Matthew Mead as Cold War poet

The Cold War

After evoking (in Travelogue)the absence of good pro-Cold War poetry, I can't resist mentioning someone who wrote excellent poetry about everyday life in the Cold War, without actually being enthusiastic about it. So we should talk about Matthew Mead a bit. Mead (1924-2009) was best known as a translator from German poetry, and he was living in Germany in the Sixties. He had acquired German as part of Army service, in some way. He published Identities in 1967 and The Administration of Things in 1970. It is obvious that being learned in modern German literature made him sophisticated – no cheap effects. He also did not partake of English literary fashions. Mead’s theme, as suggested by his liking for a (largely forgotten) poet named Heinz Winfried Sabais, is “living through the shared experiences of a generation and reaching the truth through loss of generalisations”. Reaching the truth is the artistic drive. The generation is not mainly English, but in fact German and Russian. Take this passage from ‘A Poem In Nine Parts’, which was published, as part of the original series of Migrant Press pamphlets, in 1960:

Skirts, head-scarves, skin-tight slacks.
Lips of blood, breasts by e.e. cummings,
Girls hurry up the hill against the wind
To work at the sweet-factory.
Is it true that two women
(Furtseva and Pauker)
Trudge middle-aged
Like a theory of increasing misery
Yet nyloned, sandalled, stiletto-heeled,
Girls hurry up the hill
To hive as worker-queens,
Climbing to an eight a.m. start
With the jounce of a gay proletariat
In a confection of spring sunshine.

This proletariat hurrying up the hill
Is gayer, at a guess, George,
Than any proletariat you have seen.
Hey yeeorgi, Georgi Karpov!
Does the committee still meet Wednesdays
To smash the occasional ikon?

Furtseva and Pauker were senior female politicians (in the Soviet Union and Rumania, respectively) in the post-war era. “Served with distinction in illegal and violent regimes”, roughly. Pauker actually fell from power in 1953. The shot of female workers walking down the street towards a factory could be in a hundred European films. The poem is addressed to Georgi Karpov, in this case as “minister of religion” – in the Soviet Union that actually meant being an atheist-materialist whose job it was to arrest people for “religious propaganda”. The factory is in the West, presumably in Germany – the girls are wearing the branded products of “consumerism”. The comparison with top female communists is sarcastic. The theme is how abstract ideologies fare when mapped onto concrete, documentary, scenes – how generalised ideas are traps. Female factory workers are not much impressed by abstractions. The poetry is about sobering up from Marxist intoxication. This makes his poetry seem oddly out of date in 1970; the questions he is answering relate to the period after the death of Stalin, rather than the Sixties. Mead’s subject matter is broadly similar to that of Jack Beeching. With both, there is a kind of emotional anti-climax after the Twentieth Congress and destalinisation. But ‘Nine Parts’ makes its statement about politics concrete while being complex enough to bring about a “potential space” in which the imagination can work.
I thought his best poem was “From a Provisional Capital”, which is an account full of novel-like detail of life in Bonn. Yes, it was a provincial town, chosen as the capital partly to avoid jealousy by all the large towns of each other. The poem is mainly about German women of a certain generation being unmarried, and their matching men lying in graves deep inside the Soviet Union.

Mead does not have the heroic qualities which would set him beside Kipling. And so, we still have a gap in the series of patriotic poets. This is what I argue in 'Travelogue'. But there was good poetry about the Cold War, and Mead wrote some of it.
There was a Penguin Modern Poets (in 1970?) which had Mead, Beeching, and Harry Guest. It was vital in pointing out poets whom common opinion had missed. It is still a thing one must possess.