Self-Revelation in the New Poetry

BY PETER DAVISON

DOES a poet reveal himself in his work? It depends on what you mean by “himself.” Most of us who read poetry can usually hear an unmistakable personal voice speaking to us through a poet’s work. Shakespeare, however, defies any effort to perceive a single human being behind the characters and voices of his poetry. Lesser poets are easier to get on even terms with, but many of them reveal a personality only in fits and starts. Others still — those whose poetry is frankly autobiographical, like Wordsworth or Whitman — embody in their work a personality which they consciously display and celebrate.

Yet who can say that a poet’s self-portrait is in fact faithful to the poet as a man? Yeats revealed a number of personalities in his poems — the dreamer, the revolutionary, the prophet, the angry old lecher — but, as Richard Ellman established in his fine biography, Yeats adopted mask after mask, and the poet in his life infrequently resembled the men who speak to us in his poetry. Walt Whitman in person was hardly as robust as he made himself out in “Song of Myself.” The poet cannot help putting a different face on things (for better or worse) when he writes of himself; and no matter how much he tries to reveal, he has always to hurdle the barrier of his instinctive and stubborn reticence. If you want to know what a poet is like, better trust the shrewd eye of an outsider, like John Malcolm Brinnin on Dylan Thomas, and leave the poet to more important tasks than self-revelation. The poet always transmutes himself. He cannot help it, and we should be grateful. After all, a good poet may be a dreary and unpleasant individual. His poems reveal him as a poet, not as a man.

Still, there are ways in which the poem cannot help revealing something of the man who made it. By its tone, its images, its rhythm, its structure — by what it says, the poem tells us not who the man is, but what manner of man he is. It tells us about his inner preoccupations; it tells us how he comes to the process of writing; tells us how and what he hears and sees, which of his five senses he favors over the others, what impression life makes on him. Does he take life hard? Most poets do. In what small things does he see a larger pattern? The poet can hardly help revealing at least this much about himself.

Even though the long reach of the creative process is one of the great mysteries of our being, a poet can be known by the masks he chooses to wear in his verse, just as he can be known by his clothes or his friends or his physical appearance. His masks not only protect and identify him, they also hem him in. There are many legends about men whose masks became their faces, and the risk that this may happen is one of the dangers of writing poetry, as it is of other occupations. The poets discussed in this critique are all under fifty, some of them much younger. With one possible exception, they are still expanding the territory of their work, and their masks are still removable.

Maxine Kumin’s first book, HALFWAY (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, S3.95), might be described as amphibious, so much of it takes place in the water. This poet seems most comfortable when thinking of herself as a swimmer. Water is the amniotic element to her— friendly, cradling, buoyant, and sensuous. The movement of her poems is like swimming — rhythmic, sparkling, easy, full of shifts of light and a continuous liquid flow of sensation. So, too, her themes, for her poems often express the feeling of being afloat in a sea of sensation, but without direction, doubtful, slender of will:

From the standpoint of technique and charm (listen to the half-rhymes in that passage), Mrs. Kumin’s collection of poems shows rich accomplishment; yet the language sometimes seems too highly seasoned for the subject matter. Why, for instance, in the passage just quoted, need the lake be described as a “dappled seam,”and is the pun on “unwind worth the overstrained word? And was there no way to avoid the confused meaning of the sentence that begins “Blackfaced and thick with vomit”? It is too bad when Mrs. Kumin’s easy swimmer’s motion is strained for effect.

HOWARD NEMEROV’S NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

(University of Chicago Press, $3.50) contains fifteen new poems and draws on four earlier books. They reveal a man who looks through windows, whose vision is regularly surrounded by some kind of frame. (One of his earlier books, indeed, was entitled Mirrors and Windows.) Not only his imagery, but the very texture of his verse is transparent. Hardly a poem of the fifty-eight in this collection does not use one or more of these words: glass, window, ice, mirror, water. But for Nemerov, water is not Mrs. Kumin’s buoyant element; rather, he conceives of water as still, cool, transparent, crystal:

The man revealed in these poems is an onlooker, a watcher whose perceptions are unruffled by the fury of involvement. His struggle is not, as with Mrs. Kumin, treading water to stay afloat, but a duel with the image in the mirror. Nature appears as though behind crystal: unmisted, clearly etched, unequivocal for the most part: and yet this crystal world can be nightmarish as well as magical. What can the poet make of all these reflections and transparencies, when every mirror reflects something else, when every window frames a view, when every water pool can change from liquid to stone by turning into ice? The very clarity of Mr. Nemerov’s vision has a surrealistic quality to it, if only because the poems are so profoundly concerned with perception itseli:

Any reader of poetry, whether Nemeroy’s work suits his ultimate taste or not, can read these poems with pleasure for their elegance, the marvelous simplicity and dexterity of their language, their unruffled calm. For throughout these narrow, controlled poems

IF Nemerov shows in his poems the plight of a man separated from nature by a pane of glass, RANDALL JARRELL’S THE WOMAN AT THE WASHINGTON zoo: Poems and Translations (Atheneum, $3.75) is largely concerned with isolation and exclusion. The speaker in Jarrell’s poems, over and over again, is alienated by language, by the failure to communicate, from the reality that we all reach out for. In the excellent title poem, in which a shabby woman looks at the animals in the zoo, she laments:

The arrangement and substance of the book itself reveal the poet’s preoccupation: of the thirty-one poems, twelve are translations, and six more describe problems of language or works of literature and art. The thirteen poems that deal with people, moods, and situations are dominated by the pathos of those who cannot communicate. In another poem, about a lonely man whose solace lies in the wordless language of animals, the humans are the strangers:

There is a subtle movement of thought beneath the unpretentious surfaces of these poems of separation, but weariness rather than agony arises out of the separateness. Why, you may ask, does the book contain so many translations? Is it possible that the poet who translates is weary of laying himself on the line? Why do the poems about art and literature seem to have more wholeness than those about human beings? And even in these, as in a fascinating long poem about the David of Donatello, fatigue conquers in the end:

Although Jarrell’s collection won this year’s National Book Award, its inhabitant rather resembles a lion who, no longer fretful at captivity, “consents to his life" without the will to pace up and down his cage any longer.

ALAN DUGAN in his POEMS (Yale University Press, cloth $3.00, paperbound $1,25) takes the role of a soldier, an infantryman, the dogface of Bill Mauldin’s cartoons. So many of the controlling images in Dugan’s first book emerge from the knowledge of the squalor and confusion of war, from the self-absorption of the captive, from the inner suffering of the tortured prisoner, that it is not, perhaps, surprising that the poems dealing with other themes often lapse into wordiness and contrivance. When Dugan is at work in his favorite role, the language simplifies itself, the verse takes on a crestfallen irony, and the lines speak in a straightforward earthy rhythm. Here is a whole short poem called “Memories of Verdun”:

This poem has in it the harsh melody of acceptance without the self-pitying cynicism into which it could fall so easily. Dugan, the Yale Younger Poet for this year, has written a refreshing first volume, and it is full of the sort of wry humor that tastes of green apples.

TED HUGHES, a young English poet whose second volume, LUPERCAL (Harper, $3.00), has recently won the Hawthornden Prize in England, is a pagan whose poems evoke the superstitious mood ol “prehistoric bedragonned times,” and his craggy verse is steeped in darkness. Animals move through almost all his poems: churlish dogs, scruff cats, hook-headed hawks, plunging horses, berryeyed weasels, “Cows that sway a bony back, Pigs upon delicate feet,”yet none of these beasts enters the poems except to remind us of the beast in all of us, of the “submarine delicacy and horror” that lie beneath the surface of life. It is this vitality, this dark mystery that Hughes labors to celebrate: the beauty of brute force. Lupercal is his title, the name of the Roman feast at which barren women ran through the streets, to be lashed by priests and made fertile; and Hughes’s poems strive to perform this same priestly function — to awaken the reader to his own inner darkness and magic. The result is poems that, slender in argument and rational content, cramped in syntax, clogged in imagery, evoke the hot clutch of sensation with a directness and force that few poets can command today. If Hughes is sometimes obscure, it is partly because the obscure forces in life fascinate him. The clarity of line of a poet like Nemerov is hardly suitable for the purposes of a pagan; transparent syntax cannot matter much to a poet who is not concerned to convey a reasonable view of the world, for what is reasonable about those deeps where “Nothing touches, but, clutching, devours”? Here is the beginning of one of Hughes’s betterhumored poems, “Esther’s Tomcat”:

And this towering poem about a bull reveals the rich inner life of Hughes’s poems. The “I” of the poem is looking at the bull through the upper half of a barn door:

Hughes celebrates this animal power beyond the reach of reason so eloquently that I am sorry to criticize him at all, but frequently one fewer image, one fewer vital Saxon word, like “scowl, clamp, chop, thump, ditch,” would have made these magnificently brutal poems move more freely, without giving an impression of constantly knotted muscles. Yet, at least one poem in this collection, “Pike,” will last as long as anyone may dare to predict.

More than any other poet discussed in this review, W. S. MERWIN is the master of sound, and his poems not only demonstrate in their technique his command of vowel and consonant but evoke in their imagery a whole gamut of foghorns, sheep bells, sparrows that “shriek like nails on a slate,” “strained banisters creaking like rockers,” rattling windows, the sound of laughter. THE DRUNK IN THE FURNACE (Macmillan, paperbound, $1.25) is Merwin’s fourth book of poems, and he has also translated from the Spanish (though he includes none here). He is a young poet, only thirty-four years old, whose work has been growing in stature from year to year, and he wears a recognizable mask less often than most poets. Some of these poems deal with the sea, some with ancestors, some with nature, some with God, some with the devil. Here is a poet who can leave himself out of things except as a poet, who has that chameleon quality to act as a medium through which the colors of things are seen.

I am tempted to quote lavishly from this book, for it contains such variety and vigor, but a few samples will have to do. First, one of an enchanting flock of lyrics called “Some Winter Sparrows”:

Listen, too, to the astonishing mastery of consonants in a poem called “The Native,” about a Tobacco Road handyman in a derelict house that never falls down, though by contrast:

Or, to show another, less pyrotechnic side of Merwin’s many-sided talent, this spare little quatrain called “In Stony Country”:

Merwin is a copious poet, and The Drunk in the Furnace was published almost a year ago. Before long he may have another book ready. Watch for it. Here is a poet who is full of surprises and delight.

A poem is usually either a celebration or a discovery: a celebration, in joy or sorrow, of what is already known; or a discovery, in pleasure or dread, of something the poet did not know, or did not know that he knew. For the reader, much of the pleasure in poetry comes from satisfying his curiosity: what does this poet choose to celebrate? What is he forced to discover? How does he see what he sees? How does he give voice to what he finds out? For, while the poet as an individual may or may not reveal himself in his work, what is unquestionably revealed is the poet’s way of perceiving reality and his way of responding to it. Whether he reveals “himself” is irrelevant; it is only required that he reveal life’s challenge and the poet’s response. Whatever their limitations, the poets reviewed here have responded, each in the only way he could. Their responses are worth knowing, and when you read their work, you will take pleasure in it.