Poems from New Writing 1936-1946

It was an Islington Oxfam Bookshop buy; ‘Poems from New Writing 1936-1946’, selected by John Lehmann, with a front cover image by John Minton. New Writing was an anti-fascist magazine of the 30s (Lehmann also put together the anthology Poems for Spain) which became Penguin New Writing at the start of the war years.

Lehmann, in his introduction, makes ambivalent claims for the quality of the poetry – ‘Rare and lucky were the poets who could find the calm and leisure in the midst of such events for continuous poetic creation at the deepest level’. He admits the danger of ‘the abundant poetry which is little more than verse-journalism’, but claims ‘that this anthology may turn out to be a peculiarly interesting poetic mirror of the history of our time’.

So what survives? What’s still worth reading? Auden and MacNeice now seem head and shoulders above everyone else, Auden with ‘Lay Your Sleeping Head’, ‘Palais des Beaux Arts’ and ‘Refugee Blues, MacNeice with ‘Meeting Point’ (‘Time was away and somewhere else..’) and ‘Brother Fire’. MacNeice also translates Louis Aragon’s 1940 poem of defeat ‘The Lilacs and the Roses’:

’..those about to die bolt upright in the turrets
Smothered in lilacs by a drunken folk.

..Flowers that gave the lie to the soldiers passing
On wings of fear, a fear importunate as a breeze,
And gave the lie to the lunatic push-bikes and the ironic
Guns and the sorry rig of the refugees.

..All is quiet here, the enemy rests in the night
And Paris has surrendered, so we have just heard— ‘

There are disappointments here, poets whose high reputation has greatly diminished, if not disappeared. The voices now lie flat on the page, and it’s hard to hear what once made them so important; Stephen Spender, C. Day-Lewis, Roy Fuller, Edith Sitwell. And Laurie Lee, whose prose is still superb – Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning – but whose poetry now reads as minor period noise.

But there are discoveries too. There’s a poem by Jocelyn Brooke, author of the prose memoir ‘The Orchid Trilogy’. I’ve not previously heard of him as a poet; ‘Landscape near Tobruk’ is memorable, hard and sharp:

’This land was made for War. As glass
Resists the bite of vitriol, so this hard
And calcined earth rejects
The battle’s hot, corrosive impact.

……….Here are no trees
Uprooted, gutted farms; the unsalvaged scrap—
The scattered petrol-cans, the upturned
And abandoned truck, the fallen Heinkel: all
The rusted and angular detritus
Of war, seem scarcely to impinge
Upon the harsh resistant surface of
This lunar land.’

I’ve also not come across any other poetry by Walter Allen, MacNeice’s university friend, best known for old penguin copies of ‘The English Novel – a short critical history’ (1951). ‘Colliery Country’ is a faintly sinister account of a colliery pump:

’After the dazzling lights of a car rushed by
And darkness shuttered down like a hen’s wing,
I was alone in darkness and against
My own heart’s beat could only hear the regular
Heavy monotonous beat of the colliery pump.

……Trembling with too-great terror, I awaited
The reassurance of nocturnal noises,
Dogs barking, trains, and wind-borne human voices;
Anything but that inhuman alien heart.’

Somewhere in the shifting sands of poetic reputation there is the puzzle of David Gascoyne. He was capable of haunting images; this is not the only wartime anthology to include ‘Snow in Europe’:

’Hush, says the sameness of the snow.
The Ural and the Jura now rejoin
The further Arctic’s desolation. All is one
Sheer monotone: plain, mountain: country, town:
Contours and boundaries no longer show.

The warring flags hang colourless a while;
Now midnight’s icy zero feigns a truce….’

Gascoyne was much praised at a young age before the war, and he’s everywhere in the anthologies of mid-century. His weakness, I think was the attempt to import French Surrealism into English poetry. The tone has not worn well. In this volume ‘The Gravel Pit Field’ starts strongly:

’Beside the stolid opaque flow
Of rain-gorged Thames; beneath a thin
Layer of early-evening light
Which seems to drift, a ragged veil,
Upon the chilly March air’s tide:
Upwards in shallow shapeless tiers
A stretch of scurfy pock-marked waste
Sprawls laggardly its acres till
They touch a raw brick-villa’d rim.’

There are two more stanzas in this vein, but I can’t stand the fourth:

As with untold intensity
On the far edge of Being, where
Life’s last faint forms begin to lose
Name and identity and fade
Away into the void…’

The capital letter for Being, and mention of the void; either would be fatal for the poem, but both together…..

The real rediscovery in this book is Hamish Henderson. His ‘Fragment of an Elegy’ – later part of ‘Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica’ (1948) – evokes the desert war in extended sentences threaded through confident long lines:

’Many who for various reasons, or because
of mere unanswerable compulsion, came here
and fought among the clutching gravestones,
shivered and sweated,
cried out, suffered thirst, were stoically silent, cursed
the spittering machine-guns, were homesick for Europe
and fast embedded in quicksand of Africa
agonized and died.
And sleep now. Sleep here the sleep of the dust.’

A.T. Tolley, in ‘The Poetry of the Forties’ called ‘Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica’ the ‘one ambitious and compelling attempt to write an extended poem on World War 2’. I’ve never read it but I’ll be searching it out.