Off Topic: Rediscovering ‘The New Poetry’

‘The statue, tolerant through years of weather,

Spares the untidy Sunday throng its look,’

So goes the first two lines of John Berryman’s “The Statue”, in my 1967 reprint of the revised edition to A. Alvarez’s 1962 collection, ‘The New Poetry’.

Berryman is known for his vague and tortured Dream Songs, yet this poem is strangely provincial and steeped in history. Its near-iambic pentameter form comes to define most of the collection, which Alverez notes was criticised as being quite timid for something so self-defined as new and fresh. Indeed, the free-verse of the poems is quite distinctly chained, and the rare uses of enjambment flow through and truncate these occasionally more urgent poems. This cold narration and metered verse culminates in the unchained and visceral work of Plath and Hughes, who are both given generous selections in the book, although some of Hughes’ efforts are certainly far from his best, plonked quite unnaturally (in retrospect) against the greatness of “Wind” or “Hawk Roosting”. He is perhaps most emblematic of this “New Poetry” in the assumed urgency of his work, combined with its tempered narration that is quite comfortable in a book with selections from Larkin, Amis and Thom Gunn, the latter of which I have never truly engaged with, but is admirable in his mastery of form.

It is this strange reserved nature that becomes a great achievement in many of the poems, which all seem to possess this slightly dispossessed and grumpy middle-class Britishness, more disturbed by natural death than any immediate concerns. Take Larkin’s “Wedding Wind” for example; the aggravated enjambment disturbing the unity of the lines, suggesting an altogether darker truth than ‘the happiness I had’. The irony of this line is that the narrator’s sadness springs from others lacking the happiness that she paradoxically cannot have, but uncomfortably insists upon having. These writers are obsessed with vagueness; perhaps the destruction of previously binary beliefs. This sense of disturb finds itself in Berryman too, with a dead man becoming ‘part of the land’. The inherently vague statement is presented authoritatively, the tight meter ironically betraying any kind of conformity in the world.

Of course, Plath eviscerates these contrasts completely, suggesting with this authority something completely unchained, yet confidently so:

‘What a trash

To annihilate each decade’.

This verse is something else, and Plath relies far more on the blunt and phonetic quality of her lines than the distinct and almost prose-like specificity of her peers. The other Americans, such as Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, seem to also have this quality, although Lowell’s confessional poetry seems far more external in comparison. The British poets in the volume often seem to simply describe a typical scene as their impetus.

The better poems; Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” and Tomlinson’s “Farewell to Van Gogh” for example, combine these two transatlantic notions of what Poetry should be, molding verse that grounds modern anxiety and neurological concerns into something immediately tangible and occasionally beautiful.

“The New Poetry” contains a wealth of canonical and otherwise great poems from the 1950s and early 60s. At this distance in time, it all appears to come from a strangely similar place; perhaps Alvarez admired this kind of speech-like and contemplative free-verse most. This is only to its advantage, as the book is very readable and consistently marvelous. The totally un-self-aware approach to narrative voice strikes me most as a poetry that is embodying earlier work, but is clearly uncomfortable with the unambiguous notion of morality that comes with some of these seemingly unassuming verses of the past.