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poetry, there are more complex reasons than this for it. The most
notable tendency in recent English poetry by the younger people-in
the so-called "New Movement" poets, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis,
Donald Davie, John Wain, and others- is a growing fear of raw feeling,
of emotional self-exposure; it is not so much an anti-romantic tendency
as a sense of the poet as an involved social animal, who has to think
about his manners. This obsession with the idea of "tone" in Dr.
Richards' sense has led to a period of accomplished low-pressure poetry,
reticent, diffident, full of an irony directed against the poet's in any
case perhaps not very uncontrollable emotions. Such poems are a set
of gestures, protective, humorous, or apologetic, around a set of feelings
never laid naked on the page. There is a self-consciousness even about
the thought that one is doing something so out of the way as writing
a poem, and the poet tries never to raise his voice. Now, one cannot
imagine American poets at any time suffering from or exploiting such
a set of inhibitions. The inhibitions arise partly from the fact that
England is an overcrowded country, in which only a technique of polite
withdrawal from the frictions of unnecessary contact assures any in–
dividual an area of privacy; they arise from all the muted tensions of
the past fifteen years, tensions to which England, placed between so
many worlds, is peculiarly sensitive. But they arise also from a peculiar
split in the social consciousness of the English intellectual; nearly always
moderately to the Left in politics, a man who votes for the Labour
Party and reads
The New Statesman,
he at the same time is drawn by
social attraction toward the orbit of "the ruling few." He is at once
a bit of a do-gooder and a bit of a snob; and he uses tact, rather than
brashness, as his way of getting noticed. All this constriction is reflected
in contemporary English verse; American poets seem, by comparison,
extraordinarily free in their emotional range, not only over the violent
emotions, but often in their playfulness and tenderness. America is, as
Auden says, not like England: it is larger, lonelier, a more mobile
society, harsher than England but over a wide area warmer. The
American is a migrant, loudly out for attention, and clamorous for fel–
lowship. Thus, Nature, as Auden points out, is for the American poet
not a Mother but something alien, and perhaps antagonistic. The com–
pany of Nature is not, for the American poet, any real substitute for
the company of men (Wordsworth has no major American disciples).
Auden might have added that for most American poets the company
of God is not a substitute for the company of men either. The only
great American religious poet is Eliot, and he found his roots in seven–
teenth-century England, not seventeenth-century New England: Auden,
probably logically, leaves him out, as he leaves out himself.
