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STEPHEN SPENDER
suggested, toward a self-conscious provincialism. Although this reac–
tion was a just and reasonable one, it implied a withdrawal into one
corner of an overriding Anglo-American situation, the particular Eng–
lish locality, and an unwillingness to look outside this. The results
were sometimes very rewarding, for example the poetry of Philip Lar–
kin. However I think that in its insistence on the locality of the Eng–
lish scene, there is a sense of something blinkered about this poetry,
a concentration on what is happening to the place in England, an
altogether admirable insistence on the values to be derived from such
an imposed limitation, but a refusal to look beyond this to the areas
of wider consciousness which include America. This is not just a ques–
tion of traveling to the United States or of staying in England, it is a
matter of what is happening to English consciousness through the
predominance now of the American area of the language, and through
the great vitality of American literature in dealing with the overrid–
ing situation of contemporary forces influencing life.
England is that part of the area of the common language which
is distant from the center of the contemporary civilization and which
retains some sense of the past of the shared tradition. Distance
im–
plies a certain outsideness which previously was gained by going back
into the past of the tradition. Where outsidene..."5 was historical it
is
now geographical. People move around in different areas of space
instead of different times.
Today, owing to the death of the past tradition as nature and
objects which can be concretely experienced and the increased pres–
sure of the forces of the contemporary world, the need to get outside
the civilization, to distance oneself from it, is felt acutely by many
Americans. England
is
a place where they can realize this. At first
sight, such journeys may seem very superficial, mere escapism from
the pressure of political horrors, the rejection by a latter-day "lost
generation" of notorious corruptions and scandals.
However, I think that the
mOllvementi
Anglo-American re–
lationship corresponds to the fact that England and America are en–
closed within the same overriding modern situation in which America
is at the center of its violence, England on the circumference. The
relationship today is not one of European past and American con–
temporaneity, but of scale. The America that has to be imagined
is,
from the point of view of the poet, almost uncontainable. Hence the
