Transatlantic Connections - Softcover

Welford, Theresa

9781586540548: Transatlantic Connections

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1586540548 ISBN 13: 9781586540548

Publisher: Story Line Press, 2019

In the 1950s, a group of brash young British writers coalesced into a controversial poetic and critical movement known simply as the Movement. In the 1980s, a group of brash young American writers coalesced into an equally controversial poetic and critical movement known as New Formalism. Especially since the British coalition known as The Movement was short-lived, surviving less than a decade, few people could have predicted that it would have an impact that was both far-reaching and long-lasting. This groundbreaking new study shows that the Movement lives on, in a very real way, in New Formalist poetics and poetry.

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About the Author:

Theresa Malphrus Welford, who grew up in a small, working-class town near Savannah, Georgia, received a PhD in English Literature from the University of Essex in 2006. A two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Theresa has published poetry, creative nonfiction, book chapters, and scholarly articles, as well as two edited collections of poetry: The Paradelle and The Cento (both published by Red Hen Press). She is currently working on two textbooks and a number of picture-book manuscripts. Theresa and her husband, Mark Welford, happily share their home in Statesboro, Georgia, with countless rescued animals (cats and dogs).

Excerpt One

After interviewing more than a dozen New Formalists about their reactions to the Movement writers, I noticed a clear pattern: they first encountered the work of the elder English writers at important moments in their own literary development, usually as undergraduates or young graduate students.

As an undergraduate at Brown University in the late 1950s, Dick Allen encountered the work of Thom Gunn in New Poets of England and America. He says that Gunn has been a long-term influence on his own work, from formal poetry to free verse. From his very first reading of Gunn’s poems about motorcyclists, he found them inspiring because of “how wonderfully they combined the contemporary with narrative and rhyming form.” Larkin’s “Church Going,” in the same anthology, struck him as a “major poem” and Larkin himself as an “obvious master,” because of his “combination of form and important subject matter.”

In 1964, Charles Martin first read poetry by Gunn, Larkin, and Davie, also in New Poets of England and America. . . . Martin says, “Larkin made an immediate impression on me.”

Timothy Steele was studying in London in 1969 when he read the Faber paperback Selected Poems by Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. He was immediately taken with Gunn’s poems: “They had an intellectual energy, and a gift for extended metaphor, that called to mind the work of my favourite poets at that time, Shakespeare and Donne. Yet Thom’s verse was contemporary in matter and diction. It was alert to the living moment.” That same year, Steele discovered Larkin’s poetry and was similarly impressed.

As an undergraduate in the 1970s, Mark Jarman had encounters with the work of Gunn and Larkin that were much like Steele’s. Of Gunn, Jarman recalls, “Partly he fascinated me because he wrote about California, where I was from, and he did it in ingenious verse forms, like rhyming syllabic verse. . . . When I was learning to write, I imitated him a lot.” Jarman also came to believe that Larkin is “actually very innovative in his verse” but that he “disguises his innovations, rather the way Frost did,” and that Larkin’s poetry encompasses an impressive “range of diction within a strict space,” with imagery that is phrased in “original yet totally accurate” ways.

As a graduate student at Harvard University in the 1970s, Dana Gioia had his own eye-opening encounter with Larkin’s poem “Poetry of Departures”: “I had no idea who Larkin was then, but I knew immediately that he was the writer I had been looking for—not merely a master but a confidant.” When he read Larkin, he “suddenly . . . realized that this was the guide who was doing what I was trying to do.”

While some New Formalists discovered the Movement writers by chance, others sought them out. John Gery applied to Stanford University in the 1970s precisely because Donald Davie taught there. . . . As a teacher, Davie turned out to be “as complex and challenging” as Gery had hoped. He was further pleased to find classmates who were committed to using traditional forms, including several subsequent New Formalist poets—Dana Gioia, Vikram Seth, and, later, Paul Lake.

Excerpt Two

The poems that I have discussed (and some that I have not) strongly suggest that the New Formalists have absorbed ideas, themes, images, metaphors, techniques, and even language from Davie, Gunn, and Larkin, and that they have refracted these through lenses that are distinctively American or transatlantic. The resultant poems are different from the originals, modified by the New Formalists to suit their own strengths, interests, experiences, beliefs, ideas, and occasionally, perhaps, their Americanness. These poems support Gunn’s argument that “derivative” poets have nothing to be ashamed of, for the New Formalists appear to have done exactly as Robert Duncan did (in Gunn’s estimation): “Duncan too fed on those he admired, but like a true cannibal he digested their virtues to make them his, and they rose in him with a fresh life, both recognizable and altered.”

The New Formalists have likewise taken in the work of their predecessors, resulting in poems that contain—“both recognizable and altered”—a number of the virtues and, perhaps, limitations of the Movement. Many New Formalists, like the mockingbird in Gunn’s poem “Patch Work,” have not only heard and admired the “repertoire of songs” written by Davie, Gunn, and Larkin but have also borrowed freely from that repertoire. The New Formalists have appropriated the “plangent notes” and “trills” of these Movement writers, creating “headlong song[s]” of their own. The resulting poems are much more than mere imitations or echoes, consisting of much more than “virtuosity of tone,” a phrase Steele uses in his negative assessment of mockingbird-poets. Indeed, a substantial number of the New Formalist poems are equal in quality to the English poems that have evidently inspired them.

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