johnlyon
thought it a gap, a limitation in your mind that you cannot imagine a man taking a real
interestin public affairs. I hope I have a normal amount of domestic piety and affection, and
I wish now that I had more children—I respect you for having so many. But I dropped all my
literary interests, even reviewing, because I got absorbed in the war; I thought the defeat of
HitlersoimportantthatIcoulddonothingelse(itwasatimeofgreathappiness,lookingback,
and anyway considerable pleasure, but I have just a steady trickle of mental productiveness,
and it was then all directed into propaganda). I still think the war was quite important enough
for that, and a good deal of my previous poetry had been concerned to say so; it could not
be called a betrayal of my deeper interests. I remember being scolded briefly by a journalist
in a pub near the BBC, on his way out, near the end of the war, because I had dropped all
my literary work so completely—‘just left us cold’, he said, assuming there was nothing else
I was good at really; I was startled by an attack from such an unexpected quarter.^53
Poetic silence or poetic nonsense, then, both seem common responses to the
nonsense of the violence of war, but neither response should be confused with
quietism nor berated as irresponsibility. It is the verse which promises to make sense
of war, to keep or get things in proportion, that we should, perhaps, mistrust.^54
(^53) Empson, ‘On stopping Poetry: an extract from a letter to Christopher Ricks’, inComplete Poems,
126–8.
(^54) The tendency which I have been describing here forpoetry in the face of the extremities of war to
‘disappear’, to pursue evasiveness or trickery or even nonsense, is by no means limited to the verse of
the late 1930s, anticipating the Second World War. Andrew Marvell, a major poet of the English Civil
War, currently being (mis)appropriated, less than persuasively, by critics and editors as a politically
committed poet, evinces such characteristics. Writing of Marvell, S. L. Goldberg describes this well:
‘The only resolution the poems offer is the one they achieve as poems. And [Marvell] also recognizes
what this implies: not only that as a man he has to maintain a difficult balance between equally possible
but conflicting kinds of fulfilment, but thatkeeping such a balance is almost impossible—almost
indeed, a kind of trick...This doesn’t mean that his poems are politically or morally indecisive,
however; his subtleties are not a way of evading choice or action. But they do delicately insist on
the gap between the poet’s activity and the activities he is writing about, between their own protean
awareness and the limiting action forced on us in ordinary life. Usually...they insist on the loss as
well as the gain involved in their own imaginative creation’ (S. L. Goldberg, ‘Marvell: Self and Art’, in
John Carey (ed.),Andrew Marvell(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 166–7).
Turning to the Irish ‘Troubles’ of the later decades of the twentieth century, we find Derek Mahon,
at the beginning of ‘The Last of the Fire Kings’ (inPoems 1962–1978(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1979), 64), intent on escape and poetic trickery:
Iwanttobe
Like the man who descends
At two milk churns
With a bulging
String bag and vanishes
Where the lane turns,
Or the man
Who drops at night
From a moving train
And strikes out over the fields
Where fireflies glow,
Not knowing a word of the language.