[In the review below, Skelton states that while Corso does not control his language, his approach is fresh.]

These six authors are neatly divisible into two teams, which we might well call the Bards and the Belligerents. The one group clearly believes that concern for poetry itself, for the shaping of language and the creation of cadence, is a valid reason for making poems. The other group, equally clearly, believes that each poem must arise from concern with the human predicament, and from observation of the phenomena of our time. Each group has its weakness, of course. Vernon Watkins, an elder member of the Bards, can become prolix and pretentious because of his interest in the tunes he plays. Norman McCaig can allow his fascination with the vividly metaphysical exploration of visual detail to produce poems that are so insistently lively as to appear frenzied. Thomas Kinsella, on the other hand, can slow down his poems with such deliberate Tennysonian richness, that they become petrified at the spectacle of their own technical authority.

Attacking these weak points of the Bards, the Belligerents would do very well indeed. Gregory Corso, though weakly Whitmanesque from time to time, and cursed with a fundamental inability to prevent his diction slithering uneasily from the literary to the vernacular without any control at all, does show a certain freshness of approach. His central images are often graphically cinematic. He has moved in his later work towards poems which express ideas as well as attitudes. And his lack of any real musical ability does make a man like Vernon Watkins seem pretentious. One could say much the same of Vernon Scannell, whose Sense of Danger leads him to portray, in vivid journalistic detail, and with audenesque strength and wryness, such important phenomena of our time as rapes, murders, dead dogs, coffee bars, psychopaths, incendiaries, and ageing schoolmasters. Set up against Norman McCaig's world of intellectual delight and mythical richness his direct passions seem importantly down-to-earth. And yet, if one looks closer, Mr. Scannell's language is undistinguished to the point of being commonplace; his rhythms are orthodox and rather dull: he has taken the technical discoveries of the old Yeats and of Auden and used them to good effect, but he hasn't adventured any farther on his own. But he does seem to be intensely sincere, and tremendously concerned; he's more upset about things than Mr. McCaig, that's clear.

Mr. Kinsella is also upset, but in a sort of hieratic fashion. His poem about Atomic Horror, and his poem about Ireland's bloody history, are much more measured and universal than D. J. Enright's bitter, level-voiced, “In Memoriam”. Mr. Enright, indeed, resolutely avoids all the effects for which Mr. Kinsella searches. His simplicities are different ones, and his angers are different. Sometimes only the sheer pressure of his statements, as being evidence we cannot ignore, prevents his verse from losing all pretention to poetry. And it is often when he is most nearly not writing poetry that he is most movingly, intelligently, and convincingly successful. Enright has great powers, and great control over them. His work has improved steadily over the years until now he is clearly one of the most interesting poets writing.

And yet, I would say the same of Kinsella, beside whose traditional rhetorics Mr. Enright's mean diction and acrid disputatiousness look petty. Kinsella, undoubtedly the leading Irish Poet of the post-Patrick Kavanagh generation, has gone farther than almost all his fellow-bards in solving the problems of making new structures which shall be simultaneously of our day, and of our history. He can set a “romantic” or a “metaphysical” image in a structure which can also contain the deft bathos we expect from poets of our own time. In ‘Mirror in February’ we get:

Below my window the awakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities,
And how should the flesh not quail that span for span
Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young and not renewable, but man.

This contrasts sharply with Vernon Scannell's similarly gloomy reflection:

And now another autumn morning finds me
                    With chalk dust on my sleeve and in my breath,
Preoccupied with vague, habitual speculation
                    On the huge inevitability of death.

Neatly done, but no more than neatly. In other poems Scannell shows the same traits. One feels almost as if, though fascinated and troubled by life, he is not really interested in the art-form which he practises—he adopts such undistinguished modes of expression. Vernon Watkins, on the other hand, is clearly Proud of Poetry. He laments the death of Keats and pays tributes to Wordsworth, Heine, Holderlin, and Dylan Thomas. The fundamental laziness of Mr. Watkins's verse is shown over and over again. For example,

The barren mountains were his theme,
Nature the force that made him strong.
This day died one who, like a stone,
Altered the course of English song.

This, the opening verse of a poem on Wordsworth, is typical of Mr. Watkins's pedestrian moments. Other moments there are, of course, but not too many. It is a sad business, for Mr. Watkins clearly is an earnest and good man who is completely possessed by his poetic vocation. His language, however, is dead, his rhythms are mechanical, and his cadences, though carefully made, only superficially attractive. Enright's best poems cut deeper, but a lot of them are quick scratches at the temptingly pink-and-white complexion of some easy generalization. These make him sound, often, like a poetical Bernard Levin, and the cleverness, the dexterity of the language, can't conceal the self-approving gleam.

Run over by a car? Beg its pardon speedily,
Before you are charged with subversive leanings.
If drunken cops black your two eyes
Proffer them a third, to show your heart is in the right place.
Drop no coin in a beggar's bowl:
it suggests imperfect admiration for the country's standard of living. …

Norman McCaig is never as superficial as Enright, and never never never as dull as Vernon Watkins. His springs of Helicon have something of alka-seltzer about them; they effervesce and cheer without inebriating. They have great distinction, both in wit and wisdom. They have profundity of thought, and are often moving. In fact, on this showing (and on the showing of McCaig's last three books, come to that), I'd place him firmly in my all-England team against the Americans, alongside the best of the Belligerents. Take this for example:

Three heifers slouch by, trailing down the road
A hundred yards of milky breath—they rip
The grasses sideways. Waterdrops still drip
From the turned tap and tinily explode
On their flat stone. An unseen bird goes by,
Its little feathers hushing the whole sky.

McCaig is superb!

Much has been said about American poetry being ahead of ours at present. Certainly there are fine poets writing across the Atlantic, but those whose work is published over here are not always of the top rank. Gregory Corso cannot compare, for example, with Robert Creeley, Anne Sexton, George Starbuck, David Wagoner—to mention four only of the poets whose work is unknown in England. And why in the name of heaven are we still waiting for adequate editions or selections of William Carlos Williams? Poetry is, or should be, internationalist; more American poetry should appear over here, and more British and Irish over there. We need to have Weldon Kees, Irving Layton, Charles Reznikoff, William Stafford: they need to read, of the authors under discussion, Norman McCaig and Thomas Kinsella.