INSTABILITIES IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH POETRY Also by Alan Robinson
POETRY, PAINTING AND IDEAS, 1885-1914 Instabilities in Contemporary British Poetry
ALAN ROBINSON Lecturer in English University of Lancaster
M MACMILLAN PRESS ©Alan David Robinson 1988
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First published 1988
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Robinson, Alan, 1957- Instabilities in contemporary British poetry. 1. English poetry--20th century-• History and criticism I. Title 821 '.914'09 PR601 ISBN 978-0-333-46769-5 ISBN 978-1-349-19397-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19397-4 For Elaine, with love Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
1 James Fenton's 'Narratives': Some Reflections on Postmodernism 1
2 Theatre of Trope: Craig Raine and Christopher Reid 16
3 Waiting for the End: Absences in the Poetry of Michael Hofmann 49
4 History to the Defeated: Geoffrey Hill's The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy 62
5 The Mastering Eye: Douglas Dunn's Social Perceptions 82
6 The Civil Art: Tom Paulin's Representations of Ulster 100
7 Seamus Heaney: the Free State of Image and Allusion 123
8 Declarations of Independence: Some Responses to Feminism 161
Notes 209
Index 230
vii Preface
This collection of essays makes no claim to be a comprehensive survey; my sins of omission are obvious, but my necessarily restricted focus is, I hope, not invidious. My aim has been to consider a representative selection of established and emerging writers whose work demands attention both for its own excellence and for what it reveals about the directions contemporary poetry is taking. The refusal to impose a uniform coherence is deliberate: as an attempt to avoid the blinkered monomania that may result from the desire to justify an extended critical thesis, but also as a response to the radical destabilisation of British poetry at present. For, as in the mid-seventeenth century when English poetry underwent a diaspora which accompanied the ideological turmoil of the English Revolution, so in the late 1970s and 1980s the fragmentation of the political consensus in Britain is paralleled indirectly and complexly in the divergences of contemporary poetry. The very 'idea of Britain' or Britishness has been undermined by Irish poets such as Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin and by the Scottish poet Douglas Dunn, all of whom resist what they regard as England's continuing political and artistic hegemony over their nations. 1 Their rejection of appropriation corresponds to the widespread refusal of women poets to accept as 'natural' and hence unquestionable their subordination to the existing patriarchal order in society. Nationalism, class- and gender-consciousness converge in opposition to the Establishment's marginalisation of 'the Other'. The analytic self-awareness in this sexual and regional politicisation parallels an increasing self-consciousness in stylistic matters, evident both in technical experimentation and in ethical introspection about the pragmatic role of the writer's artful 'representations' in the social construction of the self. This increasing theoretical sophistication (evident in the impact on several poets of varieties of Poststructuralism) will, for better or worse, surely come to be seen as one of the characteristics of late• twentieth-century poetry. The increasingly self-referential word• play of Tom Paulin's poetry (like that of Paul Muldoon) recalls the late-Structuralist concern with literary jouissance and the decon• structionist fascination with linguistic slippage. The avoidance of
ix X Preface closure and the semantic absences in poets such as James Fenton and Michael Hofmann likewise draw their Postmodernist styles into proximity with deconstruction. Even older poets have not emerged unscathed from the theoretical ferment: the historio• graphical anxieties of Geoffrey Hill's long poem on Charles Peguy recall recent discourse theories and the 'metahistory' that became prominent in the 1970s, while Seamus Heaney's latest collection, The Haw Lantern, toys with deconstructionist theory, presumably cajoled by the promptings of Heaney's academic friends at University College Dublin, and at Harvard, where he has held since 1984 the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory. To avoid oversimplifying these complex ideological disruptions and stylistic instabilities, I adopt a diversity of critical perspectives, drawn from heterogeneous areas of cultural theory; my own ideological position is, I believe, implicit but not obtrusive. The formalism of the first two chapters, which by and large treat their subjects on their own terms, is subsequently drawn under scrutiny, interrogating the validity of purely stylistic analysis and of literary aestheticism through a dialogue with poets who hold diametrically opposed views on political engagement. While each essay is self-contained, nevertheless certain thematic interests recur if the chapters are read in juxtaposition, giving the book a cumulative structure. The first three essays examine some of the characteristics of 'Postmodernist' poetry, offering some reflections also on its political complexion. The following essays on Hill, Dunn and Paulin share a common interest in historiography: the concern about (mis-)representation that Hill shares with Dunn leads into the alternative, non-Establishment histories proposed by Dunn and Paulin. The cultural nationalism of the latter two marks an affiliation with Heaney, whose preoccupation with the writer's moral responsibilities strongly recalls Hill. The collection concludes with an essay that addresses more general questions about women poets' self-perceptions, their perception of their social position and how these bear on the problematic of a specifically feminine poetics. The result is a project which, I hope, raises important questions about the direction not just of British poetry but also of British society.
Lancaster ALAN ROBINSON Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Keith Hanley and Ray Selden, who each read the first draft of one chapter, and to Claude Rawson and Jenny Mezciems for their editorial stringency and kindly advice with my essay on Geoffrey Hill. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own. It is a pleasure to thank also Mick North and Bernard O'Don• oghue, for obtaining scarce poetry magazines; Michael Hofmann, for lengthy discussion of his work; Ann Pasternak Slater, for use of her draft gloss of Marina Tsvetayeva, and Craig Raine for forwarding proofs of Seamus Heaney's The Haw Lantern. I am indebted to the University of Lancaster for a term's study leave in spring 1987 that enabled me to make substantial progress on the typescript; to the staff of the University Library for their efficient and good-humoured assistance; to Maureen Jex, who typed the first chapter; and to the healthy scepticism of my first• year seminar groups and lecture audiences at Lancaster on whom ideas in several of these essays were first inflicted. I have been fortunate in having Frances Arnold and Valery Rose as my editorial team at Macmillan; their help has been much appreciated. My greatest debt, as ever, is to my wife Elaine, who created the time in which this book was written and encouraged me throughout. The last word goes to Perdita, whose growing enthusiasm for her books has survived Daddy's unreasonable absorption in his, and to Chloe, whose imminence was a spur to activity and whose arrival was so considerately timed.
I should like to thank the following for kindly granting permission to reprint copyright material: the extracts from Selected Poems (1983) and The Incident Book (1986), by Fleur Adcock, are reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press; the extracts from Standing Female Nude (1985), by Carol Ann Duffy, are reprinted by permission of Anvil Press Poetry Ltd;
xi xii Acknowledgements the extracts from Terry Street (1971), The Happier Life (1972), Love or Nothing (1974), Barbarians (1979) and St Kilda's Parliament (1981), all by Douglas Dunn, are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; the extracts from The Memory of War and Children in Exile: Poems 1968-1983, by James Fenton (copyright © 1972, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983 James Fenton), are reprinted by permission of the author and the Salamander Press, Edinburgh, Ltd; the extracts from North (copyright© 1975 Seamus Heaney), Station Island (copyright © 1984, 1985 Seamus Heaney) and The Haw Lantern (copyright © 1987 Seamus Heaney), all by Seamus Heaney, are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.; the extracts from Collected Poems, by Geoffrey Hill (copyright © 1959, 1968, 1971, 1978, 1983, 1985 Geoffrey Hill), are reprinted by permission of the author and of Andre Deutsch Ltd and Oxford University Press, Inc.;
the extracts from Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983) and Acrimony (1986), both by Michael Hofmann, are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd;
the extract from Selected Poems by Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (1973), is reprinted by permis• sion of Oxford University Press;
the extracts from The Flower Master (1982) and Venus and the Rain (1984), both by Medbh McGuckian, are reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press;
the extract from Quoof (1983), by Paul Muldoon, is reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and Wake Forest University Press;
the extracts from A State of Justice (1977), The Strange Museum (1980), Liberty Tree (1983) and Fivemiletown (1987), all by Tom Paulin, are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Acknowledgements xiii
the extracts from The Onion, Memory (1978), A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979) and Rich (1984), all by Craig Raine, are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and Oxford University Press;
the extracts from Pea Soup (1982), by Christopher Reid, are reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press; the extracts from Selected Poems 1956-1986 (1987), by Anne Stevenson, are reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Four of these chapters have previously been published, in slightly different form: Chapter 1 in Critical Quarterly, vol. 29, no.1 (spring 1987); Chapter 3 in Prospice, 22; Chapter 4 in The Modern Language Review, vol. 82, no. 4 (October 1987); and Chapter 6 in The Swansea Review (November 1987). I am grateful to the editors of these journals and to the Modern Humanities Research Association for agreeing to my reprinting of material that first appeared in their pages.