gareth reeves
that not to express emotion is to run the danger of negating it: ‘How dare we now
beanything but numb?’ Aftermath entails a deliberate emotional retreat.
It was against this background that ten or so years later Charles Tomlinson
(Davie’s friend and poet-in-arms against what they considered to be the rhetorical
extravagance and neo-Romanticism of poets of the previous generation, especially
Dylan Thomas) wrote his poem ‘Against Extremity’ (which contains the sentence
‘The time is in love with endings’^10 ), amongst whose targets is Sylvia Plath, some
of whose poems famously, or notoriously, locate their emotions in imagery drawn
from the Holocaust. For Tomlinson and like-minded readers, such a strategy was to
misappropriate horrific public memories for private gratification. For critics such
as George Steiner and Al Alvarez, it was to tap into material which had hitherto
been squeamishly excluded from poetry. Alvarez’s anthologyThe New Poetrymade
available to British readers American post-war poetry (including Plath’s) that went
‘beyond the gentility principle’ endemic to much contemporary British poetry.
His introduction explicitly invokes the new conditions of the War’s aftermath and
refers to ‘the forces of disintegration which destroy the old standards of civilization.
Their public faces are those of two world wars, of the concentration camps, of
genocide, and the threat of nuclear war.’^11 Alvarez goes on to argue that war’s
atrocity is, uniquely in world history, now universal, involving not just the military
but civilians on a mass scale, and ‘concentration camps run scientifically as death
factories’. Arguments like this can be used to justify Plath’s practice in poems such
as ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Daddy’ (both written in 1962): to internalize wartime atrocity
poetically as part of an emotional strategy is legitimate because it taps into what has
become a universal imagery of trauma.
But however one reacts to these arguments, the tide of poetic opinion was
turning. Already there was setting in a reaction to the caution of the ‘Movement’
poets (among whom were Davie and Tomlinson), usefully summarized by Ted
Hughes (an admirer of Douglas’s poetry):
One of the things those poets [of the Movement] had in common I think was the post-war
mood of having had enough...enough rhetoric, enough overweening push of any kind,
enough of the dark gods, enough of the id, enough of the Angelic powers and the heroic
efforts to make new worlds. They’d seen it all turn into death-camps and atomic bombs. All
they wanted was to get back in civvies and get home to the wife and kids and for the rest
of their lives not a thing was going to interfere with a nice cigarette and a nice view of the
park....Now I came a bit later. I hadn’t had enough. I was all for opening negotiations with
whatever happened to be out there.^12
(^10) Charles Tomlinson, ‘Against Extremity’, inCollected Poems(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987), 163. 11
A. Alvarez, ‘The New Poetry or Beyond the Gentility Principle’, inidem(ed.),The New Poetry:
An Anthology(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 26.
(^12) Ted Hughes, ‘Ted Hughes andCrow’, interviewed by Egbert Fass,London Magazine, Jan. 1971,
10–11; quoted in Morrison,The Movement, 244.