Pinter’s Poetry: A Diachronic Analysis

Abstract

A playwright, poet, actor, director, political activist, and winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, Harold Pinter has become a focus of global criticism. Although Pinter was regarded as of greatest playwrights of twentieth century (Pendarvis 189), his drama has been greatly discussed around world; his poetry, on other hand, has failed to gain enough attention. Up to now, most scholars (1) have discussed Pinter's poetry in passing when their foci are on his plays or life. They have observed with acumen some characteristics of Pinter's poetry. Like his best plays, Pinter's best can force mundane reality to assume deepest overtones (Baker and Tabachnick 18). However, little attention has been given to evolution of Pinter's poetry as a whole. In a period of 60 years or so, Pinter as a poet had written a great number of poems, among which least 90 are published (Balter, Harold Pinter 134). A diachronic study of these published pieces will manifest an overall tendency toward a gradual compression: Words, lines, verses all become briefer as time passes (www.haroldpinter.org), which is confirmed by Baker when he observes that Pinter's poems become shorter, increasingly so, with age (Harold Pinter 19). But brevity is not all. In terms of diction, syntax, image, and other poetic components, Pinter's earlier are more elaborate, ornate, irregular, obscure, complicated, while his later ones become clearer, more direct, more unadorned, regular, and easily intelligible. His early poetic style can be called baroque while late one plain. early phase covers from 1950s to 1960s; his middle phase encompasses 1980s; late phase refers to 1990s and beyond. Such dates are approximate and inevitable features of earlier poetic rhetoric sometimes reoccur in later poetry written later. This paper will investigate change Pinter's poetry undergoes by analyzing some representative pieces in different periods: and this examination will help us better understand development of Pinter's poetic career. However, it should be borne in mind that Pinter's poetry, in company with others, has a tendency to resist formulaic generalizations. changes in his poetry reflect developments in Pinter as a creative writer. His early poetic writing is much influenced by themes, language, and forms of Jacobean revenge tragedy, an interest encouraged by his English master at Hackney Downs Grammar School Joe Brearley, (2) and inflated language of contemporary poets such as W. S. Graham and Dylan Thomas. (3) His middle period sees him increasingly influenced by Samuel Beckett (4) and reflects Pinter's paring down of language, simplifying it and remembering personal relationships. In Pinter's later period, his poetry is affected by personal loss such as death of his father and close friends, personal illness, increasing awareness of his own mortality, and increasing political commitment. Pinter's poetry also depicts absurdity of human condition in post-Second World War world and reflects his effort to convey pointlessness of existence by exposing its bleakness and by fighting injustice. Pinter's lifelong friend Mick Goldstein recalled that, at an evening gathering after school, Pinter cited Cardinal Newman to me about creation being a vast aboriginal calamity. Billington, who quotes this remark, adds that the notion that they need surface of daily existence lie destination and emptiness permeates [Pinter's] work. (5) But this thematic preoccupation changes from sense of apocalyptic angst caused by aftermath of War to concrete expression of oppression. It partly explains permeation of death throughout Pinter's canon. early poetry is shrouded in an enigmatic and doomed atmosphere; in his later poetry, source of death takes on shape of human agency in so-called democracies, to use a word he repeats four times in his 1996 poem The Old Days. …