The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence

BRITISH ADOLESCENCE HAS a history of its own; so do the poems that describe it. “In England,” the historian John Gillis writes, “the invention of adolescence was the unintended product of the reform of the public schools”—that is, elite private boarding schools such as Eton (Youth and History, 105).¹ Elite single-sex boarding schools—for girls and for boys—inspired much popular fiction and some poetry (by Rudyard Kipling and by W. E. Henley, among others) before 1900 (Springhall, Coming of Age, 132–33). Only in the twentieth century, however, could the life of the schools be juxtaposed with the psychological models that ascribed special importance to adolescence. After the Second World War, literary interest in schools receded, as postwar teenagers, mods, rockers, and hippies attracted vast publicity.

W. H. Auden built his early style from an idea of adolescence inseparable from the special conditions of schools. That idea would inform not only Auden’s contemporaries but his legatees overseas. From his titillating undergraduate novellas to the title poem of High Windows, Philip Larkin’s views of adolescence helped to shape his outlook and his oeuvre, much of it defined by his own felt distance from youth. Thom Gunn’s early poems about motorcycle gangs and Elvis Presley reflect a measured identification with the youth subcultures through which Gunn would mark his Anglo-American career. Both poets’ late work sets adolescence as pastoral against a sense that youth had become something historically new. For Basil Bunting, both apparently timeless and historically specific 1960s ideas about youth proved needed ingredients for his for his poetic monument, Briggflatts.

Auden lived and worked in schools and colleges, as a student or as a teacher, in all but one of the years between 1915 and 1935. He became not only, in Edward Mendelson’s words, “the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century,” but also the first important poet to experience in his formative years both the post-Freudian medical and literary models of adolescence and the social life of the English public school (Auden, Selected Poems, ix). Auden’s early poems describe not a generalized immaturity but a particular kind of adolescence, enabled and mediated by all-male boarding schools. The poems, as Richard Bozorth suggests, both prefigure and instantiate Cyril Connolly’s “Theory of Permanent Adolescence”: Connolly argued in 1939 that “the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives, and to arrest their development” (Bozorth, Auden’s Games, 324–25).² Auden’s homosocial, and sometimes homosexual, groups and teams find nothing worth developing into or toward, and they refuse the clearer rules of adulthood for the obscurities of in-groups and codes.³

“In Auden’s poetry until 1932,” writes Edward Mendelson, “the schoolboy was the measure of all things” (Early, 128). Yet most critics (Mendelson included) see schools and youth as standing for something else: for psychoanalytic models, for the nation-state, or for homosexuality generally. This chapter argues otherwise. Schools and youth in general—and elite boarding schools in particular—are why the poems sound as they do, and what they are about. Taken together the poems put forward a pattern: the group life created by and for “boys” in a school is for those boys both formative and insufficient. Graduating, becoming adult, means treason to groups defined by adolescence (and sometimes by homosexuality as well); not growing up, on the other hand, amounts to stagnation and death. To see Auden’s early poetry first through his interest in schools and schooling might show how thoroughly that interest informs the poetry and how the poems’ style fits the milieu they describe.

That interest appeared before the style did. Auden and Day-Lewis’ preface to Oxford Poetry, 1927 shrugged off readers’ interest in youth qua youth: “Those who believe that there is anything valuable in our youth as such we have neither the patience to consider nor the power to condone” (PTB 4–5). Yet the young Auden embraced youth as a subject. He wrote to Isherwood that in his poem “Thomas Prologizes” (1926), “The idea of course is an adolescent, who feels that all his old ideas are breaking up and have taught little but lyric and lechery. Then he thinks ‘lets get on to something new’” (sic; quoted in John Fuller, Auden, 40). “I chose this lean country” (summer 1927) ends by invoking the “mildewed dormitory” to which the poet’s readers (“this people”) would return (Auden, Juvenilia, 211). A nine-section poem called “The Megalopsych” depicts fugitive schoolboys along with useless, failed “men”: “The last boy vanishes, / A blazer half-on, through the rigid trees” (Juvenilia, 199). “Narcissus” (1927) asks: “But where are Basley who won the Ten, / Dickon so tarted by the House, / Thomas who kept a sparrowhawk?” (Juvenilia, 186). These lines adapt Villon’s ubi sunt to the world of the public school. They would find their way into Paid on Both Sides, and may be the first bit of Paid Auden composed (Juvenilia, 241; EA 15).

Auden’s poetry through 1933 often seems to dramatize not his own prep school, public school, or university life so much as that of his friends, especially Gabriel Carritt and Christopher Isherwood. Carritt’s sporting exploits infiltrate several of Auden’s works (among them The Orators), while Isherwood and Edward Upward’s visions of school life as covert war predate Auden’s similar models. Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows recalls Isherwood and Upward (“Chalmers” in the novel) “swearing never to betray each other, never to forget the existence of ‘the two sides’ and their eternal, necessary state of war” (24). At Cambridge, the pair maintain a constant “conversation … hardly intelligible to anyone who had happened to overhear it: it was a rigmarole of private slang, deliberate misquotations, bad puns, bits of parody and preparatory school smut” (65).

By late 1927 Auden’s poetry incorporated all those characteristics: it was evolving toward Paid on Both Sides, in which school and nation, real wars and school games, mingle inextricably. “Because sap fell away” takes place in school:

The locker contains “mouldy passion” both because boys’ lockers smell of stale sweat and clothes and because the “changing-room” (now scene of a loss and prey to “lethal factors”) holds motives and stages of development “we” should (but do not) outgrow. Katherine Bucknell links this poem to a rugby match Auden watched “between Oxford and Cambridge Old Sedberghians,” in which Carritt led the Oxford side (Juvenilia, 228).⁴ Auden’s early poems equate geological change, the turning of the seasons, and graduation, each of which will destroy what is valuable in summer or in youth. So they warn their undergraduate hearers:

“Ways, / All of them evil” are not only geographic paths but means of employment. “The average private school child,” Auden and T. C. Worsley wrote in 1937, “has a fuller and a more exciting life at school than he has at home, or, in many cases, than he is likely to have in his work” (PTB 397). “The fall of an old house” suggests architectural collapse and genealogical decay (as in “The Fall of the House of Usher”) but also the end of a “house” in a public school (“Dickon so tarted by the House”), and perhaps the Oxford usage (still current) by which Christ Church students call their college “the House.”

About Paid itself my argument scarcely needs to be made. John Fuller notes “particular references in [Paid] to sporting customs at Sedbergh School,” and place-names near both Sedbergh and Gresham’s (Auden, 23, 33). “The school saga world” of the play, Isherwood suggested, was “founded upon our preparatory school lives”: “It is impossible to say whether the characters are really epic heroes or only members of a school OTC” (Lions. 192–93; Exhumations, 19). The Old Gang of Paid cannot envision any rules but those of school competitions:

For Bozorth, Paid “amounts to a critique of the Auden group’s own psychosexual arrested development, implicated as it is in a culturally conservative homosociality” (Auden’s Games, 97). Yet the “critique” is only half the story: outside of Paid, the poems can admire school life, especially as it pertains to sex. Of Auden’s many 1930s writings about teachers and schools, the best known is his 1934 memoir of Gresham’s, with its often misinterpreted line “at school I lived in a Fascist state” (PTB 59). The passage describes not public schools generally (despite their emphasis on loyalty and team spirit) but an unusual feature of Gresham’s, the “Honour System,” which required the boys to inform on one another (PTB 58–59). This Honour System apparently prevented much of the semicovert homosexual life of other public schools, about which Auden at Oxford proved curious, even envious, at one time “planning to compile a three-volume study of preparatory school, public school, and university ‘confessions’” (Carpenter, Auden, 78).⁵ Auden could thus research the sort of desirable homosocial (if not overtly homosexual) gossip and ritual that (in his view) the Honour System of Gresham’s ruled out.⁶ He wrote in 1929 that in Berlin “I am having the sort of friendships I ought to have had at 16 and didn’t” (quoted in Mendelson, Early, 59). Isherwood even told Humphrey Carpenter that during the months in which he and Auden had sex, “the value of the sex making was that it kept an adolescent quality in our relationship alive—almost as if we could go back together into the past” (Auden, 64).

Poems written after Paid return to dilemmas about growing up (or not growing up); they also return to belated erotic attachments, which Auden describes in terms drawn from school. “Pairing off in twos and two,” “knowing what to do / But of no use,” Auden’s boys or young men seem destined for a life they cannot welcome, and they display nostalgia for an erotic life that they have outgrown:

Redemptive moments in these poems have not only homoerotic qualities but further qualities of rehearsal or sport: “Calling of each other by name / Smiling, taking a willing arm / Has the companionship of a game” (EA 32). Failures, conversely, are attempts to leave school. In “Consider this and in our time,” the “Financier” loses a game played “on the lawns / Of College Quad or of Cathedral Close”; “Amid rustle of frocks and stamping feet,” the poem continues, “They gave the prizes to the ruined boys,” a graduation gone wrong (EA 47). Auden’s 1930 poem in the meter of “Locksley Hall” depicts an England where male adolescents receive a glittering homoerotic present but a subordinate, useless future: “Boon companions” have “betrayed us,” “Taught us at the annual camps arranged by the big business men / ‘Sunbathe, pretty, till you’re twenty. You shall be our servants then’” (EA 48). Perhaps missing the irony, Naomi Mitchison praised “the whole poem’s young, strong rebellious he-quality,” linking it to “the modern youth movement in Germany” (in Haffenden, Critical Heritage, 82).⁷

The pattern of blocked development, of schoolboys with no destination outside school, which drives the most serious poems of 1928 through 1932 generates broad comedy in Auden and Isherwood’s plays. In The Enemies of a Bishop (1929), a master named Augustus runs a strict reformatory: “Whatever you make of yourself here,” he declares, “you’ll make by discipline and self control” (Plays, 45). One of Augustus’s charges makes a mockery of his rules by seducing him. When the permissive bishop arrives to save the day, he and his campy “Flying Squad” reform the wayward adults by turning them into schoolboys, via athletics, classroom punishments, and psychoanalysis: “You will do the Cautley Spout run every afternoon for two months. You will be timed.… Also, every Saturday morning, before lunch, you will bring me five thousand lines. The motto for this week will be ‘Mummy’s been dead quite a long time now’” (Plays, 76).

Does the play, then, invite its audience to reenter adolescence? Not quite: its epilogue distinguishes audience members (ordinary citizens who are “going to have friends, to bring up children,” “to be like this forever all the time”) from the characters in the play, who do not participate in “life’s circular career”:

The actors in this epilogue suggest both schoolboys (stuck in their limited theater) and gay men, unlikely to “bring up children” or enter into the “profuse production” of “natural growth” (Plays, 78–79). Enemies evolved into The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), losing many of its school elements in the process. An intermediate play, The Chase (1934), retains from Enemies the reformatory, the wrongheaded master, and the schoolboy who seduces him in drag. These plays and these poems imply, or describe, one pattern: a small group at school, speaking a language distinctively theirs and distinctively adolescent, creates a valuable homoerotic community whose members feel they must but cannot grow up.

The same pattern permeates The Orators. Auden told “boys and girls and their parents” in “Writing” that Homer produced “a kind of writing called epic—long stories in verse about the exploits of a small group of young warriors under a leader” (PTB 24). Auden perhaps defined “epic” as involving youth (“young warriors”) partly because had just finished creating an anti-, semi- or parodic epic of adolescence. Yet if The Orators has a unifying conceit or form, it is less epic than dramatic miscellany. Public schools, and fiction about them, featured such miscellanies: Kipling’s Stalky & Co. has a school pantomime whose script “had been rewritten and filled with local allusions”; its heroes “invented … catch-words that swept through the house” (47, 139–40). The Orators is just such a series of sketches, speeches, and recitations, into which almost any short lyric, dramatic, or narrative work, and almost any private reference, fits, as long as it has to do with the life of the school.⁸

Though critics tend to read The Orators as an attack on protofascist idealizations of adolescence, schools, and small groups, it would be truer to say that as a miscellany, it contains almost every conceivable view of such groups, from admiration to appalled mockery; what it does not contain is hope for adult (or heterosexual) satisfaction. The sixteen-line prologue to The Orators describes its boy’s progress away from, and then back toward, a mother figure who cannot forgive him for growing up (EA 61). In 1945 Auden retitled the poem “Adolescence” (Collected Poems, 23).⁹ This ideal-typical adolescent also makes maps, inscribing “All the family names on the familiar places.” These maps become the first of many failed guides in The Orators; another is the “scheme or plan” promised by the prize-day speaker (EA 62). One may read the whole of The Orators, in fact, as a disintegrated or failed “map” of the progress from adolescence to adulthood. The young man “following his love” in Auden’s sestina nearly completes that progress after he escapes the mentors who have drawn his “map of the country”; he turns the endless childhood they promise (“we shall watch your future”) into his own “consummation,” a vague independence (EA 77).

The rest of the people in The Orators may leave home, but they fail once they leave school. “Have a good look at the people you know,” the poem warns, “at the boy sitting next to you at this moment, at that chum of yours in the Lower School.… Pray God, boys, you may not have to see them as they will be not so very long from now. ‘What have you been up to?’ you’d think; ‘What did you ask for to be given that?’” (EA 63). Auden’s mysteriously overspecified petitionary prayer includes all manner of English men and women, boys and girls, but especially schoolboys: “For those who cannot go to bed; for those in dormitories; for those in pairs; for those who sleep alone” (EA 67). Its blithe assignment of talents and fates recalls Auden’s Christ Church habit of assigning destinies to his friends: “One is a lightning calculator; he is a young one. One is clumsy but amazes by his knowledge of time-tables” (EA 70).¹⁰

The often-remarked difficulty The Orators gives in telling readers how seriously to take it, or which parts of it are satire (and of what), stems partly from the work’s roots in school culture (which nobody outside a given school can quite know how to read) and partly from its ideas about development: it cannot decide if the adolescence it models solicits envy or disdain. Most critics connect The Orators to school, not to university, but in Auden’s imagination these are continuous: some “private associations” in the Airman’s journal are reminiscences of Christ Church, with “an economics Don called Harrod / (Now Junior Censor),” “Bill [who] came from the same school but not till a year later,” and “a lot about the Essay Club and Stephen” (EA 78, 88). The Airman’s “enemy,” as all commentators notice, incarnates adult (institutional, masculine, heterosexual) authority, which Auden sometimes mocks or impersonates and sometimes attacks with tones as blunt as Wilfred Owen’s: “His collar was spotless; he talked very well, / He spoke of our homes and duty and we fell” (EA 81).

No surprise, then (especially after Auden’s Third at Oxford) that the war with the enemy includes an exam: “At 6 p.m. passages of unprepared translation from dead dialects are set to all non-combatants. The papers are collected at 6.10. All who fail to obtain 99% make the supreme sacrifice. Candidates must write on three sides of the paper” (EA 92). The postexam revolutionary counterattack involves school disruptions: “Form-masters find crude graffiti on their blackboards; the boys, out of control, imbibe Vimto through India-rubber tubing, openly pee into the ink pots” (EA 92). The doomed student revolt here—a consciously inadequate metaphor for political revolution—recalls the war in Lindsay Anderson’s film If … (1968). Here, as there, it becomes hard to know whether school stands for society or vice versa; part of the point of both works is our inability to think of one in terms uninflected by the other.

No wonder, then, that their revolution fails: Auden’s young rebels achieve only “resistance,” in James Kincaid’s sense. “Resistance,” Kincaid generalizes, “is so convinced of the primacy of power that it only wants to act against power, not independently of it. Resistance thus confirms power [through] an endless series of mildly subversive acts of protest or denial.” In this sense, Kincaid explains, “resistance is the ultimate acquiescence.… It likes where it is, since that location provides the only identity it can know” (“Resist Me,” 1329). For “location,” read “school.” “The defect in traditional education,” Auden wrote in 1943, “was not that it failed to arouse passion, but that this, in too many cases, was the passion of rebellion, and rebellion is not a vocation … being only the mirror image of that against which it rebels” (Prose, 2:179).

Acknowledged sources for The Orators include the late essays and rants of D. H. Lawrence and the psychological theories of Homer Lane.¹¹ Like Auden’s father, Lane took an interest in juvenile delinquents, whom Lane rehabilitated at his school, the Little Commonwealth (a model for A. S. Neill’s Summerhill). Carritt recalled that in “talking about Homer Lane,” Auden “made [Carritt] want to study adolescent deviance”; Carritt moved to New York in order to do so (Spender, Auden: Tribute, 57). Lane’s Talks to Parents and Teachers (1928) called adolescence “the age which stamps the spirit with the seal of loyalty”; “the boy or girl who does not take an interest in games,” Lane wrote, “has not become adolescent in the psychic sense,” since he or she is not “one of a group” (104, 106). Auden would echo these views; he and Worsley wrote in 1937

Auden and his circle also read about adolescence in Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), by André Gide, whose English translation appeared in 1927; Isherwood records his own and his friends’ enthusiasm for it (Lions, 167). Spender in 1930 “discovered a great passage in [Les Faux-Monnayeurs] which is rather like my life with my friends” (Letters to Christopher, 37).1¹² Gide’s “schoolboys” (in Cyril Connolly’s laudatory précis) “when not engaged in bringing out a literary manifesto, are discovered organizing a brothel, stealing books, blackmailing their parents … and finally hounding the weakest to death by means of an extensive suicide pact” (Condemned, 20).

Almost all these actions take place in The Orators, whose concluding odes recapitulate the Airman’s—and The Counterfeiters’s—school-centered model of youth. As in Gide, boys celebrate their own games in elaborate language marked as theirs alone. The second ode lauds Carritt’s victorious rugby side, echoing both “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” by Hopkins, and Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young”: “shoulder them high, who won by their pluck and their dare” (EA 96). This ode obeys Pindaric conventions in avoiding normal word order and in praising the athletes’ families and towns of origin (EA 97). Mendelson calls The Orators “an account of everything a group ought not to be” (Early, 95, 93). But neither Auden’s attachment to Carritt nor Carritt’s commitment to his rugby side were satirical.¹³ Auden taught rugby at Larchfield and seemed not to mind (Davenport-Hines, Auden, 119). Auden wrote in 1932, to the school-aged poet John Cornford, “everything your headmaster says about the team spirit … is absolutely right”; “it is the tone of his voice which makes it such a lie” (quoted in Davenport-Hines, Auden, 127).

The trouble with the school as small or idealized group is that group members are supposed to outgrow it. They can, however, return to groups as schoolmasters, in the manner not only of Auden but of Edward Upward, to whom Auden dedicates the third ode. Its incantatory concluding stanzas suggest that the schoolmasters made the best of a bad lot:

Not only Auden but most of his circle taught, just after graduating from Oxford or Cambridge, either in prepatory or in public schools: “For budding authors it’s become the rule” (PTB 334). John Lehmann in 1936 pointed out that “Auden, Day-Lewis, Warner, Upward, are, or have at one time been schoolmasters” (he might have added Spender and New Country editor Michael Roberts) (in Haffenden, Critical Heritage, 179). “Schoolmastering suits me; I thoroughly enjoy it,” Auden told his older brother in 1930 (quoted in Carpenter, Auden, 111). Auden contributed to school magazines; a former pupil, John Duguid, recalled that “he would be one of the gang and attend meals with us” (Carpenter, 159, 174; Izzo, “The Student,” 30, 33).¹⁴ Schoolteaching informed Auden’s poetry after The Orators; in “Now from my window-sill I watch the night,” the famous “Lords of Limit” appear in school as “Oldest of masters, whom the schoolboy fears” (EA 115). Auden then describes his own young charges, “Favel, Holland, sprightly Alexis” and their age-mates:

If Auden’s early poems described an adolescence particular to public schools, they were received—by the graduates of those same schools—as the voice of the nation’s youth. “It would be hard,” John Mortimer wrote, “to overestimate the effect Auden had on me and my generation of middle-class schoolboys. He wrote about what we understood: juvenile jokes about housemasters, homosexual longings, the Clever Boy, the Form Entertainer and the Show Off” (quoted in Firchow, Contexts, 27).¹⁶ Michael Roberts wrote in 1932: “To condemn Mr. Auden’s very frequent use of public school and O.T.C. imagery is … unreasonable, for in addressing the public-schoolboy he is attacking … English decadence at the crucial point” (in Haffenden, Critical Heritage, 109). The Auden number of New Verse (1937) reprised such comments: MacNeice’s open letter to Auden indicated that “the taunt of being a schoolboy … is itself a compliment because it implies that you expect the world and yourself to develop,” missing the poems’ implications that Auden did not expect any such end (in Haffenden, Critical Heritage, 255–56). Charles Madge, who had once written “Yes England I was at school with you,” later complained that Auden’s “immature quality, once an attraction, becomes an embarrassment” (quoted in Hynes, Auden Generation, 112; in Haffenden, Critical Heritage, 272). As late as 1940, James Southworth—apparently the first American critic to write about Auden’s homosexuality—called Auden’s early poetry a description “particularly … of youth” (Sowing, 132).

Auden described it instead as an exorcism. “The work of a young writer,” Auden explained, “is sometimes a therapeutic act. He finds himself obsessed by certain ways of feeling and thinking of which his instinct tells him he must be rid before he can discover his authentic interests.” And yet “what he wrote in order to exorcise certain feelings is enthusiastically welcomed by his contemporaries, because it expresses just what they feel” (Dyer’s, 18–19). One might think such prose described “Spain,” or other political writings that Auden repudiated. Yet Auden wrote in 1966, in a new preface to The Orators, that his “unconscious motive in writing it was therapeutic, to exorcise certain tendencies in myself by allowing them to run riot in phantasy” (8). The Age of Anxiety (1947) offered an account—Auden’s last—of the rebellion and solidarity specific to youth: the character Emble explains that “To be young means … to be held waiting in / A packed lounge for a Personal Call / From Long Distance,” a call that “Defines one’s future” (Collected Poems, 474). As in The Orators, such a call may never come.¹⁷

Auden’s early preoccupations with adolescence became part of his legacy not only to later English writers, such as Keith Douglas (see his “On Leaving School”) but also to midcentury North American poets; Daryl Hine, Randall Jarrell, and Karl Shapiro, among others, wrote dramatically and deliberately Audenesque poems about high school, college, and youth. “An Adolescent,” by Hine, with its evasive Sapphic stanzas and anonymous chorus, makes one striking example (we will see others in chapter three) (Hollander, Moment, 135). Perhaps more surprising, Auden’s ideas of adolescence entered the inventions of John Ashbery. Ashbery wrote his Harvard thesis on Auden and later told Aidan Wasley that among his influences, “Auden was the most important because he came first”; he sets The Orators among his favorite poems (Wasley, “Apprentice,” 667, 681). Ashbery’s debut volume, Some Trees (1956), which Auden picked for the Yale Younger Poets prize, adopted the conspiratorial tone of Auden’s earliest lyrics, along with their shifting pronouns; in “Popular Songs,” “All are aware, some carry a secret / Better” (Ashbery, Selected 4). Those shifters, with their hint of private references, make one source for Ashbery’s famously slippery style. “Of who we and all they are / You all now know,” “The Grapevine” begins; “But after they began to find us out we grew” (Selected, 9). “They” in this poem resemble parents or schoolmasters, while “we” are their charges or students, still going through “These changes we think we are. We don’t care / Though, so tall up there/ In young air” (Selected, 9). Another poem from Some Trees, “And You Know,” shows Ashbery’s characteristic verbal maneuvers evolving out of a prior coterie language, the local slang and in-jokes associated with the Audenesque and with the public school: “we carry your lessons in our hearts (the lessons and our hearts are the same) / Out of the humid classroom, into the forever. Goodbye, Old Dog Tray” (Selected, 23).¹⁸

Ashbery’s subsequent poems can also infuse half-serious symbols of youth and school with homoerotic implications, and with existential frustrations. “Our Youth” warns “You will never have that young boy”; “the problem has not been solved” (Selected, 37–38). (Auden’s “This Lunar Beauty” conveyed the same warnings.) In “The Big Cloud,” youth—just as in Auden—represents a promise always betrayed: “laughter danced in the dim fields beyond the schoolhouse: / It was existence again in all its tautness, / Playing its adolescent joke.… But life was never the same again. Something faltered, / Something went away” (April, 58–59). It would be wrong to expect, throughout Ashbery’s work, the kind of sustained attention to the social particularities of adolescence, to the cultural indicators of generational change, that I have noted in Williams and in the young Auden. Yet we have already seen a preoccupation with adolescence advance through “Soonest Mended,” one of Ashbery’s most famous poems. And the pathos and sense of loss that many critics consider Ashbery’s primary subject acquires its distinctive relation to the slippery language that marks Ashbery’s style in part through their common sources in the school codes, evasions, and deliberate “immaturity” that we recognize, in other contexts, as Audenesque.

Philip Larkin declared that “deprivation was for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth” (Further Requirements, 47). One might add that he felt deprived of youth. Repudiating both childhood and maturity, Larkin’s writings come close to identifying adolescence as the only desirable state. The desirable adolescence they imagine, however, is the adolescence of others, the youth he could not experience, being of the wrong temperament, gender, or generation. His poems thus imagine a double deprivation: the loss everyone will experience as he or she ages and the loss (or never-having-had) peculiar to Larkin or to those like him. Larkin’s earliest work takes up—as does Auden’s—young people imagined or observed in colleges and schools. His poetics of lost or occluded adolescence last (as Auden’s did not) into the 1950s, when Britain developed a national youth culture; that culture gave Larkin (even when he denounced it) one more symbol of what he had missed, around which his late poems might crystallize. Adolescence in this sense may not create a basis for Larkin’s style; instead, it becomes inseparable from his subjects.

Larkin’s juvenilia replicate Auden’s plots, depicting heroes in confined, school-like societies who “must escape, or perish saying no” (CPL 257, 243). “To read the Journal of an Airman,” Larkin felt in 1939, “was like being allowed half an hour’s phone conversation with God” (quoted in Motion, A Writer’s Life, 44). Soon enough Larkin found styles unlike Auden’s in which to describe regrets about missed youth: the very early “Ugly Sister” ends:

Larkin therefore made them up. During his last year at Oxford, Larkin wrote several hundred pages of fiction, poetry, and criticism in the persona of “Brunette Coleman.” All are, or concern, British girls-school stories, of the kind popular since the late nineteenth century with audiences (mostly) of girls and young women; most of the Coleman material consists of two extended fictional works, Trouble at Willow Gables and the unfinished Michaelmas Term at St. Brides. Larkin showed this material to a few Oxford friends and preserved it throughout his life (Trouble, 205). Before its 2002 publication, Trouble at Willow Gables was heralded in the British press as Larkin’s undergraduate lesbian fantasy; at least one reviewer savaged it as “pitiful pornography and feeble erotica” (Diski, “Damp-Lipped”). While surely designed to excite male readers with its scenes of spanking, tying-up, seduction, and repeatedly ripped trousers, Trouble and its unfinished sequel reveal stranger aims than their reception suggests—aims that would inform Larkin’s poems much later.

“Coleman” gave Larkin two things his own life had lacked: girls and the public school. Larkin had lived with his parents while attending the single-sex King Henry VIII School. “All the time I lived in Coventry I never knew any girls,” he recalled (Further Requirements, 9). John Kemp, in Larkin’s novel Jill, believes public school life “was wild and extravagant … compared with his own: it seemed to him that in their schooldays [his Oxford classmates] had won more than he would ever win during the whole of his life” (57). Kemp makes up a sister, named Jill, who “writes” to him from her boarding school, also named Willow Gables: “he liked to think of her as preoccupied only with simple untroublesome things, like examinations and friendships” (135–36).¹⁹ Willow Gables in “Coleman” provided Larkin—as Willow Gables in Jill provided John Kemp—with fantasies of acceptance among safe erotic objects. The predatory sixth-former in Trouble expresses views that now might attract police: “Hilary thought, as so often before she had thought, that there was nothing so beautiful in the world as a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl” (84) Her object of desire, Mary, “lived a life so simple and rounded-off in its purity that it only remained for it to be shattered” (84). Hilary decides not to shatter it after all, preferring to retain her “vision of [Mary] embodying the purity of youth, dressed in white tennis things and haloed with a netball stand” (174).

So far, perhaps, so much undergraduate porn. Why, though, did “Coleman” also write essays and poems? In “Coleman’s” adaptation of “Femmes Damnées,” Baudelaire’s poem about a lesbian seduction, Larkin introduces for the first time the contemporary, tawdry particulars that characterize his later poems:

The Coleman materials provided not only an excuse for technical practice (in verse and in prose) but a way to develop the outlook that would, later, generate Larkin’s best verse. “Coleman’s” essay “What Are We Writing For?” consists of a serious and amply documented defense of the genre of girls-school fiction, which (she claims) has yet to produce its masterpiece. According to her “purist view-point,” “a school story … is not a story about schoolgirls, but a story about a school with schoolgirls in it” (Trouble, 267). In writing school stories, “we are evoking that old, safe, happy beautiful world for our contemporaries, as well as creating a world of make-believe for our juniors, who are not yet old enough to savour the quintessence of their youth”; “we must construct a closed, single-sexed world” (268–69).

Larkin spent months, if not years, doing just that. Writing to Amis, Larkin belittled the Coleman works, including “WILLOWGABLISMUS” in a “list of sexual perversions” (Selected Letters, 103).²⁰ Letters to other correspondents, however, treat Coleman as a sort of Pessoan heteronym, a distinct person: writing Jill “is quite fun, because [John Kemp] writes a lot of imaginary stuff about her—diaries, letters, etc. Brunette Coleman, who wrote ‘Trouble at Willow Gables,’ is helping me. She also wrote a poem the other day called ‘Bliss’” (Selected Letters, 63). If Larkin mocks Coleman, he also has Coleman mock him: the girls-school writer Nancy Breary, Coleman decides, “has moments of rapture,” but “her writing suggests that by temperament she is a poet, for her characters are a little thin and her plots weak” (Trouble, 264). The naughty episodes also gave Larkin, so to speak, plausible deniability if Amis, or anyone else, should ask why he took such an interest in fictive girls. One answer might lie in the relative freedom Larkin imagined within their “closed single-sex world,” so much like the boarding-school worlds in the early Auden. None of the people in the Coleman stories have visible parents, severe financial worries, dull jobs, or unsatisfied demands for heterosexual sex; these absences matter as much to the stories’ wish-fulfillment aspects as does the presence of lesbian amours. Those absences are also what Larkin found in the (nonpornographic, “juvenile”) school stories that “What Are We Writing For?” proves that he read in bulk.

The stories terminate, in fact, by emphasizing their status as closed and fictive worlds. Near the end of Michaelmas Term, the Oxford fresher Marie ventures into a bar to find a servant, Pat, who figured in Trouble:

Larkin becomes a literary writer—first in his fiction, then in his poetry—when and as he recognized that sort of pastoral as historically contingent, and as always in some way insufficient. At the same time, he often fails to find consolation elsewhere. The protagonist in Larkin’s last completed novel, A Girl in Winter, recalls the amorous disappointments of her sixteenth year, meditates on adulthood, and concludes that it holds no rewards: “in most lives there had to come a break, when the past dropped away and the maturity it had enclosed for so long stood painfully upright” (183). “Such a break,” Larkin continues, “brings knowledge, but no additional strength”:

Almost everything that happened to Larkin seemed to him to signal the end of youthful possibilities. In a sonnet of 1949, “interest passes / Always towards the young and more insistent” (CPL 22). The poems declare baldly, throughout Larkin’s career, that maturity brings no satisfactions at all: “wanting … and finding out clash”; “Smiles are for youth” (CPL 146, 194). M. W. Rowe avers that after Jill, Larkin “no longer needed to be sustained or supported by fantasy” (“Unreal Girls,” 92). Larkin’s poems suggest otherwise. In “Breadfruit,” “Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit, / Whatever they are,” and grow up to marriage, mortgages, “nippers,” and finally “absolute / Maturity … when old men sit and dream / Of naked native girls who bring breadfruit, / Whatever they are” (CPL 141). Since “Breadfruit” is its own plural, “they” can mean fruit or girls: old men know no more of voluptuous natives than they do of tropical fruit, and know no more than they knew as boys.

Andrew Swarbrick and others have shown how Larkin’s poems set up oppositions (usually between happy, sociable other people and the unhappy or solitary poet) and then suggest that the opposites are really the same (or, at least, more similar than they appeared). “Reasons for Attendance” follows that pattern (as “Breadfruit” did) and depends (as “Breadfruit” did) on idealizations of youth. The poet approaches

The poem reconsiders Larkin’s choice of solitary “art” (a “lifted, rough-tongued bell”) over the dance music’s trumpet, and comes to find both choices dubious (CPL 80). Larkin in effect “rewrote” “Reasons for Attendance” several times, in the unfinished poem “The Dance” and again in “High Windows”; all these poems describe Larkin’s exclusion from a space defined by distinctively youthful pastimes or tastes.

That exclusion produces the oppositions that the poems’ endings lament (or, as Swarbrick argues, deconstruct). “Love Songs in Age” (1957) derives its pathos, and its verbal compression, partly from its compression of the life course: its old woman (based on Larkin’s mother) rereads old sheet music and finds “the unfailing sense of being young / Spread out like a spring-woken tree” (CPL 113). “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” (1953) also casts youth as a “heaven” of last resort: the poet is

To base one’s poetry on an opposition between youth and age, vivid sociability and isolated decline, is to delete from the life course what social norms present as its fulfillment: responsible, “mature” adulthood, in which men and women settle down and establish careers or raise their families. Larkin wrote to Maeve Brennan in 1961, “At first one wants to get older in order to be grown up; then” (Larkin’s own poem “On Being Twenty-Six” notwithstanding) “there’s no difference between 25 and 26, it’s just like wearing a different tie; but once past 35 it’s impossible not to feel that each year is taking one further from what is desired … UNLESS … you have bound yourself thoroughly into life” (quoted in Motion, A Writer’s Life, 315). “Looking back on my first 40 years,” he told Brennan in 1962, “in a way I feel I am still waiting for life to start.” Larkin added that this feeling “may be a sign of what the S[unday] Times calls ‘second adolescence’” (Selected Letters, 344).

By that time the definition and experience of British adolescence had changed. “In the 1950s,” writes Springhall, “the adolescent age group” acquired a “degree of self-awareness” that “marked a discontinuity from the previous history of their age group in Britain, if not in America” (Coming of Age, 190). The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart’s influential book, complained of the “juke-box boys,” who “spend the evening listening [to pop music] in harshly-lighted milk bars,” “boys aged between fifteen and twenty, with drape-suits, picture ties and an American slouch” (189). Colin MacInnes in 1958 called such boys parts of “an international movement”: “a teenager … is a new kind of person” whose “songs, and even styles of clothing, are carried across Europe … by a sort of international adolescent maquis” (England, 47, 55, 57). “Never before,” MacInnes concluded, “has the young generation been so different from its elders” (59; emphasis his).

Some poets noticed that difference almost immediately: “Meditation in a Coffee Bar” (1961), by the Cambridge don Graham Hough, compares the girl on whom the poet spies, with her “heart-breaking narcissistic gaze,” to “Yeats’s great rough beast that was to be / The god of a new age” (Legends, 36). Far from the academy, the “Liverpool Poets” (Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Adrian Mitchell, and Brian Patten) began a series of local performances at coffee bars and “mixed media events” as early as 1961 and 1962, though their best-known documents (the Penguin Modern Poets “Mersey Sound” anthology, and Edward Lucie-Smith’s Liverpool Scene) date to 1967 (Hewison, Too Much, 68). Poetry in general, and the Liverpool Poets in particular, became—along with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks; the paintings and collages of Richard Hamilton; and the “Swinging London” fashion of Mary Quant—part of the decade’s discussion of a revived, postimperial British pride built on youth and youth culture.

By 1970 George Melly could write that “pop,” by which he meant a style in all the arts, might “present … an exact image of our rapidly changing society, particular in relation to its youth.” “Its viewpoint is largely confined within an age limit extending (currently) from fourteen to the late twenties”; “pop is a young, almost adolescent culture” (Revolt, 5). A “pop” art in Melly’s sense would combine elements of youth as pastoral—bright, new, immediate, innocent—with youth as rebellion, making something new in the world. Yet such an art had troubling limits: pop, Melly concludes, “is … tied only to the young, and therefore incapable of development beyond a certain point” (253). No one thought Larkin a “pop” poet or even a fashionable one: he appeared instead to match the sensibility of the immediate postwar generation, too young to feel heroic about the war, too old to experience 1960s youth. Yet Larkin’s poems answer, even echo, “pop” ideas. Larkin had never envisioned maturity anyway (not, certainly, as something worth striving for); his dejected lyric outlook shared with pop its sense that adulthood had nothing to show.

No wonder, then that Larkin reacted to the new youth with strenuously mixed feelings.²¹ Motion writes that Larkin “viewed the student revolution” of the late 1960s “with mingled fascination and contempt” (A Writer’s Life, 376–77). In late 1969 Larkin read The Beatles: The Authorised Biography “with great interest & a good deal of fascinated repulsion. What a scene” (Selected Letters, 423).²² Compiled between 1966 and 1971, Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse reflects not only his antimodernist preferences but also his attention to the new youth. Perhaps in response to commercial exigencies, Larkin included all four Liverpool Poets; Adrian Henri’s “Mrs Albion You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” apostrophized “Beautiful boys with bright red guitars / in the spaces between the stars” (607–8).

More important in thinking about Larkin’s point of view, and more durable as verse, are several poems from his Oxford Book by poets who shared Larkin’s tastes. Elizabeth Jennings’s “Young Ones” (1967) is a direct antecedent for Larkin’s “Sad Steps” and “High Windows,” presenting the poet as an outsider both to the secret knowledge of the new youth and to the supposed consolation of age. Jennings’s eponymous girls “slip on to the bus, hair piled up high, / New styles each month, it seems to me”:

The youth of the late 1960s seem to Jennings different in kind, more confident, and more unlike adults than the youth she experienced ten or twenty years before. “The Clothes Pit,” by Douglas Dunn, sets the popular image of carefree mods against the material conditions of working-class Hull: Dunn’s “young women … do not need to be seen / Carrying a copy of … The Liverpool Poets”; nevertheless, “The litter of pop rhetoric blows down Terry Street, / Bounces past their feet, into their lives” (Larkin, Oxford, 622).

For Larkin such “pop rhetoric” both amplified and debased the happiness he had earlier seen in adolescence, for others if never for him. Announcing “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three/ (Which was rather late for me),” “Annus Mirabilis” (1967) complains that the poet was born too soon for the sexual revolution (Larkin had “sexual intercourse,” as Motion has proven, well before 1963). Originally entitled “History,” the poem pursues not Larkin’s biography but his attitude toward the youth that he felt he had missed (Selected Letters, 398). It is that youth from which Larkin articulates his exclusion: he belongs instead to the last generation defined by “the Chatterley ban,” overturned in 1960.²³ Larkin’s generation felt that male desire led “only” to

Larkin’s tone and repetitions court sarcasm: has “every life” ever felt the same? How much do broad cultural narratives and signposts—Beatlemania and the Chatterley trial, the pill, the “sexual revolution”—really say about individual experience? Might they falsify as much as they show? Yet the young in this poem appear to seize, in fact, the pleasures Larkin ascribes to them in his fiction; in doing so they emphasize Larkin’s difference from them.

Almost a year later, in April 1968, Larkin finished “Sad Steps”; the title comes from Sir Philip Sidney, whose sonnet asks whether lovers on the moon might feel as frustrated as those on Earth (part of Sidney’s point is that we can never know). This poem, too, explores Larkin’s distance from youth, identified this time not only with sex but with romance, and with a Romantic image: “the moon dashes through clouds,” “High and preposterous and separate,” becoming a “lozenge of love! Medallion of art!” (CPL 169) Sublime and inaccessible, though framed by everyday words and experiences (“curtains,” “piss”), that moon for Larkin “Is a reminder of the strength and pain / Of being young; that it can’t come again / But is for others undiminished somewhere” (CPL 169). The poem’s equanimity seems more impressive if we recall that “the young” in Larkin’s own life—“the young” he encountered five days a week in Hull—were several years past innocent Beatlemania; in late May 1968, student radicals would briefly take over the University of Hull.

Larkin’s final engagement with ideas of youth came through diction. He told John Betjeman “that whenever he looked at” High Windows, “he found it was full of four letter words” (quoted in Motion, A Writer’s Life, 444). If, as William Gass writes, “swearing consists of a series of cultural quotations” (On Being Blue, 49) most of Larkin’s swear words quote youth: “they fuck you up, your mum and dad” is only the best-known example (CPL 142). Alan Bennett wrote that the “real Larkin” of the poems was the “one who feels shut out when he sees fifteen-year-olds necking at bus stops” (“Instead of a Present,” 70). One of the ways he reacts in the title poem is to move into, and then away from, their language. Janice Rossen is wrong to call Larkin’s verb “fuck” (attested as early as 1502) “a recent invention of the younger generation” (Larkin, 129). But Rossen is right to say that the gap in diction between the beginning of “High Windows”—“This Be the Verse” or “Sad Steps”—and the ends of those poems amounts to a generation gap. “I think [my use of swear-words] can take different forms,” Larkin wrote to John Sparrow: “It can be meant to be shocking (we live in an odd era, when shocking language can be used, yet still shocks—it won’t last)” (quoted in Motion, A Writer’s Life, 444). Larkin’s language calls attention to the “odd era” in which he wrote his late poems, when “the strength and pain of being young” seemed so unlike the experience of youth in previous generations, even though their underlying emotions may have been the same.

“High Windows,” in particular, asks whether “being young” means in the late 1960s what it meant for the Larkin of the early 1940s, the Larkin who wrote Willow Gables: the poem gets energy from its contradictory answers. A preserved draft makes clear Larkin’s scrutiny of his own envy, and the genuineness of his hopes for the young:

Larkin began the poem in 1965, when one writer “born eighty years ago” was D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930). The “couple of kids,” or coupling kids, in “High Windows” enact Lawrence’s dream of sexual freedom: the pill and the diaphragm segregate youth from adulthood, kids from Larkin, one generation from another. The “wonderful world” that Lawrence and Larkin imagined “held no one like them and no one like me / And now it’s here / And God has wiped away all the tears from their eyes” (quoted in Motion, A Writer’s Life, 354). That last line is a Miltonic and biblical reference: the angels in “Lycidas” “wipe the tears forever from his eyes,” and Isaiah promises that the Lord will “wipe away tears from all faces” at the End of Days (Isaiah 25:8). Lawrence and Larkin, in other words, look down on “kids” as if from Heaven. Yet if Larkin believes the countercultural, free-loving “kids” are in Paradise, the young men and women themselves think no such thing; they are, as Brunette Coleman put it, “not yet old enough to savor the quintessence of youth.”

That contrast between their unselfconscious view of themselves and Larkin’s melancholy enters the contrast in form between the start and the end of the poem. “High Windows” moves from a deliberately jerky, halting quatrain with one half-rhyme on “she’s” and “paradise,” through xaxa and abab rhymes, to strong internal rhyme on “birds”/“words,” to a fluent pair of rhymes on a sibilant, so that the last stanza could almost be one rhyme four times. The rhyme, in turn, emphasizes the shift in tone, as (in Barbara Everett’s words) the “violent flatness of its opening … modulates into the exaltation of the close” (“Larkin: After Symbolism,” 239). “High Windows” ends in a look up to wordless, endless radiant nothingness: death becomes both the end of the long slide everyone takes through life and an ascent into a mysterious void. Yet the poem—like “This Be the Verse” and “Sad Steps” and “Reasons for Attendance”—considers the relation of one generation to the next.

To read Larkin as always vexed by the youth he missed and by the changing cultural meanings of adolescence is to see how he speaks not just to his own time but to ours. Mark Greif, in an essay called “Afternoon of the Sex Children,” finds in twenty-first-century America, with our tween pop stars and our moral panics over child porn, the final results of a postwar cult of youth: “The lure of a permanent childhood in America,” Greif writes, “partly comes from the overwhelming feeling that one hasn’t yet achieved one’s true youth, because true youth would be defined by freedom so total that no one can attain it” (172). Modern adults can therefore see and envy such freedom only in social milieux they cannot themselves enter, in the closed worlds of teens and schools: “envy of one’s sexual successors is now a recurrent feature of our portion of modernity” (174). “High Windows,” which Greif then quotes, makes exactly that point.

So, in retrospect, does Willow Gables. Edna Longley finds in Larkin’s poems evidence of a “narcissistic personality” that avoids “coming to terms with the adult world” (“Larkin, Decadence,” 38). Yet that avoidance, in the poems, becomes a source of artistic strength. (Does anyone truly “come to terms with the adult world”?) Larkin explained, in a preface to his jazz writings, why he had given up record reviewing: “In a humanist society, art … assumes great importance, and to lose touch with it is parallel to losing one’s faith in a religious age. Or, in this particular case, since jazz is the music of the young, it was like losing one’s potency” (All What Jazz, 22). Yet losing touch with youthful power and freedom, and with the imagined communities these things represent, had been a theme of Larkin’s work all along, even as the location of adolescence moved—in Larkin’s imagination and in British culture—from boarding schools to Swinging London’s streets. In High Windows, with its four-letter words and its “kids,” the poet asks for the last time whether adolescence itself has changed, and he concludes that the succession of generations matters less than the experience each one has—an experience that for Larkin himself led always to vacancy, disappointment, self-declared (even flaunted) isolation, and the making of those feelings into art.

Auden gave up an early style founded on the language peculiar to youth; Larkin found a subject in his felt distance from it. A third English poet would ground his own aesthetic on what he shared with successive generations of the self-consciously, subculturally, proudly young. “Every time some black-jacketed young sod thunders past me on a ghastly 450cc m’bike I mutter ‘Thom Gunn made you up, you sod, you noisy little bounder,’” Larkin told Robert Conquest in 1961 (quoted in Motion, A Writer’s Life, 344). It would be equally apt to say that black-jacketed bikers made up Thom Gunn. Only a few years younger than Larkin, and part of the same mid-1950s Movement, Gunn attended even more often than Larkin to ideas about youth, subcultures, and the adult poet’s relations to them.

That relationship, as it developed over forty years, proved almost exactly the opposite of Larkin’s. Where Larkin insists that he lacks the virtues of youth, Gunn insists that he and his poems can share them: representatives of successive adolescent subcultures (rockers, hippies, gay male hustlers, skateboarders) provide constant analogues for Gunn’s own aesthetic goals. Gunn has written that his life “insists on continuities, between England and America, between metre and free verse” (Occasions, 194). His work also insists on the continuity of subcultures, from 1950s bikers to 1990s skaters, gay club kids, and radical Berkeley students. Early critics focused on Gunn’s “nameless bikers and national servicemen, greasers and Teds, presided over by … James Dean and Elvis Presley” (Woods, Articulate Flesh, 213–14). Later admirers praised his celebrations of gay men’s communities, sexual pleasures, and solidarity. Critics have been slower to see the unity in his work, which depends on a succession of similarly configured, usually (not always) male heroes from a succession of youth subcultures with which Gunn’s poems identify their goals and their forms.

Gunn wrote, in a poem called “The Life-Artist,” “I elevate not what I / have … but what I wish to have, / and see myself in others” (CPG 162). He also saw himself in America. In San Antonio, where Gunn’s partner Mike Kitay taught in 1955 and 1956, Gunn “heard Elvis Presley’s songs first” and acquired “a motorcycle which I rode for about one month” (Occasions, 188). Gunn has explained that during the mid-1950s he “was much taken by the American myth of the motorcyclist, then in its infancy, of the wild man part free spirit and part hoodlum, but even that I started to anglicize; when I thought of doing a series of motorcyclist poems I had Marvell’s mower poems in my mind as my model” (Occasions, 187). He also recalled that during those years, “I had an irrational terror that on some visit back to England I might fall fatally ill, get stuck there, and die”; he calls the fear “absurdly romantic,” “as through I would by dying there get wedged forever inside a purgatory of dissatisfied adolescence” (Shelf Life, 175–76). America, for him, meant a powerful, physically capable youth and youth culture; England connoted bad, weak, or failed coming-of-age.

And yet Gunn’s poems took part in—even anticipated—a specifically English way of thinking about youth, one predicted by Hoggart, articulated by MacInnes, and codified by Dick Hebdige, whose Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) explains: “The cultivation of a quiff, the acquisition of a scooter or a record or a certain type of suit” serve “the construction of a style” and create “a gesture of defiance or contempt” (2–3). Gunn’s poetry (like Hebdige’s theory) traces the continuity of such gestures through the mid-1950s, when they first became evident in Britain, through three generations of increasingly international subcultures, from Teds and motorcyclists to punks, skateboarders, and club kids. The “resistance through rituals” and visual style, the reliance on “pose” or “stance,” which Hebdige attributes to modern youth subcultures is precisely the “pose of self-confidence” that Gregory Woods finds in Gunn’s characters (Articulate Flesh, 214). In Gunn’s much-anthologized “On the Move,” “Boys … in gleaming jackets trophied with the dust” become both existential heroes, who “join … the movement in a valueless world, / Choosing it,” and paradigms of successful adolescence in an Eriksonian sense, “self-defined, astride the created will” (CPG 40). Jeff Nuttall recalls that in Britain around 1957, Bill Haley concerts and Elvis Presley films became sites of vandalism and violence, “trial gestures of tribal significance” (Bomb Culture, 23). He calls Gunn’s poems about bikers, with their “aggressive masculinity” and their “atmosphere of oil and petrol,” the first adult art works to capture that tribal power (28).²⁴

“Elvis Presley” (1957) is perhaps the first literary poem about a rock and roll artist, and surely the first by an English poet. The poem provided the title for Melly’s Revolt Into Style; when Gunn won a major award in 2003, the Guardian called him a “hip 1950s poet who revered Elvis” (Ezard, “Poetic Justice”).²⁵ Gunn’s stanzaic lyric deserves to be read entire:

Each stanza reevaluates, and elevates, the Elvis of the stanza before: each seems designed to answer high-culture objections. Yes, Elvis seems limited, but therein lies his strength. Yes, the words are hackneyed, but his delivery gives them style; yes, it’s an act, but it’s also genuine. When we have worked out all the stanzas’ oppositions we have come from a reflexive rejection of Elvis all the way to seeing in him the icon of a new culture: self-consciously adolescent and proud of it. “Generation” means both “demographic cohort” (as in “Beat Generation”) and “effect, product, result”: Elvis sets his hip against contingency itself. Gunn begins by belittling one of Elvis’s hits, and assumes that Elvis’s appeal requires an explanation: the poem translates what it takes to be adolescent energy, in a newly characteristic form, into words that adults can understand.

No wonder, then, that the poem positions Gunn in between adolescence as pastoral (where the same old forms suit each generation) and adolescence as “revolt.” Robert K. Martin writes that the Elvis of 1957 “is Gunn’s self-defined man … who creates himself, through the medium of style” (Homosexual Tradition, 184). Gunn’s poems are full of such self-defined men, their styles (as in Hebdige) inseparable from the codes of defiant youth. Giving a “youngster” a tattoo, “Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt” initiates that youngster into a similar style of outlaw self-definition: “on / his arm … gleam ten / stars.… Now he is starlike” (CPG 118). In “Black Jackets,” a “red-haired boy” in “cycle boots and jacket” also demonstrates an attitude Gunn admires: “The present was the things he stayed among” (CPG 108–09). What the boy cannot do for himself—what few of Gunn’s strong-willed heroes do for themselves, and what Gunn tries to do (discreetly) for them—is articulate that attitude; the poems explain about each subcultural hero what he cannot explain but seems to prove in the stance he takes. With its verbal control and commitment to precise prose meaning, the poem makes clear for the adult poet, and for his readers, what the “red-haired boy” and the tattoo artist know without wanting to say. Their hyper-masculine armor and their self-possession suggest both the energetic young men in the later poems and the closet from which Gunn’s later poems emerge.

Besides adolescence as new power and adolescence as eternal pastoral, Gunn outlines a third model that he goes out of his way to reject: a sub-Keatsian Romanticism of self-expression, extreme emotions, and literalized confessions, which had become associated for Gunn with the pained, fragile, and closeted youth he seems himself to have experienced. “Autobiography,” for example, remembers “how it felt / to sit on Parliament / Hill on a May evening / studying for exams,” “skinny / seventeen” and “dissatisfied”; to this teenaged Gunn (as to the aging Larkin),

These octosyllabics (“history” and “general” are disyllabic, “Wallace’s” trisyllabic) link the poem to others in My Sad Captains (1961); the half-rhymes, and the abbreviated sonnet form, link it instead to Auden, whose poems of young men on journeys (“Adolescence,” for example) stand behind Gunn’s. Adolescence is itself a “foundation,” because future experience builds on it; the exposed foundations are both the beginnings of civilizations and lives (since ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) and the bombed-out houses of post-Blitz London. The poet as former soldier, overlooking rebuilt cities and ruins in their “new spring,” finds himself still dominated by the conflict which now belongs to his own “history,” the conflict which for Gunn offers terms in which to interpret the rest of the world.

Gunn’s commitment to adolescence as a subject dates from his earliest poems; after Stonewall and gay liberation, it entered his prose. A 1979 essay finds the gay poet Robert Duncan’s work dominated by three “human figures,” one of whom, “the searcher,” “is above all the adolescent and young man. He is seeking something out but its shape is still unclear to him” (Occasions, 128–29). “The adolescent,” Gunn continues, “is the perfect embodiment of the searcher, but the theme of sexual restlessness never completely leaves Duncan’s poetry, as it never completely leaves the human being” (129).²⁶ Gunn’s move in the 1970s toward openness about gay identity and gay sex required no stylistic shift, and not even much of a change in his subjects, since Gunn had already been writing about attractive young men and their subcultural signs for more than a decade. Instead of soldiers and motorcyclists in cafes, or (as in “Street Song”) hippies and teenaged drug dealers, The Passages of Joy (1981) pursued “Romantics in leather bars” with “bottles and badboy uniforms” (CPG 207, 339). Gunn identified the continuity among subcultures in his own prose, calling the gay activists and the clubgoers of the 1970s “the direct heirs of the hippies, drug-visionaries also,” with “a shared sense of adventure, thrilling, hilarious, experimental” (Shelf Life, 215).

The continuity of subcultures in Gunn’s poetry signals the continuities in his attitudes and ideals, and the continuities between past and present, England and America, bikers and hippies, even rock and disco, which Gunn’s style tries to demonstrate. “New York” tries to bring disco’s two-four beat into Gunn’s nevertheless unmetered verse:

Young men like the young Gunn of “Autobiography,” should (the poems argue) admire young men like that dancer, rather than wallowing (like the “confessional” poets Gunn abhorred) in their own pain (CPG 231). Later poems about athletic youths make the same point: take the pinball wizard in “Bally Power Play,” or the young “Tow Head” of the later poem “Skateboard,” his body all performance, his clothes emblematic, “chain round his waist,/ Hair dyed to show it is dyed” (CPG 433).

The Man with Night Sweats (1992) returned Gunn to prominence largely by virtue of its sensitive reactions to the HIV crisis among gay men. Those reactions, controlled versions of decline, mourning, and death, gained strength through their contrast with the figures of youthful vitality that continued to populate other poems. “Nasturtium” erects one tensely extended figure for them all, a “prodigal” daffodil “Born in a sour waste lot,” now ready

Gunn’s eight-line stanzas reflect the young flower’s exertions and motions: doubled consonants (haNDsome … wiND, STill STrewing, for TH … wiTHout) hold the nasturtium “up” as it sways from side to side, while rhymes and syntax drive it forward in its growth. Those accomplished moves reflect the flower’s character: as the “street-handsome,” lithe, and blithe nasturtium stands to other flora, so the street kids stand to softer peers. Bodily skill and “street-handsome” style together denominate the poet’s ideal, and the form reflects them. With “Hotblood on Friday,” with the cycle-gang kids in “Black Jackets,” with the disco acrobat, the pinball champion, and the stunt-turning boy in “Skateboard,” the poems coalesce into intellectual defenses of heroic adolescents, members of particular subcultures, whose embodied self-creations the poems emulate as they describe.

Gunn’s final collection, Boss Cupid (2001) did the same. “A GI in 1943” records, apparently, Gunn’s very first sighting of a talismanically strong young man whose unusual clothes reflect his membership in a tough group. This soldier shows “Boy flesh / in a man’s tunic,” “rough animal stubble” on a calm “farm boy’s face” (Boss, 53). Gunn’s skateboarders, “forward boys in backward caps,” and so on, would reincarnate the GI’s “smooth look / of power. Power / as beauty, beauty / power”; Gunn’s “focusing eye,” trained to find such young men, “has learned nothing / fresh in fifty-three years” (Boss, 53–54). The poet seeks in “beauty” not “truth” but “power,” a rawness against which Gunn counterposes his own discreet, abstract diction, his own set of rules. And it is power connoted not only by the young man’s physique but by a generational “uniform”—in the 1940s, infantry; in the 1990s, “backward caps.”

Such heroes’ attraction is, of course, sexual, but it is rarely merely sexual. Sometimes the sex is sublimated entirely. “Office Hours” (another poem from Boss Cupid) describes “big handsome / sweaty boys / with their goatees / and skateboards,” “sharp chic / ironic girls / with brisk hairstyles / and subtle tattoos”: they are his undergraduate students at Berkeley, and with them “sexuality / is grandly deflected” into discussions of literature (Boss, 77). These young men and women in Gunn’s office, with their distinctive, symbolic clothes and hair, descend directly from the motorcyclists and leatherboys in Gunn’s poems of the 1950s. They represent for him, as surely as his frequent reuse of Elizabethan stanza forms, a continuity of history and character from early modern times to the present. Gunn’s identification with successive generations of youth subcultures provides the wild hopes against which Gunn’s chaste diction and explicit, almost didactic style plays. We might even venture that Gunn has achieved a reconciliation denied both to the more pessimistic Larkin and to the more ambitious, skeptical Auden: in Gunn’s work adolescence as pastoral—as a style and self-enclosure that can be repeated—both contains and explains adolescence as newness, as rebellion. Each generation of a modern subculture finds new ways of self-definition, ways which can be understood (and praised) in inherited forms.

The schools in Auden; the spaces of exclusion in Larkin; and the clubs, biker bars, and street festivals in Gunn are spaces for nonprocreative creation, for a way of life that does not (necessarily) contribute to a normative, heterosexual, instrumentalizing adult economy, which is to say a way of life that might find a place for such “useless” things as modern poems. It would be anachronistic and probably unhelpful to say that adolescence itself, for these poets, is “always” “queer” (or “queered”). We can, though, say that adolescence in all three Britons becomes a space for nonutilitarian, non-reproductive pleasure and for specialized verbal exchange, devoted to self-construction, meant to give pleasure, and defined (by others, from the outside) as immature. That is the space of adolescence in schools, where British ideas about it began, and of adolescence in subcultures, where those ideas ended up; it is also the space we give poetry itself—as all three poets, in their strongest poems, seemed to know.

Such knowledge also suffuses the strongest single poem postwar Britain produced: Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts. Without the inherited idea of youth as pastoral, refuge, and source, the poem would make no sense; without the rise of youth subcultures, without their challenge to early-1960s British society, the poem could not have been written. In 1963 the seventeen-year-old poet Tom Pickard called on the sixty-three-year-old Bunting for advice. Allied during the 1930s with Pound, Bunting had apparently given up writing after his Poems (1950) found few readers. Pickard, however, wanted to read and learn; he soon brought Bunting into the group readings at Newcastle’s Morden Tower that Pickard and his friends set up. Soon afterward, Bunting began Briggflatts, dedicated to Peggy Greenbank, with whom Bunting had an intense, and apparently consummated, romance in their teens. Briggflatts contrasts its young lovers with frustrated traveling conquerors (Eric Bloodaxe, Alexander the Great) and with emblems of patience, humility, and endurance (a mason, a worm); all are aspects of Bunting, who suffered for conscience and traveled through a world at war but fled in shame from his first love. “Stocking to stocking, jersey to jersey, / head to a hard arm,” Bunting’s young lovers “kiss under the rain, / bruised by their marble bed” (CPB 60). “Take no notice of tears,” the poet instructs himself; “letter the stone to stand / over love laid aside” (CPB 62)

The five “movements” of Briggflatts present conflicting versions of adolescence. Is it the crucible of the later self or a purgatory through which all selves must pass? Is it, instead, a height from which all adult experience is a falling away? Bunting told Jonathan Williams, “My autobiography is Briggflatts—there’s nothing else worth speaking of” (quoted in Caddel and Flowers, Basil Bunting, 7). To read the poem without attention to the years (1963 through 1965) and the milieu in which Bunting wrote it is to see a pathos-charged version of adolescence in general, and of Bunting’s early years in particular. To attend as well to the time and place of writing is to see how the growing counterculture, as Bunting encountered it, made the poem possible.

Briggflatts begins not with children nor with teens but with a “sweet tenor bull” in “late spring” and a stonemason who “times his mallet / to a lark’s twitter,” engraving—as the poem reveals—a tomb. In this rocky world, young lovers must take whatever hard bed they find, even a gravestone. Boy and girl form a minimal household unit, expressed in minimal language: “Wetter, warmed, they watch / the mason meditate / on name and date.” The couple then return home:

The rest of the poem measures the adult Bunting’s distance from that youthful communion. Bunting decries “love murdered,” “love laid aside”; “What can he, changed, tell / her, changed, perhaps dead?” (CPB 46) The answer to that question is this poem, which doubles as a confession: Bunting’s whole life seems, to him, corrupted by his infidelity to Peggy, “Guilty of spring / and spring’s ending” (CPB 46, 47). “The abandoning of the girl,” Peter Makin writes, “becomes the pivot,” and “supplies the sense of an evasion, in the poet, that has to be explained or atoned for” (Bunting, 134). All pleasures (but especially sexual ones) seem “stained” by that first betrayal, as marble is “stained” by long rains (CPB 49). Even poetry itself

Bunting “deserted” neither in the Great War (when he endured imprisonment as a C.O.) nor in the Second World War (when he served in the RAF and in Persia). Rather, he has deserted Peggy, Northumbria, and the “spring” of his own, younger, local self. The death of King Eric Bloodaxe, who “ended in bale on the fellside,” represents a loss of Northumbrian self-rule akin to Bunting’s “flight” south (CPB 51).

And yet, as the poem gradually lets us realize, almost all of us have betrayed or broken some promises made in youth; Bunting’s break with Peggy works almost as a secular Original Sin, as a means by which we may recall chances we did not take, potential powers and companions we did not pursue. The slowworm (a recurring emblem) is not a worm but a snakelike European lizard (Anguis fragilis fragilis) known for its exceptionally long life and its ability to lose its tail in order to escape when threatened. Both a phallus and a suggestion of potency lost, the lizard stands either for cowardice or for survival, for crafty reinvention or for a dishonorable abandoning of the best parts of one’s younger self.

How should the grown poet think about the passion he abandoned in his youth? The dominant note remains regret: “Stars disperse. We too, / further from neighbors, / now the year ages” (CPB 59). Keith Alldritt explains that “the abandoned love is now perceived in the present tense,” as “what was past becomes actual” (Poet as Spy, 162). Bunting continues:

Recent interpreters emphasize Briggflatts’s sonata structure, examine its use of early British history, or scrutinize its Quaker symbols. The poem’s first readers, though, focused on Basil and Peggy. Cyril Connolly described “all-pervading nostalgia” (Evening, 366). John Peck wrote accurately that “musical patterns … weave around [Bunting’s] recollection of a ‘love murdered’ and ‘laid aside’ in adolescence”; this “tender and traduced eros” finds itself uneasily enmeshed in Bunting’s “pattern of heroic lament” (“Bardic,” 169, 171). For Makin, Briggflatts describes “an artistic maturity ruined by its own evasions,” which “seems to be finding a justification in saying that … evasion … fits in with the fundamental nature of things” (Bunting, 138).

But what nature, and what things? Bunting’s “evasion” and its historical parallels seem alternately cowardly or despicable, to be condemned (like desertion) and inevitable, to be accepted (as the slowworm accepts its lowly, long life). Not the innocence or naturalness of presexual childhood but rather the initiative and freedom from shame of a reimagined adolescence, represent or instantiate the paradise from which Bunting has departed. The poem thus seems to ask: Is maturity necessary? Can we, as adult readers, imagine its abolition, or its cancellation, so that the innocent energies of the poem’s adolescents become (again) accessible to us? That question has two sources in Bunting’s own life. The first is his love affair with Peggy Greenbank. The second is the idea of an international youth culture, with its own art forms and its own manners, independent of inherited cultural authority—an idea that, as we have already seen, blossomed in Britain in the early 1960s. Bunting could not depict the first until he had encountered the second.

Bunting met Greenbank in 1913, when he was twelve and Peggy was eight. Their attachment continued for five years. “When [Bunting] was about seventeen and Peggy thirteen,” Alldritt (Bunting’s biographer) concludes, “they crept into the old whitewashed meeting house” and there “went through a pretend Quaker marriage ceremony” (Poet as Spy, 12–13). Bunting got back in touch with Greenbank after “Briggflatts” appeared; in 1965 and 1966, and again a few years later, the poet and his first love carried on an affair (165–66). We may find his continuing interest in her—and, perhaps, in substitutes for her—disturbing. “All his life,” admits Alldritt, Bunting “would be drawn to pubescent or just post-pubescent girls” (84). “The Well of Lycopolis” (1935) presents pubescent sexuality in dysphemistic terms: “Daphnis investigated / bubless Chloe / behind a boulder”; “Abject poetry, infamous love … After hours, is it? or under age? / Hack off his pendants! / Can a moment of madness make up for / an age of consent?” (CPB 24–25). Erotic life here seems disgusting, but so do the laws that restrict it. Set in the Canary Islands, “The Orotava Road” (also 1935) finds the poet watching “Milkmaids, friendly girls between / fourteen and twenty / or younger,” who

We saw these questions answered ambivalently or pessimistically in Auden’s early poetry, wistfully or grimly in Larkin’s verse. The only recent critic to find anything like these ideas in Briggflatts is Christian Wiman, who dislikes the ideas and the poem. “You’re not a man at sixteen, you’re a gland,” Wiman quips; “To locate your life’s ideal in that instant is, finally, deeply sentimental, and there is a direct connection between that psychological occlusion or willed immaturity and the idolatry of form, or technique, or style” which Wiman finds in Bunting and in modernism generally, very much as John Crowe Ransom had (“Free of Our Humbug,” 40). Wiman, like Ransom, finds modernist poetics inadequate because unstable, overemotional, immature.

Yet Wiman sees what Bunting is trying to do: Briggflatts seeks a style as sensitive to the promise and ambition of adolescence as Wordsworth’s Prelude (which Bunting acknowledged as an influence) is to the promise of childhood. Bunting also ends up less confident than Wordsworth about the recompense adulthood might bring. Youthful memories, as Randall Jarrell once wrote, “are deeply humiliating in two ways; they remind the adult that he once was more ignorant and gullible and emotional than he is; and they remind him that he once was, potentially, far more than he is” (Third Book, 19). That potential has no mention in Bunting’s earlier poems. Its realization into Bunting’s poetry depends on a concept of relatively autonomous adolescence, of teenage independence from adult institutions, which arrived in English culture long after Bunting’s own youth.

Bunting became able to write Briggflatts—to make his poem of eternal disappointment—exactly when he discovered British youth culture, or when it discovered him. “Tom Pickard tapped an audience I didn’t know existed,” Bunting told Jonathan Williams (quoted in Alldritt, Poet as Spy, 150). Bunting remained close to Pickard and to his circle for several years, reading parts of Briggflatts to Pickard while it was still being written. In the preface to his 1968 Collected Poems, Bunting acknowledged a debt not just Pickard’s circle but to youth counterculture generally. “I have set down words as a musician pricks his score,” Bunting wrote, “not to be read in silence, but to trace in the air a pattern of sound that may sometimes, I hope, be pleasing. Unabashed boys and girls may enjoy them. This book is theirs” (CPB 3). Alldritt writes that “photographs of [Bunting] after he had become a part of the youthful set at the Morden Tower show how he had let his hair grow long” and adopted “the sort of clothes worn by the young men of Tom Pickard’s generation: duffle coat, scarf and sweater”; “very visibly, and also clearly very happily, he aligned himself with the young” (Poet as Spy, 168).

Bunting also furnished a preface to Pickard’s first book, High on the Walls (1966). Pickard, Bunting wrote, offered “few poems, but new and lasting, their maker very young. Tradition and fashion have no power over a man who has escaped education, with fresh eyes, a fresh voice, and skill to keep the line compact and musical.” The same qualities which gave Pickard his appeal—his extreme youth, his status as an outsider—not coincidentally debarred him from institutional (perhaps from “adult”) support: “He has to endure,” Bunting continued, “the hatred of art which persists in the north of England, the insolence of officials, and of those who pirate the money subscribed ‘for the arts’” (iii). One of Bunting’s best-known short poems, “What the Chairman Told Tom,” recasts the reactions Pickard got when he sought local arts subsidies:

Bunting’s affiliations could scarcely be clearer: on one side, Bunting, Pickard, and their allies at Morden Tower; on the other, “the chairman,” “an accountant,” and “a schoolteacher,” who consider all poets “delinquents.” Bunting’s appeal to “unabashed girls and boys” thus looks like his last, most satisfactory answer to the “problem of patronage” that Richard Price has seen throughout Bunting’s work and which “What The Chairman Told Tom” brings up (“Basil Bunting,” 99). At seventeen (the age when Bunting abandoned Peggy), Pickard had established a common-law marriage with his first love, started a family, and begun to create what Bunting had never quite had: a literary community that owed nothing to London, nothing to adult authorities, and nothing to the canons of respectability that would have condemned Basil’s liason with Peggy.

No wonder, then, that Briggflatts as autobiography presents itself as a record of potential and of failure; no wonder it juxtaposed its sweet (and sexual) memories of Bunting’s own adolescence with violently mixed feelings about adulthood. In asking why and how he failed his first love, in drawing on youth counterculture while doing so, the poem also places at its heart the contradiction between adolescence as perpetual pastoral, the same sort of thing in each generation, and adolescence as something new. Conscious of ancient history, dependent on 1960s youth, nostalgic for an erotic life conceived as at once transhistorically archaic and indissolubly personal, Briggflatts draws on the history of adolescence in Britain in order to ask whether and how we must grow up.