Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (review)

This vigorous and engaging volume offers a series of close readings of the poetry of Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Edwin Morgan, and Seamus Heaney in support of an argument that the poetics of each owes a substantial debt to the Old English he was taught at university. The general survey of twentieth-century poetry that the volume's subtitle apparently implies, then, never quite materializes, though several other poets are mentioned in passing and the chapter on Edwin Morgan touches in more detail on Scots language translations of Old English poetry by Alexander Scott and Tom Scott. On the whole, though, Jones' claim that there is Anglo-Saxon DNA coursing through the blood of modern English poetry rests on the geographical variety and canonical status of these four poets – an American, Englishman, Scotsman, and Irishman – whose work spans much of the twentieth century, and indeed spills into the twenty-first.

In the cases of Pound, Morgan, and Heaney the engagement with Old English poetry involves direct translation, in particular of the elegy The Seafarerand the epic Beowulf. With Auden the involvement is less direct, though the flavour of Anglo-Saxon verse suffuses works such as the early play Paid on Both Sidesand the long poem The Age of Anxiety. Jones' discussions of all four poets, however, travel beyond straight translation and into the broader realm of poetic technique and subject matter. Thus, what Pound learns from his eccentric, foreignizing translation of The Seafarerserves him well when he comes to write the Cantos, Morgan's Anglo-Saxon translations lead us startlingly towards science fiction poems such as 'Off Course', and Heaney's fascination with Old English seeps into 'North' as much as it does into his much applauded (and also criticized) version of Beowulf.

Jones' main thesis is that modern poetry is founded on and sustained by a philologically inspired poetics. These four influential figures were themselves influenced by the discovery, in Old English classes at university, of a set of rhetorical techniques that promised an alternative to the seemingly tired tradition of stress-syllabic rhyming verse. It is this that distinguishes the modern OE-translating poet from his Victorian and Edwardian predecessors. Generally speaking, nineteenth-century translators such as H. W. Lumsden, William Morris, and A. J. Wyatt sought through translation to reinscribe Old English verse into the anglophone canon – Lumsden by adopting the rollicking ballad metre thought suitable for a folk epic like Beowulf, Morris and Wyatt by fashioning a more overtly archaizing blank verse based on heavily alliterative anapaestic trimeter. From Pound onwards, however, Old English is used as a resource to refashion the contemporary canon – Jones links Pound's groundbreaking translation of The Seafarerto line 532 of the Cantos: 'to break the pentameter, that was the first heave'. One of the major strengths of Jones' book is the detail with which he supports Pound's claim that the forging of a new tradition lay in the reworking of an old one. As well as reviewing the case in favour of Pound's early familiarity and lifelong fascination with Old English verse, Jones painstakingly unpicks the cadences of the Cantos, showing how they echo Old English rhythms even when they break free of alliterative constraints: 'Hoping to effect a new, American-led renaissance, Pound's language for the Neukuiais not the mock-Old English of The Seafarerbut a modern version of it.'

Jones argues that to the twentieth-century poets Old Engish did not signify an Ango-Saxon ethnic authenticity so much as a latent energy that could be tapped into to revive poetry in the modern idiom. He frequently returns, with variation, to the titular phrase 'strange likeness': since Old English is both foreign to and identical with present-day English, it functions as an ideal tool to defamiliarize and refresh contemporary poetry while linking it to an ancient tradition. In the case of Auden there is the...