New Collected Poems (review)

Some literary texts, causing scarcely a ripple in the larger tidal survey, excite a turbulence troubling particular readers; a tide-map may change shape subsequently to accommodate the strange object, or the waters again close over what can be deemed a local snag or a reader's special neurosis. This last can happen time and again; there are books proclaimed as discoveries every other decade, only to sink back out of circulation. Turbulence is endemic to a category such as modernism compromised between a periodic and a stylistic designation, and representing an institutional net of decisions as complicated and as slow to adapt as the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy of The Man Without Qualities.

But the problems of modernism's configuration have reached a point where endless fine adjustments exacerbate the category's contradictions. The institutional panoply sails on, but with twin prows, an ever more stressed catamaran. Straining in one direction is a reassertion of a rigorously defined set of stylistic and epistemological principles. The extension of the core modernist cohort of poets to include Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen exemplifies this tendency, symptomatic of the retrieval of modernism by poets and scholars after postmodernism. Modernism then becomes a stylistic choice in the present, asserting its legitimacy through extending the modernist line towards the point where history or conspiracy is seen as contriving to snap or occlude it.

On the other hand, retrieving submerged writing by women and by gay poets contemporary with high modernism, has had the unanticipated effect of bringing back into currency a range of stylistically un-modernist poetry. Some was written oblivious of modernism, some in deliberate refusal or contestation, but all derives from that same rich conjunction of symbolism, Georgianism and urban-realist balladry where modernist poetry had its English birthplace. Georgian style anticipated the anti-modernist regionalism which has become the poetic mode most favored in contemporary Britain. But another line of un-modernist poetry runs from the early poetry of Yeats, including a predilection for theosophical concoctions and personal mythological pantheons, and represents a principled commitment to poeticism as resistant to commodification, declarative transparency and instrumentalism—a position developed by later poets, particularly women and gay men, including Robert Duncan, John Wieners, and Jennifer Moxley. From this perspective there are poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay as radical as the early poems of Ezra Pound; and Robert Duncan could discover major sources not only in the subsequently canonized modernist H. D. (whose writing has a theosophical strand) but also in the eldrich Lallans ballads of Helen Adam. Such predilections if expressed as a program, might reject the Poundian (and objectivist) emphasis on clarity of particulars, staking all on the prosodic generation of powerful feeling (not necessarily self-expression).

The poetry of Sylvia Townsend Warner belongs to this complicated constellation, where tradition was recreated rather than conserved. Her poetry of a sometimes frank lesbian eroticism and of a distinctly unintellectual communist commitment, works through and against the conventions of Georgian verse. No wonder it outraged Robert Frost more than overt modernism could—for Warner's poetry is blasphemous in taking the pastoral mode seriously and, to reach for a current usage, in queering the pastoral.

The editor of Warner's New Collected Poems, Claire Harman, is cautious with claims for the work, and this is fortunate since her understanding of poetics is limited. Noting that in Warner's drafts "you can see her quite often changing words for the improvement of the musical effects," she adds "this might seem deplorable." If sensible behavior is her criterion for poetic success, Harman is reading the wrong poet. She does however praise the powerful ambivalence of the Second World War poem "Recognition." This point could be extended; Warner's war poems are uncomfortable, potent, perverse in their use of pastoral, and decidedly feminist:

No will of mine, the pilotWhispered, from my young wife and from my sleepingChildren to this workSent me out, a sower reapingThe curses of women who clutch their babies unsleeping.

This...