A forgotten attempt to document women’s poetry

Winter Were: a forgotten attempt to document women’s poetry
Theodora Roscoe, Mary Winter Were, compiled by, Poems by Contemporary Women; Hutchinson, 1944 75 pp.
“Includes poems by the compilers, Vera Brittain, Clemence Dane, Viola Meynell, Vita Sackville-West, and others.”
Do not pronounce this “winterwear”.
I have never heard of this anthology but I was trying to check if Were was British or not and the title came up in a catalogue. 29 poets. None of it is any good… a forgotten book. There are 60 pages actually of poetry. It is kitsch. Wartime schaltz. There is one exception… a poem by Sylvia Lynd which surprisingly enough I quoted in a post elsewhere in this blog, a few years ago (August 2010). It is about a flycatcher… not about the war, not pseudo-religious, not rhyming; full of concrete details. It is about a bird… and light on its feet, rapid, sudden in movement.

I bought the book because I was surprised to see an anthology with this criterion and to be honest I thought that Trevor Kneale had broken a duck with his 1973 anthology of 41 women poets. There was an anthology called The Distaff Muse (1949), by Clifford Bax and Meum Stewart… there was a copy in my family home, I am not sure if my mother or my grandmother bought it. My grandmother had lots of poetry. But ‘Distaff’ goes back to the Middle Ages, in fact it starts with an excerpt from a Middle English poem called The Flower and the Leaf which has no author but which at least one historian thought might be female because of its sensitivity to flowers, textiles, and fine shades of colour. Is this scientific? who can say, but when I read this as a teenager I found it very provocative because I just didn’t have a view of what was feminine and what wasn't. So actually this level of “primary object choice” could be terribly important, I could see that, but I couldn't process it. George Saintsbury said “Few would lay much real stress on the argument that The Flower and the Leaf must have been written by a woman because“ etc. etc., and, yes, Saintsbury taught my grandmother, at Edinburgh.
I did get a copy with a dust jacket and the dj says "In these pages, the love of nature and husbandry, inherent in English women, is very evident, while motherhood and the spiritual side of life are not forgotten." A lot of the poems are about birds or flowers (and, yes, either a flower or a leaf is a common subject). The conclusion from reading Roscoe/Were in isolation is that women were concentrated in the conservative and artificial and pious realm. You can rescue them by rejecting modernity, so bold language and secular values, but actually public taste has gone decisively in that direction since 1944. Or, you can reflect how there was no “overview” of women's poetry at the time, it wasn’t carefully documented and so you could have an anthology which leaves out the best dozen or so women poets doing it at the time. ("This is the only collection of poems written entirely by women.") That is, this is a useless source and one of a category of low-grade sources. That is, recovering early or mid-20th C women’s poetry is tricky and we may have a long way to go in it. Perhaps Deryn Rees-Jones has said the last word.. and perhaps there is more to uncover. So
DUNKIRK
They looked at Death,
and with him nonchalantly passed the time of day,
he paused bewildered – said beneath his breath
“Immortals these”, and laid his scythe away.
(Susan D’Arcy Clark)

- yes, this is kitsch. Patriotism plus spirituality – it is just a No. There was a time when people really had trouble separating religion from the well-being of the British Empire. This was not benign for poetry. Was the Empire mainly about money? yes.

A number of the poets are credited as belonging to the Society of Women Journalists. It looks as if a lot of the poems are based on expertise in journalism… so the poem always has a very firm idea of what feeling you are supposed to have. A box with “your feeling here”. They start with the conclusion and are reckless about methods. The authors have no interest in poetry as such - certainly not in technique and the conscious history of style. The themes are usually patriotic and spiritual -connected to Church and State, actually. The poems fit inside the authority structures and are indeed authoritarian in approach – they don’t start with doubt or follow through with evidence. It seems other contributors were involved in organising war work and reached the anthology through networks of such Top People rather than through networks based on an interest in poetry. It is significant that women began to control parts of the State, as men were away at war and also because the State was doing ten times as much as it had before 1939. These were nurturing organisations and there is visibly a link to feminism as it developed in the 1970s. So, committees running organisations that weren’t making war and weren’t making profits. This is an interesting model. However, being an important person does not inevitably lead on to writing important poetry.
Clemence Dane lived from 1888-1965, and we have to ask how contemporary? Based on the Internet, some of the authors were suffragettes of WWI vintage and some were gay. They do get credit for this. However, it doesn't look as if many of them were primarily poets. One of the compilers was born in the 1880s and it looks like the concept is “contemporary in 1910”. Stylistically, all these poets were out of date, and evidently quite a few people in 1944 were still writing Victorian poetry. Rapidly, we move on to the prior question, “how is it that Now is owned by a minority and many poets who are alive and writing are not Now and do not co-own what Now is?”. I am unwilling to answer this although numerous of my posts (label “history of taste”) investigate it. Anthologies by Michael Roberts, K Allott, and E. Lucie-Smith, over 35 years, document the notion of Now! which was victorious.
It is apparent, all the same, that some people wanted to consume poetry but found modernism puzzling, alienating, and unpleasurable. The new regime included printing and offer for sale of poems in whose course it was possible to fail… so separating an elite, with Close Reading skills or modern ideas or whatever, from another reading public which regarded Tennyson and Housman as the standard. So in the Thirties, and up to 1944, there were people who wrote completely non-modernist poetry, and they were part of that “market segment” which disliked modernism. However, tracing the “social biography” of this segment does not remove the fact that these poems are no good. Dorothy Wellesley wrote some good poetry, but check this -

He is not dead, nor liveth
The little child in the grave;
And men have known for ever
That he walketh again:
They hear him November evenings,
When acorns fall with the rain.


Deep in the hearts of men Within his tomb he lieth,
And when the heart is desolate
He desolate sigheth.
(“The Buried Child”)

This is just kitsch, again. And why is it in 16th century language? I guess the claim is to be spiritual, by using the language of the Prayer Book and the King James Bible. We may also think of the radio serial “The Shadow” (“who knows what evil lies within the hearts of men? The Shadow knows”). Looking closely at Palmer’s 1938 Post-Victorian Poetry shows that, while he has a vocally anti-modernist position, he does not present any gifted anti-modernist poets from the previous ten years… traditional poetry has sunk and gone to the bottom of the lake. It has unchained the inner kitschmeister. I don’t have an explanation for this. So we have “the rise of modernism” and “the failure of conservatism” and these are two quite separate stories, involving two separate groups of people. The crisis has two aspects, and I only have the history of one side, who were mainly Oxford graduates as it turns out. Close Reading did discourage students from writing kitsch.

There is a party of the defeated, with Resentment as its stock in trade. Palmer actually sets out their market offer, as it was in 1938. So of all the frustrated poets, some are “alternative”, experimental, and so on – but probably 95% are stuck in conservative attitudes and reject “advances in taste” as well as being unable to build those advances into their own practice.
Elsewhere, “Clemence Dane is the ‘invisible woman’ of British 20th century culture: a prolific and popular writer and artist, described by her great friend Noel Coward as ‘a wonderful unique mixture of artist, writer, games mistress, poet and egomaniac.’” And she was the model for Mme Arcati in his play Blithe Spirits. Her poetry is no good. It seems she was gay and a feminist, as well as making pots of money.
It would be nice if reading bad poetry bestowed on you knowledge of the history of bad poetry but that is just a vain hope. This is a really bad book but it is futile to think that it is an X-ray of women’s poetry at the time. I very much doubt this and clearly there were quite a few good women poets who just don’t feature here. That is the difference in the 1970s – there were people who wanted to be experts in women's poetry and created that expertise by effective and persistent work, the bureaucracy of culture (if you like). A good anthology is the result of years of preparatory work (and not just contacting people you know as fellow-journalists).

I have never heard any of my fellow fans of Forties poetry mention this anthology, and I don’t feel inclined to share it with them. It clearly isn’t a window on exciting processes. Unlike Rexroth, for instance, and his great 1948 anthology. I have just noticed that, out of 9 female poets in that anthology, none are in Lucie-Smith. A check… Rexroth was collecting “new” poets, so all his selections should fit into the frame of “1945 to 1970”, which is the frame Lucie-Smith uses. This tells a tale about the instability of taste. How your career can float away from you. Of nine female poets in Rexroth, three never got a book out. Eithne Wilkins was one. I am glad to say that someone is doing a book by her. We heard details about this at the Apocalyptics conference in Sheffield earlier this year.
Of 6 female poets in Allott’s Penguin anthology, only 3 are still there in Lucie-Smith’s Penguin anthology, 8 years later.
But, what about the hot new poetry of 1470? "The narrator sees a company of ladies and knights arriving, dressed in white and wearing chaplets made of various kinds of leaf. The knights joust with each other, then join the ladies and dance with them in the shade of a laurel tree. Then a second company arrives, this time dressed in green and ornamented with flowers. They perform a bergerette, a dance-song, in praise of the daisy, until they are overcome first by the oppressive midday heat and then by a storm. The company of the leaf, safely sheltered by their laurel, courteously come to the aid of the company of the flower drying their drenched clothes over improvised fires.

And after that they yede about gadering
Pleasaunt salades, which they made hem eat
For to refresh their great unkindly heat.

OK, this doesn’t exactly sound macho. Since when do men make salads. Further “The great philologist Walter Skeat accepted Bradshaw's judgement, and spoke of the poem's "tinsel-like glitter…which gives it a flashy attractiveness, in striking contrast to the easy grace of Chaucer's workmanship“ - this sounds so much like what men always say about women’s poetry that it is an argument for female authorship. Could we define this as “ the first musical” and insert Jeanne Crain or Ruby Keeler into it? There was a musical called "Hooray for Daisy" in the 1950s, but I think it was about a cow rather than a daisy.