The Poetry of Barker by George Barker
The Poetry of George Barker is noted for its distinctive style and thematic preoccupations, with particular emphasis on personal and emotional extremes, including grief, violence, and the complexity of love. His most significant autobiographical work, "The True Confession of George Barker," captures his independent sensibility, while "Collected Poems, 1930-1965" serves as a comprehensive representation of his moral and technical achievements in poetry. Barker's work is characterized by recurring motifs and a striking use of imagery, often reflecting on the dualities of life and death. His poetic voice aligns with the Romantic tradition, favoring depth over clarity and frequently engaging with abstract concepts through vivid, sometimes graphic, imagery. Although he shares thematic similarities with contemporaries like Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane, Barker maintained a distance from literary movements and schools, favoring a solitary approach to his craft. Despite his rich imagery, critiques of his work often point to a lack of coherence in some poems, suggesting that his preoccupation with extremes may hinder a unified vision. Ultimately, Barker's poetry is marked by a vibrant tension between his lavish language and the complexities of human experience, making his work both exuberant and occasionally challenging.
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The Poetry of Barker by George Barker
First published:Thirty Preliminary Poems, 1933; Poems, 1935; Calamiterror, 1937; Lament and Triumph, 1940; Selected Poems, 1941; Sacred and Secular Elegies, 1943; Eros in Dogma, 1944; Love Poems, 1947; News of the World, 1950; The True Confession of George Barker, 1950; A Vision of Beasts and Gods, 1954; Collected Poems, 1930-1955, 1957; The View from a Blind I, 1962; Collected Poems, 1930-1965, 1965
Critical Evaluation:
George Barker’s deliberately anti-poetic autobiographical poem, THE TRUE CONFESSION OF GEORGE BARKER is the most forceful single expression of his independent sensibility, but his COLLECTED POEMS, 1930-1965 is the best single text for an understanding of his moral and technical achievement. Selections from his earlier books are organized chronologically in the COLLECTED POEMS, where the sequence in itself demonstrates that Barker, like Thomas Hardy, is not the kind of poet who develops; rather, his methods, insights, and themes re-occur and he has mined a narrow but deep poetic vein throughout his career. He was the youngest poet chosen by W. B. Yeats for inclusion in the OXFORD BOOK OF MODERN VERSE and even then, in 1936, when he was only twenty-three, he had found his definitive style, so that the poems published in the mid-1930’s are very like those published by The New Yorker and Poetry in the mid-1950’s. There is little change in the technique of clustering images, for the same obsessions with swans, wombs, bowels, kisses, and the violence of sex and war return again and again with little advance in control. Throughout Barker’s career he re-encounters and explores again the personal themes of grief, violence, human extremity, and the saving power of unified sensibility.
Barker is similar to Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane in attempting to explore, as it were from inside, a host of images. If the single most important structural unit of Romantic poetry is the image, Barker—who has memorably described his mother in a London air raid bravely moving “from mourning into morning”—is a poet in the main line of the Romantic tradition. Yet in spite of this general kinship with “Dionysian” writers Barker has written no manifestoes and joined no schools. As a young man he kept aloof from the social poetry of Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, MacNeice; and by the same triumph of isolated sensibility he still keeps his distance from literary fashion.
Barker has commented on the words he offers in trade for bed and board; it would appear that the poet who regards himself as the explorer, and the prophet, of unconscious and profoundly personal images resigns himself to facing the charges of obscurity, provincialism, isolation. Certainly Barker prefers depth to clarity and is willing to pay the price.
Such a poet divides the world into opposing forces, condemning whatever makes for death and sacramentally celebrating what makes for life. Taking Blake as his master, Barker assumes that whatever is mechanical is evil; thus whatever inverts or besmirches the numinous loveliness of sexual love, genuine belief, or free intelligence must be attacked. Because control in life as in writing is a form of imprisonment, Barker can even praise an American poet, Allen Ginsberg, for his ranting at this moment in history. Barker’s recent poems on the United States muster a magnificent rhetoric of rejection, while the poems from a visit to Italy are written in praise of traditional sanctities.
In “Stanzas on a Visit to Longleat House in Wiltshire, October 1953,” Barker praises the ceremony and largesse of the great country house—but indirectly, by a description of its present debasement as an open house of the National Trust. Rather similarly, praising the free moral intelligence, Barker can honor T. S. Eliot. There is a desperate audacity in Barker’s frequent assertion that poets may correct the actual world.
A division of the human experience into opposed extremes is mediated in Barker’s writing by the tension of opposites, by a dazzling conflict of images. Barker’s real distinction lies in his setting in motion a logic of images in a fine poem: the long cycles of love poems and of sacred and secular elegies have as their principle of construction the juxtaposing of abstract and concrete, of seriousness and levity. In the otherwise turgid “Calamiterror,” the frequent recurrence of specific place names—Wyoming, Lincolnshire, Asturias—within an abstract and luxuriant setting of multiple images, affords this effect of tension and complexity. The same effect is achieved with the names of historical figures from Cromwell to Chamberlain in “Secular Elegy II,” in which Barker describes the aftermath of war in images of gross and grotesque sexuality. Often his perception of the incongruity, the bestiality, of sexual love is conveyed by graphic imagery.
At his most characteristic, Barker dwells upon the violence of war and love, and even in his religious poetry his tendency is to upbraid God, to shock the reader into a perception. In the “Holy Poems” Barker speaks of God as a thunderous cowboy riding on his shoulder.
A general tendency to pursue images so intently leads to poetical atomism, to superb individual lines and stanzas but not whole poems. There are lines no one would want to miss, but “Channel Crossing,” “At the Wake of Dylan Thomas,” “A Sparrow’s Feather,” and a few others are the only whole poems in the lot. Barker seems at his best when he possesses a leading subject to control his Elizabethan splendor of imagery: when, for instance, he is writing descriptively, as in “On a Friend’s Escape from Drowning off the Norfolk Coast.”
There is also considerable focus when he is speaking of a writer he admires, as in the elegies on Thomas, Eliot, and MacNeice; and when, as in “Nine Beatitudes to Denver,” he has a specific evil to describe and condemn. Barker has never given over rhyming despite his hatred of forms and controls, and he is at times a master of the short lyric stanza.
It is his very extravagance of imagery and wrenching of syntax and unabsorbed exotic vocabulary that works against Barker rather than for him. The poems tend to be more ornamental than coherent, and often his ornaments consist of disastrous puns, of the silly use of the invocation “O” in many poems, or of uncritical lapses of tone. Obsession with extremes of feeling perhaps prevents Barker from forging a coherent imaginative vision of the world and of human life. Surely those of his lines which are impenetrable seem like indications that the quest for meaning has failed—that the poem has not made enough order. Barker is, then, an uneven poet, a writer whose frequent lack of control is the outward sign of a lack of personal integration. Yet his superabundance of images possesses an exuberance and a very non-English (and non-American) quality of strangeness, something which is a natural dialectic counterpart to the alternative tradition of sincerity, of lucidity, which runs from Wordsworth down to Robert Frost and Philip Larkin in our own day.