Two elements of the 1950s Left
This is going to talk about a 1950 poem by EP Thompson and a 1953 film by Muriel Box.
The theme which is stirring me up is the question of whether art reacted to and celebrated the new welfare state. I think the answer is yes, and some art has been subject to selective memory just as poverty is written out of the past by selective memory. The 1951 general election saw a Conservative victory but also saw Labour getting 175,000 more votes than they did. This would suggest that the Welfare State was popular as well as expensive. That is heavily suggested by the fact that the Conservatives left it in being – going for a high tax policy which would have alienated their middle-class supporters. They have remained a high tax party. They remained in power for 13 years but did not demolish either the welfare state or nationalised industries (with a couple of exceptions – steel and road haulage). Policies which had recently been Left or even far Left had become consensual. I think this is is reflected by the art of the time – even if something consensual does not fuel intense conflict and debates. The context is essay collections (Declaration and Conviction), the first edited by Tom Maschler, in which Left intellectuals say how bored they are by the Left in the 1950s. The situation will stand a closer examination than those essayists give it. (Actually, some of the essayists are quite far Right.) Not everyone was equally bored by the Welfare State.
Thompson published a poem called ‘The Place Called Choice’. This was in a magazine, California Quarterly, emanating from the Marxist Left in America. The site is memorable while explaining why this poem was little-known in Britain until many years later. It is 14 pages long, over 400 lines I guess.
Old iron workings. Mica. Quartz. The monotonous peatbog,
Black roots, ling, harebell, the wet relics of a forest.
The gutted stannary. Scrub oak on the old encampment,
Brambles and St. John’s wort, among the chalkbits and pellets,
The droppings of rabbits, a sherd of pottery, a flint, a coin.
Or with more grace at Burford, integral with Cotswold stone,
Entering the ceremony of cottages, sweet william and crown imperial,
Buried among neighbours and labourers, the Leveller corporals.
Riding by night the Roundheads forded the river
(Fifty miles since dawn, Fairfax and Cromwell),
- this is very convincing descriptive poetry, clearly related to the documentary films which had been a feature of the previous 20 years (and which were still going in 1950). Another passage is:
Across the Piltdown gravel,
Over the Swanscombe skull, crunched among ammonites and shells,
Over the tiny Crustacea, the bric-a-brac of chalk,
First cousins to our father
Who lies crouched in the abandoned road of memory
Clutching in his stone fist a charm against the centuries:
Trawling the turfs of Fosberry with a net of shadows,
Vaulting the Countless Stones, the barrows, the temple to Mithras,
Bursting the hinges of Stonehenge and entering on Halifax,
Howling in the eyeteeth of the boar, through the saurian’s crutch,
I am eager to say how much I like the poem partly because my friend JE Keery turned it down for his Apocalyptics anthology. Thompson said the poem had “apocalyptic expectations”, which is why Jim was considering it. He was a bit bemused by the “saurian’s crutch” phrase. In the end, a long poem is not going to show well in an anthology. For me, this poem changes the balance of 1950s poetry. It is especially significant for 1950s Left poetry, but it is a vital part of the whole picture.
England, buried somewhere under bricks, oddments, worn tyres:
Under the shady transaction clinched in the flashy roadhouse:
Buried with Arnald and Lockyer, with Holberry, with Linell,
With the victims of anthrax: in the back courtyards of Bradford
Where the applewood is black, bearing fruit by the oldest mills:
Stupefied in the smoke of Sheffield, sullen in Derbyshire,
For the concept of roadhouse, let me quote Michael John Law (this is actually a summary of a paper I haven’t read):
In the inter-war Home Counties, the roadhouse, a sizeable country club style location of entertainment and dancing was an iconic destination of consumption and leisure aimed at the wealthier middle classes. These establishments were marketed in newsreels as exclusive and sophisticated but in reality were open to wider groups in a settings that offered anonymity by virtue of their suburban locations. Reflecting this, roadhouses were also used in literature and in cinema as a locus of transgression and danger.
The word “roadhouse” comes trailing a narrative of social aggression. This positions Thompson's poem – it provides sites which are not physical but embodiments of social myths. His poem is composed of pre-existing symbols and this allows it to make statements on the symbolic plain. All the sites in his poem are recognisable, and there are dozens of them. It follows that it has the freedom of abstract thought and yet its object is a shared social world, the one we live in. Thompson is always interested in the argument rather than originality. The poem takes us back to the real world at each point. Jim Keery pointed out that "Arnald" and the others were 17th C radicals, Levellers and so on.
(I doubt that roadhouses had the moral atmosphere which the commentator hopes they do. About 30 minutes’ walk from where I live is what I take to be a 1930s roadhouse, by the main road out of town and unrelated to what housing would have been around it when it was built. It was surely aimed at motorists. It is what we now call art deco – I find it beautiful rather than flashy. CAMRA says “The main entrance leads to an internal porch with a lovely timber and glass screen. Behind this is a lobby with woodwork that looks as though it would have been at home on an ocean liner or an up-market '30s cinema.” - the use of glass and chrome is what gets called “flashy”.) Thompson's poem is about commitment. That decision may be suspected of reducing the available interpretations to one, and throwing the evidence away, but his patient compilation of maybe 80 individual "shots" frees the imagination and makes it very likely we will start speculating and having chains of association of ideas. The impetus builds up and becomes irresistible.
Muriel Box directed 12 feature films during the 1950s and this is more than any other female director in Britain. She was a vocal feminist and spent much of her time, after her film career was over, advocating feminist ideas. I saw her 1953 film “Street Corner” on You-Tube. It is about policewomen. This is really a film about the welfare state as well as a feminist film. Despite certain artistic problems, it is a Left film which allows us to think about vital issues of Left art in Britain.
The initial problem with Box is that she has been forgotten. First, her films as a director have been abandoned by the “collective memory” of film fans. Secondly, she was a team player and without a distinctive visual style. Third, her films as director were part of commercial cinema, made for Rank Film, which means they were highly conventional and part of a period of cinema which virtually every film fan is eager to forget. (“her films were all shot quickly and relatively cheaply, with second-tier stars, aimed squarely at the mainstream of commercial domestic cinema.” - BFI) They would not have got made if they had stood out, at the script stage. Fourth, the great films she was associated with were her scripts directed by other people. “The Seventh Veil” and “Dear Murderer” are major films with stars and budgets which her films as director do not stretch to. “Seventh Veil” got the script Oscar and deserved to. So her filmography is a recovery project rather than a body of work accepted as classic, or which people can recall if you start talking about it.
‘Street Corner’ shows violence as undesirable and violent people as anti-social. I couldn’t help thinking, while watching this, about Sixties cinema presenting violent criminals as enviable and liberated. Really, it was as if the psychopath had taken control of the camera. My feeling is that I like films which enable me to think, and that the residue of such films may be a layer of moral sensibility which has sustained me and which has shaped the way I think about politics. Films which want the weak to be protected against the strong may not get discussed in high-powered essays, but they may have affected people's values. Box’s films are not remembered by film theorists, they did not produce posters which get stuck up on the bedroom walls of teenagers, but they are part of a whole realm of film narrative which has expressed values we live by. I am tempted to say that some films are unconnected to the life of society because they admire psychopaths, who are unable to connect, because they lack empathy. Films which connect you to society tend to draw social problems into the cinema, which interferes with fantasy, but they connect to you and you connect to them.
‘Street Corner’ is shot in documentary style and tells three stories, all of which concern the policewomen at an unnamed police station somewhere in London. The lead story has an 18 year old with a 15-month old baby, who is effectively thrown out of the house by a tyrannical mother-in-law, and takes up with a flashy young man whose economic basis, we find out, is as a jewel thief. He ends up getting nicked by two policewomen – somewhat surprisingly, but that is how the story works out. The young woman hangs out at a nightclub – we might think it would look like a flashy roadhouse, but it is in a cellar and glamour is in short supply. She gets to wear some nice clothes, but again the fantasy element (“I dress up in expensive clothes, stay up late, insult people, throw off restraints, and behave badly”) is constrained. A typical detail is bargaining with the fence – he offers the thief £80 for jewels worth £1000. Having read Ghost Squad I know that this is a good offer, fences were offering 5% of the real value for stolen jewels at that time. However, the point is that Box does not allow wishes to take over, the jewel thief is just as constrained by economic limits, by the stance of his employer, as a skilled labourer would be.
Peggy Cummins plays the 18 year old and had already made “Gun Crazy” in America. Date, 1950. Direction, Joseph H Lewis. This is probably a better film than ‘Street Corner’, but there are points on both sides. Cummins adds brilliant performances to both films.
So, we know that the character is 18 and has a 15-month old baby. These facts bespeak a sociological approach - her life situation is being described through events, rather than subjective wishes. She is frustrated, but not by by being a wife and mother- it is her mother-in-law who makes her unhappy. I said that Box does not have a visual style, but her artistic powers come out in other aspects of mise en scène, in the way she puts characters in a situation and gives them autonomy. The priority of the script is to give us information about the characters so that we know what their possibilities are and what decisions they are taking. Box takes great care about this, and it is obvious that this care corresponds to the ideas animating the Welfare State. Almost all the characters are female– this is a feminist and Left film and we can’t read it properly unless we build those ideas in. We are being asked to care and to think about the welfare of people. One feature is the idea of forgiveness – the story offers characters a way back in if they have stumbled, and this introduces the idea of being popular, of being approved by social opinion, as something indefinable which is of great importance to each individual. In fact, this idea is the collective. As follows, the film excludes the concept of pure evil – and the Peggy Cummins character goes to the bad but is clearly offered redemption, and shows repentance, at the end. The villains do not get the chance to express their hatred of society – this embracing of evil is significant in some films, but I just wonder if it is overrated. “Gun Crazy” is a good example, the Cummins character is brilliant with guns and has a complete fury against people who get in her way, but my feeling when I saw the film was that I wasn't enjoying this and the cruelty was not turning me on. I think Box’s patient interest in human character may get us further. Joseph H. Lewis had strong simple ideas for making cheap films (King Studios didn’t do expensive ones), but they aren’t necessarily great films. In ‘Terror in a Texas Town’, the sailor hero has a duel in which he has a harpoon and the bad guys have guns. This is a memorable idea, but it doesn’t make it a great film.
There is a brilliant essay on Box (by Josephine Botting and Sarah Castagnetti) on the BFI website: “After The Lost People, Muriel was set to make her solo directorial debut with a high-profile adaptation of Anthony Thorne’s bestselling novel So Long at the Fair – until star Jean Simmons insisted that she be replaced, foreshadowing similarly ‘unsisterly’ stances taken by Box’s subsequent stars Kay Kendall and Muriel Pavlow.“
I don't know the story here, but I suspect that the problem was Box wishing to show ordinary women working and fulfilling duties, as part of her vision of a society busy looking after people, and the actresses wishing to become Screen Goddesses (and go to Hollywood). I would make more of this, because it is part of a basic issue with Left cinema, and the imitation of reality is incompatible with the staging of fantasies, but after all I don’t have the basic stories. Box was not making “women's pictures” because she was not much interested in glamorising her actresses. (I have new information, from Box herself, interviewed on 16 January 1991, which partially disproves this: "she suddenly said to me - this was Kay Kendall - tears started to flow and she became very emotional, 'I've never been directed by a woman before!'" - so it wasn't about glamour, it was about not trusting women.) It may well be that feminism is incompatible with women’s pictures – which have largely disappeared since 1970. Jeanine Basinger codified the genre and ends her account in the 1960s. Box, in the interview, commented on how the studio always gave director jobs to men. So women were distrusted, and this was ”the intelligence of the system”. But, if you look at 100 male directors working in Britain in the 1950s, you really have to ask how many of them ever made a good film. And sifting through bad films lets you measure that ”intelligence of the system”. (The interviews project was set up by BECTU, the stage union, together with the BFI. I have to record that because people are so eager to record cinema union activity as damage rather than care and welfare. 700 interviews on this site.)
My feeling with Street Corner is that the film story does not allow the characters to sink into fantasy, and the way it is written does not allow the creator to give way to fantasy. Two of Muriel Box’s films which I haven’t seen seem to be about the nature of fantasy – (see next post).
The climax of Street Corner involves a police dog chasing down the villainous jewel thief. Reading up definitely shows it was a male dog… I feel this is a flaw, surely the film mission statement required a female police dog? Botting and Castagnetti give astounding details from preserved documents about the making of the film:
[producer] Sydney Box sought approval for Street Corner from the authorities well before filming began. As well as maintaining good relations, they needed police support to ensure accuracy and to keep the budget down by providing access to locations and equipment.
Collaboration on Street Corner began in early December 1951, with the police commissioner laying out the conditions on which assistance would be given. One key stipulation was an involvement at the script stage, leading to protracted negotiations as the producer’s desire for lurid and melodramatic events came up against the police commissioner’s insistence on authenticity. Shooting didn’t start until the following September, partly due to “innumerable battles with Scotland Yard” over the production.
TNA’s file includes no less than four treatments and various script iterations peppered with comments from the Met’s public information officer, Percy Fearnley, and Chief Superintendent Elizabeth Bather, [...]
It is incredible that a film got made at all under these conditions. This is reminiscent of Soviet reportage, where the institutions or sectors being described could raise objections to how the story went. This is an under-discussed problem – by getting so close to reality, Box could deal with real social problems in a convincing way. But then reality actually takes over, the creative autonomy of the artist sinks beneath the waves, and the main problems in making the story have directly to do with the government and their PR offices. The quality of “Street Corner” clearly has to do with government interference as well as with its impressive authenticity and accuracy of observation. This is something which was still causing problems in the 1970s, I mean that the collectivist artist wanted to abandon the imagination and hand control of stories over to the collective. But when someone turned up who claimed to be the voice of the people - maybe not someone working for the Metropolitan Police, but someone - the story lost purpose and the project lost conviction.
The most interesting thing I saw while tracing Box over the swamps of the Internet was a still from a film set in an “approved school” for girls (i.e. they were sent there by a court after committing crimes) which shows a riot... an extraordinary thing, other directors were spending the money on colonial battles which Box spends on a huge scene showing rioting 13-year olds. The anarchic energy is almost unnerving – just get 100 13-year olds on camera and they will look like the end of civilisation, I suppose. The thing is, the rule of cinema is to get the female characters wearing as enviable clothes as they possibly can, and all these half-grown tearaways are wearing prison clothing which most teenagers wouldn't be seen dead in. This is Box staging a grand tableau – of a scene which nobody else would even want to film. (I think the film is "Good-time girl", 1948, which she wrote but didn't direct.)
There certainly were left-wing artists at work in the 1950s, it wasn't all self-centred pangs about losing commitment, and the art of the time can be analysed to shed light on the upsurge of Left art after 1968. That is, there is a collective which works on difficult questions and whose results individuals have used.
Monday 21 June 2021
Saturday 19 June 2021
The academic taste 1936-98
Technical post with supporting data
Note. This is a piece of analysis necessary to support other posts. It is analytical rather than giving new information about lost or misunderstood poets. The theme is simply that the "British Poetry Revival" was a product of the (modern) system rather than something from an island wilderness somewhere.
Without re-running a rather angry debate, let me suggest that Eric Mottram’s values were academic, effortful, highly literate, meritocratic, and so forth. He detached poetry from Pop culture rather thoroughly. The question whether he is a breakaway or rather continuing the line of Allott which a generation had absorbed in the 6th form. Eric’s definition of the ”British Poetry Revival” could be the fourth standard-setting anthology, successor to Roberts and Allott. If we break poetry into academic poetry versus other kinds, the Alternative as defined by Mottram belongs clearly with the academic kind. His values are meritocratic and favour abstract ideas. It is possible to argue that he staked out a position which bypassed a large subset of the Alternative scene, and that the total legacy of the Underground includes values which meant nothing to Eric. Repeatedly he asked for poetry to need work, and for readers to invest the needed work and not be lazy. He had a vision of consumer culture as being completely relaxed and undemanding, and he rejected this altogether. This is a meritocratic approach to culture. He sounds quite similar to many other academics of his generation in worrying about leisure being effortless.
Let us look at what Roberts says in the introduction to his 1936 anthology. “... and a poem is equally confusing if it takes into account greater complexities of thought and intricacies of feeling than the reader has ever noticed. It unsettles the mind – and by the mind I mean more than the conscious mind; and the reader expends the energy he originally brought to the poem in trivial irritation with the poet. […] in so far as the poet is a good poet, the situation will remedy itself. [...]perhaps their recognition of the new element will be accelerated by his writing. But in either case they will welcome the way of speech which makes them articulate. […] Sometimes his writing is significant primarily for only a few of each generation as when it is evoked by some remote place or rare experience or an intricate thought which few can follow. [...] his writing has a value over and above that of its immediate appeal: he has added to the possibilities of speech, he has discovered evocative rhythms and image-sequences unknown before. In a good poet a change or development of technique always springs from a change or development of subject-matter. [so] we must also discuss content[.]”
This belief in innovation is obviously close to the criteria which Eric Mottram was applying. It is difficult to see a breach as having occurred between Roberts and the British Poetry Revival. Actually what Roberts evokes had become the main line of British poetry. We have to speak of editors compromising with a more colloquial style, rather than Mottram’s idea being an innovation or deviation. He could pick up 36 poets because the system had produced those 36 poets. Roberts starts by describing a crisis, the economic crisis present in 1936, which directly affects poetry. It brings about a crisis of self-awareness which draws with it a crisis of style. Taking on modern poetry also involves a personal crisis for the reader, or this is what Roberts implies. It is hard to see that there has been a crisis continuously from 1936 to 2021. I think the proposal is more “we only become conscious in moments of crisis, our normal state is one of serenity and routine thoughts”. This is interesting – maybe it is also true that “poetry is not at all points in a stage of wiping out its past and embracing the radically new, most years are ones of stability and serenity”.
A check shows that, of 36 poets whom Eric defined as the British Poetry Revival in 1974, 3 had studied at Oxford and 10 at Cambridge. This suggests that he was not reacting against the academic taste. It allows us to claim that his poets were innovative, that they were critical thinkers and oriented against literary and political doctrine, but not that they were “outside the system”. Sociologically, he was favouring male poets and highly educated poets, and the same arguments that can be levelled against Allott (in 1962) can be levelled against Mottram.
The question of what values opposed Mottram’s favoured poets to (some) other authoritative critics in the 1970s is not at all simple. I am going to bypass it, while observing that it is not as simple as “Left versus Right” or “Establishment versus Outsiders”. In fact, it is logical to see Mottram's roster as the successor to Roberts, Allott, and Lucie-Smith. It is anomalous to favour those three while rejecting Mottram’s choices. It is an inconsistency which the passage of time is likely to wear down and smooth out.
A point of departure for us was the observation that the majority of society is happy to consume poetry in the form of songs. Excluding song from poetry, by some act of definition, is an effort too great to be worth attempting. The anomaly is consuming poems without music. This is something which only a minority, in Western societies, undertake. A credible proposal is that the ability to do this involves cognitive practices, or preferences, which correlate with higher education –and that success in higher education is made possible by acquiring them.
Secondary proposals are that the development of 20th C poetry has been directed by a need to exploit this musicless space – both by developing the possibilities which are latent inside it and by avoiding the qualities which fall flat without music (and the atmosphere which music lends). And, that there is a line of four statements which track the history of this “high quadrant” of taste, namely Roberts, Allott, Lucie-Smith, and Mottram. Roberts defined a modern taste partly by eliminating 50 to 100 poets (who were otherwise popular) and the three successors did not resurrect any of the poets he had struck out – part of a consistency of line of a very dramatic nature.
The poetry in question is secular, fluent in abstractions, attracted to crisis, critical, and attached to Enlightenment values. Applying the findings of science to self-awareness is a particular feature of it. A belief in the value of acquiring knowledge is fundamental. This often involves dissolving inherited knowledge. It is reasonable to associate these values with higher education and with cognitive practices which are obscured by music. The distantation from music, or from song, is not accidental.
If I could inject just one example it may make things clearer. I have just been looking at a chat site where people were talking about films. The topic of “worst films ever released” elicited answers which mentioned “Zabriskie Point”. I really like this film. My guess is that the problem is because it shows exact documentary scenes in order to raise doubt about American society – the state of aperture in which one can have new ideas is the location of pleasure for the intended audience. But, some cinema-goers find that state anxious and frustrating. I am inclined to say that they equate entertainment with constant gratification, what you offer a fractious five-year-old child. So there is a wide separation between people who enjoy that state of doubt and people who find it unpleasant. This is a big clue to why poetry based on abstractions exists, and why some people don’t like it.
The 36 poets listed by Mottram are not all writing the same poem. The range of subjects and styles is immense. But it is possible to speak of fundamental, initial conditions. It is also right to speak of an audience formed by reading this poetry, and for whom the poetry exists. One initial condition is that the gap left by the abolition of inherited forms of gratification is huge. Poetry which goes halfway into the new space is going to fail, not filling this gap. The situation favours poets who take on the new emptiness wholeheartedly – who write poetry native to this realm rather than having nostalgia for conditions which cannot be found there. Developments are not random, they are adjustments to the laws of the new space. Often this involves an acceptance that abstract thought is central, and removal of finished ideas, of information (we could say), which would inhibit such thought by removing the objects it could have worked on. I said that the consistency between four major statements of the contents of the modernist realm was astonishing. This means that the differences are small enough to be peculiarly enlightening and to repay close examination.
Comparisons between Mottram and Lucie-Smith suggest that Eric just narrowed the scope, to produce a specialist anthology. After all, half (19/36) of Mottram's poets are already there in Lucie-Smith. If you look at the poets whom Mottram left out, it becomes obvious that Mottram was systematically favouring the academic taste – complicated, ambitious poems with insider knowledge of European styles, belief in critique, openness to abstract ideas. And, relatively, limited interest in biographical poems about personal feelings. Love poetry is not on the agenda. His preferences are meritocratic.
I suspect that the precision of these comparisons sustains the basic thesis – that, despite the profound differences between roughly 160 poets appearing in the four selections described, there is an underlying shape which guides the four editors. A shape which tolerates 160 different poets cannot be ultra-specific.
Lucie-Smith includes 30 of Allott’s poets – although moving on by a whole generation and losing the first 27 years of Allott’s time-span. Essentially, Lucie-Smith accepts Allott’s version of the post-war period. Allott leaves out Charles Causley, at his most productive in the 1950s. Lucie-Smith was surely right to re-enlist Causley. His similarity to a folk style (i.e. to traditional songs as they might have been sung by sailors, sober or not, at the time he was writing) makes him marginal to a modernist editor – so “good but it doesn’t really count”.
Of poets in Allott, I am amazed that Lucie-Smith left out Kathleen Raine – she wrote so many compelling poems. But, in the context of an overall tendency which is secular, it was consistent to drop her over the side. Raine went on to write a thorough critique of the modernist thing. Having been married to two modernist poets, she was in a good position to to do that. She had seen it being set up, in the group around the magazine Experiment around 1930, run by students whom she knew very well. Her definition of the entire set of what modernism had blanked out, subjected to unobserving, is useful for getting the geography straight, even if the theses, drawn from the Counter-Enlightenment, are unconvincing. It is understandable that Lucie-Smith should omit her. She would have omitted him. Empson, in the Experiment offices, had put stress on exact analysis of feelings, with a background belief in materialism, the chemical basis for what happens in the mind. This is intertwined with Close Reading of poems. The two have been responsible for a great deal of English modernism. And Raine rejected these ideas, even in 1930.
Lucie-Smith includes very few religious poems – although, of poems published in his period, they were surely a high percentage. Rhyme, religion, disbelief in abstraction – all these were features of women’s writing, in the lost mid-century era. So the poor showing of women in Lucie-Smith’s book is structurally given, it isn’t a question of individual preferences emanating from him. He includes Peter Levi's poem about a pope – but it is in fact critical of religion, subtly attacking Pius XII for not protesting about the Holocaust. It is critical and about politics, so avoiding the features of religious poems which secular people object to.
Evidently the poets whom Mottram collected, and the rest of the Alternative sector who came along a bit later, would not have accepted that there was a shared Alternative agenda. They would have defined themselves as in revolt against that, and other things.
Crisis theory sustains the idea of constant historical progress. In fact, it may be that the idea that “every year most of the art of the past collapses and loses all meaning” is incredible unless you believe that there is a constant, unresolved, social crisis. If you accept that consciousness is normally only there for a few minutes a day (as at least some textbooks say), then someone might induce a crisis in order to prolong consciousness – because they feel that they are so intelligent that they win if legacy knowledge is useless. Even if other people associate it with anxiety, frustration, discomfort, etc. Are we really in a constant state of crisis? Certainly modernist art does well in a situation of crisis, and certainly the idea that art itself is in crisis appeals to some people and not to others. Highly intellectual art possibly has handicaps, but also a competitive advantage during a cultural crisis. Peter Fuller wrote that book “The crisis in modern art” - once you accept the truth of the title, then you need to read the book. I must say, I wasn’t aware that modern art was in crisis in 1983. Crisis and the obsolescence of tradition are complementary ideas. Maybe they're both wrong.
I have been looking at Sean O’Brien’s anthology The Firebox, which covers the years 1945 to 1998. How does this relate to past anthologies? Well, And 29.4% of his poets went to either Oxford or Cambridge. I did a count of how many poets from Lucie-Smith’s roster re-appear in O'Brien's. The count is 29. Given that his book covers almost 30 years after Lucie-Smith’s book was published, and so closed, this is a strikingly high level of overlap. The conclusion is that he has accepted Lucie-Smith's version of the post-war decades – and so that the sequence is Roberts– Allott – Lucie-Smith – O'Brien. O’Brien does not rescue poets whom Lucie-Smith had thrown off the boat. This is in line with the acceptance path which goes from Roberts onwards. We are looking at a consensus.
What is this telling us? We spoke of a modernist quadrant which includes free verse, secular views, the rejection of English nationalism, Enlightenment values, a belief in social progress as those values abolish rigid tradition, and finally graduate poets. My impression is that almost 100% of O’Brien’s poets are graduates. The university link is fundamental, to a point where it is never discussed. It is true that he has cut down on Oxford and Cambridge – the educational apex has widened, dramatically so. The interest in montage, by contrast, has faded out. The role of cultural criticism has also weakened (although it may have been replaced by something more diffuse and more consensual).
Snippet biographies no longer reveal details of a poet's educational status – people are too anxious about the meritocratic system for this to be neutral. So I can’t tell if any of these 126 poets missed out on university. It would be interesting to see further information on this. Yes, maybe they aren't all graduates. They are pretty close on it, as a group. (Causley and Roy Fuller did not go to a university. Interesting – one was a teacher, one a lawyer. It is hard to think back to the 1930s when that didn’t imply graduate status. No, they required vocational training. So poets born before 1930 are relatively unlikely to have attended university.)
O'Brien's selection is even more secular than Lucie-Smith's. It is noticeable that he does not reinstate Kathleen Raine – my impression is that he has closed out the line of “New Age spirituality” which Raine founded, not everyone’s taste but surely part of the big picture. I am speaking about "university taste" while avoiding a definition of it. That offers difficulties. However, Barker, Raine, and Causley clearly represent what university taste dislikes, and that may be a glimpse of its boundaries. If we're lucky.
I have a note saying that in 1950 there were 25 universities in Britain. Rather obviously that expansion meant that the poetic world could no longer be dominated by two or three of them – and that the graduate world was going to grow so huge that it could take over the literary world almost in its entirety. The apex was going to grow much wider but also much stronger. I don’t think there is much doubt that the influence of Close Reading and so on has diminished – anything monolithic and doctrinal has been steadily criticised, if only because the number of people involved in higher education has made the unspoken assumptions too obvious for people not to be aware of them. Graduates used to be a group so small and envied that they were homogeneous, that just isn’t true when there are several million of them. However, if everyone has gone through the mill of writing essays about poetry, most of them for two years of A-levels and then three years of Eng Lit at university, that is bound to have an effect – producing shared assumptions and blind spots. The four anthologies discussed are a site where you can gather information on the blind spots. The key factor may simply be approval – certain reaction patterns are so rewarded by teachers, and locked into anthologies, syllabi, and so on, that they come to seem natural. And continue to carry their burden of pleasure. Pleasure, approval, empathy – these are the conservative forces. And someone who is weak in these areas is unlikely to get far in the creative arts.
Note. This is a piece of analysis necessary to support other posts. It is analytical rather than giving new information about lost or misunderstood poets. The theme is simply that the "British Poetry Revival" was a product of the (modern) system rather than something from an island wilderness somewhere.
Without re-running a rather angry debate, let me suggest that Eric Mottram’s values were academic, effortful, highly literate, meritocratic, and so forth. He detached poetry from Pop culture rather thoroughly. The question whether he is a breakaway or rather continuing the line of Allott which a generation had absorbed in the 6th form. Eric’s definition of the ”British Poetry Revival” could be the fourth standard-setting anthology, successor to Roberts and Allott. If we break poetry into academic poetry versus other kinds, the Alternative as defined by Mottram belongs clearly with the academic kind. His values are meritocratic and favour abstract ideas. It is possible to argue that he staked out a position which bypassed a large subset of the Alternative scene, and that the total legacy of the Underground includes values which meant nothing to Eric. Repeatedly he asked for poetry to need work, and for readers to invest the needed work and not be lazy. He had a vision of consumer culture as being completely relaxed and undemanding, and he rejected this altogether. This is a meritocratic approach to culture. He sounds quite similar to many other academics of his generation in worrying about leisure being effortless.
Let us look at what Roberts says in the introduction to his 1936 anthology. “... and a poem is equally confusing if it takes into account greater complexities of thought and intricacies of feeling than the reader has ever noticed. It unsettles the mind – and by the mind I mean more than the conscious mind; and the reader expends the energy he originally brought to the poem in trivial irritation with the poet. […] in so far as the poet is a good poet, the situation will remedy itself. [...]perhaps their recognition of the new element will be accelerated by his writing. But in either case they will welcome the way of speech which makes them articulate. […] Sometimes his writing is significant primarily for only a few of each generation as when it is evoked by some remote place or rare experience or an intricate thought which few can follow. [...] his writing has a value over and above that of its immediate appeal: he has added to the possibilities of speech, he has discovered evocative rhythms and image-sequences unknown before. In a good poet a change or development of technique always springs from a change or development of subject-matter. [so] we must also discuss content[.]”
This belief in innovation is obviously close to the criteria which Eric Mottram was applying. It is difficult to see a breach as having occurred between Roberts and the British Poetry Revival. Actually what Roberts evokes had become the main line of British poetry. We have to speak of editors compromising with a more colloquial style, rather than Mottram’s idea being an innovation or deviation. He could pick up 36 poets because the system had produced those 36 poets. Roberts starts by describing a crisis, the economic crisis present in 1936, which directly affects poetry. It brings about a crisis of self-awareness which draws with it a crisis of style. Taking on modern poetry also involves a personal crisis for the reader, or this is what Roberts implies. It is hard to see that there has been a crisis continuously from 1936 to 2021. I think the proposal is more “we only become conscious in moments of crisis, our normal state is one of serenity and routine thoughts”. This is interesting – maybe it is also true that “poetry is not at all points in a stage of wiping out its past and embracing the radically new, most years are ones of stability and serenity”.
A check shows that, of 36 poets whom Eric defined as the British Poetry Revival in 1974, 3 had studied at Oxford and 10 at Cambridge. This suggests that he was not reacting against the academic taste. It allows us to claim that his poets were innovative, that they were critical thinkers and oriented against literary and political doctrine, but not that they were “outside the system”. Sociologically, he was favouring male poets and highly educated poets, and the same arguments that can be levelled against Allott (in 1962) can be levelled against Mottram.
The question of what values opposed Mottram’s favoured poets to (some) other authoritative critics in the 1970s is not at all simple. I am going to bypass it, while observing that it is not as simple as “Left versus Right” or “Establishment versus Outsiders”. In fact, it is logical to see Mottram's roster as the successor to Roberts, Allott, and Lucie-Smith. It is anomalous to favour those three while rejecting Mottram’s choices. It is an inconsistency which the passage of time is likely to wear down and smooth out.
A point of departure for us was the observation that the majority of society is happy to consume poetry in the form of songs. Excluding song from poetry, by some act of definition, is an effort too great to be worth attempting. The anomaly is consuming poems without music. This is something which only a minority, in Western societies, undertake. A credible proposal is that the ability to do this involves cognitive practices, or preferences, which correlate with higher education –and that success in higher education is made possible by acquiring them.
Secondary proposals are that the development of 20th C poetry has been directed by a need to exploit this musicless space – both by developing the possibilities which are latent inside it and by avoiding the qualities which fall flat without music (and the atmosphere which music lends). And, that there is a line of four statements which track the history of this “high quadrant” of taste, namely Roberts, Allott, Lucie-Smith, and Mottram. Roberts defined a modern taste partly by eliminating 50 to 100 poets (who were otherwise popular) and the three successors did not resurrect any of the poets he had struck out – part of a consistency of line of a very dramatic nature.
The poetry in question is secular, fluent in abstractions, attracted to crisis, critical, and attached to Enlightenment values. Applying the findings of science to self-awareness is a particular feature of it. A belief in the value of acquiring knowledge is fundamental. This often involves dissolving inherited knowledge. It is reasonable to associate these values with higher education and with cognitive practices which are obscured by music. The distantation from music, or from song, is not accidental.
If I could inject just one example it may make things clearer. I have just been looking at a chat site where people were talking about films. The topic of “worst films ever released” elicited answers which mentioned “Zabriskie Point”. I really like this film. My guess is that the problem is because it shows exact documentary scenes in order to raise doubt about American society – the state of aperture in which one can have new ideas is the location of pleasure for the intended audience. But, some cinema-goers find that state anxious and frustrating. I am inclined to say that they equate entertainment with constant gratification, what you offer a fractious five-year-old child. So there is a wide separation between people who enjoy that state of doubt and people who find it unpleasant. This is a big clue to why poetry based on abstractions exists, and why some people don’t like it.
The 36 poets listed by Mottram are not all writing the same poem. The range of subjects and styles is immense. But it is possible to speak of fundamental, initial conditions. It is also right to speak of an audience formed by reading this poetry, and for whom the poetry exists. One initial condition is that the gap left by the abolition of inherited forms of gratification is huge. Poetry which goes halfway into the new space is going to fail, not filling this gap. The situation favours poets who take on the new emptiness wholeheartedly – who write poetry native to this realm rather than having nostalgia for conditions which cannot be found there. Developments are not random, they are adjustments to the laws of the new space. Often this involves an acceptance that abstract thought is central, and removal of finished ideas, of information (we could say), which would inhibit such thought by removing the objects it could have worked on. I said that the consistency between four major statements of the contents of the modernist realm was astonishing. This means that the differences are small enough to be peculiarly enlightening and to repay close examination.
Comparisons between Mottram and Lucie-Smith suggest that Eric just narrowed the scope, to produce a specialist anthology. After all, half (19/36) of Mottram's poets are already there in Lucie-Smith. If you look at the poets whom Mottram left out, it becomes obvious that Mottram was systematically favouring the academic taste – complicated, ambitious poems with insider knowledge of European styles, belief in critique, openness to abstract ideas. And, relatively, limited interest in biographical poems about personal feelings. Love poetry is not on the agenda. His preferences are meritocratic.
I suspect that the precision of these comparisons sustains the basic thesis – that, despite the profound differences between roughly 160 poets appearing in the four selections described, there is an underlying shape which guides the four editors. A shape which tolerates 160 different poets cannot be ultra-specific.
Lucie-Smith includes 30 of Allott’s poets – although moving on by a whole generation and losing the first 27 years of Allott’s time-span. Essentially, Lucie-Smith accepts Allott’s version of the post-war period. Allott leaves out Charles Causley, at his most productive in the 1950s. Lucie-Smith was surely right to re-enlist Causley. His similarity to a folk style (i.e. to traditional songs as they might have been sung by sailors, sober or not, at the time he was writing) makes him marginal to a modernist editor – so “good but it doesn’t really count”.
Of poets in Allott, I am amazed that Lucie-Smith left out Kathleen Raine – she wrote so many compelling poems. But, in the context of an overall tendency which is secular, it was consistent to drop her over the side. Raine went on to write a thorough critique of the modernist thing. Having been married to two modernist poets, she was in a good position to to do that. She had seen it being set up, in the group around the magazine Experiment around 1930, run by students whom she knew very well. Her definition of the entire set of what modernism had blanked out, subjected to unobserving, is useful for getting the geography straight, even if the theses, drawn from the Counter-Enlightenment, are unconvincing. It is understandable that Lucie-Smith should omit her. She would have omitted him. Empson, in the Experiment offices, had put stress on exact analysis of feelings, with a background belief in materialism, the chemical basis for what happens in the mind. This is intertwined with Close Reading of poems. The two have been responsible for a great deal of English modernism. And Raine rejected these ideas, even in 1930.
Lucie-Smith includes very few religious poems – although, of poems published in his period, they were surely a high percentage. Rhyme, religion, disbelief in abstraction – all these were features of women’s writing, in the lost mid-century era. So the poor showing of women in Lucie-Smith’s book is structurally given, it isn’t a question of individual preferences emanating from him. He includes Peter Levi's poem about a pope – but it is in fact critical of religion, subtly attacking Pius XII for not protesting about the Holocaust. It is critical and about politics, so avoiding the features of religious poems which secular people object to.
Evidently the poets whom Mottram collected, and the rest of the Alternative sector who came along a bit later, would not have accepted that there was a shared Alternative agenda. They would have defined themselves as in revolt against that, and other things.
Crisis theory sustains the idea of constant historical progress. In fact, it may be that the idea that “every year most of the art of the past collapses and loses all meaning” is incredible unless you believe that there is a constant, unresolved, social crisis. If you accept that consciousness is normally only there for a few minutes a day (as at least some textbooks say), then someone might induce a crisis in order to prolong consciousness – because they feel that they are so intelligent that they win if legacy knowledge is useless. Even if other people associate it with anxiety, frustration, discomfort, etc. Are we really in a constant state of crisis? Certainly modernist art does well in a situation of crisis, and certainly the idea that art itself is in crisis appeals to some people and not to others. Highly intellectual art possibly has handicaps, but also a competitive advantage during a cultural crisis. Peter Fuller wrote that book “The crisis in modern art” - once you accept the truth of the title, then you need to read the book. I must say, I wasn’t aware that modern art was in crisis in 1983. Crisis and the obsolescence of tradition are complementary ideas. Maybe they're both wrong.
I have been looking at Sean O’Brien’s anthology The Firebox, which covers the years 1945 to 1998. How does this relate to past anthologies? Well, And 29.4% of his poets went to either Oxford or Cambridge. I did a count of how many poets from Lucie-Smith’s roster re-appear in O'Brien's. The count is 29. Given that his book covers almost 30 years after Lucie-Smith’s book was published, and so closed, this is a strikingly high level of overlap. The conclusion is that he has accepted Lucie-Smith's version of the post-war decades – and so that the sequence is Roberts– Allott – Lucie-Smith – O'Brien. O’Brien does not rescue poets whom Lucie-Smith had thrown off the boat. This is in line with the acceptance path which goes from Roberts onwards. We are looking at a consensus.
What is this telling us? We spoke of a modernist quadrant which includes free verse, secular views, the rejection of English nationalism, Enlightenment values, a belief in social progress as those values abolish rigid tradition, and finally graduate poets. My impression is that almost 100% of O’Brien’s poets are graduates. The university link is fundamental, to a point where it is never discussed. It is true that he has cut down on Oxford and Cambridge – the educational apex has widened, dramatically so. The interest in montage, by contrast, has faded out. The role of cultural criticism has also weakened (although it may have been replaced by something more diffuse and more consensual).
Snippet biographies no longer reveal details of a poet's educational status – people are too anxious about the meritocratic system for this to be neutral. So I can’t tell if any of these 126 poets missed out on university. It would be interesting to see further information on this. Yes, maybe they aren't all graduates. They are pretty close on it, as a group. (Causley and Roy Fuller did not go to a university. Interesting – one was a teacher, one a lawyer. It is hard to think back to the 1930s when that didn’t imply graduate status. No, they required vocational training. So poets born before 1930 are relatively unlikely to have attended university.)
O'Brien's selection is even more secular than Lucie-Smith's. It is noticeable that he does not reinstate Kathleen Raine – my impression is that he has closed out the line of “New Age spirituality” which Raine founded, not everyone’s taste but surely part of the big picture. I am speaking about "university taste" while avoiding a definition of it. That offers difficulties. However, Barker, Raine, and Causley clearly represent what university taste dislikes, and that may be a glimpse of its boundaries. If we're lucky.
I have a note saying that in 1950 there were 25 universities in Britain. Rather obviously that expansion meant that the poetic world could no longer be dominated by two or three of them – and that the graduate world was going to grow so huge that it could take over the literary world almost in its entirety. The apex was going to grow much wider but also much stronger. I don’t think there is much doubt that the influence of Close Reading and so on has diminished – anything monolithic and doctrinal has been steadily criticised, if only because the number of people involved in higher education has made the unspoken assumptions too obvious for people not to be aware of them. Graduates used to be a group so small and envied that they were homogeneous, that just isn’t true when there are several million of them. However, if everyone has gone through the mill of writing essays about poetry, most of them for two years of A-levels and then three years of Eng Lit at university, that is bound to have an effect – producing shared assumptions and blind spots. The four anthologies discussed are a site where you can gather information on the blind spots. The key factor may simply be approval – certain reaction patterns are so rewarded by teachers, and locked into anthologies, syllabi, and so on, that they come to seem natural. And continue to carry their burden of pleasure. Pleasure, approval, empathy – these are the conservative forces. And someone who is weak in these areas is unlikely to get far in the creative arts.
Tuesday 15 June 2021
Thoughts on study of history of taste
Thoughts on study of history of taste
After posting about the relationship between poetic taste and the institutions over the past ten years, I thought to summarise the results. The posts are under labels history of taste, exclusion, anti-modernism, statistics, among others.
summary of results.
We will start with the most basic figures and with the maximum position of sedition. This wins by being the most critical and having the most potential to change the set-up. We will consider later whether it is valid and livable.
One, poetry is a marginal art. Few people consume modern poetry. Response: if it is so unpopular, the people in charge don’t have the mandate to be in charge. It is like the committee of the MCC after losing a test series to Ireland.
Two, the developmental process and reinforcement. If we look at Allott’s Penguin anthology (1962 edition) and see that 39.5% of the poets included had studied at Oxford university, that gives us a strong hint that take-up of higher education is significant in the developmental process which led someone to write significant poetry. Young people are taught to write about poetry in a certain way, in sixth forms and at universities, and it is likely that this affects their aesthetic reactions too. So the dominant taste has institutional backing. It is hardly surprising if the young people who missed out on those classrooms, being the bulk of the population or of any year-group, should not share those tastes. Poetry would have to be obvious and self-explanatory, not just conforming to values which English teachers admire. Poetry is a game in which winning behaviour has been defined by institutional bias.
Study of the ”inclusion lines” of anthologies is generally rewarding. It recovers something which poets are fascinated by and which editors have invested great and enduring effort in. There is a basic ambiguity – the editor spends all day including people and the bar full of dissident poets wants to claim that they spent all day excluding people. This ambiguity is fundamentally unresolvable.
Three, the development of the dominant taste.
Shifts in time show that the dominant taste is not timeless and not directly linked to objective reality. Arguably, it is the outcome of struggles between rival groups, decided by a wider “response community” with interest and expertise. With a little effort, we can trace poets who were popualr but then disappeared. We can even trace “candidate cliques” who tried to stage a take-over of taste and failed.
Because modern poetry is largely consumed by the most educated group, other groups have to be considered as the excluded. A shift in the way poetry is presented (in magazines and on the radio, for example) would change the status of poetry by appealing to part of the non-participating audience.
Four, the status of outsiders. There is a central taste, and a large number of other ways of writing poetry are consigned to outsider status. In a different set-up (after firing the existing managers) these other styles would also be able to freely compete for centre stage.
Five, the role of empathy. People empathise with the poet, to read poetry, and so converge on existing poetry and on the existing people who read poetry. This sounds benign – perhaps poetry wouldn't work if empathy didn’t work. However, it is also conservative. Dissidents may have a bad time and simply disappear or fall silent. We surely want to recover dissident poetry – which may be the most interesting material, artistically.
The denser the solidarity of a culture-bearing group, the more variant trajectories there are which were never followed. The diversification of poetry since 1970 (to take an arbitrary point) is related to the coherence and conservatism of the literary world prior to 1970.
Six. Theory of a separate female taste. Specifically, the feminist version of the literary process says that institutional support imposes values quite different from the institutional ones, and that there is a separate, female and feminist, scale of poetic merit, which would inject a phalanx of female poets into the “top 100 poets”.
Seven, the idea of progress – that at a certain moment a new style arrives and every existing style becomes obsolete, provincial, fit for the junk shop. This sounds like the voice of a dominant group tearing up everyone else’s assets. It is the supreme moment of exclusion. If we see the proposal that “poetry plus Theory = good” and ”non-theoretical poetry = bad”, we are bound to suspect that this is a way to eliminate rivals. All the same, innovation is what we all want.
Now I plan to go through the same points again, in more detail.
One, poetry is a marginal art. Song lyrics have the status of poems by any reckoning. It is normal to listen to songs, in our society. If it is not normal to read modern poetry, the key must be the lack of music. Poetry without music is an economically marginal taste. Everybody else rejects printed poetry because it lacks music – this is very easy to analyse. It is the minority who enjoy print who ask for analysis. This would presumably take the form of “cognitive sociology” – some cognitive patterns are attractive to a minority, who are fluent in them. There is a background to this, presumably in terms of both innate ability and acquired skills. The aesthetic pleasure presumably follows that dual ability. I am hesitant about all this, because I don’t have the academic background needed to research this kind of issue, and I am not aware of available research that would hand me the results.
Two, the developmental process. Reinforcement.
If we look at Allott’s Penguin anthology, and see that 39.5% of the poets included had studied at Oxford university, that gives us a strong hint that the developmental process which led someone to write significant poetry follows and parallels the process which led them to take-up of higher education. (If we add in Cambridge, the figure is about 60%.) These are not two independent processes, they are strands in one more complex process. Since the dominant taste is the one supported by the English syllabus and the way exams are marked, it is reinforced by the management in 6th forms and at universities.
While we may be looking at poems written when the subject was aged 30, the process involves sensitive stages in adolescence: in order to pass exams at age 18, the subject had to follow a certain path from age fifteen on. That path must have included study and much reading, probably also attendance at a selective school, which involved contact with teachers who had the time to interact with pupils (especially gifted ones), and who themselves possibly had access to the elite culture. Quite possibly they were among the people who read modern poetry.
For an 18 year old, the act of writing a poem is likely to recall previous acts of writing school work for the approval of teachers. This is an aspect which people like to suppress, as part of leaving chilldhood behind. Actually, the teacher is the original reader, the original window through which you could see how other people reacted to your words. I am speculating that people who wrote poetry have positive memories of that experience, that the teachers generally had said to them “yes, very interesting”. Pupils are likely to reproduce the cognitive behaviours which teachers rewarded. I suspect that this is a buried stratum of verbal awareness, that learning how to be a poet reprograms it to almost non-existence. But approval is certainly motivating. It is not surprising if people who write good poems had earlier on been good at passing exams. Self-confidence may be the most precious resource. The system does produce 18 year olds with swelling self-confidence.
Successful pupils acquire a strong sense of approval for conforming to the dominant rules (which become dominant in this way). A completely different scale of values could be accessible if this reinforcement were interrupted, or if someone deliberately made an exit from them.
We can speak of an inside with no outside. That is the most pessimistic model. We could also speak of the memory of pleasure. As a reader you converge on the good poetry which actually exists. As a poet you congregate on the audience which actually reads poetry. These processes are profoundly pleasurable and pleasure is the most powerful reinforcement. Of course the prevalent system of values reproduces itself. Approval and pleasure are hard to separate – it is inorganic to separate them, at least completely. Consider someone who writes poetry, radically original indeed, which nobody enjoys. That is not very pleasurable. After a while, such poetry is likely not to get written. And this is where the bit about “an inside with no outside” might actually be true.
Three, the dominant taste.
British poetry has evolved rather rapidly over the past hundred years, and for this to happen it was necessary for the scene-makers not just to teach people what literary values were, but to reform those values, periodically, and inculcate new ones. Anthologies are a convenient way of studying these shifts, although they are not the things which make the shifts occur.
If you look at the series of three widely read anthologies – by Michael Roberts in 1936 (the Faber Book of Modern Verse), Allott in 1950 and again in 1962, and Lucie-Smith in 1970 – it is valid to regard them as victorious in the struggle over taste; they both take advantage of the victors and consecrate them. It is simple to show that there were thousands of other poets who do not show up in their contents lists and did not reach a susceptible audience of school pupils or students through that medium. (I discussed this through looking at a 1938 book by Herbert Palmer which presents the case against modernism in some detail.) It is likely that those three anthologists shared the same heritage, the later two massively influenced by their predecessor (or predecessors, respectively). Roberts left out several dozen quite well-known poets, ones whom Palmer discusses. if you look at those moments where taste has been decisively influenced, it is hard not to think that the outcome could have gone in several different ways.
Looking at sociological categories finds that the victorious poets tend to be male and Oxford graduates, but tends to bypass a more obvious qualification, that the editors were looking for a certain process of intellectual liberation, of “mastery of language”, and that this is what the victors had actually delivered. This is a diffuse quality, but could include an appearance of having reached the outside of conventional knowledge. Or of filtering naive self-consciousness through the findings of science (possibly including sociology?). Or of freedom from prejudice and common sense.
Without re-running a rather angry debate, let me suggest that Eric’s values were academic, effortful, highly literate, meritocratic, and so forth. He detached poetry from Pop culture rather thoroughly. The question whether Mottram is a breakaway or rather continuing the line of Allott. Eric’s definition of the ”British Poetry Revival” could be the fourth standard-setting anthology, successor to Roberts and Allott.
Two obvious lines which Roberts rejected are nationalist poetry and the rhetorical style. These vanished from history. I investigate them in several posts. The conclusion is not that they should be resurrected. (I do not investigate the decline of religious poetry, arguably more important.)
UKIP as a form of anti-modernism. The attack on liberal elites which took off around 2010 (arguably), included a negative version of high culture, as the “liberal elite”, and this is a moment where the hegemony becomes visible. English Nationalist poetry had been part of the cultural hegemony between around 1890 and 1920; there are questions around its demise around 1920 and why it has never come back. This shift is a stain, a way of tracing of where the consensus is. I discuss this under labels “UKIP” “anti-modernism” “right-wing poetry”.
There is a question whether the modernist revolt, as canonised by Roberts’ 1936 anthology, is actually the same as the taste “institutionalised” by the rise of English Literature courses at universities (which didn’t exist prior to 1920). This is problematic. Certainly, Eng Lit students in the 1950s were expected to read Eliot and Auden. But the details are problematic.
2a, statistics. The posts include a series which argue about numbers. The initial project was to define selectivity: so if Lucie-Smith selects 85 poets it is of interest to establish that there were possibly 3000 published poets he could have taken on for his survey of the span 1945 to 1970.
Listing out all the poets publishing (in long spreadsheets) is tedious but does highlight how many people get left out. Most probably, there are gatekeepers and they do not read all the poetry published. Rather, they rely on advice from other gatekeepers, an intelligent system which is good at picking up talent. But it is easy for the system to miss poets, either because they don’t play the poem-submission game hard enough or by sheer accident. The shared values of the gatekeepers are the hegemony, in plain sight. If you find a list which shows 906 books of poetry being published in 1977, you have to ask: how would you design a system in which an “intelligent filter” would sift through all that poetry? when the people taking part aren't being paid to do it?
Three, links of poetry to higher education
I have not written about this because it is too pervasive. It is likely that the poetry audience consists mainly of graduates, that the number of poets active has increased in line with the number of graduates in the population, that the proportion of female poets has risen in line with the proportion of females in the total set of graduates. Further, that the proportion of poets from ethnic minorities (BAME) is increasing in line with the number of ethnic minority graduates.
In this concept, the poetry audience is necessarily changing because the demographics of the graduate cohort are changing. Much of the debate around poetry is actually about how fast the changes should be, and what its attitudinal or doctrinal implications are.
The Sixties saw an expansion of the elite, with a great increase in the number of students in higher education. Evidently poetry expanded too, socially and stylistically. What it did not do was get away from the predominance of university study as a “qualification” of its writers and readers. This is a statement which can be flipped over – I am aware that people have very firm opinions on both sides of the argument. It is true that publishing a book makes knowledge available to anybody who picks the book up. It is true that the point of universities was to share and disseminate knowledge. You can't find fault with that. However, if you measure it is also true that the new students tended to come from middle-class families –and that, during the Sixties, the great majority of them were male. If Allott did an anthology for Penguin, the product was a paperback on sale for a few shillings (6/- in 1963) which would be on the shelves of any bookseller. This must have been an example of making culture available to everybody. That is the only possible description. He spends many pages of the book explaining why each poem is good, and exactly how good it is. That is designed to heighten accessibility. It tells you what you are looking for, it shows you what you are missing. He tells you not every poem is unattainably great. This is frank and democratic. What is less certain is how many readers actually wanted to read rather sombre analytical prose en route to artistic pleasure – in fact, we can see this as a hurdle, a selection factor.
Four, the status of outsiders
essay on folk-song and poetry (label “folk song”). Actually a naive style being used by the educated. What we see is the excluded layers of language being recuperated by accepted poets. This process of recuperation was taking place throughout the 20th century – it is not something with unexploited potential. One proposal is that the unsophisticated poetry at any point is soaked in styles which had once been dominant and which the centre had defined as out of date.
The research led me to get very interested in vanity press poetry. If you look at all the books published in a given year, it becomes obvious that a large number of titles are produced by poets you have never heard of – and publishers who never get a book reviewed. You have found the vanity press world. If you ask why people don’t know how poetry is written, don’t know how to get publishers interested, don’t know why people would like their poetry – that might answer the question of how do (other) people find out how poetry is written, what style is possible in the year we are actually living in, what the poetry audience wants. That is, looking at the outside of poetry illuminates what the inside is.
Poring over spreadsheets with thousands of titles, I have noticed some exceptions to the rule that vanity press poets have no careers because they do not understand how the literary process works. I can see at least four poets who started with vanity (or, obscurely, “semi-vanity”) presses who went on to achieve some fame – and, to be egocentric for a moment, writing poetry which I am familiar with and enjoy. (names withheld). I don't have exact data on how some rather subterranean publishers operated– but my impression is that, in the four decades I am concerned with, 20% of titles came from vanity presses who made the author pay, and possibly rather more than that. Sending out poems to many magazine editors gives those people the chance to reject you and prove you wrong. Not all poets are up to this. Maybe we have to rethink, and maybe poets who use vanity presses are not so dissimilar from everybody else. Sending your poems to 100 magazines is rational, but maybe not all fledgling poets are that rational in how they go about things.
Five, the role of empathy
It is legitimate to ask “why is this good taste”. Poetry is a profoundly social activity, everything converges. It is likely that your taste has been influenced by your teacher at school, by your friends as a student, by the anthologies you read as a teenager, by the theorists you read. There is a lock and key arrangement here – you acquire the accepted taste and then you find yourself perfectly equipped to read poetry which actually exists. In fact, you may well converge on what exists – if only because converging on what does not exist is pointless.
This is most cogent when we ask why most of the educated audience ignores modern poetry. The real audience acquired taste by face to face contact, to some extent. People who missed out on this probably don’t have the poetry-reading habit. It follows logically that they have not been influenced or programmed. In theory they could, as a body, represent a hundred kinds of poetry that nobody is writing. This remains a theory because they do not participate and we cannot acquire information about their reactions.
Possibly 0.01% up to 0.03% of the adult population read poetry as part of their normal cultural intake. So, wondering about the people who seldom or never participate has a large area to wander through – although almost no data is available to support any speculation. It is natural to hypothesise that this 0.03% resemble each other – they are attracted to the social activity around poetry because they find it easy to converse with the people who are taking part in that activity. Further, we would guess, taking part in that life causes them to converge further – as they share the same experiences, they become more similar. Actually, the more empathetic people are, the more they become similar to the other people who they interact with – poetry demands empathy, and empathy makes you share feelings and attitudes.
There is a paradox here. Someone who is bad at empathy may find poetry irritating, for staking the whole game on empathy. They may be unable to enjoy it, because empathy delivers the information which could clause pleasure. So we may have a route-map in which people who lack empathy are missing from this territory, and people who are strongly empathetic come to share the dominant values because their inclination is to share and understand other people's feelings and wishes.
Six. Theory of a separate female taste. Evidence is lacking. I have never considered this. The question of a new aesthetic is separate from the question of political agitation and legal reform or equal pay, practical issues. I am uncertain how to approach this. Various posts describe female poets omitted by Allott and Lucie-Smith and argue for their restoration. Label “mid-century women’s poetry”.
Seven. The idea of progress in art, and of reflexivity making art the subject of art. See label “historicism”. Let us look at what Roberts says in the introduction to his 1936 anthology. “... and a poem is equally confusing if it takes into account greater complexities of thought and intricacies of feeling than the reader has ever noticed. It unsettles the mind – and by the mind I mean more than the conscious mind; and the reader expends the energy he originally brought to the poem in trivial irritation with the poet. […] in so far as the poet is a good poet, the situation will remedy itself. [...]perhaps their recognition of the new element will be accelerated by his writing. But in either case they will welcome the way of speech which makes them articulate. […] Sometimes his writing is significant primarily for only a few of each generation as when it is evoked by some remote place or rare experience or an intricate thought which few can follow. [...] his writing has a value over and above that of its immediate appeal: he has added to the possibilities of speech, he has discovered evocative rhythms and image-sequences unknown before.
In a good poet a change or development of technique always springs from a change or development of subject-matter. [so] we must also discuss content[.]” This belief in innovation is obviously close to the criteria which Eric was applying. It is difficult to see a breach as having occurred between Roberts and the British Poetry Revival. Actually what Roberts evokes is the main line of British poetry. We have to speak of editors compromising with a more colloquial style, rather than Mottram’s idea being an innovation or deviation.
Roberts starts by describing a crisis, the economic crisis present in 1936, which directly affects poetry. It brings about a crisis of self-awareness which draws with it a crisis of style. Taking on modern poetry also involves a personal crisis for the reader, or this is what Roberts implies. It is hard to see that there has been a crisis continuously from 1936 to 2021. I think the proposal is more “we only become conscious in moments of crisis, our normal state is one of serenity and routine thoughts”. This is interesting – maybe it is also true that “poetry is not at all points in a stage of wiping out its past and embracing the radically new, most years are ones of stability and serenity”.
Does progress take place? I don't find this question to be soluble. If you see an editor, or a little group, say that the poetry they favour is the definitive style of the moment, you are bound to suspect that this is simply a tactical weapon to shove every other kind of poetry off stage. However, innovation is always possible, and it may be that something vital is happening in a small area of poetry, in any given year. This possibility seems to have become much less prominent since the 1990s, as the diversity of poetry is just too apparent to everybody – people no longer believe in a “leading edge”.
*** I have tried to remove judgements from the above text. In this conclusion, I will relax that a bit. I want to point out the problems with poets rejecting external criticism, and how they will bend any line of argument to support their belief in themselves. It is now popular to criticise society, or the literary world, for not being perfectly set up to admire a particular poet, i.e. the poet who is speaking. So, “if history had run differently then you would have liked my work. Therefore it is my right to ask for re-programming to take place. Your right to enjoy your own taste or to dislike my work is thus removed, I refuse to accept it.”
I am not keen on this line of reasoning. Readers get into poetry to acquire an experience. If you invalidate the judgements of good and bad which are integral to that experience, you invalidate experience altogether. Nobody is going to bother with poetry in this climate of opinion. Taste follows someone’s biography but I am sceptical that you can invalidate either one. Poets need to accept the validity of public opinion and of the people who buy their poetry. When your poems are rejected, rather than criticise the hegemony, write better poems.
If there is some idea in linguistics which I picked up as a student in 1976, it may well be that someone disproves it in 2021. I can think of specific examples. So I could have been wrong for the whole of that time. I expect quite a few things which I read in 1976 were actually untrue. I don't think this applies to poetry appreciation in the same way.
I have been talking about three classic anthologies because it is certain they were influential. If we looked at badly constructed anthologies, the influence is less certain, and we might be scrutinising the stupidity of one editor, rather than seeing a real part of the cultural landscape. But, obviously, there are some pretty bad anthologies around. Poetry With an Edge is an anthology which does not convince, either by the quality of poets included or by the arguments and assertions about the quality of the poets. However, it only a sample from one publisher- it is not a standard anthology and nobody supposed that it was. The flaws it shows are not, straight away, flaws in the scene as a whole, rather than local ones. The underlying point of the contents list, that this publisher was signing more new poets than any other one, is convincing because it is true.
Gesturing towards that crowd of the rejected does not at all tell us that we want to read them all. Excursions into the Greyed-Out Material (the redacted names, you could say) highlight the act of exclusion but do not invalidate it. I think Roberts, Allott, and Lucie-Smith did incredibly well in finding the good poetry. Of course it is compelling to dig up poets they passed by. But mostly they got it right. It is interesting to see how Roberts left out Edward Thomas, but Allott, following Roberts scrupulously for the most part, put him back in – even though Allott’s anthology technically starts in 1918 and Thomas died from the blast wave of a shell in 1917. What I find difficult is “reversing figure and ground”, so that their choices would seem invalid.
If we suppose Lucie-Smith considered 400 poets to assemble his volume with 86 poets, the possible data about why each of the others was rejected is very voluminous. Unfortunately it is not on record. We could use it only after making it up. That is actually two problems, volume and invisibility. The process of criticising anthologies has to sail round these problems. It is certainly easier to look at the winning poems, which we can read – but that means leaving out the process of selection. Silence is too important to be passed over in silence.
When New Lines came out, crystallising the Movement as a standard of taste, there was a symposium in Essays in Criticism in response to it. That gesture shows how important the anthology was. But, if you read the symposium, nobody in it likes New Lines very much. So, the Movement was not the hegemony in 1956. There is a hegemony but it embraces a whole range of central standards and individuals, so that you can never look at it directly. If we consider that Allott was a “normative” editor, you have to take on the fact that he selected 86 different poets. They are extremely different from each other. He probably thought he was covering the spectrum, and this is what all gatekeepers think.
I have not read any vanity press publications, although logically that should be a source of information on the exclusion process. I mentioned four people whom I know to have used paid-for publications and who later emerged as significant poets – since I have read their work, that is useful, if low-grade, information about that greyed-out sector.
After posting about the relationship between poetic taste and the institutions over the past ten years, I thought to summarise the results. The posts are under labels history of taste, exclusion, anti-modernism, statistics, among others.
summary of results.
We will start with the most basic figures and with the maximum position of sedition. This wins by being the most critical and having the most potential to change the set-up. We will consider later whether it is valid and livable.
One, poetry is a marginal art. Few people consume modern poetry. Response: if it is so unpopular, the people in charge don’t have the mandate to be in charge. It is like the committee of the MCC after losing a test series to Ireland.
Two, the developmental process and reinforcement. If we look at Allott’s Penguin anthology (1962 edition) and see that 39.5% of the poets included had studied at Oxford university, that gives us a strong hint that take-up of higher education is significant in the developmental process which led someone to write significant poetry. Young people are taught to write about poetry in a certain way, in sixth forms and at universities, and it is likely that this affects their aesthetic reactions too. So the dominant taste has institutional backing. It is hardly surprising if the young people who missed out on those classrooms, being the bulk of the population or of any year-group, should not share those tastes. Poetry would have to be obvious and self-explanatory, not just conforming to values which English teachers admire. Poetry is a game in which winning behaviour has been defined by institutional bias.
Study of the ”inclusion lines” of anthologies is generally rewarding. It recovers something which poets are fascinated by and which editors have invested great and enduring effort in. There is a basic ambiguity – the editor spends all day including people and the bar full of dissident poets wants to claim that they spent all day excluding people. This ambiguity is fundamentally unresolvable.
Three, the development of the dominant taste.
Shifts in time show that the dominant taste is not timeless and not directly linked to objective reality. Arguably, it is the outcome of struggles between rival groups, decided by a wider “response community” with interest and expertise. With a little effort, we can trace poets who were popualr but then disappeared. We can even trace “candidate cliques” who tried to stage a take-over of taste and failed.
Because modern poetry is largely consumed by the most educated group, other groups have to be considered as the excluded. A shift in the way poetry is presented (in magazines and on the radio, for example) would change the status of poetry by appealing to part of the non-participating audience.
Four, the status of outsiders. There is a central taste, and a large number of other ways of writing poetry are consigned to outsider status. In a different set-up (after firing the existing managers) these other styles would also be able to freely compete for centre stage.
Five, the role of empathy. People empathise with the poet, to read poetry, and so converge on existing poetry and on the existing people who read poetry. This sounds benign – perhaps poetry wouldn't work if empathy didn’t work. However, it is also conservative. Dissidents may have a bad time and simply disappear or fall silent. We surely want to recover dissident poetry – which may be the most interesting material, artistically.
The denser the solidarity of a culture-bearing group, the more variant trajectories there are which were never followed. The diversification of poetry since 1970 (to take an arbitrary point) is related to the coherence and conservatism of the literary world prior to 1970.
Six. Theory of a separate female taste. Specifically, the feminist version of the literary process says that institutional support imposes values quite different from the institutional ones, and that there is a separate, female and feminist, scale of poetic merit, which would inject a phalanx of female poets into the “top 100 poets”.
Seven, the idea of progress – that at a certain moment a new style arrives and every existing style becomes obsolete, provincial, fit for the junk shop. This sounds like the voice of a dominant group tearing up everyone else’s assets. It is the supreme moment of exclusion. If we see the proposal that “poetry plus Theory = good” and ”non-theoretical poetry = bad”, we are bound to suspect that this is a way to eliminate rivals. All the same, innovation is what we all want.
Now I plan to go through the same points again, in more detail.
One, poetry is a marginal art. Song lyrics have the status of poems by any reckoning. It is normal to listen to songs, in our society. If it is not normal to read modern poetry, the key must be the lack of music. Poetry without music is an economically marginal taste. Everybody else rejects printed poetry because it lacks music – this is very easy to analyse. It is the minority who enjoy print who ask for analysis. This would presumably take the form of “cognitive sociology” – some cognitive patterns are attractive to a minority, who are fluent in them. There is a background to this, presumably in terms of both innate ability and acquired skills. The aesthetic pleasure presumably follows that dual ability. I am hesitant about all this, because I don’t have the academic background needed to research this kind of issue, and I am not aware of available research that would hand me the results.
Two, the developmental process. Reinforcement.
If we look at Allott’s Penguin anthology, and see that 39.5% of the poets included had studied at Oxford university, that gives us a strong hint that the developmental process which led someone to write significant poetry follows and parallels the process which led them to take-up of higher education. (If we add in Cambridge, the figure is about 60%.) These are not two independent processes, they are strands in one more complex process. Since the dominant taste is the one supported by the English syllabus and the way exams are marked, it is reinforced by the management in 6th forms and at universities.
While we may be looking at poems written when the subject was aged 30, the process involves sensitive stages in adolescence: in order to pass exams at age 18, the subject had to follow a certain path from age fifteen on. That path must have included study and much reading, probably also attendance at a selective school, which involved contact with teachers who had the time to interact with pupils (especially gifted ones), and who themselves possibly had access to the elite culture. Quite possibly they were among the people who read modern poetry.
For an 18 year old, the act of writing a poem is likely to recall previous acts of writing school work for the approval of teachers. This is an aspect which people like to suppress, as part of leaving chilldhood behind. Actually, the teacher is the original reader, the original window through which you could see how other people reacted to your words. I am speculating that people who wrote poetry have positive memories of that experience, that the teachers generally had said to them “yes, very interesting”. Pupils are likely to reproduce the cognitive behaviours which teachers rewarded. I suspect that this is a buried stratum of verbal awareness, that learning how to be a poet reprograms it to almost non-existence. But approval is certainly motivating. It is not surprising if people who write good poems had earlier on been good at passing exams. Self-confidence may be the most precious resource. The system does produce 18 year olds with swelling self-confidence.
Successful pupils acquire a strong sense of approval for conforming to the dominant rules (which become dominant in this way). A completely different scale of values could be accessible if this reinforcement were interrupted, or if someone deliberately made an exit from them.
We can speak of an inside with no outside. That is the most pessimistic model. We could also speak of the memory of pleasure. As a reader you converge on the good poetry which actually exists. As a poet you congregate on the audience which actually reads poetry. These processes are profoundly pleasurable and pleasure is the most powerful reinforcement. Of course the prevalent system of values reproduces itself. Approval and pleasure are hard to separate – it is inorganic to separate them, at least completely. Consider someone who writes poetry, radically original indeed, which nobody enjoys. That is not very pleasurable. After a while, such poetry is likely not to get written. And this is where the bit about “an inside with no outside” might actually be true.
Three, the dominant taste.
British poetry has evolved rather rapidly over the past hundred years, and for this to happen it was necessary for the scene-makers not just to teach people what literary values were, but to reform those values, periodically, and inculcate new ones. Anthologies are a convenient way of studying these shifts, although they are not the things which make the shifts occur.
If you look at the series of three widely read anthologies – by Michael Roberts in 1936 (the Faber Book of Modern Verse), Allott in 1950 and again in 1962, and Lucie-Smith in 1970 – it is valid to regard them as victorious in the struggle over taste; they both take advantage of the victors and consecrate them. It is simple to show that there were thousands of other poets who do not show up in their contents lists and did not reach a susceptible audience of school pupils or students through that medium. (I discussed this through looking at a 1938 book by Herbert Palmer which presents the case against modernism in some detail.) It is likely that those three anthologists shared the same heritage, the later two massively influenced by their predecessor (or predecessors, respectively). Roberts left out several dozen quite well-known poets, ones whom Palmer discusses. if you look at those moments where taste has been decisively influenced, it is hard not to think that the outcome could have gone in several different ways.
Looking at sociological categories finds that the victorious poets tend to be male and Oxford graduates, but tends to bypass a more obvious qualification, that the editors were looking for a certain process of intellectual liberation, of “mastery of language”, and that this is what the victors had actually delivered. This is a diffuse quality, but could include an appearance of having reached the outside of conventional knowledge. Or of filtering naive self-consciousness through the findings of science (possibly including sociology?). Or of freedom from prejudice and common sense.
Without re-running a rather angry debate, let me suggest that Eric’s values were academic, effortful, highly literate, meritocratic, and so forth. He detached poetry from Pop culture rather thoroughly. The question whether Mottram is a breakaway or rather continuing the line of Allott. Eric’s definition of the ”British Poetry Revival” could be the fourth standard-setting anthology, successor to Roberts and Allott.
Two obvious lines which Roberts rejected are nationalist poetry and the rhetorical style. These vanished from history. I investigate them in several posts. The conclusion is not that they should be resurrected. (I do not investigate the decline of religious poetry, arguably more important.)
UKIP as a form of anti-modernism. The attack on liberal elites which took off around 2010 (arguably), included a negative version of high culture, as the “liberal elite”, and this is a moment where the hegemony becomes visible. English Nationalist poetry had been part of the cultural hegemony between around 1890 and 1920; there are questions around its demise around 1920 and why it has never come back. This shift is a stain, a way of tracing of where the consensus is. I discuss this under labels “UKIP” “anti-modernism” “right-wing poetry”.
There is a question whether the modernist revolt, as canonised by Roberts’ 1936 anthology, is actually the same as the taste “institutionalised” by the rise of English Literature courses at universities (which didn’t exist prior to 1920). This is problematic. Certainly, Eng Lit students in the 1950s were expected to read Eliot and Auden. But the details are problematic.
2a, statistics. The posts include a series which argue about numbers. The initial project was to define selectivity: so if Lucie-Smith selects 85 poets it is of interest to establish that there were possibly 3000 published poets he could have taken on for his survey of the span 1945 to 1970.
Listing out all the poets publishing (in long spreadsheets) is tedious but does highlight how many people get left out. Most probably, there are gatekeepers and they do not read all the poetry published. Rather, they rely on advice from other gatekeepers, an intelligent system which is good at picking up talent. But it is easy for the system to miss poets, either because they don’t play the poem-submission game hard enough or by sheer accident. The shared values of the gatekeepers are the hegemony, in plain sight. If you find a list which shows 906 books of poetry being published in 1977, you have to ask: how would you design a system in which an “intelligent filter” would sift through all that poetry? when the people taking part aren't being paid to do it?
Three, links of poetry to higher education
I have not written about this because it is too pervasive. It is likely that the poetry audience consists mainly of graduates, that the number of poets active has increased in line with the number of graduates in the population, that the proportion of female poets has risen in line with the proportion of females in the total set of graduates. Further, that the proportion of poets from ethnic minorities (BAME) is increasing in line with the number of ethnic minority graduates.
In this concept, the poetry audience is necessarily changing because the demographics of the graduate cohort are changing. Much of the debate around poetry is actually about how fast the changes should be, and what its attitudinal or doctrinal implications are.
The Sixties saw an expansion of the elite, with a great increase in the number of students in higher education. Evidently poetry expanded too, socially and stylistically. What it did not do was get away from the predominance of university study as a “qualification” of its writers and readers. This is a statement which can be flipped over – I am aware that people have very firm opinions on both sides of the argument. It is true that publishing a book makes knowledge available to anybody who picks the book up. It is true that the point of universities was to share and disseminate knowledge. You can't find fault with that. However, if you measure it is also true that the new students tended to come from middle-class families –and that, during the Sixties, the great majority of them were male. If Allott did an anthology for Penguin, the product was a paperback on sale for a few shillings (6/- in 1963) which would be on the shelves of any bookseller. This must have been an example of making culture available to everybody. That is the only possible description. He spends many pages of the book explaining why each poem is good, and exactly how good it is. That is designed to heighten accessibility. It tells you what you are looking for, it shows you what you are missing. He tells you not every poem is unattainably great. This is frank and democratic. What is less certain is how many readers actually wanted to read rather sombre analytical prose en route to artistic pleasure – in fact, we can see this as a hurdle, a selection factor.
Four, the status of outsiders
essay on folk-song and poetry (label “folk song”). Actually a naive style being used by the educated. What we see is the excluded layers of language being recuperated by accepted poets. This process of recuperation was taking place throughout the 20th century – it is not something with unexploited potential. One proposal is that the unsophisticated poetry at any point is soaked in styles which had once been dominant and which the centre had defined as out of date.
The research led me to get very interested in vanity press poetry. If you look at all the books published in a given year, it becomes obvious that a large number of titles are produced by poets you have never heard of – and publishers who never get a book reviewed. You have found the vanity press world. If you ask why people don’t know how poetry is written, don’t know how to get publishers interested, don’t know why people would like their poetry – that might answer the question of how do (other) people find out how poetry is written, what style is possible in the year we are actually living in, what the poetry audience wants. That is, looking at the outside of poetry illuminates what the inside is.
Poring over spreadsheets with thousands of titles, I have noticed some exceptions to the rule that vanity press poets have no careers because they do not understand how the literary process works. I can see at least four poets who started with vanity (or, obscurely, “semi-vanity”) presses who went on to achieve some fame – and, to be egocentric for a moment, writing poetry which I am familiar with and enjoy. (names withheld). I don't have exact data on how some rather subterranean publishers operated– but my impression is that, in the four decades I am concerned with, 20% of titles came from vanity presses who made the author pay, and possibly rather more than that. Sending out poems to many magazine editors gives those people the chance to reject you and prove you wrong. Not all poets are up to this. Maybe we have to rethink, and maybe poets who use vanity presses are not so dissimilar from everybody else. Sending your poems to 100 magazines is rational, but maybe not all fledgling poets are that rational in how they go about things.
Five, the role of empathy
It is legitimate to ask “why is this good taste”. Poetry is a profoundly social activity, everything converges. It is likely that your taste has been influenced by your teacher at school, by your friends as a student, by the anthologies you read as a teenager, by the theorists you read. There is a lock and key arrangement here – you acquire the accepted taste and then you find yourself perfectly equipped to read poetry which actually exists. In fact, you may well converge on what exists – if only because converging on what does not exist is pointless.
This is most cogent when we ask why most of the educated audience ignores modern poetry. The real audience acquired taste by face to face contact, to some extent. People who missed out on this probably don’t have the poetry-reading habit. It follows logically that they have not been influenced or programmed. In theory they could, as a body, represent a hundred kinds of poetry that nobody is writing. This remains a theory because they do not participate and we cannot acquire information about their reactions.
Possibly 0.01% up to 0.03% of the adult population read poetry as part of their normal cultural intake. So, wondering about the people who seldom or never participate has a large area to wander through – although almost no data is available to support any speculation. It is natural to hypothesise that this 0.03% resemble each other – they are attracted to the social activity around poetry because they find it easy to converse with the people who are taking part in that activity. Further, we would guess, taking part in that life causes them to converge further – as they share the same experiences, they become more similar. Actually, the more empathetic people are, the more they become similar to the other people who they interact with – poetry demands empathy, and empathy makes you share feelings and attitudes.
There is a paradox here. Someone who is bad at empathy may find poetry irritating, for staking the whole game on empathy. They may be unable to enjoy it, because empathy delivers the information which could clause pleasure. So we may have a route-map in which people who lack empathy are missing from this territory, and people who are strongly empathetic come to share the dominant values because their inclination is to share and understand other people's feelings and wishes.
Six. Theory of a separate female taste. Evidence is lacking. I have never considered this. The question of a new aesthetic is separate from the question of political agitation and legal reform or equal pay, practical issues. I am uncertain how to approach this. Various posts describe female poets omitted by Allott and Lucie-Smith and argue for their restoration. Label “mid-century women’s poetry”.
Seven. The idea of progress in art, and of reflexivity making art the subject of art. See label “historicism”. Let us look at what Roberts says in the introduction to his 1936 anthology. “... and a poem is equally confusing if it takes into account greater complexities of thought and intricacies of feeling than the reader has ever noticed. It unsettles the mind – and by the mind I mean more than the conscious mind; and the reader expends the energy he originally brought to the poem in trivial irritation with the poet. […] in so far as the poet is a good poet, the situation will remedy itself. [...]perhaps their recognition of the new element will be accelerated by his writing. But in either case they will welcome the way of speech which makes them articulate. […] Sometimes his writing is significant primarily for only a few of each generation as when it is evoked by some remote place or rare experience or an intricate thought which few can follow. [...] his writing has a value over and above that of its immediate appeal: he has added to the possibilities of speech, he has discovered evocative rhythms and image-sequences unknown before.
In a good poet a change or development of technique always springs from a change or development of subject-matter. [so] we must also discuss content[.]” This belief in innovation is obviously close to the criteria which Eric was applying. It is difficult to see a breach as having occurred between Roberts and the British Poetry Revival. Actually what Roberts evokes is the main line of British poetry. We have to speak of editors compromising with a more colloquial style, rather than Mottram’s idea being an innovation or deviation.
Roberts starts by describing a crisis, the economic crisis present in 1936, which directly affects poetry. It brings about a crisis of self-awareness which draws with it a crisis of style. Taking on modern poetry also involves a personal crisis for the reader, or this is what Roberts implies. It is hard to see that there has been a crisis continuously from 1936 to 2021. I think the proposal is more “we only become conscious in moments of crisis, our normal state is one of serenity and routine thoughts”. This is interesting – maybe it is also true that “poetry is not at all points in a stage of wiping out its past and embracing the radically new, most years are ones of stability and serenity”.
Does progress take place? I don't find this question to be soluble. If you see an editor, or a little group, say that the poetry they favour is the definitive style of the moment, you are bound to suspect that this is simply a tactical weapon to shove every other kind of poetry off stage. However, innovation is always possible, and it may be that something vital is happening in a small area of poetry, in any given year. This possibility seems to have become much less prominent since the 1990s, as the diversity of poetry is just too apparent to everybody – people no longer believe in a “leading edge”.
*** I have tried to remove judgements from the above text. In this conclusion, I will relax that a bit. I want to point out the problems with poets rejecting external criticism, and how they will bend any line of argument to support their belief in themselves. It is now popular to criticise society, or the literary world, for not being perfectly set up to admire a particular poet, i.e. the poet who is speaking. So, “if history had run differently then you would have liked my work. Therefore it is my right to ask for re-programming to take place. Your right to enjoy your own taste or to dislike my work is thus removed, I refuse to accept it.”
I am not keen on this line of reasoning. Readers get into poetry to acquire an experience. If you invalidate the judgements of good and bad which are integral to that experience, you invalidate experience altogether. Nobody is going to bother with poetry in this climate of opinion. Taste follows someone’s biography but I am sceptical that you can invalidate either one. Poets need to accept the validity of public opinion and of the people who buy their poetry. When your poems are rejected, rather than criticise the hegemony, write better poems.
If there is some idea in linguistics which I picked up as a student in 1976, it may well be that someone disproves it in 2021. I can think of specific examples. So I could have been wrong for the whole of that time. I expect quite a few things which I read in 1976 were actually untrue. I don't think this applies to poetry appreciation in the same way.
I have been talking about three classic anthologies because it is certain they were influential. If we looked at badly constructed anthologies, the influence is less certain, and we might be scrutinising the stupidity of one editor, rather than seeing a real part of the cultural landscape. But, obviously, there are some pretty bad anthologies around. Poetry With an Edge is an anthology which does not convince, either by the quality of poets included or by the arguments and assertions about the quality of the poets. However, it only a sample from one publisher- it is not a standard anthology and nobody supposed that it was. The flaws it shows are not, straight away, flaws in the scene as a whole, rather than local ones. The underlying point of the contents list, that this publisher was signing more new poets than any other one, is convincing because it is true.
Gesturing towards that crowd of the rejected does not at all tell us that we want to read them all. Excursions into the Greyed-Out Material (the redacted names, you could say) highlight the act of exclusion but do not invalidate it. I think Roberts, Allott, and Lucie-Smith did incredibly well in finding the good poetry. Of course it is compelling to dig up poets they passed by. But mostly they got it right. It is interesting to see how Roberts left out Edward Thomas, but Allott, following Roberts scrupulously for the most part, put him back in – even though Allott’s anthology technically starts in 1918 and Thomas died from the blast wave of a shell in 1917. What I find difficult is “reversing figure and ground”, so that their choices would seem invalid.
If we suppose Lucie-Smith considered 400 poets to assemble his volume with 86 poets, the possible data about why each of the others was rejected is very voluminous. Unfortunately it is not on record. We could use it only after making it up. That is actually two problems, volume and invisibility. The process of criticising anthologies has to sail round these problems. It is certainly easier to look at the winning poems, which we can read – but that means leaving out the process of selection. Silence is too important to be passed over in silence.
When New Lines came out, crystallising the Movement as a standard of taste, there was a symposium in Essays in Criticism in response to it. That gesture shows how important the anthology was. But, if you read the symposium, nobody in it likes New Lines very much. So, the Movement was not the hegemony in 1956. There is a hegemony but it embraces a whole range of central standards and individuals, so that you can never look at it directly. If we consider that Allott was a “normative” editor, you have to take on the fact that he selected 86 different poets. They are extremely different from each other. He probably thought he was covering the spectrum, and this is what all gatekeepers think.
I have not read any vanity press publications, although logically that should be a source of information on the exclusion process. I mentioned four people whom I know to have used paid-for publications and who later emerged as significant poets – since I have read their work, that is useful, if low-grade, information about that greyed-out sector.
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