An Alternative Tradition: Hardy, Housman, Frost, Kipling and Graves

Abstract

If Pound, Eliot, Williams and Stevens are names which immediately spring to mind when one thinks of early modern poetry, they are certainly not the only ones. Hardy, Housman, Frost, Kipling and Graves are equally prominent. The first quartet is American — though Eliot became a naturalised British citizen; the second English — with the exception of Frost (whose first volume of verse nevertheless was published in England). Though national consciousness probably has little to do with it (even where Kipling is concerned), the ‘English’ quartet differs from the American in being far less self-consciously modernist, more readily to be seen as continuing, rather than making a deliberately sharp break with, nineteenth-century practices. In particular, they are much more willing to retain the formally correct syntax that poetry had hitherto shared with prose, their verse is more likely to ‘scan’, and their allusiveness, when they employ it as a technique, is more likely to be self-explanatory — or at least not so essential to the overall meaning of the poem that annotation becomes indispensable to its understanding. To this extent they are easier than the poets of the previous chapter, with whom ‘the fascination of what’s difficult’ (though that is a Yeatsian phrase) seems at times to become almost an obsession, and they hit the reader less frequently with a deliberately cultivated shock of the new.