4 6 0 E S S A Y S I N C R I T I C I S M

THE MIDDLE BROW MUSE

I

FIRST a private word to Mr. Enright who, in the last number,sets the precedent for saying private words in public places.It was not I—a fact Mr. Enright knows and chooses to conceal—who favoured him and Mr. Conquest with unsolicited manu-scripts, but a reader of my verse. Nor did I apply for a ticket'in full knowledge of who [my] "fellow-travellers" would be'(Mr. Enright's phrase). How could I have had any preciseknowledge of this since the matter was in no way public? Mr.Enright may have noticed that in reviewing New Lines I alsocriticised Poetry Now, an anthology which did contain mywork. Perhaps this point is sufficient to dispose of Mr. Enright'scruder implications.

These are scarcely issues of general interest. Mr. Davie raisesone that is. It is his contention that only by means of a 'self-imposed loss of nerve' can poetry be renewed after the verbaldebaucheries of the forties. It is mine that it can only be re-newed by poets whose sensory organisation is alive, who areaware in their finger-tips of the universe around them and whohave broken through that suburban mental ratio which toomany of the movement poets attempt to impose on their experi-ence. In short, my contention is that poetry can be renewedthrough a revived poetic imagination, through great excitementand great control—through, that is, 'the holiness of the Heart'saffections and the truth of the Imagination', combined, as thegreat romantics combined them, with 'application, study, andthought'. The outcome of the 'self-imposed loss of nerve', aswe have recently seen, results too often in a kind of atrophy ofthe senses, in the production of mechanical verse exercises.

Mr. Davie, by the way, is fond of the example of Hiroshimaas being the result of chaotic 'nerve', but Hiroshima represented,surely, the death of the faculty of imagination in the leaders ofdemocracy.

CHARLES TOMLINSON

Bristol University

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