Not Bad decisions, not bad elite

Not Bad decisions
This post addresses the idea that there is a central line of British taste which runs through three anthologies, the Faber book of modern verse (1936) – Allott (1962) – Lucie Smith (1970). There was a formation of taste organised around those, and young poets could learn the ropes by careful reading of them. Obviously, there were other formations of taste, and fleets of poets who were excluded from these showcase anthologies. I have not found a “British poetry scene: the critical heritage”. That’s really what I want. The literati don’t actually say, in their weighty essays, “Auden got famous because he was so similar to the people who wrote the reviews and edited the magazines”. But that’s the really interesting question. The period books I am looking at are intent on finding out what “the sound of the time” is. It sounds like “teachers training pupils to write essays in a certain way because that will get them the most marks” and “pupils trying to reach the sound which will give them the most recognition and the most prizes from the people who bestow prizes”. When I describe that, surely it is something we have seen in the real world. If you don’t know what the examiners are looking for, you can’t teach your pupils how to win. That is really the point of “the sound of the time”. I can see that poets like Barker, Dylan, Kathleen Raine, didn’t fit into this ideal. It is not satisfactory to determine what “the sound of the time” is without ever asking who set it up, or whether that approach necessarily sets up “the Age of Auden” and necessarily kicks Dylan Thomas and George Barker into the canal.
We are thinking about a reversal whereby all the legislation about taste made by this elite is nullified. We should also consider a deconstructive approach, whereby modern poetry is not enjoyable in itself, but simply a reflection of the power of the cultural elite, which we need to be told we are part of. I find this version implausible, but it may shed light on the social process. Surely some 17 year old, in some situation, was being told “if you don’t like Auden you aren’t the right kind of person.” The question is whether this elite process, owned by a few people, distorted everything, and my answer is that they produced Not Bad Decisions.

I have been reading Auden: the critical heritage (edited John Haffenden), which sounds like a dull read, but is striking because so few of the reviewers like what they see. It’s always “clever chap but the one I am reviewing is no good”. Take this piece from 1940:
“81. MICHAEL ROBERTS ON A FAILURE TO AFFIRM, NOT THIS TIME?, ‘ The SPECTATOR’ clxv, 26 July 1940,
(review of ‘Another Time’)

Mr. Auden has always been fluent, he has always been ready to turn out a piece of slack, gossipy verse for a social or political occasion, and he has always shown a remarkable capacity for picking up odds and ends of other people’s styles. The present volume is, on the whole, trivial or skilfully imitative, although it opens with a very effective dedicatory poem in Mr. Auden’s most characteristic Blake-ish manner: Every eye must weep alone Till I Will be overthrown — But I Will can be removed Not having sense enough To guard against I Know, But I Will can be removed.[EA, 456] In the poems that follow, the predominating influence is that of Mr. Leishmann’s excellent early translation of Rilke. ‘Perhaps I always knew what they were saying,’ ‘Brussels in Winter,’ ‘Herman Melville,’ ‘The Capital,’‘ Pascal,’ ‘Voltaire at Ferney’ and other poems all have so much of Mr. Leishmann’s characteristic idiom, rhythm and syntax, that it is difficult to judge them as independent works: the reader is left wondering how much of Rilke’s vision ought to be read into these poems and whether Mr. Auden really means anything by the mythology that he borrows from Rilke. (‘Where do They come from? Those whom we so much dread … .’) It is not easy to accept these personifications as reality, or images of reality, from a poet who at other times talks with far more confidence in terms of Freudian analysis and discusses patriotism, religion and disinterested labour as if they were the result of some fixation about The Father that could be avoided, and ought to be.”

It’s Leishman, single n, obviously. Roberts is often seen as the impresario who protected Auden, but this review really is unkind. This fits into this series of posts in a specific way. The accusation is that a tiny number of people selected a few of their own number and manipulated the public realm so that they seemed like the only winners and so the Voice of the Time. This is why 60% of the poets in Allott’s anthology are either Oxford or Cambridge chaps. But – if you look at Haffenden’s anthology in a certain way, it shows the Oxbridge literati, as a group, being perversely influential, but also as maintaining autonomy from the designated stars of the Auden group and registering just about every defect which they had. Also, it shows people maturing and altering their position as more evidence got into print – this is the Roberts story. I was failing, a few weeks ago, to locate a body of Roberts’ reviews so that I could see how much he changed. The evidence is scattered and has to be dug up, but that Spectator review is really compelling. In fact – the level of objectivity gives them a claim to occupy the position of influence which they actually occupied. Dylan Thomas’s parody of Auden shows him as someone who fulfilled rhythms faultlessly in verse which made almost no sense; Roberts’ review names the source, for those sonnets (60 or however many) and makes exactly the same point, that Auden was washed away by the rhythms and didn’t have time to make sense as well.
What Roberts is pointing to is precisely the moment where “someone sounds educated but isn’t writing a good poem”. Auden takes the cultural capital which Rilke and Leishman undoubtedly possessed, and is imitating it without really writing anything significant. Roberts has pinpointed it, but the conclusion we have to draw is that ‘Another Time’ is surrounded by artistically genuine works in the modernist style. These were never large in number, but that just underlines the value of the anthologies, which led you right to them.

I am not sure that the line [Faber book of modern verse – Allott – Lucie Smith] actually needs to be overthrown. I have been looking at 1950s and early 1960s issues of Poetry Review. They were a different pole of taste, an opposite pole to Roberts (and Eliot). They undoubtedly represented a gathering-point for people who rejected Eliot and the faber book. They also didn’t deserve to win. I think the pattern might be “creaking elite-based process which produces Not Bad decisions”, and the eventual retail popularity of Auden, MacNeice, and Spender is an example of where the market actually liked the poets.
If we also look at another choice, the absence of Kipling from the Faber Book, Kipling’s disappearance goes back to him being a militarist and losing reputation after the worst war ever, the Great War. The people whose relatives had died just couldn’t read him any more. That was around 1920. This is not manipulation by the Oxford boys, it was a lot deeper than that. So, this is a Not Bad decision. My feeling is that all the anthologies just mentioned are very good. I can’t get excited about attacking them.
If you read Herbert Palmer’s 1938 book, he rejects Eliot and Auden. He was closely associated with Poetry Review, and their group shared this anti-modern attitude. If you scrap the Roberts line, and have Poetry Review set the standards, you would throw Eliot and Auden out of the window – too obscure, too hard to follow, not cosy enough. I am still asking why one elite won. Maybe it was because the other elites resisted innovation, couldn’t deal with hard poems, didn’t do the necessary work, had damaging political or religious commitments, couldn’t win arguments.
I am compelled by the critical accuracy of the reviewers in Haffenden’s book. They were clearly part of the elite, just like Auden, but when they wrote for public consumption they didn’t puff him up to manipulate public opinion, instead they discussed his faults in great detail and so shared their genuine knowledge with the public. Moreover, Michael Roberts, who had done wonders for Auden with his three landmark anthologies (New Signatures, New Country, the Faber Book) in the Thirties, was willing by 1940 to publish a devastating review of one of his better books. If this elite were willing to criticise the stars of a generation, and to revise their views over time, it is plausible that they were more competent than other elites, and that this is why they won.

I am interested in detailed flaws in the showcase anthologies. I am certainly willing to argue with Lucie-Smith about his decision to leave out Kathleen Raine. But that is different from trying to overthrow the entire system and discredit the site where honour is attributed to excellent poets. I am keen to revive Kathleen Nott (see post on this site), and I think Allott made a mistake in leaving her (and Lynette Roberts) out, but that is not to discredit 86 poets whom Allott did manage to include. Overthrow would mean constructing an anthology which left out all of the poets whom Allott included, or whom Lucie-Smith included. That is a lunatic idea. Just sketching it makes you realise that the project is fatally flawed.
I think you have cases in Allott where someone is getting anthologised because they sound like a modernist and intellectual poet without actually writing something convincing or original. If you look at the last 80 pages of his 1962 anthology, you can see this happening. So, you have “elite solidarity” detached from “artistic discrimination”. But, his anthology is almost entirely made up of high quality poems. He made a long series of “Not Bad decisions”.