As Lehman nears the present, his choices grow off balance and whimsical. John Ashbery receives twice as many pages as Pound and almost three times as many as Robert Lowell, who might just as well never have written his extraordinary early poems. (You can get the idea of Ashbery in two pages—almost everything after that is sludge.) It’s simply madness to reduce John Berryman to half a dozen pages and Randall Jarrell to five (scanting his great war poems), while lavishing eight on Charles Bukowski and ten on James Schuyler. Lehman’s fondness for the Beats and the New York School (their glamour largely faded now) means that Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara are given acres of elbow room, though Ginsberg is weirdly denied Howl, the most famous poem of the postwar period. The strangest inclusion is the Canadian Anne Carson, here because she “has taught in the United States and has a wide following among younger poets”—with standards like that, you could include any poet who ever came here for a long weekend.
Reading through the poets even younger, I’m drawn to some I’ve frequently criticized—to the strangled psychology of Louise Gluck and C. K. Williams’s voyeuristic confessions, to the smudged Turneresque landscapes of Charles Wright and Jorie Graham’s MRI cross-sections of consciousness. Yet far more pages are wasted on giddy, crowd-pleasing poets like Billy Collins and James Tate. Worse, the younger poets are getting older—the youngest in Matthiessen was thirty-three; the youngest in Ellmann, forty-two. The youngest in Lehman is fifty-five, and at this rate the baby in the next edition will be over seventy.
Anthologies age as badly as fashion, and the pillbox hats and pearls of one generation must give way to the tattoos and tongue studs of another. It took a long while for the most distinguished press in the mother country to notice that Americans wrote poetry at all; but where Oxford’s first anthology of American verse could have been carried around in a small handbag, the new one has to be wheeled around in a shopping cart. This bloated, earnest, largely mediocre new Oxford takes up a lot of space on the shelf without providing a clear view of our moment. That chance won’t come again for another generation.
100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Strand
In Greek, an anthology meant a bouquet. The existence of such bouquets tells us two things—that the ancients liked cut flowers and that they found themselves short of time. Mark Strand’s 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century has trouble figuring out what it wants to be, and his introduction is hedged with excuses for what it is. You might make all sorts of assumptions after reading the title, and the introduction is in a hurry to tell you how wrong you are. The editor announces, in a somewhat embarrassed fashion, that the poets come only from the Americas and Europe (one manages to straggle in from Australia), that no poet was born after 1927 (or, if foreign, somewhat later—there’s a Danish poet as young as seventy), that each poet is permitted the star turn of only one poem (though due to an editorial mishap one poet had to be given two), and that an attempt was made to balance the usual suspects with others scarcely guilty of anything.
After the editor’s nervous apologetics, you’re grateful he does not invoke, as anthologists almost ritually do, poetry’s Luminous Richness, or Humanizing Power, or any of the broad claims that make reading poetry irritating and being a poet a torment. You are not spared, however, the reassuring knowledge that the poems chosen “require no special knowledge for their appreciation” and that in the editor’s opinion they “can be read more than once without diminishing their power to persuade, amuse, or entrance,” statements that come with a whiff of condescension.
A reader might be forgiven for wondering who needs such an anthology, since anyone who loves poetry will be depressed to see Eliot’s “Prufrock” or Auden’s elegy for Yeats, poems any tenth grader should know, yet taken aback to find Elizabeth Bishop represented by a diffuse and overly earnest poem like “In the Waiting Room” (much beloved by scholars of “identity”) or Yeats by the laggard “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz.” The editor might answer that he means to be provocative; but surely readers unfamiliar with poetry ought to be given the best poems at hand, while familiar readers ought to be jostled and stirred by every page—it is difficult to serve both masters. A good poetry anthology requires taste combined with irrational prejudice. There are poems here by Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and Dylan Thomas already collected to death, and poems good enough by poets who have written much better (it’s hard to choose a weak poem by Frost, but Strand has succeeded). Any anthologist who includes Alan Ansen instead of Randall Jarrell or Edwin Muir instead of A. E. Housman comes from a region where the bears are princes.
Poetry has never been entirely the preserve of men, though until the present generation you had to look very hard to find women, so it is perhaps understandable that the editor has looked a little too hard and included mediocre work by mediocre poets like Louise Bogan, Ruth Stone, May Swenson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay (responsible for the anthology’s worst line, “White against a ruddy cliff you stand, chalcedony on sard”). Readers who already adore Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, however, will be grateful, if they don’t know her work, for a typically charming and idiosyncratic poem by Amy Clampitt.
Half the anthology consists of poets born in the United States or Great Britain, which leaves the other half for the rest of the world; and as a result the quality there is somewhat higher, or would be in that utopia where translations are better than the originals. Alas, the reader limited to English may wonder why anyone would bother reading Neruda, Hikmet, Akhmatova, or Alberti. A reader must usually take poets in translation at a deep discount (it’s odd that wit translates better than humor, since you’d think it would be the other way around)—it’s a miracle that the reader sees a glimmer of the gifts of Rilke and Cavafy, Pavese and Tsvetaeva. Translation may be a bad business, but it’s the only business for the monoglots Americans have become.
100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century, its title reminiscent of the marquees that used to line Broadway (“100 Dancing Girls 100”), is unlikely to convince new readers to throw down their tabloids and pick up a book of poetry. What might do so would be an anthology much more personal and crotchety, full of poems the anthologist simply and helplessly loved—whatever the promises of the introduction here, too many poems seem like timeservers or pensioners, included out of a desire to please (or, worse, a desire not to offend). It may seem ungrateful to complain about an anthology so catholic in its tastes; but the former poet laureate is one of the few poets who could produce an anthology worth the reading, and he has wasted an opportunity. Anthologies like this are published for occasions on which a present is traditional but diamonds too expensive. Never meant to be read, the guilt book ends up on a thrift-store shelf, with forlorn inscriptions like “Happy Birthday” and “To the young graduate with love from Cousin Jake.”
The Lost World of Lawrence Durrell
Czech has one word for Schadenfreude, I’m told, but another for taking delight in the misfortunes others have caused themselves. Though most poets are neglected, few have been the source of their own neglect. Lawrence Durrell is so well known for the steam-heated sex and casual betrayals of The Alexandria Quartet and for travel journals like Prospero’s Cell, it’s difficult to remember that he was once considered a poet of great promise.
Though he wrote mediocre novels in the thirties, including one under a pseudonym, Durrell’s literary imagination was from the first devoted to poetry (he must have tired of hearing that his prose was “poetic”). Like Faulkner and Joyce, he found his way to fiction through poetry and, once there, discovered it hard to make his way back. His first book of poems, published in 1943 when he was thirty-one, had a touch of Auden, a dab of Eliot, and the amalgam of period manners young poets fool themselves into thinking original, when it is just theft in parts.
Curse Orion who pins my man like moth,
Who sleeps in the monotony of his zone,
Who is a daft ankle-bone among stars,
O shame on the beggar by silent lands
Who has nothing but carbon for his own.
Uncouple the flutes! Strike with the black rod!
Reading Durrell’s apprentice verse is like strolling through a regional museum whose exhibits have never been updated—a dinosaur wanders through the foyer, missing its tail; glass cases imprison a moth-eaten panda and seven tigers shot in a single afternoon; and off in a corner a woman in an eighty-year-old apron pours eighty-year-old tea.
The lines quoted above come from the most ambitious and protracted of Durrell’s early poems, “The Death of General Uncebunke: A Biography in Little,” which proclaims itself “not satire but an exercise in ironic compassion,” meaning satire by another name. This jaunty, overextended joke, a portrait of a fictional explorer and Tory M.P., “must be read like a novel,” the author declared, “to be really appreciated.” It’s hard to know how poker-faced he was, since he also advised that the poem “should be read with the inner voice, preferably in some dialect.”
Indebted more to Eliot’s Sweeney and Auden’s James Honeyman than to the surrealists mentioned by Peter Porter, the editor of this Selected Poems, such a poem shows Durrell straining, not so much at what poetry could do, but at what he could do in poetry. Like many minor poets, he might have made a greater mark had he written nothing but light verse:
Now the blacker the berry, the thicker comes the juice.
Think of Good Lord Nelson and avoid self-abuse,
For the empty sleeve was no mere excuse
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
“England Expects” was the motto he gave
When he thought of little Emma out on Biscay’s wave,
And remembered working on her like a galley-slave
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
Heroic verse is one thing, but antiheroic verse is almost better.
When a poet writes a novel, especially one that attracts a devoted following, it’s common to look to the poetry for signs of the fiction struggling to escape. Durrell’s taste for characters as peculiar as General Uncebunke makes the poems read like trial pieces; but, if you view his poetry as a false start or dead end, as the fiction’s forethought afterthought, you can’t see what the poems were before they Whiggishly turned into something else. (The General makes you think that had Eliot really been interested in Madame Sosostris or Phlebas, he might have become a minor novelist instead of a superb poet.)
Lyric sensibility of a Keatsian sort has for a century been tolerable only in prose—Faulkner and Joyce would never have been great poets, not just because they were not talented enough, but because they loved the lushness of language too well. There’s a book to be written about the novel’s appetites of style—Durrell needed the form’s capaciousness, because the pressures and tensions of verse brought out only his vices, and the poetic manner could not contain the worlds he beheld.
Porter’s introduction to this compact selection reads like a brief for the defense, beginning with an apology for suggesting, in an old encyclopedia entry, that Durrell’s “poetry did not mature and produce the masterpieces his readers had every reason to expect” and that the poet was “more a Mendelssohn than a Mozart.” I’m not sure what Porter has to apologize for, except that calling Durrell a Mendelssohn grossly exaggerates his talent. Such an introduction (which, to add injury to insult, suffers from various typos and misquotations) does the poet little good—the reader ends up having to translate the editor’s enthusiasm: “important but somewhat neglected” means “almost entirely forgotten,” and the “appropriateness with which he builds lyrical afflatus into aspects of reality” means the poet was a bit of a blowhard. The editor himself falls victim to the style when he writes that certain poems “shine as brightly as the Ionian Sea or the chips of unfading mosaic in the temples and palaces of the Ancient World.”
In order to extract any pleasure from Durrell’s poetry, the reader must cross acres of humorless blather:
The sumptuary pleasure-givers living on
In qualities as sure as taste of hair and mouth,
White partings of the hair like highways,
Permutations of a rose, buried beneath us now,
Under the skin of thinking like a gland
Discharging its obligations in something trivial:
Say a kiss, a handclasp: say a stone tear.
It’s not that a little of this goes a long way but that a lot goes such a little way. Occasionally some descriptive phrase (“riding through the soft lithograph / Of Paris in the rain”) or emotive expression (“The sense of his complete unworthiness / Pressed each year slowly tighter than a tourniquet”) catches the reader’s dimming eye; but the main impression is of a man unsuited to this line of work. In the end, whatever Durrell considered himself, being a failed poet was the making of him. The vices of his poetry were not exactly the virtues of his prose, but they didn’t get in the way of its virtues—they were diluted until they became only an irritant of style.
After the early poems, Durrell abandoned his lyrics for a style closer to journal writing. The poems became warmer and more rueful, not straining for effects so much as waiting for them to occur; despite continuing trouble with tone, the poems were closely and attractively observed, when there was something close and attractive:
The mauve street is swallowed
And the bats have begun to stitch slowly.
At the stable-door the carpenter’s three sons
Bend over a bucket of burning shavings.
Such lines show the same denial of spectacle that divides Edward Lear’s watercolor sketches from his labored oil paintings.
Durrell never stopped writing poems, though after the forties he rarely managed more than a few pages a year. The poems became annotations on the loss of youth and the deteriorations of age, but with the authority of plain feeling:
I shall die one day I suppose
In this old Turkish house I inhabit:
A ragged banana-leaf outside and here
On the sill in a jam-jar a rock-rose.
(He outwitted himself by dying in France, not Cyprus.) Here, for a moment, he was capable of abandoning that “lyrical afflatus” and becoming the latest in a long line of warm-blooded Mediterranean poets from Horace to Cavafy. Then a “single pining mandolin” strikes up a tune, and none of the good habits can make the bad ones go away. Except in a very few poems, Durrell never captured the watchful melancholy or local habitation of the poets he most admired. He saw that poetry was the “perfect form of public reticence,” though he could rarely be reticent in any form—the rare moments of restraint, like the ending of his elegy for George Seferis, are therefore the more poignant:
You show us all the way the great ones went,
In silences becalmed, so well they knew
That even to die is somehow to invent.
Bad poetry is a foreign country—we have a steady series of readings of the good poetry of the past but broken relations with the mediocre, and we must learn to read like innocents.
Whether you think it a Proustian masterpiece or overheated tosh, The Alexandria Quartet is an affair of style, a poet’s novel full of sentences that outstay their welcome, jewelry trays of adjectives, and more overpolished prose than in a year of Anglican sermons; yet you would trade most of these poems for the clarity of a sentence like “At the time when I met Justine I was almost a happy man.” Few besides the editor will believe Durrell, as a poet, “one of the best of the past hundred years,” a period in which the “three most remarkable first collections of poetry” in English were, he claims, by Stevens, Auden, and … and Durrell. Lawrence Durrell was never a poet’s poet but something slightly sadder, a minor poet’s minor poet.
Hart Crane Overboard
Before Hart Crane leapt into the Atlantic that fatal April noon in 1932, he folded his topcoat over the ship’s rail with impeccable manners. (He was, however, clad in pajamas.) Disappearing into the violent wake, he was seen no m
ore, dying younger than Byron but older than Shelley. Not being a seagoing breed, poets rarely die by water—Shelley drowned in a sudden squall; but he had written fifteen hundred pages of poetry, while Crane left only two very short books and the scraps of a third. The hope for a homegrown American epic that died with him has never entirely revived.
The precocious son of a wealthy Cleveland candy manufacturer (Crane’s father created the Life Saver mint but sold the rights cheap), Crane dropped out of high school and convinced his parents to send him to New York, where he hoped to make his way as a writer. Wearing the scarlet A of Ambition, at seventeen he confidently predicted that he would “really without doubt be one of the foremost poets in America.” Somewhat surprisingly, Crane was soon published in some of the best little magazines. He impressed his friends, not just with his bulb-eyed and brutish good looks (there’s always room in New York for a handsome boy with manners and a wild streak), but with his canny critical judgment. He was a fan of Pound before The Cantos and Joyce before Ulysses and was terrified by Eliot before The Waste Land. As early as 1920, he was recommending, before either had published a book, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, whom he referred to as “Marion”—Crane’s deranged spelling offers one of the quiet comedies in the new Library of America edition of his Complete Poems and Selected Letters.
Most of Crane’s short life was spent scuffling for money. His tight-fisted father kept him on an allowance at first but expected Crane to get a job. The poet tried various fits and shifts, finding employment most frequently in advertising (writing copy for, among other things, a new synthetic leather called Naugahyde), though at times he was forced back to Ohio, where he spent an unhappy Christmas selling candy from an Akron drugstore counter. No doubt his father saw this as his son’s first step toward inheriting the family business, but the experiment was not a success.
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