-centredness, really - is all the worse for being "unmeasured," unrestrained either by the self or some external context. From this observation, Davie moves immediately into his discussion of another form of antisocial literary behaviour: the mythic method, the modernist "flat / Fiat of synopsis" which in his view erodes individuality. The "Kosmos served by myth," he writes, is "closed-in," surely because every idiosyncrasy, every potentially fugitive element is tamed and domesticated through typology - Hathor, Circe, and Aphrodite becoming that single pair of breasts inside one nightie. The passage makes it clear that a mythicized cosmos is also one which seeks to close itself off from time and "more frigid histories" (37). And for that reason it "Is just what Rhyme must quarrel with" (37). This we can read literally: after all, we have already seen that Davie's particular use of rhyme in the poem is such as to enhance our sense of the sequential nature of time. But "Rhyme" may also mean poetry generally, and it is probably not too much to say that these lines provide a kind of manifesto for their poet - one which suggests that the task of poetry is to counteract anti-temporal ways not only of writing, but also of living. There follows almost immediately another narrative, this time concerning Letitia Mactavish and her nineteenth-century marriage to James Hargrave. Like Perouse and Tonty, Letitia enters Davie's poem precisely because she is not a timeless, larger-than-life figure. She is admired, as was Tonty, for her loyalty. "Snug" in the inhospitable "Pontine marshes of the North," she and her husband are an "unlucky [but] loyal pair." Yet, "Who sings the quiet / Martyrs to inappropriate diet, / To wrong and rigid hygiene, and / Dyspepsia in Prince Rupert's Land?": they are not appropriate subjects for epic narrative. We are told that Letitia's "letters home survive, and bore," and it is precisely the mundaneness of her life that Davie chooses to celebrate and recount. Thus he writes of her letters: Never an item in them for Revolving Time to trifle with; Domestic news, too trite for myth, All on one cheerful-cheerless note -

192 At Home in Time The baby's colic, her sore throat; Never a thing that can be pried Free of the times she lived inside, The nineteenth century's fifth decade.

(38)

Letitia's is a life absolutely inseparable from history and essentially inhospitable to myth. In fact, it is even resistant to appropriation by the purportedly less distorting mode of comedy: "Weep, Comedy, to see displayed / The short unsimple annals of / The poor in health: his qualms, his cough, / Her constipation" (38). Davie raises the question of whether it is possible to organize Letitia's acts and experiences on any basis other than simple sequence: With little meaning and less news In the record, can the Muse Even of Comedy maintain Hers was a life not lived in vain?

(40)

If not, if Letitia's days were merely terminal and not teleological, the implications for us all are very bleak indeed. This crucial insight provokes an engaging mental drama in the poet, which occupies our attention until the end of the third epistle. The action begins slowly, as we are told that "mythographers" are what they are in large measure because they cannot tolerate such "mournful limits" being placed "on the exercise of taste" (40), on their interpretation of life. Thus, "an early death's no stumbling block" to them, so readily do they embed it in myths of recurrence and in metaphysical mysteries. "Believing that," writes the poet, "we might as well / Go the whole hog to Heaven and Hell" - an observation of particular interest because of the way in which that "we" subtly locates him within the camp of those for whom a mournfully limited, linear view of life is ultimately intolerable. Very soon we are told that "there's some virtue in / A place where prepossessions are / Less confidently saecular," even though our poet is obviously unable to bring himself to eat the "crustier pie in clearer sky / ... cooked by an established church." What lies behind this new willingness to fraternize with the mythographers is not only Davie's understandable desire to step back from his own very bleak conclusions, but also a repugnance for the kind of life that results from pervasive secularization: "Tickets for Lear are not much prized / Where all's been de-mythologized" (41). At this point, the claims of aesthetics and morale weigh more heavily than those of truth. Davie is in the awkward position of

193 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism

having his heart with the mythographers and artists, while his mind - an ironic reward for all its toughness and integrity - discovers itself among the philisrines. And that is an intolerable situation: No, England, if I have to choose, There are some myths too good to lose; And if my choice must lie between Barbara Castle and Christine Brooke-Rose, I have no wish to flatter In plumping firmly for the latter. To be more positive; I bless All such girls as you, Miss Hesse.

(41-2)

In her contribution to New Approaches to Ezra Pound, Christine BrookeRose had drawn attention to Pound's "telescoping [of] time by his very choice of sources," and had pronounced the experience of reading the Cantos "part scholarly and part irrational, apocalyptic, timeless" (252-3). Especially interesting - in the light of Davie's mention of flattery - is that within one paragraph of that last comment, Brooke-Rose points out that the Layamon passage in Canto xci should be read "with the best commentary I have read on it, that by Professor Donald Davie" (253). She, evidently, would plump for him as he for her. But Davie's alliance with "all such girls" is essentially a matter of taste and reaction, and as such it is somewhat tenuous. The moralist and the realist in him still hold most powerful sway, and the "girls" rapidly lose their allure: And yet James Hargrave might be more Welcome as a son-in-law, Who surely more sincerely grieved Than livelier men, the more bereaved In that he was resourceless in His stolid pain, and could not spin Tales to himself of passionate Divorce and death, to cushion it.

Here are asserted again the harsh realities of life in time. The last three lines leave no doubt that what the mythographers and epic poets would make of pain, divorce, and death is mere illusion. However, it heightens the mental drama enacted in these closing lines that the poet, having made this point, is himself not quite able to look reality in the face. Thus he follows his discussion of Hargrave's "stolid pain" with the observation, "I'm glad to leave that thought

194 At Home in Time

alone; / It comes, and cuts, too near the bone." And with this he is moved to reassert the consolations of comic form. An invocation to the comic muse ends the third epistle, but so sceptical is the phrasing, so deeply the tongue in cheek, that the lines effectively preach the gospel of inexorable, non-teleological process: So Comedy, once more our saviour, Quash such unreserved behaviour. Do what you can (it isn't much) To save Letitia from the touch Of levelling and defiling Time; Cripple the measure, wrench the rhyme!

(42)

When we begin the fourth epistle the measure has not been broken, and the rhyme has in fact strengthened - which tells us that we, at least, have not been removed from the clutches of "levelling and defiling Time." At this point we are more or less in the middle of Six Epistles as a whole, and it is no surprise to find that the fourth letter not only consolidates the poem's long-standing insistence on the practical or experiential "truth" of linear time but also begins to hint at certain consolations more defensible than the anti-temporal ones considered so far. The consolidation is made through a discussion of aestheticism. "Is it time," we are asked, For self-congratulating rhyme To honour as established fact The value of the artifact? Stoutly to trumpet Art is all We have or need, to disenthrall Any of us from the chains History loads us with?

(45)

The answer clearly given is that it is not the time to do these things. The lure of I'art pour I'art is, we are told, "found emollient everywhere / The poet or the painter goes" except in his or her ordinary circumstances, where the hawsers of economics, society, and history are felt inescapably. Though they may be "too preoccupied to care," all artists "notice at least two / Sides to the dubious thing they do." In the story of Marion du Fresne, which he shortly begins to narrate, Davie reinforces this sense of the two-sidedness of art by first linking du Fresne with various mythical and literary parallels, and then abruptly indicating the discrepancy between aestheticizing myth and historical reality:

195 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism The mythological parallel As usual works out far from well As soon as we imagine how Things really were.

(48)

Du Fresne's "real" end - he was eaten by Maoris at Assassination Cove - interests Davie because it is so resistant to the mythopoeic mind. An idea with an inescapably visceral impact, it appeals at best to the comic muse, who Davie tells us enjoys black humour, and is "noteworthy for straightforwardness": "She won't be cruel to be kind / Nor, anthropophagous, pretend / Doing it serves some higher end" (49). So Comedy comes, at this point in the Epistles, to represent not just the least distortive literary mode, but a kind of prophylactic against more pernicious distortions of the "real" world of empirical experience. She is described as a "corrosive shield," and the poet's prayer runs thus: "From Utopian projectors / Caustic Comedy protect us!" Amongst the "Utopian projectors" we must number not only the various misguided explorers whose stories are told in the Epistles, but also Pound - or "Odysseus-Pound," as Eva Hesse called him (17) - and those other poets and critics named by Davie whose concern is to enter or at least adumbrate a world outside of linear time. "To make cosmos - / To achieve the possible" is how Pound formulated this aim in Canto cxvi - a passage cited by Hesse on the second page of her introduction to New Approaches. ill

With the futility of such ambitions firmly established, Davie turns his attention to what is for him the only defensible consolation: I re-affirm we ought to yield Firm pre-eminence of status Among projections, to Mercator's; Trusting the lie of lands and seas Before such lies as; History's.

(49)

"History" as used here is not time itself but time composed and interpreted by human beings - historiography, really, which next to geography seems infinitely less reliable as a guide for humanity. Notice the pun on "lie/lies," and the way in which the mention of history seems to provoke or underline duplicity in language. In his own appropriation of the cat's cradle analogy, Davie writes of Mercator,

196 At Home in Time Between his stanchions I can sling My own small lattices of string, Slack hammocks where I can compose Into a somnolent repose The harrowing abbreviations Of lives endured, inured to patience Or insensate, flailing round Some misappropriated ground Of pride or Polynesia or That atoll not worth sailing for, National honour.

Davie's position in these closing pages of the fourth epistle is complex, and because its articulation depends on a somewhat forced reinterpretation of earlier metaphors, it is also rather cloudy. There is guidance to be found in an essay he published two years before Six Epistles, "Landscape as Poetic Focus," which ends with the following declaration: "It begins to seem as if a focus upon scenery, upon landscape and the areal, relations in space, are a necessary check and control upon the poet's manipulation of the historical record." The essay makes it again very clear to us that Davie's quarrel with such manipulation, and all "utopian projections," is driven by social and political concerns: ... it is surely time that we made up our minds about the unsound and politically inflammable historical nostalgias peddled by Yeats, by Eliot ("the undissociated sensibility"), by Pound, by the Agrarian Southerners, by all the Anglo-American poets of the right. Pound's is the case which reveals how politically naive and perilous these historical nostalgias are, if we take them as the central burden of the poetry, not just as part of the poem's machinery, necessary fictions - as modern versions perhaps of the literally false but poetically useful and time-honoured myth of the Golden Age. (169)

In the Six Epistles Davie seems to include Charles Olson among those poets who traffic in such myths; but in his essay on landscape, Olson and Ed Dorn are applauded for their concentration on space as the ground of relationship: "by focusing upon human or communal relations in physical space rather than recorded time, or rather (more exactly) considering the historical relations as secondary to and conditioned by the areal relations, I am inclined to think that these poets may have read the signs of our time correctly, so that other writers may learn from them" (169).

197 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism

Even though it is impossible to say quite what is meant by that phrase "may have read the signs of our time correctly/' there is much that is clear here. Since what Davie calls "the historical record" is always a human projection of some kind, an implicitly teleological interpretation of bare sequence, there is less ideological danger when we balance our understanding of human temporal relations with a grasp of spatial or geographical ones. In that sense, Davie is proposing a markedly classical approach to history. He quotes from C.O. Sauer's 1925 essay "The Morphology of Landscape": "The historia of the Greeks, with its blurred feeling for time relations, had a somewhat superior appreciation of areal relations and represented a far from contemptible start in geography" (Davie, "Landscape" 166-7; Sauer 318). Oddly enough, Davie's adoption of this ancient attitude makes possible a rather idiosyncratic concession to post-Einsteinian physics. Having begun his first epistle by defending "dumb clockwork Time" against the idea of a "Space-cum-Time continuum," he now yields in epistle four to the idea that "Space and Time inscribe one field." But typically he insists on some stay against pure relativity: space and time may inscribe one field, "But (and here I give no quarter) / Space is the long side, Time the shorter" (50). By this point we have come a long way from the poem's opening, and the very idea of temporality has been considerably complicated. But it is crucial to notice that Davie remains adamant in his rejection of transcendence. Though it is rather differently formulated, we still have the insistence that the only mysteries we should pursue are those natural and proper within our limits and circumstances. The difference is that after Davie's concession to the Einsteinian view, the mysteries towards which our limits naturally point are seen to be inherently more engaging than the dreams of the transcendentalists: older poets had the sense At least to run a staked-out fence Around their fields. And those fields are Better than rectilinear; The curve of earth takes care of that, Unless of course you think it's flat As apparently those do Whose pastures melt into the blue Unfenced Beyond of the sublime, The mythopoeic waste of Time.

(50-1)

This passage accomplishes a crucial revision to the poem's understanding of linear time, and also to our reading of its own insistently

198 At Home in Time sequential forms. It restates and advances the point that "closed" forms are the "open" ones, so that what seems baldly sequential is implied to be always and of necessity "better than rectilinear/' because time is inevitably complicated by space. Thus the Six Epistles, with the insistent linearity of their verse, and their equally compelling attention to space and landscape, might be argued to open up a "field of force" more powerful - because more immediately human - than the "unfenced Beyond" to which mythographers aspire. One cannot help but be struck by the deftness with which Davie has moved through each of the epistles to strengthen and justify his commitment to time. But this last move, which in effect steals Einsteinian physics away from Eva Hesse - who as we saw used it to justify Pound's ideogrammic method - and puts it to work in defence of Davie's own poetic ideology, is surely his most subtle and bold. His boldness is remarkable simply because in using Einstein to authorize the link he makes between time and place, Davie runs the risk of dissolving altogether that pragmatic, empirical view of time he makes his stand upon at the opening of the first epistle. That it should not be dissolved is imperative because in the poem, as in Davie's prose writings, it is the cornerstone of a social and political philosophy to disseminate which is a principal motive for writing. In those first pages of the poem Davie seems very well aware of the corrosive effect any concession to theoretical physics would have on his common-sense conception of time. How then, one has to ask, does he avoid dissolving the latter with his concession to Einstein in the fourth epistle? This is primarily a question of rhetoric: how, from the reader's point of view, does Davie manage to derive support from Einsteinian physics for an argument about time with which it is in many ways incompatible? One answer is that he does not attempt an explicit reconciliation of the two views, so the very real and inevitable points of disagreement between them are never allowed to become visible. As the fourth epistle closes and the idea of space and landscape is injected into the discussion, Davie appears to be articulating a theory; but as I have already noticed, the articulation is cloudy, deeply metaphorical and in some ways cryptic. What, after all, must we understand by "better than rectlinear"? And what exactly is the "staked-out fence" which older poets are said to run around their fields? Also, "fields" itself raises more questions than it answers, for it inevitably recalls the "fields of force" - redolent of the new physics - alluded to at the opening, but at the same time must be read, according to the stress on landscape, more literally. In short, what Davie gives us at the end of the fourth epistle is not a logical theory about the relation of time to space in life and poetry, but an

199 Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism

intuitive and metaphorically expressed series of connections. Einsteinian space-time is not so much endorsed as it is invoked as authority for the existence of other, more immediately human - if less specific - relations between space and time. Another crucial point is that the fifth epistle, which follows, not only declines to pursue the complicated relationship between space and time, but in fact reasserts the common-sense attitudes of the first epistle by denigrating theory itself: A thesis, though sincerely meant Is in the end impertinent, Comedy says. In her sharp praxis There's no place for grinding axes; Thesis, antithesis, the same, A more or less convenient frame For weaving on. The web is tattered; Mending it's all that ever mattered.

(55)

The rhetorical effects of this retractatio are complex indeed. In the first place it absolves the author of almost any criticism we might wish to level at his "thesis," previously articulated. His suggestion that thesis and antithesis are "the same" appears to undercut his own attempts at theorizing in the previous epistle, but it also justifies indirectly his own failure to make logical connections and clear distinctions. A second and perhaps more important effect of this particular form of retraction, though, is that it allows Davie to step back from his "theory" while leaving the latter largely intact. It relieves him of the obligation to argue his assertions through to conclusion - or to the point at which they might dismantle each other - and yet makes it possible for the rest of the poem to pursue its more modest, highly empirical course in an atmosphere shot through with the promise of theoretical justification. The last two epistles resemble the first two in being guided, largely, by the dictates of "sharp praxis." There is the same stress on narrative, on "the due / Observance of successive time" (60), and a return to the idea that "general notions" are "insufferable" (66), particulars infinitely preferable.5 Early declarations in favour of a "woefully linear" existence link with the poem's consistent interest in exploration, to issue in the declaration that "The way to live is on the move" (58). And Corporal John Ledyard, the eighteenth-century explorer, is celebrated for his "self-bestowed" commission to explore "Travelling as sheer condition!" (59). As in the first epistle, this way of living in harmony with sequential time is defined in opposition to certain anti-

2oo At Home in Time

temporal approaches, those which turn "round the telescope / Until what's insular and near / Seems crisp, definitive and clear / As in Romance" (68). Yet all of this seems to carry more authority simply because we read it after the complex speculations of epistles three and four; its pragmatism seems somewhat less contentious than in the first two epistles mainly because we have been given the sense that it is part of a broader, more inclusive theory. Similarly, Davie's earlier discussions of geography grant a kind of rhetorical sanction to the following, quite self-assured lines: there is one Abstracted potent lexicon Of place, which helps us understand Where, in some ultimate sense, we stand: That heath and strand and wood and cape Make up a grid we can't escape, However manifestly these Vary with localities.

(66)

In passages like this we are struck by not only how little - in rhetorical terms - has been lost by Davie's retraction, but also how much has in fact been gained. Here we have the poet's allegiance to place stated forthrightly, with neither tentativeness nor stridency, and in the context of a vision of time its relation to which appears to require no further clarification. It is important to remember, though, that space entered the discussion in epistle four in response to Davie's rather bleak observation that the "inextricably linear" nature of human experience brings constant "news" but no "meaning." Since his argument with Pound and others is based on the belief that "meaning" is not to be manufactured by treating time as "a sort of poet's plasticine," he turns to space as a consolation. And in the longer passage quoted above he suggests that landscape - as an abstraction - is nearly immune to process, and therefore able to help us "understand / Where, in some ultimate sense, we stand." The comment comes at an important moment in the poem, and encountered then it does strike us as a long-awaited clarification of what the work itself "in some ultimate sense" has been about. Precisely how landscape can be a source of meaning is never made clear, but the suggestion is that the accomplishments and follies of humanity on the move are in some way imprinted on the land, which becomes a sort of material history, "recording" - though not interpreting - "the surprising, unforeseen / Conjunctions human beings prove / The more the rule, the more they

2oi Donald Davie's Quarrel with Modernism

move" (50). This would explain why humanity is represented throughout the poem by explorers and travellers, who carry to an extreme degree the belief that "The way to live is on the move." This account of Davie's attitude to place is borne out by "Landscape as Poetic Focus," where he cites with evident approval Sauer's contention that geography must establish "a critical system which embraces the phenomenology of landscape. ... [and which] includes the works of man as an integral expression of the scene." Davie goes on to note that this kind of geography (derived, so we are told, from a classical source, Herodotus), finding its true place near to anthropology and even archaeology, is drawing by that token near also to sculpture, photography, painting, architecture, and literature. (168)

This passage prompts us to notice, in closing, one further way in which the Six Epistles might be said, in Davie's memorable phrase, to be "significantly sequacious." The poem is an argument which ends by modifying its initial premisses; after we have been given landscape as a source of "meaning" there can be no return to the unalloyed commitment to temporality with which the poem begins. By the end, we are "drawing near" to the point at which Davie's newly posited alignment of time and place will require that the literary mode employed in order to reach that stage transform itself. Of the vectors which define our position at the end of the sixth epistle, we recall, "Space is the long side, Time the shorter," so some abatement in the insistently sequential form of the poem might logically be expected - linked, in some way, to an increased valorization of space. In fact, what seems to be anticipated is precisely the kind of fusion between literature and geography which Davie and Sauer argue might be derived from Herodotus. Difficult to envisage, the attributes of that sort of work are only hinted at in Six Epistles to Eva Hesse. There is almost certainly an attempt to realize them in Davie's next extended work, The Shires (1974) - forty lyrics (for the forty English shires) in which, as Howard Erskine-Hill puts it, "one life is the medium of selection ... [and] one place is the medium for the poetic representation of English culture from earliest times" (125). But The Shires has been called "an oddly misconceived venture" (quoted in Gioia, "A Map" 103), and widely criticized. Gioia insists in its defence that it must be read as an "epic-autobiographical poem in the Poundian manner" (104), and that is an important indication of where the oddness lies. For the poetic program set out in that last letter to Eva

202 At Home in Time

Hesse, the compromise made between space and "dumb clockwork Time," may well amount to a potential betrayal of history - which would not ordinarily be odd, unless cohabiting with some sort of explicit commitment to linearity. The vision of a text fusing literature, geography, and history is very possibly unattainable, and, when freed from the "wavering switchback road" of Davie's Hudibrastics, prone to produce cat's cradles in which The strings of Time are plaited Like woven canvas, bound or matted Into ... A vibrant standing-place to toss us Into who knows what upper air?

(23)

CONCLUSION

World Enough, and Time: Recent Negotiations between Poetry and History

At Cambridge in 1947 Davie became tutor to Charles Tomlinson, who seems even as an undergraduate to have shared both his temperamental affinity for the English Augustans and his intellectual interest in the American avant-garde.1 This unlikely combination of influences has been no less enduring in Tomlinson's poetry than in Davie's, and almost certainly has contributed to that "underrating and misunderstanding" of the former's work which Davie twenty years ago pronounced "scandals of such long standing that, when I think of them, I despair" (Thomas Hardy and British Poetry viii). Tomlinson has seemed too "American" a poet for the English, yet too "English" for the Americans - the unfortunate result of his typically classical insistence on balance, or "blended thinking" as MacNeice would call it. "Meetings," "meshes," "ceaseless pairings," "encounters," and "exchanges" (I glean this list from a single poem)2 have always been at the moral centre of his work; and his stylistic dialogue between "the two poetries," as Marjorie Perloff once called them in a key essay,3 is the proper emanation of that centre. The Way of a World, Tomlinson's seventh volume of poetry, appeared in 1969, pressing with an added urgency his by then familiar themes of reciprocity and negotiation. "Proportions matter," he had written fourteen years earlier in a piece called "The Art of Poetry" (Necklace 14), and it was the moderate, Horatian outlook thus expressed that led Davie to comment that "Tomlinson's morality is sternly traditional, classical, almost Augustan" (Necklace xvi). His was stern morality of a highly attenuated sort, however, operating primarily in matters artistic. "The Art of Poetry" appeared to take issue with the aestheticism of Wallace Stevens, but nevertheless it did so "lightly," as Tomlinson was to remark (Necklace, preface), and the influence of Stevensian "elegance" was - and remains - prominent

204 At Home in Time

in his work of the mid-fifties. In 1969, however, Tomlinson's insistence on self-restraint had extended itself beyond the realm of art where constant "negotiation" between the perceiver and perceived, as between the elements in a picture, had always been central - into history and politics. The Way of a World included a poem "Against Extremity" (11-12), which began: "Let there be treaties, bridges, / Chords under the hands, to be spanned / Sustained." The psychology of political extremism itself was examined in a poem purportedly spoken by the assassin of Leon Trotsky ("Assassin," 10-11), on which Tomlinson later commented: "I see the assassination of Trotsky as an attempt to transcend time, almost as a caricature of mysticism, an attempt to have the future now on one's own terms and the result of trying to complete that circle is inhumanity" (Rasula and Erwin 409). That link between an acceptance of time and Tomlinson's "Augustan" moderation is crucial, for it appears again in another poem of the volume, "Prometheus" (4-5), a sceptical account of the composer Scriabin and "his hope of transforming the world by music and rite" (ix). In their survey of British poetry in the seventies, Peter Jones and Michael Schmidt single out Tomlinson's "Prometheus" as "'political poetry' of a high order" (xii), adding the rather enigmatic phrase, "durable because not useful." It is a comment the poet would no doubt understand and approve. In an interview with Alan Ross for London Magazine he observed that though "Prometheus" and his later poems on revolutionary figures are "committed to political reality," they are not in themselves political acts, not "committed" in the more popular sense of the word. He paraphrases the American poet George Oppen, who, though a member of the Communist party in the thirties, insisted that "if you decide to do something politically, you do something that has political efficacy. And if you decide to write poetry, then you write poetry, not something that you hope, or deceive yourself into believing, can save people who are suffering" (Ross 39). Elsewhere Tomlinson observes, "I may be the [kind of] writer for whom it would be possible to see men were being fed and to go on writing poems" (Rasula 411), which implicitly endorses Oppen's separation of art and political life and yet concedes that the poet remains subject to certain social and political obligations. Not surprisingly, then, this view leads to a rejection of poetry which "merely urgjes] ... opinions" (Denise Levertov's To Stay Alive is Tomlinson's example); but simultaneously it produces admiration of works, like "Prometheus," which are "committed to political reality," or which "sum up a whole phase of politics very close to the events."

2O5 Recent Negotiations between Poetry and History

That last is Tomlinson's description of Marvell's "Horatian Ode on Cromwell's Return from Ireland," which he cites approvingly along with Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel: "these are indisputably fine poems but neither of them settles for easy partisanship" (Rasula 410). Tomlinson's position as I have outlined it needs to be seen, at least in part, as a reaction against the poetic and political milieu of the sixties. A self-described "mental immigrant" to the United States,4 he was visiting professor at the University of New Mexico in 1963 and gave a reading tour of New York state in 1966. Encountering the activist poetry spawned by the Vietnam war, he seems to have been appalled. In Robert Bly's political poems, for example, he laments that "on top" of liberal sentiments the poet "heaps" "very ugly and inflated rhetoric that mistakes itself for poetry when all it is doing is enjoying a bath in its own righteous indignation" (Rasula 410). What motivates Tomlinson here is not substantive political disagreement, but his aversion to extremism itself, on the two linked fronts of politics and poetic style. Even when at home, one must remember, an active English poet in the sixties would have felt certain pressures towards extremity. As in America, there were broad cultural and political changes afoot, some of these distinctively home-grown, others a matter of American influence. Indeed, the cultural "Americanization" of Great Britain had itself become a potent political issue. One literary manifestation of this - and one in which any poet who read the reviews could not help but be implicated - was already alluded to in my introduction: the powerful and continuing influence of A. Alvarez's crusade against the "fog of English gentility." He initiated this in an essay in Commentary ("English Poetry Today," 1961), and strengthened it in the following year by his anthology The New Poetry, where the essay reappeared as a polemical preface, "Beyond the Gentility Principle." It is testimony to the extraordinary legacy of The New Poetry that Alan Brownjohn was still remarking in 1972 on the "state of demoralised inferiority" (240) into which British poets were cast by comparisons with their American peers. The poets Alvarez had celebrated - most of them American - found their exemplar in the "confessional" Robert Lowell: where once he "tried to externalize his disturbances theologically in Catholicism and rhetorically in certain mannerisms of language and rhythm, he is now ... trying to cope with them nakedly, and without evasion" (Alvarez 29). Alvarez espoused a poetic of psychological intensity, memorably satirized by James Fenton in his verse "Letter to John Fuller," written in the early seventies:

2o6 At Home in Time He tells you, in the sombrest notes, If poets want to get their oats The first step is to slit their throats. The way to divide The sheep of poetry from the goats Is suicide.

(55)

Alan Brownjohn recognized that Alvarez's intentions had been good: it was altogether admirable "to encourage poets to be courageous" (Brownjohn 242), and the complexities of late capitalist civilization did indeed require an appropriate poetic response. But for Brownjohn it was crucial to avoid the "instinctive response ... to resort to the counter-irrationality of a counter-culture": "the only effective response, in the long term, will come from a rational, sceptical temperament which will calmly and wisely dismantle the machinery of horror and organise the commonwealth of decency" (249). In that sentence, he might as well have been describing Tomlinson, whose stress on balanced relationship, on an "impassioned civil intercourse" (Kenner "Next Year's Words" 335), opens the way into what Schmidt memorably called "the Eden of civility" ("Eden" 1406) - a metaphor for a state both personal (or psychological) and public (political). "What is derided as 'gentility,'" runs a memorable passage in an influential and extended defence of Tomlinson - Donald Davie's Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1972) - "can be glossed as 'civic sense' or 'political responsibility'" (188). Although Brownjohn argued that his strictures did not necessarily lead to a new Augustanism (249), it is interesting to notice that Tomlinson's formative years as a poet - the period 1948-51 in particular - saw him attempting to resist the extremist influence of Dylan Thomas by immersion in English Augustan poetry (Some Americans 6). Hardly noticed at the time, but an event of great significance for the current of thought and poetic practice I have begun to outline in this chapter, was the 1975 publication of a new translation of Horace's Ars Poetica by the Somerset poet and cultural commentator C.H. Sisson. Sisson's introduction made it clear that his version of Horace was pointedly occasional; a revival of the Latin poet was, he implied, both necessary and inevitable in the mid-seventies. While deferring at first to Professor C.O. Brink's view that "the road to the Ars Poetica" has for most of the twentieth century been "blocked," he went on to proclaim that "A way back to the two greatest Augustans [by which he means Virgil as well as Horace] is now practicable" (14). From this - a conclusion Pound's dislike of Virgil could never have allowed him to reach - we must infer both the slightly immodest suggestion

207 Recent Negotiations between Poetry and History

that it is Sisson's own translation which is opening the lines of communication, as well as the more important idea that the present milieu is one especially congenial to a Horatian perspective. That last point is made as Sisson's introduction ends: "The case for pushing this famous little work out once more into the stream of contemporary literature is the extraordinary relevance of so much that Horace has to say in our situation, and the remedial wholesomeness of his tone" (22). In the translation itself Sisson underlines this point by conflating the first and the twentieth centuries. He follows the seventeenth-century precedent of John Oldham, who sought to make Horace "speak as if he were living and writing now" (cited by Sisson, Poetic Art 19). Thus in the final section of the Ars Poetica he replaces the Sicilian poet Empedocles, who sought immortality by leaping into the crater of Mount Etna, with (who else?) A. Alvarez, whose espousal of psychological extremism in The New Poetry was extended in his subsequent book, The Savage God: A Study in Suicide, published in 1971. Sisson's dismissal of Alvarez as a modern Empedocles shows his own demurrer at extremity, but he resembles Tomlinson also in the moderation of his claims for language in general and poetry in particular. Annotating lines 384-400 of Horace's text (the section dealing with Amphion, the founder of Thebes, who reputedly moved the stones of the city into place by the music of his lyre), Sisson writes: The point of this somewhat fantaisiste account of the origins of poetry is that poetry has a role in the development of civilization and has its connections with all our most profound concerns. It is the fact of this connection which has given such currency - and such durability - to Horace's own work; and in our own day it has been the doctrine of so un-Horatian a group as the surrealists. (44, my italics)

One takes the point that poetry "has a role" in time and human affairs, but Sisson is strikingly vague on the nature of that role. When we look at his translation of Horace, the cloudiness not only persists, but might even be argued to have been intentionally exacerbated: Then you come to Homer And other poets who set a value on courage And had some effect: the poet was also an oracle And what he said had some relation to life, Whether in politics or as a recreation After hard physical work. It is not disgraceful, At least in its nature, this art of perspicuous speaking.

(33, my italics)

208 At Home in Time

The litotes in that last sentence is Sisson's own, a pointed and free extrapolation from the much less guarded wording we find in Horace, where after the mention of Amphion, Homer, and Tyrtaeus, and the point that song has been the means for oracular utterance and moral teaching, we have this: "ne forte pudori / sit tibi Musa lyrae sollers et cantor Apollo."5 Brink stresses that for Horace "the true poet is utilis urbi" (511), a point on which Sisson is not nearly so unequivocal. Added to the repeated, compounding, vagueness of that word "some" (for which there is also no precedent in the Latin), Sisson's lines inevitably suggest that "the art of perspicuous speaking" is not to be credited with any great or direct efficacy in human affairs. Tomlinson, with similar reservations as we have seen, characterizes the indirect connection between poet and world a little more precisely: "I think the private and the public impulse are reconciled in one's care for language - one's duty towards that is a duty to a thing at once public and private; one will so deal with language that insofar as it is in one's power, one will not issue a debased currency" (Rasula 411). Of his poems on Charlotte Corday, Danton, and J.L. David, he remarks elsewhere that "the measure of these poems oughtn't to be that they're committed to political reality (though they are), but whether I've preserved the language there in which such things can be written of - whether my duty to language has been maintained and I've thus succeeded in reconciling public and private concerns" (Alan Ross 39). Interestingly Sisson, otherwise so unclear on the relation of public to private (or poetic) worlds, makes a similar point about language. Commenting on lines 48-74 of the Ars, he seems to paraphrase a wellknown American politician of recent history: the question is not what language can do for the poet, but "what the individual writer can do for the life of language" (36). And he goes on to qualify this with the crucial point that language enjoys a life separate from the poet: "Whether or not the poet can be said to keep the language alive, the language is alive in the poem." That independent "life" of words is a matter of their link with history, Sisson argues - "The full meaning of a poem is the product of its history, including the current usage, and its location" (36); language, therefore, is the property not of individual writers but of history, and that fact simultaneously limits the practical utility of words in a single pair of hands, while guaranteeing that all poems will bear "some relation to [public] life." In 1978 Schmidt drew attention to the way in which Sisson's work as a critic consistently attempts to set authors and literary texts "in a world of contingent realities" (Avoidance 4), and in the attitude to

209 Recent Negotiations between Poetry and History

language I have just described, words themselves emerge as the unstable meeting place of various contingencies: the discourses of politics, economics, art, and history itself. In a writer who began to publish in Britain during the thirties, and whose readiest models might have been Auden, Orwell, Day Lewis, and MacNeice, this is not an unexpected position. "Order and Anarchy," an essay published in 1939, devotes considerable time to "the relations of literature and government" (Avoidance 92), and makes the claim that "political criticism" and "literary criticism" are "complementary": "The uneasiness one feels in reading faulty political verse is due to literary faults, but political criticism may be able to account, in part, for the manner in which the faults arise. And this may be of use to the common cause which literary and political criticism serve" (92). That cause, so far as one can infer it from Sisson's writings, is freedom - intellectual, physical, and political. "It is evident that one cannot be completely free," he writes in the same essay, and the central, vexing and urgent matter then becomes "the delimitation of the frontiers of government" (85). Similarly, while he recognizes that language is always implicated in "contingent realities" - that no utterance is ever "free" in that sense - he insists that whatever "governs" speech must also be kept firmly within limits. In other words, Sisson would endorse Tomlinson's claim that a poet's principal public duty is to the language; but he would argue further that it is the public use of language which, paradoxically, is his or her greatest enemy. It is that last insight - at least in part - which left Sisson ultimately unable to accept Marxist orthodoxies of the thirties. "Order and Anarchy" includes a trenchant attack on Auden, whose particular motives as a "bourgeois instigator of revolution" he found suspect (93); but Sisson's assault is driven also by his resistance to the determinism of a Marxist world-view, by his dislike of any dogma that might exercise far-reaching control over action or speech. Thus, "good writing alone may be described as independent of government" (Avoidance 93): a formulation which suggests an oddly Thatcherite conception of the literary economy, and which seems to bear out Homberger's politically loaded observation that in poetry ours is a period "of the most severe privatization of meaningful experience" (209). In that connection it is interesting that in 1976, in a witty essay called "A Four Letter Word," Sisson chose with melodramatic reluctance - "even my inured typewriter jibs at the enigmatic word" (Avoidance 529) - to label himself a Tory. But the essay struggles to liberate that term from government by recent historical use, insisting that Sisson is a Tory in the sense that Samuel Johnson used the word of himself.

2io At Home in Time

Johnson's Toryism, as Walter Jackson Bate argued in his biography, "has far more in common with some aspects of twentieth-century liberalism, even with socialism, than it has with modern, right-wing, capitalistic 'conservatism'" (195). In this the key principle, according to Bate, is "subordination for the sake of protection" - a belief, based on "a dark, unillusioned recognition of [human] evil" (Bate 195), in the necessity of government for the protection of the weak. Sisson reveals his Johnsonian temper when he dismisses "what might be called the great obligatory truths of the left, which all decent people take without choking:... a belief in the harmony of democracy, largescale organization, and individual self-expression" (Avoidance 529). Such "obligatory" yet possibly conflicting "truths" Johnson distrusted as "cant," terms by which the powerful may easily seduce the naive; and likewise Sisson dismisses the "various logomachies" (529) in which "managers" of political life have become adept. For Sisson, Johnson embodies an attitude that is simultaneously humane, empirical, and sceptical, yet not to be simplistically imitated: "There is no question now of resuscitating Samuel Johnson's definition of Tory and offering it to anyone as a political programme," for Johnson's historical moment is now passed, but "the surviving Tory lives on, in an obscure ill-understood opposition, profoundly sceptical in all those fields in which popular belief is most widespread and passion rises highest" (Avoidance 534). A person who "might as soon find himself voting Labour or Conservative" in contemporary conditions, Johnson is for Sisson an Augustan ideal, a figure who stood firmly against extremity. When we read in "A Four Letter Word" that "the abstract 'individual', with his imaginary 'rights'" must be got "out of the way" (Avoidance 534), we might easily recoil. But the quotation marks there are crucial: what is being dismissed is not the signified - the individual with his or her real rights - but the signifiers for these things, the sometimes purely verbal currency in which politicians trade. Sisson's distrust of words in their political context is deep and a recurring theme in his work. His urge is to reach through the curtain of "cant" towards "the limited physical person, who moves around on the earth, [and to] identify the particular obligations which arise from the presence, round about, of other physical persons in like case" (Avoidance 534). To recognize that human beings operate in a "web ... of great complexity," which includes all temporal contingencies, is for Sisson the necessary basis for all defensible action and thought; one is reminded of Barthes's assertion that the "ethical scope" of classical discourse broadens proportionally with the extent of the author's involvement in "the forms of history or of social life" (57-

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8). When Sisson stresses the physicality and the particularity of the web, though, he is obviously if rather awkwardly attempting to focus our attention on interconnectedness as a practical, experiential rather than theoretical or verbal - phenomenon. While the web of "particular obligation" is where right actions start, the web of theory and language is treacherous; the enmeshment of words in history and politics renders them untrustworthy. In 1975 Sisson noticed a similar view of language in another poet thirteen years his junior, yet by that time already recognized as a central figure in contemporary British poetry. In Geoffrey Hill, he wrote, there is to be found "an extreme meticulousness," not attributable "solely to the nature of the subject-matter, or the academic milieu in which [his work] ... is conceived" (Avoidance 467), but by implication to the conditions of writing and the nature of language itself. Hill, he argued, "quite properly shrinks" from the "looser forms" of writing, is unable to entertain John Stuart Mill's point that "a certain laxity in the use of language must be borne with, if a writer makes himself understood" (Avoidance 468). Anyone who has read a line of Hill will immediately concede the accuracy of this and recall the consequences of his rejection of such laxity: the extreme - almost obsessive - concern with polysemy, with registering and thereby taking under control the slipperiness of his medium. Sisson astutely traced Hill's meticulousness iofear, to a deep and generalized distrust of the means of communication. Writing of Hill's habit of excessive quotation, especially in his prose, Sisson noted an evident fear that "some author quoted might be slightly misrepresented, or some idea picked up in the course of reading not precisely attributed" (Avoidance 467). In the Clark Lectures, which he gave at Cambridge in 1986, Hill took up directly the whole question of words, their accuracy, efficacy, and accountability. Published in 1990, the lectures were given the title The Enemy's Country: Words, Contexture, and Other Circumstances of Language. In that word "contexture" he sought to evoke the very condition of linguistic enmeshment mourned by Sisson and symbolized for that poet by the metaphor of the web.6 "Contexture" comes in fact from Thomas Hobbes, mention of whom should not be surprising after what has been said about Sisson and Johnson. Hill cites the treatise on Humane Nature (1640), in which Hobbes notes that "there is scarce any word that is not made equivocal by divers contextures of speech" (Enemy's Country 22); meaning is produced by the "drift, and occasion, and contexture of the speech, as well as the words themselves" (Enemy's Country 23). In that last, writes Hill, "it is 'drift' and 'contexture' that tune the sentence" (25), making the "continuity

212 At Home in Time or contiguity of things" a fundamental element in both the making and unmaking of significance. As Hill quotes from Humane Nature to the effect that it is "a great ability in a man, out of the words, contexture, and other circumstances of Language, to deliver himself from Equivocation" (Enemy's Country 25), one hears unmistakably the note of endorsement. But one also hears wistfulness, for the Clark Lectures as a whole are driven by an intractable sense that deliverance in those terms is impossible. For example, Hill presents Ezra Pound to us as a figure well aware of "the political and economic realities of circumstance, of the ways in which the writer's judgement of word-values both affects and is affected by his understanding of, or his failure to comprehend, the current reckonings of value in the society of his day" (5). But Pound's ironic tragedy, as Hill defines it, was his failure to keep this in mind in his own political utterances and activities. He mightn't have done this, it is implied, had he paid more attention to a figure whom Sisson also has come to regard as exemplary.7 This is Dryden, who emerges in Hill's lectures as the central figure, a man engaged always "in a competitive negotium [or business]; ... competing with the strengths and resistances and enticements of the English language." "The negotium of language," writes Hill, "is inextricably a part of the world's business" (9), and an individual who writes oblivious of the contingency of "value" is doomed to become a victim to the world. Hill's Dryden is a man acutely sensitive to the "contexture" of speech, who "draws circumstance ... not only into his critical strategy but also into the timbre of his writing." And at base his attitude to language is more sceptical than Hobbes's: "Dryden was concerned that the judicious author, for all his care to establish right meanings, is fated to be misconstrued" (63). Thus, "the implications of 'That every man strive to accommodate himselfe to the rest' [a quote from Hobbes] are grained and cross-grained into the body of his [Dryden's] work" (2). When Hill in his title borrows from Davenant's preface to Gondibert, calling the world of circumstance "the enemy's country," he reveals something of his own unhappiness at being forced into negotium, a word he glosses by citing its Latin derivation - nec-otium, suggesting not merely business or negotiation, but also the absence of leisure, of poetic privilege remote from the claims of temporality. One source of displeasure is Hill's sense - articulated in many essays over the years - that though writers are forced into business with the world, the nature of their transactions is resistantly problematic. In "Our Word Is Our Bond," a fiendishly convoluted essay of 1983, he revealingly concerns himself with J.L. Austin's book How to Do Things

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with Words, and with the idea of what Austin called "performative" utterances. In this context Hill makes the Hobbesian point that "where there is 'semantic content' it is most likely that there will be semantic 'refraction', 'infection' of various kinds" (139) - a fact which makes any attempt to achieve practical effects directly through language hazardous indeed. Pound again emerges as a figure confused in matters of this sort: his "error was to confuse [what Austin called "verdictive" with "exercitive" utterances]... to fancy that poets' 'judicial sentences' are, in mysterious actuality, legislative or executive acts. ... The 'world's' revenge during his court-hearing and its aftermath, was unwittingly to pay him back, confusion for confusion, with legislative or executive acts presuming to be true verdictives" (159). Pound found himself in the enemy's country, accordingly, where words are fiduciary symbols: "held or given in trust" and therefore a matter of obligation and accountability, and "depending for [their] value on public confidence" (OED) and therefore contingent. "Our Word Is Our Bond" is the motto of the London Stock Exchange. "Must men stand by what they write"? is the question asked in Hill's long poem, The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy, which appeared also in 1983. Peguy, who stood opposite Charles Maurras - once Sisson's symbol of political hope8 - in L'Affaire Dreyfus, is described by Hill as "one of the great souls, one of the great prophetic intelligences of our century" (Mystery 36). Once a staunch admirer of the socialist deputy Jean Jaures, Peguy in 1914 called for his death; one Raoul Villain evidently took Peguy's verdictive for an exercitive, and Jaures was assassinated that July as he drank wine in the Cafe du Croissant in Paris. Hill describes his poem as "a homage to the triumph of [Peguy's]... defeat" (36), and all the contradictions, "stubborn rancours and mishaps" of the man's life are brought to a focus on his rather Poundian failure to recognize that the world and its contingencies may make our word our bond. Peguy's "defeat" is all the more tragic because to resolve the problematic interconnection of the self and world - the "contexture" of experience and speech - had been his lifelong aim. It had drawn him to the figure of Joan, and in Le Mystere de la Charite de Jeanne D'Arc (1910) - from which Hill took the title of his poem - he had explored the Domremy phase of Joan's life, her meditations upon the evil present in the world and on the duties of the virtuous individual. In an earlier drama on the same subject, Jeanne d'Arc (1897), he had presented his heroine as tormented by the conflicting claims of what he called la mystique and la politique, "unqualified, disinterested moral values" on the one hand, and on the other "the strategies, expediencies, and compromises involved in taking power" (Wainwright, The

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Mystery 7-8). His Joan was, in Hill's terms, struggling to function in "the enemy's country"; she was faced, in an obviously more profound sense, with Dryden's problem: "how to relate otium to negotium ... how to obtain, amid the world's circumstances, that Vacation from other business'" (Enemy's Country 4) in which words might be delivered from equivocation. Peguy's Mystere9 was staged in translation by the Royal Shakespeare Company in November, 1984, and again by different companies in Oxford, Cambridge, and London in the fifteen months which followed. The translator was Jeffrey Wainwright, whom Peter Jones and Michael Schmidt in their survey offer as one of the leading British political poets of the last two decades. That description has been reinforced more recently by Jeremy Hooker (another one of the same, according to Jones and Schmidt), who writes that Wainwright "is a politically committed writer who reclaims for poetry the desire for liberation and an integrated 'common' world which moves through the radical tradition to which he belongs" (36). We do well to notice the place of "desire" in that sentence; it is not the task of liberation but the desire for it that Wainwright apparently claims for poetry. The point must qualify whatever we understand by Hooker's phrase "politically committed writer." And when we turn to Wainwright's poetry it becomes immediately apparent that the poet's engagement with contemporary politics is very oblique indeed. His celebrated sequence "Thomas Miintzer," for example, is spoken by Miintzer himself, a Protestant reformer described by Wainwright in his note as "a radical and visionary both in theology and politics for whom religious thought and experience became integrated with ideas and movements towards social revolution" (54). Miintzer is in short a prefiguration of Peguy, and the writing of Wainwright's poem - like the translating and staging of Le Mystere is a political act of only a rather indirect and discreet kind. In connection with the Miintzer sequence, Jones and Schmidt cite the Marxist poet and critic Edgell Rickword: "The past that is relevant is the one that also speaks to one's contemporaries" (Jones and Schmidt xiii). We have seen this already as the justification for Sisson's translation of Horace, and of course it has a certain validity; but what is striking in Wainwright's case is the poet's effacement of his own voice. When Miintzer says "God made / All men free with His own blood shed. / Hold everything in common" (57), we are no doubt intended to grasp the relevance of this to the contemporary situation. But it is "the past" which speaks in an act peculiarly - perhaps naively - clinging to historical context as a defence against the semantically wasting effects of contexture. Tomlinson, we remember, also

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makes use of the dramatic monologue in his "Assassin," where the stated aim is to avoid or limit any debasement of the verbal "currency." Wainwright, as Hooker presents him, is a poet who feels the same obligation as Tomlinson, but who is even more acutely aware than Hill (his principal influence) of the difficulty involved in doing such a thing. His poetry "involves scrupulous testing of language against the history which it reflects, or is used to manipulate or evade" (Hooker 33). And "in his awareness of the corruptibility of all language, and his measuring of ideals against the reality of flesh and blood, he is the opposite of a propagandist" (36). He is also, by that token, the aesthetic - though certainly not the political - ally of Sisson, who stresses attention not to words but to the "physical person," and who in 1939 characterized propaganda as one of "the enemy's weapons" (Avoidance 88) - an especially resonant phrase in the context of what has been said about Hill and Hobbes. It is necessary to take stock of what is delivered in those last few sentences, for the way in which distrust of language unites all the poets I have discussed in this chapter is remarkable - all the more so because of the diversity of their political allegiances. Wainwright speaks from and for his working-class origins, and his sceptical approach to language derives a specific colouring from that: words are unreliable in themselves, yes, but in England and its literary milieu they are "heavily influenced by the ideology of ... [the] dominant class" (Hooker 34). Sisson is well known for his support of the monarchy, his insistence that church and state in Britain should not be separated, and his long-standing admiration for T.S. Eliot's model, Charles Maurras, the French royalist and anti-Dreyfusard whom Sisson declared in 1950 "the only writer capable of re-directing our political enquiries" (Avoidance 15). Tomlinson leans to the left, yet very moderately; his politics are better thought of as a social and ecological morality derived in large measure from Ruskin, and most obviously visible in his mid-career poems about the industrial midlands, where he was born. Hill, easily the most elusive of the four on this question, goes some way to defining himself through his identification with Peguy. Despite these differences, however, the four poets move in tight formation in what George Steiner memorably dubbed "the retreat from the word"; they evidently no longer share unreservedly the belief "that words gather and engender responsible apprehensions of the truth" (20), or that words have the worldly authority which, in the minds of Aristotle or Aquinas, they once had. In this respect, our contemporaries show themselves true heirs of Auden. And one notices their tendency to ponder that "retreat from

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the word" - sometimes nostalgically - in the same body of texts and writers; the common fascination with Peguy is an obvious example of this, but I might also have brought them together on the subject of Marvell's "Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland," to which Sisson devoted two long essays in 1951 and 1965, and to which Hill alludes strategically in The Enemy's Country. With the introduction of that word "retreat," it is interesting to note that Alvarez's diagnosis of a failure of nerve in British poetry was renewed in 1985 by Martin Booth, who announced that the art "has lost itself in a bog of indifference ... [and] apathy" (3). What Booth missed in the contemporary scene, however, was no longer the "naked" confrontation with psychological disturbance celebrated in The New Poetry, but rather a forthright recognition, by poets, of their worldly obligations: they are "not precious. They belong to the world and occasionally they become a part of it" (12). Now one might say that such a recognition in some form defines the work of each of the poets I have discussed; in fact, for Steiner the "retreat from the word" seems to be provoked directly by the demand, felt by writers, that they become part of the world: "The instrument available to the modern writer is threatened by restriction from without and decay from within" (27). But it would probably be better to talk of these figures as merely preoccupied with relations between words and the world, for in none of them is the notion of poetic privilege or "preciousness" decisively rejected. Readers of Hill's Mystery, for example, might well feel that the whole question of poems and their enmeshment in time and the world has been worried at length - and with great sophistication but to no real solution. Whether or not men (or women) must stand by what they write remains unanswered at the end, even by implication. The example of Peguy tells us that writers may, on occasions, be forced to answer to the world; but it does not say that they must. When we read Hill's essays and lectures on this subject, even his style - making major points almost obsessively through quotation from other sources - bespeaks what might very well be considered a failure of nerve of the sort bemoaned by Booth. For example, does Hill's use of the words of another writer - Ezra Pound - to conclude both "Our Word Is Our Bond" and The Enemy's Country indicate an unwillingness to be bound by his own words? There is no doubt that in Hill and the other poets so far considered the claims of the world are entertained with an unusual rigour, persistence, and integrity, yet they are not in practice admitted permanently to the palace of art. Otium and nec-otium, ease and labour, define in the tension between them the situation of the contemporary poet; it is an ambiguity,

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Sisson's revival of the Ars Poetica reminds us, for which Horace's famous line "aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae" can speak. We remember Sisson's claim for the "extraordinary relevance" of Horace "in our situation," which Sisson insists is so serious that some clarification of the relation between poetry and "the development of civilization" has become crucial. Without presuming to suggest either why this is the case or whether in this respect British poetry since the sixties has been unique, I would certainly argue that the sense of an obligation to history and the world has become especially strong in poets and critics of the period. John Fuller's resurrection of the neo-Augustan verse epistle, for example, seems a direct - yet internally divided - outgrowth of this. While he acknowledges to James Fenton that poets have duties beyond apprehension of the "beautiful and true" (85), he confesses that they are duties he himself feels unable to fulfil: It isn't easy not to feel effete This side of anguish, When those who can't choose what to eat Don't speak our language.

(89)

Seamus Heaney has made the rather obvious point that it is even less easy to operate "this side of anguish" in societies where there is considerable suffering. Irish, Polish, South African, and West Indian poets, he remarked in his 1989 lectures on The Place of Writing, "have been caught at a crossroads where the essentially aesthetic demand of their vocation encountered the different demand that their work participate in a general debate which preoccupies their societies" (36). Even when not subject to direct political pressure, such poets "would need to have been insensitive in a disqualifying way not to feel the prevalent expectation" (37). In The Government of the Tongue (1988) Heaney had made the point that all poets, regardless of circumstances, are like the children of "temperamentally opposed parents ... Art and Life": "Both Art and Life have a hand in the formation of any poet, and both are to be loved, honoured and obeyed. Yet both are often perceived to be in conflict and that conflict is constantly and sympathetically suffered by the poet" (xii). For "the poet" in that sentence one could substitute Geoffrey Hill, which raises the question of whether the kind of mental stalemate we have noticed in his work - issuing, as it does, in multiple evasions and equivocations - is th inevitable terminus for any poet who wishes to mediate scrupulously and conscientiously between the claims of his "parents," art and life. Certainly, when Heaney remarks on the "ideological depth-charges

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in all literature" and "well-urged doubts about the very possibility of justified language arts after Auschwitz" (Place 38), it would appear that he, too, is marching in Steiner's "retreat from the word." Yet this is not the case. If we are careful we notice Heaney's wording: both art and life "are often perceived to be in conflict." By implication, the conflict may be relieved by an alteration in the way we look at relations between words and the world. The tongue may well be "governed" as Sisson argues by the pressure of affairs; or as Heaney puts it, the tongue may be denied its autonomy by the world (Government 96). But it may also be "granted the right to govern," be "credited with an authority of its own" (92). In a deliberate rejection of "prevalent expectation," Heaney raises the figure of the Emperor Nero (with whom John Fuller guiltily identifies himself, incidentally, "fiddling among the flames" - 86), asking whether "the joyful affirmation of music and poetry [could] ever constitute an affront to life" (xii). The "purely creative, intimate, experimental act of poetry itself" (96) moves, by a shift in perspective, from being "a culpable indulgence" (xii) to an act which is its "own vindicating force" (92). When Heaney calls that the "government" of the tongue, though, he unavoidably moves beyond the idea of a pure, self-justifying lyric impulse. For the phrase suggests something both social and moral as well: self-control, perhaps, or a kind of inward-looking Augustan discipline. Moreover, like Shelley's famous equation of poets and legislators, Heaney's phrase situates literature in the discourse of public service; and the point, surely, is that at some real if rarefied level literature serves. How this is so becomes clear in what Heaney has to say about the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, "singing in the Stalinist night, affirming the essential humanism of the act of poetry itself against the inhuman tyranny which would have him write odes not just to Stalin but to hydro-electric dams" (xix). Heaney carries Tomlinson's insight about a poet's responsibility to language into markedly romantic realms when he tells us that Mandelstam "was the vessel of language. His responsibility was to sound rather than to the state": "for him, obedience to poetic impulse was obedience to conscience; lyric action constituted radical witness" (xix). It strengthens Heaney's case that he makes no naive claims for the materia of that lyric action. He concedes to Hill and Hobbes that we must be "highly conscious of the conditioning nature of language itself, [of] the way it speaks us as much as we speak it." But "the essential point remains: Mandelstam's witness to the necessity of what he called 'breathing freely', even at the price of his death; to the art of poetry as an unharnessed, non-didactic, non-party-dictated, inspired act" (xix).

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Despite the stirring humanist rhetoric of this description, the fact remains that the case of Mandelstam - as Heaney presents it, anyway - confirms rather than refutes Hobbes's thesis. The phrasing would have us believe that the power of Mandelstam's poetry is inherent, or a matter of "inspiration," but in fact it derives from the "drift" and "occasion" of speech, from the contingent situation. The poetry, though intensely personal and apolitical, serves an impersonal and political end, becoming in its historical context no less "ideological" than the prescriptions of Stalin against which it defines itself. So paradoxically, Mandelstam becomes Amphion by playing Nero; his words contribute to the building of the just city by abdicating all social responsibility. It is a peculiar solution to Hill's impasse, and one suspects it fudges the issue somewhat. Certainly it leaves literature with very limited and vague political choices, for a text according to this account can propagand either nothing, or the abstract and very-difficult-to-define ideal, freedom. And as Sisson might point out, that is a notably weak and passive response to the particular "logomachies" at work in the world of practical politics. A poet who has been linked to recusant Russian writers of the postrevolutionary period is Tony Harrison, whose long poem, V. (1985) was heralded in the Tribune as "the most outstanding social poem of the last 25 years."10 That is a title we have already seen bestowed on a number of other works, but Harrison's is the only one of these to have been discussed vehemently in the House of Commons - confirmation, surely, of the work's extraordinary enmeshment in public affairs. Interestingly, Harrison is not a poet in the neo-romantic tradition of Mandelstam or Heaney; this is so despite what was implied by Richard Eyre, the screening on BBC channel 4 of whose film version of V. in fact provoked the political uproar, when he positioned Harrison opposite "the acknowledged legislators of our world" (V. 38, my italics). For Harrison is a classicist by training and temperament; in 1987-8 he was in fact president of the Classical Association. His presidential address in April of that second year recognized the conflicting claims of world and word in what are now familiar terms: "the Muses have to inspire work in a world where the many other 'divinities', the personifications and the ideologies, continually have the blood of victims spilled and holocausts created" ("Facing" 435). In this context he invoked Steiner and the idea of "a retreat from the word," but significantly for our argument here, set himself apart from that movement. Forbidden to read poetry aloud in school because of his workingclass accent - "Mi 'art aches and a drowsy numbness" (Selected Poems 122) - Harrison experienced first-hand the actual social and political power that that can be exercised through words. Whereas "the occasion

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and contexture of speech" is a source of dismay for almost all the other poets we have discussed, for Harrison the perception that meaning is not fixed but contingent is a liberating one, suggesting that speech can be a force for change. Thus, in the confrontationally named poem, "Them & [uz]," he addresses the literary establishment and purveyors of Received Pronunciation as follows: "So right, yer buggers, then! We'll occupy / your lousy leasehold Poetry" (Selected Poems 123). The furor that erupted when the media discovered that V. was about to be screened appeared to focus on Harrison's free use of obscenities (the Sun claimed there were ninety, Gerald Howarth, MP, claimed forty-seven, and the Daily Mail counted seventeen of "the crudest, most offensive word"). But even Mrs Mary Whitehouse, who dwelt rather unhealthily on the "harshness, even brutality" she heard in "The four letter word," perceived that much more was at stake. There was, she wrote to the Independent, a "message" behind the publication of the poem, which she saw as promoting "an increasingly outdated permissive humanism" (V. 68). Undoubtedly the vehemence of conservative reaction was due to this "message," according to which the work could not help but appear an attempt to commandeer language and the "glorious heritage" of English literature, to occupy that "lousy leasehold Poetry" in the name of what Harrison, following Thomas Gray, elsewhere called "mute ingloriousness" (Selected Poems 112). Harrison, argued Gerald Howarth, who first raised the question of V. in parliament, was "another probable Bolshie poet seeking to impose his frustrations on the rest of us" (V. 41). Thanks to the crudeness of that formulation, we can see clearly that Harrison had awakened the rough beast of the far right not only by attempting to give a voice to the oppressed and disadvantaged, but by using poetry - an "unharnessed, non-didactic, non-party-dictated, [and] inspired act," if we follow Heaney and romantic tradition - to do so. Martin Harris in the conservative Daily Telegraph was too discreet to make a great fuss about four-letter words, but attacked the poem on ostensibly literary grounds, showing himself hostile to the very notion of didactic literature: Harrison is the kind of pedant who will never let an image unfold in the reader's mind. ... his poetry has been humourlessly didactic, crammed with "relevance" and shackled to relentless rhymes and rumty-tum rhythms, like a kind of politicised Pam Ayres. (V. 48)

Here we notice the suggestion, buried deeply beneath which is the Howarthian accusation of Bolshevism, that Harrison's tongue is both governed by ideology and motivated by the desire to govern: he will

221 Recent Negotiations between Poetry and History

never let an image "unfold" freely in the reader's mind. To disparage V., Harris invokes a long-standing and ideologically powerful linkage between an essentially romantic poetic and the idea of personal and political freedom. It is a link which Samuel Johnson's brand of Toryism would have dismissed as "cant." Harrison, like Tomlinson, Sisson, and Hill, is a poet situated with Johnson in the neoclassical tradition. He tells us in an autobiographical statement of 1971 that his "two early ambitions to be Dr. Livingstone and George Formby, were compromised in the role of poet, half missionary, half comic, Bible and banjolele, the Renaissance ut doceat, ut placeat" ("Inkwell" 33). Horace, then, is his point of departure, while certain poets of the English eighteenth century especially Gray, whose "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is the model for V. - are a constant influence. In his verse dramas Harrison has revived the heroic couplet, and he practises a form of translation which he accounts for as "a mixture of what Dryden called metaphrase and paraphrase." Introducing his version of Racine's Phedre, he writes that "in a pre-Romantic age" he would have felt little need to justify himself ("Preface" 174). And his decision to set the play in India under the Raj is motivated by the recognizably classical desire (one which Sisson finds embodied in Horace, incidentally) to "rediscover a social structure which makes the tensions and polarities of the play significant again" ("Preface" 175), in other words to readmit history and occasion to literary meaning - and that, as John Haffenden once suggested to him, is to translate "myth into politics" (240). Harrison tells us that he demurs at the "absolutism" of Racine (Haffenden 240), and it may be that an ability to live comfortably in a non-absolutist, non-essentialist, linguistic world is what frees him up to use literature as a political tool, whereas Hill and those other figures we have considered seem to be prevented from doing so by a residual reverence for the idea of the self-vindicating Word. This is not to say that Harrison feels entirely free from such notions; after all, when he links himself with Horace he enters the enemy's country between the urge to teach and to please, between nec-otium and otium. In his sonnet sequence The School of Eloquence, as in V., he feels himself accused of betraying the business of writing by indulging in its pleasure, of betraying his class (the mute inglorious) by acquiring speech. Similarly his use of classical techniques and texts, like Gray's "Elegy" itself, is complicated by his awareness that "the Classics are always used as a prop to the status quo" (Haffenden 245). That adds relish to a poem like V., where classicism is turned against the establishment, but it also requires that a poet must struggle "not to be always in collusion" (Haffenden 233).

222 At Home in Time

In "The Grudge/' an influential editorial for Stand magazine in 1975, Douglas Dunn astutely captured this contradictory position, typical of the working-class writer: "His work is ... directed at an audience who do not receive it; instead, it is received by an audience largely composed of those he is against" (5). Summarizing Dunn's view, Luke Spencer has recently underlined the positive potential of this condition. Caught between "the oppositional imperative of working-class writing and ... bourgeois cultural dominance," he writes, it is crucial for a poet to maintain the tensions which define his or her role, "to keep that grudge intact: its purity will help prevent the dilution and assimilation of the working-class poet's emancipatory project." For Spencer it is also important in this enterprise not to underestimate the power of bourgeois hegemony, a point on which he argues both Harrison and Dunn himself have erred, writing poems that cannot be said to be "'directed at' a working-class audience in anything but a vague, long-term sense" (34). Nevertheless, Harrison emerges from Spencer's analysis as the contemporary poet who comes closest "to mitigating Orwell's pessimism about proletarian writing or to meeting Homberger's exacting criteria for an art of the real" (45), one which acknowledges the existence of "contingent values, other people, history itself." Hill, on rare occasions, shows himself capable of reading his own "contexture" in a similarly positive way. Talking to Blake Morrison in 1980, he declared that "the poet's gift is to make history and politics and religion speak for themselves through the strata of language" ("Under Judgement" 214). These are words which Damian Grant subsequently used to support his claim that in recent British poetry "history has not quite 'lost its voice'" - pace Christopher Middleton, who has been lamenting since the early sixties that "a very dangerous cleavage of poetry from history" has occurred.11 Nevertheless, Hill's own phrasing is instructive: history and politics and religion "speak for themselves" (my stress) in poetry. In Hill's work Grevel Lindop has noticed a consistent tendency to refract such public issues through "historical preoccupations and personae" (154), thereby upholding the "privatized" condition of the poet's own experience. That is precisely what Jeffrey Wainwright does in his Miintzer sequence, and it has to be said that such poetry may well appear to emanate "from within" history, but it does not necessarily participate - actively - "in the production of history," as Grant (160) would argue. If effective satire requires the construction and engagement of a coherent, critical self outside of its object, how much more imperative is such a thing in political verse? To think of history as something with a "voice" into which a poet can "throw" his own

223 Recent Negotiations between Poetry and History

(Grant 161) is to view it as comparatively stable and impersonal certainly not the turbulent process of social and ideological contention which is bound to elicit, as in Harrison's case, a poetry both highly personal and thoroughly politicized. Stan Smith may therefore be correct to claim that Hill is "unequivocally committed to the recovery of history" (Inviolable Voice 229), but the poet's fear of being in collusion with the currents of history itself inevitably clouds and impedes his progress as a political poet. Harrison appears to have no such fear, perhaps because the idea of an utterance free from worldly contexture and circumstances, a tongue "ungoverned" in Heaney's sense, has no real force for him. The "country" within which poets work is thus not the "enemy's," for the simple reason that there is only one country, history; and as Harrison makes clear in an interview, facility with language does not remove you from that realm: "I thought that somehow language would take me away, but - on the contrary - the more I became articulate, the more I was conscious of what I owed to the goad of the inarticulate" (Astley 234). That insight - that otium is not in fact exclusive of nec-otium, that "to please" does not rule out "to teach" - suggests that Harrison, following the way back to Horace, seems to have avoided becoming "travel-stained," as Davie put it, by "the long trek" through romanticism. The conflicting claims of word and world are entertained in his poetry by an overwhelmingly practical intelligence of the sort Sisson argues belonged to the author of the Ars Poetica (13). That, together with his irreverence and his desire to use the classics so as to make them a "less solid" (Astley 245) prop to the status quo, emerges clearly in his letter to The Times of November, 1987. Replying to Mr Hector Thomson, who in a previous letter had insisted on the place of Latin in the continuity and stability of English culture, he wrote: I am very glad to be able to endorse all he said by swearing, if I may be permitted, that without the many years I spent acquiring Latin and Greek I should never have been able to compose my poem V. (V. 69)

The particular fascination of Harrison's work is his "persistent location" of broader political issues "in the voice, the word, the language" (Grant 170) - in other words, in the elements, genres, and distinctive styles of literary writing. His adoption of neoclassical postures and models is consciously a politically fraught act, an intervention in the process of history. The latter he characterizes as "inescapable, high, / necessary, putrescent, / unburied, still not picked over" (Selected Poems 99); so evidently for Harrison we have

224 At Home in Time

still not advanced into what Marxism conceives of as "post-history." Indeed, despite his proletarian allegiances, his sceptical attitude to all form's of authority certainly would preclude belief in such "closed" paradigms of history as the Marxist one - "discourses of totality," as Martin Jay would call them - which rationalize the contingent moment in terms of an overarching pattern. The concept of "totality" was also, not coincidentally, quite foreign to the Enlightenment, yet Jay demonstrates that it "emerged in the interstices" of the Augustan period. The Enlightenment version was "longitudinal" in nature, with an "optimistic bias" (Marxism and Totality 31), and in that respect it resembled Western Marxism - a deeper reason, perhaps, for the popularity of neoclassical forms among left-wing writers of the thirties. By "longitudinal" holism I understand the Enlightenment doctrine of progress, in which each moment takes its place in an evolutionary sequence. In a qualification of great relevance here, Jay suggests that the eighteenth- century version of "longitudinal totality" differs from the Marxist one in "its assumption that the process of growth, the continual resolution of new problems, is open-ended and infinite" (Marxism and Totality 31). Just as the forms of Augustan literature undergo transformation in modern hands, so does the "longitudinal" understanding of history, which in the writers discussed here tends to be adopted for reasons variously pragmatic. In Auden and Davie, for example, there is a recognition that post-Einsteinian physics has so altered the notion of time as to remove it from the realm of the practical human intelligence; in MacNeice, by contrast, we are returned to linear time because we cannot live elsewhere - however deep our aspirations to do so. "History," then, is understood - or provisionally decided - to be linear and progressive, but with very much less of the "optimistic bias" of the Enlightenment, and rather little inclination towards a sense of "totality." But one does remember Auden's "vision of agape," MacNeice's anticipation of "a civilized, articulate and welladjusted community," and Harrison's vain hope that the "UNITED" sprayed on his parents' graves might "mean 'in heaven' for their sake" (V. 15). So time and telos are not entirely divorced, even this late in what must be to a neoclassical sensibility a very demoralizing century.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 There we are told that Horace learned all that it is possible to learn about writing, but "lacked the root." Virgil is for "chucking out" (27-8). For a detailed account of Pound, Eliot, and their attitudes to Virgil, see L.R. Lind "Virgil, Pound, and Eliot." 2 See Carrington 554-7. 3 See Gioia 127. 4 See The Anxiety of Influence, chapter two especially. 5 Another interesting use of Hudibrastics by a contemporary poet of neoclassical inclination is John Fuller's updated Ovid, "The Art of Love" (18-28). 6 See their Survey of Modernist Poetry 254-5, an^ Hamburger's discussion of them at 82. 7 See his Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, particularly chapter one. 8 See Is There a Text in This Class?, especially chapters two and ten. 9 See Jencks Post-Modernism, 18-19. 10 Tomlinson speaking on Charles Tomlinson, Stephen Spender, and P.J. Kavanagh, The World's Great Poets vol. 2, CMS Records, CMS 618, 1971. CHAPTER ONE

i An illuminating parallel to this passage is to be found in David Jones's essay "Art in Relation to War," written nine years earlier. Eliot's thought surely moves along lines similar to these: "Certainly men never more

226 Notes to pages 33-45

2 3 4

5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

needed to contemplate form, they need all there is to remind them that all evidence to the contrary, the end of man is happiness. The 'parts that are united in one' in an art-work may be, for some, the most convincing analogy which they can get in this world of the 'proportioned parts' of the heavenly city, to delight in which, religion says, is part of our redeemed destiny" (Jones 135). Discussed by Shusterman, 153. For an account of relations between Eliot and the Auden group, see Hynes 27-9. The formalist tenor of The Sacred Wood is caught by two passages, chosen almost at random. In "The Perfect Critic" Eliot writes that "a literary critic should have no emotions except those immediately provoked by a work of art." And in "The Imperfect Critic" he tells us that "the Arts insist that a man shall dispose of all that he has, even of his family tree, and follow art alone. For they require that a man be not a member of a family or of a caste or of a party or of a coterie, but simply and solely himself." See The Sacred Wood 12 and 32. For a discussion of this, see Margolis 75. See Rainey, chapter One, 25-75. "Inventors" are "discoverers of a particular process or of more than one mode or process," originators of "certain finenesses of perception." "Masters" are those who "are able to assimilate and co-ordinate a large number of preceding inventions" (Pound "How to Read" 23). See Collected Poems 98. Quoted and discussed in Macaree 41. For a more detailed account of the Augustan doctrine of uniformity, see Stone 24. Maxwell is discussed in Kojecky 13. Discussed in detail by Longenbach, 211-13. Quoted and discussed in Highet 684 and 444. In Eliot's Introduction to Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, 1928. Quoted by Valerie Eliot (Facsimile 127). Quoted and discussed in Macaree 36-7. Despite the fact that he cites Kenner for support, Tucker's new and otherwise intriguing claim that The Waste Land is structured - in the manner of Joyce's "Oxen of the Sun" - as an evolution of literary styles, depends upon the assumption that Eliot's Augustan experiment is localized within the third section of the poem. Tucker argues that "the perception of literary evolution" "is a myth far more powerfully present in Eliot's mind than any he may have gleaned from Jessie Weston" (224), and such a claim is fundamentally inhospitable to the view that any single period might exercise an especially broad influence on the poem. It is important, though, to notice Kenner's distinction between Eliot's use of

227 Notes to pages 46-67

17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

specific Augustan "modes" (which, even admitting the unreliability of the drafts as evidence, do seem to have been largely confined to "The Fire Sermon" and related pieces), and more general "norms and decorums of an Augustan view," which I argue below operate in the rhetoric and discourse of the poem as a whole. In the spring of that year, Aldington reports, he went with Eliot to Padworth Churchyard in Berkshire. There Eliot began to talk about Gray's "Elegy," remarking that "if a contemporary poet, conscious of his limitations as Gray evidently was, would concentrate all his gifts on one such poem, he might achieve a similar success" (261). Maclntyre gives the French and this translation: Epigram's an assassin! Keep away from him, fierce Wit, and vicious laughter that makes the Azure weep, and from all that garlic of vulgar dishes! (35) Of interest in this connection is Gordon N. Ross "The Waste Land and The Deserted Village." See chapter six passim, 147-50 especially. I have discussed this effect elsewhere. See Deane "A Line of Complicity: Baudelaire - T.S.Eliot - Adrienne Rich." I quote from DAI (April 1984) 44 (10): 3O74A See Christ 98. For a discussion of the extent to which modernist poetics - as advocated by Pound and Wyndham Lewis - aspired to escape sequentiality, see especially Dasenbrock's fourth chapter. He writes that certain sentences in Lewis's Enemy of the Stars "are unprecedented in the extent to which and the manner in which they evade any specification of the temporal relations that exist among the various parts of the sentence" (128). For more on this dichotomy, see Stead passim. It is intriguing to consider that if this is the case, the evolution of The Waste Land provides a parallel to that shift from a Lockean to a Humean ideology which John Sitter has noticed in long poems of the eighteenth century. See Sitter passim, but especially 161. CHAPTER TWO

1 This observation could no doubt be made to provide some support for the obviously extreme claim, made first by Bayley and subsequently endorsed by Fraser, that Auden was not "at any time a sociallycommitted or propagandist or 'social realist' poet in any real sense" (Fraser 29). 2 These dates of composition are given in Bloomfield and Mendelson 51. 3 The link between Auden and Althusser is made by Smith, 20.

228 Notes to pages 67-142 4 For an excellent discussion of this passage and related issues, see Smith 20. 5 New Year Letter was T.S. Eliot's title for the volume. The book was published in the United States by Random House as The Double Man. On the publishing dispute which led to this, see Carpenter 303. 6 Willem de Sitter (1872-1934) is the Dutch mathematician whose theories, made public in London during the Great War, kindled British interest in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, on which de Sitter's model of an expanding universe was based. CHAPTER THREE

1 He was introduced to The Waste Land at Oxford by Tom Driberg, who showed him a 1922 back-issue of the Criterion. The list is given in A Certain World 372. See Carpenter 57-9. 2 For a discussion of the common attitude to MacNeice, see Longley Louis MacNeice: A Study ix-x. 3 Here he refers to Madge's article "Surrealism for the English," New Verse 6 (December 1933): 16. 4 See Modern Poetry 18-21. 5 Longley suggests that the milieu evoked here recalls "the summer that ended in August 1914" (Louis MacNeice: A Study 59-60). 6 See "Great Riches" and "Dylan Thomas: Memories and Appreciations," Selected Literary Criticism 171-3 and 183-5. 7 "Yeats's Epitaph," Selected Literary Criticism 118. MacNeice must have had "Lapis Lazuli" in mind as he wrote these lines. Autumn Journal was published in May of 1939, and written during the autumn of 1938. "Lapis Lazuli" appeared in Yeats's New Poems in 1938. 8 See Longley's discussion of this letter in Louis MacNeice: A Study 56-76. 9 On children and timelessness, see "When We Were Children" (1944) (Collected Poems 241). CHAPTER FOUR

1 Dutton assembles evidence for this claim in Snow on the Saltbush 155-60. 2 Writing of the same passage, Malouf notes that "Poets, who are nothing if not hard-headed, tend to project theories that make a central place for their own work" (150). 3 See Matthews "Literature and Conflict" 304-7. Matthews reprints a substantial portion of the letter from Read 304. 4 Read explicitly rejects the kind of reductive applications of psychoanalysis with which Hope seems keen to associate him. The words I have quoted indicate that he cannot, for example, hold with Jones's

229 Notes to pages 142-203 suggestion that the artist's aspiration to ideal beauty is "a reaction, a rebellion against the coarser and more repellent aspects of material existence, one which psychogenetically arises from the reaction of the young child against its original excremental interests" (Read "PsychoAnalysis" 257). 5 Read no doubt made use of H.G. Baynes's translation, subtitled "The Psychology of Individuation," and published by Kegan Paul in 1923. 6 On the debate occasioned by Frank's essay - and the idea of "spatial" form generally - see Mitchell, and Surette ("Rational Form"), as well as Frank's recent book, The Idea of Spatial Form. Dasenbrock (139-51) refines Frank's position in a way that invites comparison with Auden in "New Year Letter": "One should speak ... not of spatial form but of spatiotemporal form, for the spatial form one finds in modernist literature is always the form of something in time, not something that tries to be, in Frank's terms, 'one timeless complex of significance.' The scientific, Einsteinian connotations of the term spatio-temporal, whether or not they could stand up to rigorous examination, are salutary as a corrective to the automatic assumption that the modernist concern with pattern and form in history expresses a desire to escape from history into myth" (147). CHAPTER FIVE

1 Langer's Philosophy in a New Key was considered at length by Davie in another of his essays from 1953, "Syntax in Poetry and Music." This, with some modifications, formed the second chapter of Articulate Energy (1955). Certain of the changes were evidently made in response to Langer's publication, in 1954, of a sequel, Feeling and Form. This had brought from Davie another essay, partially a retraction of his earlier assessment of her work. See "The Deserted Village: Poem as Virtual History." 2 See Francis Gallaway's essay "Reality and Nature" (Reason, Rule and Revolt 120-40), especially 122. 3 I quote here from the dustjacket of the 1968 reprint. 4 Quoted on the dustjacket of Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. 5 Von Hallberg writes that in his distrust of general principles, Davie "has the support of a major liberal tradition; from the late eighteenth century, the word 'liberal' has carried the sense of unorthodox - that is, free from the constraints of general laws" (85). CONCLUSION

1 For Tomlinson's record of their early discussions, see Some Americans 5-6. 2 "Winter Encounters," Selected Poems 1951-1974 10-11.

230 Notes to pages 203-24 3 "The Two Poetries: An Introduction." In pointing to the ways in which British and American poetry have fallen out of touch with each other, Perloff (263) acknowledges a debt to Davie, who in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry had lamented: "what we have had for some years now is a breakdown in communication between these two English-speaking poetries, though for civility's sake the appearance of a continuing dialogue between them is maintained" (184). 4 Here I adapt Tomlinson's phrase from Some Americans 12. 5 Lines 406-7 in Brink's edition. Brink offers the partial translation, "so that you may not feel ashamed of Musa lyrae sailers et cantor Apollo," and goes on to comment: "The poet's true excellence is seen to have lain in the practices of the ancient uates and his successors. His art eminently belonged to society, res publica" (511). 6 Tomlinson has indicated Hill's debt to Sisson in The Sense of the Past 16. 7 See the forewords to his Collected Poems and Selected Translations (1974), repr. in Avoidance 463-6. 8 To avoid over-simplification here, it is necessary to point out that Sisson has also written admiringly of Peguy in the New English Weekly, 14 November 1946. See Avoidance 44-7. His more powerful admiration for Maurras, though, emerges in his two essays on the man (1950 and 1976; Avoidance 96-109 and 536-43). 9 More correctly, Jean-Paul Lucet's adaptation of the play, including material from Jeanne d'Arc and the later Le Mystere de la Vocation de Jeanne d'Arc. 10 Quoted by Neil Astley in Harrison V., new edition, 36. In the same edition, Richard Eyre makes the link between Harrison and the Russian, Gumilyov (1886-1921), 38. 11 London Magazine 4.6 [8] (1964): 78. Quoted at length and discussed by Grant, 158-9.

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Index

Absolutism, 24, 53, 113, 159, 172, 187, 221 Activism, 130, 132, 133, 205 Adams, John, 175-6 Adler, Alfred, 142 Aestheticism, 194, 203 Affective poetics, 51-2, 53' 133 Aldington, Richard, 46 Althusser, Louis, 67, 131, 151 Alvarez, A., 13, 58, 205, 206, 207, 216 Amphion, 207, 219 Angry Penguins, 123, 139, 188 Apostrophe, 48-9, 53 Appleyard, Bryan, 13 Arbuthnot, Dr John, 137, 138, 159 Aristotle, 112, 177, 215 Arnold, Matthew, 37, 78, 174 Auden, W.H., 15, 21-4 - clock time, 72, 73 - "the dialectic," 76 - discursiveness, 57 - and Eliot, 78, 79 - feminism, 17, 72

- Making, Knowing, and - and Horace, 10, 58 Judging, 59 - and the "Just City," 59, - New Year Letter, 56-8 60 - language, theory of, 63-5 - "New Year Letter," 58- literature as social 77 - "Ode to Terminus," 68 force, 64-9 - An Outline for Boys and - and the middle style, Girls and Their Parents, 63 58-9 - "Out on the Lawn I Lie - modernism, departure in Bed," 118 from, 57 - "The Public v. the Late - neoclassical influences, Mr William Butler 19, 58, 76, 77 Yeats," 60 - political views, 61-5 - "The Sea and the Mirpassim ror," 64-5, 70, 72 - affinity for poststructur- Secondary Worlds, 66, alism, 63 67,68 - and relativity, 73 - "vision of Agape," 117, - "Spain," 61 - "Writing" (1932), 63, 66 224 - "Writing" (in The WRITINGS: Dyer's Hand), 64 - "A Bride in the 3o's," Austin, J.L., 25, 212, 213 61 Ayer, A.J., 13 - "Criticism in a Mass Ayres, Pam, 220 Society," 58 - The Double Man, 68, Babbitt, Irving, 34 228n5 Bahlke, George, 77 - The Dyer's Hand, 64 Barthes, Roland, 28, 29, - "The Horatians," 10 30, 210; on classical dis- "In Memory of W.B. course, 25 Yeats," 60-1, 66, 69, 77

250 Index Bate, Walter Jackson, 210 Bayley, John, 6, 227ni Beach, Joseph Warren, 61 Belgion, Montgomery, 134 Benjamin, Walter, 16 Bergonzi, Bernard, 172, 174 Blake, William, 85 Bloom, Harold, 15, 21 Blunt, Anthony, 108 Bofill, Ricardo, 7 Boileau, Nicolas, 161 Booth, Martin, 216 Borges, Jorge Luis, 147, 149 Bradley, F.H., 53 Breton, Andre, 82 Brink, C.O., 206 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 185, 193 Brooks, Cleanth, 151, 152, 153 Brownjohn, Alan, 13, 205, 206 Bush, Ronald, 55 Byron, Lord, 61 Callan, Edward, 76 Campbell, Roy, 10, 11, 14 Caplan, Usher, 16 Carey, Henry, 138 Carpenter, Humphrey, 62, 78 Carra, Carlo, 16 Caudwell, Christopher, 80, 171 Chirico, Giorgio de, 16 Christ, Carol, 52 Chronos and Kairos, 86 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 185 Classicism, 3-5; as critical construct, 14-15; and modernism, 5-6; and postmodernism, 6-7, 28 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 103, 140 Common style, 39-40, 169 Corday, Charlotte, 208 Corke, Hilary, 162 Couplet: heroic, 42, 43, 124, 125, 156, 160, 221; Hudibrastic, 75, 99,

- "The Deserted Village: Poem as Virtual History," 22gni - "Eliot in One Poet's Life," 24, 161, 163 - Ezra Pound, 174 - Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor, 174, 185 - "Herbert Read's Romanticism," 24, 164, Dante, 33, 50, 161, 169 165 Danto, Arthur C, 93, 106, - "Homage to William 155 Cowper," 10, 162 Danton, Georges Jacques, - "Landscape as Poetic 208 Focus," 196, 201 Darras, Jacques, 28 - The Language of Science Dasenbrock, Reed Way, and the Language of Liter54, 229n6 ature, 174 Davenant, Sir William, 212 - The Late Augustans, 174 Davenport, Guy, 185 David, Jacques Louis, 208 - Purity of Diction in English Verse, 10, 164Davie, Donald, 14, 23, 24, 85 passim 27, 28, 223, 224 - The Shires, 201 - "areal" relations, 196, - Six Epistles to Eva 197, 200 Hesse, 173-202 - civility, 181-7 passim - Thomas Hardy and Brit- classical syntax, 165-8 - comedy as redemption, ish Poetry, 173, 206 - "T.S. Eliot: The End of 181-4, 192, 195 an Era," 168 - distrust of "utopian - Under Briggflatts, 173 projections," 195-6 - and Eliot, 18, 36-8,161-3 - "Wombwell on Strike," 11, 30 - and Hope, 162-4, 167 - and Johnson, 175, 176 Day Lewis, Cecil, 10, 39, 79, 209 - language as bond, 189 Denham, John, 127, 165, - links between eigh168 teenth and twentieth centuries, 168-75 passim Dennis, John, 150-2 passim Derrida, Jacques, 28, 63 - literature, society, poliDidacticism, 8, 27, 62, 87, tics, 166, 170, 173, 175 89, 107, 126, 130, 152 - and modernism, 173, - in Davie, 184, 186 187-9 - in Dryden, 8, 152 - myth, 193, 194 - and neoclassicism, Aus- - in Eliot, 135 - in Harrison, 220 tralian, 162, 163 - in Hope, 134, 160 - and Pound, 174 - in MacNeice, 79-82, 87- time and history, 176, 9 passim 195-9 passim, 202 - and Tomlinson, 10-11, - in Pound, 36, 53 203 - in Whitman, 91-3 WRITINGS: Discursiveness, 11, 37, 54, 57, 134, 167 - Articulate Energy, 10, Donne, John, 57, 161 164-85 passim 100, 185, 202; rhyming, 53, 54, 74, 75, 76, 77 Cowley, Malcolm, 59 Cowling, Elizabeth, 7, 19 Cowper, William, 174 Crabbe, George, 10 Croft, Julian, 123, 125 Cunningham, J.S., 44

251 Index Dorn, Ed, 196 Douglas, C.H., 34 Dryden, John, 8, 10, 14, 19' 27, 75 - and Auden, 22, 58, 59 - and Davie, 169, 173 - and Eliot, 37-8, 39, 40 - and Harrison, 221 - and Hill, 29, 212 - and Hope, 127, 129, 137, 138, 160 - and Kipling, 9 - and MacNeice, 20, 79, 88 WRITINGS: - Absalom and Achitophel, 205 - Annus Mirabilis, 46 - The Conquest of Granada, 146 - The Hind and the Panther, 39 - Religio Laid, 8 Drydenism, 79, 88,140,162 Dunn, Douglas: "A Dream of Judgement," 12; "The Grudge," 222 Dutton, Geoffrey, 123

- literature and society, 33 - and MacNeice, 98 - the objective correlative, 56 - and Pope, 42-5 - satire, 43 - time, 53-5 WRITINGS: - "Ash Wednesday," 168 - "Burnt Norton," 96, 99, 139 - "A Commentary" (1924), 4, 8 - Essays Ancient and Modern, 33 - For Lancelot Andrewes, M/ 31' 34 - Four Quartets, 139-40 - "From Poe to Valery," 122

- "The Function of a Literary Review," 33 - The Idea of a Christian Society, 39 - "The Idea of a Literary Review," 43 - "The Imperfect Critic," 226114 - "John Dryden," 36-7, 161 Eagleton, Terry, 131 - John Dryden: The Poet, the Edification, 18, 38, 40, 49, Dramatist, the Critic, 134 59, 79, 169, 175 - "Johnson as Critic and Einstein, Albert, 20, 70, Poet," 3, 38, 40, 129, 72, 73, 177, 197-9 134, 161 passim, 229116 - "Little Gidding," 168, Eliot, T.S., 14, 17-19, 20, 169, 170 23, 29, 30 - "The Metaphysical - the "classic," 31 Poets," 129 - classicism, 3, 32, 33-4, - "The Perfect Critic," 47,48 22604 - and Dryden, 18, 27, 36- "Poetry and Drama," 9/42 31, 33, 81-2, 134 - and the eighteenth cen- "Preludes," 98 tury, 41, 61 - "Reflections on Vers - and Goldsmith, 48 Libre," 42 - and Gray's "Elegy," 48, - "Religion and Litera227m 7 ture," 134 - on the ideological - The Sacred Wood, 33, 40, "power" of literature, 22604 135 - and Johnson, 18, 34, 38, - "The Social Function of Poetry," 33, 35, 130 39, 41, 122

- "Tradition and the Individual Talent," 123 - "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," 3, 32, 55 - The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 49, 78 - "What is a Classic?" 3, 6, 31, 39 - The Waste Land, 42-55 Eliot, Valerie, 42 Eloquence, 48, 50, 52 Empedocles, 207 Empson, William, 151 Epistle. See Verse epistle Erskine-Hill, Howard, 201 Espey, John, 5 Euclid, 177 Extremity, 25, 29, 72, 182, 187, 210 Eyre, Richard, 219 Fenollosa, Ernest, 166, 174, 177 Fenton, James, 217; "Children in Exile," 11, 30; "Letter to John Fuller," 11, 205; "Open Letter to Richard Grossman," 11 Fish, Stanley, 28 Formalism, 11, 151-2 Formby, George, 221 France, Anatole, 4, 5 Frank, Joseph, 152, 22gn6 Eraser, G.S., 140, 227111 Free verse, 23, 124, 190, 191 Fresne, Marion du, 194, 195 Frost, Robert, 8 Frye, Northrop, 154 Fuller, John, 217, 218; "The Art of Love," 225n5; Epistles to Several Persons, 11 Fussell, Paul, 58, 75 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 25 Gall, Sally, 17 Gallaway, Francis, 159 Gautier, Theophile, 5, 41

252 Index Gay, John, 137, 138, 159 Gioia, Dana, 201 Giraudoux, Jean, 42 Goldberg, G.J. and N.M., i4i/ 151 Goldsmith, Oliver, 48, 122,

173,

174

Graham, Robert, 6 Grant, Damien, 222 Graves, Robert, 25 Gray, Thomas, 11, 30, 46, 48, 169, 220, 221, 227ni7 Greene, Donald, 175 Gropius, Walter, 7 Habermas, Jiirgen, 24, 25 Haffenden, John, 221 Hale, W.G., 5 Hamburger, Michael, 24, 172 Hargrave, James, 193 Harley, Robert, 159 Harnett, Gerald, 8 Harris, Martin, 220 Harris, Max, 123, 140, 141 Harrison, Tony, 24; V., 30, 219-23 passim Hart, Kevin, 17, 125, 145 Hassan, Ihab, 147 Hazlitt, William, 37 Heaney, Seamus, 217-19, 223; The Government of the Tongue, 217; The Place of Writing, 217 Hegel, G.W.F., 113 Heinemann, Margot, 80 Heisenberg, Werner, 177 Hellas, 7-8 Heraclitus, 73 Herodotus, 201 Hesse, Eva, 23, 177, 185, 195, 198 Heuser, Alan, 86 Highet, Gilbert, 5 Hill, Geoffrey, 29, 211-14, 221, 222; and Dryden, 212; and Pound, 212, 213, 216; The Enemy's Country, 211, 216; The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy, 30, 213-

14; "Our Word Is Our Bond," 212-13, 216 History, 11, 12, 13, 25, 2224 passim; and Auden, 602, 66,68; and Davie, 180, 181, 192, 195; and Eliot, 53, 54; and Hope, 155; and MacNeice, 94, 112; and Pound, 35 Hitler, Adolf, 16 Hobbes, Thomas, 211-19 passim Homberger, Eric, 11, 17, 222 Homer, 84 Hooker, Jeremy, 214, 215 Hope, A.D., 15, 17, 21, 23, 25 - affective power of literature, 133, 135 - "applied" poetry and "pure" poetry, 126 - classicism, 136 - on the eighteenth century, 155-60 - and Eliot, 121-4 - and modernism, 125, 129, 136 - narrative, 155, 156, 160 - and Poe, 121-2, 126 - poetry and social "ecology," 130, 132-4 - and postmodernism, 146, 147 - and Pound, 121, 122 - on Symbolism, 125, 126 - time, 153-5, a6o - and Verlaine, 127 WRITINGS: - "The Activists," 130-4, 146, 147 - The Age of Reason, 22, 154-6 - "The Bamboo Flute," 157, 158 - The Cave and the Spring, 122, 152 - "The Discursive Mode," 121, 125, 129, 132, 134, 167 - Dunciad Minor, 22-3, 137-54

- "The Middle Way," 127, 129 - The New Cratylus, 12136 passim, 152 - Poems, 162 - "The Satiric Muse," 126, 127, 130 - "The Sincerity of Poetry," 123 - "The Transit of Venus," 157 - "Sir William Herschel's Long Year," 156, 160 Horace, 14, 150, 152 - and Auden, 10, 58 - and Harrison, 221, 223 - and Hope, 15, 127, 128, 137, 153 - and Housman, 9 - and Kipling, 9 - and MacNeice, 10, 20, 79 - and Tomlinson, 203 - translated by C.H. Sisson, 206-8, 217 - in the twentieth century, 8, 9, 206-7 Home, C.J., 159 Housman, A.E., 9-10, 14, 36 Howarth, Gerald, 220 Hulme, T.E., 4, 14, 18, 20, 41, 54, 139, 165, 166 Hume, David, 227^6 Humphreys, Arthur, 20, 21, 144 Hutcheon, Linda, 7, 146, 149, 150 Iser, Wolfgang, 27 Isherwood, Christopher, 79 James, Clive, 12 Jameson, Fredric, 54 Jarrell, Randall, 57, 92-3 Jaures, Jean, 213 Jauss, Hans Robert, 19, 28 Jay, Martin, 23, 24, 25, 224 Jencks, Charles, 6, 7, 28, 146, 149

253 Index Johnson, Samuel: - and Auden, 59 - and Davie, 168, 169, 173-6 passim - and Dunn, 12 - and Eliot, 3, 34, 38, 40, 48, 52, 58 - and Hope, 159, 160 - and Longley, 12 - Toryism, 209-10, 221 WRITINGS: - Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare, 146 - Rasselas, 40 - The Vanity of Human Wishes, 41, 49, 75, 122, 144, 170 Jones, David, 187, 225ni Jones, Ernest, 142 Jones, Peter, 204, 214 Joyce, James, 64, 226ni6 Jung, C.G., 142, 143, 146 Just City, 59, 60, 115, 206, 219 Kafka, Franz, 56 Kalb, Friedrich, 16 Kenner, Hugh, 6, 44-5 Kermode, Frank, 6, 86 Kettle, Tilly, 157, 158 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 56 King, Bruce, 136 Kinnell, Galway, 184 Kipling, Rudyard, 9 Kiremidjian, G.D., 150 Klein, A.M., 16 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 34, 44/51 Kracauer, Siegfried, 24 Lacan, Jacques, 63 Laforgue, Jules, 45, 46 Langer, Suzanne, 164, 165, 22gni Langhorne, John, 174 Lawrence, D.H., 92 Ledyard, Corporal John, 199 Lenin, V.I., 92 Levenson, Michael, 4, 53 Levertov, Denise, 204 Ligare, David, 6

Autumn Sequel, 88 "Bagpipe Music," 26 "An Alphabet," 82 "Carrick Revisited," 94 "Eclogue between the motherless," 26 - "Eclogue from Iceland," 26 - "Eliot and the Adolescent," 78, 161 - "Hidden Ice," 120 - "Homage to Cliches," 26 - "Leaving Barra," 95 - "Letter to WH. Auden," 80, 81, 84 - "London Rain," 116 - Modern Poetry, 82, 83, Macaree, David, 46 117, 130 McAuley, James, 122, 123, - "Plurality," 20, 86, 92163 4, 100, 109, 113 McKinnon, William T., - The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, 84,85 92, 103 MacNeice, Louis: - absolutism, rejection of, - "Poetry To-Day," 78, 79, 81, 84, 92, 161 86, 99, 105, 113 - "The Springboard," 115 - Auden's "Vision of - The Strings Are False, 107 Agape," relation to, - "Stylite," 94-5 117-19 - "Subject in Modern - Augustan-Romantic Poetry," 78, 80, 82, 85, antithesis, 79 92 - classicism, 79,88,109, no - "Sunday Morning," 100 - dialectical world-view, - "This I Believe," 81 24, 84, 85, 87 - "The Tower That - didacticism, 87-9 Once," 79 - Eliot, 78, 79, 88 Mactavish, Letitia, 191 - engagement, political, Madge, Charles, 79, 81 80-4 passim, 145 - language, theory of, 82-7 Mahon, Derek, 13 Mallarme, Stephane, 89, - romanticism in, 84-8 126, 132, 168 - social vision, 105, 112Malley, Ern, 123, 139, 140, 20, 224 162-65 Passim - Symbolism, criticism Malouf, David, 122, 123, of, 83 127, 158 - time, 85-7, 94, 95, 98, Mandelstam, Osip, 218, 102, 105, 112 219 - Whitman, influence of, Margolies, David, 80 89-93, !oi, 118 Margolis, John D., 33 - Yeats, W.B., influence Marvell, Andrew, 205, 216 of, 102, 114, 228n7 Marx, Karl, and Marxism, WRITINGS: 23, 28, 61, 80, 105, 131, - Autumn Journal, 20-1, 209, 224 22, 27, 88-120 Lindop, Grevel, 222 Lindsay, A.D., 113 Lisle, Leconte de, 41 Livingstone, Dr, 24 Lobb, Edward, 51 Locke, John, 227^6 Long poem, 17-18 Longenbach, James, 18, 53,54 Longley, Michael, 12 Longley, Edna, 82, 101 Lovejoy, A.O., 39 Lowell, Robert, 205 Lucet, Jean-Paul, 23ong Lukacs, Georg, 61, 62, 131, 133

-

254 Index Matthews, Brian, 123, 141 Maurras, Charles, 34, 213, 215 Maxwell, D.S., 39 Mayer, Elizabeth, 61, 117 Mendelson, Edward, 11, 63 Middle style, 58, 59, 61 Middleton, Christopher, 222

Mill, J.S., 211 Milosz, Czeslaw, 3, 14, 30 Milton, John, 37, 84 Modernism, 6-29 passim, 55, 89, 147; and Auden, 57, 63; in Australia, 123-5; and Davie, 170, 173, 174, 187, 189; and Hope, 125, 129, 136; and the Horatian tradition, 53, 149, 167; and time, 54 Moody, A.D., 42, 43, 46, 48,49 Morrison, Blake, 10, 222 Movement, The, 162 Mulhern, Francis, 57 Mundy, Jennifer, 7, 19 Muntzer, Thomas, 214, 222 Mussolini, Benito, 171 Nabokov, Vladimir, 147 Nakanishi, Wendy Jones, 185 Narasimhaiah, C.D., 136 Narrative, 54, 155-6 Neoclassicism: in Australia, 123-4, X36; in Britain, 13; and Fascism, 16; in the United States, 9 Nero, 219 New Apocalypse, The, 82, 83, 123, 139, 140, 141, 188 New Classicism, The, 7, 8 New Romanticism, The, 140 Newton, Isaac, 156 Nicholls, Peter, 35

Oakeshott, Michael, 175, 176 Oldham, John, 207 Olson, Charles, 185, 187, 196 Oppen, George, 204 Orwell, George, 209, 222 Owen, Wilfred, 92 Parmenides, 86, 87 Parnassians, French, 5, 41,83 Parnell, Thomas, 159 Paulin, Tom, 12 Peacock, Thomas Love, 134 Peguy, Charles, 213-16 Perkins, David, 38 Perloff, Marjorie, 28, 203, 23on3 Perouse, Jean Francois, Comte de la, 180, 187, 191 Philips, Ambrose, 138, 147-50 passim Phillips, A.A., 137-50 passim Picasso, Pablo, 7 Pinsky, Robert, 8-9 Plain style, 8, 31, 37, 39, 128 Plato, 60, 111, 112, 117 Poe, Edgar Allan, 121-2, 126, 127 Pope, Alexander - and Auden, 20, 59 - and Davie, 23, 161, 173 - and Eliot, 19, 42-5 - heroic couplet, 75, 99 - and Hope, 15, 22, 128, 129, 137, 138, 148, 156, 159 - and MacNeice, 26 WRITINGS: - The Dunciad, 44, 49, 147, 149, 150 - "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," 57, 144, 145 - "Essay on Criticism," 172 - "Essay on Man," 57, 159, 160

- The Rape of the Lock, 42, 43, 49, 149 Post-history, 105, 106, 224 Postmodernism, 6, 7, 21, 28, 146, 147, 149 Poststructuralism, 28, 63 Pound, Ezra: - and classicism, 4-6 - didacticism, 34 - and Dryden, 36, 37 - on the eighteenth century, 5, 6, 36 - Gongorism, dislike of, 45 - on Horace and Virgil, 5, 225ni - the image, 35-6, 56 - on Johnson, 41 - The Waste Land, annotations to, 18, 19, 42-55 passim WRITINGS: - The Cantos, 35 - Guide to Kulchur, 41, 43, 172 - "Homage to Sextus Propertius," 5 - "How to Read," 34, 35, 52 - "Hugh Selwyn Mauber!ey," 5 - "Mr. Housman at Little Bethel," 36 - "A Retrospect," 35, 36, 47 - "The Serious Artist," 34 Pringle, John Douglas, 122,

124,

134

Propaganda, 57, 59, 67, 81, 135 Rabillard, Sheila, 51 Racine, Jean, 221 Rainey, Lawrence S., 35 Read, Herbert: - Augustans, scorn for, 140, 164 - classic and romantic, opposition of, 142-3 - classicism and inhumanity, 15 - and Davie, 164

255 Index - and the Ern Malley hoax, 140, 164 - and Hope, 140 - and the New Apocalypse, 141 - and postmodernism, M7 WRITINGS: - "Psycho-Analysis and Criticism," 141 - The True Voice of Feeling, 164 Rhetoric, 38, 48-53 passim Rickword, Edgell, 214 Riding, Laura, 25 Riefenstahl, Leni, 16 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 56 Rimbaud, Arthur, 163 Robbins, Bruce, 7 Romanticism, 161, 166 Rosenthal, M.L., 17 Ross, Alan, 204 Ruskin, John, 215 Ryle, Gilbert, 25 Said, Edward, 146, 150 Saliger, Ivo, 16 Salvaggio, Ruth, 16-17 Satire, 12, 16, 42, 43, 46-7, 54, 126, 129, 139, 14350 passim, 222 Sauer, C.O., 197, 201 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 28, 131, 150 Schmidt, Michael, 204, 208, 214 Scriabin, Aleksandr, 204 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 185, 186 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, 173 Shakespeare, William, 37, 84, 161 Shelley, P.B., 88, 218 Shusterman, Richard, 35, 50 Siomopoulos, Gregory, 51 Sironi, Mario, 16 Sisson, C.H., 14, 206-11, 221, 223; and Horace, 29, 206-9, 217/ and Johnson, 210; Toryism,

209-10; "A Four Letter Word," 210; "Order and Anarchy," 209 Sitter, John, 62, 227^6 Sitter, Willem de, 70, 73, 228n6 Sitwell, Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell, 86 Smith, Stan, 17, 63, 66, 72, 75, 76, 223 Socialism, 10, 24, 63-5 Sorel, Georges, 34 Spacks, Patricia, 49 Spatial form, 152, 153, 229n6 Spears, Monroe K., 10, 58 Spencer, Luke, 222 Spender, Stephen, 79, 80 Spiegelman, Willard, 8-9, 13, 14, 53, 59, 68 Stalin, Joseph, 219 Steiner, George, 215-19 passim Sterne, Laurence, 149 Stevens, Wallace, 203 Stewart, Harold, 123, 163 Stillinger, Jack, 43 Structuralism, 63 Surette, Leon, 172, 22gn6 Swift, Jonathan, 22, 23, 40, 54/ 57, 137/ *38, M4, 159 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 36 Symbolism, 9, 26, 83, 125, 126, 128, 167, 168, 170, 172 Symons, Arthur, 26 Syntax, 165, 167, 170, 173 Tate, Allen, 152, 163 Thomas, Dylan, 163, 206 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 215 Thomas, Ron, 4 Thomson, Hector, 223 Time: - linear, 20-9 passim; 54, 55, 71-3, 85-7 passim; in Da vie, 176-8, 188; in Hope, 154, 160; in The Waste Land, 54; in MacNeice, 96, 108, 112

- non-linear, 22, 23, 55; in Davie, 188, 191; in Hope, 152, 153, 22gn6; in MacNeice, 86; in Pound and Wyndham Lewis, 227n24; in The Waste Land, 54 Tolley, A.T., 139 Tomlinson, Charles: - Augustan moderation, 29, 203-5 - eighteenth-century influences, 10-11, 206 - neoclassicism, 14 - time, 29, 204 - political poetry, 204-5, 208 - civility, 206 - Davie, support from, 173, 203 - language, theory of, 218 WRITINGS: - "Against Extremity," 204 - "Antecedents," 29 - "The Art of Poetry," 203 - "Assassin," 204 - "Prometheus," 204 - "Swimming Chenango Lake," 29 Tonty, Henri de, 183, 189, 191 Toryism, 209-10, 221 Totality, 23, 24, 25, 86, 87, 224 Trapp, Joseph, 152 Treece, Henry, 163 Trotsky, Leon, 204 Tucker, John, 6, 226ni6 Tulip, James, 7, 8, 146 Uniformity of culture, 39, 77, 226nio Valery, Paul, 89, 168 Van der Rohe, Mies, 7 Van Doren, Mark, 36 Verlaine, Paul, 47-8, 127 Verse epistle, 10,11, 61, 65, 67, 68, 77, 185, 186, 217 Vico, Giambattista, 134 Virgil, 25, 33, 84, 138, 206

256 Index Von Hallberg, Robert, 184, 187 Wain, John, 11 Wainwright, Jeffrey, 214, 215, 222 Waller, Edmund, 127 Walpole, Sir Robert, 147 Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 10

Weston, Jessie, 226ni6 Whitehouse, Mary, 220 Whitman, Walt, 89-93, 101 Williams, Charles, 59, 60 Winkler, Raymond, 56, 59, 62 Winters, Yvor, 19 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 25 Wbolf, Virginia, 79, 80

Wordsworth, William, 128, 129, 157, 174 Yeats, W.B., 19, 24, 60, 61, 65; "Easter 1916," 114; "Lapis Lazuli," 102 Ziegler, Adolf, 16 Zoffany, John [Johann], 157-9