Laing, Dilys Bennett

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LAING, Dilys Bennett

Born October 1906, Pwllheli, North Wales; died 14 February 1960, Norwich, Vermont

Wrote under: Dilys Bennett, Dilys Laing

Daughter of Alfred James and Eve Bennett; married Alexander Laing, 1936

Dilys Bennett Laing, who became a U.S. citizen in 1941, and her husband are associated with the Dartmouth group of poets, which includes Philip Booth, Ramon Guthrie, and Richard Eberhart. Laing's poems frequently appeared in Poetry, the Nation, The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Saturday Review.

Although Laing's poetic vision is authenticated in personal experience, her eye, especially in her early volumes, is turned outward, surveying politics, history, culture, and nature. Her strong antiwar stance is expressed in many poems and in the Responsibles, a group Laing and her husband formed in the 1950s in protest against the Cold War.

Some of Laing's later poems reflect the profound influence of her visit to Mexico in 1950. In her last years, she was preoccupied with Aztec studies and with the manuscript of Corazon, a tale that, according to her son, reflects the schizophrenia Laing saw as the era's disease.

Laing's first volume, Another England (1941), opens with poems of bitter protest against war, which Laing cautions submerges the individual in "the mass impulse" and "mass objective" and pulls us down from our position of superiority on the evolutionary ladder to become "hawks" in our airplanes and "crabs" in our tanks and submarines. The anger with which the volume opens gives way in Part II to gentler reflections of the redeeming power of poetry and art. In "The Maker," Laing objects to the "falling cadence of disillusion" of fashionable poetry, asserting that "It is the gift of the poet / to contradict chaos, to hear the YES! of the womb … / making another space, and a new time."

In Birth Is Farewell (1944), Laing offers appraisals—sardonic, wry, humorous, laudatory, and poignant—of human achievements and of the evolutionary achievement that humankind itself represents. In the couplet that comprises "Note to Charles Darwin," Laing writes: "Sorrow took the swinging ape / and twisted it to human shape." Laing devotes particular attention to juxtaposing man's scientific and technical achievements with the moving fullness, the unpredictability, the majesty, and the eternalness of nature.

The verses in Poems from a Cage (1961) celebrate, in Laing's words, "two conditions basic to poetry as to life": "captivity" and "release." Within the thematic framework, there are some deliciously feminist poems. "Let Them Ask Their Husbands"—the title comes from Corinthians—declares, "In human need / of the familiar / I see God / woman-shaped / and I have my Pauline pride." Laing, in this volume as in her others, often employs metaphors of pregnancy, motherhood, and wifehood, metaphors so naturally woven into the fabric of her poetry that they reveal a poet neither self-conscious nor ashamed nor unduly prideful of her sex.

Laing neither followed in the poetic fashions of her time nor blazed new trails and thus did not achieve fame. However, she always enjoyed and still enjoys the high regard of fellow poets, including Marianne Moore. Her poems are gracefully and economically shaped and are often aphoristically brilliant. They have solidarity, maturity, and wit. Readers will recognize in Laing an accomplished craftswoman. They will be rewarded by the fullness of her vision and will enjoy a poetry rife with a sympathetic humanity.