Michael Roberts as Machiavel

The free ticket

The starting point is a consideration of a dataset of thousands of 20th C poets. Most of these had no careers, they do not feature in the anthologies. This greyed out background makes us think more about what is special in the trajectory of the poets who did get selected, who do feature in a trawl of anthologies. Part of this is a sense of Time – being able to see the history of literature and to place yourself on a time-line, and so work out what style is appropriate. I previously discussed the issue of why one person decides what Now is and another doesn't, but we are not going to get into that again. Samuel Hynes titled a book "the Auden generation" which conducts itself as if only four poets had debuted during the 1930s. Surely "generation" implies everyone, and that would include several hundred people (even if "emerging" was not something they got round to).

I noted that mid-century poetry was dominated by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. This is based on standard anthologies. The ratios point to assimilation to modern culture as part of a biographical process, and as source of both content and formal insights to support poems. Clearly, also, the anthologists picked good poems, and the sociological background is incidental to that. My feeling was that almost all the poets who were completely ignored wrote in out of date styles – they lacked a sense of Now. My feeling was also that this sense comes very quickly when you socialise with other people who read modern poetry, because most readers have a strong sense of the “out of date”. Poetry is not different from clothes, films, popular music, painting, etc. in this respect. To recover why some poets grasped what being out of date meant, we would look at social groups and not specifically at individuals.

To analyse this, my urge is to go back to Michael Roberts’ anthology New Signatures, 1932. Evidently, this defined the way to write as legitimated by Allott (in his Penguin anthology) thirty years later. It was the way Allott himself wrote. It showed a style which people could copy. It was the winning ticket. So, what we are looking at is a population of a few hundred people who wrote poetry in some other way and didn’t make it into Allott’s 1960 version of the contemporary. New Signatures was the key to legitimacy – it was a public document, widely reviewed and presumably on sale quite widely. It was really obvious at the time that this was the style which was going to dictate the pace for everything else. So why did most poets starting in the 1930s pass by this style? Roberts “mentored” the poets who picked up the Legitimate style from his exhibition of it– but only a minority were willing to do that. There is a free ticket but most people don’t go along to pick it up. A quote –

The sun, a heavy spider, spins in the thirsty sky.
The wind hides under cactus leaves, in empty door-
ways. Only the wry

small shadow accompanies Hamlet-Petrouchka-
Chaplin across the plain
the wry small sniggering shadow preceding, then in train.

(A.S.J. Tessimond, at p.101) Maybe a lot of poets didn’t like this style. Oxford was full of bright kids but it can’t be that everyone else wasn't bright. Maybe the key thing is the capacity to imitate – you have 19 year olds with a honed ability to imitate. They see a style and just pick it up. It is theirs. Meanwhile hundreds of other 19 year olds can’t imitate the new style. It’s like being unwilling to put on a new fashion in clothes. “I’m not wearing THAT.” The message only reaches those who are destined to receive it.
Roberts also did the Faber Book of Modern Verse, which jettisoned most 20th C poets, even the famous ones. In 1936, if you virtually memorised Roberts' anthologies, that equipped you to write Modern verse. I am just asking why some people didn't do that and still tried to write poetry. In 1960, Allott is effectively repeating Roberts' decisions, setting them in stone. This becomes the story of poetry 1930 to 1960.>br> Maybe there is a minority of poets who see style as detachable from their personality. Studying literary history makes this realisation inevitable. That detachment may be the basis for choosing a style and so choosing the right style. This is still speculative – so, to speculate again, maybe any (arts) university course will grant the same realisation.
Tessimond worked in advertising. This also sheds light on the question of poetic fashion. To write ads, you have to have a sense of what is up to date. You also have to be flexible rather than stubborn, other-directed rather than preoccupied with your own feelings – again, this may suggest the personality type of someone who is able to acquire a new style. So we are positing not just a social scene in which everyone is interested in modern poetry but also the kind of person who is able to assimilate new verbal patterns rather than just stick with what they were doing before. Fairly obviously this might correlate with creating verbal environments which other people can go inside and feel released and at home in.
I think that arriving at a university and a town where you don't know anybody is a big shock and often sweeps away previous attitudes, which is a moment that makes room for the adoption of a new style. A new career in a new town. I also think that a high-powered university gives you a double stimulus; whereby the whole set-up is telling you that you are destined to be the best, but both your teachers and your peers, who are competitive with you, are being very critical of you, and that testing process is necessary to high-flying universities. In poetry, being self-confident on its own leads to prolix and dull poems, and pure criticism produces people who never complete any poems at all. The balance is the key.
I don’t want to state that the Oxford set-up is perfect. Clearly there are people who come out of it with an excessive self-confidence and sense of entitlement; and others who come out furious after close contact with people who are too talented, and with others who eagerly confirm that you are the lesser talent and they much prefer several other poets in your year. Larkin has left a record of how angry he was with Sidney Keyes for being more talented than he was, and how crushed he was by being left out of a book (Eight Oxford Poets) which featured better poets his age. (The editor, Michael Meyer, turned him down.) We are not talking about a set of perfect outcomes. All the same, if you are designing an environment for novice poets, you probably want that combination of self-confidence and vigorous criticism. Facing rivals who are not only super-gifted but also super-competitive may not be a benign experience. It can leave burn marks. All the same I think one of the common features in unsuccessful poetry is how unselfcritical it is – the poet may have a good time writing it but they are not asking if it is any good. The ones who are going to make it all have that ability to focus on their weaknesses.

Inventing a style which other people can use is another topic which we can go into at another time. Special gratitude is due to people who do this – Auden is a prime example. Eliot produced poetry which people couldn't imitate, that is another matter. Dylan Thomas certainly produced a hundred imitators.

This post tacitly accepts that most good mid-century poetry came from a sociologically very narrow group of people. It is hard to accept that, but if you want to devise environments which facilitate novice poets then it is helpful to look at examples of success. The post is quite narrow itself, and we should also recall what happened a bit later– as Wolfgang Görtschacher has documented, the Sixties saw a terrific rise of interest in poetry at the new universities, and it is possible that every university had a poetry scene of some kind. So the Oxford-Cambridge dominance was washed away during the Sixties. I think it was easier to go from three centres of poetic endeavour to 30 than from zero to thirty. I think it’s good that there were some centres of excellence in 1950 and better that there are now a whole lot. And some centres of insolence. And probably some centres of indolence, too.

In the 1970s, we still have figures from the 1930s setting the rules – Roberts, Auden, Grigson, Allott. (Even though Roberts died in 1948.) I looked up Eight Oxford Poets and they were Keith Douglas, Gordon Swaine, John Heath-Stubbs, Michael Meyer, Roy Porter, Drummond Allison, J.A. Shaw, Sidney Keyes. The year was 1941. They were all twenty.