The Poetry of the Thirties, and: Poetry of the Spanish Civil War (review)

REVIEWS 161 AT. Tolley, The Poetry of the Thirties. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975. Marilyn Rosenthal, Poetry of the Spanish Civil War. New York: New York University Press, 1975. These books belong to the critical genre, Literary History, but since the history of literature cannot be separated from human history, it is an artificial and dying genre. The books do attempt to connect lit. hist, to political events but because the critics focus on who-came-when-and-did-what-to-or-for-whom in the history of literature, the politics of the period are rarely integrated into the narratives. In Rosenthal's book on the poetry of the Spanish Civil War, the reader finds warmed-over tins of political spam at the beginning of chapters; in Tolley's book on British poetry in the 1930's, his attempts at integration give way to his central concern, the Stock Exchange of Literary History-Auden now at Wa, down 3, Spender at 1 1 , up 2. Literary History is a bourgeois genre. Literary History, like formal literary criticism, ignores a number of crucial questions about writing: when a person sits down to write, especially day after day, is he or she thinking about other writers and other books, or preoccupied with the morning mail, particularly the bills, and thinking about family, lives, where he or she has been and hopes to go, all the thousands of things that construct a person's, even a poet's life. Instead, Literary History talks about influence, Tolley spends much of his time discussing how British poets of the 1930's read and reacted for or against other poets. Only occasionally, as in his comments on Betjeman's "Croydon" and "Oxford: Sudden Illness at the Bus-Stop," does he push aside lit. history concerns for more human ones, what Betjeman is trying to say and the human experiences that seem to prompt him. Tolley also illustrates an ironic point about literary influence: when these poets were consciously and unconsciously imitating or rejecting other poets, they wrote lousy poetry (and the overabundance of quotation reinforces this point). But when they tried to find, and more rarely, found their own voices, they wrote some of the best English poetry of the century. Tolley's discussion of Louis MacNeice shows how the poet worked his way through the Classics, then the Auden School, and came out at the end of the decade with his personal and political masterpiece, Autumn Journal: Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire. Ebbing away down ramps of shaven lawns where close-clipped yew Insulates the lives. . . Tolley's strength and the value of the book is his encyclopedic knowledge of British poetry in the 1930's. He knows where the bodies are buried, who started what little magazine and what it did, and who wrote what and when. Sometimes his pedantry gets in the way-the textual history of Julian Bell need not be treated with the same seriousness as Hopkins-but over the 445 pages, Tolley writes an excellent survey. (He also provides a superb bibliography.) But too much of the critic's time-and ours-is wasted on his playing the Literary Stock Exchange. He treats the poets as property-if he writes about the American 1930's, will he build up Marvin Gardens?-thus he booms David Gaseoyne and sells short on George Barker. Throughout, he tries to devalue Auden-he attacks him relentlessly and often unfairly to support his thesis that Auden was not the dominant poet of the decade, only one of the more clever ones. Bourgeois capitalists must be original, the critic must say something new. From the insularity of British poetry-hermetic even in its most international decade -it's exciting to turn to the world perspective of the poets in Marilyn Rosenthal's Poetry ofthe Spanish Civil War. In the first extended quoted poem in the book, Leon Felipe's "La insignia," we find: "you remain, England,/old greedy fox,/you halted the History of the West three centuries/ago" (so much for tales of Sir l-'rancis Drake and the Armada). The best thing about Rosenthal's book is its anthology...