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THE ALVAREZ GENERATION
THE ALVAREZ
GENERATION
Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes,
Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter
William Wootten
Liverpool University Press

First published 2015 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2015 William Wootten
The right of William Wootten to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by
him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data

A British Library CIP record is available
print ISBN 978-1-78138-163-2 cased

epdf ISBN 978-1-78138-760-3
Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon cr0 4yy
In memory of my father
Patrick James Wootten
1939–99
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Preface xi
PART I 1
1: Beginnings: Oxford and Cambridge Poetry
in the Early 1950s 3
2: Violent Times: Anti-Movement Poetry in the
Mid to Late 1950s 19
3: In Opposite Directions: A. Alvarez and Thom Gunn 29
4: Against Gentility 45
5: On Being Serious 59
6: Anthology-Making 71
7: First Reactions: The Review Debate and the Initial
Response to The New Poetry 91
PART II 99
8: Sylvia Plath 101
PART III 129

9: Going to Extremes 131
10: ‘A Study of Suicide’ 145
viii T H E A LVA R E Z G E N E R AT I O N
PART IV 151
11: Against Extremism 153
12: Costing Seriousness 165
13: ‘I Don’t Like Dramatizing Myself’ 181
14: Birthday Letters 189
15: Geoffrey Hill’s New Poetry 193
16: Children of The New Poetry 199
Bibliography 207
Index 222
Acknowledgements
M uch of this book was researched and written while I was a postdoc-
toral research fellow on the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Penguin Archive Project at the University of Bristol. I am grateful for the
support both of Bristol University and the AHRC and indebted to the staff
of the Bristol English Department and the other members of the Penguin
Archive Project for their help, companionship and enlightening discus-
sion. John Lyon looked at an early draft of the book and was encouraging
and helpful even when disagreeing with some of my conclusions. George
Donaldson cast a thoughtful eye over an early version of some of the mate-
rial on Sylvia Plath. Markland Starkie assisted with the transcription of
interviews. I am grateful to Penguin Books for granting me permission to
consult the Penguin Archive and to Rachel Hassall for navigating me round
it, as well as to Hannah Lowery, Michael Richardson and the staff of the
Library of the University of Bristol, Special Collections. I am also indebted to
the staff of the British Library and the Library of the University of Reading,
Special Collections. I should like to thank Al Alvarez, Alan Brownjohn,
Edward Lucie-Smith and the late Peter Porter for being so generous with
their time and so patient in answering my questions. Above all, to Elv, who
did so much to ensure this book finally got finished, and Lucy, who didn’t
but who is wonderful nonetheless, I give my thanks and love.
Early versions of some passages in the chapter on Sylvia Plath first
appeared in the Cambridge Quarterly. I first aired a few of this book’s argu-
ments in the Times Literary Supplement.
x T H E A LVA R E Z G E N E R AT I O N
For permission to reproduce substantial pieces of quotation, I am grateful

to the following.
Al Alvarez, from ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’, ‘John Berryman’, and
‘Thom Gunn’ in Business: People, Pastimes, Poker and Books (London:
Bloomsbury, 2007), copyright © Al Alvarez 2007, reproduced by permission
of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
A. Alvarez, from The Savage God, copyright © A. Alvarez, 1971, repro-
duced by permission of the Orion Publishing Group, London, and Aitken
Alexander Associates.
Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love VII, from Broken Hierarchies: Poems
1952-2012, ed. Kenneth Haynes (2013), copyright © Geoffrey Hill, by permis-
sion of Oxford University Press.
Veronica Forrest-Thomson, from ‘A Plea for Excuses’ from Veronica
Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Barnett (Shearsman Books,
in association with Allardyce Books, 2008), copyright © Jonathan Culler and
the Estate of Veronica Forrest-Thomson 2008, by permission of Allardyce,
Barnett, Publishers.
Editorial document on anthology schemes, letter from Richard
Newnham to A. Alvarez, 1 October 1959, letter from Richard Newnham
to Philip Larkin, 15 June 1961, from the editorial file of The New Poetry
(DM1107/D63); letter from Richard Newnham to Donald Hall, 24 March
1962, Richard Newnham to Peter Levi, 11 October 1962 from the edito-
rial file to Contemporary American Poetry (DM1107/D12) all reproduced by
permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
Peter Porter, ‘Why Did Dante Pick on Suicides?’, from Afterburner, copy-
right © Peter Porter 2005, reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan.
Peter Porter, ‘John Marston Advises Anger’, ‘Seahorses’ and ‘The Cost
of Seriousness’, ‘The Delegate’ and ‘An Exequy’, from The Rest on the Flight,
copyright © Peter Porter 2010 by permission of Pan Macmillan and Allen
and Unwin Australia.
Peter Porter, ‘The Historians Call Up Pain’ from Once Bitten, Twice
Bitten copyright © Peter Porter 1961 and ‘Seaside Resort’ from Preaching to
the Converted, copyright © Peter Porter 1972, reproduced by the permission
of the Estate of author c/o Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews,
London W11 1JN.
Preface
William Wootten
T hat as recently as the 1960s and early 1970s English poetry could have
been reckoned a matter of life and death will strike most readers now
as a concept hard to credit. One of the first to look back in bemusement was
Sean O’Brien, who, in a collection of essays published in 1998, breaks off
from a discussion of Ted Hughes to point out:
In the 1960s the savagery of the natural world as [Ted Hughes] conceived
it was popularly twinned with [Thom] Gunn’s more urbanised and erotic
interest in aggression, and (for reasons no longer clear, supposing they ever
were) a set of associations grew up around the two poets’ work: nature-
violence-the-Holocaust-psychic crisis—a kind of cultural shorthand of
which the present will have its own equivalents. Alvarez’s essay ‘Beyond
the Gentility Principle’, with which he introduced The New Poetry, as well
as some of the essays in Beyond All This Fiddle and parts of the later study
of suicide, The Savage God, are key documents in identifying the emotional
style of the Fifties and Sixties—some features of which seem barely compre-
hensible at the moment.1
1 Sean O’Brien, The Deregulated Muse (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998),
p. 35.
x ii T H E A LVA R E Z G E N E R AT I O N
Quick and accurate in his summary of the emotional style in question,

O’Brien is too cautious—or too canny—to give it proper explanation or elab-
oration. That, however, is the task taken on by this book.
More generally, this is a study of the generation of poets born between
1929 and 1932 who succeeded and differed from the poets of the Movement.
It concentrates on five poets: Thom Gunn (whose divided status as both a
member of this group and of the Movement will be a subject of this study’s
early chapters), Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter, and
on one influential editor and critic, A. Alvarez.
As O’Brien attests, those wishing to wrestle with the emotional style that
succeeded the Movement need to come to grips with the prose of A. Alvarez.
Alvarez was one of the first to identify the promise of Gunn, Hill, Hughes,
Plath and Porter, and, more than the academic critics who followed him,
Alvarez it was who helped establish their reputations, Plath’s and Hughes’s
in particular. Whether as commentator, populariser or provocateur, Alvarez
not only helped create the taste by which these poets were enjoyed, his prose
affected how they would regard their own and each other’s work. Moreover,
though Alvarez’s prose is often at odds with more recent criticism and
poetic taste, and, at times, with my own views and interpretations, his is
criticism of a high order which brings into relief both why its subjects were
first lauded and why, and how much, they should continue to be prized.
One key document whose existence has not been forgotten—by literary
historians at least—is the key document to be examined by this book:
Alvarez’s 1962 Penguin anthology The New Poetry. A bestseller on its publi-
cation, and a school and university textbook for two generations, The New
Poetry is, alongside Robert Conquest’s 1956 Movement anthology New
Lines, the most discussed poetry anthology of the post-war era. Since it
first appeared, there has been scarcely an account of post-war British verse
which has not sought to orientate itself by referring to Alvarez’s book and
the arguments of its introductory essay ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’.
Randall Stevenson’s volume of the Oxford English Literary History, covering
the years 1960–2000, would be a recent and influential, and, by and large,
informed and informative example.2 More widely, Alvarez’s introduction
to The New Poetry has been much more frequently endorsed than it has
been understood.
The idea of a popular critic arguing against the Movement, against the
provincialism of English verse and for ambition, experiment and American
influence is one thing, the detail of Alvarez’s actual argument is another,
2 Randall Stevenson, Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 12, 1960–2000: The
Last of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 167–209.
P re f ace x iii
and conflation of the two has served literary history less well than it has
rhetorical convenience. So it is worth making clear at the outset that
Alvarez did not give general endorsement either to American influence or
to latter-day modernism. Much of what comes to mind when these now are
mentioned, and much of what has been championed by poets and critics in
the years since, has no welcome in either The New Poetry or in Alvarez’s later
criticism. Alvarez did not advocate the work of Allen Ginsberg and the Beats
or Charles Olson and the Black Mountain poets, nor did he trumpet the
emergence of John Ashbery and the New York School. Instead, the contem-
porary American poets Alvarez admired were what are usually termed
‘confessionals’, and what Alvarez would go on to call ‘extremists’. Above
all, Alvarez advocated the examples of Robert Lowell and John Berryman,
the two American poets he put at the start of what was supposed to be an
anthology of British poetry in order to shame and instruct those who came
after. The work of two further Americans was added to The New Poetry’s
second edition: Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.
The New Poetry did attempt to predict and steer the progress of Anglo-
American verse, and would go on to have as much success at both as any
anthology was likely to achieve. Nevertheless, the continuing usefulness
of The New Poetry as a prophetic work able to scry the rights and wrong
of post-war poetic history has shrunk as that history has proved various
in ways that no commentator could have quite predicted. The New Poetry
was always a book that answered to its moment, and indeed its importance
was, and is, very much bound up with how it did so. Nineteen sixty-two was
the year of Adolf Eichmann’s execution, in May, and the year of the Cuban
Missile Crisis, in September. At no point since the end of the Second World
War were thoughts of ‘the concentration camps, of genocide and the threat
of nuclear war’, all referred to by Alvarez in his introduction to The New
Poetry, so much in the public mind.3
Facing up to these may have seemed less compellingly pertinent to the
task of the contemporary poet through the years that followed, but that does
not necessarily refute the argument that it was so in 1962. Moreover, The
New Poetry’s timeliness and lack of timelessness give it a literary historical
importance a less period-bound anthology would not possess: what was
once contemporary pulse-taking is now a significant record of the mood and
obsessions of the time. Behind Alvarez’s stated wish to move beyond gentility
as a governing principle in British poetry is an implicit wish to move beyond
gentility as a governing principle in British life. Behind Alvarez’s discussions
3 A. Alvarez, ed. The New Poetry, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1966), p. 22.
x iv T H E A LVA R E Z G E N E R AT I O N
of literary seriousness is a critique of an idea of what should constitute the

socially serious. Indeed, ascertaining what it was that Alvarez, Plath or
Porter meant by ‘seriousness’, how their use recalled but differed from the
use of prior poets, critics and philosophers, is a way of understanding more
broadly how, despite apparent continuities in the vocabulary, the poetic and
critical language of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s bent to the pressures of changed
social and emotional reality.
I wouldn’t have written this book if I did not believe that discussion of
shared poetic sensibilities and generations can be worthwhile. Still, it must
also be admitted that talk of the sensibility of a generation will always be
somewhat presumptuous. The sensibility I examine here is not the sensibility
of every poet who came of age with The New Poetry, nor even of all the poets
whose work was included in its two editions. Not only did this sensibility have
little purchase on those younger writers, such as Alan Brownjohn and Anthony
Thwaite, who took on the Movement style, poets included in The New Poetry
such as Charles Tomlinson and Christopher Middleton, and poets outside it
such as Roy Fisher and Gael Turnbull, were finding their own international,
neo-modernist alternatives to Movement ideals and practice. Furthermore,
even the poets who are examined closely by this book produced some of their
finest poetry outside, or comparatively unconcerned with, the emotional style
that is its focus. I have nothing here to say of the more Australian Peter Porter
or the more American Thom Gunn, of the Geoffrey Hill of Tenebrae or the
Ted Hughes of Season Songs. And, to anyone who would point out that this
is some of their best work, work by which their overall achievement should in
part be judged, I would only respond: I agree.
All that conceded, the sensibility here under examination is one that
touched not only Gunn, Hill, Hughes, Plath and Porter, but others among
their contemporaries, especially the poets of the Group. Nigh on ubiquitous
in the mid-1960s, the Group has become increasingly unfashionable and has
excited correspondingly little critical interest. This book is no bid for the
Group’s en masse critical rehabilitation, but I do pay it some attention, for
not only is the Group an informing backdrop to Peter Porter, who, like Peter
Redgrove, Philip Hobsbaum, Martin Bell, Edward Lucie-Smith and George
MacBeth, was one of the Group’s core members, reference to the Group also
helps clarify what were general tendencies of the time rather than individual
authorial quirks, and a Group perspective can help show just how inter-
connected the poets of this study actually were. Moreover, in the Group’s
chairmen, Philip Hobsbaum and Edward Lucie-Smith, we find poet-critics
and catalysts of poetic activity who, like Donald Davie and Ian Hamilton,
would vie with Alvarez as a commentating influence upon the poetry of the
1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
P re f ace xv
I devote some space to the processes of publication of The New Poetry as

well as the other high-volume titles of 1962 which first shaped and sounded
the poetry boom of the 1960s: the second edition of Kenneth Allott’s hugely
popular Contemporary Verse, Donald Hall’s Contemporary American
Poetry, the first two volumes of the Penguin Modern Poets, and the Faber
Selected Poems of Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. Literary critics, when they
take account of the publishing contexts of poetry at all, typically concern
themselves with the single-authored poetry collection and the finely-crafted
small edition put out by a small press, regarding the particularities of large-
scale editions from large publishers to be uninteresting on the grounds
that poets typically have next to no influence over such books’ appearance.
Nevertheless, in the mid-twentieth century, it was with the anthologies that
contemporary poetry found a large readership, and it was with their contents
that was established, to a considerable degree, the poetic canon we now
inherit. While contingencies of commercial publication as well as the ideals
of editors may have helped determine their composition, these anthologies
affected both how most readers regarded the poems they contained and how
poets, included and excluded, conceived of their own work in relation to that
of their peers. Moreover, not only is it not always easy to extract the clear
unmediated product of poetic genius from messy contingency, commerce
and the editorial hand, it is not always the case that poetry and its readers
would be better off if they could be.
The poets discussed here are, as one would expect, subject to the influ-
ence of earlier writers, influence that could, depending on one’s critical
credo, be examined in the Oedipal terms favoured by Harold Bloom or as an
expression of allusion and gratitude after the manner of Christopher Ricks.
Nevertheless, poetic influence and anxiety is not always a matter of fathers
and sons, and poets are not always gracious. My preoccupation is less with
the ways the poems of one poet behave towards those of a poet of another
generation than with the ways in which contemporaries’ poems behave
amongst themselves. There have been generations in which such behaviour
can be fairly described as friendly, the poems tokens of and part of actual
friendship—a state of affairs which itself does not rule out friction or compe-
tition. The poets discussed in these pages behave much more like siblings,
the operations of influence upon them may perhaps at times be described
as comradely, certainly as emulative, but, most typically, they are rivalrous.
At the centre of this book are one year, 1962, and one poet, Sylvia Plath.
Plath’s friendship with A. Alvarez and her strong interest in ‘Beyond the
Gentility Principle’ have excited surprisingly little detailed scrutiny, and
Plath’s relationship to the wider emotional style traced in this book and to
the generation of poets she joined in England has attracted less notice than
x vi T H E A LVA R E Z G E N E R AT I O N
one might expect. However, as was well indicated by Robin Peel’s study of
Plath and Cold War politics, Writing Back, the time has come to re-situate
Plath’s work, not merely in her life, but into her place and times.4
Alvarez’s taste in British, American and Central European poetry was to
become a significant factor in the writing, publishing and reading of poetry
throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s. So, while in Part One of
this study A. Alvarez’s criticism is by and large referred to as a guide and
critical counterpart to the poetic sensibility already forming more or less
independently of it in the years before The New Poetry was published, in
Parts Two and Three it is often looked to as writing that itself influenced
as well described the course of contemporary poetry. The association of
what Alvarez was now terming ‘extremism’ with great bodily and mental
risk and, especially, with suicide, precipitated a strong negative reaction
among both poets and critics that was itself to be a notable trend in the
poetry and criticism of the 1960s and 1970s. Two poet-critics formulated
detailed poetics that were in part intended as robust responses to Alvarez’s
extremism: Donald Davie, whose debate with Alvarez in the first issue of Ian
Hamilton’s Review was only the first of a number of public disagreements
with him, and, latterly, and from a younger generation and different sensi-
bility, Veronica Forrest-Thomson. My discussion of Forrest-Thomson’s work
acts as a prelude to my consideration of the meditations upon suicide and
poetry made by her champion Peter Porter, most notably those within the
elegiac collection The Cost of Seriousness.
Aspects of the poetics as well as the subject matter of the later poetry of
Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes can, like Peter Porter’s, be seen to have evolved
in reaction to bereavement by suicide and in opposition to the perceived
suicidal tendencies of extremism. In the cases of Gunn and Hughes, this
reaction forms part of a more general turn taken by their poetry against
the emotional style that defined the poems of their youth. The ascertain-
ment of how much these subsequent revisions and recantations convince
leads onto wider reflections of the original virtues and vices of the extremist
style and its alternatives. The book concludes with a look at the legacy of
the generation of poets in its pages and their emotional style, at the later
work of Geoffrey Hill, the form and success of the generational anthologies
that have succeeded The New Poetry and what lessons the earlier anthology
might have for the changed poetry world of the present.
4 Robin Peel, Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics (Cranbury, NJ,
London and Ontario: Rosemont, 2002).
PA R T I
C hapter O ne
Beginnings: Oxford and Cambridge

Poetry in the Early 1950s
T he contributors list to Oxford Poetry of 1953, edited by Donald Hall

and Geoffrey Hill, reads like that of a broad-minded poetry magazine
of the 1960s. Names on the list include, alongside those of Hill and Hall
themselves: A. Alvarez, Alan Brownjohn, Jenny Joseph, J.E.M. [Edward]
Lucie-Smith, George Macbeth and Anthony Thwaite. Oxford Poetry and
publications like it bear out a general truth: most of the English poets who
came to prominence the early 1960s had, like their editors and critics, been
the student poets of the Oxford and Cambridge of a decade before.
Oxford Poetry was a product of the Fantasy Press. This, the most signifi-
cant poetry publishing venture in Oxford or Cambridge in the 1950s,
was started in 1952 after Michael Shanks, then President of the Oxford
University Poetry Society, linked up with the painter and printer Oscar
Mellor. The pamphlets the press turned out were slim—five or six poems—
but they were well produced, and they were keenly read, as was Oxford
Poetry. Michael Shanks’s successor was Donald Hall, an American who had
been a friend and follower of the poet Richard Wilbur at Harvard. The recip-
ient of a Henry Fellowship, Hall came to Christ Church, Oxford in 1951 and
quickly became friendly with Oxford’s nascent literary critics—Hall recalls
how ‘George Steiner, Al Alvarez, and I were a little troika’.1 Already a grad-
uate and slightly older than those now around him, Hall offered the young
English poets of Oxford a mentoring service. He also introduced them to
1 Donald Hall and Ian Hamilton, Donald Hall in Conversation with Ian
Hamilton (London: Between the Lines, 2000), p. 39.
4 T H E A LVA R E Z G E N E R AT I O N
the American verse of the time.2 Hall and Mellor were to produce pamphlets
10–18 of the Fantasy series, pamphlets including those of Geoffrey Hill
(11), Adrienne Rich (12), A. Alvarez (15) in 1952, the Cambridge import
Thom Gunn (16) and the Oxfordian Anthony Thwaite (17) in 1953. Hall’s
successor, Oxford undergraduate George MacBeth, brought in older poets
associated with what was starting to be termed the Movement, publishing
Donald Davie (19), Philip Larkin (21) and Kingsley Amis (22) in 1954. It was
the Fantasy Press too which in that year published the first edition of Thom
Gunn’s Fighting Terms.
Studying English at Oxford in the early 1950s meant the imbibing of
large measures of philology and dashes of old-fashioned appreciative criti-
cism, but no modern literature. Students could be inspired by the lectures
of C.S. Lewis, bored by the lectures of J.R.R. Tolkien and taught by dons
who thought ‘magic’ a good description of the workings of a literary text.
T.S. Eliot might as well never have existed. Because of this, some under-
graduates looked enviously to English Literature as it was being studied in
Cambridge and in the universities of the United States. Cambridge critics
such as F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards and William Empson (the last already
long-exiled from Cambridge itself) were making literary criticism and the
study of English look both more intellectually demanding and more urgent.
In America, New Criticism, a name designated by John Crow Ransom’s
1941 study The New Criticism, was at its zenith. Ransom and others such
as W.K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, R.P. Blackmur, Allen Tate and Monroe
Beardsley, informed by the ideas of Eliot and the practice of I.A. Richards,
rigorously discounted matters such as authorial intention, viewed the poem
as a self-sufficient made object and would undertake detailed examinations
of a poem’s tensions, paradoxes and ambivalences.3 Still, while the New
Critics may have made academic English, especially the analysis of poetry,
look a discipline capable of matching up to the sciences, they also exhibited
a religious devotion to the sanctity of the text and an interest in Southern
Agrarianism at odds with modern mechanistic and industrialised society.
Hoping to bring Oxford English up to date and into line with such devel-
opments, A. Alvarez and Oxford contemporaries David Thompson, John
Miles and Graham Martin founded a Critical Society. The meetings were
to be addressed by F.R. Leavis, William Empson and a host of the American
2 Recalled by Alan Brownjohn in interview with the author, 10 September 2010.

3 My brief summary here owes something to that in Terry Eagleton, Literary
Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 48–49.
B eginnings 5
New Critics.4 The poet, critic and novelist John Wain, a friend and contem-
porary of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, and the critic Frank Kermode,
both now teaching at Reading University, attended and offered advice and
support. The lecture halls were packed out.
Along with this new taste in criticism came the wish to write verse like
that of William Empson, a wish as manifest in Alvarez as it was in Wain,
and attested by the knotted, academic—and surprisingly myth-filled—
Fantasy pamphlet Alvarez produced at the time. This Empsonianism of
Wain and Alvarez, and not the poetry of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin or
Donald Davie, was the poetry originally most associated with the term ‘the
Movement’. Indeed, that association was to be the reason New Lines did not
link itself with the Movement by name and why Robert Conquest had, in
his original draft introduction to the anthology, attacked the Movement as
‘producing verse of notable aridity’.5
Oxford’s most conspicuously talented young poet of the time would also
show a marked interest in Empson and a poetry of ambiguity, and yet, from
the start, would write poetry markedly unlike, if not antipathetic to, that of
the Movement, whether defined by Conquest or by anyone else. Anthony
Thwaite recalls how at the Oxford Poetry Society ‘this youth in the corner
stood up and recited “Genesis”; I felt like Larkin when he met Kingsley Amis,
you know, that “here was a talent greater than my own”.’ 6 The youth in ques-
tion was Geoffrey Hill. Others who encountered Hill at this time were to be
similarly awed. Having asked Hill to submit to the Fantasy Press, Donald
Hall received Hill’s manuscript and ‘could not believe it. You can imagine
reading these poems suddenly in 1952. I was amazed. I remember waking up
in the night, putting on the light and reading them again.’ 7
Hall befriended Hill, probably introducing him to the work of Robert
4 See A. Alvarez, Where Did It All Go Right? (London: Richard Cohen Books,
1999), pp. 114–115.
5 Robert Conquest, ed., New Lines: An Anthology (London: Macmillan, 1956),
p. xiv. That Conquest wished to associate the label ‘the Movement’ with the
Empson-influenced verse of Wain and Alvarez was revealed by Karl Miller
and is referred to by Alan Jenkins, ‘Thom Gunn’s Postures for Combat’, in
The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Davie, Gunn and their
Contemporaries, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009),
pp. 187–203: p. 196.
6 Quoted in Robert Potts, ‘The Praise Singer’, Guardian, 10 August 2002.
www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/aug/10/featuresreviews.guardianreview15.
Accessed 10 November 2011.
7 Robert Potts, ‘The Praise Singer’.
Lowell, a poet whose wrought densities and ambiguities, religiosity and

studied impersonality at this time made him very much a poet of the New
Criticism and a natural successor to the T.S. Eliot-influenced Americans
already admired by Hill, notably Allen Tate.8 Hill’s interest in the American
academic poetry of the 1940s came with a devotion to the British anti-
academic poetry of the same decade: to the heavy-stressed, punning,
oracular poetry of Dylan Thomas and George Barker, but also to the soldier
poets Keith Douglas and—a taste more peculiar to Hill—Sidney Keyes.
It is Lowell or Tate whose formative influence on Hill is stressed by Hill’s
critics. But the British Neo-Romantic poets of the 1940s are every bit as
significant to the shaping of Hill’s style and attitudes. Take, for instance,
these lines from Sidney Keyes’s ‘The Bards’:
their raftered halls

Hung with hard holly; tongues confusion; slow
Beat of the heated blood in those great palaces.9
‘Merlin’, which featured in Hill’s Fantasy pamphlet, and which is the best
of those very early poems, contains the lament: ‘Arthur, Elaine, Mordred;
they are all gone/ Among the raftered galleries of bone’. Here Hill/Merlin
considers the greater number of the dead in a manner that also appears to
remember the dead heroes of the Second World War. Deliberately or not,
the echo of Keyes’s lines is a means of including Keyes the poet and soldier
within that slain Arthurian host. Nor does the influence of these lines of
Keyes stop there. They reverberate through Hill’s poems down the years,
whether in the ‘tongue’s atrocities’ of ‘Annunciations’, or in blood and ‘groves
of legendary holly’ in ‘Mercian Hymns’.10 We hear too the bard ‘Robed in
his servitude’ in Keyes’s ‘strike the strings and muster/ The shards of pain
to harmony’ and find a vision of the poet with a supposed patron negoti-
ating the difficulties of an audience in a manner that looks forward through
‘Annunciations’ to the ‘stubborn blinded pride’ of Hill’s later work.11
With such poetic activity and achievement going on in Oxford, it might
8 Hall recalls: ‘I remember talking about Lowell with Geoffrey. I might have
introduced him to Lowell’s poems. I’d brought them with me.’ Hall and
Hamilton, Donald Hall in Conversation with Ian Hamilton, p. 37.
9 Sidney Keyes, Collected Poems, ed. Michael Meyer, int. Jeffrey Wainwright,
memoirs Milein Cosman, Michael Meyer and James Lucas (Manchester:
Carcanet, 2002), p. 41.
10 Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 84, 132.
11 Keyes, Collected Poems, p. 41.
B eginnings 7
be thought her student poets would be feeling confident in their output and
ability. Yet this was not, it seems, the case. Edward Lucie-Smith recalls:
We Oxford poets had an inferiority complex about our Cambridge contem-

poraries. The chief cause was Thom Gunn. Though his first collection,
Fighting Terms, did not appear until 1954, the poems Gunn was publishing
in magazines were already much discussed, and were causing ripples in a
literary world well beyond our own student environment.12
Reviewing early ’50s Oxford from the perspective of the mid 1970s,
Lucie-Smith provides a straightforward explanation for Gunn’s success: ‘a
Cambridge passion for Eng. Lit. was combined with a rather taking bully-
boy strut’, a conclusion Lucie-Smith backs up by quoting the opening verse
of ‘A Mirror for Poets’:
It was a violent time. Wheels, racks, and fires

In every writer’s mouth, and not mere rant.
Certain shrewd herdsman, between twisted wires
Of penalty folding the realm, were thanked
For organizing spies and secret police
By richness in the flock, which they could fleece.13
Gunn’s poem may evince the renewed interest in traditional formal resources
that would characterise poetry by the Movement, but it also shows marked
differences from a typical Movement poem. It is less polished in either its
rhymes or its metre than is characteristic contemporary work of Kingsley
Amis, Donald Davie, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings or John Wain.
Likewise, Gunn’s poem shows none of the love of reason, common sense,
proportion and the comfortable life usually associated with those slightly
older poets. It also evinces a different attitude to the past. In Kingsley Amis’s
Lucky Jim, Jim Dixon reckons the
hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chiang Kai-shek, Senator

McCarthy himself, would … seem a light price to pay for no longer being in
the Middle Ages. Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as
miserable, as cock-sure, as bad at art, as dismally ludicrous or wrong … ?14
12 Edward Lucie-Smith, The Burnt Child (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975), p. 163.
13 Thom Gunn, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 24.
14 Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (London: Victor Gollancz, 1954), p. 88.
True, Dixon’s thoughts aren’t directed at Gunn’s prized Elizabethans.

Nevertheless, their whole attitude to the pre-modern, and especially the pre-
Enlightenment, its, art, ethos and unpleasantness is starkly at variance with
the non-progressive history given by Gunn’s poem, whose title, ‘A Mirror for
Poets’, makes a case: the desperate heroics of poets in the Elizabethan age
are the glass in which poets should still see themselves reflected.
With a different attitude to the past comes a different attitude to the
present. Peered into, Gunn’s mirror seems to reflect back poets not so
much of another age as of another place. ‘[S]pies and secret police’, torture,
the horrid attractiveness of the violent despot: ‘Her state canopied by the
glamour of pain.’15 The twisted wires folding this flock seem snipped from
the Iron Curtain, the totalitarian state of Elizabeth presented in terms of the
dictatorships of the 1930s and ’40s, or of the Eastern Bloc of the 1950s. At
the same time, state violence is met by resistant personal violence, and this
connected to poetic vitality. Rather than the impersonally elegiac, late ’40s
manner of young Hill, or the calm good sense and diminished realism that
would become associated with the Movement, Gunn offered a way in which
young poets, whose experience of National Service would, for the most part,
have been, like Gunn’s, inactive if not tedious, could turn their University
studies into vigorous, threatening activity.
The guiding intellectual force behind this early poetry of Gunn was the
teaching and writing of F.R. Leavis, at this time a fellow of Downing College,
Cambridge. Leavis made it possible to believe that the proper reading of
literature was, or at least should be, dynamic action. Gunn later said of
Leavis: ‘he had a very interesting view of literature, seeing it as a part of life.
That was what was so wonderful. Literature is not like a fine wine that you
taste and judge by comparison with other wines. You compare a book to a
person, for example, or to an action.’16 The passivity of tasting is dropped
for doing; the appeal of literature is not merely literary but judged by action
and felt life.
Leavis also had a Romantic confidence that
Poetry matters because of the kind of poet who is more alive than other
people, more alive in his own age. He is, as it were, at the most conscious
15 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 24.

16 Thom Gunn and James Campbell, Thom Gunn in Conversation with James
Campbell (London: Between the Lines, 2000), p. 22.
B eginnings 9
point of the race in his time. … He is unusually sensitive, unusually aware,

more sincere and more himself than the ordinary man can be.17
Such description, then, made becoming a poet of note not merely a matter
of iambs and images, but of becoming one who would exhibit the higher
awareness of the age, a higher sincerity.
The great sway the teaching and opinions of F.R. and his wife Q.D.
Leavis held in Cambridge, the interest in Cambridge criticism in Oxford,
as evinced by the Critical Society, ensured that other Oxbridge poets of
Gunn’s generation would be marked by the imprint of their ideas and their
attitudes. Geoffrey Hill has a strong Leavisite streak.18 For all his antipathy
to academic analysis, so too does Gunn’s Cambridge junior Ted Hughes.
D.H. Lawrence, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, a little
John Donne, the tastes of the young Hughes were very much the product of
Leavisite Cambridge.
It was no accident that, come 1962, A. Alvarez’s ‘Beyond the Gentility
Principle’ would begin and end with citation of Leavis’s views. It begins by
recalling how F.R. Leavis trumpeted the revolution of T.S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound in 1932 and ends with Alvarez’s belief in the possibility that the new
poetry could bring about what F.R. Leavis denied: the possibility of recon-
ciling the spirits of T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. That Alvarez could use
Leavis as a common point of reference in the introduction to a paperback
anthology intended for a large readership indicates not just Leavis’s influ-
ence on an editor and the poets he chose to include but also how wide the
dissemination of Leavis’s views had become by 1962, and that this dissem-
ination had created an audience likely to be sympathetic to criticism that
could present itself as carrying on from where Leavis had left off.
To return to Cambridge and to Thom Gunn and ‘A Mirror for Poets’.
Gunn’s poem is underpinned by a thoroughly Leavisite position on the
organic society of the Elizabethan dramatist, one backed up by books such
as L.C. Knights’s Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson,19 where Jonson’s
17 F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary

Situation (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with Chatto and
Windus, 1972), p. 16.
18 This is noted by Christopher Ricks in True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony
Hecht and Robert Lowell under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 28–29.
19 L.C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1937).
‘flail of comedy showed coherence in society.’20 This coherence in the society

of Elizabethan England, where ‘the boundaries met/ of life and life’, stands
opposed, not just to Jim Dixon’s preference for the modern world, but also
to the coherence of an eighteenth century of refined taste, chaste practice
and pure diction appealing to an enlightened reading public that would
be admired by the Movement poet-critic Donald Davie.21 In Q.D. Leavis’s
Fiction and the Reading Public, it is asserted that: ‘Elizabethan civilization
… as a whole presents to us—in Shakespeare, for instance—an inexplicable
mixture of the profound and the naïve, the fine and the gross, the subtle and
the crude’.22 Surveying Elizabethan pamphlets, Q.D. Leavis concludes:
By modern standards they show an insulting disregard of the readers’

convenience: the dashing tempo, the helter-skelter progress, the unexpected
changes of direction and tone so that the reader is constantly faced with a
fresh front, the stream of casual allusion and shifting metaphor, leave us as
giddy as the Elizabethan dramas leave us stunned.23
Pure diction, good taste, clear syntax, an even tone, chastity and control of
metaphor: all the virtues of New Lines and the Movement are alien to such a
critical temperament. In such matters, it is not the Movement but its oppo-
nents who are the more Leavisite. From the Leavises would come many of
the terms and criteria that would be used to reject the Movement in general
and Larkin in particular, and these would endorse one vision of coher-
ence in (past) society at the expense of other less welcome and more recent
social cohesions. When, for instance, Thom Gunn, A. Alvarez and others
use ‘suburban’ in their prose as a term of disapprobation, it is a recognisably
Leavisite scorn, born of the opinion, expressed in Culture and Environment,
that: ‘Instead of the community, urban or rural, we have, almost universally,
suburbanism.’24
Q.D. Leavis’s analysis of Shakespeare and Elizabethan poetry portrays
purity of diction as very much a social as well as a poetic hindrance. Such
too is the view of other similarly minded critics of the period. Patrick
Cruttwell accounts for Shakespeare’s coming into his own by writing of

21 Gunn, Collected Poems, pp. 25, 24.
22 Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, intr. John Sutherland (London:
Pimlico, Random House, 2000; first published 1932), p. 89.
23 Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, p. 88.
24 F.R. Leavis, Culture and Environment (London: Chatto and Windus, 1933),
p. 1.
B eginnings 11
how ‘Language such as this breaks through the barriers of poetic diction
exactly as the characters who use it break through the conventions which
surround them’.25
Far from Cambridge (and partly as a result of the influence of Yvor
Winters, about whom more anon), Thom Gunn would come to disagree
with the valorisation of the later as opposed to the early Elizabethans, the
view that the ‘Daniels and Draytons and Fulke Grevilles’ were ‘worthy and
honourable writers, but irredeemably limited—and outside their limits
was the capacity to change their tune to a changing age’, but this was a
belief widely held and forcefully presented, and there is little doubt that
it was Gunn’s view too before other views and wider reading changed his
mind.26 What emerges in Cruttwell’s Shakespearean Moment (which is
also the Donnean moment) is a much-praised desertion of ‘the old kind of
rhythm, a smooth mellifluousness, and the old kind of mentality, a prefer-
ence for simple and agreeable contents and an aversion from complexity
and toughness.’27
Reading how Cruttwell goes on to bemoan what happened to English
poetry when the Shakespearean moment was over makes it easy to see
how in the years ahead Ted Hughes could come to compound the analysis
of Cruttwell with the language of A. Alvarez. As Neil Corcoran points out,
‘When [Hughes] says in “Myths, Metres, Rhythms” that “Shakespeare’s
hybridization and cross-breeding, for all its superior vigour, multiple
genetic resource and incidental, exotic, half-caste beauty, became [after the
Restoration] a barbarous offence against gentility”’, Hughes’s terms may be
A. Alvarez’s but his sentiments are Cruttwell’s.28
Still, the coherence in Cambridge society was not total, even among
Leavisites. In 1952, Philip Hobsbaum, who was studying under F.R. Leavis at
Downing College, decided to begin a verse-speaking society and advertised
for members. At the inaugural meeting, a natural science student named
Peter Redgrove quickly impressed Hobsbaum by telling someone fumbling
for ‘The Exequy’ of Henry King that the poem could be found on page 203 of
25 Patrick Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment and its Place in the Poetry of
the 17th Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954; second impression 1970),
p. 59.
26 Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment, p. 62.
27 Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment, p. 63.
28 Neil Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), p. 190. The original observation that Hughes must
have read and learned from Patrick Cruttwell was John Lyon’s.
Herbert Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems.29 This first bond between
Hobsbaum and Redgrove (who was regularly sitting in on Leavis’s lectures)
was followed by an early division. Hobsbaum read out Gunn’s poem ‘Carnal
Knowledge’, which had recently appeared in the Cambridge magazine
Granta, and which was now serving ‘as a talking point for literati in cafés
and common-rooms.’30 To Hobsbaum, the poem was ‘slick’ and ‘execrable’. 31
Not so to Redgrove. Indeed, Redgrove and a friend were planning to publish
two poems by Gunn, ‘Here Come the Saints’ and ‘Hide and Seek’, in a new
magazine they were setting up—delta.32
Unpacking the word ‘slick’ and second guessing the young Hobsbaum,
I would hazard Hobsbaum disliked the poem’s debt to Empson and that
he might also have disliked what was revealed of the poet’s sexuality.
Nevertheless, what must have most irked him is the conscious posing that
takes place within the poem. Its opening words, ‘Even in bed I pose’, might
be a sad confession, but can also read as a manifesto for a lack of sincerity,
the poem’s refrain of variations on ‘You know I know you know I know
you know’ a mise en abyme of two persons knowingness that is contrary
to the honesty of either the spoken word or of the human body. Within the
poem, the old alliance between nakedness and truth is dissolved: ‘an acute
girl would suspect/ That my self is not like my body, bare.’33 What might
have been a Donne-like depiction of ‘His Mistris Going to Bed’, has the poet
naked first but, upon reflection, not naked after all.
Jean-Paul Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness (which Gunn may have
not yet have read but whose disseminated influence is already traceable in
Gunn’s work): ‘My body as it is for me does not appear to me in the midst
of the world.’34 For Sartre, in a slightly different way from the way that is
depicted in ‘Carnal Knowledge’ but one which Gunn would go on to explore:
‘I am possessed by the Other; the Other’s look fashions my body in its
nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as
I shall never see it.’35 To adapt the Eliotic terminology that might have been
used to discuss the poem in Cambridge at the time, the poem reflects upon
29 For a first-hand account of this meeting, see Philip Hobsbaum, ‘The Redgrove
Momentum: 1952–2003’, The Dark Horse, 15, Summer 2003, pp. 24–31: p. 25.
30 Hobsbaum, ‘The Redgrove Momentum’, p. 24.
31 Hobsbaum, ‘The Redgrove Momentum’, p. 24.
32 delta, No. 1. Winter 1953, no page numbers.
34 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, intr. Mary
Warnock (London and New York: Routledge, 1958), p. 303.
35 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 364.
B eginnings 13
a dissociation of erotic sensibility, a space between ‘breast and lips’, heart

and word, ‘thighs and head’ and genitalia and intellect, ‘So great, we might
as well not be in bed.’36
The erotic poetry of unfeeling toughness was a territory Gunn would
come to mark as his own—decades later, Gunn’s mock personal ad. ‘The
Search’ alerts possible respondents: ‘insensitivity a big +’. 37 Through the
1950s the pose was to become a defining preoccupation, whether for the
poet himself or for those he watched. For instance, a look at ‘Elvis Presley’
in Gunn’s next book, The Sense of Movement (1957) prompts the observa-
tion: ‘Whether he poses or is real, no cat/ Bothers to say: the pose held is a
stance’.38 ‘Carnal Knowledge’, however, seems less at ease about its insensi-
tivity and dishonesty, for the protagonist is not as insensitive as he would
appear to wish to be: his stammers meet her tears, that he knows of ‘no
emotion we can share’ is cause for anything but rejoicing. 39
A year after he had first disliked ‘Carnal Knowledge’, Hobsbaum was
himself editing delta and invited to meet Gunn, by this time already grad-
uated and, in the little world of Oxbridge poetry at least, something of a
celebrity. During their talk, Gunn explained to Hobsbaum the technical
inadequacy of D.J. Enright, before thrusting at the young Hobsbaum poems
by Philip Larkin that either Gunn or John Wain had copied out. Hobsbaum
recalled: ‘this was what I’d been looking for; that’s why every one of my four
books has an epigraph from Larkin. This was plot, scene, circumstance.’40
Andrew Motion writes in his life of Larkin, ‘“Fantasy Poets, Philip
Larkin, Number 21” arrived in March [1954], but attracted almost no atten-
tion’, a statement no doubt true so far as sales figures and press coverage are
concerned.41 Yet as the Gunn/Hobsbaum meeting shows, those people who
did come across the pamphlet took very careful note of the poems it contains.
(That A. Alvarez was to become one of the pre-publication subscribers to
The Less Deceived was presumably largely down to its existence).42 In that
pamphlet, Thom Gunn would have read poems including ‘At Grass’, a poem
which, like ‘Church Going’, was published in the Spectator that same year.
36 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 364.

37 Thom Gunn, Boss Cupid (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 79.
40 Gerry Cambridge and Philip Hobsbaum, ‘Philip Hobsbaum in Conversation’,
The Dark Horse, No. 14, Summer 2002, pp. 30–50: p. 38.
41 Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (London: Faber and Faber,
1993), p. 240.
42 Motion, Philip Larkin, p. 262.
Gunn’s discovery of Larkin was, very slightly, earlier and it was a

discovery of poems which seem less archetypically Larkinesque. Gunn
later remembered:
Philip Larkin was an extraordinary revelation when I read him in 1954. I can
remember the anthology I read him in; I was also in that anthology. And there
was a poem I really admired tremendously, called ‘Wedding Wind’. It’s a very
Lawrentian poem, not a Larkinesque Larkin poem, and it’s very good too.43
This was the unironic, unsuburban and passionate Larkin, the Larkin which
Gunn continued to value, in spite of those other contrary Larkins whose
values and influence he would come to deprecate. The anthology Gunn
had been reading was Springtime, a selection of young poets edited by G.S.
Fraser and Ian Fletcher, two veterans of wartime Cairo and the milieu of
Personal Landscape poets such as Lawrence Durrell and Keith Douglas.44
Fraser and Fletcher may have thought Larkin a find but, seeming to think
him Irish (Larkin was living in Belfast at the time), they knew as little about
the poet as did Gunn.
The brief selection of Larkin in Springtime includes, along with ‘Wedding
Wind’, ‘Wants’, ‘Coming’, ‘Deceptions’, ‘Going’ and ‘Since the Majority of
Me’. The Lawrentianism of ‘Wedding Wind’ might appeal to those who
shared F.R. Leavis’s veneration for D.H. Lawrence, but these were poems no
longer guided by the late sixteenth- and earlier seventeenth-century poetic
golden age admired by the Cambridge critics and their poetic followers.
Fraser and Fletcher mention that a friend—a friend who had, it seems,
recently purchased a copy of Donald Davie’s Purity of Diction in English
Verse—found that some of Larkin’s lines ‘reminded her a little of the second
half of the eighteenth century: a smoothness that is not vapid, a weightiness
that is not jolting or rough, as in Goldsmith or Johnson.’45 Larkin’s initial
impact on Gunn made the latter not up to date Elizabethan but deriva-
tive. Kenneth Allott, when introducing Gunn in Contemporary Verse, an
anthology to which we shall return, points out that ‘Thoughts on Unpacking’
is in ‘Philip Larkin Country’.46 Indeed, ‘Thoughts on Unpacking’ is a poem
with not just a typical Larkin scenario, but with typical Larkin language,
43 Gunn and Campbell, Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell, p. 24.
44 Springtime: An Anthology of Young Poets and Writers, ed. G.S. Fraser and Ian
Fletcher (London: Peter Owen Limited, 1953).
45 Springtime, p. 7.
46 The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, ed. Kenneth Allott, revised edition
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 374.
B eginnings 15
containing phrases such as ‘unpacked, unlabelled, somehow followed too’,

‘seeming to sneer “This is the past you shared”, ‘the diminished luggage’.47
This is tribute to Larkin, but only in the way that imitation is the sincerest
form of flattery.
During the spring of 1954—so, about the same time as he was being
introduced to Larkin by Thom Gunn—Philip Hobsbaum also met fellow
Cambridge undergraduate Ted Hughes. It took a while before Hughes made
it known to Hobsbaum and mutual friend Peter Redgrove that he was a poet,
but in due course Hughes submitted to delta.48 What these poems were,
Hobsbaum did not later recall, other than to say that they were ‘Hopkins
inflated by reminiscences of Yeats and Dylan Thomas’, a combination which
didn’t much appeal.49 Not only was Hobsbaum in training to be man of firm
and fierce critical opinion, to a young editor who had just discovered D.J.
Enright and Philip Larkin, Hopkins inflated by Yeats and Dylan Thomas
would be synonymous with the persistence of the Neo-Romantic style that
such Movement poets were now making look overblown.
Hobsbaum was won over to Hughes’s talent by an early, uncollected
poem entitled ‘The Woman with Such High Heels She Looked Dangerous’.
But this does not mean that Hobsbaum’s first impressions of Hughes’s poetic
origins and project were much mistaken. (Hobsbaum himself, following his
disenchantment with the work of Hughes’s later years, would deem Hughes’s
whole career as being that of ‘an intelligent Dylan Thomas’).50 There is
plenty of ‘Hopkins inflated by reminiscences of Yeats and Dylan Thomas’ in
Hughes’s first volume The Hawk in the Rain, not least its title poem, whose
description of how the ‘hawk/ Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye’ is
the product of having read many times that ‘Over St John’s Hill/ The hawk
of fire hangs still’.51 The descriptor of how ‘banging wind kills these stub-
born hedges,/ Thumbs my eyes’ 52 well knows ‘the wrangling hedges’ and
‘the hawk on fire, the halter height, over Towy fins/ In a whack of wind’ of
Thomas’s poem.53 Those same loud notes resound in the very next poem in

48 Philip Hobsbaum, ‘Ted Hughes at Cambridge’, The Dark Horse, Autumn 1999,
pp. 6–12: p. 6.
49 Hobsbaum, ‘Ted Hughes at Cambridge’, p. 7.
50 Hobsbaum, ‘Ted Hughes at Cambridge’, p. 12.
51 Dylan Thomas, The Poems, ed. and int. Daniel Jones (London: Dent, Everyman,
1982), p. 201; Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber
and Faber, 2003), p. 19.
52 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 19.
53 Thomas, The Poems, p. 202.
Hughes’s collection, ‘The Jaguar’, where the violent physicality becomes the
noise of ‘the bang of blood’.54
The young Hughes was taking many of the same lessons from Dylan
Thomas that were being learnt by Geoffrey Hill at Oxford: consider the ‘burly
air’, the striving salmon, ‘the hawk’s deliberate stoop in air’ and so forth in
Hill’s ‘Genesis’.55 Hughes accentuates the brute physicality of the wind, the
whack of it. ‘Wind’ turns the whack to a ‘crashing’, ‘booming’ and ‘stam-
peding’; its force is felt against bodily effort: ‘the brunt wind that dented the
balls of my eyes’.56 (Such features may also be an exaggerated response to the
sort of physicality looked for in Leavisite close readings, and a desire to see
poetry as a work of active service—Thom Gunn, a poet who does not show
Hill’s and Hughes’s debts to Thomas, displays this when harking to how ‘the
first cock crow/ Batters our ears’ in ‘Here Come the Saints’.57)
That many in the 1950s, including erstwhile Neo-Romantics/New
Apocalyptics such as Norman Nicholson and G.S. Fraser, could find the
rhetoric of Dylan Thomas and his followers and associates overblown in a
way they had not done a decade before is as much indicative of a change
in the world as an improvement in critical faculties. The outrages, strange-
nesses, immensities and sufferings of the Second World War, and the psychic
anguish it brought to readers, had made the overblown, the irrational and
obscure seem fitting in a way they would not be thereafter. Changing condi-
tions brought changed verse from Thomas himself, who, with ‘Over St John’s
Hill’, produced a post-war poem which demonstrated to his juniors how a
way of writing that had suited the war years could be addressed to peace-
time subject matters, to the violence of nature and, as it invokes the gallows
at Tyburn, to the violence of Britain’s past.
Yet, if awareness of what Hughes carried over from Thomas and
Neo-Romanticism is important to understanding the poetry Hughes would
write over the next few years, so too is an awareness of what he straightaway
discarded. ‘Over St. John’s Hill’ may be about violence in nature, but rather
than moving towards exultation of that violence, the poem comes to grieve
‘for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing’.58 Hughes—and here he
differs from Geoffrey Hill—discontinues the Neo-Romantic tradition of
elegy and lament. In its stead come lines such as ‘the master-/ Fulcrum
of violence’ and the ‘diamond point of will’, which make it plain how the

55 Hill, Collected Poems, p. 15.
58 Thomas, The Poems, p. 203.
B eginnings 17
pairing of Hughes with Gunn is not merely a whim of the publishers and
promoters of the time.59 A shift in disposition and mode of address had been
made plausible by a shift in subject: write about birds, or other animals, and
not people and notes of elegy and sympathy do seem, to most readers at least,
far less obligatory. At the same time, much of the charge of the poetry—and
the unease it would arouse in unsympathetic readers—is gained from the
sense that this shift is nevertheless only nominal.
The diagnosis is similar when another influence on ‘The Hawk in the
Rain’ is considered. Tim Kendall, who has found Wilfred Owen’s letters
behind the poem’s opening lines, writes that they illustrate a problem ‘which
besets much of Hughes’s work: shearing wartime atrocity from its specific
contexts, his poetry risks sounding absurdly overwritten.’60 At the same
time, Kendall finds the poems of violence in nature superior to, and more
original than, the poems in The Hawk in the Rain which deal directly with
the First World War, poems troubled by belatedness and ‘the profound jeal-
ousy that [Hughes] can never achieve the authority of the combatant poet.’61
A look at ‘Bayonet Charge’, a poem which directly—or rather, given that
Hughes was not a witness, indirectly—recounts the action of the First World
War, would seem to confirm the point. Yet the case is not quite as straight-
forward as such an analysis maintains. Other poems in the volume, in spite
of their belatedness, show Hughes more diverse in his sympathies and
perspectives than one might expect. When, in the second part of ‘Griefs for
Dead Soldiers’, ‘the widow’ watches the ‘telegram opening … more terribly
than any bomb’, the depicted experience may not be first hand, but Hughes
could hardly be accused of Boys Own daydreams of war and of forgetting its
cost. When Hughes addresses the photographs of ‘Six Young Men’, he, no
less than Philip Larkin in ‘MCMXIV’, is writing of his own experience of
war, his own relationship to its participants, an experience that is perforce
belated, a subject that could not in the same way be theirs. It was, however,
the poetic discoveries and perspectives of poems such as ‘The Hawk in the
Rain’ that Hughes would choose to build on and which dominate his 1960
volume Lupercal.

60 Tim Kendall, Modern English War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), p. 200.
61 Kendall, Modern English War Poetry, p. 201.
C hapter T wo
Violent Times: Anti-Movement Poetry

in the Mid to Late 1950s
T ed Hughes and Philip Hobsbaum chose not to let their experience

of Cambridge literary life stop on graduation. Hughes continued
to haunt the town and its literary circles. At the party that launched St
Botolph’s Review, he would meet a young American poet on a Fulbright
scholarship who was discovering what it was like to be berated for ‘begin-
ning a poem like John Donne, but not quite managing to finish like John
Donne’: Sylvia Plath.1 Philip Hobsbaum went to London to train as a teacher,
and there re-established his reading group. The Group’s first meeting
was held in Hobsbaum’s Edgware Road flat in October 1955; its attendees
were: Hughes, Peter Redgrove, Julian and Catherine Cooper, two actors,
Patricia Hartz and Leon Cripps, and Hobsbaum’s fiancée, Hannah Kelly.
Among other contributions that evening were Hughes’s ‘Misanthrope’ and
‘Secretary’ and Redgrove’s ‘Bedtime Story for my Son’: astonishingly good
poems from a couple of recent graduates, the last-named perhaps the most
impressive of the three, and perhaps the first cause of Hobsbaum’s pecu-
liar preference for Redgrove’s poetry over Hughes’s.2 In November, Julian
Cooper invited the Australian bookseller Peter Porter to attend meetings.
Four months later, they were joined by Edward Lucie-Smith, who had been
1 Sylvia Plath and Peter Orr, Interview, 30 October 1962 in The Poet Speaks,
Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr,
John Press and Ian Scott-Kilvert (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966),
pp. 167–172: p. 168.
2 The Group: An Exhibition of Poetry, Catalogue for an Exhibition, the Library,
University of Reading, 7 June–10 December 1974, p. 15.
in contact with Hobsbaum as an undergraduate at Oxford but who had been

doing his military service in the RAF. As the 1950s wore on, the Group’s
number was added to by the somewhat older Martin Bell, and by contempo-
raries such as Alan Brownjohn, the BBC producer George MacBeth and the
Canadian David Wevill.
One way of stating the Group’s importance is to declare it a forerunner
to the contemporary poetry workshop, or indeed to deem it the first proper
poetry workshop in England. At the same time, it should be stressed that
Group meetings had a flavour that would make them unfamiliar to most who
attend poetry workshops today. Not only was there the bearded and forbid-
ding Hobsbaum in the chair and a heavy Leavisite aspect to proceedings,
there was also the structure of the evening: its first half would concentrate
on new work by one writer; this would then be followed by a coffee break,
after which members could share work they particularly liked and, increas-
ingly in later years, new poetry of their own.
The Group perpetuated ideas and an ambience as well as a social network
that had started in Oxford and Cambridge, but it also brought its members
into contact with poets who had been very much outside both. Peter Porter,
who had managed to acquire his impressive knowledge of European culture
without attending university, had beginnings as a poet which owed nothing
to the literary tastes and programme of Oxbridge English. Not only was he
an admirer of W.H. Auden and the social poets of the 1930s, poets unfa-
voured by Leavis and his followers, Porter was no great fan of D.H. Lawrence
either and, in later years, was heard to say that: ‘I would rather spend a
winter in a canning factory in Narvic than have to read Women in Love
again.’3 Unsurprisingly, Porter went on to become a vocal anti-Leavisite.
Nevertheless, by joining the Group, he was attending what was, to all intents
and purposes, a Leavisite seminar whose shape, tastes and attitudes would
affect both his views and poetic practice.4
Recalling his years in the Group, Alan Brownjohn writes:
Meetings ended at about eleven, and voices, lifted in contention, would

keep it up about Leavis, the New Statesman, the intentionalist fallacy, the
Spectator and the Movement, up the stairs to the square outside, along
the street to Stockwell underground station and on into the train. Passing
3 Ann Thwaite, ‘An Open Letter to Peter Porter’, in Paeans for Peter Porter, ed.
Anthony Thwaite (London: Bridgewater Press, 1999), pp. 66–69: p. 67.
4 Porter spells out his dislike of the Leavisite approach in his essay ‘Grub Street
Versus Academe’, The New Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, July 1974.
V iolent T imes 21
circumspectly one night a large array of rockers, Peter Porter said, ‘Gunn’s
friends have come for us.’5
Sided with one set of Oxbridge poets at the Group, Porter had also joined
Hobsbaum’s war of words against Thom Gunn, the recent Cambridge
hero now eulogising wild ones in black jackets. What made for Group quips
made also for Group poems. The notion that poets of the time might be,
quite literally, on ‘fighting terms’ is the jokey contention of ‘It was a Violent
Time’ by Martin Bell, a poem chronicling the boozy brawls and misdeeds
of the era’s poetry scene which takes as its epigraph A. Alvarez’s opinion
in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ that ‘… literary history; it is savage with
gang-warfare’.6 7
Bell’s poem is no more than an entertaining period piece. Yet Group
jostling against Gunn’s work in general, and ‘A Mirror for Poets’ in partic-
ular, produced poetry which better stands the test of time. ‘A Mirror for
Poets’ rests confidently on authorities it doesn’t care to name: ‘Yet the
historians tell us, life meant less./ It was a violent time, and evil-smelling.’8
So a rival young poet might be forgiven for asking quite who these histo-
rians—or should that be Leavisite literary critics?— might be. Furthermore,
Gunn’s poem as a whole does beg a question of the poets who look into its
mirror: how willing are you, really, to pay a violent price for better art and a
better audience?
Peter Porter’s ‘John Marston Advises Anger’ is an outsider’s attack on
‘A Mirror for Poets’, but also a considered answer to its question, and one
which honours its rival despite itself. Echoing Gunn’s use of ‘the historians’,
but noting who they really are, Porter observes: ‘The critics say/ Think of
them as an Elizabethan Chelsea set’.9 Putting critics in their place (and his
own writing in its contemporary milieu), Porter points out how they’ve
‘never listened to our lot’ before conceding ‘the bodies are the same’.10
Where Gunn enlists Ben Jonson as his poetic representative from the past,
Porter takes up cudgels on behalf of Jonson’s great adversary (and occasional
5 Catalogue to the Group Exhibition, p. 31.

6 Martin Bell, Collected Poems 1937–1966 (London, Melbourne and New York:
Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 1967), p. 98.
7 The New Poetry, ed. A. Alvarez, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1966), p. 22.
8 Thom Gunn, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 25.
9 Peter Porter, Collected Poems 1: 1961–1981 (Oxford and Melbourne: Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 20.
10 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 20.
friend) John Marston, spits contempt for the Chelsea set and for a recent
lover with expensive tastes, before rounding on the purveyors of the sort of
poetic history to be found in the poems of Thom Gunn:
What’s in a name,
If Cheapside and the Marshalsea mean Eng. Lit.
And the Fantasie, Sa Tortuga, Grisbi, Bongi-Bo
Mean life? A cliché? What hurts dies on paper,
Fades to classic pain. Love goes as the M.G. goes.11
Not a direct imitation of Marston’s style (it is less so even than Gunn’s poem
is of Jonson’s), Porter’s verse does have some of Marston’s deliberate rough-
ness; it keeps well clear of the ‘slick’. Porter’s poem shifts from the ‘glamour
of pain’, imagined in the past, to ‘classic pain’, which may be Marston’s but
may also be the present poet’s. The exotic nonsense list of ‘Fantasie, Sa
Tortuga, Grisbi, Bongi Bo’ (nightspots and coffee bars of the 1950s) evokes
life as F.R. Leavis meant life, but undercuts it with satire and realism. Thus
is conjured the idea of an Elizabethan-cum-Jacobean organic community
with which to contrast present-day fallings and failings which the poet then
refuses to endorse, discovering the two periods, their two Londons, are
remarkably alike, each full of moneyed girls with cheap affections and a yen
for well-heeled lovers.
The poem concludes:
It’s a Condé Nast world and so Marston’s was.

His had a real gibbet—our death’s out of sight.
The same thin richness of these worlds remains –
The flesh-packed jeans, the car-stung appetite
Volley on his stage, the cage of discontent.12
Marston’s society connects to ours not through the parade of violence but
through shallowness. Around the time this was composed, Porter, who was
fired from Bumpus bookshop by A. Alvarez’s friend Tony Godwin, joined
Notley’s advertising agency, which would also employ Peter Redgrove,
Edward Lucie-Smith and the translator, wife of David and occasional Group
member Assia Wevill. Rather than ignoring the counters of a day job for one
of the demons of the Leavisite cosmos, Porter imports into his poem the
bright hollow ring of brand names. In place of Gunn’s energetic would-be

V iolent T imes 23
heroic self-image shining out from an Elizabethan mirror, the face of disaf-
fection and corruption stares back through the glass.
Group scepticism towards the work of Gunn was balanced by an abso-
lute certainty as to the virtues of the work of Redgrove and Hughes. Of
the latter, Porter recalled: ‘It was apparent to me when first I joined that to
see Hughes as an already mature and original poet was an article of faith
demanded of all Group members.’13 Hughes did not visit the Group for long.
The immediate reason for this was the fact that Hughes was accompanying
his now wife Sylvia Plath to America, but it is unlikely Hughes would have
remained a regular attendee. While Hughes may have relished the chance
to declaim poems such as Hopkins’s ‘Dreadful Sonnets’ to an audience, the
academic spirit of analysis fostered by Hobsbaum was never going to be
much to his liking.14
Still, Hughes’s abandonment of Group meetings did not curtail the pres-
ence and influence of his poems there. Hughes continued to send poems to
the Group for their discussion, among them poems which later appeared
in his first volume, The Hawk in the Rain, such as: ‘The Horses’, ‘Famous
Poet’, ‘Wind’ and ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’.15 The Group poets did
not just discuss these poems at meetings, they evangelised on their behalf.
According to Edward Lucie-Smith, when the Group attended G.S. Fraser’s
London poetry soirees: ‘Our usual way of baiting the company was for one or
other of us to read a poem by Ted Hughes. A favourite was “The Martyrdom
of Bishop Farrar”.’16
The poem’s ability to provoke must have derived in large part from
the vicious spectacle that is its subject and from its manifest keenness to
dwell on grisly details. Set in the reign of Mary, so slightly predating the
setting of ‘A Mirror for Poets’, and not yet, I think, informed by the notions
on Protestantism and Catholicism that were to dominate Hughes’s reading
13 Peter Porter, ‘Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: A Bystander’s Recollections’,

Australian Book Review, 233, August 2001, http://www.australianbookreview.
com.au/past-issues/online-archive/153. Accessed 5 October 2009.
14 Porter, ‘Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’.
15 There are, for example, Group Reading Sheets of Ted Hughes poems ‘The
Horses’, ‘Famous Poet’, ‘Wind, ‘Bayonet Charge’ and ‘Macaw and Little Miss’,
University of Reading, MS 4457/ 20 30. These are recalled by, for instance,
Edward Lucie-Smith The Burnt Child (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975), p. 166.
‘Macaw and Little Miss’, ‘Famous Poet’, ‘Fallgrief’s Girlfriends’ and ‘The
Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ are all recorded in Peter Porter, ‘Ted Hughes
and Sylvia Plath: A Bystander’s Recollections’.
16 Lucie-Smith, The Burnt Child, p. 173.
of Shakespeare, ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ places bodily pain at its

centre. That pain never loses its fascination, but there is no pretending the
bishop’s martyrdom is anything other than revolting. While Farrar suffers,
‘watching Welsh townspeople/ Hear him crack in the fire’s mouth; they see
what/ Black oozing twist of stuff bubbles the smell/ That tars and retches
their lungs’.17 The bystanders do not just see horror; they inhale it, passively
smoking the dying man. The poem itself replicates the dynamic between
flaming martyr and crowd, between the poet or reciter and audience, daring
the crowd to turn away or cover up their mouths and ears: a quality prized
by the Group poets as they witnessed their faith in Hughes in front of G.S.
Fraser’s appalled guests.
‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ glories in a transfiguration through
which the body is literally ‘tongued with fire’.18 Words are enacted in
flesh. Bloody Mary’s burning of Farrar is ‘her sermon’.19 Insisting no
less than Gunn’s ‘A Mirror for Poets’ that words here are not ‘mere rant’,
Hughes’s poem has smoke burn Farrar’s ‘sermons into the skies.’20 Edward
Haley comments:
The meeting of vitality and death is the fuel which powers Farrar’s transience,
but it is of interest to note how the conclusion of the poem draws attention to
the survival of language; what is the significance of Hughes specifically citing
the transience of Farrar’s sermons if it is not a latent self-conscious desire for
the endurance of the poet himself after death?21
That survival is contingent on a point of connection between bodily and

doctrinal sincerity, which entails the making good of words by steadfast
martyrdom, Farrar’s ‘pocketed’ ‘hot’ words as ‘good gold as any queen’s
crown’.22 At the head of his poem, Hughes quotes Farrar’s words on being
chained to the stake: ‘If I flinch from the pain of the burning, believe not the
doctrine that I have preached.’23 The protestant stand and the sincerity that
goes with it are here absolute.
‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ keeps its historical distance; it is
17 Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber and Faber,
2003), p. 48.
21 Edward Hadley, The Elegies of Ted Hughes (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), p. 30.
V iolent T imes 25
concerned with the particularities of the martyrdom of Farrar: the words

of absolute sincerity are Farrar’s not Hughes’s. Strictly speaking, the poetics
of sincerity has overtaken neither dramatic context nor a poetics of imper-
sonality, nor is the poem itself a sermon. While acknowledging this, it is
nonetheless possible to find this a scenario that differs from those prevailing
in the poetry of the time of its composition. The immortality of poets,
whether directly summoned or figured in their standbys, is a, if not the,
favourite theme of the Neo-Romantics. But, in the work of Dylan Thomas,
the poet does indeed have to be dead for immortality to be achieved; that
death is neither violent nor is the manner of death a guarantor of words. In
‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’, sincerity, extreme suffering and extreme
death intersect. Starkly clear for the first time is a dynamic that would be
used by a number of the most striking poems from Hughes’s generation,
from Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’, whose protagonist addresses her own
gawping crowd, to Offa in the eighteenth of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns,
who watches how ‘flesh leaked rennet over them; the men stooped, disen-
tangled the body’.24
Peter Porter may have thrown his lot in with Ted Hughes’s early friends
and apostles. Nevertheless, from the outset, his verse is quite as uncom-
fortable with, as fascinated by and as rivalrous of, the poetry of Hughes
as it is Gunn’s. The historians of ‘The Historians Call up Pain’ are, like the
critics in ‘John Marston Advises Anger’, a borrowing from and a commen-
tary upon the historians of ‘A Mirror for Poets’. Yet a close look finds ‘The
Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ also contested with. The implication that
pain, in particular, bodily pain, makes good coin of words and that these are
indicative of a sincerity which poets may do well to emulate, there in ‘The
Martyrdom of Nicholas Farrar’, is, in Porter’s poem, grown greater, grown
even more extreme.
‘The Historians Call up Pain’ lets the death of one condemned protes-
tant lose its particular and individual purchase by being subsumed in a
mass martyrdom of Anabaptists. ‘Ten thousand heretics’ are burnt to death
in a year, the protestant martyrs dying ‘soundlessly at the stake/ Their eyes
hotter than the flames’,25 silent riches that make small change of Farrar’s
‘miserdom of shrieks’ and the way that ‘out of his eyes,/ Out of his mouth,
24 Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 122. I

state this not instead of my earlier, political reading of this poem but to add
a further plausible and complementary interpretation. See William Wootten,
‘Rhetoric of Violence in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and the Speeches of
Enoch Powell’, Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 11, 2000, pp. 1−15.
fire like a glory broke’.26 Porter’s poem then shifts period and frame of refer-
ence. Where ‘John Marston Advises Anger’ has its swipe at Eng. Lit., it is
now the Cambridge history courses that appear smug and distant:
This, of course, was

Six centuries ago: today this persecution
Is a best bet Honours question
In the History Tripos.27
Granted, this is an outsider’s bristling at the privileged young Cambridge

poets with whom he was now coming into contact (‘Tripos’ is the name
given to Cambridge undergraduate courses—a nicely dividing and divisive
wedge of specialist vocabulary), yet Porter, with his commanding tone and
erudition, appears not to look up at these Cantabrigians enviously but to
glare upon them from commanding heights of wisdom and experience.
Porter is not just trying to do down and outdo his Cambridge rivals, he is
also minded to cast doubt on what is so striking in their poems. Hughes
advances the possibility of an identification with the pain and passion of
Farrar. When Porter moves to a single instance of martyrdom, he denies
reader and poet such sympathetic powers: ‘We cannot know what John of
Leyden felt/ Under the Bishop’s tongs’.28
For all that, Porter’s poem is not a straightforward denial of what Hughes
is about in ‘The Martyrdom of Nicholas Farrar’. Towards its end, ‘The
Historians Call up Pain’ turns like a corkscrew. Satire, a Kingsley Amis-
like realism and hostility to romanticism, and the very desires that Hughes
conjured up in his poem, give way to one another:
Yet if we keep
Our minds on the four last things
And join the historians on their frieze of pain
We may forget our world of milk gone stale,
Cancer touches in the afternoon, girls in Jensens,
Gramophone records scratched and warped,
Managers fattening tumours of ambition.
We cannot know what John of Leyden felt
Under the Bishop’s tongs—we can only
Walk in temperate London, our educated city,

V iolent T imes 27
Wishing to cry as freely as they did who died

In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness
And our regret with which to build an eschatology.29
Ringing as these lines are, they do not ringingly endorse a position. Instead,
their rhetoric makes quarrel with itself as much as with the words of other
poets, leaving readers to ask whether they are encountering a fixing of the
mind, a diagnosis or an exhortation. The first sentence appears to suggest
that looking to the heroic pain of the past over and above our smaller,
actually felt pain is a species of escapism. The second shifts us towards an
Audenesque notion of the temperate civilised city, a scolding of Gunnish
historians (and by implication poets) who would want something more
painful for the good of strong emotion, verse or the coherence of society.
Indeed, it could be taken as a gloss on, and riposte to, Gunn’s comment to
the London Magazine, which looks complacently at the National Health, the
unions and the demise of the squirearchy, and declares: ‘The agony of the
time is that there is no agony.’30 In fact, Porter finds, there is no shortage
of agony, of cancer, ambition and loneliness, nor, with the ‘milk gone stale’,
an absence of the evil smelling. This last sentence could be read as a mani-
festo for the poetry of secular eschatology Porter would often write in the
future, but it could also be read as being altogether more resigned. A poet
much less given to ambiguities than was the Movement fashion has been led
to produce that type of ambiguity which shows the poet genuinely in two
minds as to his subject.

30 Thom Gunn, Letter to the London Magazine, June 1957, pp. 65–66.
C hapter T hree
In Opposite Directions:
A. Alvarez and Thom Gunn
T hough A. Alvarez’s appointment as poetry editor of the Observer in

1956 would quickly make him best known as a literary journalist,
through much of the 1950s he was primarily an academic. Alvarez studied
and taught at Oxford and at Princeton, where he was a protégé of R.P.
Blackmur, and his university posts resulted in two critical books aimed
largely at an academic audience: 1958’s The Shaping Spirit, which is about
the poetry of English and American modernism, and 1960’s The School of
Donne, which is on the metaphysical poets.
The Shaping Spirit is somewhere between being a work of Movement
criticism (John Wain is a notable influence) and a reaction against it. On the
one hand, Alvarez offers up the opinion that ‘The experimental trappings
of modernism are a minor issue in English verse. It is largely an American
importation and an American need.’1 On the other, as he writes of Eliot,
Yeats, Pound, Lawrence, Auden, Empson, Crane and Stevens, there is no
doubting the pull of American modernism for the young Alvarez, nor his
interest in seeing, in Yeats and Lawrence in particular, versions of a modern
poetic intelligence beyond the American.
The chapter on D.H. Lawrence is the most telling. Here innovation and
emotion become one: ‘The whole of Lawrence’s power and originality as a
poet depends on the way he keeps close to his feelings. That is why he had
to rid himself of conventional forms.’2 Here too Alvarez falls out of temper
1 A. Alvarez, The Shaping Spirit (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958), p. 12.
2 Alvarez, The Shaping Spirit, p. 153.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Erstes Kapitel.
Reise nach dem Arbeitsfeld.
Am 21. Februar 1908 verließ ich zusammen mit einem

Schweden, W. Andersson, Schweden, um mit dem Dampfschiffe
„Drottning Sofia“ nach Buenos Aires zu fahren. Auf der herrlichen
Seereise konnten wir Kräfte für künftige Strapazen sammeln. Mit
Salz- und Sonnenbädern härteten wir unsere Körper in dem
Gedanken: Auf einer solchen Reise, wie dieser, ist die allerwichtigste
Ausrüstung eine gute Gesundheit. Ist man munter und gesund, so
arbeitet man gut, ist man infolge Krankheit niedergedrückt, dann
geht alles schlecht. Während meiner ganzen Reise war ich auch
nicht einen einzigen Tag ordentlich krank.
Auf dem Dampfer schloß ich mit einem jungen Landsmann, Carl
Moberg, Bekanntschaft. Es war ein wilder Junge. Eines Tages
kletterte er auf den Großmast der „Sofia“, setzte sich auf den runden
Knopf der Spitze und genoß bei einer Zigarette die Aussicht. Da er
den Eindruck eines kühnen und furchtlosen Menschen machte,
stellte ich ihn bei der Expedition an. Und das habe ich nicht zu
bereuen brauchen. Moberg erwies sich während der ganzen Reise
als ein tüchtiger und zuverlässiger Kamerad. Ich habe ihn hier so
schildern wollen, wie ich ihn zum ersten Male kennen gelernt habe,
damit der Leser verstehe, daß er ein Mann war, der für die Indianer
paßt.
Ich will hier nicht schildern, was so viele andere vorher
beschrieben haben, sondern übergehe Buenos Aires und begebe
mich von dort direkt nach der Zuckerfabrik Esperanza in
Nordargentinien. W o d i e I n d i a n e r a n f a n g e n , d o r t w i l l i c h a u c h
m e i n e n R e i s e b e r i c h t b e g i n n e n . Ich bitte nun den geneigten Leser,
der besseren Orientierung wegen, diesen Platz auf der Karte
aufzusuchen.
Nach den Zuckerfabriken in Nordargentinien kommen die
Indianer von weit umher. Hier in den Fabriken treffen wir nicht die
Wilden der Urwälder, sondern solche, die, von den Reichtümern des
weißen Mannes angelockt, aus ihren Dörfern gekommen sind, um
Arbeit und Verdienst zu suchen. In diesem Buche werden wir diese
Menschen auch nicht hier, sondern weit hinten in den Urwäldern und
Gebüschen ihrer Heimat kennen lernen.
Mit dem größten Wohlwollen wurde ich von den Brüdern Leach,
den Besitzern der Fabrik Esperanza, aufgenommen. Sie haben ein
echt englisches Heim mit bequemen Stühlen, Polo, Freundschaft
ohne Ziererei und Zeremonien und Dienstbereitschaft ohne viele
Worte.
In Esperanza hielt ich mich einen Monat auf, um meine
Expedition auszurüsten. Während dieser Zeit hatte ich Gelegenheit
zum Studium der Indianer, die, wie schon erwähnt, von weit her nach
den Fabriken kommen, um Arbeit zu suchen. Außerdem machte ich
eine Expedition nach dem nahebelegenen Berge Calilegua.[1]
Unter den Indianern in Esperanza hatte ich das Glück, einen
alten Freund von meiner Reise 1901 zu treffen, den Matacoindianer
„Chetsin“. Dieser, der Dolmetscher seines Stammes, sprach
ausgezeichnet spanisch. Beinahe jeden Tag pflegte ich ein
Stündchen in seiner Hütte zu verweilen und mit ihm von allem
möglichen zu sprechen. Zuweilen erzählte er mir einige Sagen
seines Stammes.
Es war ein eigentümliches Gefühl, auf einem Holzblock in der
Grashütte bei einem spärlichen Feuer zu sitzen und erzählen zu
hören, wie die wilden Schweine dem Gürteltier den Mais stahlen und
wie das Meerschweinchen dem Jaguar das Feuer stahl und es den
Matacoindianern gab, und einige Augenblicke später in einem
bequemen Stuhle in dem englisch komfortablen Leachschen Hause
zu sitzen und über Politik, Flugschiffe und Sport zu sprechen. Die
Gegensätze im Leben bereiten immer Vergnügen.
Über die Wanderung der Indianer nach den Zuckerfabriken
möchte ich hier einige Worte sagen.
„Bapurenda“ nennen die in Bolivia lebenden Indianer das Land
Argentinien. Das bedeutet: dort gibt es Arbeit. Nach den
Zuckerfabriken kommen jährlich tausende Indianer aus dem
argentinischen Chaco und aus Bolivia, um Arbeit zu suchen. Man
verwendet sie teils zum Roden und Graben, teils für die Ernte. Diese
Wanderung nach Argentinien ist für die friedliche Eröffnung der in
Südbolivia von Indianern bewohnten Wildnisse von der größten
Bedeutung für die Weißen gewesen, und ist es auch heute noch.
Nach „Bapurenda“ kommen die Indianer aus weiter Ferne. Man sieht
dort die sauberen und aufgeweckten Chiriguano und Chané, die
heimtückischen und zudringlichen Toba, die schmutzigen und
unzuverlässigen Mataco, die stets heiteren und faulen Choroti.
Einige Tapiete und Ashluslay[2] sind auch dort gewesen, obschon die
ersteren als Toba, die letzteren als Choroti und Mataco aufgetreten
sind. Eigentümlicherweise sollen auch von solchen Teilen des
südbolivianischen Chaco, wo noch nie ein Weißer gewesen ist,
Indianer nach Argentinien gekommen sein. Unter ihnen ist der
Chiriguanohäuptling Cayuhuari bemerkenswert. Dieser Häuptling
wohnt seit 1890, wo er sich gegen die Weißen empört hatte, im
Chaco.
Ein sehr großer Teil der Indianer nimmt die lange Reise nach
Argentinien zu Fuß vor, da nur wenige Pferde haben. Einzelne
haben bis zu ihrer Ankunft über 500 km zu wandern, und das ist ein
ganz hübscher Spaziergang.
Der Grund der Wanderung dieser Indianer ist die große
Schwierigkeit, alle die Herrlichkeiten des Weißen, wie Messer, Äxte
und Kleider, in ihrem eigenen Lande zu erwerben. Wenn sie bei sich
zu Hause Arbeit haben, ist sie in der Regel schlecht bezahlt, und
innerhalb großer Gebiete ist überhaupt keine Arbeit zu bekommen.
Mehrere Indianer haben mir gesagt, sie würden, wenn sie zu
Hause Arbeit fänden, diese Wanderung nicht vornehmen. Eins ist
jedoch sicher, daß diese Reisen in ein fremdes Wunderland im
höchsten Grade verlockend für sie sind. Ich war gerade in einem
Ashluslaydorf, als die ersten dieses Stammes, die in den Fabriken
gewesen sind, wieder nach Hause kamen. Sie wurden mit Ovationen
empfangen. Das ganze Dorf war ihnen entgegengegangen, und
unter dem Gesang der alten Frauen wurden sie zu ihren Hütten
gebracht, wo sie von ihren Kindern und Frauen bewillkommnet
wurden. Sie hatten so viel Merkwürdiges mitgebracht, alte Gewehre,
alte Uniformen, Zucker, Streichhölzer, Pulver, Knallerbsen, betresste
Käppis, Anelin u. a. Wie viel ist nicht zu erzählen, wenn man nach
Hause kommt. Es muß mindestens ebenso merkwürdig gewesen
sein, als wenn ein Erdbewohner von einer Reise nach dem Monde
nach Hause gekommen wäre. Wie wunderbar muß es den zu Hause
Gebliebenen vorgekommen sein, von den Eisenbahnen, den
Fabrikmaschinen, den elektrischen Bogenlampen, den großen
Hütten und allem anderen Neuen zu hören. Auch sie werden zu der
mühseligen, langen Wanderung verlockt, und immer weitere Gebiete
eröffnen sich dem weißen Manne ohne Kampf, ohne
Schwierigkeiten.
Infolge dieser Wanderungen nach Argentinien verbreiten sich
eine große Masse Werkzeuge, Messer, Waffen u. a. über den
ganzen Chaco, und die ursprüngliche Kultur der Indianer verändert
sich vollständig. Viele von ihnen lernen auf diesen Reisen etwas
Spanisch, denn den Indianern fällt diese Sprache leicht. Sie lernen
sogar sehr bald, es grammatikalisch zu sprechen.
Nach den Zuckerfabriken kommen die Mataco und Choroti sowie
teilweise auch die Toba mit Frauen, Kind und Kegel, Hunden und
Hausgerät, Schmutz und Ungeziefer und bauen dort ihre Dörfer,
ganz wie im Chaco. Die höherstehenden Chiriguano und Chané
bringen nur wenig Frauen und niemals ihre kleinen Kinder mit, falls
sie nicht für immer dort bleiben wollen. Die Chiriguano und Chané
wohnen in Zelten oder in den den Fabrikbesitzern gehörigen
Baracken.
In den Fabriken habe ich die Indianer, besonders die Mataco und
Chiriguano, arbeiten sehen. Die ersteren werden als die Tüchtigsten
beim Ernten des Zuckerrohres, die letzteren als die besten Gräber
betrachtet. Die Mataco und verschiedene Chiriguano werden auf
Akkord bezahlt. Die besten Chiriguano sind Tagelöhner und werden
den weißen Arbeitern gleichgestellt. In der Regel verdienen die
Chiriguano täglich 1–1½ Pesos, die Matacomänner 40 Centavos und
die Matacofrauen 20 Centavos außer der Kost. Die Arbeitszeit ist für
die letzteren ungefähr acht, für die ersteren zehn Stunden.
Über den Fleiß der Indianer habe ich einige Notizen machen
können. Die Chiriguano arbeiten in der Regel alle Tage außer den
Montagen, wo sie den Sonntagsrausch ausschlafen. In San Lorenzo,
unweit Esperanza, wo ich Gelegenheit hatte, etwas statistisches
Material zu sammeln, arbeiteten die Matacomänner im Durchschnitt
12½ und die Matacofrauen 11½ Tage im Monat. Das beste Resultat
hatte eine Matacofrau, die von 127 möglichen Tagen 125, und ein
Matacomann, der 110 gearbeitet hatte. Die Häuptlinge und
Dolmetscher arbeiten am wenigsten.
Bei der Bezahlung der Indianer hat man darauf zu sehen, daß sie
nicht die ganze Löhnung während der Arbeitszeit ausbezahlt
erhalten, sondern noch etwas zugute haben, wenn sie heimkehren,
sonst halten sie sich für betrogen.
Stirbt ein Indianer, dem die Fabrik etwas schuldig ist, so
verlangen die Mataco, Choroti und Toba nichts. Trifft dies bei den
Chiriguano ein, so fordert der Häuptling die Bezahlung der Schuld
durch ihn an die Hinterlassenen. Der Grund hierfür ist
möglicherweise der, daß die Chiriguano infolge ihrer langen
Beziehung mit den Weißen die Erbschaftsverhältnisse derselben
besser kennen.
Abb. 1. Matacomädchen, Esperanza.
Leider wird für die Zivilisierung der nach den Zuckerfabriken
kommenden Indianer nichts getan. Sie werden hier im allerhöchsten
Grade demoralisiert. Die Männer verfallen der Trunksucht, d. h. sie
lernen Branntwein trinken, im Verhältnis zu welchem alle
einheimischen Getränke bedeutend unschuldiger sind. Infolge des
Branntweins und der schlechten Beispiele seitens der weißen
Arbeiter kommt eine große Anzahl Indianer durch Schlägereien in
den Fabriken um. Die Indianerfrauen verkaufen sich den Weißen.
Geschlechtskrankheiten herrschen unter den indianischen Arbeitern,
die teilweise geradezu Bordelle besuchen, wo sie mit den weißen
Frauen Bekanntschaft machen. Der Chiriguanohäuptling Maringay,
der niemals in Argentinien war, und von dem ich später noch recht
viel zu erzählen haben werde, fragte mich einmal: „Sage mir, ist es
wahr, daß es in Argentinien Läden gibt, wo man weiße Frauen, je
nach Beschaffenheit, für 2, 3, 5 Pesos bekommt?“ Maringay fand
sicher, daß die Weißen merkwürdige Läden hatten.
Abb. 2. Hütte der Mataco-Guisnay. Rio Pilcomayo.
Viele Chiriguanoindianer kommen mit ihren Familien nach den

Zuckerfabriken und kehren niemals in ihre Heimat zurück. Das
Leben dieser Indianer verläuft ebenso wie das der weißen Arbeiter.
Sie leben in einer Art Konservenbüchsenkultur und stellen so gut wie
gar keine ihrer alten charakteristischen Sachen her. Ein wie trauriges
Leben führen sie doch, viel schlechter als in ihren Dörfern in ihrem
eigenen Lande. Anstatt der feinen, bemalten Tongefäße bilden leere
Konservenbüchsen, Blechteller usw. ihr Hausgerät. Manchmal sieht
man auch unter ihren Habseligkeiten ein europäisches
Nachtgeschirr — in dem sie das Essen verwahren.
Eine in den Fabriken in großer Ausdehnung betriebene Unsitte ist
die, daß die Indianer Schießwaffen erhalten. Infolge dieser führen
die Indianer, die dort gewesen sind, siegreiche Kämpfe mit denen,
die nur Pfeile und Bogen besitzen. Diese Schießwaffen werden
eines Tages manchem weißen Manne das Leben kosten, denn
sicher werden die Indianer im Chaco noch manchen Aufruhr
anstiften. Auf argentinischem Gebiete sorgt besonders der
Tobahäuptling Taycolique systematisch für eine Bewaffnung seiner
Leute mit Feuerwaffen. Er ist schon so weit gekommen, daß er die
unmodernen Remingtongewehre kassiert und statt dessen
Repetiergewehre eingeführt hat. Taycolique hat seinen Leuten das
Schießen beigebracht. Eines Tages zog er mit einigen seiner
Männer an einem Platze vorbei, wo einige Weiße Schießübungen
abhielten. Taycolique forderte sie zu einem Wettschießen auf, und
seine Tobaindianer gewannen den Preis.
Im großen ganzen wird meiner Ansicht nach das
Indianererziehungsproblem am besten gelöst auf die Weise, daß
man dem Indianer gutbezahlte Arbeit, wie sie sie in den Fabriken
haben, gibt. Viel wäre außerdem zur Hebung der Indianer zu tun, sie
müßten schreiben, lesen und rechnen lernen, und man müßte sie
vor dem Branntwein und der Prostitution bewahren. In diesen
Fabriken müßten industrielle Schulen errichtet werden, in welchen
die Indianer ein Handwerk erlernten. Eine Arbeit, wie sie sie in
gewissen Gegenden haben, mit durchaus unbefriedigender
Bezahlung, erzieht sie nicht zu fleißigen und arbeitstüchtigen
Menschen, sondern bewirkt eher das Gegenteil. Erhalten sie eine
ordentliche Entschädigung und sehen sie, daß es ihnen durch Arbeit
gut ergeht, daß sie leichter ihren Magen füllen, Pferde, Werkzeug
und Kleider anschaffen können, dann arbeiten sie gern, und die
Arbeit tut ihnen gut und erzieht sie.
Der Calilegua.
Während meines Aufenthaltes in der Zuckerfabrik Esperanza
unternahm ich mehrere kleine Ausflüge, darunter einen etwas
längeren nach dem wunderschönen Calilegua, dessen nicht selten
schneebedeckter Gipfel stolz über die Urwälder blickt, in denen
Zuckerfabriken und Sägemühlen und kleine Menschlein sich
abarbeiten und abäschern.
Auf mehr als schlechten kleinen Pfaden klettert der Weg diesen
Berg hinauf. Er geht durch Bäche, über Gebirgskämme, durch den
Urwald mit dessen schweigender, feuchtwarmer Pracht, über die
Baumgrenze, nach dem einsamen, großartigen Reiche der Erdgöttin
Pachamama, wo man einen weiten Blick über Täler, Hochebenen
und Berge hat und sich nicht, wie unten im Tale und im Urwalde,
durch Lianen und Baumstämme und zwischen dornigen Büschen
hindurchzudrängen braucht.
Die Calileguaindianer sprechen alle Spanisch. Dieses ist stark
mit Quichuaworten vermengt, die Namen der Heilmittel sind z. B. in
der Regel auf Quichua. Man kann also annehmen, daß die
ursprüngliche Sprache dieser Indianer Quichua war. Die
Calileguaindianer wohnen oben auf den Bergen in kleinen
viereckigen Hütten aus Stein oder getrockneten Ziegelsteinen mit
Grasdächern. Auf dem First steht gewöhnlich ein Kreuz. Dasselbe
schützt gegen Blitzschlag, d. h. wenn es von einem christlichen
Geistlichen gesegnet ist, denn diese Gebirgsindianer sind schon seit
langer Zeit Christen. Dies hindert indessen nicht, daß sie gleichzeitig
an vieles andere glauben, was gar nichts mit der christlichen
Religion zu tun hat. So opfern sie noch der Pachamama Branntwein
und Coca. Gehen sie über einen Paß, so legen sie einen Stein auf
den Boden, damit sie nicht auf dem Wege müde werden.
Auf dem Calilegua machte ich eine interessante Bekanntschaft,
und zwar die eines sehr anständigen Medizinmannes in mittleren
Jahren, der mir ganz offenherzig verschiedenes anvertraute. Gegen
Knochenschmerzen soll man Fett vom Uturunco, Tapir oder Bären
anwenden. Der Uturunco ist ein mystisches Tier; es soll ein Jaguar
sein, der ehemals ein Mensch gewesen ist. Das Fett des Uturunco
ist gelb. Von Peru bis nach Argentinien kennt man die wunderbaren
heilenden Eigenschaften des Fettes dieses Tieres. Hat man an
einem gewissen Platze die Erde berührt, so können Hand-, Fuß-
oder Kniegelenke anschwellen. Man tut am besten, wenn man auf
die geschwollene Stelle Erde von dem Platze, wo man krank
geworden ist, legt. Auch Bärenzunge ist gut. Bei einem Erdbeben,
wie sie auf dem Calilegua oft vorkommen, geht man am besten nach
dem Begräbnisplatz, um zu beten. Hagelt es, so verbrenne man
kreuzförmig gelegte Palmblätter, dann bleibt die Ernte unbeschädigt.
Da einer meiner Begleiter, ein argentinischer Gaucho, auf dem
Calilegua erkrankte, bekam unser Freund Gelegenheit, seine Kunst
zu versuchen. Er gab ihm ein aus Mais bereitetes Bier, in welches er
glühende Kohlen legte. Der Gaucho gesundete und mußte dem
großen Arzt ein erkleckliches Honorar zahlen.
Tafel 2. Der Calileguaberg.
Zwischen dem, was man hier auf dem Calilegua zu sehen
bekommt, und dem, was man bei den Quichuas weit hinten in Peru,
zwölf Breitengrade von dort, findet, herrscht eine große Ähnlichkeit.
Ungeheuer gleichförmig verbreitet sich die Quichuakultur längs der
Anden. Sie haben dieselbe Kleidertracht, dieselben eigentümlichen
Nadeln zur Befestigung der Frauenschale, beinahe dieselbe
Keramik, dasselbe Kokakauen, dieselben Arzneien, dieselben Opfer
in den Gebirgspässen, dieselben Schleudern u. a. Diese große
Gleichförmigkeit fällt um so mehr auf, wenn man an den Gegensatz
zwischen den Bewohnern des Gebirges und des Urwaldes denkt.
Nach einem Ritte von einigen Tagen von Cuzco, der Hauptstadt des
alten Inkareiches, nach den Urwäldern ist man im Gebiete der wilden
Indianer, die mit den Bewohnern des Gebirges beinahe nichts
Gemeinsames haben. Hier im nördlichsten Argentinien sowie im
südlichen Bolivia, ist der Gegensatz nicht ganz so scharf, aber
dennoch groß genug. Die Stämme, von denen ich hier sprechen will,
die auf den letzten Ausläufern der Anden nach der Ebene zu oder in
derselben wohnen, haben mit den Quichua und deren Nachkommen
wenig Gemeinsames. Reiten wir vom Calilegua in Argentinien über
das Gebirge direkt nach Cuzco, so treffen wir nur zwei
Indianersprachen an, das Quichua und das Aymara. Folgen wir den
Urwaldwegen und den Flüssen, so lernen wir wenigstens einige
zwanzig Sprachen kennen, bis wir über Santa Cruz de la Sierra,
über den Rio Mamoré und den Rio Madre de Dios nach der alten
Hauptstadt der Inka kommen.
Vom Calilegua nach den Fabriken zurückgekehrt, beendigte ich
meine Ausrüstungsarbeiten, und am 5. Mai saßen wir im Sattel, um
nordwärts, nach dem Rio Pilcomayo, zu ziehen. Einige Tage darauf
gingen wir über den Rio Bermejo und setzten unseren Weg längs
der letzten Ausläufer der Anden fort. Das jetzt von uns durchzogene
Gebiet war teils von Weißen, teils von den in vollständigem
Abhängigkeitsverhältnis von jenen stehenden Mataco-Vejos
bewohnt. Alles, was ich von ihnen sammeln konnte, kaufte ich an;
des Abends saß ich bei den Alten, die mir dies und jenes erzählten.
Diese Mataco haben eine Sage von einem großen, die ganze Welt
verheerenden Feuer. Ein Vogel „Miya“ hatte ihnen von einer wilden
Katze „Noté“ die Maissamen geraubt, ein kleiner schwarzer und roter
Vogel „Sipúp“ hat die Kürbissamen geraubt. Das Meerschweinchen
„No-ték“ hat das Feuer von einem bösen Geist, „Tacuash“, der es
verborgen hatte und den Matacos nichts davon abgeben wollte,
geraubt.
Die Mataco-Vejos sind von der mächtigen Chiriguanokultur, über
die ich weiterhin ausführlicher sprechen werde, stark beeinflußt. Sie
sind außer den Chiriguanos und Chanés die einzigen Indianer im
Chaco, die ihre Toten zuweilen in Tongefäßen begraben.
Dem Toten bauen sie in der Tiefe des Waldes ein besonderes
Haus mit Feuerstätte und Bett. Er wird auf das Bett gelegt oder
manchmal in ein Tongefäß hineingestopft. Ich selbst habe niemals
ein derartiges Grabhaus gesehen, die Indianer haben es mir aber so
beschrieben. Als ich danach fragte, erklärten sie mir, augenblicklich
gäbe es keins, das nicht vollständig zerstört sei. Sie wollten mir ihre
Gräber vielleicht nicht zeigen. Auf meiner Reise 1902 zog ich auch
durch das Gebiet der Vejos und grub damals ein Vejograb aus.
Vielleicht war dieses nicht typisch. Unter einer Wildschweinhaut lag
der Tote in die Erde eingegraben mit seiner Wasserkalebasse. Von
Hütte und Bett war keine Spur vorhanden. Die Kalebasse war leer.
Das Wasser habe der Tote ausgetrunken, sagten die Indianer.
Nicht selten arbeiteten die Mataco-Vejos als Diener der am Rio
Itiyuro wohnenden Chanés. Daß ein Chané dagegen bei einem
Mataco dienen sollte, wäre undenkbar. Einen solchen
Klassenunterschied zwischen den Stämmen werden wir hier
wiederholt zu erwähnen Gelegenheit haben.
Am 18. Mai waren wir in Yacuiba, einem großen Dorfe an der
Grenze zwischen Bolivia und Argentinien. Jetzt ist es ein ganz
anständiger Platz, während es früher ein gefährlicher Zufluchtsort für
Verbrecher war, die aus Furcht vor der argentinischen Polizei hierher
geflohen waren.
Yacuiba war während eines großen Teiles der Reise ein wichtiger
Stützpunkt für mich. Ein liebenswürdiger Franzose, C. Holzer, hat
mir dort große Dienste geleistet, indem er mir bei vielen schweren
Transporten von Ausrüstungen und Sammlungen behilflich war.
Mein erster Ausflug von Yacuiba galt den Chanéindianern am Rio
Itiyuro. Diesen werde ich in einem anderen Zusammenhange
schildern. Mein zweiter war nach dem Rio Pilcomayo und den an
diesem eigentümlichen Flusse wohnenden Indianern.
Hier begann der ernste Teil meiner Reise.
[1] Ortsnamen, Eigennamen, spanische und indianische Wörter

sind in der Regel der spanischen Aussprache gemäß
geschrieben.
[2] Ashluslay: englisches sh.
Zweites Kapitel.
Unter den Indianern am Rio
Pilcomayo.
Als ich frühzeitig im Jahre 1902 vom Rio Pilcomayo heimkehrte,

glaubte ich kaum, daß ich jemals wieder dorthin kommen würde. Die
widrigen täglichen Staubstürme machten den Aufenthalt
unerträglich. Anfang Juni 1908 ritt ich gleichwohl wieder durch den
großen Wald zwischen Yacuiba und Crevaux nach dem Rio
Pilcomayo. Man vergißt so leicht die Schwierigkeiten einer Reise.
Nach einiger Zeit gedenkt man ausschließlich der angenehmen
Stunden. Nach einer Höflichkeitsvisite bei den Matacoindianern ging
ich bei Crevaux über den Rio Pilcomayo und reiste durch ein von
den Toba bewohntes Gebiet zu den Chorotiindianern, die etwa 50
km unterhalb Crevaux viele Dörfer besitzen. Hier verweilte ich vor
allem in dem Dörfchen des Chorotihäuptlings „Waldhuhn“. Dort
amüsierte ich mich prächtig; beinahe nackt, nur in Federschmuck
und Brille gekleidet, tanzte ich des Nachts mit den Indianern und
Indianerinnen an den weißschimmernden Sandufern des Rio
Pilcomayo. Fühlten wir uns vom Tanze erhitzt, so tummelten wir uns
in dem brausenden Wasser des Flusses. Wir jagten, sangen,
spielten, fischten, wir rauchten abwechselnd aus derselben Pfeife
und langweilten uns niemals. Einige Besuche machte ich 60–70 km
weiter unterhalb des Flusses bei den Ashluslayindianern, die, durch
meine Vorräte von Messern, Nadeln, Tabak und prächtigen Tüchern
angelockt, mich einluden, sie im Herzen ihres Landes zu besuchen.
Erst ein Jahr später, im Oktober 1909, als meine Wege mich
wieder von Yacuiba nach dem Rio Pilcomayo führten, konnte ich ihre
Einladung annehmen. Es erscheint mir als das Geeignetste, diese
beiden Reisen nach dem Rio Pilcomayo im Zusammenhang zu
schildern.
Mit fünf Mann verließ ich am 27. Oktober 1909 den
bolivianischen Militärposten bei Guachalla, 100 Kilometer von
Crevaux, und folgte dem nordöstlichen Ufer des Rio Pilcomayo. Ein
Mestize, Flores, begleitete mich als Dolmetscher. Er sprach
ausgezeichnet Choroti und verstand auch etwas Ashluslay.
Jahrelang hatte er unter den Indianern gelebt und hatte dort auch
eine größere Anzahl Frauen. Von den Weißen am Rio Pilcomayo ist
wohl keiner so imstande gewesen, das Indianerleben kennen zu
lernen, wie dieser Mann. Er kennt ihre Sitten und Gebräuche, er
weiß, wie man sich bei einem Indianerfest zu benehmen hat, er kann
ihre Lieder singen, er tanzt wie ein Indianer. Viele Chorotifrauen
haben sich dem Weißen hingegeben. Flores ist der einzige Weiße,
der mit einer solchen Frau ein Kind hat, und die Chorotiindianer
betrachten ihn auch vollständig als zur Familie gehörig. Er ist ihr
Freund und Ratgeber und hat manches Mal die Unterhandlungen
zwischen Indianern und Kolonisten geleitet. Einen vortrefflicheren
Dolmetscher konnte ich kaum erhalten.
Unser erstes Nachtlager nach Guachalla hatten wir in einem
Ashluslaydorf. Als ich in das Dorf ritt, waren alle Indianer betrunken.
Unter Jubelrufen führten sie meinen Maulesel zum Festplatz. „Elle
is.“ „Der kleine Papagei ist gut“, riefen die Indianer. „Ashluslay is! is!
is! Toba häes! häes!“ „Ashluslay sind gut, Toba schlecht!“ johlte „der
kleine Papagei“, indem er Tabakblätter um sich streute. Man hob
mich vom Maulesel, umarmte mich und berauschte mich mit
Algarrobobier. Es war wild, aber interessant. In dieser Nacht schlief
ich vor meinem Bett, während drei Indianer, in meine Decken
eingehüllt, schnarchten. Wir kamen gut überein, aber der
Kommunismus ist anstrengend.
Trotz Freude, Freundschaft, Rausch und Geschenken konnte der
Dolmetscher die Indianer nicht dazu bringen, uns auf ihren Wegen,
die direkt nach dem nördlichen Chaco gehen, in das Herz ihres
Landes zu führen. Alle Versprechungen waren vergessen. Dort gibt
es keine Menschen, dort gibt es kein Wasser auf drei
Tagemärschen, sagte einer, auf zwei, sagte ein anderer, gar keins,
sagte ein dritter. Daß Wassermangel herrschte, war möglicherweise
wahr, denn wir befanden uns am Ende der Trockenzeit. Ich beschloß
deshalb, zu warten, und erst nach den ersten Regentagen, die bald
kommen mußten, einen Versuch zu machen, in das unbekannte
Land nördlich vom Pilcomayo einzudringen.
Wir gingen deshalb längs des Rio Pilcomayo weiter und folgten
immer dem nördlichen, d. h. dem bolivianischen Ufer, wo ich mich
leicht orientieren konnte. Zuerst kamen wir durch das Land der
Mataco-Guisnays. Man hatte mir erzählt, daß einer dieser auf der
argentinischen Seite des Flusses wohnenden Indianer den Skalp
eines Ashluslayindianers besitze. Der Dolmetscher und Moberg
wurden, mit allerlei Tauschwaren beladen, vorausgesandt. Ich ging
nicht selbst mit, weil ich wußte, daß ich, wo es sich um einen so
interessanten ethnographischen Gegenstand handelte, nicht
gleichgültig und uninteressiert genug auftreten könne. Als sie in das
Dorf kamen, war dort ein großes Fest, und die Matacos waren
betrunken und johlten. Mitten im Dorfe hing auf einer spiralförmig
abgerindeten Stange der mit roten Taschentüchern und anderen
Schmuckgegenständen behängte Skalp. Moberg und der
Dolmetscher taten, als sähen sie nichts. Dem ersteren wurde
Algarrobobier angeboten, dem letzteren zuerst nichts, weil er für
einen Chorotifreund, also Matacofeind, gehalten wurde. Nachdem
sie eine Weile gesessen und geplaudert hatten, tat der Dolmetscher,
als wenn er erst jetzt zufällig den Skalp gesehen hätte und fragte:
„Was ist das dort für ein Waschlappen?“ Der Besitzer begann nun
seine Taten zu rühmen, und der Skalp wurde heruntergenommen
und besichtigt. Sie erzählten ihm, daß seine Heldentaten nun weit
und breit unter den weißen Männern bekannt werden würden, was
ihm natürlich schmeichelte. Nach vielem Hin und Her tauschten sie
denselben ein. Erst sollten jedoch die alten Frauen singen und mit
ihnen tanzen.
Wie Friederici[3] nachgewiesen hat, ist das Gebiet in Südamerika,
aus dem Skalpe bekannt sind, kein sehr bedeutendes. Außer dem
Chaco ist es nur ein kleines Gebiet in Guyana. Kopfjäger sind
dagegen ein großer Teil der Indianer Südamerikas. Dies war der
erste Skalp aus Südamerika, der in eine Sammlung gekommen ist.
Nachdem wir mehrere große Matacodörfer, ein Ashluslaydorf und
einen bolivianischen Militärposten passiert hatten, kamen wir nach
einem großen, unbebauten, infolge Streifzüge der Toba-
Pilagaindianer unsicheren Gebiet. Diese Tobas zeichnen sich unter
anderem dadurch aus, daß sie gleich den Chorotis und Ashluslays
große Holzklötze in den durchbohrten Ohrläppchen tragen. Was man
auf einem Marsche durch ein von feindlich gesinnten Indianern
bewohntes Gebiet am meisten zu fürchten hat, ist, daß einem
während der Nacht die Reittiere gestohlen werden. Ungefähr 250 km
unterhalb Guachalla kamen wir nach dem äußersten, erst einige
Monate vor Antritt meines Ausflugs angelegten Militärposten der
bolivianischen Regierung.
Dicht bei und einige Meilen von dem Militärposten lagen große,
von Ashlulayindianern bewohnte Dörfer. Wir besuchten den
Häuptling Toné in seinem Dorfe. Dieses hat, wenn alle Indianer
versammelt sind, etwa 1000 Einwohner. Mitten auf dem großen,
offenen Platze des Dorfes schlugen wir unser Lager auf und
machten es uns richtig gemütlich. Wir waren zu einer Zeit
gekommen, wo die Algarrobofrucht reif war, und Algarrobobier wurde
auf dem Festplatz in großen Quantitäten getrunken. Interessant war
es, das indianische Leben zu sehen, das zu studieren ich hier
reichlich Gelegenheit hatte und späterhin schildern werde. Mehrmals
bin ich bei von den Weißen unabhängig lebenden Indianern
gewesen, aber niemals bei einem so großen und mächtigen
Stamme.
Abb. 3. Ashluslayfischer. Rio Pilcomayo.
Die Ashluslayindianer lagen im Krieg mit den Tobas, und der

Krieg verlief sehr ungünstig für sie. Auf alle Weise suchten sie mich
zu verlocken, für sie Partei zu ergreifen und mit meinen Feuerwaffen
eine gute Hilfstruppe zu bilden. Sie spiegelten mir in beredten
Worten vor, wie wir die Männer skalpieren, Frauen und Kinder zu
Gefangenen machen und eine Menge Pferde stehlen wollten. Das
letzte war ihrer Ansicht nach die beste Lockspeise für den weißen
Mann. Ich versprach ihnen, falls sie während unseres Aufenthaltes
überfallen würden, bei der Verteidigung ihrer Dörfer behilflich zu
sein, auf einen Angriff wollte ich mich aber nicht einlassen. Immer
eifriger pochten sie auf eine Allianz, wozu sie von dem Dolmetscher
hinter meinem Rücken ermuntert wurden. Zuletzt blieb mir nichts
anderes übrig, als entweder den Indianern auf ihrem Anfallskriege zu
folgen oder mich davonzumachen. Einen Augenblick war ich
zweifelhaft. Ich wußte, daß ich, falls ich die Ashluslays zum Siege
führte, Herr dieses Landes sei, fürchtete aber doch die
Konsequenzen. Es handelte sich hier darum, sich an die Spitze
eines Einfalls in argentinisches Gebiet zu stellen, und es wäre schön
gewesen, wenn das bekannt geworden wäre. Aus weiter Ferne

The Alvarez Generation Thom Gunn Geoffrey Hill Ted Hughes Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter 1st Edition William Wootten

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The Alvarez Generation Thom Gunn Geoffrey Hill Ted Hughes Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter 1st Edition William Wootten

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The Alvarez Generation Thom Gunn

Geoffrey Hill Ted Hughes Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar 1971st Edition Sylvia Plath

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath 1st Edition

The Art of Us Kl Hughes Ted Hughes

Human Naïve Pluripotent Stem Cells 1st Edition Peter

Key Concepts in Victorian Studies 1st Edition William

Third Generation Internet Revealed: Reinventing

Disraeli the Novelist 1st Edition Thom Braun

Nagorno Karabakh and the Lachin Corridor Crisis

Liverpool University Press

Copyright © 2015 William Wootten

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data

print ISBN 978-1-78138-163-2 cased

Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

PART III 129

For permission to reproduce substantial pieces of quotation, I am grateful

Quick and accurate in his summary of the emotional style in question,

3 A. Alvarez, ed. The New Poetry, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

of literary seriousness is a critique of an idea of what should constitute the

I devote some space to the processes of publication of The New Poetry as

Beginnings: Oxford and Cambridge

T he contributors list to Oxford Poetry of 1953, edited by Donald Hall

2 Recalled by Alan Brownjohn in interview with the author, 10 September 2010.

Lowell, a poet whose wrought densities and ambiguities, religiosity and

their raftered halls

We Oxford poets had an inferiority complex about our Cambridge contem-

It was a violent time. Wheels, racks, and fires

hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chiang Kai-shek, Senator

True, Dixon’s thoughts aren’t directed at Gunn’s prized Elizabethans.

15 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 24.

point of the race in his time. … He is unusually sensitive, unusually aware,

17 F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary

‘flail of comedy showed coherence in society.’20 This coherence in the society

By modern standards they show an insulting disregard of the readers’

20 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 25.

a dissociation of erotic sensibility, a space between ‘breast and lips’, heart

36 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 364.

Gunn’s discovery of Larkin was, very slightly, earlier and it was a

containing phrases such as ‘unpacked, unlabelled, somehow followed too’,

47 Gunn, Collected Poems, p. 79.

54 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 20.

59 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 19.

Violent Times: Anti-Movement Poetry

T ed Hughes and Philip Hobsbaum chose not to let their experience

in contact with Hobsbaum as an undergraduate at Oxford but who had been

Meetings ended at about eleven, and voices, lifted in contention, would

5 Catalogue to the Group Exhibition, p. 31.

It’s a Condé Nast world and so Marston’s was.

11 Porter, Collected Poems 1, p. 20.

13 Peter Porter, ‘Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: A Bystander’s Recollections’,

of Shakespeare, ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’ places bodily pain at its

That survival is contingent on a point of connection between bodily and

concerned with the particularities of the martyrdom of Farrar: the words

24 Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 122. I

This, of course, was

Granted, this is an outsider’s bristling at the privileged young Cambridge

26 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 49.