With Cheltenham Festival and Poetry Society prizes and New Statesman Prudence Farmer Awards to his name, Craig Raine seems to have discovered the formula for the winning poem. His typical aha!-effects, the quick sharp thrusts of his couplets and the riddlemaker's precision of his images all suggest an abundance of that gift for ready metaphoric connection which Aristotle thought central to the poetic sensibility. And critical acclaim has not been lacking. (p. 13)

[Loose] couplets are Raine's preferred form; in The Onion, Memory twenty-five of the fifty-two poems are cast in them, and in A Martian sends a Postcard Home the proportion rises steeply, twenty of the twenty-four poems being in these irregular couplets. Elsewhere in The Onion, Memory—for example, in the title poem or 'On the perpetuum mobile'—Raine deploys metrical patterns more closely based on iambs, and often allows rhyme, but in the couplet poems rhyme is usually banished (the occasional rhyme or off-rhyme in a poem like 'Kublaikansky' is untypical) and the cadences are further removed from any iambic model. Out of this rejection of familiar poetic disciplines grows a new approach to the notion of the couplet, which, in Raine's hands, becomes a vehicle of new firmness and flexibility. Characteristic of this vehicle are four stylistic features. First, we may note the use of the present tense as a norm whose effect is to impart to specificity of observation a sense of general relevance and validity. Second, the syntactic pattern in the couplet poems tends almost invariably toward short, simple sentences containing one finite verb. Third, where a further finite verb is introduced it is common for this verb to be linked by the conjunction 'and' and to be placed at the beginning of the line. This high incidence of lines beginning with 'and' produces a sense of thoughts added, as it were, as afterthoughts; frequently the conjunction yokes together disparate images, and in this way innocent syntax is transformed into the image-maker's linguistic hold-all. It is worth noting here that it is extremely rare to find adjectives linked by 'and' in Raine's poetry; for obvious reasons, the density of imagery well-night eliminates description. Fourth, it is characteristic of Raine's couplet line that it ends on a noun. Elementary in itself, this device, in conjunction with the others mentioned here, endows Raine's couplet line with a unity and rightness that are equivalent, in the overall scheme of his poetics, to the Augustan propriety of Pope's couplet line.

Outside his couplets, Raine can sound unfortunately derivative. The title poem of The Onion, Memory recalls both Eliot and W. D. Snodgrass, and in 'On the perpetuum mobile' we find a tone unmistakably borrowed from the early Eliot…. The peculiar barrenness of this poem comes from its slavishly derivative use of the tone of Eliot's 1917 volume, and in particular the tone of the 'Portrait of a lady'. It is the strength of Raine's couplet poems that in them (and, it is true, occasionally elsewhere) he develops a manner and tone entirely his own.

This manner and tone, this style in which, for all its necessary limits, the poet is able to achieve triumphs, is always dictated by the overall scheme of Raine's poetics. When I use this phrase I mean to refer to his conception of the role played in poetic creation by images. Without question, poetry has always availed itself of metaphor and simile, but Raine's approach is different in so far as he elevates image-making to the supreme structural principle of his work. In 'The gardener' Raine is clearly interested in the man at work primarily as a peg on which to hang images; the images are the poem, they represent its total structure, and without them the poem would not exist. We can rarely, if ever, say this of the use of imagery by any other poet in the language. (pp. 14-15)

When George Orwell wrote [in his essay "Politics and the English Language"] that 'The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness' and maintained that 'A newly invented metaphor assisted thought by evoking a visual image' he was speaking of prose in terms which, as Pound and Raine would well have understood, apply equally well to poetry; we need only compare (for example) Pound's observation in the ABC of Reading: 'In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstraction.' The notion that image-making is the clearest form of definition, and therefore the clearest means of communicating experience, is central to Craig Raine's aesthetic.

Other contexts for Raine's aesthetic suggest themselves, possibly the most persistent being one from outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition. From 1902 to about 1908 Rainer Maria Rilke worked according to a concept of 'Dinge', or things, which he developed fully during his acquaintance with the sculptor Rodin and expounded in his monograph on Rodin, as well as in letters. For Rilke, 'Dinge' held within them the absolute; it is as if all meaning and all relation to life in its relative phases could be perceived through a close enough contemplation of the thing in question. That thing might be anything, from the perceptible or conceptual world: Rilke's poems of this period take animals, birds, flowers, cathedrals, works of the visual arts, people, well-nigh anything as their centres—but not emotion, or experience immediately related to a persona. It was important to Rilke, as to the Imagists in their different way, to present his things simply and without discursive interpretation. (pp. 17-18)

Returning to Raine, we find that he too, like Rilke and like the Imagists, possesses an active, outward-looking curiosity which fastens on anything and everything as a possible subject for poetry. His poetry—as he puts it in 'An enquiry into two inches of ivory'—deals with

                 Daily things. Objects
                 in the museum of ordinary art.

It is interesting that his weaker poems—those in which, as I have already suggested, he adheres too faithfully to the forms of other men—are also those in which he comes closest to examining emotion, and experience related to a persona; his better work looks outward and attempts to embrace the full thisness of the world through exactness of definition….

Raine's images recreate the object-subject, giving us, at their most effective, a Rilkean sense of penetration akin to symbolism. That Raine's things are not symbols is evident from the fact that there is nothing beyond themselves that they could represent; but they partake of the flavour of universal validity which we associate with symbols.

Occasionally Raine's images take on a slightly different function, in poems where his prime concern is not so much with essence as with narrative. 'In the dark', arguably the finest poem in the second collection [A Martian Sends a Postcard Home] is an excellent example of this shift of function, the images in it serving as a sort of imagistic shorthand to represent areas of life which are familiar and do not need elaborate delineation. The poem is the story of a girl, her unwanted child, and the social pressures which inflict an inevitable tragedy. No one would claim the story is original; but Raine invests it with a 'ne'er so well expressed' felicity that conjures forth every essential element in the narrative in a handful of precisely-chosen words:

           God danced on his cross
           at the foot of her bed
 
           like Nijinsky having a heart attack …

The moral-religious pressures brought to bear in such a case have rarely been as succinctly expressed, and something too of the girl's own mental torment comes over in that image of a Christ crucified, represented in the traditional almost-S shape so close to squirming pain. Raine is surely right to suppose that such images speak for themselves and do not require 'overt moralizing'. The echoes and extremities of the image are clear and whole.

If we look again at 'The gardener' we see, of course, that it lacks the large moral dimensions of 'In the dark' and, existing as it does in a realm of sheer exuberance in the activity of image-making, represents a less serious artefact. As I have already said, Raine uses his gardener as a useful peg on which to hang images. The difference could be compared to the difference between Rilke's poem about the panther, which makes a profound statement on the relationship of will to liberty, and his poem about flamingos, where the simple pleasure and accuracy of observation are the poem's sole justification. If 'The gardener' is to be defended against those who, like Brownjohn, would see in it (and others of Raine's poems which resemble it) an abdication of seriousness of purpose, the defence must be the same as we would offer for Rilke's poem: that a poetic experience uncomplicated by moral perspectives is no less valid qua poetic experience simply because it is simpler. It offers a different pleasure and a different reward; it would be a wilful aesthetic that would therefore reject it out of hand.

In addition to this defence we can add that Raine occupies a position in British poetry in the final quarter of the century similar to that of the Imagists in the first, in so far as his aesthetic of image-making necessarily exposes him to objections such as that which Firkins aimed at the Imagists; and it is undeniably true that when the poetic process becomes merely a process of seeing the poems produced can have limitations of the kind Firkins, Fletcher and Hughes suggested. Thus the title poem of A Martian sends a Postcard Home is too flashy and glib, too self-consciously manufactures new vision. Poems on familiar moral issues can at times be less successful than 'In the dark', too: 'In the mortuary' is an easy poem in a vein long ago made familiar by Gottfried Benn's morgue poems, and the tale of 'Oberfeldwebel Beckstadt' is an unfortunate string of clichés. The Onion, Memory is uneven too; in one poem Raine's talent can be an elevation and a revelation, in the next the rather pompous huffing and puffing of a superannuated wolf. To say this much is to say only that Raine's achievement so far is uneven, and this much can be said of any poet.

But, having placed his aesthetic in perspective, we are equipped to follow his success not only in one, but in two directions: in the production of poetry, and in the changing of the conditions in which poetry can be produced. For one thing already appears certain: that Raine's impact on British poetry must be assessed not only in terms of his own work but in terms of the effects it has on the prevailing climate of poetry. It may even be that his own work will fail to maintain the high standards he has set himself in his best poems in the two volumes to date, and to a certain extent that will cease to matter. If he has a truly robust talent he may well develop along the lines of Rilkean symbolism, or he may follow Pound's course towards fragmentation and juxtaposition, or he may find an alternative of his own—or he may cease to produce good poetry; speculation is foolish. But his impact on British letters in the brief span of time since his first two collections appeared, in 1978 and 1979 respectively, has been immense. The adjective 'Martian' is everywhere current whenever an unusual angle of looking at the world is under discussion, and, looking beyond Raine's Oxford stable-mate Christopher Reid, whose poetry shares many of the characteristics of Raine's, we can already detect the influence of Raine in poems by various hands in magazines, as well as in the first collection [Looking into the Deep End] by … David Sweetman. It was a commonplace in the second half of the 1970s that British poetry was becoming enervated and lifeless. If Raine has succeeded in injecting new vigour where it was needed his contribution will have been twofold, creative and corrective. (pp. 18-20)