The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence

BY THE END of the 1960s, ideas of teenagers and of youth culture had spread through much of the industrialized world.¹ “Los teenagers,” wrote the Spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma, in his essay on Barcelona nightlife, “viven su existencia entre ellos, puros, hermosos y un poco irreales [the ‘teenagers’ live among the other patrons, pure, beautiful, and a little unreal]” (El Pie, 206). Though European and Asian critics decry “teenagers’ taste for US films, television and music,” writes the anthropologist Charles Acland, new works “portraying global teens” are “celebrating this aspect of a new, transnational generation” (“Fresh Contacts,” 44). This is a book about some poets writing in English, not about all poetry worldwide. It can, though, acknowledge the international spread of teen culture in two countries where it emerged rather late and where major poets have either pursued or angrily rejected comparisons between the kind of person that a teenager or an adolescent is and the kind of poetry those poets want to create. The countries are Ireland and Australia; the poets, Paul Muldoon, John Tranter, and Les Murray.

Partly in response to Seamus Heaney, partly in response to Northern Ireland’s Troubles, and (perhaps most of all) out of his own temperament, Paul Muldoon makes both adolescence and uncertainty organizing principles for many of his poems, using each to represent the other, in a skeptical poetics resistant to both ideas of pastoral self-seclusion and hopes for social (even for emotional) change. In Australia, John Tranter emerged from the utopianism of 1960s youth revolt (and from the would-be poetic avant-garde with which, in Sydney, that revolt was associated); during the 1970s and afterward, Tranter incorporates emblems of teen culture into his skeptical, poststructuralist-inflected style, reviving adolescence as pastoral in order to replace failed hopes of adolescence as utopian revolution. In doing so, Tranter—almost alone among the contemporary poets in this book—looks steadily, directly, and self-consciously at the legacy of Rimbaud. Tranter’s Australian archrival Les Murray stands alone in another way; he takes note of modern adolescence and its implications for modern writing in order to denounce everything it represents.

Muldoon’s poems regularly include phrases like these: “Mercy was thirteen, maybe fourteen” (“Boon”); “Internal exiles at thirteen or fourteen” (“The Geography Lesson”); “I was thirteen or fourteen” (“Making the Move”); “she was twenty / or twenty-one” (“Big Foot”) (PMP 54, 76, 90, 112). The same mannerism appears in his prose; Muldoon writes that he “first read Donne … at the age of fifteen or sixteen” (“Getting Round,” 108). The youngest age such phrases mention is “ten”; the oldest is “twenty-one.” These paired ages (I have not listed them all) are only one of the many ways in which Muldoon’s work has used his—and our—notions of adolescence. From the adventure tales and drug-lore of “Yarrow” to the schooltime pranks of “Twice,” from the embarrassed chastity of “Cuba” to the lubriciousness of “De Secretis Mulierum,” from recurring phrases to recurring characters (such as the schoolmate Will Hunter), many of Muldoon’s poems include teenaged protagonists or feelings and situations we associate with adolescence.

Muldoon’s poetry has long struck readers (both hostile and friendly) as somehow immature. Mark Ford described Meeting the British (admiringly) as “outlandish” and “emotionally discontinuous,” comparing Muldoon’s provocative personae to Heaney’s “absolutely solid poetic personality” (“Out of the Blue,” 20). For Calvin Bedient, Muldoon’s “brilliant callowness” “fit[s] … Ortega y Gasset’s characterization of [modernism] as masculine and youthful” (“The Crabbed Genius,” 210–11).² Other critics have described Muldoon’s “elusiveness,” his “chimerical … first-person voice,” and his attraction to the “contingent and provisional” (McDonald, Mistaken Identities,149; Wilson, “Paul Muldoon,” 349; Matthews, Irish Poetry, 186). Muldoon’s versions of youth and young people explain and act out the elusive, provocative stances so often remarked in his work.

Muldoon’s poems, with their slippery, shifting shapes, explore frustrated or confused identities, presenting people who do not yet know who they are or what to do. The poems imagine—with tenderness or brutality—teen romance and its failures, comparing it favorably to adults’ doctrines and disciplines. Refusing both the stable, “mature” perspectives associated with adult authority and the childhood innocence other poets associate with lyric, Muldoon imagines failed, stalled, incomplete, or continually reenacted comings of age. His interest in adolescence works in tandem with his tendency to entangle or even destroy the narrative lines of his long poems; the result is a world in which most sorts of intellectual and emotional closure are simply not possible. Instead, Muldoon’s poems tend to present people who cannot or will not complete their life stories by settling on one identity or growing up; at their happiest, these presentations celebrate the artifice displayed by his playful, defiant, or coy personae.

Muldoon has been viewed as notably, or exceptionally young from the time he began to publish—in part because he was young (twenty-one when his first book, New Weather, appeared), and in part because he was frequently (and still is) viewed as Heaney’s younger counterpart or successor. “I was seventeen or eighteen,” Muldoon told Michael Donaghy, when he first encountered Heaney (Donaghy, “A Conversation,” 77). “Clonfeacle” (from New Weather) responds to the dinnseanchas genre (poems on Irish place names), which Heaney replicated in English, in the trimeter quatrains Heaney used. “Walk[ing] along / The river where [Patrick] washed, / That translates stone to silt,” Muldoon imagines that

“I” and “you” are perhaps coming to some agreement about a date or a romance or the end of one (Tim Kendall suggests a first kiss [Paul Muldoon, 34]). The hesitation in the lines maps hesitations in the actors they chronicle, a hesitation that concludes in silence, in mid-stanza. This youthful uncertainty is where “I” and “you” and the poem’s sound agree; all are set against the older certainties that Patrick and the river (and, perhaps, implicitly, Heaney) embody.

“Whatever the mottoes are,” Muldoon has remarked, “when they become organized, codified, there’s a very fine line between organized religion and organized crime” (Keller, “An Interview,” 17). The uncertain young lovers of “The Kissing Seat” seem about to cross a related line: “The organized crime / Of the kissing seat, /How well it holds us,” the poem begins. Its lovers seem of two minds about each other; both are looking

Such hesitancies are not Muldoon’s alone (Heaney signed his own earliest poems Incertus). Yet more than most young poets the Muldoon of the 1970s liked to present himself as young and uncertain, even in poems with few or no autobiographical elements. Muldoon’s youthful personae can take their ambivalent perspectives—and offer the insights that come with them—precisely because they are distant from adult authority. “I was only the girl under the stairs,” “The Big House” begins, “But I was the first to notice something was wrong” (PMP 43). It is because the guests and the mistress have paid her little attention that she can report on the Big House so well, and it is because she is the servant girl (up first in the morning) that she has seen the squire arrive, dead, on horseback. Nor is the serving-girl who speaks the poem the only young person whom we might identify with its author; one of the guests at the haunted estate is “a young man who wrote stories for children,” though “The young man’s stories were for grown-ups, really.”

Another early poem, “February,” likens its man or boy (“he”) to a tree:

The poem is the first of many in Muldoon’s oeuvre to mingle remembered sex with imagined violence or to portray the former in terms of the latter, and it requires conjecture as well as decoding.³ Yet the poem coheres only if we take its subject to be, first and last, youth: the poem imagines that stage of life as a condition of rural, or village, isolation, a condition at once magical, limiting, violent, and subject to “laws of time” that send the residents away (in Muldoon’s own case, to university) despite their mixed feelings about it. The “fledgling,” the girl or woman with her “belly slashed” (a wound or an appendectomy—or an abortion), the “one wearing her heart on her sleeve” and the “one without breasts” may share not only victimhood but youth. The Romantic figure the poem awaits can redeem them all, apparently, by “break[ing] the laws of time.” “They” are, perhaps, the girls of a village, and the poem’s final lines seem to reverse its implicit situation; it may be “he” who plans to leave but asks if he should stay.

From New Weather on, Muldoon has written poems that look back critically at his own failed romances—from divorces to difficult dates. The first such poem to achieve tonal control was “Elizabeth.” In it, unexpected migrations of birds (arriving “inland, they belong to the sea”) stand for the uncertainties of the young woman Muldoon names:

These figures of self-enclosure and self-imprisonment are the “self-inwoven similes” Christopher Ricks identifies with Northern Irish poetry in general (Force, 51–55). Their use here, though, suggests not civil war (much less reconciliation) but a baffled or balked self-creation. Muldoon does not know what to call Elizabeth because Elizabeth does not know who she is, what name she prefers, or what she wants, and no one—not her father, not her lover—stands in any position to tell her. Without the ability to make such decisions (or to let them be made for her) she seems to be fading away: the birds “will stay long / Enough to underline how soon they will be gone, / As you seem thinner than you were before.” That ending suggests both a figurative “shrinking” (from the imposing outdoor birds) and anorexia (which reappears in Quoof). Elizabeth’s unsettled, in-between status is not a source of power (as it can be for Muldoon’s male juveniles) but a debilitating condition.

An earlier, cruder romantic-erotic failure takes place in “How to Play Championship Tennis,” whose lonely “third-form” narrator flees the groping advances of the ironically titled “school caretaker” (PMP 46). Heterosexual initiations guide still other poems from this period, among them the tender “Boon” (which features Mercy, along with Will Hunter) and “The Girls in the Poolroom,” whose speaker delights in malapropism:

A far stronger poem of sexual initiation, “Cuba,” also sets the absurdities of adults’ beliefs against teenagers’ tentative search for something else. “My eldest sister” (named May) has been out all night, and returns home “in her white muslin evening dress” (PMP 78). First-time readers assume she has been out with a man, and perhaps that they have had sex. “My father,” too, knows, or thinks he knows, that May has done something sinful, instructing her to “‘make your peace with God.’” In the same way the father feels sure that President Kennedy will start a nuclear war over Cuba because he is “‘nearly an Irishman,’” hence temperamental, “‘not much better than ourselves’”; the young siblings can only listen in fear. May then proceeds to the confessional:

It may be that May has simply lied to the priest. Most readers, however, are likely to imagine that she has told the truth; her night out in evening wear has led to nothing more indecent than that. Against her, the poem’s grown men (and perhaps its readers) seem prurient in their assumptions, and this may be part of the point: May’s body is none of the Father’s business, and perhaps not much of her father’s either. “The poem’s fathers manipulate May,” Kendall writes, “imposing their narrow prejudices upon her; ‘Cuba’ is a parable of innocence destroyed … by their sanctimonious codes” (Paul Muldoon, 76). Yet her innocence seems to have been preserved, almost against her wishes. What the poem has to set against its fathers is a youthful solidarity and curiosity; we identify with the more benign snooping represented by the poem’s young narrator and with the innocent curiosity represented by his sister’s night out.

Set in 1963 (rather than 1962) the sonnet “Profumo” works as a sequel to “Cuba.” Its innocent teen romance involves Muldoon himself:

The “snobbish” mother works as a blocking agent, parallel to the father in “Cuba.” As in that earlier poem, public affairs, mediated by distracted adults, interfere with the private world of the young people in the poem, a world with code words such as “swalk” (sealed with a loving kiss). The discreditable sexual secrets of the Profumo affair of 1963 emphasize the relative innocence of the young Muldoon’s secretive actions, from cigarette to birthday card to the tabloid under the cushion. John Masefield’s once-famous poem about nautical voyages, meanwhile, stands in mocking contrast to Muldoon’s domestic troubles; “Cargoes” sets a “Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir” against the humdrum, practical freight of England (Masefield, Poems, 43–44).

Even more than “Cuba,” this poem emphasizes the tentative, furtive attitudes of its youthful actors. After the abrupt first sentence, most of the poem consists of noun phrases, the verbs buried in dependent clauses. Those clauses, moreover, introduce actions recalled or contemplated rather than undertaken and completed. Muldoon has not yet stamped and sent the birthday card; “my mother,” at the edge of her seat, has not uncovered the tabloid, perhaps never will. Muldoon’s rhyme scheme, meanwhile, seems exceptionally tangled even for him: abcd ecfg ebdgfa, with no completed rhyme until line six. It could be overreading to connect the rhymes’ hidden couplings to the couples the poem considers (Muldoon and Frances Hagan, John Profumo and Christine Keeler). One can, though, say that the rhyme scheme suggests connections that have to be kept from the wrong eyes.

Muldoon’s poems of failed or comic romance belong to a larger pattern; his characters try to come of age and find they cannot. In “Making the Move” the powerlessness that the adult Muldoon feels as his first marriage breaks up and the compensatory fantasies of male heroism it prompts reproduce the comically simple fantasies and adventures of teenaged boys. Its couplets, with their deliberately obvious rhymes, mime the speaker’s juvenile failures; Muldoon remembers

Ulysses’ bow “would bend for no one but himself”; he used it as he traveled circuitously back to his own “good wife.” Muldoon’s journey away from his marriage will instead return him to the juvenile state in which he identified with “bad Lord Byron” and hoped to emulate Ulysses.⁴ Muldoon would later say he had been “taken by the idea of the ‘self’ bow, the bow ‘made all of one piece’, as opposed to ‘backed’ or composite…. The yew self bow is traditionally six feet long, man-tall” (“Getting Round,” 119). From these sources Muldoon has derived not only a young man in a collapsing marriage but a man who returns ambiguously to his teenage preoccupations as part of a continuing effort to make some sense of himself, a self who is not and will not soon be “all of one piece”—even if he has long been “man-tall.”

“Making the Move” also names Raymond Chandler, whom Muldoon has characterized as “a pure stylist,” “a man who pretended to be engaged in narratives but wasn’t the least interested” (Donaghy, “A Conversation,” 79–80). Muldoon’s attraction to versions of adolescence, to baffled or failed or unfinished growing up, makes itself evident in his own narrative poems, not only in their incidents of adventure but in their frustrated and frustrating plots. “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants” ends in symptomatically, confrontationally anticlosural gestures—ellipses, an incomplete sentence, the final line “‘Huh’” (PMP 147). Tales told within the poems become shaggy-dog stories; land and sea journeys, quests, and even paved roads come to sudden and baffling endings.

As “Incantata” (with its meditation on “the word ‘might’”) acknowledges, Muldoon has been drawn to verb forms that suggest uncertainty; Jane Stabler calls his verse “slyly interrogated by conditionals and subjunctives” (Stabler, “Alive,” 55). Andrew Osborn has shown how Muldoon’s skepticisms inform his intricate rhymes, which “spurn … all-or-nothing dichotomies in favor of greater or lesser probabilities” (“Skirmishes,” 328). Muldoon’s preference for young and aggressively uncertain characters—from his Irish schoolboys to a snappy girl in a Toronto disco—works in tandem with his abrupt or random endings, his odd tastes in verb moods, his elusive rhymes, and his stated attraction to indeterminacy; they let him depict sympathetic beginnings followed by vexing or indeterminate middles and relieve him of having to draw conclusions.

The adolescents in his 1990s poetry are less frequent and less tormented. Yet up to The Annals of Chile (1994) they do the same kinds of representative work. Expansive and hyperallusive where the earliest poems seem cannily restrained, the long poem “Yarrow” may seem (like Muldoon’s other recent verse) the stylistic opposite of New Weather. Muldoon’s uses of youth, however, suggest that the early and late poems share concerns. “Yarrow” juxtaposes punningly related incidents from Muldoon’s own life with symbols and quotations from Plath, King Lear, and other sources, including boys’ adventure stories; the assembled fragments serve, among other purposes, to mourn Muldoon’s mother. Much of the putative autobiography takes place in “the winter of 1962–63,” when Muldoon would have been aged eleven; much of the rest imagines his later romance with an almost comically self-destructive woman called S——, addicted to New York City, to heroin, and to self-dramatization (Redmond, “Interview,” 4). Other parts of the poem revisit “Profumo”—“the mouth of Christine Keel- // er,” “a photo of Mandy Rice-Davies,” the profaned head of the Queen (Annals, 74, 110, 79). As in “Making the Move,” Muldoon’s failed romance prompts him to recall youthful adventures that reached no conclusion:

In the course of “Yarrow,” the young Muldoon discovers adventure, heroic (impossible) versions of himself, sex (and the idea of the erotic), Latin (and the idea of translation), danger (and the thrill of the forbidden). He discovers, moreover, that for him these things are confusingly, but compellingly, related. These discoveries seem to lead directly into the glamorous, absurd affair with S——. And if they begin in Muldoon’s 1963, they continue throughout his teens:

Though the previous page refers to the extreme cold and the Profumo scandal of 1963, the “year” this page describes must have been later, since Jimi (Hendrix) released his first single (“Hey Joe”) in December 1966. Almost all of “Yarrow” contains such mixed and plot-defeating signals. “The polylingual parodying of … noble heroic deeds … and of romance,” concludes Steven Matthews, “continues Muldoon’s attack on all idealisms,” while its “demotic measures of time” repudiate any “fixed sense of history” (Irish Poetry, 205). “Yarrow” offers instead an antinarrative antihistory, starting from Muldoon’s twelfth year, and festooned with red herrings, hyperactive allusions, and double entendres, in which Muldoon in effect fails to grow up.

From this angle “Yarrow” seems consistent with much of Muldoon’s first two decades of work. Girls just old enough to walk out with boys; boys old enough to devour (or try to act out) adventure tales; and men and women in their late teens or twenties (often seeking sexual exploits or taking hallucinogens) are the usual, almost the only, centers of consciousness in New Weather, Mules, Why Brownlee Left, and even in Quoof (whose poems about Muldoon’s father see him through the eyes of an admiring son). With the brief exception of “The Right Arm,” Muldoon’s corpus before Hay seems almost devoid of young children, since (among other reasons) he does not seem to believe in childhood innocence; his poems begin with the entry into experience, and with the uncertainties and missteps attendant upon it (PMP 107).⁵

The uncollected sonnet “Under Saturn” announces much more coarsely Muldoon’s dissent from childhood innocence, painting its formative encounter—apparently a first kiss—as excitingly “dirty,” always already sexual. The octave recalls “a child’s vow / Sworn in all integrity … To a girl with hair in braids”; the sestet then recasts the memory in decidedly un-Yeatsian terms:

These poems’ disbelief in childhood innocence matches their lack of trustworthy, or even sympathetic adults. In Muldoon’s world to grow up is to know more facts, to have more experience, to see more of the conjunctions and resemblances that could link anyone to anything. It is not, however, to learn how the world makes any final, stable sense. To try to condense from the world a foundational truth (on which codes of conduct or institutions might rest) might be as irrational, as destructive, as trying to “squeeze” “a moral for our times” out of a frog (PMP 120). Almost the only figure in Muldoon’s early poems who does grow up—whom we see in his youth and as an adult—is Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward, in “Anseo,” whose adult role as a republican militarist ironically repeats his role as school rebel (PMP 83). And one of the admirable aspects of Muldoon’s father, as the poems present him, seems to be his distance from authorities; he exerts himself to demonstrate farm skills or shares a decidedly noninstructive moment (watching “our favoured wrestler, the Mohawk Indian”) rather than promulgating rules and judgments (PMP 111).

“What I resist very strenuously,” Muldoon has declared, “is … any kind of ism, that insists on everything falling into place very neatly…. I’m antiprescriptive” (Keller, “An Interview,” 18). Many readers link this “antiprescriptive” bent to his background and his generation. Muldoon arrived at Queen’s University–Belfast in 1969; his frequently quoted, unpublished essay “Chez Moy” recalls those times.⁶ “Unlike Heaney and slightly older writers,” whose university days coincided with the Northern civil rights movement (Clair Wills argues), “Muldoon’s adolescence was overshadowed by the beginning of the Troubles, perhaps fostering a feeling of political impotence rather than ethical responsibility” (Reading, 21). His earliest poems on political violence share a terse, difficult attitude of non serviam: “We answer to no grey South / Nor blue North,” the U.S. Civil War soldiers in “The Field Hospital” declare (PMP 33).

We might compare Muldoon’s refusals and obliquities not only to those of the committed, violent men and religious believers Muldoon can depict (from Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward to Gallogly) but to the real young people studied by social psychologists such as Ed Cairns, whose research suggests that children in Northern Ireland after 1969 sensed less “complexity of moral problems,” became more ready to accept adults’ rules and norms, than children in England or the United States (Caught in Crossfire, 76). Even more than in another milieu, skepticism in this one might come to seem a form of individuation; individual doubt becomes odder and more powerful as a component of character and poetry the more the people and works around it seem committed to violent certainties. While Heaney wrote newspaper columns and book reviews, Muldoon’s only remotely “civic” publication from the 1970s would be The Scrake of Dawn, a commissioned anthology of poems by Northern Ireland’s students aged eight through sixteen.

If there are logical stopping-points to Muldoon’s representations of adolescence, they occur in short poems of the 1980s and 1990s that recall particular young people with admiration. One such poem, the sonnet “Twice,” seems to remember deceased schoolmates, among them the prank-loving “Lefty” Clery:

“Fifteen- or eighteen inch[es] thick,” the manhole cover has taken unto itself the distinctively uncertain adjectival phrases that Muldoon’s other poems attach to people. (That “lever” may be a riposte to Heaney, too.)⁷ That symbolic photograph, like the fictive ice disc, turns individuals into illusions or doubles of themselves. The poem has done likewise with its key words. Ciotach is Irish for “lefthanded” or “lefty”; “sawed,” “water,” and “manhole cover” each appear twice close together, while the homophones saw (“cut”), saw (“viewed”), said, sawed, and sod trade places throughout.

It makes no sense to ask which of the two “Lefty” Clerys in the school picture is real—no more sense than to ask, faced with Muldoon’s eye-rhymes, whether “sod,” “sawed,” “said,” or “side” is the original word. The prank, played in a school photograph, mocks the official, school-standard view of the world. It allies Muldoon and his language with the unofficial (“subversive,” even) gestures practiced by the schoolmates he remembers, sets his sense of himself apart from the stabilities of an adult world. Moreover, it works to commemorate those schoolmates and their tricky sense of themselves; they may no longer be “of this earth,” but Muldoon’s poem, like their ghostly image, still is.

Muldoon’s verbal strategy has struck other readers as a “postmodern disavowal of origins” (Batten, “He Could Barely Tell,” 188). Poems like “Twice” indeed depict copies without originals, dual and multiple chains of shifting selves whose narratives fail to reach clear ends. Yet Muldoon’s youthful personae, with their tenuous romances and school pranks, “attempt to take both roads” (as Kendall has put it) and try to conceal or joke about those attempts, not because they have no sense of self but because the selves they sense are dual, multiple, tricky (Paul Muldoon,17). Readers who seek purchase on Muldoon’s language from social and cultural theorists might turn instead to recent studies of youth and youth culture, which, the anthropologist Vered Amit-Talai argues, encourage “an especially acute awareness of the contingent character of any cultural experience,” “impart[ing] a constant edge of private scepticism to social action” (“The ‘Multi’ Cultural,” 232, 228). The adolescence that in Brooks or Oppen promises to change society and in Lowell has already failed to do so succeeds in Muldoon at refusing to settle down.

“Muldoon’s subject,” McDonald observes, “has often been, not disconnectedness (or “deconstruction”) per se, but “the connectedness which the ‘arbitrary’ brings about” (Mistaken Identities, 160). This sort of connectedness cannot lead the narrative poems to clear and firm conclusions, the lyric poems to ringing affirmations, or the characters in them to stable, mature self-knowledge. What it can do is enable a verbal art that—in its early tenderness, in its frequent outrage, in its unpredictability—Muldoon has always associated with the unstable self of youth. It is such a self that “Lefty” Clery celebrates, or once did, and such a self that Muldoon runs aground or “los[es] with all hands,” in “Yarrow” (Annals, 189).

Such a self, too, distinguishes Gypsy Rose Lee, perhaps the least remarked of the many personae in Muldoon’s “7, Middagh Street”—and the only person in Muldoon’s poems before Hay (1998) who can be called happy. In her section of “7, Middagh Street,” the vaudevillian turned ecdysiast tells stories from her early career. At the same time, she explains how she discovered (to put it more flatfootedly than Muldoon does) that art is our nature, that to become oneself is to learn concealment and evasion, that to grow up successfully, in her line of work, is not to grow up at all. Muldoon has pieced her monologue together from anecdotes in Lee’s memoir, some of them pages or years apart.⁸ In his poem, she remembers a show with horses onstage:

Most readers of “7, Middagh Street” find Muldoon’s spokesman (rightly) in Louis MacNeice. We might also see his points of view in Gypsy Rose Lee, whose entertaining story is the story of how to become Muldoon’s sort of artist. Existing between her own famous past and the present in which she speaks, Gypsy Rose Lee becomes at once the silliest and the happiest of Muldoon’s expert representations of immaturity. Lee’s act, even her costume, mocks received notions of innocence (Eden) as it stretches decorum (and local laws). As an adult, she enjoys retelling, and even interpreting her stories of underage exploits; she, too, has “grown accustomed” to “a life-size cut-out of” herself—another of Muldoon’s flexible, doubled identities. At the same time, she holds on to the props of other acts and of her own youth: “I keep that papier-mâché cow’s head packed,” she quips, “just in case vaudeville does come back” (PMP 182).

We have seen in Muldoon a new way to use adolescence, speaking from within it, denying that his own poems or attitudes can get beyond it, never ascribing to it any revolutionary power, and never even trying out an “adult” voice. The Australian poet John Tranter also pursues uncertainty and instability through forms and properties that suggest modern youth; Tranter also responds, as Muldoon does not, to the legacy of youthful, prophetic radicalism that runs from the New Left of 1968 all the way back to Arthur Rimbaud. The historian John Rickard writes that in Australia, “much of the cultural creativity of the late 1960s and early 1970s had [the] intoxication of [a] generational revolt” (Australia, 241).⁹ Australian poets whose work began in those years, among them Michael Dransfield, Laurie Duggan, John Forbes, and John Tranter, became known as the Generation of ’68. Duggan’s comic poem “(Do) The Modernism” echoes the Who: older Australian versifiers, Duggan complains, “never busted a pentameter or stayed out late / till the g-g-g-generation of s-s-sixty eight” (quoted in Johnston, “Surviving”).¹⁰ As the coeditor of new magazines such as Leatherjacket and Transit, Tranter became a representative for the generation; his 1979 anthology, The New Australian Poetry, became its definitive document.

Tranter’s early participation in supposedly revolutionary literary communities did not lead to a continued faith in radical improvement led by youth (either in literature or in society). Instead, as with late Lowell—and perhaps more decisively—versions of adolescence in Tranter’s later poetry describe not a continued faith in youth so much as a disillusion with everything else. As early as Red Movie (1972), Tranter tried to represent simultaneously youth, instability, power, and velocity: “Cracking the speedo at a hundred plus, / adolescent, on a faster highway, I caught myself dreaming of you in the distant future” (Trio, 25). (An Australian “speedo” is a speedometer, not a bathing suit.) Australian critics regularly compare Tranter’s poems, “built for speed, you might say,” to fast cars (Dobrez, Parnassus, 154). Martin Duwell writes that Tranter “allow[ed] the fast life of youth, drugs, sex and cars into poetry” (quoted in Johnston, “Surviving”). Yet these speedy vehicles represent not confidence so much as instability. For Andrew Taylor, Tranter’s poems “remain ungrounded in any ‘truth,’” just as the automobiles and aircraft remain on the move (“Resisting”) ¹¹

Tranter has described a “striking discontinuity between my generation and that immediately preceding it” in Australian letters, “between those born before the Second World War and those born after, say, 1940” who “had grown up with Dylan and the Beatles, with Kerouac and Zen, with Frank O’Hara and rock and roll” (Duwell, Possible Contemporary, 26, 27). Yet his poetry of endless and antiteleological motion and his use of adolescence to stand for it links Tranter not so much to rockers nor to Beats nor even very firmly to O’Hara but instead to Ashbery, late Lowell, and Muldoon. His poems’ quickly changing tones and attitudes; their interest in forms of power that prove temporary; their tendency toward in-group speak, argot, and shorthand; and their deliberate failure to stick with one voice all fit the teenaged characters, whom Tranter (like Lowell) plays off against baffled, disillusioned elders, as if in unfinishable competition to become the (one) voice of the poem.

Tranter began the sonnet sequence Crying in Early Infancy in 1971 and completed it in 1977; since he did not arrange the sonnets in order of composition, they cannot reflect “development” in his thinking (Duwell, Possible Contemporary, 31). Their vividly unstable verbal registers convey a consistent pessimism about maturity and authority. One sonnet from Crying, entitled “(after American Graffitti),” imagines the taste of “marsh water … which illuminates our adolescence.” In it, “hot machines [i.e. fast cars?] are broken and a promise / is a memory” (Trio, 59). Another sonnet, “The Student Prince,” ends up as angry and direct as Tranter ever becomes; its burden is that neither educational institutions nor inherited concepts of bildung nor prior standards of aesthetic success retain any worth for him:

Over and over in Tranter growing up brings nothing new. The sonnet “Half Moon” implies that an adequate representation of so-called puppy love, of first crushes and crushing break-ups, would also be an adequate representation of adult emotion, since social adulthood adds nothing to experience but only subtracts from its range:

The voice here (if we can call it one voice) tries out an effect common in Tranter’s later work; the speaker sounds disillusioned enough that we associate him with “middle age” and yet tells us that he feels as he did in his teens. Nothing in language, art, or experience seems to Tranter more trustworthy than what might have been said and done in the back of a car at age seventeen; the volatility of tone and the semantic uncertainty in Tranter’s work create a space that the shifting attitudes and excitements of the very young seem to fill.

In that uncertainty they invoke Rimbaud. “The first, say, fifteen years of my writing,” Tranter has said, were “undertaken in the shadow of Rimbaud,” “the protoype of all modern poets” (Duwell, Possible Contemporary, 21). Rimbaud became for Tranter, as for some of the American modernists we saw in chapter 1, the ideal-typical adolescent, as well as the first modern poet. Published in several versions during the 1970s (I quote the latest, from 1979), Tranter’s long associative poem “Rimbaud and the Modernist Heresy” replaces or misplaces Rimbaud amid 1950s teens, conflating international modernism with a cultural history of English-speaking youth:

Tranter has said that “when [he] was very young,” he believed—thanks to his reading of Rimbaud—“that the role of the poet was rather visionary and prophetic” and that poets could “see … patterns of meaning in the universe” (quoted in David Brooks, “Feral Symbolists,” n.p.). After 1971 he ceased to believe in that role; “Rimbaud and the Modernist Heresy” began as a record of that disillusion, working out, as the Australian critic David Brooks put it, “the apparently duplicitous role Rimbaud has played in Tranter’s own thinking and the damage his influence may have done to Tranter’s generation” (“Feral Symbolists,”).

Rimbaud is for Tranter the spirit of the Generation of ’68, almost as the self-mythologizing heroin addict Michael Dransfield, another poete maudit, became for other Sydneyside ’68ers a reincarnated Rimbaud, the doomed apostle of “Visionary Impressionism” who intended “living as a form of art” (Dobrez, Parnassus, 428–29). “Arthur! We needed you in ’68,” Tranter exclaims near the end of “Modernist Heresy”; “you / cannot accept this burden of pity” (Trio, 105). “Arthur” never arrives and cannot save a generation if he does. Yet Tranter does not repudiate his early admiration for Rimbaud’s poems. Tranter instead presents poetry in general, and Rimbaud’s attractive example in particular, as a continuing, collaborative, almost furtive enterprise; the poem therefore describes “an adolescent growing up crooked; / in the universities, a small profit in a great / decline” (Trio, 99). Tranter’s long poem pursues the questions many readers of Rimbaud have asked: Why did he give up poetry? If we no longer believe, as Tranter had ceased to believe, in a sacred or visionary mission for poetry, why should we read or write it? Is there value in secular, non- or anti-prophetic, representations of contemporary life? Must a poet raised on Rimbaud’s untenable hopes, or on the related hopes of 1968, come up with new representations of crisis states, of fluid identity, that retain Rimbaud’s investment in youth without writing (as Rimbaud did) metaphysical checks no experience can cash?

We might say that readers of Rimbaud after 1968, after the international failure of utopian youth movements in public life, must choose among versions of him; either he is a poet of adolescence, recording a biologically and culturally catalyzed transitional state heightened by drugs and literary technique, or he is a visionary poet, a seer whose discoveries transcend body, style, and place. It requires a lengthy counterintuitive essay, if not a book like Kristin Ross’s, to show how Rimbaud might be both at once. Tranter, as his interviews make clear, embraced in his verse the paraphernalia of youth culture—the swimming pools, the slang, the speeding cars—exactly when, perhaps even because, he switched allegiance from the “visionary” to the “adolescent” Rimbaud.¹²

That switch produced Tranter’s unusual diction. Tranter turns to his clashing array of tones and socioloects, and to teen lingo in particular, in order to avoid implying that any particular kind of language is the best, effective, sacred, or right one. In this he resembles but goes beyond Robert Lowell; what Lowell did with colliding lines and statements, Tranter does with jangling, “inappropriate,” or “unserious” phrases and words. “I think you’re stoned again / or is that true love?” Tranter asks in “Parallel Lines” (Under, 49). The lingo in “Boarding School” seems to him as least as good as any other way to express amours:

Here the uncertainties and excitement of teen life are neither resolved nor replaced by anything weightier; the assumptions adults tend to make about teen argot—that it pertains to an in-group, that it changes constantly, that it may accomplish nothing of consequence—for Tranter simply describe language in general (Trio, 127).

The recent pantoum “Rimbaud in Sydney” suggests that the difference between the nineteenth-century French Rimbaud (a last flowering of Romanticism who battles and fails to defeat the world as it is) and the contemporary Australian Tranter (who battles with subways and swears in comic frustration) is the difference between a Romantic youthfulness and a contemporary, perhaps interminable adolescence. Tranter’s poem begins:

Tranter is quoting not only Rimbaud’s poem “Roman” (“On n’est pas sérieux, quand on a dix-sept ans”) but Rimbaud’s letters; in Wyatt Mason’s translation, “Romanticism has never been fairly appraised; who would have? Critics!! The Romantics, who so clearly prove that the song is infrequently the work of a singer…. For I is someone else [Je est un autre]” (Rimbaud Complete, 366). Romanticism has never been properly judged (Tranter’s juxtapositions imply) because there can be no place, no point of view, not even a proper diction from which to judge it; anything we can say will sound immature.¹³

Less concerned with the 1960s than Tranter’s earlier writings, Under Berlin (1988) seems even more interested in the 1950s teen culture that spread so swiftly from America into Australia. “South Coast After Rain, 1960” invokes the year when Tranter himself turned seventeen; in one of its brief sketches,

the rock’n’roll sounds brand new.

Things will be like this

A reader may add that adults know better—but Tranter asks whether we do; the boy and girl may “meet,” “fight, separate, / grow old” (he elides marriage and childbirth), but the moment of their first encounter will matter more than all their subsequent lives: “Parked in the darkened driveway / they sink into a kiss. The radio / fills the car with emotion” (Under, II).

Other parts of Under Berlin read like outright sequels to Tranter’s earlier works. In “Debbie & Co.” the chaotic self-display of the very young appears to be as good an example of human interaction as anything else. The poem takes place at a “Council” (public swimming) pool:

We have observed similar scenes in Larkin: the young people in groups, doing things only teens tend to do, reflect a kind of paradise. Yet this poem (unlike “High Windows”) contains no adult “I,” no framing consciousness of the poet’s own, only Debbie and her friends. Noel Rowe writes that “Debbie & Co.” depicts “a world on the raw edge of adolescent ambiguity” as “Debbie is momentarily aware of some trade-off between the past and the future” (Modern Australian Poets, 40–41). This moment represents, Rowe suggests, the “recognition of ambiguity” and the linguistic indeterminacy that Tranter highlights in his poetry generally: “the poem itself is chemical gossip,” a watery, splashy language that hopes to remain unfixed (41).

“High School Confidential,” another poem from Under Berlin, relates only glancingly to the kitschy scare film about marijuana whose title it shares but insistently to the legacy of teen culture (and of parodies, even self-parodies, of teen culture) that the title suggests. Tranter depicts a mesh of subcultures with their own proliferatingly associative talk—a realm like poetry (or like Tranter’s poetry) itself. The poem begins:

As the teens, innocent or ignorant, recede from the poem (by growing up), they “just fade out”; no similarly vivid language, no other bodies can replace theirs, and the poem describes their absence along with the specially demarcated cultural space they create. That space for Tranter creates an occasion for lyric, because it also marks loss, as in another poem named after a B-movie, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon”:

“Tribe” here means both teenagers and Australians. The ethnographer Gaile McGregor finds in modern Australian culture an “obsession with ‘coming-of-age’ metaphors” and an unusual interest in intermediary or transitional zones such as beaches and suburbs (Eccentric Visions, 278, 219–21). If the adolescent “zone of focus” in Tranter represents a replacement for lost hopes about art, it can also represent Australia: a young country that wants to deem itself independent, too optimistic or naïve to see how its hectic transitions reflect international trends.

Even the most elegiac, most apparently personal parts of Tranter’s writings remain awkwardly labile, unsure of themselves, tonally “immature.”: “My parents of all people refused to permit / the sort of pleasure you need when it’s night,” he wrote in “Curriculum Vitae,” and his later poems still seem to search for it (Studio, 94). The same poem cuts from a teen idyll to a memory of school; Tranter remembers “wanting to move away, to grow up, the big city,” and then envisions his “muddled past” as

We want to believe (these lines suggest) in a greater Romantic ode, as in a model of adolescent self-discovery; we now know that such discoveries are at best mediated, at worst controlled or faked. Tranter represents himself, his stand-ins, and his poetry as both nostalgic for an adolescence always in part imaginary and as themselves in some ways adolescent—helplessly modern, excitable, liable to change.

“Tranter’s poetry never believes in natural innocence,” Rowe confirms; rather than the mythic childhood or the unspoiled landscapes favored by previous Australian poets, “it features cars, movies and adolescents” even when its setting is clearly rural (Modern Australian Poets, 42). No wonder, then, that Tranter’s chief rival in Australian poetry, the antimodernist, antiurban, fiercely agrarian and devoutly Catholic Les Murray, attacks the 1960s and all that they stand for in poems that also attack, explicitly, the idea and experience of adolescence. Murray’s “Burning Want” describes his teen years as the worst in his life: “From just on puberty, I lived in funeral.” He will have no truck with idealizations of adolescence, and his only interest in teen culture is to condemn it:

In the context of Australian letters, “Burning Want” represents not just a catharsis but a quarrel between Murray’s antimodernist, anti-1960s populism, on the one hand, and the Generation of ’68 on the other; Murray condemns and dismisses, while Tranter investigates or emulates, whatever seems characteristic of modern teens. The two poets’ antagonistic views of adolescence reflect, as well, two versions of pastoral. Pastoral in an Australian context can mean what I have denoted by it thus far: a literary mode that depicts self-consciously artificial, secluded, poetic Green Worlds. In this sense Tranter adapts—and at the same time mocks or scrambles—a teenage pastoral that replaces a discredited version of youth as revolution. Often, however, in Australian letters, “pastoral” means just “poetry about the countryside,” about the rural Australia that has given that country its still-dominant self-image. Tranter himself grew up in very rural circumstances, to which his poetry rarely alludes; I might also say that he makes the altered or compromised “pastoral” of youth his replacement for the traditional “pastoral” (more properly, ruralist) poetry of earlier and rival schools.

In particular, it replaces or rivals the rural Australia that Les Murray views as the source of his strength; Murray, as David McCooey writes, has made “the pastoral” (in the sense of rural settings) “central to [his] development of [what he considers] an authentic Australian tradition” (“Contemporary Poetry,” 171). Tranter retreats from adolescence as revolution into a renovated and ironized version of adolescence as pastoral; he does so partly in order to make his art adequate to a broader cultural uncertainty that he (and his critics) identify with an urban, secular postmodernism.

That uncertainty is for Murray something to loathe. We have seen, for most of this book, poets who find in adolescent states of mind, adolescent experience, or teen culture something to recommend, if not indeed something superior to adult life. These poets have been the ones who made, from twentieth-century adolescence, most of the distinctive poems about it. Adolescence is for many real people not their best, most interesting, or even riskiest time of life but simply their worst, most frustrating, least free. Yet poets who associated adolescence mostly with cruelty and misery have been understandably less inclined to derive their poetic forms from it.

Murray may therefore be one of the first poets in English to make such misery the dominant note not just of one poem (such as Lowell’s “St. Mark’s”) but of a group on the subject; Murray’s language, often flatfooted in its declarations, never showy, never evasive or “cool,” matches his attitude toward adolescence, as Tranter’s slippery language matches his. Reacting against the idea of innovation in literature as in social life, Murray identifies wholly both with his own adult “ancestors, / axemen, dairymen, horse-breakers” (note that each group has one occupation, which defines them) and with the awkward, quiet victims of school bullying, the least sociable members of any class (Collected Poems, 5). Take the victimized boy in “A Torturer’s Apprenticeship”: “be friends with him and you will never / be shaved or uplifted, cool or chic”: “He must be suppressed, for modernity, / for youth, for speed, for sexual fun” (345). Student movements and their demonstrations (“demos”) are simply extensions of teen bullying: “The first demos I saw, / before placards, were against me, / alone, for two years, with chants” (461).

Murray’s poem “Rock Music” goes so far as to call popular, stylish teenagers “beautiful Nazis … who never leave school” (410). In context, this is not a claim about the fascinating aesthetics of fascism but a grim condemnation of sex appeal: “Sex is a Nazi…. To it, everyone’s subhuman” (410). These lines appeared in a volume whose title, Subhuman Redneck Poems, announced Murray’s role as spokesman for the rejected, the ugly, and the uncool. Murray’s longest poem about a teenaged person lands as far as possible from any appreciation of teen culture. The segmented, self-isolating lines of “It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Age Fifteen” describe Murray’s autistic son: “Don’t say word! when he was eight forbade the word ‘autistic’ in his presence. / Battering questions about girlfriends cause a terrified look and blocked ears” (430–31).

Like Tranter (and like William Carlos Williams), Murray accepts both the equation of modern adolescent peer groups with modernity and the idea that a poetics that admires those peer groups will be some kind of modernism (or some sequel to it). For the “Boeotian” Murray, though, this equation means that modern adolescence, secular urban modernity, and modernism in poetry are all elitist, shallow, immoral and bad.¹⁴ Murray’s commitments to rural Australia (as opposed to the cities and suburbs where most Australians now live), to a national rather than cosmopolitan culture, to Catholic doctrine (with its notion of fixed authority), and to a style or antistyle that claims to resist all trends, indeed to resist historical change as such, let Murray write a poetry that goes out of its way to attack youth culture. Prominent poets not discussed in this book (Elizabeth Bishop, for example) largely ignore the developing idea of adolescence, and plenty of comic poets (Ciardi, for example), have mocked it. Murray may be the only prominent and aesthetically original twentieth-century poet who takes sustained notice of modern adolescence in order to attack it seriously and to repudiate all it represents.