486
PARTISAN REVIEW
voice of Carson McCullers) might serve to suggest the charm and
sophistication of Muldoon's latest idiom:
The magnolia tree at my window's a bonsai
in the glass globe
I jiggle like a cocktail-
waiter from the Keynote Club,
so that Chester's Kwaikiutl
false face and glib,
Jane and Paul Bowles, the chimpanzee
and its trainer, Gypsy
and hers, are briefly caught up in an eddy
of snow; pennies
from heaven , Wynstan's [sic]
odi
alque amo
of Seconal and bennies:
then my cloudy
globe unclouds to reveal the tipsy
MacNeice a monarch
lying in state on a Steinway baby grand
between the rotting
carcasses of two pack-mules from
Un Chien Andalou
picks out a rondo
in some elusive minor key.
Tony Harrison, born (1937) and raised in working-class Leeds,
educated at the University of Leeds, is in many ways Muldoon's op–
posite number. Where Muldoon goes in search of the singular
shape, the unrepeatable lyric signature, Harrison is a man for the
syllable count and the rhyme. To the extent that such a practice de–
fines the formalist, he is a formalist. But he is no maker of filagrees.
There is nothing decorous or formally ingenious about his lines or
structures (most commonly sixteen-line sonnets). His antecedents
are the piston-stroke lines and straight rhymes of Kipling, of
Auden's ballads, of stage and music hall.
Like his contemporary, the Scots poet Douglas Dunn , Har–
rison alternately celebrates and scorns the status of the "barbarian"
working-class outsider. His very best poems playoff what are per–
ceived as the awkward and gnarled speech idioms of that class
against the linguistic expectations of the ruling culture. We see this
clearly in a series of coming-of-age poems, included from his aptly
titled collection,
The School of Eloquence:
I
\
I
\
\
{
