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

SPORADIC ATTENTION was what Ian Hamilton’s collection of essays got from Donald Davie’s review of A Poetry Chronicle in the second number of Poetry Nation. No wonder; the fish Dr Davie was out to fry were in a lot of other kettles besides Mr Hamilton’s. Dr Davie’s article was in effect a lightning conducted tour of the history of the poetry market from Rupert Brooke to John Fuller.

     For an old man like me — well, fairly old — an interesting point about Dr Davie’s piece was the way he couldn’t help peppering it with half-humorous commercial and politico-military jargon: ‘putsches’ ‘objectives’ ‘assaults on wider fronts’ ‘take-overs’ ‘group-images’ and the like. One gathers that Mr Hamilton’s book is also full of it. Karl Kraus would have poised the forceps: a classic give-away of current preoccupations, not to say corruptions. Similarly Robert Conquest’s decades-back introduction to his Movement anthology, buttressed with references to such well-known poets as George Orwell, the Id, and Aldous Huxley, stood witness to the fads of the fifties. And a few years later there was the famous ‘gentility principle’ preface to yet another group collection, wherein A. Alvarez talked about the art of verse in terms of breakthroughs and feedbacks — the argot of technology.

     As befits the vocabulary needed to tell it in, the story Dr Davie unfolded was riveting. For the last half-century the literary capital has been controlled by a succession of Oxonian arbiters of poetic taste whose careers began as undergraduates plotting with co-conspirators in Oxford pubs: for example, Auden and Spender in the thirties, Keyes and Allison in the forties, Wain and Amis in the fifties, Fuller and Hamilton in the sixties (needled by such counterplotters as William Cookson and Peter Dale of Agenda). About once a decade, or half-decade (these things are speeding up) dedicated Oxonian storm-troopers detrain at Paddington Station, efficiently if not silently occupy various key points of the media (Broadcasting House, Observer, New Statesman, Printing House Square); and next thing you know The Movement rules (or it may be The Group, or the Review). A totem is set up (a Philip Larkin or Robert Lowell) and a Cambridge poet or two (say a Thom Gunn or Ted Hughes) let in on the pickings — but never, never anyone from Redbrick . . .

     This is of course a farcical résumé (though it could be defended) of Dr Davie’s thesis, which it may be he does not take all that seriously either. He is a Cambridge man: at Cambridge, where Oxford is concerned, there is a certain amount of paranoia. I speak as an Oxonian: and for my own part recall rumours about acolytes of one Leavis of Downing College infiltrating key positions in Eng. Lit., publishing, and literary journalism . . . In any case only half of Dr Davie’s ‘arbiters of poetic taste’ (G. S. Fraser, A. Alvarez, Ian Hamilton, and now Peter Porter) who have guided us over the last thirty years from the rostrums of the Sunday heavies have been Oxford men. If it matters.

     For I suppose that where I take issue with Dr Davie is in this: he seems to attach literary importance to what are after all no more than the politics or social history of the poetry trade. He knows quite well that there is no such thing as a school of poets; that in the real world its nearest equivalent usually turns out to be a solitary shark escorted by a couple of pilot-fish. That what he calls ‘arbiters of poetic taste’ have never been much more than intelligent relayers and advertisers of current moral and intellectual fashion. Gifford and Jeffreys were the prototypes. That in fact it doesn’t matter, so far as what’s called the health of poetry is concerned, whether the reviewer’s throne in the ‘influential’ public prints be held by Mr Praiseall Gush or Mr Astringent Lemon. The only difference being the type and amount of mediocrity that either is likely to encourage. The best work of this century was probably written while critics like Gosse and Bennett were laying down the law in the big circulations, what time Pound, Eliot, Rosenberg, Edward Thomas et al. were producing in disregard thereof.

     Having lived through, let me not say been part of, the poetry scene since the early forties, my view of it doesn’t quite square with Dr Davie’s, though I agree with much that he says. Differences of time and of place modify the conspectus. For one thing I’m less involved in the thickets of academe, my anchorage having been off the sea-coast of Bohemia. I don’t know about Dr Davie, but for my generation Eng. Lit., so far as examiners at Oxford were concerned, came to an end with Alfred Tennyson. As a result we regarded the moderns not as a property of our elders but as contemporaries speaking to if not for us. Nor were we led to our poets by Sunday paper reviewers — is anybody? The vehicle of a reputation was word-of-mouth, or the poet’s actual product, which seldom reached us packaged in academic exegesis like a Van Heusen shirt embalmed in polythene wrapping and stiffened with plastic bracers. To an extent that is now perhaps no longer possible or at any rate thought desirable, the young educated one another.

     Unlike Dr Davie, my base is, or was, London, where I found my first and last job: on the Sunday Times. That was in 1942. According to theory I should have been an advance-guard of the Keyes-Allison axis; but they forgot my briefing, or had no time to give it (both got killed the following year). What a lever lay to hand! But during a partly comic, mostly mute and entirely inglorious five years with the Sunday Times, if I thought of the paper at all it was as a peg to hang my economic hat on and enable me to live in London.

     The point about London then was that it had taken over from Paris as the meeting-place of the arts, or at any rate artists. Its literary life was very different from the one that now obtains. Rather than publisher’s parties, expense lunches, state-subsidized poetry readings, and organized cultural get-togethers, what went on was something more spontaneous and organic. If you knew where to go, and sooner or later you found out, there was almost no person of interest or achievement, past or potential, whom you did not meet. I sometimes wonder if there will ever again by anything like those casual, unofficial, almost nightly random meetings of mostly young and mostly unlike-minded writers and painters and musicians that took place in certain cafés and pubs round Soho, Swiss Cottage, Chelsea and Notting Hill. Till almost the end of the fifties they constituted the sort of ‘convivial’ university that people like Ivan Illich now advocate. And there you met not only intellectuals but the ordinary citizenry, leavened by the odd burglar or prostitute, according to where you went. Since the fifties I have not seen anything like it except on a very minor scale in one or two provincial centres like Leeds and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and even there it is being killed, as happened long ago in London, by the power-shovels of redevelopment and property speculation. The new universities — Keele, Lancaster, York and so on, isolated communities shut in glasscrete compounds often miles from the life of the cities to which they are attached — make a poor swap.

     At that time there was in operation, or on the point of death, a school of poetry which called itself New Apocalypse. Dr Davie doesn’t mention it, though the group was hardly worse or better than the ones he lists. So far as I recall most Apocalyptic verse was written in a style and language quarried from The Four Zoas and Finnegans Wake. Henry Treece and G. S. Fraser were its ringmasters; Dylan Thomas and George Barker the involuntary totems; Nicholas Moore its Great Poet — Fraser went so far as to announce that he found Moore’s mind more interesting than William Blake’s. The whole affair was patently ersatz — few of its adherents had even met one another — but provided a pattern for the groups and movements that were to come, and was to that extent usefully prophylactic. For the rest, in the Soho publands reigned Tambimuttu, whose real and valuable function was that of catalyst, of introducer-in-chief for those who needed to know one another. He edited (if this verb can be used to indicate an appetite and enthusiasm so romantically catholic as to be perfectly undiscriminating) Poetry London, one of the only two verse magazines to appear during the war years. Impossible to say whom it was associated with, because it was associated with everybody, from Walter de la Mare to Keith Douglas. The other magazine was Wrey Gardiner’s Poetry Quarterly, much less flamboyant, which had to do with Alex Comfort, Fred Marnau and Denise Levertov; its reviews and critical articles were generally more intelligent than the poetry. The most remarkable figure however was David Archer, ex-bookseller, ex-publisher, private and personal patron of poets till he ran out of money, who never read any poetry and certainly never talked it. His Parton Press had published the first books of George Barker, Dylan Thomas and David Gascoyne before the war, and in 1942 that of W. S. Graham, a record of firsts that compares with the Faber list in its great days.

     Looking back I find that my recollections of the poetry scene in the forties and fifties do not much engage themselves with magazines, editors, reviewers, or the apparatus of promulgation. It is the poets who dominate, as logically they ought. The poetry of the forties has been deservedly abused, for any amount of appalling tosh got into print during that decade. Just as much appalling tosh got into print in the fifties and sixties: a different kind of tosh. What is forgotten is that the most savage lambasting of current rubbish also took place in the forties — I recall one or two bastinados administered by John Heath-Stubbs in Poetry Quarterly. What is obscured, now as then, is the best work that the forties produced. Three poets of stature, though opposed in style, emerged between 1940 and 1950 — Vernon Watkins, W. S. Graham, and Patrick Kavanagh. Keith Douglas might be added to this list. Kavanagh, unquestionably the dominant Irish poet since Yeats, published The Great Hunger in 1941; and in the same year appeared Watkins’s The Ballad of the Mari Llwyd. Both were long poems, as long poems go in our exiguous age. In fact the forties produced a notable crop of these if one adds the witty and goliardic True Confession of George Barker. This, with Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger — a contemporary pastoral with a documentary realism and edge that recalls both Crabbe and Clare — may arguably be counted among the outstanding long poems of our time.

     But leaving aside Dylan Thomas (the joker in the pack), none of the forties poets I’ve noted won much attention. Thus in 1950 a retrospective essay by Alan Ross in the Listener could discuss ‘the poetry of the forties’ without mentioning any of them, or even such figures as George Barker, David Gascoyne and Dylan Thomas. Apart from the last named — and in his case it was mostly in America, or posthumous — none attracted the comparative ballyhoo that later attended Wain, Amis, Larkin and Ted Hughes. Barker, Graham, Watkins, Kavanagh & Co may have been old-fashioned in their undiluted dedication to the vocation; their single-mindedness had begun to seem absurd if not embarassing in a society where material benefit was becoming a sine qua non, and where the Arts Council and the universities were beginning to rig trampolines for the daring young men on the flying trochees. Only one had university qualifications, and only one a regular job, whereas the newer generation (except Hughes) identified with Academe and financial respectability. It may be significant that the public reputations of some of the latter group were first established in a series of full-page profiles that appeared in — The Times Educational Supplement.

     ‘The aim of a good deal of literary and academic criticism is to raise up the mediocre, to get people to believe that the tenth-rate is somehow respectable,’ wrote Kavanagh. As the fifties wore on that theorem began to be demonstrated. It became difficult for some poets of real calibre to get into print in literary magazines and periodicals at a time when these were awash with sub-Empsonian villanelles and the like. To this let me bear witness. Chance led me to play a hand in the game when a young businessman called Tristram Hull asked for help to find contributors for a pamphlet-size ‘little review’. The connection was at first as tenuous as Nimbus itself, but grew with the magazine until I found myself appointed co-editor in 1956 — which appointment lasted a twelvemonth. Almost the first number under this new dispensation printed fourteen pages of poetry by Stevie Smith, picked from a batch of fifty or more which she sent when we wrote asking for a poem. No editor, she explained, would touch her stuff. Hard to believe now; but Philip Larkin had not yet made that odd but authentic voice approvable. Much the same happened with Patrick Kavanagh, another poet not exactly undistinguished. Out of the blue we received a thick bound volume of carbon typescripts of his unpublished verse. Many years later I heard that these poems had been picked up from a scatter of papers on the floor of the poet’s Dublin flat by a friend who had had them typed and bound, and had then sent me a copy. Kavanagh at that time had lost interest in furthering the publication of his work in England, since he was getting the same deal as Stevie Smith. We published nineteen of these poems in the next Nimbus, a collection that formed the bulk of Come Dance with Kitty Stobling which Longmans published a few years later. This book led to the publication of his Collected Poems and Kavanagh’s subsequent apotheosis in Ireland after his death in 1967. Almost immediately after the Kavanagh issue, Christopher Logue took my place on the editorial board of Nimbus, which thereafter concerned itself with Sicilian politics. At any rate my connection with the magazine ended.

     But not, as it turned out, with the poetry scene. For one year Nimbus had held a door open for two poets who were serious artists but whose work, remote from the mode, could find no platform; and paid attention to others less blatantly neglected (Hugh MacDiarmid for example). But though Nimbus published early work by George Mackay Brown and Geoffrey Hill it could not claim to have done much to introduce new voices worth listening to who could not have been heard elsewhere. However, in 1958, while living on fish and chips in one of the dressing-rooms of the derelict Theatre Royal at Castleford, I received a letter from the Irish painter Patrick Swift inviting me to come in with him to edit a new quarterly. The backing was to come via the remarkable Mrs St John Hutchinson, a friend of George Moore and Sam Beckett, of Matisse and Giacometti; she was then in her eighties. We called the magazine X, after its dictionary definition ‘the unknown quantity’. The actual backer I was never to meet, but through his generosity X was able to pay contributors on the scale of Encounter. The first number came out at the end of 1959, the seventh and last in 1962. Swift was responsible for the art side and launched a series of torpedoes at the official art of the day (those were the boom years of abstract) while offering as an alternative the work of then unknown figurative painters like Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews, and the as yet uncanonized Lucien Freud and David Bomberg. We were out to provide a platform for the individual vision, not accepted avant-gardisme or second-hand attitudes. While the list of contributors remained international, from among the native English X managed to recruit at least two new poets who certainly would not have been elsewhere given a hearing. This can be stated categorically, for during the three years that X operated neither of the two poets I am about to name were able to get work accepted by any other literary periodical. The odd thing was that both found publishers for their first books of verse. At that date, by some reversal of natural law, publishers took risks that editors of professedly advanced poetry magazines didn’t or wouldn’t; even, come to that, the Arts Council itself. For one of these poets had his first book chosen by the selectors of the Poetry Book Society (I was one of the two selectors), only to have it disallowed by the Arts Council for fear of being involved in action for libel — a fear which the publisher of the book, who would have been the first target of such action, either didn’t share or managed to overcome.

     These two poets had nothing in common, either in age or in background, beyond being odd men out, going against the stream, thinking, feeling and seeing for themselves. (Few really experience for themselves, fewer have the courage to believe in the validity of that experience; it is this ability that constitutes the artist, who is always, and ipso facto, an original.) One was a senior Civil Servant of utmost respectability; the other probably the most dedicated lay about of the century. This may be said without fear of libel, for Brian Higgins, God rest him, has been dead these ten years; it was he who put the Arts Council in so great a tizzy. Higgins called himself ‘a realist who wished to be romantic’, was Yorkshire-Irish working-class (‘only I don’t work’), a mathematician and one-time Rugby League fullback. Both his lyric and satiric verse was alive with fire and bad taste. He was, as Martin Seymour-Smith remarks in his Guide to Modern World Literature, ‘a hit-or-miss poet . . . who had too little time to exercise control over his considerable intelligence’. But one or two of his poems sustain a comparison with Blake, that else might seem fatuous, made by a reviewer of his last and posthumous book in the New Statesman (which of course never published a line by Higgins while he was alive; despite or because of the abusive letters Higgins used to hurl at its editor). The other poet should have been the job-evasive Higgins’s natural enemy, for at that time C. H. Sisson was an Under-Secretary in the Ministry of Labour. In fact the two complemented one another while sharing an intellectual savagery that did not, and still doesn’t, sit easily with the soft thinking and softer feeling of the day. Higgins died of a rare heart condition when he was thirty-five. Useless to speculate what he might have done or been; but with his going there closed a window which would have let fresh air into the hothouse. Some of us might have felt the draught. But C. H. Sisson is still with us, and recently, at long last, made an impact with his collected poems, to which Dr Davie was among the first to accord recognition in a notable review in the Listener. No need to underwrite what Dr Davie said there; what concerns is the fact that a poet of Sisson’s quality could go virtually unpublished, even in the cultural periodicals, for ten years before the day on which a small pamphlet of his poems, privately printed as a last bid for attention, found its way to the editorial table (then groaning under the weight of wads and wads of identikit verse) in the Covent Garden attic where X was assembled; that for ten years afterwards, despite the appearance of three collections of poems, those same cultural periodicals should still be ignoring him, with a few honourable and offbeat exceptions such as Agenda and Ishmael (yet the latter is edited from Madrid!).

     It is time to wind up. As may have been noted, my view of the poetry scene since the forties is not enhanced by any belief that it could have been much worse (or even better) without the activities of our ‘arbiters of poetic taste’. That very démodé lady, the Muse (or shall we say concept?) takes little interest in group-movement syndromes, reviewers, critics, creative chairmen and other browsers of comparatively lush pastures situate on the lower slopes of Parnassus, where a career may be pursued in the name of a vocation. We live in the trough of a century; our Wordsworths and Coleridges are dead (though MacDiarrnid still lives) and it may be we are having to make do with a Tennyson in the shape of Robert Lowell, another major talent and minor genius now writing his equivalent of Maud and the Idylls. Poetry, like sex, has become a preserve of educationists, just as in the nineteenth century they were preserves of the moralists. I do not feel confident that the talent dammed by universities here and in America will prove to be more than so much dead water; but, just as around the 1860s there was a quiet but living undercurrent that represented the mainstream of English poetry more truly than the somewhat galvanic surge and thunder of Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and even Arnold — an undercurrent bearing the verse of John Clare, William Barnes, Arthur Hugh Clough, Christina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy — I’d suggest that a similar undercurrent, mostly ignored by the relayers and advertisers of trends and tendencies, was flowing in the 1960s and is still flowing.