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

The American Poetry of Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill

The American Poetry of Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill langdon hammer Very early in their careers, Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill found stylistic models with complex implications in poets from the second generation of American modernists: Yvor Winters for Gunn and Allen Tate for Hill. This essay explores the uses the British poets made of the Americans. It is also concerned with the distinctive constructions of twentieth-century American poetry those uses imply. Gunn and Hill inherit modern American poetry differently (to an extent, they inherit a different American poetry) from most American poets of their era. As a result, one chapter in postmodern American poetry, one elaboration of what is possible after and in response to modern American poetry, is being written by British writers. Winters and Tate are conspicuous influences on Gunn and Hill.1 To investigate Gunn’s or Hill’s debts to the Americans, therefore, is not to discover buried sources, in the manner of Harold Bloom’s poetics of influence;2 it is in each case to observe a poet willfully adapting the language and ideas of an older, established poet, as if testing the imaginative value of an available poetic role or “pose” (a word Gunn liked to use in the 1950s). Both were thoroughly visible and deliberate: that was, in a sense, their point; and they were no less consequential or authentic because they were studied. One might say of Gunn and Hill what Gunn said of Elvis Presley in a poem from 1957: “Whether he poses or is real,no cat / Bothers to say: the pose held is a stance,”indeed a“posture for combat.”3 Of course Gunn and Hill have long since grown out of those “poses.” But Winters and Tate remain orienting points of reference even in their recent poems because the Americans suggested to them ways of placing themselves in literary history from which their careers have continued to unfold. Belonging to the cohort of American poets Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams, who published their first books immediately following The Waste Land and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,Harmonium,and Spring and All,Winters and Tate modeled critical but engaged responses to modernism that were also,for Gunn and Hill, alternatives to the antimodernism of the new English writing of the 1950s known as the Movement.4 Turning to Winters and Tate, Gunn and Hill turned away from their English contemporaries. Yet they borrowed from American poetry without defining themselves as American poets.Rather,they placed the American poetry they read in the context of other traditions: for Gunn, the tradition of plain-style lyric from the traditional British ballads to Thomas Hardy; for Hill, a poetry of devotion and witness from the Spanish baroque to Paul Celan. Gunn and Hill altered what they took from Winters and Tate (and other American poets they read through or alongside them) by situating American poetry outside American tradition. Winters and Tate, interestingly, were unpromising models. Remembered today more often as critics than poets, they were both figures of thwarted or curtailed poetic ambition whose criticism focused on (as Tate put it)“the limits of poetry,”and whose poetic output was small.5 Gunn and Hill saw in Winters and Tate something larger than their bodies of poetry, however; they saw models of honorable poetic work, definitions of poetry and the human purposes it might serve. And even in the ways that they were limited, Winters and Tate were generative. Following the implications of positions derived from Winters and Tate, Gunn and Hill opened their own work, over time, to possibilities Winters and Tate had renounced or foreclosed. They converted deadends into fresh points of departure. In Winters and Tate, a skeptical rationality constrains lyric power to the point of impasse, expressed in the limits they place on the language, subjects, and attitudes suitable to poetry, as well as in the truncated shape of their oeuvres . The tension between lyricism and skepticism in their work is an early versionof thegeneralconflictbetweentheproponentsof“closed”and“open”form that crystallized in the late 1950s during the period of the“anthology wars”and that still structures practice and discussion of American poetry, under various guises.Gunn and Hill came toAmerican poetry indifferent to that conflict,recognizing no obligation to choose sides. We can attribute their impartiality partly to temperament, partly to circumstances: as poets born and educated in Britain, who published their early work there, Gunn and Hill developed at a remove (a far one in Hill’s...