by Neil Astley
W.H. Auden (b. York, 1907-73) was the foremost English poet of the 20th century, influencing a whole generation of politically engaged writers in the 1930s. His poetry’s central themes are love, politics, religion, morals, the individual human being and the impersonality of nature. His poem ‘Funeral Blues’ [ 115] gained wide popularity after its recital at a funeral in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ [98].
The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti (b. Deir Ghassana, 1944) has spent much of his life in exile, in Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. He said this of his poem ‘Silence’ [ 96]: ‘When I started the opening two lines of this very short poem, I realised I was talking to myself, not to my readers, as if to solidify my hatred of rhetoric and eloquence and my love for simplicity and concrete language. As a Palestinian with a negated history and a threatened geography, craving world attention and understanding, I was hesitant to have the poem published. But I decided to publish it because I needed to be its reader. I was trying to convince Mourid Barghouti that pain, even the Palestinian pain, does not mean shouting loudly.’ [Guardian, 13 December 2008.]
Coleman Barks (b. Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1937) is an American poet renowned as a translator of Rumi [ 13, 151] and other mystic poets. He has been a student of Sufism since 1977. Working from literal, scholarly transcriptions of Persian poetry (and with John Moyne in particular), he produces what he calls ‘collaborative translations’: ‘I try to create valid English free verse in American English… I try to be aware of what spiritual information is trying to come through.’ Barks has managed ‘to connect these poems with a strong American line of free-verse spiritual poetry’, such as that of Theodore Roethke, Gary Snyder, Walt Whitman and James Wright.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) is now recognised as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. When she died in 1979, she had only published four collections, yet had won virtually every major American literary award. She maintained close friendships with poets such as Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, and was always highly regarded by other writers, but her work has only come to eclipse that of her contemporaries in the years since her death.
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, she was a virtual orphan from an early age, brought up by relatives in New England and Nova Scotia. The tragic circumstances of her life – from alcoholism to repeated experiences of loss in her relationships with women – nourished an outsider’s poetry notable both for its reticence and tentativeness. Her closely observed poetry mirrors the ambivalence she perceived in the world, ‘the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life’, transforming the world through close observation as though seeing is believing.
Her insights are achieved through acute observation. ‘At the Fishhouses’ [ 38] shows poetry’s transforming power, Bishop’s accumulation of minute detail leading to the incantatory finale where the sea is described as like knowledge, ‘flowing and drawn, and since / our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown’. That word ‘flown’ is the past participle not of ‘flow’ but of ‘fly’; ‘flown’, chiming with ‘drawn’, sounds better than ‘flowed’, but completely changes the sense. James Merrill, Anne Stevenson, Robert Pinsky and George Szirtes have all written illuminating commentaries on these few lines.
Robert Frost wrote that ‘Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another’. A prime example of that would be Bishop’s villanelle ‘One Art’ [ 93], which claims ‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’, but the effect of its repeatedly rhymed assertions is to assert the opposite, with the parenthesised interjection (‘Write it!’) brilliantly disrupting the clinching last line. Indirection and understatement can often provide a stronger means of expressing and confronting a conflict between thought and feeling than open lament or direct description.
John Burnside (b. Dunfirmline, Fife, 1955) is a Scottish writer of radiant, meditative poetry and of dark, brooding fiction. His books include several collections of poetry and one of short stories, several novels, and a memoir, A Lie About My Father (2006). In his essay in Strong Words (2000), he wrote: ‘Our response to the world is essentially one of wonder, confronting the mysterious with a sense, not of being small, or insignificant, but of being part of a rich and complex narrative.’ ‘Unwittingly’ [44]; from ‘Of Gravity and light’ [72].
Edip Cansever (b. Istanbul, 1928-86) went from school into business at his father’s antiques shop in Istanbul, later lamenting he hadn’t studied philosophy: ‘At nineteen I was married, and at twenty I was a young man with a child. I was at the same time obliged to make a living, and drawn to poetry. […] My partner was a good-hearted man. He was in charge of sales, while I would read and write in the mezzanine. Our true friendship began in those days with poetry and continued for twenty-two years. The results are in my home, my room and among my books.’ [‘Autobiographical Sketch’, Irish Pages, 4 no.1.] Cansever became one of Turkey’s leading post-war poets.
First published in 1954 in his second book of poems, ‘Table’ [ 15] became a talismanic poem for Turkish readers but was a mixed blessing for its author: he said if he had written nothing other than this poem, ‘it would have been worth it. And yet I haven’t been able to escape from this poem ever in my life.’
Translators Julia and Richard Tillinghast: ‘Cansever’s imagination is a place where physical objects, sense impressions and ideas coexist not only with ease, but with joy.[…] But if Cansever is not religious, he is, in a strikingly unacademic way, a philosophical poet. Who other than a philosophical poet could have written these lines in “Precipice”: “O appearances, there’s something about you I just don’t understand!” In “Table” we suspect he was thinking of Plato’s “forms”, and that his table represents something like the Platonic idea of a table.[…] The poem is given some background by the knowledge that Cansever owned an antique shop in the Covered Bazaar, so he must have bought and sold many an old table that wobbled but then stood firm.’ [‘Neither Hopeless Nor Not Hopeless: At Cansever’s Table’, Irish Pages, 4 no.1.]
Raymond Carver (b. Clatskanie, Oregon, 1938-88) viewed Chekhov as common soul in his practice both as a poet and a highly influential short story writer. His stories chronicle the lives of marginalised people in smalltown America, while his poems tell stories about difficult marriages, strained relationships and dealing with illness. Winning his own personal battle with alcoholism, he found happiness late in life with the poet Tess Gallagher – the gift of ten more years he celebrates in ‘Gravy’ [ 119] – only to be defeated by lung cancer. The poem ‘Late Fragment’ [ 124] is inscribed on his grave.
Nina Cassian (b. Galati, Romania, 1924) is a Romanian poet, journalist and classical composer. She was granted asylum in the US when a friend was arrested by the Securitate in 1985 for possessing a diary including poems by her satirising the Ceausescu régime. Her poetry is highly personal and courageous, with passion as its central concern: passion as desire and passion as suffering. She believes that poetry ‘is not to transcend life or to transform it, but it is life…Art is as alive as an animal.’ ‘Temptation’ [25].
Charles Causley (1917-2003) lived for most of his life in his birthplace, Launceston in Cornwall, where he worked as a schoolteacher, and produced many books for children and six poetry collections. He said he couldn’t tell when writing if a poem was for children or for adult readers, and included children’s poetry in his 1975 Collected Poems. His poetry is both traditional and visionary, drawing on timeless forms such as ballads, folksongs and hymns. ‘Eden Rock’ [118].
C.P. Cavafy (b. Alexandria, Egypt, 1863-1933) was a Greek poet who lived in Egypt, where he worked as a journalist and civil servant. His poetry was little known outside the Greek community of Alexandria, only winning critical recognition in Greece itself after his death and wider international renown much later with the publication of numerous translations into other languages. Cavafy divided his poems into three categories: philosophical, historical and hedonistic or aesthetic, the eroticism of the la
tter emerging as explicitly homosexual only after 1918. Common to all his mature work is his ‘unique tone of voice’ which, according to Auden, ‘survives translation’. ‘Ithaka’ [ 28] is his quintessential life-quest poem in which the journey itself is what’s important, not the final landing (the Laistrygonians and the Cyclops were giants encountered by Odysseus on his ten-year odyssey after the Trojan War).
Julius Chingono (b. Norton, Zimbabwe, 1946-2011), the son of a farmworker, worked for most of his life as a blaster on the mines. Made redundant in 1999, he worked intermittently as a rock-blasting contractor. His poem ‘As I Go’ [ 27] depicts a life stripped to its essentials. ‘His often deceptively simple poetry was written with compassion and clarity, feeling deeply as he did for the hardships of the poor and marginalised, while his honesty, humour and ironic eye made him a sharp and witty observer of those who abused their station through corruption and hypocrisy.’ [Poetry International Web]
Kate Clanchy (b. Glasgow, 1965) is a poet whose work has had a mixed reception, earning immediate recognition with her first book, Slattern (1995), but unjustified, damaging attacks by male critics for her otherwise much admired and popular third collection, Newborn (2004), which ‘draws on common experiences of women, and the unfamiliar world they enter once they have boarded the pregnancy train and realise, to use Sylvia Plath’s metaphor, that “there’s no getting off ” [Deryn Rees-Jones]. ‘Love’ [50].
Michael Coady (b. Carrick-on-Suir, Co. Tipperary, Ireland, 1939) is a poet, short story writer and photographer whose work explores the universal in the local, celebrating town and country, people and place in Ireland. ‘Though There Are Torturers’ [107].
David Constantine (b. Salford, 1944) is an English poet known also for his translations of poets such as Enzensberger, Goethe, Hölderlin and Jaccottet. Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, his poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Throughout his work, the personal life, with its own joys and suffering, asserts itself against a world whose characteristic forces are dispiriting and destructive. For Constantine, all personal life and all poetry written from it deal with the realities of social and political life in the here and now, assert themselves, fight for survival, and actively seek to make a world in which humane self-realisation would be more and more, not less and less, possible. ‘Common and Particular’ [ 114].
Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and documentary filmmaker. Her cultural experience spans three countries: born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1954, she grew up a Muslim Calvinist in Glasgow, later eloping with a Hindu Indian to live in Bombay. She now lives between India and Britain, drawing her main themes from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, religious strife and terror. Her poetry has universal appeal, especially in these times. When I read her poem ‘They’ll say, “She must be from another country”’ [ 109] at the launch reading for the American edition of Staying Alive at New York’s Cooper Union in 2003, the whole audience of several hundred people burst into spontaneous applause.
Michael Donaghy (b. New York City, 1954-2004) was an Irish-American poet and musician who moved to London in his 30s, and was a phenomenal reader of his work. His playfully serious poetry owed much to the example of 17th-century Metaphysical poets like John Donne, often elaborating an unusual metaphor or combination of metaphors through many narrative shifts and surprises, much to the delight of audiences at his tour-de-force performances. His sudden death at the age of 50 came as a great shock to his many friends in the poetry community in Britain. ‘The Present’ [86].
Mark Doty (b. Maryville, Tennessee, 1953) is an American writer noted for the compassion, relish and wild muscularity of his highly personal poetry. Central to Doty’s work are animals and his concern for the need to cope nobly and gracefully with what is beyond our control. Exploring our preoccupation with the past and the future, he encourages us to live more in the present. His poetry universalises themes of loss, mortality and renewal, and expresses a remarkable empathy for all human and animal life. He has published several collections, including My Alexandria (1993) and Atlantis (1995), which deal poignantly with the failing health and ultimate death of his partner from AIDS and with his almost crippling grief – also the subject of his prose memoir Heaven’s Coast (1996). ‘Migratory’ [34].
Rita Dove (b. Akron, Ohio, 1952), the daughter of one of the first black chemists to work in America’s tyre industry, was the youngest US Poet Laureate (in 1993-95) and to date the only African-American poet to hold that office. Her poetry is known for its lyricism as well as for its personalised sense of history, political scope and diverse themes, from the Civil Rights era to music and dance. She edited the eclectic Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011). ‘Dawn Revisited’ [18].
Alan Dugan (b. New York City, 1923-2003) was an idiosyncratic American poet who titled all his collections Poems, culminating in Poems Seven in 2001. His poetry is ironic and down-to-earth, his language skilfully drawing on everyday speech, his stance often disenchanted, at odds with society and despairing of the world, but accepting what is necessary for survival, especially in love and marriage, as in ‘Love Song: I and Thou’ [ 63]
Helen Dunmore is an English poet, novelist and children’s writer who won the first Orange Prize for fiction in 1996. Born in Beverley, Yorkshire, in 1952, she has lived in Bristol for most of her life, but the place which has exerted the greatest pull on her imagination has been Cornwall: the land, the sea and the light. Her poems capture the fleetingness of life, its sweetness and intensity, the short time we have on earth and the pleasures of the earth, with death as the frame which sharpens everything and gives it shape. ‘Wild strawberries’ [58].
Stephen Dunn (b. New York City, 1939) started out as a semi-professional basketball player, worked in advertising and served in the US Army, experiences which must have helped ground his poetry, with its concern with the anxieties, joys and problems of how to co-exist in the world with those who are part of our daily lives. No fewer than five poems in Staying Alive, including ‘Sweetness’ [ 106], were taken from his 1989 collection, Between Angels, a book remarkable for its portrayal of ‘our human vulnerability and our quiet everyday tenacity, perhaps courage, in the face of those vulnerabilities’ [Steve Kronen, Kenyon Review].
T.S. Eliot (b. St Louis, Missouri, 1888-1965) was the foremost Modernist poet of the 20th century, raised in America but writing his greatest work after moving to England. His two major works are The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943), the former written when he was ‘classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’ (as he wrote in 1928), the latter after his conversion to Anglicanism.
Like The Waste Land, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ [ 74] is a densely allusive work, presenting ‘a psychological landscape where inner obsessions mesh with outer conditions’ [Edna Longley]. Eliot’s poetry includes quotations from many classic poems, often in the original language, expressing the universality of particular human experiences. His epigraph to ‘Prufrock’ is from the Inferno (XXVII, 61-66), where Dante recounts his visit to the underworld. These words are spoken by Count Guido da Montefelltro (1223-98), punished in a prison of flame for his treachery on earth: ‘If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would ever return to earth, this flame would remain without further movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this gulf, if what I hear is true, I can answer you with no fear of infamy.’
George Orwell preferred Eliot’s earlier poetry of ‘glowing despair’ to the later ‘melancholy faith’ of his wartime sequence Four Quartets, which mystically blends an Anglican version of Englishness with the ‘way’ to God. The extracts here are from two of the Quartets, ‘East Coker’ [ 121] and ‘Little Gidding [ 122], named after English villages he visited during the 1930s, one with family associations and the other an Anglican community.
U.A. Fanthorpe (b. Kent, 1929-2009) began writing while working as a hospital receptionist, publishi
ng her first collection, Side Effects (1978), at the age of 49. She was Head of English at Cheltenham Ladies’ College when she made a life-changing decision to become ‘a middle-aged drop-out in order to write’: ‘At once I’d found the subject that I’d been looking for all my life: the strangeness of other people, particularly neurological patients, and how it felt to be them, and to use their words.’ Looking back later, she realised that behind all her poems ‘lie preoccupations with the way people speak, birds, the landscape, cats, England, power, powerlessness and words, words, words’. ‘Atlas’ [62].
Robert Frost (b. San Francisco, 1874-1963) was the most popular American poet of the 20th century. Most of his best-known poems are set in the New Hampshire farmland where he lived. Joseph Brodsky said of Frost (1996): ‘He is generally regarded as the poet of the countryside, of rural settings – as a folksy, crusty, wisecracking old gentleman farmer, generally of positive disposition. In short, as American as apple pie.[…] Now, this is obviously a romantic caricature.[…] Nature, for this poet, is neither friend nor foe, nor is it the backdrop for human drama; it is this poet’s terrifying self-portrait.’