BOOKS
POETRY CHRONICLE
FIGHTING TERMS. By Them Gunn. Hawks Well Press. $.75.
THE LESS DECEIVED. By Philip Larkin. St. Martin's Press. $3.00.
A CRACKLING OF THORNS.
By
John Hollander. Yale University Press.
$3.00.
OVERLAND TO THE ISLANDS. By Denise Levertov. Jonathan Williams.
$2.75.
SEEING IS BELIEVING. By Charles Tomlinson. McDowell, Obolensky.
$3.00.
Since the war England has produced very few poets and a
great deal of what with mildness and generosity would be called
"li–
terary history": movements and counter-movements, schools, trends and
influences. That is to say, less affectionately, it has been racked by gang
warfare. And rather more energy seems to have gone into the fighting
and the simplified battle propaganda than into the poetry itself. Less
than a century ago Henry James was berating America for lacking Eng–
land's civilized amenities; for the writers at least, the position is now
fairly reversed. England has no quarterlies, no
Partisan,
no
Kenyon,
no
Hudson,
no
Sewanee,
no Creative Writing courses, no Foundations, no
Fellowships, no Gauss Seminars, no Writers Conferences, no Schools of
Letters, and precious few little magazines and highbrow paperbacks.
Since the demise of
Scrutiny,
there are only three big periodicals with
literary aspirations and money enough to appear regularly, and two of
those are mere rag-bags; that leaves
The Twentieth Century.
Finally,
there is only one literary center in England-London, and over that
the ex-poets of the 'thirties brood like the fog. No wonder the young
men are angry.
Out of all this two excellent poets have, almost surprisingly,
emerged: Thorn Gunn and Philip Larkin. They are both original writers
and both represent a new type or a new tone in modern verse. Yet it
is new without any of the experimental gimmicks of modernism. Both
poets use more or less regular verse forms and both avoid the inchoate
rhetoric that passed for poetry in the roaring 'forties. Neither, in short,
are Dylan Thomists. Yet if they are traditional, it is only because, as
someone has said, it is a tradition in English poetry to be intelligent.
