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D.J. Enright (ed.): THE OXFORD BOOK OF CONTEMPORARY VERSE 1945-1980 (O.U.P. £7.50)

     In a poem called To Certain English Poets (a poem not included in the volume under review) Donald Davie remarks, -

Like you I look with astonished fear and revulsion
at the gross and bearded, articulate and good-humoured
Franco-American torso pinned across
the plane of human action, twitching and roaring.

Davie is always an interesting if sometimes disagreeable writer who long ago outgrew the confines of the ‘Movement’, - he has publicly rejected most of its central critical tenets - and his intention here is clearly ironic, but I suspect that for D.J.Enright the fear and revulsion Davie describes are still powerfully felt emotions. He obviously has an ally somewhere at (or in?) OUP. This someone seems determined to keep us in a kind of 1950’s time-loop, locked in a grey place where ‘The Movement’ grinds on and on and on (and on…). Examine the evidence: Philip Larkin gave us The Oxford Book of 20th Century English Verse, Kingsley Amis gave us The Oxford Book of Light Verse, and now D.J.Enright serves up The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse. In his introduction he makes unforgivably facetious remarks about European writers, some of whom have enjoyed the unfair advantages of revolution, proscription, imprisonment and even death, is dismissive of confessional verse almost as if he were unaware that several brilliantly gifted poets have considered it worthwhile to work in a mode to which this much misused label could be attached (hence, no Plath, no Dream Songs), and calls for a poetry of civility, passion and order. He’s got the order wrong of course,- passion comes a very poor third. A lot of the poems in this book are so slight they would be more at home in Amis’ anthology, or, as Theodore Weiss has observed, they seem designed to provide convenient ‘fillers’ for literary journals. (You know the sort of thing, - a couple of limp quatrains in the left hand corner of the page abutting on a publisher’s blurb for something really exciting like a new critical study of Thomas Hardy’s poetry.)

     Do we need this book? Well, no dear reader we don’t, - I cannot imagine a duller or more misleading selection of the last 35 years of verse in English, but, - alas - educators and the half-educated will fall on it with sighs of relief and having digested its contents will relax in the confidence that they have done their duty. People who actually like poetry (who even ‘believe in it’ in some obscure way) will very likely throw this book against the nearest wall, - nevertheless it will become a standard work and will be force-fed to hapless scholars everywhere with the result that another generation will grow up in the belief that poetry is a very dull affair of no possible relevance to them. And who can blame them? DJ’s choice should carry a government warning - THIS BOOK MAY SERIOUSLY DAMAGE LITERATURE - but I don’t expect the present government to agree. The Oxford Contemporary is a kind of literary equivalent to the last Tory Manifesto, and we all know what the enactment of that abomination is doing to us.

     On the second page of his introduction DJ attempts a neat little preemptive strike : It is common among reviewers of anthologies to complain, often with some justification, “If A and B are in why are Y and Z out”. Yes, yes of course some good poets have to be missed out but when you can fill a whole series of alphabets with ‘poets of major achievement’ who are excluded then something must be wrong. Confronted with a book so generously stuffed with the work of such indisputably minor versifiers as A.D. Hope, Patricia Beer, Kingsley Amis, James K. Baxter (who?), John Holloway, Howard Nemerov, etc…how is it possible to excuse the abscence of (for example) W.S. Graham, Roy Fisher, Christopher Middleton, Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, Lee Harwood, George Barker, John Ashbery and the entire ‘New York School’, and Duncan, and Dorn, and Olson, and Creeley, and Reznikoff, and Rakosi, and Bly, and Merwin and, and and….? Perhaps DJ actually dislikes the work of all these poets, but however philistine his personal tastes as the editor of an ‘authoritative’ anthology lie is under some obligation to his trusting public to make this anthology in some degree representative. Take the case of Lee Harwood. He is an extremely uneven poet but the poems he was writing in the late sixties/early seventies are a brilliant achievement without obvious precedent in English verse and they have been highly influential. Much the same could be said about Roy Fisher except that he’s been consistently good since the 50’s. I suppose DJ must consider these poets too dangerously modernist to be included: they’d really mess up the view. Their abscence is understandable if inexcusable, but what are we to make of Enright’s selection of Philip Larkin, for whom he has repeatedly professed the most fervent admiration ? The abscence of such masterpieces-of-their-kind as Church Going and The Whitsun Weddings might be explained by the fact that they’re already over-anthologised, but where are The Building, Money, The Old Fools, and Livings? DJ’s choice simply gives no idea of the real stature of this fine traditionalist poet. His choice of Douglas Dunn’s work is no better.

     When it comes to American poets one can appreciate Enright’s dilemma. He allows that it would have been painfully impoverishing and therefore absurd to exclude them, but it’s obvious that the scope of this anthology made it impossible for him to do justice to the many astonishing varieties of post-war American verse. Yet we can still ask why out of 40 poets only eight are American, and how Nemerov and Wilbur managed to survive much stiff competition. I’m thankful that Enright has seen fit to include Bishop, Jarrell, Lowell, Simpson, Hecht and Berryman, but it appears that the last of these is only included with considerable reluctance :
…rather than have John Berryman out altogether, I have selected work by him which may well though not indisputably be judged unrepresentative - since if poetry is a public matter it is not the place for private revelations and if it is not a public matter it has no place in a published book. Now as far as I’m aware poetry has been a place for private revelations of one sort or another since (at least) Sappho, whose great friend Alcaeus was not above using poetry as a public forum for settling private scores, so I can’t see the force of the argument. Also, Enright is being absurdly literal minded in dismissing all the Dream Songs as confessional verse. After all, their hero is Henry not John. Admittedly the two share many of the same friends and experiences but most readers will have no difficulty in enjoying these marvellously funny, original and touching poems for themselves as - well - as works of art. The Dream Songs are a stylistic tour-de-force, not bleeding hunks of autobiography. However they are not polite and there’s the rub. There is something profoundly patronising about Enright’s treatment of American poets. They are only tolerated if they have proved themselves to be sufficiently well-mannered, quietly-spoken and conventionally dressed: no-one who would look out of place in an Oxford common-room is admitted. The overwhelming impression is of an English poetry which (in Davie’s words) is severely limited in its aims, painfully modest in its pretensions, deliberately provincial in its scope and thus inevitably marginal in importance. It is a poetry that has still failed to come to terms with modernism, will not begin to tolerate surrealism and has even failed to acknowledge the truth that Davie arried at so belatedly, ie., that Post-Romantic is what we are, - like it or not. From the evidence of this volume Enright would like us all to climb back into some Late Augustan garden of civil verse, closing all the gates firmly behind us. This is an invitation you can refuse.