English Poetry and the War
Alex Comfort
IT TAKES
up to three months for
PARTISAN REVIEW
or any other American
periodical to reach us here, even when the submarines permit. Accordingly
the picture which one gets of American poetry in wartime is fragmentary.
Anything may come up, from a few rather striking poems by Shapiro,
reminding one of our own Lau.rie Lee, or a little more MacLeish or Del–
more Schwartz, to a small flower-show
by
Harold Vinal. All these elements
which the Atlantic disgorges for us are discontinuous.
It
is hard to form
a coherent picture of the trends in poetry since war broke out (American
magazines, especially
arti~ic
and literary ones, are fantastically costly
here) and harder still to assess the fragments which reach us.
But I should imagine that the young American poet has to face very
much the same position as the Englishman, being pulled all ways at once
by influences which are trying to drive him into interpretation. We have
our own Van Wyck Brookses. The drive against modern trends in writing
is far less intense than we anticipated-it was, in fact, a good deal fiercer
during the Auden period, and even today the press, reduced to a single
folded sheet, attacks Auden or even Eliot by name when it is looking for
an intellectual to denounce. But unlike the Brooks campaign, our own is
to some extent internecine. There has been the clamour for war poetry,
coming not from the middle-class public, which is too stunned to clamour
for anything, but from those border-line literary journals like "John o'
London's Weekly" which continue to publish Georgian poetry. But added
to that there has been a considerable amount of quarrelling, friendly or
otherwise, between men of genuine literary standing, which is threatening
to constitute two rival groups, a classical and a romantic. In addition to
this, the classical group is :tending to become identified with socialism (it
has repudiated Communism) and the prosecution of the war, and the
romantic with anarchism, which is quite strong, pacifism, which is even
stronger, among the youngest poets, and a frame of mind which one can
only term Nihilism, although it bears little relation to the pre-Revolution–
ary Russian doctrine of that name. It may seem from a distance that
divisions of this sort are very little more significant than the usual wran–
gling of literary men at any time, but they are acquiring an importance
in
view of the literary situation which has arisen in France, because they
parallel it to a very close degree.
The youngest poets are really facing a tripartite attack-from the
press and the Georgians, (some of these have been incredibly plodding
along, waiting for the tide to turn against technical and conceptual innova-
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