The Beat poets owe a great deal to Walt Whitman - a similar metre and lack of formal stanzas, revolutionary for his time and now probably overlooked in favour of Ezra Pound onwards. John Malcolm Brinnin is another fine American craftsman of the thoughtful, probably somewhat more outwardly-looking poem. Dear old Beats - mostly navel-gazing in retrospect, very subjective, while dressing up their egocentric works in supposedly social observation. Mind you, hard to find a poet who doesn't, one way or the other!
With one or two glowing exceptions:
There was an old man in a tree,
Whose whiskers were lovely to see;
But the birds of the air, pluck'd them perfectly bare,
To make themselves nests in that tree.
There was an Old Man on the Border,
Who lived in the utmost disorder;
He danced with the cat, and made tea in his hat,
Which vexed all the folks on the Border.
In each instance, we are invited to contemplate the helplessness of old age, as external forces - the beard-plucking birds - exert the relentless dimunition of the physical, while in the second example, internal (mental) decay renders the Old Man of the Border incapable of discerning the correct dancing partner, or the right receptacle in which to brew his tea. Both display the inexorable onslaught of the ageing process and, in the case of the Old Man, even social hostility. With few words, Lear has demonstrated deftly the cruel vicissitudes of the abandoned elderly, no truer in his time than it is today, with the current a
(Stop it. No-one wants a load of social comment, they just want nice-sounding poetry or a few names to drop. Up next: Patience Strong. Ed.)
