Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

IT MAY seem to some readers that, for the first time in this century, our best writers do not have to struggle for recognition against the malign influence of powerful philistine critics, or against magazines edited without taste or judgement. In the early 1930s young writers had to endure the enervating presence of an established literary outlook, powerfully present in the figure of Sir John Squire, who turned what should have been a major literary outlet, the London Mercury, into a magazine of the utmost dullness. In the decade before that Arnold Bennett was, through his column in the London Evening Standard, ‘a kind of book-dictator’ (as Wyndham Lewis called him). And before the First World War, according to Ezra Pound, the Egoist ran ‘the sort of fool-column that the French call a sottisier, needing nothing for it but quotations from the Times Literary Supplement’. Today the literary situation appears transformed: there is less obvious foolishness, nobody possesses Bennett’s influence, and the TLS is intelligent as almost never before.

     At first sight, Ian Hamilton’s New Review seems to be part of this rise in standards; his magazine relates itself to a distinct ‘tradition’ of post-war writing, if a provincial one, uses energetic-sounding writers, and prints plenty of poetry. It is undoubtedly an attempt to establish a way of thinking and feeling for contemporary literature in England; and in doing this it registers a claim to being both humane and intelligent. The establishment can rarely have appeared so congenial. Yet something, quite clearly, is wrong with it. There is a consistency of outlook among the writers gathered together by Ian Hamilton; and if that outlook is analysed, it appears intelligent, but not intelligent enough; humane, but not humane enough: for its understanding of the world is narrow, and its literary outlook ungenerous.

     The New Review indicated what ‘tradition’ meant to it by publishing lengthy (but comfortable) interviews with Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson and Philip Larkin; the interviewers included Jonathan Raban and Clive James, both of whom are strongly committed to the belief that these writers, who first established themselves in the late 1940s or early 1950s and have dominated British writing since, have a continuing importance for the mid-1970s. I want to challenge that claim by examining the past attitudes and achievements of these and other writers, before they were organized by the New Review into the ‘significant past’. I shall call them and their younger supporters  ‘The New Review group’.

     Jonathan Raban described the publication of Angus Wilson’s novel As If By Magic as ‘a major occasion in contemporary literary history’ (Encounter, July 1973). That novel is a satire upon contemporary anti-intellectualism, represented by a group of student-hippies obsessed with D. H. Lawrence, Tolkein, and ‘self-expression’ in art; its writing, according to Raban, led Wilson to much research into pyramidology, astrology, and ancient earthworks. Rather than directly confront Raban’s palpably exaggerated claim for the novel, let me ask what intellectual issues are raised by the vigorous promotion of such fiction.

     Angus Wilson has hinted that his wider concerns are with ‘the decaying humanist world’, of which he and others are ‘trying to make sense’ in their fiction.(1) Yet there is surely overwhelming evidence that the hippie movement was never a particularly significant movement in this country, nor was it much in evidence by 1970 or 1971, when Angus Wilson was researching into it. Several British writers nevertheless regarded it as a dangerous cultural force, destroying values in art. (In the United States it was an effective political as well as cultural movement, working successfully against President Johnson, and the Vietnam war. Philip Rieff’s Fellow Teachers [1975], representing the disillusioned liberal reaction against its effects in education and literary culture, has to range very widely precisely because the movement had such extensive effects there.) Stephen Spender’s poem ‘Art Student’, published in The Generous Days in 1971, has a protagonist who wants to exhibit the bleeding innards of an animal: ‘That’s all we can do now — send people back /To the real thing — the stinking corpse’, the student says. Kingsley Amis’s novel of the same year, Girl, 20, deals with the same problem, but transfers the hippie characteristics to a 54-year-old avant-garde composer and political liberal. The two arguments of this novel are that such people are likely to have affairs with vulgar and aggressive young girls and leave their wives — which they ought not to do —; and that experiment in the arts is self-evidently absurd. Clive James dignifies this novel by proposing that it is about ‘the responsibilities of middle age’; in fact it argues that the prerequisites of the survival of humanist culture are ‘civilized’ (bourgeois) behaviour and restraint in art. The defence of Angus Wilson’s decayed — but evidently still desirable humanism — lies in cultural and moral conservatism.

     The issues involved become clearer beside Anthony Thwaite’s argument about ‘The Two Poetries’ (Listener, 5 April 1973). This makes the simple proposition that poetry in England is divided into two increasingly irreconcilable groups: the Liverpool Poets, Michael Horovitz and Adrian Mitchell on the one hand, and Philip Larkin and the Review poets on the other. The young prefer to read and listen to the former, while Philip Larkin and the others go without an audience. Now we can see what is wrong: the hippies who have suffered such extensive fictional and poetic abuse are the undesired audience for the first kind of poetry, while the New Review group represent the main line of humanist culture in Britain. They are being ignored by a large potential audience, and this constitutes a cultural crisis. This is a poverty-stricken analysis of the literary situation, remarkably so coming from our most influential literary editor. But let us, for the moment, take it seriously. How generous, in fact, is the humanism that is being so vigorously and extensively defended?

     Philip Larkin, who possesses an almost heroic status among the New Review group, makes few aesthetic statements; but he makes an extensive one in the Introduction to his collected jazz-record reviews, All What Jazz (1970). He describes the effect of his discovery that, while he wasn’t listening, Louis Armstrong’s music had developed into the modern jazz of Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman. Larkin was shocked. Modern jazz, he realized, was related to modern art (Picasso) and modern poetry (Pound); and he goes on to make a ferocious and passionate polemic against modernism in all the arts. Almost nothing has been published by the New Review group that seriously qualifies Larkin’s view of art and society. The origins of modernism are simple; a loss of ‘tension’ between artist and audience:

The artist has become over-concerned with his material (hence an age of technical experiment), and, in isolation, has busied himself with the two principal themes of modernism, mystification and outrage. Piqued at being neglected, he has painted portraits with both eyes on the same side of the nose. . . . He has written . . . a novel in gibberish, or a play in which the characters sit in dustbins. He has made a six-hour film of someone asleep. He has carved human figures with large holes in them. . . . Basically the message is: Don’t trust your eyes, or ears, or understanding. They’ll tell you this is ridiculous, or ugly, or meaningless. Don’t believe them. You’ve got to work at this. . . . I’m giving a course of 96 lectures at the local college. . . .

The inclusiveness of this condemnation is remarkable, to say the least. Larkin is not being provocative when he writes that the alliterative ‘Parker, Pound, Picasso’ stands for ‘every practitioner who might be said to have succeeded them’ (my italics): he means it. The list throws out both strict modernism and a very different experimentalism: Henry Moore and James Joyce; Samuel Beckett and Andy Warhol. Amis’s moralized objections to experimental art are readily accounted for by Larkin’s ‘outrage’ at all forms of modernism. Later, Larkin denies that modern jazz could have some political relation to the aspirations of the Black Power movement’.

     It is a simple, definite, comfortable world that is being outraged. Art is (or ought to be) essentially clear: commonsense can always tell what is acceptable; what the audience already knows is sufficient for its future understanding; it has no need to be educated. Nor can an art form arise out of political experience; art’s relation to society is also simple: for preference there should be no relation at all.

     The exclusion of all forms of modernism and all experimentalism accounts for a major characteristic of the ‘tradition’ of the New Review group: an almost exclusive concern with style. If commonsense can tell us so readily what is the case, then there can be no necessity to examine what might be the causes of this simple reality. To ‘get it down’, to allow reality to present itself, to ‘write itself without interference from any wider critical scheme, becomes the purpose of creative writing — a view which Larkin reveals as profoundly uncreative, a narrow, rootless provincialism, not a ‘tradition’ at all. The difficulty that people in different classes and groups behave differently from each other can be accounted for by a minute analysis of personal style. Amis is an acute recorder of this kind among the urban middle classes; Jonathan Raban likes to take on whole cities — Boston and London for example. But neither asks the difficult questions about the political or ideological origins of ‘style’ — which is only the surface effect of deeper meanings — by which they are obsessed.

     A concern with style rather then meaning or origins is often associated with political conservatism. Philip Larkin’s conservatism is at last beginning to cause some concern: is his poetry, asks Alan Brownjohn, ‘a solipsistic escape for a shy, conservative temperament?’ (New Statesman, 14 June 1974). If it is that, what are the wider consequences of the admiration in which Larkin is held? The most interesting comment on this aspect of the subject is Colin Falck’s review of The Whitsun Weddings (the Review 14, 1964). This is an analysis of Larkin’s pessimism. Falck says this of the consequences of Larkin’s world view — correctly in my view: ‘If there is really no beauty or truth to be found in the concrete here-and-now, however it might appear to ordinary people, then there is surely none to be found anywhere.’ The inaccessibility of any ideal, Platonic world of happiness forces Larkin to write poetry that diminishes the capability of the real world, particular and concrete though he makes it, to offer any humane restoration to our unhappiness. Larkin’s ability to capture ‘the feel of life’ is, compared to what he rejects in life, only a limited humanism. Falck then comes to this extraordinary and unacceptable conclusion:

In rejecting Larkin’s particular brand of ‘humanism’ I may seem to be asking for the kind of ‘right wing’ violence to which D. H. Lawrence was sometimes led. I think perhaps I am. The last and truest humanism in art is the truthful expression of emotion, and this is something prior to all questions of politics: it concerns only the honesty or the corruption of our own consciousness. If this means barbarism, then let us have barbarism. Barbarism has come to be associated with obscurity [presumably Larkin’s ‘modernism’ is meant], but no true expression can be really obscure. Let us have a lucid barbarism. If we cannot face it in art we shall have to face it soon enough in life.

From Larkin to the Apocalypse is but a step, it seems. But Falck is naive to assume such a simple equivalence between barbarism in art and the same occurence in life. Swerving irrationally from his realization that Larkin’s humanism is severely limited, he rightly rejects a form of conservatism associated with idealism, only to turn to a more extreme form, close to fascism. That word, so qualified, is unavoidable here; for the advocacy of right-wing violence can only draw in that direction. Falck should have asked what it is that originally causes ‘the honesty or corruption of our own consciousness’. He reaches his near-fascist conclusion because he cannot see the possibility that consciousness is determined by antecedent social conditions; all consciousness is shaped by forces in the material world, and art is never ‘prior’ to them, but participates in all determined belief.

     Fascism, Falck wrote in the New Review ten years later, ‘is a suicidal act in which the spirit destroys itself along with everything it attacks’ (April 1974). Indeed it is; and that mutual destructiveness is facilitated by an insistence upon a simple equivalence between art and life, and upon expressing truthfully whatever you happen to feel, whether humane feelings or not. The unhappy results of this equivalence can be seen in Cohn Falck’s own poem ‘Mid-August’ (TLS, 24 May 1974), where he writes of a mother’s death: ‘Your gentleness gone/We are all a shade nearer barbarity’. This is supposed to tell us of the woman’s human richness; but we disbelieve it because it falsifies what we know to be the actual relationship between the individual and society. No individual either causes or prevents ‘barbarism’; though a group may do it, or a class.

     Most of the writers in the New Review group have ready access to newspapers or weekly periodicals with a liberal or left political orientation. In 1917 the Imagist poet F. S. Flint wrote to J. C. Squire about a problem similar to that under consideration here:

This is a curious phenomenon that our most liberal papers politically are our most reactionary papers in literature (among those that count, that is — I don’t count . . . the Spectator . . .). (2)

Little has changed (including the status of the Spectator); technical and formal experiment are disliked by the poetry editors of the Listener, New Statesman, Observer, and TLS today, paralleling the Imagists’ difficulties in achieving periodical publication. The real (and concealed) objection that these editors maintain, is to work that goes beyond a common-sense outlook, or refuses to be provincial, or refuses to limit itself to one culture or cultural group. The New Review group appear to be a congenial establishment because the appeal of commonsense has always been plausible; but a merely plausible humanity is not enough.

     The simple world perceived by the writers I have discussed is the source of their fear of that barbarism which, Falck says, ‘we shall have to face soon enough in life’. It is the failure of social democracy to find answers to pressing and persistent economic problems, and a fear that any consequent political change may lead to political and cultural barbarism that forces these writers, unused to conducting any analysis beyond their own immediate perceptions, into a kind of panic. Rather than take any cultural risks, they fall back upon a defence of Angus Wilson’s ‘decayed humanism’ — even though it resembles ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth’. The result has been much poor analysis, conducted in fiction and poetry of very limited value.