Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (14 page)

T.S. Eliot
(
b
. St Louis, Missouri, 1888-1965) was the foremost Modernist poet of the 20th century, raised in America but writing his greatest work after moving to England. His two major works are
The Waste Land
(1922) and
Four Quartets
(1943), the former written when he was ‘classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’ (as he wrote in 1928), the latter after his conversion to Anglicanism.

Like
The Waste Land
, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ [
74] is a densely allusive work, presenting ‘a psychological landscape where inner obsessions mesh with outer conditions’ [Edna Longley]. Eliot’s poetry includes quotations from many classic poems, often in the original language, expressing the universality of particular human experiences. His epigraph to ‘Prufrock’ is from the
Inferno
(XXVII, 61-66), where Dante recounts his visit to the underworld. These words are spoken by Count Guido da Montefelltro (1223-98), punished in a prison of flame for his treachery on earth: ‘If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would ever return to earth, this flame would remain without further movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this gulf, if what I hear is true, I can answer you with no fear of infamy.’

George Orwell preferred Eliot’s earlier poetry of ‘glowing despair’ to the later ‘melancholy faith’ of his wartime sequence
Four Quartets
, which mystically blends an Anglican version of Englishness with the ‘way’ to God. The extracts here are from two of the
Quartets,
‘East Coker’ [
121] and ‘Little Gidding [
122], named after English villages he visited during the 1930s, one with family associations and the other an Anglican community.

U.A. Fanthorpe
(
b
. Kent, 1929-2009) began writing while working as a hospital receptionist, publishing her first collection,
Side Effects
(1978), at the age of 49. She was Head of English at Cheltenham Ladies’ College when she made a life-changing decision to become ‘a middle-aged drop-out in order to write’: ‘At once I’d found the subject that I’d been looking for all my life: the strangeness of other people, particularly neurological patients, and how it felt to be them, and to use their words.’ Looking back later, she realised that behind all her poems ‘lie preoccupations with the way people speak, birds, the landscape, cats, England, power, powerlessness and words, words, words’.
‘Atlas’ [62].

Robert Frost
(
b
. San Francisco, 1874-1963) was the most popular American poet of the 20th century. Most of his best-known poems are set in the New Hampshire farmland where he lived. Joseph Brodsky said of Frost (1996): ‘He is generally regarded as the poet of the countryside, of rural settings – as a folksy, crusty, wisecracking old gentleman farmer, generally of positive disposition. In short, as American as apple pie.[…] Now, this is obviously a romantic caricature.[…] Nature, for this poet, is neither friend nor foe, nor is it the backdrop for human drama; it is this poet’s terrifying self-portrait.’

When Nehru lay dying, he had written out the last verse of Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ [
33] on a piece of paper by his bed, and kept repeating the lines (‘And miles to go before I sleep…’). Another Frost poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’ [
31], became America’s favourite modern poem because it encapsulates everyone’s anxieties about the roads we take – or might have taken – in life. Many of the
Staying Alive
trilogy poems dramatise these kinds of life decisions: the journeys we take, the roads we choose or have chosen for us.

Little-known outside America,
Jack Gilbert
(
b
. Pittsburgh, 1925) is a latterday metaphysical poet whose work replays the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, recurrent figures in his books. Gilbert’s poetry bears witness to what he calls ‘the craft of the invisible’, that is, form in the service of his explosive content. James Dickey calls him ‘a necessary poet’: ‘He takes himself away
to a place more inward than it is safe to go; from that awful silence and tightening, he returns to us poems of savage compassion.’
‘A Brief for the Defense’ [97].

Dana Gioia
(
b
. Los Angeles, 1950) is an American writer of Italian and Mexican descent. He retired early from a career as a corporate executive at General Foods to write full-time, was a revitalising chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts for six years, and is now Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. A leading New Formalist poet, he is also a critic and outspoken literary commentator, with books including the controversial
Can Poetry Matter
? (1992). His highly musical poetry is quietly visionary, often showing human lives rooted in the natural world.
‘Nothing Is Lost’ [94].

Lars Gustafsson
is a prolific Swedish poet, novelist, scholar and outspoken social critic, best-known for his novel
Death of a Beekeeper
(1978). Born in Västerås in 1936, he taught philosophy and literature at the University of Texas at Austin for over 25 years, and now divides his time between Stockholm, Bullaren and Berlin. His poetry registers the metaphysical alongside the mundane with a particular kind of clarity that has come to be associated with his work. Illuminating the potency of ordinary objects and everyday events, Gustafsson addresses critical issues that have concerned great thinkers over the centuries. Asked where he finds his inspiration, Gustafsson replied: ‘I listen. I listen and I look. Creativity knows no rules. You can get an idea for a novel from a little something someone says, or just a face you see. A rabbi once told me that when God spoke to Moses in that bush, it wasn’t in a thundering voice; it was in a very weak voice. You have to listen carefully for that voice. You have to be very sharp.’ [
Nordic Reach,
XX no.21, 2008]
‘The Girl’ [45].