"How do you write an elegy for a political movement? How do you grieve for strangers?" Those are the sort of questions that Samuel Hynes asks in this unusually empathetic yet irretrievably academic study of the writers who matured in England in the selfish Twenties—when heroism was dead—and entered the Thirties with newly discovered, political heroes and with the notion that poetry could save the world. Hynes' format—cloddish at first glance but ultimately powerful—is utterly chronological and comprehensive; year by year, almost month by month, he analyzes all of the generation's published poems, fiction, plays, belles lettres, and criticism of importance. With minimal biography, a strong sense of historical happenings, and vast chunks of quoted texts, he demonstrates how public life invaded the "private" lives of Auden, Spender, Isherwood, Day Lewis, Orwell, John Lehmann, Louis MacNeice, and others; how the Communist Party attracted and finally disenchanted; how the war in Spain became the event to write about and dive into; how the activist-artist of struggle became, by decade's end, the lost-cause artist resigned to suffering, aware that the artist's function is not to change the world, but also aware that "if art survives, man survives too." Auden dominates, of course, with his carving out of a deep valley between "Escape-art" and the more urgently needed "Parable-art," but Hynes devotes equal energy to the alternative approaches—reportage, documentary films, outright propaganda—and to the individual dilemmas and fine distinctions of "left" faced by writers who were forced to reorder priorities of message and medium. If Hynes can be seen straining to fit surrealists or Graham Greene into his overview, that's a smaller problem than his consistent de-emphasis of personal motivations. Especially since Isherwood's recent Christopher and His Kind, the Auden-Isherwood quest for the heroism of the "Truly Strong Man," requires more examination of homosexual undercurrents, and Hynes' use of "Isherwood had gone to Berlin" as an unqualified example of expanding writer interest in foreign affairs simply cannot stand. Such tunnel-vision keeps Hynes off-limits for the general reader, but it does nothing to diminish the vigor of his textual illuminations, the elegance of his prose, or the warmth with which he shares the paradox of these writers.
Pub Date: May 20, 1977
ISBN: 0712652507
Page Count: 427
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1977
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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