The Wykehamist
tween the melancholy lyrics— shadowing a young Springsteen’ s working class American reality— and the romantic saxophone and pulsating electric guitar line of the‘ dream’. But let’ s not ignore the power of the words themselves. As poetry, and as music, we follow the plot second and experience the real-time emotional landing of flashes of metaphor first, its scorching emotional power coming alive in searingly potent verse. Like when we listen to Alec Guiness read The Waste Land or Ralph Fiennes the Four Quartets, we cannot stop to reread the images, but are forced to relinquish control and process the stream of images only as our emotional response. Be it an‘ opera out on the turnpike’ or‘ a ballet being fought in the alley’(‘ Jungleland’), Springsteen’ s language captivates at once a drama and a tenderness.
But how is he a‘ counter-modernist behemoth’, and what even is that anyway?
Modernism, in poetry, was a movement that emerged around the turn of the twentieth century. As art grew increasingly abstracted, modernism made anything artistically viable. The straitjacket of form that had been being untied for many years by people like Walt Whitman, was definitively loosened. This does not mean that the resulting work was formless, but form became a much more malleable principle. The movement went on to be spearheaded by the poetic nuclei formed first around American émigré Ezra Pound in Europe, and then T. S. Eliot at the London publishing house Faber & Faber, both of whose epic works deal with a sense of disillusionment and decay after the two World Wars.
To reflect this sense of being lost in the modern age, their poems exist in a fragmentary‘ heap of broken images’(‘ The Burial of the Dead’, The Waste Land). Determined to‘ make it new’( Pound’ s mantra), these poems are crammed with citations of the past and highbrow sudokus of symbolism that lose the emotional weight the pieces which they reference once had.
Hinting at putting down anchor in his lofty Four Quartets by obeying the metres of time and place with the setting‘ Now and England’( Little Gidding, Four Quartets), Eliot somehow makes the vague setting less grounded. In his Preludes which hang beneath the precise pins of‘ six o’ clock’, he fills the image of place with smoke in passageways. The emotional power is
impressionistic and the sense of grounding in a cultural space evaporated. So, where was poetry then meant to go? Some took abstraction to the extreme, whilst others began to build the form up again. The beat movement emerged, interlocked with jazz, becoming a poetic perspective on the American Dream and romanticising the American hobo, for instance, in Kerouac’ s unrestrained prose. Similarly, the Merseybeat movement in Liverpool was associated with rock‘ n’ roll. But in the work of Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, it maintained the erudite references and impenetrable free verse that had made poetry an isolated academic interest.
But as with every force, there is an equal and opposite one. In Britain, a clear reactionary impulse rose from the shadows. Larkin and others emerged, vehemently blaming a‘ quality of irresponsibility unique to this century’( All What Jazz) on Pound, along with Picasso and Joyce. Larkin welcomed back the rhyme Pound had eschewed. Even if it barely rings clear, the sense of form as a way to deal with life is pointedly there. His poems are not overly grandiose at the outset or impenetrable. They lead us through precisely accurate descriptions of experience, before reaching a humanely articulated existentialist plot twist. The Modernists had explored what it meant to be lost, so the generation afterwards was forced to synthesise an art form that focused on being found, confident in place and era.
‘ Mister, I ain’ t a boy, no— I’ m a man, and I believe in a promised land’
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