Post-war Poetry I: the

UK

Clockwise from top left: Sylvia Plath, Ted

Hughes, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney
A poem to open: Philip Larkin, ‘The Mower’
(1979)
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
• Step back from Eliot’s modernist ‘difficulty’:
recognizable subject matter; everyday language;
philosophy or ethics flows directly from
experience; understandable by a popular audience,
without specialist knowledge.
• Draws to some extent on Eliotic idea of
relationship to tradition: tercets replace quatrains
in this near-sonnet; cadences are rhythmic but not
metered; unrhymed; implicit reference to Andrew
Marvell poem with same title.
• Develops Eliot’s sense of modern unease:
relationship with nature broken; inherited
structures of meaning-making and ritual offer ‘no
help’; pervading guilt (personal and cultural).
• Hope at conclusion? Ambiguous, as Eliot is too.
 Larkin and the post-war world
• Last week, we looked at Brecht’s 1938 drama concerning the descent into totalitarianism in
Nazi Germany. This week, we move forward in history to the post-war world.
• This era was characterised by the need to come to terms with the catastrophe of total war
much more global in its reach and impact. Alongside this, the impending nuclear-armed Cold
War and the beginnings of awareness concerning human-made environmental decline
provided a backdrop for ‘serious’ poetic reflection.
• None of this is explicitly present in Larkin’s poem about the death of a hedgehog, but it is also
written all over it. Recent history is the latent content of all four of today’s poets’ work – the
lecture charts their differing strategies of response.
• Born in 1922, Larkin is a member of the new generation of poets who must, in response to
the Second World War, like Eliot in response to the First World War, do without old certainties
and systems of belief.
• In New Lines (1956), an important anthology of modern poetry, Robert Conquest suggests
that the work of Larkin and his contemporaries is ‘free from both mystical and logical
compulsions and – like modern philosophy – is empirical in its attitude to all that comes’.
 Larkin and the post-war world
• ‘Church Going’ is typical of a poise between doubting and searching in Larkin’s
poetry. It asks, ‘what remains when belief has gone?’ (l. 35) Certainly not institutional
religion, its sceptical church-visiting narrator finds (and the poem titled puns).
• If Eliotic modernism found established institutions and received ideas to be empty of
meaning, Larkin does too.
• But, at the conclusion, ‘someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be
more serious, / And gravitating with it to this ground’ (ll. 59-61)
• The tone and method might be different to Eliot, but Larkin’s poetry, taken as a
whole, expresses doubt about many of the places in which meaning had previously
been found: love (‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘Talking in Bed’), family (‘This Be the Verse’),
work (‘Toads’), religion (‘Church Going’, ‘Aubade), nationality (‘MCMXIV’).
• And yet, there is some measured hope too, often in slightly opaque, symbolic terms
at the conclusion of poems: ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘The Explosion’, ‘High
Windows’.
 Larkin and Hughes
• Larkin (born 1922) is less than a decade older than Hughes (born 1930), and
there are definite contextual similarities between their work. However,
their responses to those circumstances have often been understood by
critics in an oppositional relationship.
• Where Larkin adopts a sceptical tone, Hughes’s approach is full-blooded,
confronting problems head on. To Hughes, Larkin’s approach looked
evasive, maybe even irrelevant and inessential.
• Their respective subject matter also differs – contrasting Larkin’s domestic,
quotidian scenes, Hughes often works with mythical and mystical material.
• Like Larkin’s ‘The Mower’, Hughes’s ‘Pike’ thinks about human relationships
to animals. It too can be read metaphorically…
 From ‘Pike’ (1960), ll. 1-8, 13-22
Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged
grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.
Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.
[…]
The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date:
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.
Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: fed fry to them –
Suddenly there were two. Finally one.
With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
 Initial analysis
• Lyric expression, draws on personal experience and draws themes from there (like
Larkin, unlike Eliot?).
• Unrhymed four-line stanzas – enjambment disguises poetic artifice – cadences are
important.
• Study of an animal emphasizes its brutality, its being well suited and evolved for success.
• Draws themes out of three remembered events: 1) the three pike in the tank, two of
which are eaten by the third; 2) two pike seen dead by a pond, one stuck half-way down
the other’s throat; 3) an eerie night-fishing session.
• Anthropomorphizing animals?
• Poem turns this around to confront the human narrator at the end, with something in
the darkness (a huge pike?) now doing the watching.
• Third incident might be a dream.
 Questions, indictments and defences
• ‘[Hughes’s] work has frequently been criticised for its apparent admiration of the energy of
animal instinctual violence as an alternative to what appears to read as a debased
contemporary culture.’ Neil Corcoran, English Poetry since 1940.
• The anthropomorphising of animals has also led his poems to be read as human allegories:
they are found to tell of our own brutality by way of metaphor. They have been seen to paint
a defamatory and uncivilized picture as such.
• ‘From the beginning Hughes is searching for a way of reconciling human vision with the
energies, powers, presences, of the non-human cosmos.’ Keith Sagar, The Art of Ted Hughes.
• ‘Hughes has been confronted with the word [violence] throughout his career, and its use is
characteristic of the ‘civilized’ attitudes against the grain of which his work so evidently runs.
To reject it might well seem to him evasive; to accept it is to run the risk of confirming his
critics’ darkest suspicions.’ Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes: A Critical Study.
 Contexts I: historical context
• ‘[Hughes and his contemporaries] inscribe a major moment in the history of poetry in
the period: they are the first English poets of post-war European catastrophe. Born in
the 1930s, they come to maturity during the immediately post-war period when
Europeans were faced with the two realities which have been most significantly
formative of the modern historical consciousness and conscience: the Nazi
concentration camp and the atomic bomb.’ Neil Corcoran.
• Perhaps humans, like the pike, are ‘killers from the egg’, who ‘spare nobody’. Is this an
adequate metaphor?
• ‘People are energetic animals and there’s no outlet in this tame corner of civilisation.
[…] My poems are not about violence but vitality. Animals are not violent, they’re so
much more completely controlled than men. So much more adapted to their
environment. Maybe my poems are about the split personality of modern man, the one
behind the constructed, spoilt part.’ Hughes, quoted in British Poetry Since 1945 ed.
Edward Lucie-Smith.
 The New Poetry, edited by Al Alvarez (London: Penguin,
1965)
• ‘What, I suggest, has happened in the last half century is that we
are gradually being made to realize that all our lives, even those of
the most genteel and enislanded, are influenced profoundly by
forces which have nothing to do with gentility, decency, or
politeness. Theologians would call these forces evil, psychologists,
perhaps, libido. Either way, they are forces of disintegration which
destroy the old standards of civilization. Their public faces are those
of two world wars, of the concentration camps, of genocide, and
the threat of nuclear war.’ (26)
• ‘The second, and specifically modern difference in our attitude to
the problem is this: the forceable recognition of a mass evil outside
us has developed precisely parallel with psychoanalysis; that is, with
our recognition of the ways in which the same forces are at work
within us. […] It is hard to live in an age of psychoanalysis and feel
oneself wholly detached from the dominant public savagery.’ (26)
• ‘What poetry needs, in brief, is a new seriousness.’ (27)
 Contexts II: literary context
• ‘Hughes’s voice, I think, is in rebellion against a certain kind of demeaned,
mannerly voice [...] I mean, the voice of a generation – the Larkin voice, the
Movement voice, even the Eliot voice, the Auden voice – the manners of that
speech, the original voices behind that poetic voice, are those of literate English
middle-class culture, and I think Hughes’s great cry and call and bawl is that
English language and English poetry is longer and deeper than that.’ Seamus
Heaney, in Viewpoints ed. John Haffenden.

• Voices:
• Eliot, Auden, Larkin; and Hughes.
 Plath
• Alvarez sees Hughes as the best example of the ‘new seriousness’. He includes 18 of his
poems in the 1965 edition (giving most other poets only 5); his introduction compares
Hughes (the new) favourably with Larkin (the old).
• Alongside Hughes, Alvarez champions Plath: ‘her work, more than anyone else’s, makes
sense of my introduction’.
• Where Hughes comments on human nature through writing about animals and the natural
world, Plath comes at bigger topics through her own personal circumstances.
• ‘As personal as her poems are, they succeed because Plath transmutes autobiography into a
representative account of agony, setting her personal, even generational drama against the
backdrops of classical myth, nature, and history, and turning family members into
archetypes.’ Ferguson, Salter, & Stallworthy, Norton Anthology of Poetry.
• This personal subject matter has often led to her poetry being termed ‘confessional’
alongside other American writers included in Alvarez’s anthology (John Berryman, Robert
Lowell, Anne Sexton).
 Confessional poetry:
what is it, and who writes it?
• Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) is a key text.
• M.L. Rosenthal, reviewing Life Studies, coins the term ‘confessional poetry’:
‘because of the way Lowell brought his private humiliations, sufferings, and
psychological problems into the poetry […] the word “confessional” seemed
appropriate enough’. M.L. Rosenthal, The New Poets: American and British
Poetry since World War II.
• ‘He has a new book coming out in April, from Fabers. I’ll be interested to
hear your response. It’s quite new I think, though for a fairly rarified taste.
[…] He goes mad occasionally, & the poems in his book, the main body of
them, are written round a bout of madness, before & after. They are mainly
Autobiographical. AutoBiography [sic] is the only subject matter really left to
Americans.’ Ted Hughes to Daniel Weissbort, 21 March 1959, Letters.
• Other key texts: Anne Sexton, Live or Die (1967); John Berryman, The Dream
Songs (1969).
 Confessional poetry: does Plath write it?
• ‘I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by
nothing except a needle or a knife or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able
to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying […] with an informed
and intelligent mind. I think that personal experience shouldn’t be a kind of shut box
and a mirror-looking narcissistic experience. I believe it should be generally relevant,
to such things as Hiroshima and Dachau, and so on.’ Plath, quoted in Elizabeth
Bronfen, Sylvia Plath.
• ‘Although Plath’s “confessional” tropes are often seen in terms of a Romantic parable
of victimization, whether of the sensitive poetic individual crushed by a brutally
rationalized society, or of a feminist protest against a monolithic patriarchal oppressor,
her self-reflexivity tends to turn confession into a parody gesture or a premiss for
theatrical performance.’ Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of
Mourning.
 Confessional poetry: how should we read it?
• The label of ‘confessional’ poet is controversial. It is resisted by almost all of those to who is
has been assigned, and by a number of their readers (scholarly and popular) too.
• To read confessional (or any other) poetry solely in relation to the author’s biography is
perhaps the least sophisticated response.
• ‘This work [by confessional poets, esp. Lowell, Sexton, and Plath] effectively shifts attention
from the biographical facts of mental illness to the ways poetic texts are formed by the
conventions of talk therapy, the dynamics of transference, the Freudian family drama of
Oedipal desires and conflicts, and the “dream work” of condensation and displacement.’
Michael Thurston, ‘Psychotherapy and Confessional Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to
Modern American Poetry, ed. Walter Kalaidjian.
• ‘For Plath and Sexton, most critics find the psychoanalytic opening onto the politics of
gender and domesticity.’ Thurston.
• ‘Confessional’ poetry is not only personal – it has distinct political and ideological points to
make about pressing social and cultural issues.
 Plath’s method
• ‘Plath learned from Hughes concreteness, but the dialogue between their poems
exposes significant differences. Plath speaks for the interior workings of the
unconscious forces which Hughes (to some extent) distances by embodying them
in animal life.’ Edna Longley, ed., The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry.
• ‘My main thing now is to start with real things: real emotions and leave out the
baby gods […] the moon-mothers, the mad maudlins […] and get into me, Ted,
friends, mother and brother and father and family. The real world. Real situations,
behind which the great gods play the drama of blood, lust and death.’ Plath, 1959
journal entry.
• ‘Here Plath resolves to stop imposing minor myths on her material. But she
correctly anticipates that her poetry of “real things” will have a grander mythic
backdrop rather than none at all. For example, when she speaks as a mother, she
conveys the elemental rather than the domestic meaning of that state.’ Longley.
Controversy: ‘Daddy’ (1965), ll. 26-35, 41-50
It stuck in a barb wire snare. I have always been scared of you,
Ich, ich, ich, ich, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
I could hardly speak.
And your neat mustache
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew. Not God but a swastika
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. So black no sky could squeak through.
I began to talk like a Jew.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
I think I may well be a Jew.
The boot in the face, the brute
[…] Brute heart of a brute like you.
 Metaphor: appropriation?
• The poem merges historical and personal narratives. It has prompted
accusations of appropriation and elicited anger.
• ‘Plath has been criticised for the way she weaves her personal mythology into
historical moments and events, notably fascism and the Holocaust. She has
been accused of trivialising history and aggrandising herself, of turning real
horror into fantasy’. Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath.
• Yet, the Eichmann trial is contemporaneous to its writing, and may have
revived memories from Plath’s childhood of reportage of the Holocaust. Also,
in interview Plath has drawn attention to her father’s German origins – she is
a second generation immigrant to the States. Are these personal and historical
narratives entwined?
• Does this justify the connections and the imagery of the poem?
 Metaphor:
personal trauma and historical trauma
‘As opposed to psychological or physical trauma, which involves a
wound and the experience of great emotional anguish by an individual,
cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear
in the social fabric […] In this sense, the trauma need not necessarily
be felt by everyone in a community or experienced directly by any at
all.’ Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of
African American Identity.
 Plath’s legacy
• ‘The influence of Plath […] is crucial on an entire generation of women
poets and, indeed, on the development of feminist theory as well as
feminist poetry since the late 1960s’. Neil Corcoran, English Poetry since
1940 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993), p. 132.
• ‘Feminist theorising since the late 1960s, both in Britain and abroad,
both social and literary-cultural, and the presence, example and writing
of Sylvia Plath, have manifestly provoked a new conception of how the
experience and desire of women may be articulated in the
contemporary poem.’ Corcoran, p. 199.
• See also Robin Morgan, ‘Arraignment’, and radical feminism; Anne
Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989).
 Heaney
• ‘The first generation of “Belfast poets” was led by Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and
Michael Longley, all about thirty when the Troubles began in 1969. their response to
the violence that followed the civil rights movement […] spearheaded one of the
greatest achievements of twentieth-century poetry in English.’ Ruth Padel, 52 Ways of
Looking at a Poem (2002)
• ‘The individual gifts of these poets meant they would have been important anywhere,
at any time. But under that pressure of time and place, what they wrote offered all
English-language poets new ways of shaping thought and feeling about fundamental
human things, and weighing up the value of any art, especially poetry, at a time when
murder and military occupation were challenging friendship and justice in the street
and home every day.’ Ruth Padel
• Where the other poets that we have looked at so far had to deal with the aftermath
and fallout of war, Heaney had to deal with a current civil war in his homeland.
 Poetry and the Troubles
• Decolonisation in Ireland has (so far) been partial. Six of the nine counties of Ulster, in
the north, were retained by the UK.
• There, a population with divided loyalties – Catholic Republicans arguing for
reunification with the rest of Ireland, Protestant Loyalists for the continuation of union
with Britain – fell into an armed sectarian conflict from the late 1960s onwards.
• At its height, violence is extreme – in 1972 alone, the year of Bloody Sunday, almost
500 are killed.
• Though the 1998 Good Friday Agreement bought an end to the worst phase of the
violence, the underlying issues remain unresolved. Brexit has reopened old wounds.
• ‘Poets are exposed to intense external pressure to comment on “the situation”, but
once they do, they open themselves up to accusations of easy exploitation of violence
for literary effect, as well as keen moral scrutiny of every aspect of their “position”.’
Sarah Broom, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2006)
 Heaney’s dilemmas
• What is the role of the writer in a time of conflict?
• Is it to act as spokesman for their own side or tribe?
• If the writer makes this choice, how will they avoid the accusation of being a voyeur, a
parasite or a spinner of propaganda?
• And if they attempt to remain detached, how can they avoid accusations of heartlessness and
cynicism?
• Especially in poems from North (1975), Heaney uses the past to explore the present: these
poems ‘link ritual sacrifices of Iron Age cultures with Irish political martyrdom’ (Broom); they
draw comparisons between age-old violence and its contemporary counterpart.
• Heaney explores his own compromised position. This is similar to Larkin (‘I had mauled its
unobtrusive world / Unmendably’) and Hughes (‘killers from the egg’).
‘Punishment’ (1975), ll. 1-4, 29-44.
I can feel the tug
Of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
[…]
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brains’ exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
 Confronting the modern world
• Some critics praise Heaney’s attempt to come to terms with an uncompromising
situation; others critique him as a mythologiser of violence.
• Roland Barthes on the function of mythologies: ‘Myth does not deny things, on
the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes
them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a
clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact.’
• Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’.
• All of the poets we’re looking at today use metaphor and myth to facilitate ways
of coming at the precise modern dilemmas of the society they lived in. Our most
pressing critical tasks include deciding why they do so, what techniques they
deploy, and how successful their approaches are as strategies for dealing with the
modern world poetically.
 Next week…

Post-war Poetry 2: the US