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G. S.
FRASER
poetically inadequate stance - I am not interested, in this context,
in
its possible moral, political or even religious inadequacy. I see some of
the newer poets as captives of a style, literarily of "literature." Yet
Richard Howard, who is the one exciting new figure in this batch, might
seem to be much more "literary," in a potentially but not actually
damaging way. Cashing in, one might say, on the contemporary boom
in Victorian studies, he gives us a series of nineteenth-century portraits,
mostly historical, some imaginary but historically typical, in the form
of the intimate journal, the verse letter, or the Browningesque dramatic
monologue. He takes some bits straight from actual surviving prose,
this, for instance, from Sir Walter Scott's journal:
Bad night, last night. Bad dreams about poor Charlotte. Awoke
Thinking myoId and inseparable
Friend beside me; only when
I
got
Fully awake could
I
persuade myself that she
Was dark, low, and distant,
And that my bed was widowed. Our match was something
Short of love in all its forms, but love
I
suspect comes only once in a life[.]
The very prolixity, the overabundance, the innocent self-exposure
of great nineteenth-century figures, Scott, Thackeray, Ruskin, the pre–
Raphaelite group for instance (and other figures imaginary, but repre–
sentative and typical, and given to us with the same density of refer–
ence) , are used by Howard as an ingenious and original tactic for
making us read on (as we would all read, for instance, an unpublished
manuscript journal, curious about keys to character, alert for a whiff
of scandal). And Howard's real and imaginary Victorians are "char–
acters": so much themselves that they are more than themselves, tower–
ing into noble or absurd self-caricature. But this fine volume is rever–
ently if sometimes humorously exploratory. There is no touch of Lytton
Strachey's sniggering superiority. One might almost say that Howard
has invented a new type of historical poem, or perhaps has invented the
historical poem properly (as we talk of "the historical novel") for the
first time. He helps us to know the Victorians because, in G. M.
Young's phrase, he lets us "hear them talking."
William Meredith has been publishing volumes of poems since
1944, when he was in the Air Force, and
Earth Walk
is a selection from
these, plus a dozen or so new poems which quite keep up the old
standard.
It
is interesting that Meredith, who has a beautifully clear and
straightforward style, explains in his preface that he has chosen from
