ENGLISH POETRY AND THE
11'
AR
195
approach of the youngest poets to the war. This came from Spender in
Horizon,
attached to a magisterial review of the year's verse. He said:
"No poet has created in imaginative terms (1) any major event
of the war (2) any statement of the nature of the struggle in which
we are involved, either as suffering or as ideas (3) any positive faith
in the democracy for which we are fighting (4) any effective statement
against war."
I require to be fortified with.the positive side of poetic achievement
in
this direction before admitting the truth of much of this. I replied to
him at the time that (1) was neither desirable nor feasible except in
prose, that (3) was conducive to bad verse, and that (2) and (4) had been
fairly successfully attempted. One must say "fairly," because of the
inherent difficulties: firstly, only the lost poets in Libya have any experi–
ence of fighting, secondly, because during the Auden epoch the new
exploitation of image and sound play led to a neglect of metrical technic,
which, until the advent of Treece, made a long work impossible; thirdly,
because in the present frame of mind in this country, effective dissociation
from the national neur()sis is almost as impossible as you in America must
be finding it, and fourthly because of the inability of the writers in the
forces to devote time to slowly elaborated work. Beyond that, one cannot
answer. It becomes a matter of taste.
The figure in English writing around whom the greatest part of our
new romantic movement revolves· is undoubtedly Herbert Read, into whose
influence Spender, in his own slow progress
in~o
Romanticism, is heing
drawn. Read has described the spirit of contemporary English verse as
pacifist, in the sense that it has abandoned the idea of war as a struggle,
and has come to see it as a calamity which one must regard as one
regards the storms. That will imply a withdrawal from any expectation
that verse written now, like the verse of the thirties, can reasonably expect
to exert an immediate social influence. The isolation of England into a
dolls' house full of unreal governments and real fears will contribute to
a
de-socializing of poetry. I mention all these factors because I feel that
the same process in America is delayed only by the time lag of her entry
into the Churchillian circus. It would be very profitable if one could
spend the last two years of English literature over again, equipped with
foreknowledge of its direction. That, it seems to me, is an opportunity
which American criticism has before it. You will sit through the show a
second time round. And if the fragments of English poetry which the sea
throws up are as discontinuous as those of American poetry which arrive
here, some such prelude as I have written, a scaffolding in which to put
them,
may possibly prove useful to act as a program, a card of the game
we
have played and you will be playing.
