In Auden's Shadow: Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender (1909-1995)

At one of their first meetings, Auden asked Spender how often he wrote poetry.

Without reflecting, I replied that I wrote about four poems a day. He was astonished and exclaimed: 'What energy!' I asked him how often he wrote a poem. He replied: 'I write about one in three weeks.' After this I started writing only one poem in three weeks.

- Stephen Spender, World within World (1951): p.44.

That gives you some sense of the character of their relationship. It was a long time before Spender managed to climb out from under the older poet's shadow, and one might even argue that he never did.

Stephen Spender: World within World (1951)

His story is a complex one, however. There were times when his poetry was almost as highly regarded as Auden's, and anthology pieces such as 'My Parents' continue to resonate to this day:

My parents kept me from children who were rough
Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes
Their thighs showed through rags they ran in the street
And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.

I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron
Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms
I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys
Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.

They were lithe they sprang out behind hedges
Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud
While I looked the other way, pretending to smile.
I longed to forgive them but they never smiled.

Some of the others, though - 'The Truly Great,' for instance - however highly regarded they may have been at the time, sound rather embarrassing now:

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

They 'left the vivid air signed with their honour,' eh? No wonder they nicknamed him 'Young Shelley.'

Stephen Spender: World within World (1951)

World within World, his autobiography, published in his early forties - though he lived to the age of 86 he never supplemented or continued it - remains, however, a strange, subtle piece of writing.

He records there how, after a brief indoctrination by Auden in the characteristics and requirements of modern poetry ('The poet is far more like Mr. Everyman than Kelley and Sheats. He cuts his hair short, wears spats, a bowler hat, and a pin-stripe city suit. He goes to the job in the bank by the suburban train' - World within World, p.53), Spender reluctantly concluded that there was no place for him there.

After I had known him six weeks he must have approved of as many of my lines. Therefore it was rather surprising to discover that he considered me a member of 'the Gang'. Once I told him I wondered whether I ought to write prose, and he answered: 'You must write nothing but poetry, we do not want to lose you for poetry.' This remark produced in me a choking moment of hope mingled with despair, in which I cried: 'But do you really think I am any good?' 'Of course,' he replied frigidly. 'But why?' 'Because you are so infinitely capable of being humiliated. Art is born of humiliation,' he added in his icy voice - and left me wondering when he could feel humiliated.

- World within World: pp.44-45.

It wasn't that Spender was insensitive to embarrassment. On the contrary, it's hard to imagine a man with a thinner skin, more naturally vain and self-regarding. It's just that he was willing to put all that on the record: to write down the whole of himself, silliness and all. Not even Auden could do that.

Stephen Spender: Journals, 1939-1983 (1985)

I never actually met the man, but I did ask him to sign his latest book - Journals 1939-1983 - for me on one occasion. It was at the Edinburgh Book Festival (one of the many sideshows to the Official Festival which take place in that city every year). I see from the ticket stub, which I still have, that it was in mid-1989, so he must have just turned 80.

He gave a brief poetry reading, then answered a few questions. The one I remember came from a woman with an exceptionally unctuous voice who asked why one particular early poem had been left out of the latest, 1985, edition of his Collected Poems, since it was (she claimed) such a wonderful piece of work.

'Oh, I don't know,' he replied, 'It just seemed a bit sentimental, I suppose.' The put-down of the woman and her level of taste was complete, and yet it seemed (almost) entirely offhand - as if it had never occurred to him that it might hurt her feelings.

She asked. He answered, as accurately as he could. That was that.

Stephen Spender: Collected Poems 1929-1985 (1985)

Then the line formed.

It turned out that almost nobody was there to hear one more reading by the eminent poet. On the contrary, they were all there to get him to sign their copies of his books. The line was snaking all the way round the tent before I could get anywhere near it, and I could dimly see, off in the distance, the old grey head rising and falling as he scribbled industriously in each tome.

I'd provided myself with his latest, in token of good faith - at least some small royalties might be going to him from the sale - but others were not so scrupulous. The man in front of me, for instance, presumably some kind of dealer, had an armful of Spenderiana from all periods of his career. And when, after half an hour or so, the line eventually got to us, the great man duly signed them, one by one.

I felt bad about adding one more tiny jot of effort to his day, but by then I'd waited so long that I simply couldn't face failure. I handed him my one book; he scribbled in it; I said 'thank you' in as unassuming a manner as possible; and that was all. There was no meeting of the eyes, no miraculous conveyance of sympathy from aspiring poet to master ... just an old man plying his pen as he'd clearly had to do so many times before.

After that, I think, he was dragged off to safety by one of his children, and the baying masses were forced to subside. I've always felt a little ashamed of the incident, as if I were guilty of contributing a little to his discomfiture that day, but perhaps it were 'to consider too curiously, to consider so.'

I'd felt terribly anxious to see the grand old man, last survivor of all those thirties poets I idolised, but the occasion seemed tainted somehow by the thronging of all those importunate bookhounds.

Stephen Spender: Journals, 1939-1983 (signed)

The defining moment for the Auden group undoubtedly came at the very end of the thirties, that 'low, dishonest decade,' as he called it in his classic poem 'September 1, 1939.' Whatever his original intentions for the poem, it became a kind of 'Goodbye to All That' for both him and his friend Isherwood. Instead of returning to soon-to-be-war-beleaguered Britain, they decided to stay in the United States.

The other members of the group remained in the UK. All took part in the war effort in their various ways - not as combatants, but as active participants on the Home Front, as well as acting as war propagandists at various points. The Spanish war had united and - some would say - defined them as a group, however various their responses to it turn out, in retrospect, to have been.

It was the Second World War that divided them, turned Spender into a kind of suave literary politician, Day Lewis into a Hardy-esque pastoralist, MacNeice into a drunken BBC producer, and linked them definitively to the Old World rather than the New.

Edward Mendelson: Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography (2017)

Whether Auden could be said to have ever written as well in his newly adopted country as he did in the old is debatable. He certainly wrote differently, though. His explorations of inner worlds and the inner life may have been less lyrically effective than the gnarled, gnomic verse he composed in the thirties, but they were certainly no less ambitious in scope.

Isherwood, too, gave up the chance to be a kind of novelistic cross between Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene to become a narcissistic Californian navel-gazer. It would be many years before either of them would be forgiven back home for this perceived treachery in time of war.

Spender, too, became less poet than prose-writer and editor - though he never stopped writing poetry right up to the end, it's his earlier work that resonates, still, with most readers.

Should he have gone with them? Almost certainly not. For him the essential thing was simply to see less of Auden, define his own life choices, both professionally and sexually. His fiction from this period is exceptionally interesting in this regard - especially The Temple, an autobiographical novel about his experiences in the Weimar republic begun in the thirties but not finally completed and published until half a century later, in 1988.

It's often seemed anomalous - to some readers, at least - that the defining note of the Auden group, the so-called 'Pylon poets,' was initially struck by Spender, not their putative leader. The poem is certainly not the anthemic call to arms it must once have seemed, but that doesn't leave it without interest. The lapidary clarity of Spender's early style seems unlikely to date in this particular case, at least:

Construction of a High-Voltage Tower (1930's)

The Pylons

The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages

Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete
That trails black wire
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret.

The valley with its gilt and evening look
And the green chestnut
Of customary root,
Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.

But far above and far as sight endures
Like whips of anger
With lightning's danger
There runs the quick perspective of the future.

This dwarfs our emerald country by its trek
So tall with prophecy
Dreaming of cities
Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck.

John Sutherland: Stephen Spender: The Authorised Biography (2004)

•


Stephen Spender: Collected Poems, 1928–1953 (1955)

Stephen Harold Spender (1909-1995)

[titles I own are marked in bold]:

Poetry:


1. Poems. London: Faber, 1933.
2. Poems. 1933. Second Edition. 1934. London: Faber, 1935.
3. Vienna (1934)
4. The Still Centre. 1939. London: Faber, 1941.
5. Ruins and Visions. 1942. London: Faber, 1942.
6. Spiritual Exercises (1943)
7. Poems of Dedication. 1947. London: Faber, 1947.
8. Selected Poems. 1940. London: Faber, 1947.
9. The Edge of Being (1949)
10. Collected Poems, 1928–1953 (1955)
11. Selected Poems (1965)
12. The Express (1966)
13. The Generous Days (1971)
14. Penguin Modern Poets 20: John Heath-Stubbs / F. T. Prince / Stephen Spender. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
15. Selected Poems (1974)
16. Recent Poems (1978)
17. Collected Poems 1928-1985. London: Faber, 1985.
18. Dolphins. London: Faber, 1994.
19. New Collected Poems. Ed. Michael Brett. London: Faber, 2004.

Plays:


20. Trial of a Judge: A Tragic Statement in Five Acts. 1938. London: Faber, 1945.
21. Rasputin's End: Libretto (1958)

Translation:


22. Georg Büchner. Danton's Death: A Play in Four Acts. Trans. Stephen Spender & Goronwy Rees. London: Faber, 1939.
23. Rainer Maria Rilke. Duino Elegies: The German Text, with an English Translation, Introduction and Commentary. Trans. J. B. Leishman & Stephen Spender. 1939. London: Chatto & Windus, 1981.
24. Schiller. Mary Stuart. Trans. Stephen Spender. Preface by Peter Wood. London: Faber, 1959.
25. Sophocles. Oedipus Trilogy: King Oedipus; Oedipus at Colonos; Antigone: A Version. Trans. Stephen Spender. 1985. New York: Random House Inc., 1985.

Fiction:


26. The Burning Cactus (1936)
27. The Backward Son (1940)
28. Engaged in Writing & The Fool and the Princess. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958.
29. The Temple. 1988. London: Faber, 1989.

Non-fiction:


30. The Destructive Element. 1935. The Life and Letters Series, 87. London: Jonathan Cape, 1938.
31. Forward from Liberalism (1937)
32. Life and the Poet (1942)
33. Citizens in War – and After (1945)
34. European Witness (1946)
35. Poetry since 1939. The Arts in Britain, 1. 1946. London: The British Council, 1949.
36. André Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, & Louis Fischer. The God That Failed. Ed. Richard Crossman. 1950. New York: Bantam Books, 1959.
37. World within World: The Autobiography of Stephen Spender. 1951. London: Readers Union, 1953.
38. Learning Laughter (1952)
39. The Creative Element (1953)
40. The Making of a Poem (1957)
41. The Struggle of the Modern. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963.
42. The Year of the Young Rebels (1969)
43. Love-Hate Relations: A Study of Anglo-American Sensibilities. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974.
44. Eliot (1975)
45. The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People (1933-75). London: Fontana / Collins, 1978.
46. [with David Hockney]: China Diary. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1982.

Edited:


47. Horizon (1939-41)
48. Encounter (1953-66)
49. Great Writings of Goethe. Ed. Stephen Spender. A Mentor Book. New York: New American Library, 1958.
50. Penguin Modern Poets 23: Geoffrey Grigson / Edwin Muir / Adrian Stokes. Guest Ed. Stephen Spender. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
51. W. H. Auden: A Tribute. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1975.

Letters & Journals:


52. Letters to Christopher: Stephen Spender’s Letters to Christopher Isherwood, 1929-1939, with “The Line of the Branch” – Two Thirties Journals. Ed. Lee Bartlett. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1980.
53. Journals 1939-1983. London: Faber, 1985.
54. New Selected Journals, 1939–1995 (2012)

Secondary:


55. Sutherland, John. Stephen Spender: The Authorised Biography. 2004. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2005.

Stephen Spender & George Orwell: Lansdowne Terrace

In Auden's Shadow

Cecil Beaton: W. H. Auden (1930)

I guess it must be pretty obvious to anyone who's ever looked at this blog just how much I've been influenced by the life and works of the late Wystan Hugh Auden. I tried to explain the obsession here, but it's quite a tall order to sum up so long a course of reading and thinking in one short post.

I first encountered his poetry at school, in the mid-1970s. I can remember the moment, in fact. I was standing in the school store-room, waiting my turn to be 'seen' by one of the teachers (I think there was some lesson in how to ace a job interview going on, but I could be wrong about that).

W. H. Auden: Collected Shorter Poems: 1927-1957 (1966)

I noticed a book with an exceptionally garish cover lying on the table, and picked it up to see what it was. I was already a great fan of the poetry of A. E. Housman, so the first poem I picked from the table of contents was, I think, Auden's sonnet about him:

A. E. Housman (1859-1936)

No one, not even Cambridge, was to blame
(Blame if you like the human situation):
Heart-injured in North London, he became
The Latin Scholar of his generation.

Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,
Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;
Food was his public love, his private lust
Something to do with violence and the poor.

In savage foot-notes on unjust editions
He timidly attacked the life he led,
And put the money of his feelings on

The uncritical relations of the dead,
Where only geographical divisions
Parted the coarse hanged soldier from the don.

It enraged me! How dare he speak so flippantly of so wonderful a writer! 'His private lust' indeed! How could he know? I went around fulminating about the cheek of 'modern' poets who dared to criticise their elders and betters for weeks afterward.

It enraged me - but also fascinated me. I'd had a chance to look at some of the other poems in the book and, while I didn't understand everything I was reading (still don't, for that matter), I understood enough for them to stay with me, keep nagging at me, get under my skin against my will.

W. H. Auden: Collected Poems (1976)

My Christmas present that year (1977) was Auden's newly published Collected Poems. By then I'd got to the stage of writing a sign for my door which read:

W. H. Auden rules!
And Edward Mendelson is his prophet ...

Mendelson's editing seemed amazingly accomplished and abstruse to me at the time, especially given the maze of competing readings and revisions he had to deal with as the poet's literary executor. Auden (like Wordsworth - or, for that matter, Yeats) was one of those poets who could never leave well enough alone.

Stephen Spender, ed. W. H. Auden: A Tribute (1975)

A great deal of my interest came from the book above, however. The fascinating essays and reminiscences it contained seemed to open up a whole cornucopia of thirties imagery and lifestyles. There was a photo-montage of Night Mail (the film, and the poem Auden wrote for it), pieces by Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, a host of other old friends - virtually everyone who was anyone, in fact, except for those who'd predeceased him.

And so the obsession began to spread, gradually encompassing all the other writers whose lives he'd touched, or in whose books he'd somehow been recorded. I've written elsewhere on this blog about Isherwood, who would have to rank first in that pantheon, but there were many others as well: basically all the members of the so-called Auden Group:

Samuel Hynes: The Auden Generation (1977)

Hence, some 45 years after "first looking into Auden's Poems", this projected series of posts about those who have ended up - fairly or unfairly - in Auden's shadow. Auden could be a dominant, some would say a domineering figure. What of those other writers and poets? What might one say about them?

There are a great many to choose from. For a start, there are the other three components of 'Macspaunday' (a derogatory epithet coined by pro-Fascist writer Roy Campbell for this set of largely left-wing poets): Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and Cecil Day-Lewis = Mac / sp /aun / day - get it?

Then there are those notorious lines from Day-Lewis's long poem The Magnetic Mountain (1933), much mocked and denigrated at the time by George Orwell (who referred to Auden as 'a kind of gutless Kipling'):

Then I'll hit the trail for that promising land;
May catch up with Wystan and Rex my friend ...

"Wystan" is, of course, W. H. Auden; "Rex" is Rex Warner. Ought he, too, to go on the list, then?

And then there are the editors and anthologists who promoted - some would say pushed - this literary movement at the time: Michael Roberts, whose two anthologies New Signatures (1932) and New Country (1933) constituted the first real attempt to define it; and Geoffrey Grigson, whose magazine New Verse (1933-39) existed - as he himself said - primarily to promote and print the work of Auden and his friends.

Paul Theroux: Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship across Five Continents (1998)

This, then, is my list of writers left unfairly - at least arguably - in Auden's shadow (I must confess to having found some inspiration for my title in Paul Theroux's memoir of his long and difficult friendship with West Indian writer V. S. Naipaul):

1. Michael Roberts (1902-1948)
2. Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972)
3. Geoffrey Grigson (1905-1985)
4. Rex Warner (1905-1986)
5. Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)
6. Stephen Spender (1909-1995)

I'll put up the blogposts as I finish them, in no particular order, to avoid any invidious implications of primacy or degrees of importance. The list above, however, is arranged chronologically in order of date of birth. It's important, at times, to remember that Day-Lewis was three years Auden's senior, and Spender two years his junior.

Such details generally matter little for people you encounter as an adult, but the Auden group met first at school (Isherwood and Edward Upward), then at university (Spender, MacNeice and Day-Lewis), and a certain in-built competitiveness was the inevitable result.

There are plenty of other people I could have included: Charles Madge, of Mass-Observation fame, who did after all run off with Stephen Spender's first wife, and whose unfortunate account of first reading Auden (from his 'Letter to the Intelligentsia') remains extant to haunt him:

But there waited for me in the summer morning
Auden fiercely. I read, shuddered and knew.
And all the world's stationary things
In silence moved to take up new positions

Edward Upward the surrealist, too, was closely involved with the group. And if you count in their enemies: George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, Dylan Thomas, George Barker, the list could grow to include virtually everyone prominent in the arts in the 1930s ...

Let's begin with the six authors above, then. I think there are important things to be said about each of them - or if not, it isn't from lack of effort on my part in collecting their various works.

Cecil Beaton: W. H. Auden (1930)

Top Ten Favourite Poems

[Massey PhD regalia]

My colleague Bryan Walpert and I are co-supervising a couple of Doctorates in Creative Writing at Massey University, both focussing on poetry. It's not as easy as you might think to keep the critical portion of these projects in balance with the creative.

The other day, at one of our video conferences, he came up with what seemed to me a very intriguing idea for taking a kind of barometer reading of someone else's aesthetic: he asked our PhD student to send us ten of her favourite poems: or (at least) ten poems that seemed truly extraordinary and moving to her.

I've done a couple of "top twenty" posts before now: 20 Favourite 20th-Century Novels and 20 Favourite 20th-Century Long Poems, both back in 2008, but this seemed a little different somehow.

As I see it, the plan is to be as honest as possible about what you really like, as opposed to what you think you should like. It got me to thinking about what would be in my own "top ten" - with stress on the poems that I've actually tried to memorise and thus keep with me, rather than those I simply admire from a distance.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here - in alphabetical, rather than chronological, order - is my top ten (today, at any rate: next week the list might be completely different):

Jack’s Top Ten

Alphabetical (by surname):


1. W. H. Auden: “The Letter” [1927]
2. Gavin Ewart: “Sonnet: How Life Too is Sentimental” [1980]
3. Robert Lowell: “For the Union Dead” [1964]
4. Marianne Moore: “Poetry” [1919]
5. Ezra Pound: “Lament of the Frontier Guard” [1915]
6. Kendrick Smithyman: “Colville” [1968]
7. Stephen Spender: “Cadet Cornelius Rilke” [1933]
8. Edward Thomas: “Adlestrop” [1917]
9. Ian Wedde: “Barbary Coast” [1988]
10. W. B. Yeats: “The Circus Animals' Desertion” [1939]

Chronological (by date of publication):


1. Ezra Pound (1885-1972):
   “Lament of the Frontier Guard” [1915]
2. Edward Thomas (1878-1917):
   “Adlestrop” [1917]
3. Marianne Moore (1887-1972):
   “Poetry” [1919]
4. W. H. Auden (1907-1973):
   “The Letter” [1927]
5. Stephen Spender (1909-1995):
   “Cadet Cornelius Rilke” [1933]
6. W. B. Yeats (1865-1939):
   “The Circus Animals' Desertion” [1939]
7. Robert Lowell (1917-1977):
   “For the Union Dead” [1964]
8. Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995):
   “Colville” [1968]
9. Gavin Ewart (1916-1995):
   “Sonnet: How Life Too is Sentimental” [1980]
10. Ian Wedde (1946- ):
    “Barbary Coast” [1988]

•

[Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)]

The Letter

From the very first coming down
Into a new valley with a frown
Because of the sun and a lost way,
You certainly remain: to-day
I, crouching behind a sheep-pen, heard
Travel across a sudden bird,
Cry out against the storm, and found
The year’s arc a completed round
And love’s worn circuit re-begun,
Endless with no dissenting turn.
Shall see, shall pass, as we have seen
The swallow on the tile, spring’s green
Preliminary shiver, passed
A solitary truck, the last
Of shunting in the Autumn. But now,
To interrupt the homely brow,
Thought warmed to evening through and through,
Your letter comes, speaking as you,
Speaking of much but not to come.

Nor speech is close nor fingers numb
If love not seldom has received
An unjust answer, was deceived.
I, decent with the seasons, move
Different or with a different love,
Nor question overmuch the nod
The stone smile of this country god
That never was more reticent
Always afraid to say more than it meant.

[1927]

It's interesting that Auden never rewrote this poem, even in the complete overhaul of his canon he undertook for the 1966 Collected Shorter Poems (which appalled so many of the admirers of his early work). There's an incantatory quality about it which has always fascinated me, and which made me like it long before I had any real understanding of what it was about. It is, after all, the poem he chose to begin his Collected Poems with, despite the fact that there are some earlier ones reprinted later on in the text ...

•

[Gavin Ewart (1916-1995)]

Sonnet: How Life Too is Sentimental

When our son was a few weeks old he had bronchial trouble
and picked up a cross-infection in the hospital
(salmonella typhimurium) through sluttish feeding –
but a hospital never admits it’s responsible –
and was rushed away behind glass in an isolation ward,
at the point, it might be, of death. Our daughter,
eighteen months old, was just tall enough
to look into his empty cot and say: ‘Baby gone!’

A situation, an action and a speech
so tear-jerking that Dickens might have thought of them –
and indeed, in life, when we say ‘It couldn’t happen!’
almost at once it happens. And the word ‘sentimental’
has come to mean exaggerated feeling.
It would have been hard to exaggerate our feelings then.

[1980]

I really like this poem. Ewart is more associated with light verse than serious poetry, but that's what gives it its sting, I think. That MC sitting beside him in the picture above and cracking up at what he's reading is actually the great Peter Reading ...

•

[Robert Lowell (1917-1977)]

For the Union Dead

"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die –
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year –
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

[1964]

I talk a bit about this poem in my post on The Literature of the Civil War. I do think it's a great example of the "State of the Nation" poem, something I say more about in my Jacket2 column here...

•

[Marianne Moore (1887-1972)]

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician –
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination” – above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,”
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

[1919]

Moore famously repudiated this poem, and cut it and cut it until it finally consisted of an abridged version of the first three lines (minus the "beyond all this fiddle"). Paul Celan translated the whole thing into German, though, which to me is pretty much a guarantee of its quality. Here it is in its complete, original form ...

•

[Ezra Pound (1885-1972)]

Lament of the Frontier Guard

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence.
Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihoku’s name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.

[1915]

Those early poems from Cathay are some of Pound's finest, I think. I suppose one could argue that it's a translation rather than an original poem,, but given the complicated mode of transmission from Ernest Fenollosa's notes from the Japanese, it seems better to concentrate on how it superimposes a kind of World War One landscape on the original Chinese one ...

•

[Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995)]

Colville

That sort of place where you stop
long enough to fill the tank, buy plums,
perhaps, and an icecream thing on a stick
while somebody local comes
in, leans on the counter, takes a good look
but does not like what he sees of you,

intangible as menace,
a monotone with a name, as place
it is an aspect of human spirit
(by which shaped), mean, wind-worn. Face
outwards, over the saltings: with what merit
the bay, wise as contrition, shallow

as their hold on small repute,
good for dragging nets which men are doing
through channels, disproportionate in the blaze
of hot afternoon’s down-going
to a far fire-hard tide’s rise
upon the vague where time is distance?

It could be plainly simple
pleasure, but these have another tone
or quality, something aboriginal,
reductive as soil itself – bone
must get close here, final
yet unrefined at all. They endure.

A school, a War Memorial
Hall, the store, neighbourhood of salt
and hills. The road goes through to somewhere else.
Not a geologic fault
line only scars textures of experience.
Defined, plotted; which maps do not speak.

[1968]

I have a good deal to say about this poem in my post A Visit to Colville. It's one of Kendrick's finest, I think ...

•

[Stephen Spender (1909-1995)]

Cadet Cornelius Rilke

Rolled over on Europe: the sharp dew frozen to stars
Below us; above our heads, the night
Frozen again to stars; the stars
In pools between our coats, and that charmed moon.
Ah, what supports? What cross draws out our arms,
Heaves up our bodies towards the wind
And hammers us between the mirrored lights?

Only my body is real; which wolves
Are free to oppress and gnaw. Only this rose
My friend laid on my breast, and these few lines
written from home, are real.

[1933]

This is kind of a weird choice, I suppose. Again, it might be my taste for incantatory eloquence which made it stand out for me among Spender's early poems. It wasn't till later that I realised it was made up of phrases culled from Rilke's impressionistic early short story "Cadet Cornelius Rilke". It's hard to say if that makes it a translation or an original poem. Can that be regarded as a real distinction anymore, in fact?

•

[Edward Thomas (1878-1917)]

Adlestrop

Yes. I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

[1917]

This is the first poem I ever read by Edward Thomas, but I've loved his poetry ever since. I could easily have chosen any of a number of others, but this one still appeals to me deeply. He manages to get away with the poeticisms in stanza three and even gets them to work for him in a strange way, I'm not quite sure how ...

•

[Robert Cross: Ian Wedde (1946- )]

Barbary Coast

When the people emerge from the water
who can tell if it’s brine or tears
that streams from them, purple sea
or the bruises of their long immersion?

They seem to weep for the dreams they had
which now the light slices into buildings
of blinding concrete along the Corniche.
Is it music or news the dark windows utter?

Day-long dazzle of the shallows
and at night the moon trails her tipsy sleeves
past the windows of raffish diners.
The hectic brake-lights of lovers

jam the streets. My place or your place.
They lose the way again and again.
At dawn the birds leave the trees in clouds,
they petition the city for its crumbs.

The diners are cheap and the food is bad
but you’d sail a long way to find anything
as convenient. Pretty soon, sailor boy,
you’ll lose your bearings on language.

Language with no tongue
to lash it to the teller.
Stern-slither of dogfish guttings.
Sinbad’s sail swaying in the desert.

Only those given words can say what they want.
Out there the velvet lady runs her tongue
over them. And she is queen of the night –
her shadow flutters in the alleys.

And young sailors, speechless, lean
on the taffrail. They gaze at the queen’s amber
but see simple lamps their girls hang in sash windows.
Thud of drums. Beach-fires. Salt wind in the ratlines.

Takes more than one nice green kawakawa
leaf, chewed, to freshen the mouth
that’s kissed the wooden lips of the figurehead
above history’s cut-water

in the barbarous isles’
virgin harbours. That hulk shunned by rats
bursts into flames.
And now the smoky lattice of spars

casts upon the beach
the shadow-grid of your enlightened city.
And now I reach through them – I reach
through the eyes of dreaming sailors,

faces inches from the sweating bulkheads,
blankets drenched in brine and sperm.
Trailing blood across the moon’s wake
the ship bore out of Boka Bay.

Trailing sharks, she sailed
for Port Destruction. In Saint Van le Mar,
Jamaica, Bligh’s breadfruit trees grew tall.
In Callao on the coast of Peru

geraniums bloomed like sores
against whitewashed walls.
The dock tarts’ parrots jabbering
cut-rates in six tongues.

The eroding heartland, inland cordillera
flashing with snow – these the voyager forgets.
His briny eyes
flood with chimerical horizons.

‘I would tell you if I could – if I could
remember, I would tell you.
All around us the horizons
are turning air into water

and I can’t remember
where the silence ended and speech began,
where vision ended and tears began.
All our promises vanish into thin air.

What I remember are the beaches of that city
whose golden children dance
on broken glass. I remember cold beer
trickling between her breasts as she drank.

But my paper money burned
when she touched it. The ship
clanked up to its bower, the glass towers
of the city burned back there in the sunset glow.’

Cool star foundering in the west.
Coast the dusty colour of lions.
The story navigates by vectors
whose only connection is the story.

The story is told in words
whose only language is the story.
All night the fo’c’s’le lamp smokes above the words.
All day the sun counts the hours of the story.

Heave of dark water where something
else turns – the castaway’s tongue
clappers like a mission bell.
Unheard his end, and the story’s.

Raconteurs in smoky dives
recall his phosphorescent arm
waving in the ship’s wake.
Almost gaily. But the ship sailed on.

[1988]

One necessary constraint on this choice of poems was length. I was originally going to include Paul Muldoon's extraordinary elegy Incantata as one of my ten, but it's just too long to reprint or really take in at a sitting. This, too, is quite a long poem, but I felt that I had to include it even so. I say more about it here, but its true significance remains mysterious to me: mysterious, but somehow immensely alluring.

•

[William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)]

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

[1939]

Well, what can you say? The aging Yeats reinvents himself yet again, "Lion and woman and the Lord knows what" - how can you just keep on getting better and better and simpler and simpler over the course of a fifty-year career?

•

So there you are: that's my ten. They do say some slightly disqueting things about my taste, I suppose. Nine out of my ten poets are men; nine out of my ten poets are dead; all of them are white ...

Having ruled out straight translations, though - and also longer poems - I guess it's kind of inevitable that I should gravitate to the kinds of poems I loved when I was a kid: eloquent, even grandiloquent at times, but with the Modernist fetish for simplicity constantly undermining their verbal flourishes.

What would your list look like?

[Doug Savage: Savage Chickens (2005)]