In her new book, Theresa Malphrus Welford offers a cogent study of poets separated by an ocean yet connected by sensibility. Through meticulous research, as well as interviews conducted especially for her project, she convincingly demonstrates the Movement's profound influence on the first wave of New Formalists. Welford navigates the currents of literary history with admirable grace: we learn of Donald Davie's mentorship of Dana Gioia, Timothy Steele's early embrace of Thom Gunn, Mark Jarman's subtle homages to Philip Larkin, and much more. In reconstructing the influence of both movements on poets writing today, Welford has produced an essential critical work that illuminates the productive kinship of two distinct generations and traditions.
-Ned Balbo, author of four bools of poetry: Galileo's Banquet, Lives of the Sleepers, The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems, and Upcycling Paumanok
In Transatlantic Connections, Theresa Malphrus Welford explores the complex, sometimes fraught influence of the Movement on America's New Formalism-on not just its aesthetics but also its sense of the poet's ideal role in society. Once marginalized-even reviled-New Formalism has, four decades on, seeped into and transformed American poetry, sparking a renewed interest in meter, rhyme, narrative and received forms, even among primarily free verse poets. Welford persuasively and meticulously demonstrates how a loose affiliation of critically unfashionable British poets left an imprint on contemporary American poetry.
-April Lindner
Quotes from Transatlantic Connections
I had no idea who Larkin was then, but I knew immediately that he was the writer I had been looking for-not merely a master but a confidant.
-Dana Gioia
We owe a great debt to poets like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, X. J. Kennedy, Thom Gunn (to name a few-add J. V. Cunningham and Philip Larkin to the list . . .), who held the fort, so to speak, during the siege.
-Leslie Monsour
Of course, in the older generation, even though they were a distinct minority, Wilbur and Larkin and Kennedy and Bowers and Gunn-and, to mention a few others, Turner Cassity, Henri Coulette, Charles Gullans, W. D. Snodgrass, and Helen Pinkerton-were all writing beautiful formal poems, and that gave all of us who were younger and interested in form, great hope.
-Timothy Steele
We love Larkin for the moments in which the gloom lifts, but we love him even more for the gloom itself. It is not by proposing an alternative vision in the manner of Yeats or Eliot that Larkin transcends the darkness-whether of modern squalor, or death, or simply the banal disappointments of ordinary late-twentieth-century lives-but by crystallizing it in verse so sharp and exact and surprising that, once read, it is never forgotten.
-Katha Pollitt
Thom Gunn will no doubt prove to be a pivotal figure. For one thing, many of us looked up to him when we were young as a model of what the poet could be, and what we were so often told we could not be-that is, he felt free to write in any verse form he chose and never restricted himself in terms of subject matter. . . . Gunn, as an Englishman living in America, seemed a bridge to multiple possibilities for the art.
-David Mason
This remarkable book offers a series of insights into a significant-and, until now, largely neglected-transatlantic poetic connection. Theresa Welford offers a convincing demonstration of just how much the New Formalist poets owe to their predecessors in the Movement-and just how intricate and influential were the personal and textual exchanges between them. Her argument is finely nuanced, acknowledging both the similarities and the differences between the American and British groups. Her analyses of individual poems are subtle, sensitive and rigorous; and her argument places the texts and poets she discusses in exactly the right historical and cultural contexts. This is a groundbreaking book about an international poetic dialogue; it will be a vital and indispensable resource for anyone interested in the recent past, present and future of poetry.
-Richard J. Gray, University of Essex Emeritus Professor and author of critical books including A History of American Literature, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature, and After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11.
