THE POETRY OF POSTMODERNITY
Also by Dennis Brown INTERTEXTUAL DYNAMICS WITHIN THE LITERARY CROWD- JOYCE, LEWIS, POUND AND ELIOT: The Men of 1914 MSMOFFAT (under the pseudonym Ned Brown) THE MODERNIST SELF IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE: A Study in Self-Fragmentation
The Poetry of Post111odernity Anglo/ American Encodings Dennis Brown Professor Department of English University of Hertfordshire M St. Martin's Press
Dennis Brown 1994 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1994 978-0-333-60473-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Great Britain 1994 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Hound mills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-39181-3 ISBN 978-0-230-37250-4 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230372504 First published in the United States of America 1994 by Scholarly and Reference Division, ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-12093-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Dennis, 1940- The poetry of postmodernity: Anglo/ American encodings I Dennis Brown. p. em. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-12093-1 1. English poetry-20th century-history and criticism. 2. American poetry-20th century-history and criticism. 3. Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain. 4. Modernism (Literature)-United States. I. Title. PR478.M6B73 1994 821'.9109-dc20 93-48922 CIP
In memory of Elsie Worvill (1916-91) George Macbeth (1932-92), poet Nola Clendinning Pechey (1943-93), artist
In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin Marshall McLuhan
Contents Preface ix 1 Introduction 1 2 W. H. Auden's "Hermes" 15 3 Allen Ginsberg's" America" 30 4 Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" 45 5 John Berryman's "Henry" 59 6 Ted Hughes' "Crow" 75 7 Geoffrey Hill's "Mercia" 90 8 John Ashbery's "Wave" 105 9 R. S. Thomas's" Amen" 120 10 Conclusion 134 Index 142 vii
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Preface This book was written between the winter of 1991-2 and the spring of 1993: the specific time frame seems important in terms of the ongoing postmodemism debate - as we race towards the double millennium. Such a declaration inevitably owns to its temporal partiality and implies a fairly imminent sell-by date. In Wyndham Lewis's description, we are all "time snobs" now: both the pace of global developments and the instantaneity of communications constantly outflank any attempt to make a fixed map of the contemporary scene. This is, in fact, what makes the discussion of 'postmodemity' continuous, contingent, confusing - and exciting. In such a situation it seems necessary to date a particular stage of one's thinking: so I shall'sign' this as of Easter 1993. I should like here to thank Peter Widdowson for cannily pointing me, nearly three years ago, towards the direction I was going in - without my then knowing it. Thanks, too, to the East London (and FAB) 'Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere' conferences where two of the chapters below were tried out and whose discussions have helped form my own sense of the nature of postmodernity. Also thanks to the encouragement or advice of Phil Ballard, Eibhlin Evans, Paul Gatland, Patrick Grant, Graham Holderness, Sarah Hutton, Sharon Monteith, Graham Pechey, Jean Radford, Eric Trudgill and George Wotton, and to Zygmunt Bauman whose book Intimations of Postmodernity came out at a crucial stage of my own project and who responded, in detail, to some material I sent him "in the spirit of dialogue". The writing of this book has coincided with the welcome transformation of my teaching base from Hatfield Polytechnic to the University of Hertfordshire. With its roots in a gift of land by A. S. Butler of De Havilland, our institution has itself played a role in the construction of postmodem realities - most particularly in aeroengineering, information science, psychology and pharmacological biochemistry: it has been a privilege to serve on research committees with representatives of such disciplines. The work below originated in a research project registered with our old Research and Consultancy Committee. lx
X Preface My conviction in the book is that certain Anglo/ American poets understood the direction in which contemporary culture was going long before "postmodernity" was theorised. One of the book's dedicatees, George Macbeth - whose recent death came as a personal shock- helped foster their work during his years at the BBC. I believe that poetry can retain its prophetic function and I hope what I have written will encourage students to keep reading it - both yesterday's and tomorrow's as well as today's. Lastly, I must particularly thank my wife, Sam, whose "formatting" has cleaned up my "keyboarding" on that amazing postmodern phenomenon, the word-processor. Deepest thanks, too (and again), for her unfailing moral support: Let the urge of mere ambition Seek success in what we do, Find direction where we go: In each other know completion. DENNIS BROWN