alan marshall
and the news|Iswar|As always.’^12 The poet as one person trying to speak with
another is at the mercy of the newspapers, the radio, the television, the telephone,
these ‘various devices’ that variously bear witness to the unvarying news of war.
Though the rhythms may be different, Rukeyser took some of her inspiration,
the power of that free ‘strong voice’,^13 from Walt Whitman—poet, war poet, and
of course journalist—as Allen Ginsberg also did. And different as Ginsberg may
be from Rukeyser or Oppen, we note in him too, in such a representative and
magnificent poem as ‘America’ (1956), for instance, a freedom and simplicity of
address (though without any lack of poignant lyric wit), that seems to be a function
of an almost existentialist situating of the selfvis-`a-visthe first century of World
Wars: as if confronting the way in which one might be implicated in those wars
were only a matter of existential courage, expressed linguistically.
It seems, at any rate, that the freedoms of American experimental modernism in
the 1960s, as already pioneered by Williams on the one hand and Whitman on the
other, and as expressed in the poetry of war, were not felt by the most gifted of the
British poets in dialogue with modernism. There seem to be two general reasons
for this: first, in Britain the dominant modernist presence was still T. S. Eliot, not
Williams or even Pound; secondly, for the British poet, poetry as an act of what
I want to call, albeit unsatisfactorily, linguistic existentialism held few meaningful
attractions for poets for whom the present was somehow less the present than it
was just the latest, the most recent stage of the past; and for whom the latest wars
made little sense without reference to the nation’s historical immersion in war.
Basil Bunting, Geoffrey Hill, and J. H. Prynne are all poets whose work demon-
strates a significant engagement with the terms of international modernism, whether
as represented by Pound or Celan, and which may be said to exist in some sort of
tension with Wordsworth’s conversational paradigm. This tension was exacerbated
after 1945 by the peculiarities of Britain’s situation—a warlike nation living more
or less at peace, but largely defined by and in thrall to its wars, and, like some soon
to be decommissioned battleship, floating uneasily, unsure of its moorings, in a
world still full of smaller wars. The poets had also to contend, as I have said, with
the masterful presence of T. S. Eliot, and the suffocating terms of Eliot’s own war
poem, ‘Little Gidding’, the last of hisFour Quartets. All three of them can be seen,
in their very different ways, to be responding critically to Eliot—whereas this was
just what their experimentally inclined American contemporaries had been spared,
either by Williams’s repudiation of Eliot or else by the prodigiously fertile example
of Whitman.
‘But few appearances are like this.’^14 It would be hard to think of a work less like
reportage than Geoffrey Hill’s second book,King Log(1968). There are no ironic
(^12) Oppen, ‘Of Being Numerous’, inNew Collected Poems, 174.
(^13) Rukeyser, ‘Searching/Not Searching’, inCollected Poems, 484.
(^14) Geoffrey Hill, ‘Funeral Music 3’, inCollected Poems(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 72.