Amid the howls and trivia a real poet

By Elizabeth Jennings
FOR the last fifteen years. English poetry has been living on the reputations of four poets. Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath (Ted Hughes's wife who took her own life) and Thom Gunn. Other groups have emerged and made ephemeral reputations, but upon these four rests the recognised lire of English poetry.
In 'my view, Thom Gunn is the only poet who is of lasting value: the reasons are these — he has a fine sense of form and a developing philosophy of life. His last book, Touch, though perhaps a little
overpraised. showed a distinguished mind and spirit at work. This book also manifested a careful delight in rhythm, We cannot ask for "religious" poets in this age of doubt and difficulty, but we can ask for questioning; in Gunn, we find it. Not easy answers, not fake religion or mysticism, but a genuine desire to find a pattern and meaning in life. We shall consider this more fully later.
What of the other three poets'? Before sickness made Sylvia Plath write shrill. hysterical poems (much praised by critics such as A. Alvazeza she showed a beautiful sense of what Hopkins would call "the instress" of things. their colour and movement. and altogether a most delicate reverence for life. Ted Hughes is famous for his poems about animals: they are his chief subject-matter. But there are limitations to this sort of writing: the poet can become in danger of mere description. Medieval artists often used animals as emblems, symbols of something else, but this is not the way Hughes works. There is no moral significance in his beasts.
Ravings and shouts
I am not forgetting the power. beauty and strength of Hughes's verse: what I am stating is that they lack a search for meaning. What then of Philip I.arkin's poems? He has a lyric gift unrivalled for years but. again, it does not seem to serve any particular purpose. Church Going and The Whitsim Weddings are marvellous poems of experiences observed from outside; but if they bear a philosophy, then it is a drab one.
Larkin looks on the world with disillusionment, his writing is exquisite, his art faultless. but his viewpoint is a negative one. It is not even expressed overtly but is sifted, as it were. through his splendid imagery and rhythms.
There have been disillusioned poets in the past (Tennyson had his depressed moments, for instance) but they have come out openly with the grief which disillusionment brings. This is what I really object to in so many contemporary poets; they are no doubt, unconsciously — secretive. Only Thom Gunn has both verse and philosophy to offer.
Apart from him there are simply the ravings and shouts of -writers" who possess no sense of poetic crartmanship. I am thinking now of the Beat poets; unfortunately, they have had many followers. They, and particularly Allen Ginsberg with his long, famous poem, Howl, have debased poetry to screeching; there is no sense of order, no dignity What, then. am I asking for in English poetry at the present time, and which I find only in the work of Thorn. G111111? I would answer, grace of form and depth of thought. These are the things I struggle towards myself and, in these things. I believe. k the only hope for contemporary poetry.
Gunn began as a brash young poet in the Fifties 11, too, was lucky enough to appear in Robert Conquest's formative anthology, New Lines). Gunn was tough and his creed seemed to be a belief in power, a power dangerously like the Prussian one of the last war.
In his first book, Fighting, Terms (well named), this was the general theme. It shows strongly in a poem like Lofty it. 'he' Patois de Danse. But it is interesting that in a paperback selection, Poems /95066, Gunn has omitted the most violent of his poems. Instead we have from Fighting Terms only the tenderness which shows itself in For a Birthday:
Here is a new humility and a new compassion. The violence has been subdued and in Gunn's last three volumes, has continued to do so. His earliest poems showed a delight in power simply for its own sake : the man of action was the hero. Then, the poet developed into a subtler, more reflective man. He could see the misuse of power and also its silliness.
Perhaps I may seem to he laying too much _stress on thought. or even philosophy, in verse. But, for me, major poetry (and I think that Gunn may be moving towards it), must be felicitous in expression and profound in idea. That is why I believe that other recent poets have been over-praised and that numerous minor poets do not even enter the lists.
In Gunn's second book, The Sense Of Movement, he pursued his study of what, elsewhere, he called "Rule and Energy", but except in the now very well-known, On the Move, one did not feel that he had really reached a true blending of form and subject. On the Move is clearly based on the controversial Marlon Brando film about a gang of motorbike drivers. It has some beautiful lines in the last stanza : " . . the towns tizey travel through Are home for neither bird nor holiness, For Hirds and saints complete their purposes . . ."
There is a great step forward in The Sense of Movement: there is more subtlety of thought, more delicacy and command of movement. It is altogether more masterly.
If any poet who strives in his verse to search. with the greatest skill he can muster, for meaning and felicity can be called a religious poet, then Thom Gunn isa religious poet. Of the three
other so popular names Hughes, Plath, and 1.arkin — he is the only one of which this can be truly said. His poetry is essentially exploratory, but it is never dry or abstract. It is the problems of man. today and always, which concern him.
Touch. his most recent book is undoubtedly his finest, many of the poems in it are written in syllabics. all are concerned with man's search for truth and for contact with other men. The long poem, Afisanthropos is very impressive. It begins with a poem called T Ile First Man.
Reverence for man
In The Last Man, Gunn writes, "Drops are isolate on leaves, big and clear. It is cool-and he breathes the barbarous smell of the wet earth. Nothing moves at the edges of the mind."
There is no overt God in Gunn's world, yet his very reverence for man, especially his mind, and for nature, are a kind of unacknowledged recognition • of some outer power.
English poetry is not in a very happy state at the moment. yet just to have one poet with the seriousness of Gunn makes up for all the trivia, all the lack of artistry, all the loud voices with nothing to say. I think it is very necessary that Christians should recognise this.
I have no wish to underrate the gifts of Larkin and Hughes and, to a lesser degree, many other poets. But I think we should applaud this. surely, major poet in the making.