The Obscurity of Evasion

Extract

It is difficult to differ in one’s immediate reactions from the critical consensus on Peter Levi’s Collected Poems. The general impression is of a competent body of verse produced largely independently of the various ‘movements’ contemporary with it, descended in its early phase from Spender, derived in its later style from Eliot, and marked by an obscurity arising, as Colin Falk recognised, from the absence of “an authenticating life…whose depths and anxieties get smoothed over…without being built up into the poetic structure”. Obscurity of this kind is not part of the difficulty characteristic of much significant ‘modem’ poetry: a problem of complex and contradictory things said and shown, often overburdening the signifier, in an already allusive and elliptical discourse. Levi’s obscurity is, rather, part of a process of exclusion and elision, a smoothing over which deprives his work of a memorable presence.

To ascribe this as most reviewers have done to the limitations of Levi’s imagination is an inadequate explanation. What is needed is some discrimination, however cursory, amongst obscurities: a distinction between that obscurity which is symptomatic of innovation and gives major works their multivalent character; and the indeterminancy of works where a lack of depth and conception make their resonances finally unmeaningful and insignificant.

Levi’s obscurity, I want to suggest, arises from a conceptual naivete. His desire to smooth over conflict results in a suppression of contradictions that is made possible by his belief in an immanent, essential spiritual unity. This influences a mode which, in avoiding argument, is often either sententiously preachy or passive; either distanced from the problem in its generality—“O Great God what is human life like?”—or immersed indistinguishably in the problem itself—“I think England is prison of a kind/and in that prison I am blank wall”.