The heroic age of modern poetry has been over for some time. The learned reactionaries who shaped it for two generations have all been dead for many years: Eliot (1965) and Pound (1972), Valéry (1945) and Claudel (1955), Ungaretti (1970) and Montale (1981). Diverse in style and technique, the great modernists were all ambitious in straining at the limits of expression, in finding the principles that underlie formal conventions, in bringing to bear the weight of humane learning upon the inhuman conditions of the 20th century. The poets who have followed, even when they are good, have had neither the erudition nor the ambition to take up their challenge.

There is, however, one outstanding exception to this generalization, Peter Russell. Born in Bristol in 1920, Russell served in the British army in Europe and in the Indian army in the East. He has lived virtually everywhere—Malaya, Berlin, Venice, Tehran, and British Columbia, and at one time or another has studied much of what is worth studying. He can translate from Latin and write in Serbo-Croatian, and the range of his allusions is almost as broad (although by no means as bewildering) as that of Ezra Pound. Russell’s connection with Pound goes deeper than style, since it was Peter Russell who worked for years to secure Pound’s release from St. Elizabeth’s. (Why is it that exile and madness are the two destinies most frequently-enjoyed by American poets?)

Quite apart from a long list of volumes of verse and criticism, Peter Russell has, over the years, involved himself in a number of literary projects, as editor of the arts review Nine in the 1950’s, and more recently of his own newsletter Marginalia, which is like a personal letter from a brilliant and learned friend. His work is also to be found in Temenos, an unusual journal of “imagination.”

These days Mr. Russell is living in rural Tuscany, from which he continues to make lecturing forays, and is regarded with considerable respect in Italian literary circles. His newest volume, a selection of his recent verse accompanied by translations into Italian, might serve as an introduction to readers unfamiliar with Russell’s work.

Here we find examples of his hard-edged lyricism put into forms whose rules he manages to twist and bend to his own convenience:

Would I could find the magic arrow

To shoot up in the seamless blue

My house of earth is narrow, narrow

How should I welcome you?

It’s ruined too O make it wide

Strike down these ruins and rebuild

What if the bolt transfix my side

If my empty cup be filled.

The following lines begin his poem “By the Lake,” which also illustrates Russell’s metaphysical bent:

Primordial silence on the lake

The coots and grebes seem painted there

The alder boughs’ reflections make

No ripple on the flood or air

Russell prefaces the poem with a line from Luke’s Gospel, which he quotes in Anglo-Saxon, partly because he finds it beautiful and partly because he is contemptuous of the pseudo-literary culture of an England that has cut itself off from its past in order to embrace television and comic books.

Russell is no conservative—whatever that term means any more. Sometimes he sounds the mystical note of charity, and at other times he is the embittered reactionary. In the nightmarish “A Ballad” the wandering king describes a kingdom that could be the modern West:

In my old kingdom now they say

The people rule, the nobles dead;

The women whores, the men all gay.

And the black flag changed for red.

A race of lawyers rules the land,

There’s no fresh fruit, no game;

The milk is powdered, meat’s all canned

And the sour wine’s all the same.

Peter Russell will probably bewilder readers of poetry whose sensibilities have been formed on what Conrad Aiken called the “vin Audenaire” of postwar verse. Writing sometimes with the almost Mother Goose simplicity of Blake, he can proceed rapidly to the highest “hermeticism” (a term frequently applied to the great modern Italians). In this volume, however, his verse is never perplexing and rarely as extravagant as Russell has been elsewhere.

The hawk-moth sucks the rosemary

Whose pale blue flowers are my heart;

The long scroll of his tongue is me,

A glowing filament of art.

Finally, to appreciate Russell’s art, consider his fine poem on old age. “Anziano”:

I’m going deaf, I’m going blind.

Scales forming on my eyes;

Where delicate labyrinths wind—

A hammer,—in a vise . . .

Almost insensitive to pain,

My finger-tips mere bone—

Stumps that must knock, to feign

The well-tempered virginal’s tone;

The perfume of the rose or musk.

Dusky and vague like memories—

The body’s house a dried-up husk.

An old blanket full of fleas;

Trout broiled on a fire of wood,

Delicious odours of the past!

Succulent meat!—surely ’twas good?—

I’m “No Man” now—could feed on mast!

Deprived then of the boon of senses.

Say I’m a wretched shell,—decrepit!

young limbs that vaulted towering fences—

Blood watered down now barely tepid:

Yet in the brain-box there’s a fire

Bums like a blood-red June geranium;

Let wrinkled skin get drier and drier—

A world of wonders fills this cranium!

There is not that much great verse on old age—Sophocles, Shakespeare, W.S. Landor, Yeats; but Russell manages to echo much of it. (The “towering fences,” for example, recall Landor’s “five bar gate.”) The smell of trout cooking on an open fire leads into the great outdoorsman, Odysseus (No Man), who fought the primitive Cyclops, and an allusion to the Golden Age stories of men who lived on acorn mast. But while these echoes and allusions add layers of richness to the poem, no one can escape either the detailed realism of the opening lines or the defiant passion of the conclusion, with its brilliant image of a red summer flower inside an old man’s skull. (Does Russell, I wonder, intend a play on “geranium”—as if derived from the Greek word for old?).

When I first began to be aware of Peter Russell, I wondered vaguely why an English poet was living, cut off from his language, in Italy. The more I read, however, the more I realized that the state of Anglo-American culture, our language as well as our literature, would make Britain and America uncongenial places for the last of great modernists.

 

[Teorie e Altre Liriche, by Peter Russell (Rome: Carlo Mancosu)]