The excluded

The excluded

The list below is a list of all the poets discussed in Herbert Palmer’s “Post-Victorian Verse”. With an exception – I took out the names of poets who feature in Michael Roberts’ Faber Book of Modern Verse, two years earlier. The point of the exercise is to define what Roberts did, in creating the image of the first decades of the 20th century which we still own (as part of our cultural assets), by giving shape to the poetry which he jettisoned (and which has usually remained jettisoned). This is part of a series of blogs, on this site, (label "history of taste") about canon formation, and readers may be aware that it all started with Kipling and his exit from the stage. What happened to Kipling?

Overlap of Palmer and Roberts is 11. So 81 excluded poets:
Laurence Binyon Edmund Blunden Siegfried Sassoon Edward Thomas Charles Williams Andrew Young J Redwood Anderson Lascelles Abercrombie A.E. Richard Aldington Maurice Baring Hilaire Belloc Wilfred Scawen Blunt Gordon Bottomley Robert Bridges Roy Campbell GK Chesterton Wilfred Rowland Childe Richard Church Austin Clarke Padraic Colum Elizabeth Daryush John Davidson W H Davies Walter De La Mare Charles Doughty John Drinkwater Michael Field James Elroy Flecker John Freeman John Gawsworth Wilfrid Gibson Douglas Goldring Lord Gorell Gerald Gould Thomas Hardy Maurice Hewlett FR Higgins Ralph Hodgson Frank Kendon Rudyard Kipling Wyndham Lewis F O Mann Edith Sitwell John Masefield Huw Menai Charlotte Mew Alice Meynell T Sturge Moore Thomas Moult George Meredith Henry Newbolt Robert Nichols Alfred Noyes Seumas O Sullivan Stephen Phillips Ruth Pitter Alan Porter Edgell Rickword Victoria Sackville-West William Kean Seymour Edward Shanks Horace Shipp Osbert Sitwell JC Squire James Stephens Muriel Stuart Edward Thompson Francis Thompson WJ Turner Sherrard Vines William Watson Dorothy Wellesley Anna Wickham Humbert Wolfe Richard Middleton THW Crosland James Mackereth Charles Dalmon AE Housman Ernest Dowson Ernest Rhys Kennneth Muir RN Currey John Betjeman Geoffrey Johnson Christopher Hassall Lionel Johnson Robert Ross Joseph Campbell Oliver Gogarty Patrick Kavanagh J D Beazley Hamish McLaren Herbert Trench Katharine Tynan Mary Coleridge Margaret L Woods Margaret Sackville Sylvia Lynd Viola Meynell Mary Webb Rachel Annand Taylor Eiluned Lewis Frances Cornford Susan Miles Blanaid Salkeld Nancy Cunard S Townsend Warner Rose Macaulay Katherine Mansfield Everest Lewin Ruth Manning Sanders Jan Struther Lilian Bowes-Lyon Robin Hyde R C K Ensor Katharine M Buck Hugh MacDiarmid Martin Armstrong Edwin Muir Gerald Bullett Henry Warren Philip Henderson Frederick Prokosch R L Megroz St John Adcock Frederick V Branford Robert Gathorne-Hardy

I don’t have the energy to read all these people. I think we can use the list as raw material without energetically reading 81 books. The subject we are thinking about is the difference between the successful poets, who get critics writing about them, and everyone else – an inchoate mass of thousands of people. I say “thinking about” because the benefits come from thinking about a process, rather than reading masses of poetry. We are not thinking only of the poets whom Palmer discusses but of the whole world of outsider poets, the ones for example who paid for publication. I am sure they were incredulous that Auden won the game and they lost because they never learnt a modern style. They did lose, and all I can do is work out the rules of the game. Roberts’ achievement was less in promoting individual poets than in offering a cultural stance, something which young people could adopt and direct their poetical ideas by. Without generalising in a rush, we can say that English teachers needed such a stance, and that quite a few of them used Roberts as a guide and then transmitted the stance to their pupils. If you were writing essays, you needed a basic position, to avoid drowning in possibilities. The pupils needed confidence, and the position which Roberts had worked out obviously made you feel confident, once you had grasped it. As I said, this is less specific than pushing a particular poet, but in fact Roberts was identified as the editor who had recognised Auden, and he derived prestige from his association with Auden and his friends (MacNeice, Spender, and Day Lewis). This was a phenomenon, and it was still enjoying that centrality in the early 1970s, when I became aware of the poetry scene. That power did not rely on asserting that everybody else was dim and couldn’t really write poetry. Readers may have assumed that – it is a silent message, if that is a kind of message.
The significant thing about this stance I mention (Roberts – modernism – close reading – science – loving Auden) is that so many people could acquire it and think it belonged to them. Somehow people reading Auden felt that they had the assets which he had, and not that the poetry was brilliant but excluding them. Cultural assets only mean something if large numbers of people feel that they have a share in them.
Within the 81 names, we probably want to remember Edward Thomas, Thomas Hardy, James Elroy Flecker, and AE Housman. Roberts had pushed things too far. Of course, you could argue that Housman and Hardy were too old, their work coming before Roberts’ rough cut-off line (for “modernity”) of 1910. In the cause of precision, I have to add that there might be poets who were not picked up either by Roberts or by Palmer, and do not feature in this list of 81. Of poets active in 1936, or soon before, I could mention Kathleen Raine, Mina Loy, and Joseph Macleod.
I admire Palmer’s efforts in recording so many poets. However, from the lookout point of 2026, it is obvious that most of the secondary poets active in 1920 or 1930 had to be forgotten. This is not something you can reproach Roberts for, the process of forgetting had to metabolise most of these poets. Roberts was not committing an act of violence.
There has been interest in Kipling as the victim of Left-wing attitudes, and in fact the thesis of a “Left-liberal bubble” was mainly based in the removal of Kipling from the stage. I think it is relevant to look at these 81 names as a group. Yes, the combination of imperialism and nationalism vanished from the stage, and neither Palmer nor Roberts like it very much. But the great majority of those 81 poets had nothing to do with imperialism and pro-war sentiments. Kipling is just one of the poets who moved into the twilight. Political poetry can go out of date. This process is much more general than the Left quietly disposing of the culture of the Right.
The current literary culture is focused on grievances. If you have a class of people writing poetry unsuccessfully, and these 81 names are just a tiny sample of those, you have to ask why they didn’t make it. Current opinion would link it to low status, as being women, working class, un-English, and so on. This may be the wrong approach. We are dealing with a market, with shops and retail, with a system of fashion. The issue may be style, rather than sociology. People don’t have a problem recognising that textile design, or interior design, or cinema films, can be out of date; they should also realise that poetry consumption is subject to quite similar forces.
I spoke of “giving shape to the poetry which he jettisoned”, but there are a dozen different styles represented in the list above. I am not totally happy to describe the 81 as representing “conservative taste”. Perhaps they were not out of date until the modern style of the early 1930s had defined them as being so. Once one style has won, all the others are out of date. But did they have unused expressive force? and did they resurface later? Auden’s early style looks like something less radical than some of the Modernist writers of the 1920s. That case is still open. However, for the most part the 81 were stylistic conservatives. That is what we are looking at.
Roberts was born in 1902. That means he spent his early teens watching ex-pupils a few years older than himself go up in gilt on the Honours board because they had joined the Army, gone to the Western Front and got shot. Or blown up. Young men born in 1901, 1902, 1903 all had that experience. They never quite got to hold a rifle. But a lot of them developed a visceral dislike of Kipling, who never saw a war he didn’t like. Modernism was the reaction of the survivors.
One of the reasons that Roberts won is that he was offering a complete package. He was offering matching shoes, handbag, and hat. He always writes as part of an argument, which the poets simply are evidence for. Palmer is much less consistent – he likes many different kinds of poetry. He writes like someone who loses arguments. At the time, streamlining was the ideal, and Palmer’s lines are amorphous or baggy because he is so inclusive. Roberts offered a complete model which students or sixth-form pupils could pick up. He helps in writing essays. But Palmer comes out better, because poetry really is very diverse, and Palmer allows that. The fact that Roberts leaves out Edith Sitwell and Edward Thomas points to a basic problem.
I think I have to re-do the count. Palmer's descriptions are so banal ("depth of feeling and precision of form") that I nodded off and missed some which should probably count. Sometimes he uses a quote where he can't think of anything to say, so should I count those. A re-run has added sixty more names. Perhaps his descriptions are generic because the poetry is also generic.

It can't be 1974 again

I was compelled by Tristram Fane Sanders’ review in the TLS of my book Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People. A fair account, I think. Several people have reacted with incredulity to his claim that I am a “working class” critic. Er, no. I have to confess to being a middle-class critic.
This may come from an over-eager reading of various caption biographies which have graced various books over the years. That bit about “worked as a labourer after leaving school” would be more complete if it read “after leaving boarding school worked in unskilled jobs for a year, partly in Germany, learning better German before going on to study Mod Langs at Cambridge”. I think various biographies may be misleading, or have been chopped up, and were not very detailed at the start. The part about working in Germany was relevant to poems I wrote in the late 1970s, and appeared on book jackets to that end. I got fed up with biographies because of times as the editor of little magazines where the caption biographies always took more time than the poems. No, you can’t change your biography again. No, you can’t win the poem inside the biography. I dislike biographies. People only need to know how I write.
“He writes with a peculiar, chilly, multi-layered irony, in an epigrammatic style.” Well, that's one answer. If you looked at 100 Cambridge cultural critics, that would be true of 95 of them. So, maybe I drank the Kool-Aid. I don’t really want to remember processes of circa 1974-6. I am quite keen on the fact that I switched to Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. The problem with discussion of my class origins is that they relate to the 1960s – since I was a child in the 1960s. Surely what matters is what happened after I was 18 and old enough to make decisions for myself. There is a point here – some behaviour patterns are acquired in childhood, and they may affect behaviour in later life. But children aren’t really conscious. Literature has to do with your existence as a conscious human being. It is outside the tier of the compulsive and repetitive. And modern literature asks you to be conscious – to exercise freedom. If someone doesn’t sound middle class or otherwise, over the course of an entire book, it is not their original speech patterns which are on stage or under the spotlight. I dislike this whole area of discussion, but that is helpful because almost all the poets I write about dislike the area too. They want to be conscious, personal, minds, and sociology denies that at every step. They don’t want to repeat infantile patterns. And they don’t want society to repeat and reproduce archaic patterns.

Right after leaving school, I worked in a metal fabrication shop on a contract making prison doors. They were made complicated by adding a big metal hatch that you could put food in through. We made the same doors as part of an order for a lunatic asylum. I found that instructive, but it’s like learning Welsh – it was good for me, but other people aren’t very interested. When I was reading Anglo-Saxon poetry, I found lots of stuff about using iron in one way or another – this felt familiar because I had spent a certain amount of time bashing iron and steel. I liked that. And that link did crop up in my poems.