Thomas and Apocalypse
In the early 1940s a number of British poets, with Dylan Thomas at their head, were writing a densely metaphoric poetry in a heavily stressed metrics and a tone of staged personal declaration over a fictive arena, resulting in constructs which could be of challenging difficulty. A basically symbolist textuality was liable to run into confused mixed metaphors, and a free vocal rhetoric into syntactical confusion. Whatever problems these developments caused for readers and critics, this uncompromising poetry seems to have been generally held acceptable at the time as a contribution to contemporary poetry, but as the decade progressed this natural acceptance was eroded by an augmenting critical attack, which by the 1950s amounted to a chorus of fierce and bitterly mocking detestation. Other than Thomas’s, the poetry fell out of sight, and most of its practitioners “tamed” their way of writing without thereby achieving any great acceptance.
Thomas was to a large extent the original of this tendency, especially in the matter of the emphatic tone, the full-breathed dominantly trochaic rhythm powered by assonance, alliteration, and internal rhyme, and the constant reliance on emphasised metaphor, often mixed and sometimes of great density. As he is popularly conceived, his figurations generally do, if sometimes precariously, maintain a rationale, and relate to each other in such a way that you know where you are. “Our eunuch dreams, all seedless in the night” or “Comes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age...” in both cases two figures relate to each other perfectly rationally, and elaborate a clearly stated comparison. The metaphors may be bizarre or visually inconceivable, but they serve an immediately apprehended and logically secure intent.
The first line of the poem “When like a running grave...” is just such an extravagant but easily assimilated figure, but the very next line shows Thomas reaching further towards a much more resistant language, violating syntax
When, like a running grave, time tracks you down,
Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs,
- two adjectives without a noun to describe, and the question of whether we read a scythe made of hairs, or hair in the shape of a scythe, or a scything of hairs... and how we are to relate Death’s traditional scythe to this figure.[1] These questions seem answerable only by concentrated deliberation, if then, and Thomas seems to be relying more on a contextual cognition by which we accept the sentence as saying what we would expect it to be saying in its context: that Death comes in opposition to comfort. Most of this long poem seems to operate in this way, and to be making this one point repeatedly; in which case the poem’s “statement” may be the least interesting thing about it, and indeed not its principal purpose. It might be building up a quite challenging textuality on the foundation of a meaning which is no problem and a more-or-less insignificant feature of the construction. To some this is damning, because to the rationalist mind language must be “sense” and if is not “sense” it can only be “sound” which is a worthless and empty noise. In fact written language of any kind is probably almost never either of these things.
Thomas’s writing did not develop steadily towards or away from difficulty, but was liable to lean either way at any time, until it reached a certain stability in his last poems. In the mid 1930s the kind of poem which made his popular reputation with its straight Biblical rhetoric -- “And death shall have no dominion...” stands side-by-side with a poem such as “Then was my neophyte...”[2] which although patently about birth as entry into life and death, is strangely elusive in its details and has features of great complexity. It contains several sentences with at least two main clauses, and is full of images such as “Child in white blood”, which cannot easily be read as metaphor, and may represent an absolute and irrational substitution possibly suggested by rhyme, the effect of which is to switch the scenario rather violently to an under-text of bodily event. But “white” and “blood” remain incompatible and we don’t know which word, or neither or both, should be read figuratively.[3] Even as we comprehend the general drift of the poem, the particular construct remains as an unanswered question, and the definition of figuration itself is problematised. We cannot necessarily say that such-and-such an image represents an identifiable concept or referent; rather we are being presented with an as-if figurative complexity which is to a large extent itself the point of the exercise, hung on a quite simple theme (such as “death leads us through life”). The over-all theme is less obvious in this particular poem, though the usual declaration of time’s relentlessness occurs at the end.
Thomas’s own comment on this, one of his most unyielding poems (quoted in the notes of the 1996 edition) interestingly show him perfectly aware that he is presenting the reader with untold problems if a transmissive or thematic discourse is expected from the text, but that he is impelled to do this
I seem, more than ever, to be tightly packing away everything I have and know into a mad-doctor’s bag, and then locking it up: all you can see is the bag, all you can know is that it is full to the clasp, all you have to trust is that the invisible and intangible things packed away are if they could only been seen and touched worth quite a lot. [4]
I cannot think of any practice prior to Thomas which recognised so explicitly the poetical potential of closure, of offering the linguistic surface of the poem as a thing of “worth” in itself, without the reader necessarily needing to see “through” it. There is nothing mysterious about this, and no trickery or concealment is involved. It is the operation of lyrical intuition, the basis of song and thus of all poetical writing which does not set out to reverse it. If worried about what happens to “sense” in such a theatre, consider some of the poems which are everywhere read in defiance of their stated meanings, such as Ben Jonson’s “Drink to me only...” or Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium.” The “sense” of these poems is popularly and musically reversed because the “closed” surface is preferred to the poets’ rather crabbed messages. [5]
Even this poem holds some perfectly plain image constructs, and, as mentioned, it stands chronologically next to “And death shall have no dominion...” which Thomas saw as presenting a greater problem for his poetry, and almost omitted from the book, Twenty-five Poems. His reluctance in both directions is significant, and perhaps the central achievement lies in a text such as Vision and Prayer (1939-1944) in which these tensions are resolved by the working of intense figuration into a scene, involving a narrative action, which is neither actual nor symbolic but an event constructed by the figuration out of a lived event (an “abstract” if you wish). This donates a calmness and certainty to the poem which throws all the highly wrought figurations into a potential of purposive transfer.
Thomas’s poetical language was original it owed little to any immediate ancestry in poetry in English, nor to Continental surrealism.[6] Its innovative figures are principally adjectival whereas surrealism stresses substantive displacement, foiling expectation with the absurd and inconsequential, especially in the small-scale forms and light tone it tended to take on in English: “Her heart has floated into her left leg / And her forked tongue asks in three languages / For a bassoon, a pyramid, and an egg. “ (Francis Scarfe). Far from such ludic inconsequence, there is in Thomas a constant sense of meaningful articulation, of every term being set in a syntactically determined position as part of a pronouncement, however disrupted by multi-layered simultaneities. The tone is usually that of an urgent tale to be told, which if unwound from the metaphorical texture would be revealed as the basic human somatic condition, its inescapable contracting of perception with birth and death, their conceptual simultaneity. If this seems a banal theme consider the way Philip Larkin consistently steered aside from it. But it is not a theme, it is an obvious total condition which engenders a poetical texture, enfolded in the raised and multiplied voice. Thomas’s is also a 1930s poetry of expansive self-confidence, rejecting the Audenesque circumspection, unthreatened by political and sociological scenarios until the war came.
No war could threaten Thomas’s confidence. He dealt with it seriously, entirely in his own terms, leaning towards a religiosity. But the powerful appeal of his mode to the poetically inclined had by now brought in a new proliferation of poets basing themselves on his manner, though most later drifted away from it. Their procedures are mainly set by middle-of-the-road Thomas, neither easy nor very difficult, heavily metaphorical but rationally locuted. But there were changes of tone, by which the disruptive declamatory mode was led more and more towards a poetry of anguish and fear, which is hardly surprising under the circumstances. Looking through the anthologies and periodicals of the early 1940s which printed these poets and thinking back to Thomas, the impression is of a move towards a tone of menace, which could be put down to the war but aims itself further and deeper. “My mind’s rat gnaws / Down to the singing stone my soul my flower / Clutched in the claw, ground in the jaw of living” (Henry Treece). Human existence itself is being rendered sinister in a way that never happened in Thomas. Rather than a passionate incantation compounding mind and body, birth and death, these secondary poets again and again construct a scenario of threat, the horror beneath the surface obliquely indexed through metaphors implicating mind, body, landscape and polis in a declaration of revelatory and frequently incisive anger. And in the large-scale tone cutting across all categories of experience, some of these poets started jamming their mixed metaphors together as Thomas had done, to the point where rational unravelling would be extremely laboursome, though I don’t think any of them surpassed Thomas himself in this development. “A cloud-skull strangling sun / In spine-haired cannibal sky / Stabs the blown heart green.” (J.F. Hendry). “Winter’s plumage of bowlers embosses the brainsick elevator” (Thomas Good) “From desire to action burns a long line / Of reef-roped intestines scooped out from eyes / That blaze with wizard froth.” (Dorian Cooke) “Wizard froth” is the kind of intuited construct, sometimes found in Thomas himself, which defies explication though it feels like a significance, and there the matter ends. But the difference lies not in the degree of experiment, but in the tone or message of ulterior disaster which motivates the details of the wording. Probably the only one of these post-Thomas poets to eschew the doomed stance entirely, was W.S. Graham.
While the bulk of this writing developed no further than its initial opportunities and rested in a quite tame intuited symbolism such as Treece’s, there are also occasional signs of a wish to push further the most resilient features of Thomas, intensified by a pessimism which is quit alien to Thomas himself. Multiple mixed metaphor without grounding is the principal technical index of this urge. More rarely syntax itself comes under threat, or comes apart, and in the over-excited afflatus unscannable sentences with irrational figuration throw the reader into real doubt. “Who are the speaking wound / And world thrust stride over death, / Star blurred with symbols and / The blind ghost shaping fountain’s / Horror strewn with mind / Through the talking fiend?” (J.F. Hendry). And not necessarily in this earth-shaking tone -- “Out of the space where the mouth / is a reel like porpoise hearts split / yield blood and sinew so / grey-haired toughs long for baths and comfort.” (Nigel Heseltine). In both of these the reader is defeated among conflicting syntactical structures, though Heseltine’s enticing last line makes you want to know more. [7]
It is incidentally fascinating to see a poet like Nicholas Moore, who had his own central confidence and didn’t need to apply to Thomas for anything, assaying that public, declamatory tone and the ancestral rhythms that go with it, obviously very much in the air at the time, though in a completely different, perhaps “classical” (and so appropriately anonymous) manner, within a decorum which was subject to sudden undermining: “The martial clangour of our heart-wracked time / O my ancient, my triste, my Tottenham sorrow.” [8] The sudden drastic localisation is inexplicable, but it is an inexplicability which creates no reader’s anguish and there is no claim to reveal humanity’s sinister secrets in images of cosmic guts. There is a virtuosic deftness here, a play in the heart of seriousness, which became alien to the Thomas inheritance, as to the Movement, and was taken up again under the direct influence of Moore by American poets in New York in the later 1950s O’Hara and Ashbery. Outside this route, a grim sense of fated reality, a sense of being doomed, whether to a small squalid space or to ultimate large-scale closure, gripped both sides in the 1940s versus 1950s poetry war, and especially motivated the bitter rectitude of the Movement’s apologists.
This post-Thomas manner is sometimes labelled New Apocalypse or New Romantic, distinct but closely related terms. “New Romantic” seems to me to be a larger and vaguer term covering what many poets and artists were doing during the 1940s which indulged symbolic (or symbolist) figurations and avoided the prosaic. [9] It could be seen as leading straight into later 1950s anti-rationalist or anti-secular poetry. New Apocalypse was a genuine movement with a programme, however disputed, the impetus of which seems to have pushed poets like Hendry and Cooke to extreme procedures in the years immediately around 1940, though it involved other poets, such as Moore, who if they agreed to the programme at all did not see it as necessitating the super-figurised or post-Thomas style in poetry. It was a 1930s phenomenon and the philosophising was only marginally attached at the end of the decade to a poetry which had been in production since 1933 in Thomas’s hands, and a good deal earlier among the forces that influenced him. [10]
The whole episode was, anyway, quite short lived, and by the 1950s could be said to be in disrepute and largely (forcibly or not) “forgotten”, though whether this was due to the critical attack it received or simply the death of Thomas is not so certain. Thomas would have laughed heartily at The Movement. What happened after the war was that poetry re-established its institutional bases, the periodicals and book publishers which had always carried it, the critics and reviewers, its role in education, its function as adjunct to established ways of life, and increasingly, the intervention of the academy. The very beliefs which might have informed Apocalyptic poetry, such as Freudianism, were socialised into clinics and academic specialisations, rather than serving to explain the birth of monsters in central Europe. Even the paper on which the poetry was printed ceased to be the thick hand-made stuff which the Fortune Press had hoarded during the war (and Faber used occasionally), with its hints at aristocratic privilege, and became standard book stock. Thomas’s reputation was beyond reach of these normalising forces, but the younger poets related to him were increasingly marginalised. Their sinister tone was inappropriate in an atmosphere of recovery and rebuilding, the unmethodical editing and publicity of someone like Tambimuttu [11] was out of place, and a vacuum was formed into which eventually The Movement stepped.
The resulting shift in expectation of what poetry can legitimately offer has been pervasive. Probably most poetry readers glancing at 1940s extremist poetry now would at once see it as freakish, even as impossibly and ludicrously perverse [12], and certainly as poetry of and for a group or clique of poets completely disconnected from any common reader. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that it arose directly from the popular and successful poetry of Thomas himself. The 1930s climate seemed to have been able to accommodate both Thomas and the Auden crowd, whatever particular antagonisms went on, and the contrast was part of a variegation which enriched the climate. The 1950s attitude was that there was only room for one kind of poetry, a specialised and itself quite extreme kind, which attempted to exclude not only the Soho avant-gardists but a middle-ground which inevitably restored itself in the form of people like Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill, in a re-assertion of metaphor and spirituality. Thus too poets of a quite different cast such as Nicholas Moore or Charles Madge were swept away by the tidal-wave of rejection.
The appeal of Thomas, which his followers could reasonably have expected to be sustained, lay in poetry as manifestly poetical. It appealed to a need for the poetic among the population at large in a way complementary to the more meticulous, reasonable approach of Auden and his followers, with its own poesis of charm. It projected poetry as a special zone of uplift into awareness of ultimate fate beyond the power of “ordinary” language, basically simple but attracting a welter of figuration and projective rhythm onto itself. The ancestry of this attitude gave no reason for it to be seen as an ιlitist or intellectualist position, as the secret matter of some priesthood. There was no pretence that the poet deployed the poetical performance as a conveyance of deep meaning his role was that of craftsman and rather than “understanding” what was offered was participation in a poetical excitement of great scope, in constant touch with matters of life and death, the difficulties and bizarreries of which were there to be savoured and enjoyed, and which should appeal to anyone not conditioned to reject it. By comparison the attitude represented by Larkin and The Movement was dedicated to prose and the prosaic view of life and all enthusiasm for poetry as such was actually anathema to it. It had “popular appeal” but it was not for everyone. It was a poetry for those who recognised its ambience, its novelistic scenarios, appealing to the constructed bathos of “what life is really like”, in rebellion against a century and a half of poetical effusion.
Notes
1. c.1934. The Collected Poems, revised edition 1996, p.19. I find it curious that in the three lines I quote from this poem the editors find it necessary to explain “tailor age” but entirely bypass the “calm and cuddled...” passage, and most of the rest of the poem, as if no reading problems could arise. “tailor age” is one of the few transparently obvious figurations in the poem.
2. 1936. Collected Poems, op.cit. p.57.
3. If we read “blood” as the principal figurised word, white blood can be sperm, or possibly amniotic fluid. Thanks to James Keery for this suggestion.
4. Letter to Vernon Watkins, 20th April 1936.
5. Cf. “Later it won’t matter what these words mean / In the light of what these words seem.” PR, Only the song...
6. The principal modern influences on early Thomas seem to have been Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell, and Imagism via Richard Aldington, a very English extract of Modernism.
7. Short quotations are from: Dorian Cooke, “Experience”, in Poetry World July 1939; Thomas Good, Overture, Alden Press 1946; J.F. Hendry (both quotations), the poem “Apocalypse” in The New Apocalypse, 1941; Nigel Heseltine, The Four-Walled Dream, Fortune Press 1941; Francis Scarfe, Inscapes, Fortune Press 1940; Henry Treece, 38 Poems, Fortune Press undated. These snippets are not necessarily typical of the work of any of these poets, who were mostly very young at the time.
8. Nicholas Moore, Thirty-Five Anonymous Odes, Fortune Press 1944 (published anonymously).
9. Mention should also be made of a movement towards plain-speaking poems in obvious metrical forms with socialist content, optimistic in tone and quite distinct from the sophisticated novelistic subjectivism of The Movement, involving poets such as Jack Lindsay, Paul Potts, Maurice Carpenter, Randall Swingler and others. Again it was a 1930s movement which consolidated itself in the early 1940s, especially in the collection New Lyrical Ballads, 1945. I think this also comes under the blanket “New Romantic” category. Some forms, with their attached manners, such as ballads and villanelles, are common to all of these tendencies, with even a trace in early Larkin.
10. For a much fuller account of New Apocalypse and New Romanticism, see the series of articles by James Keery under the title “The Burning Baby and the Bathwater” in recent issues of PN Review. James sees the two terms as close to synonymous.
11. Tambi’s editing was always enthusiastic and resourceful (in 1942 he published W.S. Graham’s first periodical contributions) but lacked the “discrimination” which became increasingly important in the post-war sense of the editorial and critical function. In issue 10 of Poetry London (1944) he compounded this by including almost every young poet he could find, as witness to a thriving national poetry scene. A foretaste of Breakthru.
12. And yet the same readers, editors, and pundits are, apparently, perfectly happy with the poetry of Paul Celan, hailed as one of the major poets of the 20th Century and published in this country by Penguin, while the work of the New Apocalypse poets remains for the most part uncollected, unpublished or out of print, and is not taken seriously by academics or literary journalists. Yet there is a clear affinity between the poetical methods of Celan and those of the British experimenters of the 1940s. The literary and political implications of this public hypocrisy are fairly alarming.