pointing to east and west For an Orwellian cold warrior, the ‘vicious winter’ of the Cold War ‘grips its prey
lesstightly’ in the warmth of the United States.^15 It is from the vantage-point of
superpower that light verse about love and travel can be generated without guilt,
and the occasional broadside launched against Soviet propaganda and the evils of
socialist realism: ‘Barren and burnished|The air clangs angry|Above the political
city.’^16 It takes an ex-propagandist to write so well against propaganda.
So influential did the Movement become that it effectively silenced the neo-
Romantic opposition in British culture, despite the resistance of groups such as the
‘Dionysian’ Mavericks.^17 The struggle for ascendancy led to what Silkin called the
‘sentimental tyranny’ of Movement rationalism^18 —which had everything to do
with the close fit between the Movement and Cold War imperatives. Conquest set
the style for the ascendancy by stating that the Movement ‘[submitted] to no great
systems of theoretical constructs nor agglomerations of unconscious demands’,^19
thus equating surrealist and neo-Romantic poetry with the Marxist enemy, and the
rational ‘new lines’ with Orwellian vigilance and power.
The Movement’s secret attachment to the nuclear comforts of the United States
emerges in symptomatic form as envy of the securities and largesse of American
poets, Davie’s admiration for Olson and Pound being the obvious example. It
had also to do with the gaze east, towards the dissident poets behind the Iron
Curtain. Again Davie is typical here (despite Amis’s and Auden’s dismissal of
foreign languages and cities) with his admiration for Pasternak, Mickiewicz, and
Mandelstam. His fine elegy ‘Mandelstam, on Dante’ makes a sweet Dantescan fetish
of the tortures suffered in Lubyanka and Voronezh:
You are not to be thought of apart from the life you lived
And what Life intends is at once to kill and caress
That thus the distress which beat in on your ears, on your eyes
And the sockets of your eyes, be Florentine.^20Torture pains are imitated here, stress and beat of verse dedicated to the blows
received in the interrogation chambers of the enemy creed. This admiration for
dissident poetry is a prominent feature of thework of many British Cold War poets.
The engagement in translation as a means of solidarity with poets in the Eastern
bloc is a powerful factor in the poetry of Michael Hamburger, Ted Hughes, and
Jon Silkin—but used, significantly, to wrest British poetry from the stranglehold of
Movement sweet reasonableness.
Silkin’sStandwas proud of its commitment to Eastern bloc poets, from Blok
to Brodsky. It published Alex Miller’s translation ofThe Twelve, Elaine Feinstein’s
(^15) Conquest, ‘George Orwell’, ibid. 91. (^16) Conquest, ‘Socialist Realism’, ibid. 135.
(^17) See Howard Sergeant and Dannie Abse (eds.),Mavericks(London: Editions Poetry and Poverty,
1957).
(^18) Jon Silkin, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),Poetry of the Committed Individual: A Stand Anthology
of Poetry 19 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 18.
Conquest, ‘Introduction’, p. xiv.^20 Davie, ‘Mandelstam, on Dante’, inCollected Poems, 280.