from "To Stand Against Chaos" PN Review 203




























This edition of Bernard Spencer’s poetry, together with translations and prose on poetry, is likely to be definitive following from Roger Bowen’s edition of Spencer’s Collected Poems in 1981, which augmented the Alan Ross edition of 1965 with previously uncollected poems and four translations from Eugenio Montale. Peter Robinson has extended the collection with a large selection of translations from George Seferis and a long poem from Odysseus Elytis as well as including more from Spencer’s uncollected poems plus a selection from his occasional and unfinished poems. There are more prose pieces including an obituary note on Keith Douglas and a short article on Lawrence Durrell. Both of these were associated with Spencer in the Middle East during the war publishing together in the magazine “Personal Landscape.”

Robinson provides an excellent introduction to illuminate how Spencer often pushed at the limits of conventional poetic technique, for example, with Spencer’s use of internal rhyme as in “Regent’s Park Terrace” – ‘hourly these unpick / the bricks of a London terrace’. More significantly he explores the source of energy for Spencer’s poetry: “Spenser’s poetry is formed against the pressures of an underlying sense of things being broken up, unconnected, unrelated; and to be accurate to such an awareness his poems must accommodate the pressure of merely accidental proximity of things, even as they work to transform accidental proximity into meaningful structures.” This seems an astute summary of Spencer’s ‘great theme’ and the significance of the many acutely observed objects, to use a term of Durrell’s, in Spencer’s poetry is that they are in their unobtrusive way building a structure to stand against chaos. Where Spencer is most successful the poetry is marvellous as in the second stanza of “Part of Plenty”:

                                                                              When she puts a sheaf of tulips in a jug
                                                                              And pours in water and presses to one side
                                                                              The upright stems and leaves that you hear creak,
                                                                              Or loosens them, or holds them up to show me,
                                                                              So that I see the tangle of their necks and cups
                                                                              With curls of her hair, and the body they are held
                                                                              Against, and the stalk of the small waist rising
                                                                              And flowering in the shape of breasts;

How good is his poetry in the span of the twentieth century? A certain diffidence combined with a working life spent abroad, often for the British Council, and some posthumous bad luck affected his reputation. He wrote less prolifically than his 1930s contemporaries although the Complete Poems has few examples of obvious juvenilia. He died in the same year as Louis MacNeice and so was overshadowed by a poet of almost the same age and equal lyrical grace, but greater fame. MacNeice’s fine last collection, “The Burning Perch” was savaged by Ian Hamilton and in the subsequent two years before the first Collected Poems saw the emergence of the posthumous reputation of Sylvia Plath, the sentimentalia of the Liverpool poets and the dominance of critical opinion by Movement and Group figures. To be a poet of Spencer’s generation was to be discredited by the later, weaker work of the major figures of that decade. Neglect of Spencer continued. He is not even mentioned in the ‘comprehensive’ surveys of Eric Homberger, The Art of the Real (1977) or Neil Corcoran’s English Poetry since 1940 (1993). However, a look through anthologies published in the 1950s and 1960s up to Larkin’s Oxford anthology of 1974 reveals that Spencer had an appreciative readership among poets. Robin Skelton’s “Poetry of the Thirties” selects five poems, putting Spencer in a second group after Auden, Day-Lewis, Spender and Dylan Thomas, with Betjeman, Cameron, Empson, Gascoyne, Grigson and Ruthven Todd. Only one of these five poems, the superb “Allotments”, is reproduced in the other anthologies. The editors, who, besides Larkin, were Kenneth Allot, Elizabeth Jennings and Edward Lucie-Smith, appear to have identified a dozen poems that might be considered to be among the better of the first half of the twentieth century.

Spencer’s early poems show an original gift, despite stylistic debts to Auden, for example the omission of definite and indefinite articles. “Poem”, from the section of uncollected poems between 1929 and 1932, shows his mature style with its unusual, unobtrusive collocations, “earth undressed of life”, and conversions often combined with a sound pattern of alliteration or assonance,
                                                                             Holds all bitterness, littles the will so imperious,
                                                                             Show to will’s self its dream-weak feet and hands, giant
                                                                             That clock and sheer machine by which it lives.

Moreover, in these early pieces there is that reservation over a poem’s ability to legislate for mankind, a diffidence his more famous contemporaries did not share. Robinson ascribes this to a lack of confidence in his own gift and quotes Betjeman, “I think a rejection slip would have set him back for years.” Yet there is an ambition in Spencer’s best work to relate a poem to as wide a context as possible. In “Allotments” from the 1930s the lyrical ego is placed in a manner that can be described as Whitmanesque: 

                                                                                                                              Rather it adds 
                                                                             What more I am; excites the deep glands
                                                                             And warms my animal bones as I go walking
                                                                             Past the allotments and the singing water meadows.