Books: Poetry in English: 1945-62

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"What is poetry? Why, sir," roared Dr. Johnson to his ever-attentive Boswell, "we all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is . . . It is much easier to say what it is not."

Poetry is not, unfortunately, what most poets are writing in English today. In the last 20 years, the English-speaking world has produced no major poet and scarcely a score of those minor bards who assiduously tune the lyre of language till another great man is ready to take it up. But if quality is lacking, quantity is not. In the 16 years since World War II, more poems have been composed in the U.S.—last year more than 200,000 were submitted for publication-than were written in ten centuries between Beowulf and the Bomb; and in Britain, poetic production has approximately doubled in a decade. What's more, sales of poetry on records are tuned to unprecedented volume. U.S. poetry buffs have bought 50,000 platters of Robert Frost reading Robert Frost, 400,000 of the late Dylan Thomas reading Dylan Thomas. And poetry readings have been box office in the U.S. for the first time since Oscar Wilde took lily in hand and plunged into the cultural night of Illinois.

The Revolution. Along with poetry's popularity, and adding to it, has come a striking change in poetry's style and content, a vigorous evolution that may yet become the second great poetic revolution of the century. The first revolution, which rolled over the language during the decade beginning in 1910, was an American revolution, a revolt of the vernacular launched by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost—all of them still alive and writing, but not writing much. In the early '30s, the heirs of the revolution, led by Britain's W. H. Auden, turned to what Poet Archibald MacLeish called the "invocation to the social muse."

But as the '30s stumbled toward catastrophe, poetry blundered deeper into obscurity and ambiguity, into the talented but precious minutiae of Wallace Stevens and William Empson, whose poems often suggest esthetic scrimshaw, a cathedral carved in a cherry pit. Poetry became a world unto itself, a self-sealing vacuum in which poets engaged in a conspiracy of mutual approval, safe from the embarrassing questions of the bewildered public, safe from what Poet Stefan George called "the indignity of being understood."

Two events smashed this intellectual trade union: 1) a beery, gusty, word-wildered Welshman named Dylan Thomas and 2) World War II. Poet Thomas, with his golden rain of words and his great brass gong of a voice, reminded poetry of its origins in ritual and chant. And the war forced poets to face political, social and spiritual realities. At first, the horror of it all seemed to numb them; the war itself produced no genuinely great poetry in English. But such poets as Karl Shapiro, Randall Jarrell, Richard Eberhart and Britain's Henry Treece were moved to describe their military experiences in rough-edged verse that some did not like but all could understand. Suddenly the poets were communicating again, and the postwar generation of poets has kept right on communicating.