Modern British and American Poetic Sequences

Abstract

We are faced with a remarkable and curious phenomenon. My subject is the modern poetic sequence in Britain and the United States over the past few decades. But I cannot take the obvious for granted. I cannot assume general knowledge of the nature or importance of this genre, which is nothing less than the outstanding formal development in our poetry for over a century. Examples abound-I despair of being able to touch on enough of them in so short a space. A litany of outstanding poets since Whitman will show that most have been makers of sequences. This form of the long poem-intimate, fragmented, self-analytical, open, emotionally volatile-meets the needs of modern sensibility, even when the poet aspires to tragic scope. Yet because of the stultifying critical and scholarly situation, it remains one of those fine things that need much laboring but are largely ignored by our supposed theorists. The modern sequence is a grouping of mainly lyric poems and passages, rarely uniform in pattern, tending to interact as an organic whole. It usually includes narrative and dramatic elements, and ratiocinative ones as well; but its ordering is finally lyrical, a succession of affects-that is, of units of phrasing that generate specific intensities of feeling and awareness. Because of these separate radiating centers, the sequence meets Poe's significantly modern objection to the idea of a long poem: namely, that it is impossible because of the limited duration of any one surge of emotional energy. The sequence is openly improvisational and tentative in structure-a condition, in fact, of all art, but often papered over by the conventions of set forms. From this standpoint, every successful long work of the past is, after all, a sequence beneath its surface continuity and uniformity. Tennyson's superb Maud: A Monodrama is a clear example. Its hero's psychic state gives the poet his excuse to juxtapose varied states of naked feeling, with minimal need to justify