adam piette
of his sculptural pieces, the ebony shark’s fin in the Arcadian field, wittily and
frighteninglysummoning the shape of a nuclear submarine’s conning tower into
the garden of revolutionary delights, hence its title ‘Nuclear Sail’ (the croft and
garden at Stonypath in the Pentland hills is only a short drive away from Holy Loch
where the United States based Polaris nuclear submarines).
Poetry, the Revival seemed to be saying, has a superpowerful rival in the
fictionalizing language games of the Cold War’s discursive field—the only proper
response is to go underground for the duration, organizing networks of resistance
in small presses, reading spaces, and poetry zones (Prynne’s rooms in Cambridge,
Mottram’s in King’s, Hamilton Finlay’s Spartan garden), mimicking the codes,
intelligence cells, and secrecies of a Pynchonesque counter-culture.
If the Cold War only looked like it was just a war of words—it actually killed
thousands in the ‘Third’ World, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and so on—it was
nevertheless a war which was waged as a form of words as well, with its own
systems of propaganda and persuasion. And poets were recruited to its causes and
fronts too, most usefully if they remained unaware of the sources of their support.
The covert funding of cultural institutions by the CIA hit the newsstands with the
revelation in 1967 thatEncounterhad had funds channelled into it by the Congress
for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a front organization run by Michael Josselson and
other CIAapparatchiks. Though it was being edited by Frank Kermode and Melvin
L. Lasky when the news broke, the real victim in the public eye was the old
stalwart of 1930s poetry, Stephen Spender, who had edited it at the height of the
Kennedy Cold War and was still its corresponding editor from the States. Poetry and
poets of a liberal kind were favourite targets for the CCF, since the anti-Communist
propaganda drive could most easily counter totalitarian Zhdanovite socialist realism
with a formal, apolitical display of complex feeling identified with the New Critical
lyric—the CCF’s first port of call was the New Criticism temple, theKenyon Review.
TheEncounterrevelation and the consequent suspicion thrown on Spender’s naive
good-will did a lot to break down the hegemony of New Critical liberal poetics in
the universities and bookshops. It also reaffirmed the class conflict implicit in the
Cold War division between hawks and doves, as Stewart Home’s typical Revival spin
on events implies: ‘Auden fled to America, Spender stayed here, where, as editor of
Encounter, he was the leading beneficiary of the underwriting of English publishing
by the CIA. Along with the Cambridge spies, English poetry proves conclusively
that the Oxbridge system devours intelligence and spews out shit.’^50 What the
Congress’s shady dealings also suggested, just as menacingly for the conspiracy
theorists, was that a domestic poetry of complex feeling might very well be the
most (disguisedly) political discourse of them all. Only a paranoid counter-cultural
poetics could succeed in the secret cold war of words within British culture.
(^50) Stewart Home, ‘Sixty Years of Treason’, in Iain Sinclair (ed.),Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry
Anthology(London: Picador, 1996), 166.