POETRY’S FULL ROLE

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32038, 12 July 1969, Page 4

POETRY’S FULL ROLE

The Modem Poet Essays from the “Review.” Edited by lan Hamilton. Macdonald. 200 pp.

The “Review” is a little magazine of poetry and criticism founded by lan Hamilton in 1962. It is concerned with the English and American poetry being written now, and its contributors are seriously-committed poets and critics, intent to capture and analyse the nature of poetic experience and the value and relevance of poetry in modem life. The high standard of the “Review’s” professional concern' with poetry is demonstrated in this first collection of material first published in the magazine. The credit for the standard of contributions must go to the editor, lan Hamilton, himself an established poet and critic.

What are we given in this collection? Essays, conversations and poems. Some of the most immediately interesting material is among the conversations. A. Alvarez talks to Donald Davie on “A New Aestheticism.” Donald Davie had advocated a new aestheticism; not a return to Walter Pater, but an acknowledgement that the main task of a poet is to come to terms with his medium, to wrestle with words and meanings. A. Alvarez considers this to be

evading the issue; the job of writing poetry is “the job of living in society, . . . and something that says that man must be sacrificed to the poem, to the discipline of art, seems to me nonsense, and seems, in a sense, a kind of childishness." But Davie elaborates his position to explain he considers that “a dialogue ensues between the self that you are and the medium you are operating with. And what comes out of the marriage between [them] . . is the self that you truly are, you are finding yourself in the process of writing the poem.” These two points of view are dynamic, and central to the poet’s philosophy, and, as the fluctuations of the conversation show, they are not always in opposition. Clearly, for instance, for Donald Davie a social conscience is part of “the self that you are.”

This conversation is representative of the serious tone of the essays represented here. There is a dedicated concern for revealing the value of contemporary poetry, a toughness of mind and a stringent concreteness in criticism. Four essays by Colin Falck show these qualities particularly. He writes on Alun Lewis, Philip Larkin and William; Epsom (this last prefaced by several perhaps unnecessarily dense pages on the history of the philosophy

of poetry, from Wittgenstein to Allan Tate) and his evaluations are always reasonable, lucid and usefully provocative. In an essay which serves as an introduction to the collection, “Dreams and Responsibilities," he offers an analysis of the sensibility of modern poetry (the essay is a review of Alvarez’s Penguin collection, “The New Poetry.”) Here Falck asks from poetry “a lyricism of our total experience in which poetry assumes its full role as the origin and continuous recreation of our morality and understanding.” Most of the poets discussed in this book in fact fulfil this demand in varying degrees, and in the handful of poems included at the end of the collection one may find a common concern with social responsibilities and the response the self brings to them. John Fuller, Michael Fried, lan Hamilton, Hugo Williams and others are represented by poems here. Among other valuable essays there are John Fuller on Thom Gunn, lan Hamilton on Robert Lowell, A. Alvarez on Sylvia Plath, Martin Dodsworth on Marianne Moore, Gabriel Pearson on Yver Winters. “The Modern Poet” is a splendid introduction to the best modern poetry, the poetry we should know most about that written in this decade,