Reviewed by Paul Giles, University of Oxford

It is encouraging to see the University of Iowa Press publishing a volume of essays dealing specifically with transatlantic poetics in the modern era, although it has to be said that in some ways this book promises more than it actually delivers.  We are offered here eight essays on particular examples of Anglo-American influence, along with a general essay on modernism by Stan Smith and a contextual introduction by the editors.  This introductory chapter in fact addresses a number of interesting issues, particularly around questions of how poetic anthologies have shaped the literary canon.  Clark and Ford usefully suggest ways in which books such as Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960), Al Alvarez’s The New Poetry (1962) and, more recently, Keith Tuma’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (2001) have projected differential versions of what constitutes the national literary tradition, so that ‘a transatlantic perspective on British poetry leads to a substantially different narrative from that presented in the mainstream British anthologies such as those published by Penguin, Picador, and Bloodaxe in the run-up to the millennium’ (9).  This opening essay also touches upon important questions around production and distribution, the ways in which ‘London centralizes opinion-forming elites’ through its concentration of literary journalism and publishing, while the United States, with its ‘greater scale of academic activity’ (11), allows for more regional diversity and swifter assimilation of experimental writing, of the kind that would never be countenanced by the middlebrow media in Britain.

The problem is, though, that the subsequent contributions do not really follow through consistently on the topics broached here.  Many collections of essays have a somewhat haphazard feel to them, but this book suffers more than most from the absence of an overall thematic design.  Some of the individual contributions are very good: Nicholas Jenkins offers a fine reading of Auden’s poetry in the decade after his move to the United States, suggesting how he was overtly taking issue with ‘modernism’s ideologies of national rootedness’ (90) as exemplified by T. S. Eliot’s hostility towards Jewish cosmopolitanism.  Through an excellent analysis of ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud,’ buttressed by detailed research in the Auden manuscripts, Jenkins shows how Auden was moving explicitly in the 1940s towards a ‘post-national’ consciousness rather than assenting to culture authenticated by reference by a single country or place (76).  Bonnie Costello also produces a convincing account of Auden’s influence on Elizabeth Bishop, pointing out how both poets significantly deployed the epithet ‘dear’ as ‘a term of endearment,’ one ‘that gay culture was already encoding as its own in this period’ (103).  Alan Golding similarly writes with critical assurance and authority about representations of England and Ireland in the work of Susan Howe, while Stephen Burt’s essay on Michael Hofmann explains how the latter reworked Robert Lowell’s Life Studies to his own advantage.   

Part of this book’s seemingly random quality derives perhaps from the fact that many of its essays were first published elsewhere.  Langdon Hammer’s piece on Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill first appeared in Contemporary Literature, while Stan Smith’s meditations on the differences between ‘modern’ and ‘modernist,’ which seem tangential to this book’s concerns, might be explained by the fact that, as we are told in the notes, his essay was ‘first published in a slightly different form as “Lineages of Modernism,”’ in a special issue of Miscelánea edited by Smith himself.  This kind of recycling means almost inevitably that the book tends to wander conceptually in and out of focus.  There is, in fact, very little here on ways in which the nation operates as a rhetorical frame of reference, and nothing at all on how race is a significant component within this.  The introduction admits almost apologetically that ‘the term Anglo-American has been stretched to allow discussion of the Irish contexts of Yeats and Susan Howe’ (18), but such allowance of elasticity serves merely to highlight the tenuous nature of the book’s theoretical premises to start with.   

If this volume could be said to have a central concern, it lies in how poets are said to be related to and influenced by each other through a network of personal relations.  Tony Lopez’s essay takes as its starting point John Ashbery’s love affair with Lee Harwood in 1965–66, and it goes on to infer from this how Harwood’s poetry subsequently took on characteristics of the New York School. Lopez concludes his piece by arguing specifically that Harwood was ‘influenced by American culture, not as some remote set of artistic principles, but through his relationship’ with Ashbery, and he suggests that ‘this personal route of poetic influence is likely to be much more important than is generally admitted in discussions of cultural transmission’ (149-50).  This, of course, is to return criticism to forms of anecdote and biography and altogether to occlude more complex questions about the formation of national literary traditions.  Bizarrely, Lopez cites as the culmination of his critical argument one of his own poems, ‘The New State,’ in which ‘lines from Ashbery’s title-poem in Rivers and Mountains and lines from ‘The Book’ in Harwood’s The White Room have been patched together’ (149).  Although this poem is interesting enough on its own account, the problem here is that this critical method is entirely circular, with Lopez using his own invocation of parallels between Harwood and Ashbery to bolster the critical argument about parallels between Harwood and Ashbery which he himself has just made.  Many of the contributors to this volume are poets themselves, and a privileging of poetic insight over the intellectual abstractions of critical analysis appears to be one of the myths cherished here most fondly.  Poetry seems to be regarded by several of these contributors as a special kind of language, whose sophisticated tones can be revealed fully only to a charmed circle of initiates.   One of the reasons many students in both Britain and the United States have been put off studying poetry in recent years has been the largely bogus suggestion that poetry belongs to a rarefied and difficult world, rather than being part of the same discursive scene as the novel, drama, television and so on.   Ashbery, with his brilliant integration of popular culture into his poetry and his versatile shuttling between high and low art, has done much throughout his long poetic career to subvert these tired aesthetic hierarchies, and it is somewhat dispiriting to see some of his acolytes attempting to mystify the ‘creative’ process once again.

This sense of exclusivity is seen most clearly in Langdon Hammer’s essay ‘The American Poetry of Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill,’ which treats the work of these writers as an almost entirely hermetic phenomenon, the product of personal friendships and influences, rather than as a response to cultural conditions more generally.  Hammer himself cites a comment by Gunn on his ‘promiscuous love of experience’ (120), but for Hammer this ‘experience’ is narrowed down to these poets’ relationships with avatars of modernism such as Yvor Winters and Allen Tate.  It makes for a very curious approach to the reading of poetry, part old-fashioned biography, part a form of Ivy League social gentrification, part an eviscerated version of Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence,’ where poets were said to engage intertextually with each other.  Hammer talks here of Lowell as ‘Tate’s protégé’ (129), and whereas for Bloom poets were always engaged in fatal parricidal struggles, for Hammer they all turn out finally to be each other’s protégés.  Although Hammer’s critical method is executed with great skill, its ultimate effect is to dematerialize poets such as Gunn and Hill, to extract them from the particular situations and crosscurrents that frame their poetry and to confine them within an imaginary Parnassus; Hammer writes of how Gunn’s ‘poetic contraries are united by a general quality—‘humaneness’—that transcends national contexts’ (124), and it is precisely this sense of an abstract transcendence pressed into the service of an etiolated liberal humanism that impels Hammer to gloss over the more risky, self-violating qualities of Gunn’s work.        

The last contribution to this book is in many ways the most curious.  Helen Vendler, the distinguished Harvard critic, has been induced to write an essay comparing the poetry of Ashbery and Mark Ford, one of the editors of this volume.  ‘When in 1992, I read, with instant joy, Mark Ford’s Landlocked,’ recalls Vendler, ‘I found a poet who had internalized the inner, more than the outer Ashbery’ (182); and she goes on to prophesy that Ford will be one of the ‘eventual definers’ of contemporary English poetry, ‘as Ashbery was crucial to postwar writing in the United States’ (194).  Well, perhaps.  But the status and reputations of these two poets are at the current time so obviously incommensurate that any attempt to bring them together in this way must inevitably look like a form of self-promotion, and, in the way this essay is presented as the culminating instalment of this volume, it suggests a serious lapse of judgment on the part of the editors or the publishers. Vendler herself is perceptive, as always, on Ashbery, though the assumption that he is ‘wholly without a religious creed or a political ideology’ implies again the theoretical tunnel vision that besets this whole book. To associate ‘ideology’ merely with ‘an organized form of collectivity,’ as Vendler does here (182), is to look back to the Cold War era when ideology was popularly associated with forms of social coercion and determinism, particularly those that were always threatening to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain. There is of course a long tradition of American critical writing which has prided itself on being exempt from any kind of philosophical or political straitjacket: one thinks of Eliot praising Henry James for having a ‘mind so fine that no idea could violate it,’ William James on the virtues of pragmatism, Lionel Trilling and the liberal imagination, and so on; indeed, such positions of apparent neutrality continue to be identified even today as a patriotic imperative by American foundations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities.  But, in its post-Marxist incarnation, ideology has come to be understood as an amorphous phenomenon involving much more than any conscious ‘system of belief,’ as Nicholas Jenkins’s essay in this book on how Auden and Eliot negotiated ‘modernism’s ideologies of national rootedness’ astutely suggests (90).  To ascribe an ideological consciousness to Auden is not to accuse him of being a slave to convention but to suggest that his poetry traverses a historical matrix not entirely of his own making, and exactly the same thing is true of Ashbery, despite Vendler’s claims for his transcendent status.  It would appear that this American intellectual tradition which used to cast pragmatism and liberalism as blissfully atemporal worlds elsewhere, ways of escaping from the vulgarizing categories of social and historical formation, has now switched its attention to the language poets, with equally deleterious results.

There are, nevertheless, many interesting things in this book, and it should make a very valuable reference volume for academic libraries.  Because of its erratic theoretical perspective this is, perhaps, not the kind of work that appears to its best advantage when read from cover to cover, but for students interested in how transatlantic dimensions have helped to shape the work of particular poets such as Auden, Bishop, Ashbery and Howe, it will undoubtedly be very useful.

© Symbiosis, 2004