How fine is finest? It is hard to say; for whereas any reader, or hearer, must recognise almost at first sight Porter’s accomplishment, his range, his inventiveness, the distinguished figure and bearing of so many poems, it will be a matter of taste how intensely each of us will take the poetry to heart. If he were more direct, or more musical, I would do so more. Matters of taste, obviously, and not worth starting an argument for. But his poem do not, characteristically, have these qualities.

How would I try to characterise him, then, from my admittedly minority point of view?

He is not staid, as he is often said to be, but he is even and equable; not traditional and merely conserving, but rather cerebral, with a recurrent surrealist touch; he does not centrally present or analyse dramatic situations, personal problems or relationships, as shorter reviews often present him as doing, but he offers in an inventive, elaborative flow reflections on life; he is not a poet of place, but one who sometimes describes places, in a highly formalised way; his verse is not markedly musical, but it depends on and is much concerned with music as an exemplary commentary; he does not compress, but elaborates, and his texture is not classically strict but thick, if gleaming.

The listing of these qualities may suggest that he is a poet without a subject, that he is chiefly a performer; and indeed he has a rhetoric, a language, very highly developed, full of resources, very wide-ranging and flexible, with which he could, as Shakespeare did, assimilate any ‘subject’. He often does this by disguising its referential nature, of course. Frequently, the question with Peter Porter is ‘But what is this poem about?’, for it seems to exist in a universe of discourse of its own.

How, then, to account for the fact that so many critics see him as having constant, even obsessive subjects, themes, and questions to put to the universe – matters of death, morality, limits, self-identification, foreignness? Leaving aside the fact that it is easy to extract ‘themes’ of such generality, even from a seed catalogue, or to ascribe such qualities as compassion, self-doubt, and concern with extreme experience even to the most twittish interviewee, I think that I would reply that he does have subjects, but that often they are elaborately concealed. His elaborateness is itself both nervous and confident. His poems are longer than one would expect; they are shapely and solid, but they lean against one another. They are the dwellings for subjects which he can neither refrain from nor fully approach, except over the last several years. His is the theme that conceals theme.

He seems to have been addicted from an early age to self-argument; and here his excellent prose reminiscences can be useful in picking up the nature of this habit. He has become practised in self-argument: the inner voices set themselves out, set themselves up, as chess pieces, or as instruments in some formal piece of music. What ‘themes’ there are have to be worked out; they are not matters for epiphany; Craig Raine’s method, for example, would never work with Porter’s material.

He is often compared with Auden. But Auden’s reflections are not usually complex in this way; they are written, thought, line by line, with a free, flexible movement from one to another; the self is audience, not adversary, applauding not censoring, the self of a man who has seduced his superego. For Porter the case is quite the opposite; he is the sufferer competing with his art.

So the finished art work shows solidity, consistency, practice; and the reader trying to unpick it finds him or herself responding to a somewhat anxious speed of mind. If death is the datum, let us say, it is death as game-theme; death rises from his (or her) familiar posture and challenges his inventor to one more throw; the preliminaries are entered with great speed; from ball of foot to narrowing eye Porter is alert and balanced. Both he and his death-self are set to win, neither is concerned to damage: this must not be the last throw; this contest must never be finished. It makes for an art of infinite repeatability and variability. So, if his cadences tend often to be slightly breathless and nervous, his music rests not in ‘musicality’ (as in Pound, Yeats, even Auden), but in balance.

Music gets the better of it, since music is all lies,
lies which fill the octave. Chromatic space
in verse turns out to be the ego’s refractions,
truth always stained by observation.

So this argument goes in cut-up prose,
four lines to each part. I will not say
metric or stanzas or anything autonomous,
but keep to discontent, a nearly truthful art

And what has this to do with poetry? Inroads
into rhetoric. The ugly and the disappointed
painting their faces with words; water showing
God’s love to the beautiful – no way of changing.

Then we might as well make the best of
dishonesty, accept that all epithalamiums
are sugar and selfishness. Our world
of afterwards will have no need of lies.

The pleasure here (and this passage does run powerfully) is in the phrasing, but even more in the completion of the figure.

Early in the 1970s, before his ‘return’ (or suite of returns) to Australia, Porter was travelling to many places, and out of his travels he got many poems. Preaching to the Converted is full of travel poems. I think Porter is not really at home outside England. His next book, Living in a Calm Country, begins with a poem of very English reflections, on Taunton, which makes its separate and supplementing points with great flair, in the process achieving such fine lines as ‘a stream / of seasons softening what lives’. ‘Anger’ too is a fine compressed poem. Like the best poems of this period, it is set in England; these may be holiday, but they are not tourist poems. I am not sure that the same can be said of the poems which at this time he began to ‘set’ in Australia. Some of these are too long in the sense that their impact has gone before they have. And it is not only the Australian poems that are affected. Compare the splendid opening of ‘Down Cemetery Road’:

The wind brings the Sunday bells. Come to church
good people. But for me they’re simulacra
of the great bell in my chest, clouting out the end

with the tercets that elaborate it. The opening is almost a poem on its own; I think it is the echo of Housman that does it, as much as anything, as much as the effective roughness of ‘clouting out’.

What has come (come back?) into his poetry by this volume of 1975 is the association of landscape, basically English landscape, with a profound poignancy. It appears, as yet, only intermittently. With the next book, The Cost of Seriousness (1978), he has an event, the death of his wife, to grasp, localise, and deepen this feeling. Poem after poem is about English places, and into them there seeps the theme of death and loss. It succeeds not so much, for me, in ‘The Exequy’, based on Bishop King’s famous poem; for its third section seems to complicate mood, tone, to the point of sabotaging them. Rather, it explodes in the stunning ‘Non Piangere, Liù’:

A card comes to tell you
you should report
to have your eyes tested.

But your eyes melted in the fire
and the only tears, which soon dried,
fell in the chapel.

It also resonates in ‘The Delegate’, ‘A Lecture by my Books’, and the title-poem. Evan Jones, in his review in Scripsi, has named the chief poems of this period with great acuteness, and I am happy to endorse his list, those poems plus several of the opening ones from The Cost of Seriousness, and from English Subtitles (1981) ‘Good Ghost, Gaunt Ghost’, ‘What I Have Written I Have Written’, and ‘Talking To You Afterwards’: to which I would add several of the (briefer and quieter) poems that open this last volume.

At this climactic stage of his development, what we have is a generally high level of achievement, but not always interesting poems.

In each of the last three books there are poems that stand out from their neighbours, and sections that stand out from their poems, like the sun burning through a cloud; and each time what is accomplished is forms of directness, compression, and heartfeltness. Even in them, however, the level of elaboration, the performance­quotient as it were, is high, and we are still hard put to it to say what is Porter’s subject, and what he is saying. The trouble with the much admired ‘Exequy’ is precisely that: the fine bits are the heartfelt bits, and they are musically the most graceful; but they live in a village where the signposts point round the compass. In this poem, and in many around it, the spectre of Lowell tramps along the lines together with the more commonly acknowledged Auden and Stevens.

Still, Collected Poems has an exemplary solidity, and an appealing dignity that runs through its average performances as through its fine, sometimes beautiful, poems and passages. Further, beyond a certain point none of us can help his psyche; and since Porter’s bent for self­argument goes also with a need for concealment, his recurrent desire to tell the story of himself will almost inevitably lead him to elaborate his reflections until their net of reference is generalised beyond any personal situation, and so mystifying. But the very elaboration bears a freight of pain, and that leads to renewal of purpose. It may be that the last hundred pages of Collected Poems show Porter starting a new creative life.

Here at the end I must admit
that some things are definitely new
though undoubtedly made up
of bits of old things. To those in heaven
I shall say in greeting ‘Hello, you two.’

Which makes this a short essay
if rather a long poem by today’s standards.
It took a few risks with syntax
but isn’t innovatory. I expect to find
what’s new beyond the encroaching fire.