Victorian word, as Ezra Pound remarked) is real enough: a few artists –
Michaelangelo, Mozart, Tolstoy – are universally regarded as more than merely clas-
sics. The Victorian poet Walter Savage Landor held that English literature had two
poets only, Shakespeare and Milton; and that Milton was worth only a limb of
Shakespeare. The critic F. R. Leavis issued a bulletin in 1950 stating that Eliot had
‘gone on’, and that Pound had stopped. Auden, he implied, should never have
started. Tonic severities! Yet to have eyes only for the peaks is to miss the base on
which their greatness stands. Leavis thought life too short to waste time on Trollope;
but Tolstoy, whom Leavis thought the greatest of (non-English) novelists, greatly
admired Trollope. There are no Tolstoys without Trollopes, no great novelists with-
out good ones.
The thought cannot be avoided that English poets used, not very long ago, to aim
higher, and that readers valued their work more highly, than they do today. This may
well have to do with the increasing populism of the media, though there was a
specifically literary reaction, by Amis and Larkin for example, against the rarefied
culture of Bloomsbury and of Eliot. The very word ‘culture’ can now sound unde-
mocratic, even without a ‘high’. This may be why the UK government has parked it
in a Ministry of Culture, Media and Sport. Sport is a reserved area of national life in
which elitism is still openly practised: the best team is picked on merit. In literary
history too, Elitism Rules OK, for critical evaluation has to compare qualities and
merits. The recognition of merit presupposes agreed criteria. Where there are no
recognized criteria, as in contemporary art, the financial value of an artist can be
ramped up by dealers and collectors. Writing is far more idiot-proof, since readers
buy books for themselves, unlike those investors who buy art unseen on the advice
of a dealer. Without a measure of critical consensus as to the qualities which might
be brought to bear in evaluation, anything goes. And so, as in the world of newspa-
pers, the market provides sectional interests with what they want: exhibitionism, or
stand-up comedy, or Saga Holidays, and their literary equivalents. The future for
poetry in a liter ary marketplace ruled by the priorities of popular entertainment is
hard to foresee.
Contemporary poetry, then, is a small area full of prospectors for gold. Since
Douglas Dunn’s humane Elegiesfo r his first wife,published in 1985,no British
collection has had the same impact. Dunn’s reticence packs a punch. His recent
volume,The Year’s Afternoon, has poems as good as those in Elegies.Paul Muldoon
The Northern Irishman Paul Muldoon(1951– ) remains the most talented poet of
his generation. He has a magical imagination and verbal adroitness, with an oblique
ec onomy which dazzles, puzzles and delights, though he too can punch when he has
to, simply, as in ‘Blemish’, or ‘Why Brownlee Left’ or eerily, as in ‘Duffy’s Circus’:Once Duffy’s Circus had shaken out its tent
In the big field near the Moy
God might as well have left Ireland
And gone up a tre e. My father had said so.I had lost my father in the rush and slipped
Out the back. Now I heard
For the first time that long-drawn-out cry.408 15 · CONTEMPORARIES