‘this is plenty. this is more than enough’ In the words of Michael Schmidt, Douglas ‘extended poetry into one of the
extremeareas of modern experience. Yet he penetrates that extreme area without
hysteria—as it were dispassionately. That is the wonder of his verse: it is the world
which is extreme, the strategy for survival and for witness is a kind of neutrality.’^4
That was to be one way forward for poetry in the aftermath of conflict—although,
arguably, it is the opposite, a retreat. How after the horrors of World War could
poetry, could any art, rise—or lower itself—to the occasion? Theodor Adorno’s
famous statement that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’,^5 does not mean,
as many think, that, in John Banville’s words, ‘writing poetry after Auschwitz is to be
forbidden, or impossible’.^6 Banville goes on to say that Adorno was arguing that the
Holocaust presented poetry with an unprecedented challenge which should not be
ducked by resorting to a ‘murky neo-primitivism’, but should be faced with ‘clear-
sighted modernity’; art should not ‘evad[e] existentialist man’s duty to confront his
own times in all their complexity and atrociousness’. In their different ways some
of the finest post-war poets live up to Adorno’s challenge, if only by acknowledging
with various degrees of complexity, sinuosity, at times even deviousness, the near
impossibility of so doing. And if silence was not a viable option, then you might
opt for the caution of humility. This was the strategy adopted by Donald Davie,
who based his case against the poetic expression of extreme feeling on the premiss
that such extremity underlies the violence unleashed in conflict. Blake Morrison
makes the apt connection with Douglas, who during the War wrote prophetically
that ‘to be sentimental or emotional now is dangerous to oneself and to others’.^7
Morrison rightly argues that this is ‘very similar’ to the view expressed in Davie’s
poem ‘Rejoinder to a Critic’ (1957),^8 whicharguesthatbothloveandhateare
extremities of emotion, and the one, love, implies the possibility of the other, hate.
Against those who, like the ‘critic’ of the title, find Davie’s poetry emotionally frigid,
it must be insisted that this poem is not against intensity of emotion as such, only
against its being put on display, in particular in poetry. ‘Be dumb!’ in the poem
means ‘don’t speak about it’, not ‘don’t feel it’. The poet, the poem says, should
‘Appearconcerned only to make it scan!’^9 Even so, the poem ends by more than
hinting that such an attitude does indeed require at some level the denial of feeling,
(^4) Michael Schmidt, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),Eleven British Poets: An Anthology(London:
Methuen, 1980), 3. Schmidt also makes the parallel with Doctor Faustus. 5
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, inPrisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 34.
(^6) John Banville, ‘Beyond Good and Evil’,The Nation, 31 Jan. 2005, 11.
(^7) Douglas to J. C. Hall, 10 Aug. 1943, inThe Letters, ed. Desmond Graham (Manchester: Carcanet,
2000), 295.
(^8) Blake Morrison,The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s(London: Methuen, 1980),
107.
(^9) Donald Davie, ‘Rejoinder to a Critic’,Collected Poems(Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), 74; my
italics.