The Romantics Return

...The Beats howled and declaimed, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton effused feminine resentments and psychic Angst...

...Wednesday" opens with lines that might be an extension of Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence": Gray rainwater lay on the grass in the late afternoon...

...Better to sound inchoate than brainy" became a semi-official slogan, as verse went "naked...

...Moving in Memory (Louisiana State University, 51 pp., $6.95) by Julia Randall...

...and New and Selected Poems (Atheneum, 205 pp., $21.00) by Marvin Bell...

...it seemed to the budding age to impose ethical, cultural and stylistic mannerisms that prevented the expression of anything fresh...

...that eschewed most of its traditional functions and pleasures...

...Eliot (who didn't really appreciate this kind of verse...

...Rhyme and meter still come naturally to her, as does metaphysical wordplay...

...Yeats rejected naturalism and sentimentality in favor of a ritualistic manner that linked poetry once more to its bardic and religious origins...

...The choppy enjambment of his early work gave way to the longer rhythms of iambic pentameter into which English speech naturally falls...

...Poets attempted " authenticity" of emotion and emulated everyday speech...

...Innumerable volumes published in the last decade support this thesis...

...Eliot (both more indebted to Pre-Raphaelite medievalism than either cared to acknowledge) tried to redeem art from emotionalism and bring it into a more intellectual condition...

...This faith in the redemptive power of Nature has illuminated his verse from the beginning, and now that he has openly acknowledged his High Romantic heritage it flames out of all he writes...

...Poets saluted the future, or mooned over the distant past, but agreed in heaping abuse upon their literary progenitors: "Victorian" became a byword for stuffy, flowery, trite, insincere, "uplifting" verse...

...But there will always be abiding styles that speak powerfully to one era, are largely ignored in the next, then are celebrated again when the pendulum swings back...

...In her opinion, we have "hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain/ as we are of so much in this existence, this/botched, cumbersome, much-mended,/not unsatisfactory thing...

...In Belitt's universe, objects are "sacramental"—outward and visible signs of some inward mystery...

...Piedmont born and bred" as she is, though, she probably owes as much to the Southern Fugitives: John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and early Robert Perm Warren...

...I have chosen four recent ones because each illustrates a different facet or phenomenon of the Romantic revival...

...Actually, she was not...

...All at once, simplicity came into vogue...

...but finds only further mystery...

...She had been writing for some time, without recognition...

...Insanity poems became so trendy that one could scarcely open a literary journal without coming across several...

...In short, it marks the coming full circle of the values of Victorian poetry: to enchant and entertain the reader with a heady mixture of sound and sense, rapture and mystery...

...Clampitt, Randall, Belitt, and Bell exemplify a mature acceptance of one's literary parents, and of advancing one's understanding through their achievements...

...In "Thoreau on Paran Creek," Belitt ponders the naturalist's query, "Why do precisely these objects make up a world...

...Her manner and style could not be more different from Clampitt's...

...Possessions stands as a most ironic title in a cosmos where everything remains in a state of flux: "What have we ever possessed" beyond the power to observe...

...Is it an ark, and are you there aboard, or left behind, forever dreaming shoreward...

...Everything changes because everything is "hungry for metamorphoses...

...Tempe in the Rain" finds Clampitt exploring the Greek countryside in homage to Keats...

...I suspect, however, that her densely textured verse and intricately developed ideas would not have found much of an audience before the climate turned congenial...

...Belitt has long been considered a poet's poet—revered by colleagues and critics, yet relatively unnoticed by readers...

...The more substantial writers assimilate whatever part of the latest fashion fits their own...

...But Clampitt unashamedly acknowledges that she finds today's vocabulary, thinking, even emotions, anorexic—turned to stone from shock at the horrors of modern times, perhaps...

...Bell calls the impression left by such epiphanies "a match-head in [our] thoughts, " because without these intimations of the Sublime poetry dies, and experience flattens into what "Tintern Abbey" disparages as "the dreary intercourse of daily life...

...The arches reject the seams of the pillar in their Roman similitude and pull to a point, as if to outdistance creation and gather all under their wing...

...Randall's lines are witty and compacted with meaning...

...She exhibits the same kind of joy in the melody and meaning of words that animates the prose of Dickens, Eliot and Ruskin, and the verse of Tennyson, Hopkins, Whitman, and Christina Rossetti...

...Mirroring this disjointedness, poems trickled down the page in fits and starts, three or four words to aline...

...Ideas were anathema: "A poem should not mean/But be...

...Contemplating Medusa's head, Clampitt sees the tentacles, the brazen phiz whose glare stands every fibril of the mind on end— lust looked at back ward as it were, and imagines this monster's petrifying powers as a trope for our own frozen feelings: ay, in the very tissues of desire lodge viscid barbs that turn the blood to coral, the heartbeat to a bed of silicates...

...This melancholy acceptance of transition, change and loss goes beyond mere mimicry of Keats—it echoes the cry from the "Ode on a Grecian Urn": Ah, happy, happy boughs that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu...

...JULIA Randall suffered some neglect for achieving poetic adulthood in the wrong era for her voice...

...An era of poetic schools and "isms" burgeoned...

...Resonant language, musicality, contrapuntal rhythms—all denoted artifice, hypocrisy, "the smell of the lamp...

...of our Greek/sisters that cry/old nursery tales from Daulis, dipping by/their dobe nests low over/polluted Long Green Creek./How, in another world, shall Adam speak...

...I think now of Deucalion, who cast his mother's bones behind him Randall's early work seemed to fit easily enough into the civilized formalities perfected by W.H...

...Now the revolution is striking at minimalistic prosody, solipsism, and the notion that sincerity in writing must by synonymous with ugliness, violence, fragmentation, lack of complexity...

...Ben Belitt can also be counted as a disciple of Keats...

...For nothing stands firm,/Nothing keeps adamantine...

...Writers' workshops were dominated by admonitions beginning " Poetry no longer...

...Into this sodden, nourishing afternoon I emerged...

...Certainly Clampitt's themes—for example, her feminist interest in history—engage current concerns...

...But if she is not a High Romantic, she is George Eliot descending on the 1980s through some time warp: intelligent, clear-eyed, simmering with serious thoughts, an eccentric yet queenly presence pronouncing with authority on the peculiarities of our civilization...

...While Belitt and Randall made their debuts when the school of Eliot was still ascendant, and Bell was formerly identified with the plain approach of the '60s and '70s, Clampitt burst on the scene in 1982 with The Kingfisher, a first book of poems so mature and authoritative that one could hardly believe she was a beginner...

...A jumpy, elliptical voice became more measured, ruminative, philosophical...

...A college professor at the end of a working day, Bell notices in this landscape how "the palpable Sublime flickered as motes on broad leaves/while the Higher Good and the Greater Good contended/as sap on the bark of the maples...

...Keats' "Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness," his "light-winged Dryad of the trees,/in some melodious plot/Of beechen green," the Arcadian cycle of sacrifice that plays sweeter "unheard" melodies from the side of his urn—all the music of the great odes forms a ground base for Randall's poems...

...A serious idea lies beneath the irony: Although the tags have come to seem highfalutin to our ears, which of us has not experienced that ravishment of beauty and awe at some landscape or painting or passage of music, or poem...

...Critics who have seen examples of the early work cite a long apprenticeship to explain her late advent...

...But it was not until 1984, with Drawn by Stones, by Earth, by Things that Have Been in the Fire, that he declared himself a Wordsworthian poet...

...Then, in his 1981 volume, These Green-Going-to- Yellow, he began to appeal to his Romantic heritage, evoking such icons as William Blake, "Who knew his anatomy, down to /The little-observed muscle in the shoulder/That lifts the wing...

...Annunciation to Joseph" has Mary's carpenter husband discovering, as he lathes his wood, that "wherever the balancing bubble has lain / an angel works in the grain, " and envisioning his handiwork straining toward a new Incarnation: I am moved by no journeyman thing...

...Granite liquifies in the fires at the earth' score, or drifts with the movement of its plates...

...An epigraph from Virginia Woolf on George Eliot's heroines opens Archaic Figure and defines the subject matter to be treated: "The ancient consciousness of women, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems, in them, to have brimmed and overflowed...

...His talking stones, trees, islands embody an order that runs deeper than our mercurial impulses...

...It was felt that their use of Joycean language, Empsonian ambiguity, elaborate verse forms, and abstruse allusions (often requiring copious footnotes) had relegated poetry reading to an audience of academics, and perhaps addicts of double acrostics...

...The substantial record of originality preserved in Possessions, together with the changing tastes in verse, should finally bring him to the wider audience he deserves...

...A contemporary of Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath, she compounded her sensibility out of the porcelain delicacies of Eleanor Wylie and Sara Teasdale, the ironic wit of Louise Bogan and Leonie Adams: Grandmother, I have broken the last plate, the willow-pattern, its blue mazy gate, its bridge, its double birds, its little ship crossing to home or exile...

...Madness struck a blow against the phoniness of philistines and eggheads—it was "real...

...That might be Keats as seen through the eyes of T.S...

...Possessions provides a retrospective of a poet who, as early as the 1930s, attempted to combine High Romanticism with the prevailing harmonies of Modernism, as in the following stanza from "John Keats, Surgeon": Surely the level shine of steel Honed to the littleness of hair Is implement enough to deal A stroke to lay the spirit bare...

...Possessions: New and Selected Poems 1938-1985 (Godine, 149 pp., $20.00) by Ben Belitt...

...Metaphors often became as automatic and clichéd as "the language of flowers" or the matter of which corner of one's calling card to turn down...

...The carp lay on the bottom, resting, while dusk took shape in the form of the first stirrings of his hunger, and the trees, shorter and heavier, breathed heavily upwards...

...Bell's newest collection continues along this happy course...

...And as our century plods to a close, we are indisputably experiencing a third major shift in poetic tastes that demonstrates the process...

...They are, Archaie Figure (Knopf, 113 pp., $15.95) by Amy Clampitt...

...As trends wax and wane, certain poets—the minor imitative talents—adapt to them like chameleons...

...While bright young things whitewashed over Morris wallpaper and replaced ornate Victorian bric-a-brac with Chinese screens and black vases, a new generation started to develop voices fit for a more streamlined culture...

...carrying the last mail and holding above still puddles the books of noble ideas...

...An Anglophile like Clampitt (and possibly an Anglican from her evocations of the 1940 hymnal tunes), Randall can almost be classified as a Colonial writer, so imbued is she with the literature of the British Isles, from Celtic primitivism to Oxford classicism: "I word this in the memory,/Dylan, of your gull-sided grave/and winged words across the spit of Wales;/of Roman nightingales/sickening for Hampstead...

...Water freezes, thaws, turns gaseous...

...I smell dung on the terebinth floor, and the ox's stall curves like a cradle...

...Like Wordsworth, Bell believes that "Nature never did betray/The heart that loved her...

...Ezra Pound and ?.S...

...The poet goes on to invoke female images from antiquity—statues of girls, of Gorgone and goddesses—and presents as well a 19th-century triptych of three women whose intense passions could not be contained within the conventions of their societies: Dorothy Wordsworth, Margaret Fuller and George Eliot herself...

...Who knows which...

...And, happy melodist, unwearied, Forever piping songs forever new...

...Typically, his poems minutely observe a number of small details, then at the last moment pan back to reveal them as all part of a vaster pattern...

...Such richness of language, down to its archaic use of "phiz" and "ay," consciously recreate the Grand Manner that 20thcentury writers have, on the whole, shunned (Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens stand out as exceptions...

...Not Clampitt, who promptly lights a taper to Mary, then muses on the variety of aspects presented by the eternal feminine...

...Marvin Bell's work once seemed to epitomize the lyrical, reedy poetry of the last two decades...

...now/backhoes and scaffoldings/and gray computers set us free/to manufacture loves and lifeless things/along the steely groves where no bird sings.' The reference to Keats makes her deepest heritage apparent...

...Belitt soon abandoned formality and developed a distinctive Baroque style...

...Rationality fell into disrepute...

...Keats himself would probably have used the juxtaposition to write a threnody on the death of paganism...

...Nonetheless, time and again one finds inMoving in Memory the same preoccupations with theme, the same relationship between sound and meaning as in A rchaic Figure's lusher language...

...Like them, she values agrarian society and distrusts our divorce from nature...

...Hoping to discover some trace of the Attic Romanticism evoked in his "Ode on a Grecian Urn, " she looks in vain for "Apollo in pursuit,/mad for the green, leaf-/slippery virginity of Daphne," and discovers instead, "in a hollow under/Mount Olympus' obviously pagan shoulder,/this shrine warmed by a /fragrant sweat of brown beeswax—" dedicated to a different Virgin...

...Inevitably, subjectivism became the ultimate measuring stick...

...Other leaders of the avant-garde attempted to reproduce in words the effects of Impressionist painting and the sounds of jazz—to break down the traditional English metrical system of iambs or dactyls and substitute stresses, or else to create concrete pictures with typography...

...Throughout her three books Clampitt's language has grown increasingly stately, in the manner of Victorian stylists...

...By the middle of the century a reaction set in against Eliot and the neo-Metaphysicals...

...Auden and Howard Nemerov...