Strength of Poetry

The English poet and frequent New York Review of Books contributor Fenton (Out of Danger) succeeded Seamus Heaney in 1994 as Oxford University's Professor of Poetry. Like past holders of the prestigious post, Fenton gave a series of public lectures on topics in poetry and the other arts from artistic rivalry in the Renaissance, to Heaney's ambiguities and D.H. Lawrence's animals, to W.H. Auden's readings of Shakespeare and James. This volume collects 12 of the 15 Fenton delivered (many of which later appeared in the New York Review); all but the first focus on well-known 20th-century poets. His talks on Auden, Wilfred Owen and Larkin move easily among their famous poems, the materials of their biographies (including Larkin's mixed sympathies during World War II), the scholarship on their drafts and the assumptions about them that U.K. audiences have had. A talk on Marianne Moore looks beyond her later reputation for poetic modesty to see and hear, in her poems, an angry and political young woman. Another lecture shows how Plath but neither Bishop nor Moore considered herself first of all a woman poet, and how that vocation affected Plath's art. The lack of a philosophically acute take on modernism, on the one hand, and of a deep cognizance of all strands of American poetry from the last 20 years on the other, limits the insights throughout. But the book is very English in a manner Americans often crave attuned to traditions of amateurism, studiously casual even when most learned and scrupulous in prose style. (Apr.)