Transatlantic Connections

Theresa Welford

Description

DEMOGRAPHIC— literary historians, scholars and lovers of poetry.

PITCH— For fans interested in understanding the conjugate history of American and British poetry.

In the 1950s, a group of brash young British writers coalesced into a controversial poetic and critical movement known simply as the Movement. In the 1980s, a group of brash young American writers coalesced into an equally controversial poetic and critical movement known as New Formalism. Especially since the British coalition known as The Movement was short-lived, surviving less than a decade, few people could have predicted that it would have an impact that was both far-reaching and long-lasting. This groundbreaking new study shows that the Movement lives on, in a very real way, in New Formalist poetics and poetry.

After interviewing more than a dozen New Formalists about their reactions to the Movement writers, I noticed a clear pattern: they first encountered the work of the elder English writers at important moments in their own literary development, usually as undergraduates or young graduate students.

As an undergraduate at Brown University in the late 1950s, Dick Allen encountered the work of Thom Gunn in New Poets of England and America. He says that Gunn has been a long-term influence on his own work, from formal poetry to free verse. From his very first reading of Gunn’s poems about motorcyclists, he found them inspiring because of “how wonderfully they combined the contemporary with narrative and rhyming form.” Larkin’s “Church Going,” in the same anthology, struck him as a “major poem” and Larkin himself as an “obvious master,” because of his “combination of form and important subject matter.”

            In 1964, Charles Martin first read poetry by Gunn, Larkin, and Davie, also in New Poets of England and America. . . . Martin says, “Larkin made an immediate impression on me.”

Timothy Steele was studying in London in 1969 when he read the Faber paperback Selected Poems by Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. He was immediately taken with Gunn’s poems: “They had an intellectual energy, and a gift for extended metaphor, that called to mind the work of my favourite poets at that time, Shakespeare and Donne. Yet Thom’s verse was contemporary in matter and diction. It was alert to the living moment.” That same year, Steele discovered Larkin’s poetry and was similarly impressed.

As an undergraduate in the 1970s, Mark Jarman had encounters with the work of Gunn and Larkin that were much like Steele’s. Of Gunn, Jarman recalls, “Partly he fascinated me because he wrote about California, where I was from, and he did it in ingenious verse forms, like rhyming syllabic verse. . . . When I was learning to write, I imitated him a lot.” Jarman also came to believe that Larkin is “actually very innovative in his verse” but that he “disguises his innovations, rather the way Frost did,” and that Larkin’s poetry encompasses an impressive “range of diction within a strict space,” with imagery that is phrased in “original yet totally accurate” ways.

As a graduate student at Harvard University in the 1970s, Dana Gioia had his own eye-opening encounter with Larkin’s poem “Poetry of Departures”: “I had no idea who Larkin was then, but I knew immediately that he was the writer I had been looking for—not merely a master but a confidant.” When he read Larkin, he “suddenly . . . realized that this was the guide who was doing what I was trying to do.”

While some New Formalists discovered the Movement writers by chance, others sought them out. John Gery applied to Stanford University in the 1970s precisely because Donald Davie taught there. . . . As a teacher, Davie turned out to be “as complex and challenging” as Gery had hoped. He was further pleased to find classmates who were committed to using traditional forms, including several subsequent New Formalist poets—Dana Gioia, Vikram Seth, and, later, Paul Lake.

 

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• criticism
• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: Red Hen Press
• Date de parution: 20 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781586540555
• Langue: English

Extrait

Transatlantic Connections
Transatlantic Connections
THE MOVEMENT AND NEW FORMALISM

T HERESA M ALPHRUS W ELFORD
Story Line Press | Pasadena, CA
Transatlantic Connections: The Movement and New Formalism
Copyright 2019 by Theresa Malphrus Welford
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
Book design by Mark E. Cull
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Welford, Theresa M., author.
Title: Transatlantic connections : the Movement and New Formalism / Theresa Malphrus Welford.
Description: First edition. | Pasadena : Story Line Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019019298 (print) | LCCN 2019019561 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781586540548 (print) | ISBN 9781586540555 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Movement, The (English poetry) | English poetry-20th century-History and criticism. | New Formalism (American poetry)-History and criticism. | Narrative poetry, American-History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PR605.M68 (ebook) | LCC PR605.M68 W35 2019 (print) |
DDC 821/.91409-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019298
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta George Rosenberg Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, and the Riordan Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition
Published by Story Line Press
an imprint of Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
Contents
1 ] Bridging the Atlantic: The Movement and New Formalism
2 ] Choosing Sides: The Poetry Wars in the United States
3 ] Personal and Textual Connections
4 ] Verse Craftsmanship, Plain Language, and New Austerity
5 ] Poetry
6 ] Concluding Remarks
Works Cited
Other Works Consulted or Named
Endnotes
CHAPTER 1
Bridging the Atlantic
THE MOVEMENT AND NEW FORMALISM
We owe a great debt to poets like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, X. J. Kennedy, Thom Gunn (to name a few-add J. V. Cunningham and Philip Larkin to the list . . .), who held the fort, so to speak, during the siege. 1
- Leslie Monsour
Many American poets have probably never heard of a short-lived literary group of the 1950s called, simply, the Movement, though they may be familiar with individual members of the group: Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, and John Wain. The New Formalists, often at variance with their American peers, gravitated to several of these English elders during their own poetic development twenty years later.
As I shall outline in this study, the New Formalists-including Dick Allen, Dick Davis, Annie Finch, John Gery, Dana Gioia, R. S. Gwynn, Marilyn Hacker, Mark Jarman, Paul Lake, Charles Martin, David Mason, Robert McDowell, Leslie Monsour, Marilyn Nelson, Molly Peacock, Katha Pollitt, Vikram Seth, Robert B. Shaw, Maura Stanton, Timothy Steele, Diane Thiel, and Rachel Wetzsteon-have been inspired by Movement poets, have learned from their craft, and have responded to their poems and philosophy in a variety of ways.
If critic Blake Morrison s assessment is correct that the Movement poets were probably the most influential in England since the Imagists, it is not surprising that they have had an impact extending over the decades and even across the Atlantic. 2 As recently as a 2004 interview with Robert Conquest, in fact, American poet and critic William Baer notes that New Lines -the anthology that introduced the Movement to the literary world-is still generally considered to be the most important British anthology in the second half of the twentieth century. 3 For the New Formalists, their admiration for the Movement writers was more than a passing fancy; indeed, it grounded much of their early and their mature poetry.
After describing the formation of the two groups, I shall examine the personal and textual connections between the New Formalists and Movement writers. In some instances, the American poets freely acknowledge this influence in their correspondence, criticism, interviews, and poems. In other cases, the connecting link is unacknowledged or even denied.
Beginning in the late 1970s, a handful of critics have hinted at the possible influence of the Movement writers on the New Formalists. Keith Tuma, author of Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers , noted in a 2003 email that the main connections between the so-called New Formalists and the Movement . . . would come via Donald Davie and, behind Davie, Yvor Winters. 4 Tuma also pointed out the connection between Gunn and the Wintersian legacy. He went on to say, So from my perspective, the link between the Movement and New Formalism is strong and, like much else in Anglo-American relations in poetry, has Davie as its center, less as poet than as critic and teacher. H. T. Kirby-Smith includes both Larkin and Winters in his list of anti-experimental poets who have influenced the New Formalists. 5 In addition to stating that Larkin has been a model for Steele, Gordon Harvey specifically compares Steele s Old Letters and Larkin s Love Songs in Age (both of which I shall discuss in Chapter Five ). 6 Joe Francis Doerr, in The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century , mentions Davie as an influence on New Formalism. 7
Other than these few examples, the Movement writers are rarely credited with having caused much of a ripple in the United States. Yet, as I shall demonstrate, the poetics and poetry of this group have had a major impact on many American writers associated with New Formalism.
After interviewing more than a dozen New Formalists about their reactions to the Movement writers, I noticed a clear pattern: they first encountered the work of the elder English writers at important moments in their own literary development, usually as undergraduates or young graduate students.
As an undergraduate at Brown University in the late 1950s, Dick Allen encountered the work of Thom Gunn in New Poets of England and America . 8 When he read Gunn s On the Move, his first thoughts were of pop culture icons such as James Dean and Marlon Brando. Allen was also drawn to the daring combination of contemporary subject matter and rhyme and meter and power. 9 He says that Gunn has been a long-term influence on his own work, from formal poetry to free verse. From his very first reading of Gunn s poems about motorcyclists, he found them inspiring because of how wonderfully they combined the contemporary with narrative and rhyming form. Larkin s Church Going, in the same anthology, struck him as a major poem and Larkin himself as an obvious master because of his combination of form and important subject matter.
In 1964, Charles Martin first read poetry by Gunn, Larkin, and Davie, also in New Poets of England and America . 10 Martin says, Larkin made an immediate impression on me, and I shortly thereafter read his Whitsun Weddings , which was the only book of his that I could find back then. Martin goes on to say, Davie and Gunn did not make as much of an impression on me at the time, but he later read Gunn s book Moly and saw the poems in that book (along with those in Anthony Hecht s The Hard Hours ) as perfectly contemporary in language and subjects. He read Davie s early poetry around the same time. Although he found Davie s poetic development odd and finally rather disappointing, he continues to respect Davie s criticism. For Martin, Larkin is the best of them, an indisputably great poet in an indisputably minor way. At the same time, he says, Gunn is my favorite of the three, and his elegy for Robert Duncan seems to me as great a poem in its way as Auden s elegy for Yeats. He points out that he didn t read New Lines until a few years ago but when he did, he recognized that the Movement s principles were similar to those of the New Formalists. He suspects that some New Formalist critics had read the Movement anthology and were influenced by it.
Timothy Steele was studying in London in 1969 when he read the Faber paperback Selected Poems by Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. He was immediately taken with Gunn s poems: They had an intellectual energy, and a gift for extended metaphor, that called to mind the work of my favourite poets at that time, Shakespeare and Donne. Yet Thom s verse was contemporary in matter and diction. It was alert to the living moment. 11 That same year, Steele discovered Larkin s poetry and was similarly impressed. Moved by its unassuming freshness and authenticity, he purchased Larkin s The Less Deceived and, a year later, The Whitsun Weddings . Interviewed by William Baer in 2002, Steele included Gunn and Larkin among a group of elder poets to whom he feels indebted. 12
As an undergraduate in the 1970s, Mark Jarman had encounters with the work of Gunn and Larkin that were much like Steele s. Of Gunn, Jarman recalls, Partly he fascinated me because he wrote about California, where I was from, and he did it in ingenious verse forms, like rhyming syllabic verse. . . . When I was learning to write, I imitated him a lot. 13 Later, Jarman s graduate school advisor and thesis director Donald Justice introduced him to the poetry of Larkin and discussed poems in High Windows in which Justice thought