WILLIAM FAULKNER once remarked: "An artist is a creature driven by demons. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies." It is an attitude shared by all who have discovered just how difficult it is to write one superlative poem and what bitter battles must be waged to keep poetry vital and relevant in an age when so much else seems more important.
One such battle began after World War II and during the 1950s, when the so-called Beat poets rebelled against both society and the academic, formalist mode of poetry. Three schools of revolutionary poets were founded: the San Francisco school of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder; the Black Mountain school of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley; and the New York school of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. Basically, the San Francisco school represented a fresh imagism combined with oriental influences; the Black Mountain group leaned toward an intellectual eclecticism typical of Ezra Pound's Cantos; and the New York school was surreal and Dadaistic, or more adamantly colloquial and hortative, as in Ginsberg's "Howl." But these distinctions tended to blur as the groups began influencing one another. Behind them, unifying them, were the established voices of Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, William Carlos Williams, and even old Walt Whitman, whose emotional, plain-speaking idiom came to be idolized by many of the new poets.
Seeking Identity. What was important was not the schools but the changing attitudes toward poetry, the breaking down of old poetic forms in an effort to initiate a fresh dialogue between the poet and his audience. What has emerged in the U.S. is a crop of poets who cannot be pigeonholed in schools or academies, whether they are writing in free verse or with a conscious debt to form. Among them, James Dickey and John Berryman have become the most prominent, while Robert Lowell continues to be the most profound force among the more formal American poets.
If there is a trend, it is toward the personal voice—the poet not only seeking his own identity but combatting society with that identity, the poet engaging the real world with more or less surreal imagery and ideas. Joined in that combat today are both well-known poets and those whose voices are just beginning to be heard.
HIS TOY, HIS DREAM, HIS REST by John Berryman. 317 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.50.
In 77 Dream Songs, Berryman introduced his readers to Henry, whom he describes in his latest collection as "an imaginary character (not the poet, not me), a white American in early middle age, sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss." Henry's world is modern man's world, particularly the world of the past eleven years, and embraces the whole range of human experience.