Published in 2015, this is not a new book to be reviewing. It's been on a list all that time but I wasn't convinced I'd like it. But I've been wrong before and here we go again.
It concerns the generation of English language poets born between 1929 and 1932 and concentrates on 1962. Such detailed scrutiny is carried forward into discussion of poems not always highlighted by commentators and, as such, with this period not quite the height of fashion nowadays, it is a specialist book and something to be grateful for.
William Wootten takes Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter as representative of those poets who came after the 1950's 'Movement' and followed the encouragement to risk taking offered by Al Alvarez in his introduction to The New Poetry. My doubts came from my perception that Gunn was adventurous and 'risk-taking' in his life but his poems belonged more with Donald Davie's, and Larkin's, than those he is put with here.
If the litmus test of suicide as a way of validating poetry had always sounded a bit odd, I had tended simply to side with the Larkin poem about horses and not the Hughes one advocated by Alvarez but it took Sean O'Brien, in The Deregulated Muse nearly 40 years later, to point out that such pronouncements had become 'barely comprehensible'. That is where Wootten starts and so one would imagine him to be in sympathy with O'Brien but it takes some time for that to become apparent. He is giving them a fair hearing before common sense is allowed to increasingly prevail.
The use of a Jackson Pollock for the front cover highlights a parallel with 'extremist art'. Having arrived at a time of such 'extremism', poems like Daddy and Crow seem disarmingly normal to someone who was used to Bob Cobbing, concrete and the self-congratulation of any amount of avant garde. One of the first LP's I bought was The Faust Tapes so I've been making my way towards something like decorum ever since. One needed to have read Larkin first, in the tradition of Hardy, to realize what they were reacting against. It didn't take me long to catch up but some of the intended effect of extremism is lost on you if one regards it as the established school and thus takes up with sanity and the much-maligned 'mainstream' as an act of rebellion.
Not much satisfies as much as finding support for one's own prejudices. Wootten includes an impressive amount of circumstantial evidence, at an early stage quoting Gunn's reading of some Larkin poems in 1954 as 'an extraordinary revelation'. It has elsewhere been noted how inappropriate the coupling of Gunn and Hughes was in the joint Selected if it implied a shared celebration of violence. It was Hughes that described Gunn as a poet of 'gentleness'.
There are interesting implications in linking On the Move with The Thought Fox; how the figures in An Arundel Tomb are 'lying' in both senses of the word (which almost makes one wish for 'no types of ambiguity' to be possible occasionally); how Donne's 'off-hand manner' congratulates itself on writing badly and, eventually, how Sylvia's Ariel poem combines the virtues of the two poems that Alvarez had set in opposition.
I have made more notes than I can use, which is indicative of a book full of interest, but the central concern is 'seriousness', and sincerity to experience, that Gunn is later to question in subsequent poets in Expression and Peter Porter in The Cost of Seriousness. The attempt by Alvarez to merge art and life, as if poetry and life were equivalents, can't be made to work, as recently O'Brien has written that 'art is all there is and might not be enough'.
Crow, which I've long blamed for de-railing a good start to Hughes' career, is 'rivalrous' with Sylvia's poems but
The writing is now sometimes so extreme it is often impossible to tell if what is being written is parody or merely pushing a tendency to its furthest point.
The pity was, of course, that it was such a successful book that, like a pop group who have a number one hit, he thinks it's a winning formula.
Even if Alvarez took a step back from the 'rash chatter' of those heady times, he remains unabsolved.
but Wootten doesn't think that it directly caused the rising body count as the narrative of this damned generation progresses. If Gunn is differentiated from those he is bracketed with here by his lasting relationship with Mike Kitay, rather than the failure of so many marriages, his relationship allowed for extra-curricular casual encounters and Gunn's death, it seems, was due to his own more chemical risk-taking.
Not listed on the cover but given some significance is Veronica Forrest-Thompson, who died in 1975 at the age of 27, whose short career might be compared with that of Rosemary Tonks for its brevity if not for the sort of poems she wrote, being in one of them,
at the outset and on the surface all game playing and silly intertextual artifice for the Cambridge minded.
Peter Porter finds life in conflict with 'poetic vanity' with Wootten, whether intentionally or not, showing poetry's main theme becoming itself or other poetry. And Geoffrey Hill, who was knighted for being a highbrow curmudgeon, is all about 'disgust'. The book gathers itself to a grim, perceptive conclusion, via Gunn's implication,
less that confessionalism is too sincere than it is not sincere enough.
It is 'in fact an exhibitionist being-for-others'.
In mitigation of Birthday Letters, we are told that 'readability is not a fault' even if these low-voltage poems weren't very good, with the exception of You Hated Spain, despite the media frenzy, by poetry's standards, they caused. By now William Wootten is playing like Jocky Wilson when he can't stop hitting 180's.
He ends with a very recognizable survey of poetry, in Britain (maybe America, too), as it is now. Endless success in all kinds of prizes for almost everyone (including a couple of little ones for me) but not much of obvious greatness. That isn't traced back to Alvarez, it just happened. But where, indeed, are the Audens of yesteryear.
Sales figures for poetry are usually terrible, which is to be expected, but no single volume by a contemporary poet gets in the Top 20 poetry books. It almost seems to be over, despite the same old piece being trundled out in The Observer on quiet weekends every few years about the latest 'poetry boom'. That only means some shouty virago having a go as if it's closing time already and she's cross.
The Alvarez Generation couldn't have been a commercial proposition - even I hardly know anybody for who it would have been of interest- but was well worth the effort. It is essential for anybody with an interest in the poetry of 1962 and, since I also very much enjoyed a book about the pop music of 1971, that includes me.