Limits as Power

Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations. By Peter Robinson. Oxford University Press, 2005; £53.

Twentieth century poetry has a variegated and fractured history. Contemporary critics, however, have recently acquired a useful advantage in studying it: it is all over – no more twentieth century poetry will ever be written, although later poets will imitate it, and its various directions and influences will endure, some more than others. A monolithic or monumental title like Peter Robinson's Twentieth Century Poetry does not offer a spine-browsing reader much specificity about the contents of the volume, and its subtitle, 'Selves and Situations', is also capacious. Rather than attempting to survey the entire contested territory of twentieth century poetry, Robinson argues for and exemplifies a valuable way of reading twentieth century English-language poetry. He offers a rich selection of chronologically organised essays that put that way of reading into practice through studies of poems by Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, Louis MacNeice, W. S. Graham, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Curnow, Charles Tomlinson, Mairi MacInnes, Tom Raworth and Roy Fisher.

Human beings find themselves in what Robinson calls 'a great variety of predicaments'. Sometimes a poet writes a poem, or many poems, in response to such situations of personal or political difficulty. Here, in this interrelated complexity of poem, predicament, and poet, lies, for Robinson, the potential value of writing and reading poetry. He believes that these literary activities may lead us to a deeper and fuller understanding of our selves and our situations, and hence of how we might live in the world. There is an ethical and even compassionate ambition serving as underlying motivation to this work of criticism. The danger in this is that it may not be realised, just as earlier, grander claims for the role and purpose of poetry, such as those made on both sides of the Atlantic by Ralph Waldo Emerson or Matthew Arnold, met with disappointment. The value of Robinson's quieter ambition is that it gives a meaning and purpose to critical pursuits that can otherwise tend towards the theoretical, self-referential, or pointlessly clever.

Robinson is a poet-critic with a poet's alertness to the sounds of the poem and a critic's sensitivity to its import. His productive critical method is to consider poem, poet, and world in inextricable relation with one another. The foundation of Robinson's criticism is his understanding of each poem as a text written by a human individual who is participating in, or at least witnessing, personal and political situations of difficulty or conflict. It is not enough to consider the poem as an isolated artefact, or to interpret it only against the background of historical circumstance, or simply to correlate it to some imagined state of mind of the poet. Without burdening himself or his reader with methodological concerns, Robinson charts a successful passage between new critical, biographical and historicist approaches to interpreting poetry.

There is something bold, and refreshingly unsophisticated, about his critical focus on 'selves and situations'. Handled poorly, the topic might have read like an A-level syllabus module: 'The Individual and Society'. But Robinson makes fine, nuanced criticism out of his analysis of the relationships between poetic form, poetic self and world situation. Poets, like other people, must negotiate difficult gender or sexual roles, class structures, and even national and cultural divides, and hence the usefulness of biographical detail to many of his critical discussions. The necessary shifts in attention from poem to poet to predicament and back again are sometimes a little dizzying, for the discussion must encompass poetic form and language, the act of writing poetry, the life that leads to the writing of poetry, the phenomena that place life under pressure, and the fact of life itself. For instance, Robinson writes in an examination of a passage by Charles Tomlinson about Paolo Bertolani, 'By saying "He believed" the English poet distances his own voice from the hopes or fears that his Italian acquaintance experiences...