Poems
AIote
by
the Editor
Most of the younger contemporary poets have to hurdle the overlap·
ping barriers of fashion and taste. One is inescapable, and the other neces·
sary. We all recognize the dangers of fashion, of not being able to sur·
mount it, but little is said about the no lesser dangers of not being able to
surmount good taste. This is an age of good taste in literature, and what
displeases me in so much of the competent work of our younger poets is
the timidity good taste enforces. These poets go no further than a general
good taste, which has been established for the moment by their admiration
of Yeats, Stevens and Auden, will take them. Their care to be smooth and
correct outweighs every other concern, and they smooth and correct out of
their over-contrived verse all the resistances of the personal, tempera·
mental, all the necessary awkwardness and faux pas of original creation.
But the poet who allows himself to write only
in
the way he feels he must
write, regardless of taste and fashion, and who wrestles with and exploits,
rather than evades, the difficult material offered by his own temperament–
such a poet goes further than taste can guide him. And for this reason,
whether or not he really is a poet is decided very quickly.
By taste I do not mean the
discipline
of poetry; in going beyond taste
the poet does not go beyond discipline, but extends it to new areas, incor·
pprates new regions into the domain of poetry. Nor do I necessarily mean
by this Experiment. The poet writes in a new way only because he has to,
not because he wants to. And often he does not have to write in a new
way
in order to write new poetry.
Except for Thomas' ballad I have selected the poetry here from
unsolicited manuscripts. It represents no one tendency, but it avoids, I
hope, two: the tendency of current good taste and the tendency of the
enthusiastic ego. None of these poems point out as definitely as would
certain poems by Auden and Barker the directions in which for the lack of
anything better I hope English poetry will go, but they do point them out
to some extent. They have in common, I believe, spontaneity, the com·
paratively successful digestion of influences, and they show distortions
that result from the effort to deal with resistant material. What is more,
in accepting form they accept it as something to be emphatic with, not to
be surrendered to.
CLEMENT GREENBERG
130
