Something We Have That They Don't: British and American Poetic Relations since 1925

Introduction: “Something We Have That They Don’t”

Introduction “Something We Have That They Don’t” steve clark & mark ford This volume’s title derives from“Tenth Symphony”by John Ashbery, which includes a typically inconclusive meditation on the differences between British and American poetry. The British, he muses, are so clever about some things Probably smarter generally than we are Although there is supposed to be something We have that they don’t — don’t ask me What it is . . .1 The essays collected here explore some aspect of the rich and complex history of Anglo-American poetic relations of the last seventy years. Since the dawn of modernism poets either side of the Atlantic have frequently inspired one another’s developments, from Robert Frost’s galvanizing advice to Edward Thomas to rearrange his prose as verse, to T. S. Eliot’s and W. H.Auden’s enormous influence on the poetry of their adopted nations (“whichever Auden is,” Eliot once replied when asked if he were a British or an American poet,“I suppose ,I must be the other”2); from the impact of Charles Olson and other Black Mountain poets on J. H. Prynne and the Cambridge School, to the widespread influence of Frank O’Hara and Robert Lowell on a diverse range of contemporary British poets. This book aims to chart some of the currents of these ever-shifting relations.“Poetry and sovereignty,”Philip Larkin remarked in an interview of 1982,“are very primitive things”: these essays consider the ways in which even seemingly very“unprimitive”poetries can be seen as reflecting and engaging with issues of national sovereignty and self-interest, and in the process they pose a series of interesting, often awkward questions about the national narratives that currently dominate definitions of the British and American poetic traditions.3 The notion of an autonomous American poetry can be taken back as far as the seventeenth century and the writings of colonial poets likeAnne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor; in debating this issue critics frequently contrast Puritan or Puritan-inflected representations of a paradigmatic American self with British poetry’s greater consciousness of history, society, and audience.4 It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that Americans began vociferously to demand what Edward Tyrell Channing called, in the wake of the conflict with Britain between 1812 and 1815,“a literature of our own”: Our literary delinquency may be principally resolved into our dependence on English literature. We have been so perfectly satisfied with it, that we have not yet made an attempt towards a literature of our own. In the preeminent excellence of this foreign literature we have lost sight of, or neglected our own susceptibility. So easy is it to read English books, that we have hardly thought it worthwhile to write any of our own.5 Part of the blame for this “delinquency” can be attributed to the absence of copyright protection, which made it easier for American publishers to pirate “English books” than commission from their own writers. It was necessary, as Edgar Allan Poe noted, for American authors to seek to place their work in Britain to receive any significant financial return, which rendered them correspondingly vulnerable to the verdict of the major British journals. Sydney Smith’s famous gibe, “in the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” made in the Edinburgh Review in 1820, continued to rankle throughout the century.John Neal,himself obliged to adopt an anglicized persona (Carter Holmes) in order to publish in Blackwood’s, claimed in 1828 that after hearing “the insolent question” of this Scottish reviewer he could “neither eat nor sleep”until he had“made war alone against this foe.”6 For the writers of theAmerican Renaissance this war assumed a variety of rhetorical forms that established a template for Anglo-American poetic relations that persists to this day.Walt Whitman sums up many of the most crucial of the frequently cited antitheses between British andAmerican poetry in a comparison of himself with Tennyson in one of the anonymous reviews he published as part of his promotion of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass: Poetry, to Tennyson and his British and American eleves, is a gentleman of the first degree, boating, fishing, and shooting genteelly through nature, admiring the ladies, and talking to them, in company, with that elaborate half-choked deference that is to be made up by the terrible license of men among themselves. The spirit of the burnished society of upper-class England fills this...