356
A.
ALVAREZ
In poetry the four leading English-language exponents of the
style are Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Ted Hughes and Sylvia
Plath,
all
of whom are highly disciplined and highly aware of formal
demands and possibilities. All begin with a thickly textured, wary,
tensely intelligent style they inherited ultimately from Eliot, and pro–
gress, in their different ways, towards a poetry in' which the means,
though no less demanding, are subordinate to a certain inner urgency
which makes them push continually at the limits of what poetry can
be
made to bear. Inevitably so, since each of them is knowingly
salvaging
his
verse from the edge of some kind of personal abyss. The
crucial work was Lowell's
Life Studies
in which he turned away
from the highly wrought Roman Catholic symbolism of his earlier
poetry in order to face - without benefit of clergy, and in a trans–
lucent, seemingly more casual style - his own private chaos as a
man subject to periodic breakdowns. By some odd creative logic,
compounded partly of his great natural gifts and partly of some
hitherto unrecognized need in
his
audience - an impatience, perhaps,
with strictly aesthetic criteria which took no count of the confusions
and depressions of a life unredeemed by
poetry -
the more simply
and personally he wrote, the more authentic and authoritative his
work became. He transformed the seemingly private into a poetry
central to all our anxieties.
In much the same way, John Berryman turned from the public,
literary world of
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
to the still stylized
but far more intimate cycle of
Dream Songs.
These began as a quirky
poetic journal of misdemeanors, gripes, hangovers and morning-after
despair, then gradually clarified and deepened into an extended act
of poetic mourning for the suicide of a father, the premature deaths
of friends and
his
own suicidal despair. Berryman had always been
a poet of bristling nervous energy; now his sense of grief and loss
added an extra, urgent dimension to his work, impelling it through
the whole process of mourning - guilt, hostility, expiation - which
ends with the beautifully lucid acceptance of his own mortality. He
ends, that is, writing his own epitaph.
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, belonging to a younger genera–
tion, began further along the road and explored further into the
hinterland of nihilism. Thus Hughes starts with a series of extraor–
dinary animal poems, full of sharp details and unexpected shifts of
focus, in which he elegantly projects onto a whole zooful of creatures
