alan marshall
thrives—and at the same time he can ironize, and even humanize, that discourse;
hecan cut it down to size. Ultimately perhaps, he can also bring us back, albeit
circuitously (the circuitous way is the only way left) to a world of things. For
example:
the prime joy of
control engineering is what they please
to denote (through the quartzite window) ‘‘self-
optimising systems’’, which they like
to consider as a plan for the basic
living unit.^57The ‘basic-living unit’ is the individual human being in the jargon of the control
engineer, whose advanced biological perspectives are juxtaposed with the con-
sistently basic appetite for pleasure (‘prime joy’, ‘please’, ‘like’), which in turn
makes a mockery of all our ‘plans’. Despite the evidence that has been adduced for
Wordsworth’s influence on Prynne,^58 the Wordsworthian conversational paradigm,
the idea of the poet as a man speaking to men is more comprehensively imperilled
here than it is in either Hill’s work or Bunting’s. Needless to add, reportage once
again is out of the question.
It is when we attend to how the poems address England’s post-war condition that
Eliot comes into the picture. For Prynne undercuts Eliot’s canny mythologizing of
English history inFour Quartets(‘as now in England’^59 ), and satirizes in his gently
pointed way the Symbolist paraphernalia that dovetails in the latter’s poems with
Christian other-worldliness. I mean by this that Prynne seems to show up Eliot’s
symbolism as a kind of paraphernalia, whose ‘idea of the end’—in my beginning
is my end, and so on—‘is a neat|but mostly dull falsity’.^60 The ‘white heat of
technology’, as Harold Wilson called it, brings Eliot’s musical analogies roughly up
to date: ‘The|English condition is now so abstract that|it sounds like an old record;
the hiss and|crackle suborns the music.’^61 The five poems that make up the book
recall, like Bunting’sBriggflatts, the five sections of Eliot’sWaste Landand the five
movements of each of theFour Quartets.However, at stake are two very different
interpretations of Britain’s situation in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Eliot was an unashamed apologist for imperialism, as Frank Kermode was among
the first to spell out, but an apologist with a rather wonderful alibi, a metaphysical
get-out clause: for the British Empire was, for Eliot, but a shadow of the Roman
(^57) J. H. Prynne, ‘Die a Millionaire’, inPoems(Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1999), 13.
(^58) See e.g. N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge,Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J. H. Prynne
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995); Birgitta Johansson,The Engineering of Being: An
Ontological Approach to J. H. Prynne(Umea: Umea University Press, 1997); and Alan Marshall,
‘ ‘‘Drift,’’ ‘‘Loss,’’ and ‘‘Return,’’ in the Poetry of J. H. Prynne, fromKitchen PoemstoThe White
Stones 59 ’,Etudes britanniques contemporaines ́ , 27 (Dec. 2004), 137–52.
Prynne, ‘Die A Millionaire’, 14.^60 Prynne, ‘A Gold Ring Called Reluctance’, inPoems, 21.
(^61) Ibid. 22.