Edward Lucie-Smith
I am finishing a book called “Travelogue”. The premise of the book is that nationalist-imperialist poetry stopped in the early 1920s and did not return. This is where we consider flaws in that idea – poems which are at least marginally nationalist and about the national identity or territory. I don’t think this affects the grand pattern significantly, but I also think that you don’t have “zero per cent nationalism”, and that cannot be proposed.
We will start with Lucie-Smith’s 1970 anthology (British poetry since 1945), which contains about 220 poems and can be considered as a valid reference for the period 1945 to 1970. It has a much wider intake than the usual anthology. Because it is a High Street anthology, it would not include sub-literary, badly written poems. These could also be a big slice of the total amount being written! Also, it is marked as a cultured anthology. Based on the overlap between the poets he selects and Allott’s 1962 anthology, it directly continues Allott, and so the “modernist line”. For example, Roberts’ 1936 anthology of modern verse left out Kipling. There is an area outside this formation of taste. Of course, Britain changed in the 1960s, and Lucie-Smith has a much more relaxed and inquisitive view of things than his predecessors. He was hedonistic where they were serious.
He starts in 1945 but has no poems about the Fifties wars in Malaysia and Korea. We can guess that this is because the poets were not interested, or not able to find a form in which to express their reactions – and perhaps not able to assess the meaning of international events at a reasonable pace.
In his book, there is a poem by Thwaite which we should consider as possibly nationalist, about national concerns. It is set in Libya, it connects to the years which Thwaite spent living in Libya, and it is about a Greek intellectual from Cyrenaica, around 400 AD. Synesius appears as the writers of twelve “Letters of Synesius” which Thwaite published. This one shows nomadic tribes appearing from the arid interior to wreck the agricultural society of the coastal strip, with its rainfall. This is a process which was taking place during Synesius’ life, and which probably ended his life. One level on which we could site the poem is as a commentary in abiding ecological and political structures of North Africa, the steppe versus the sown. The pastoralists will always come to loot and ransack the richer coastal people unless a State prevents them. Another level is to take the dismantling of Roman civilisation, strong in agriculture and trade, displaced by the subsistence economy of pastoralists. This could be a metaphor for the British Empire, evacuating the Arab lands in the twenty years before Thwaite’s poem. But another level is the threat of the counterculture in England (as in the West generally), dismantling the conservative academicism which came before it: “see where they squat behind the escarpment,/ Ignorant of metre, of faction and schism./ destined by favourless/Fortune to be the true/ Heirs of the Kingdom.” The society based on the empire obviously had to crumble into dust when the Empire was liberated. If culture didn’t express the new society, it was acting as a purely conservative factor.
Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Nostalgia – now threepence off’ lists and parodies the bric à brac of English culture, including some nationalist elements. Where he is interested in the nation as something that could emerge from underneath this bric à brac, he is interested in the nation and in national culture. Of course, his point of view is Left, his tone mocking. But if you are interested in politics you must have some interest in the community of citizens which is its subject matter. This is the closest to Kipling that this anthology gets.
Kingsley Amis supplies “The Last War”. This proposes that the next war will wipe out mankind and so be the last in the series. As one of the people who would be killed if such a war took place, I have to be grateful to Amis for pointing out that it would be a Bad Thing. This is about war but doesn’t connect to Kipling. He does list some categories of people who might appear in right-wing discourse: “Homicide, pacifist, crusader, cynic, gentile, jew/ Staggered about moaning, shooting into the dark.” He says they are unable to halt the war. But the sense of that could be that they are doing the right thing but not doing it energetically enough. The poem is close to the science fiction which Amis was involved with at the time, but presents more as a country house weekend murder mystery in which the characters are countries. This is too clever to have any emotional impact. It does not show a specific way in which the war might be started – he gives the Cold War a wide berth. By showing a world in which everyone is dead, he is showing us something on the big scale.
We have poems by Matthew Mead. Mead wrote effectively about the Cold War, seen from his home in Bonn, but the poems here are not on that subject. Mead appears in the other poems as someone nostalgic for a Marxist position but sharply aware that it has not worked out for Europeans.
We have two very good poems attacking the Vietnamese War. The poets did not get the vote in a US election, but they seem to have found US policy positions easier to dramatize, and to criticise, than British ones. I hope this was just a transient phase, but it seems as if the British case did not seize their imaginations. This could be the effect of too much empiricism, or simply disillusion.
Peter Porter’s “Death in the Pergola Tea-rooms” has a passage which might be from a right wing discourse. "Just out of reach and sound of cup clang,/ the old rationalist is dying in the Pergola./ Two Labour party friends and the doctor/ Rearrange his woven rugs.” This would sit with a denunciation of the intellectual Left, of a kind which the Daily Telegraph runs most days of the year. But the rest of the poem pretty effectively excludes that intent. The poem is more a farewell to the person who is dying, suggesting past intimacy. The poet is on the spot. The poem is part of an (imaginary) novel, not of a platform speech against the Left. Nationalism is not present. The rug may be handwoven, a hint of the arts and crafts sympathy of a relative – anti-capitalism at domestic level.
Heath-Stubbs gives us “The Last Watch of empire”, a poem (possibly) about Byzantium, the later Roman Empire. Poems about the Roman Empire are often allegories about the British Empire, so we have to consider this one as possibly relating to our own politics. My feeling is that Heath-Stubbs is fascinated by the alien society and by intricacies of language, and that gives sufficient motivation to what we see. The poem really is fascinating. If it has a political meaning, I can’t see what it is. The subject is a legend (undated) about the last emperor asleep for ages in a cave, ready to return when he is needed. “Where eleven hermits, as spry as wagtails, twitter,/ Raising their spare throats to the dawn’s cold beams.” It has elements of the Merlin story, where he goes mad after a terrible battle.
Logue gives us his translation of a book of the Iliad, about Achilles’ fight with the river Scamander. The fighting with the Trojans, which he also describes, exhibits his basic theme, of the arrogance of generals and the narcissism of the aristocrats. This piece was published in 1959, so not specifically directed at later wars in the Middle East -which it anticipates. The struggle was between the Greeks and the Trojans, so the idea of a Nation is silently present in every part of it. He is satirising nationalism.
My conclusion is that talking about the nation as a subject was not absolutely impossible in this period. There was no crushing taboo on it. And I could probably find nationalist poems if I looked in poets who were disregarded by Lucie-Smith, and by other people too. Poets were directed away from it by a disinclination to take a strong stand on anything – the preference for irony and privacy. They all disliked propaganda, and it wasn’t hard to find in the media around them. They were more interested by the framing than the message. Also, foreign affairs were hard to interpret in an era of rapid change. The shared values related to a situation which no longer, objectively, existed.
I think the question is better rephrased. I have looked at nationalist poetry and at privatised poetry, including personal myth. There is in reality a middling discourse, where people don’t think the details of their inner life, or that of their closest friends, are all-important. They are interested in public affairs, including levels of community much smaller than the nation as a whole. They have values which are shared rather than being unique and over-developed. They don’t have grand theories which belong to them and are not understood by other people. They don’t despair of State action. The way they write could be the basis for poetry about national politics, if the need arose. This middle area would account for at least half of the poems which Lucie-Smith has selected. Numerically, most elected politicians are not at the level of Westminster but at the level of wards, parishes, and boroughs. We might expect the distribution of poets to follow that pattern.
Privatisation is definitely an issue. It may seem to some participants to equate to value added. It guves an overall framework in which to think about these 210 poems. Heath-Stubbs’ poem has Cyril and Methodius, so missionaries from Macedonia sent by the Byzantines to convert the South Slavs. But this poem also has the theme of “saviour sleeping in a cave”, linked to Arthur or Frederic Barbarossa but not, I think, to an Eastern Emperor. The story about madness overtaking someone during a battle is found in an Irish tale, of Sweeny, and one taking place in south-west Scotland, where the original Merlin goes mad at the battle of Arthuret. The poem becomes more and more autonomous as we look at it. Its inner space becomes richer and more intriguing. I am uneasy about this, because the lack of external reference of the poem seems to go hand in hand with its development into something surprising and aesthetically developed.
Peter Levi’s poem may be the best in the entire book. It is obscure and seems like something radically personal. After some work on the puzzling parts, I can see that it is an attack on a Pope by a Jesuit, and that its theme is the failure of the Catholic Church to defend the Jews during the Second World War. Its intricacy is the key to how good it is. It deals with a large subject and develops great acuity. (I have already blogged about this.)
I have left out Welsh and Scottish nationalism, because my book also leaves them out. It is about the Third World, not politics within the divided island. Lucie-Smith leaves out such poems too. They could easily have been found. This is a classic anthology, but not so hot where the Welsh are concerned.
Thursday, 29 October 2026
Friday, 16 October 2026
Poetry Review as the out-group
This follows the previous blog, see label “Kenneth Allott”. I was reading 1950s issues of Poetry Review. “A little moment in Poetry Review for 1956 gives Ruth Pitter (quoted from a newspaper interview) saying this: Eliot contributed 'to a disaster to English poetry… by taking it away from the common man and making it the province of the few'. (p. 5)." This affects the book (Travelogue) because I am discussing why nationalist poetry disappeared and Michael Roberts is on the scene as someone who changed the whole landscape.
I saw a piece in PR by John Bayliss, 1963, where he jovially refers to the story that ‘older members of the [Poetry] Society “were believed to roast admirers of ‘The Waste land’ over a slow fire’. He acts as if it were untrue. But can we believe him?
I counted, and found that Allott’s selection included a 60% share for people who had been either at Oxford or Cambridge. So, this 7% share of women connects to the relatively lower level of education for women up to 1960 (and even 1980, in fact). The link between education and poetry can be summed up as: the more you have of cultural capital the more able you are to generate cultural capital. For most of the 20th C, the domination of Oxbridge alumni and of men is the same data object, subject to the same laws of time and scale.
This connects with the figures I developed a few years ago showing that Allott’s anthology had roughly 60% people who had been to either Oxford or Cambridge. That social group also has a very low proportion of women (or, did in 1960). [ developed? – that makes it sound complicated] I find this very hard to take in. I sort of want to reverse the polarity and promote the 150 poets – but they are terrible, there is no way I can follow that up. Margaret Stanley-Wrench… give me a break.
We have spent so much time on Allott’s anthology. The Poetry Review data gives a whole new way of exploiting it, because it recovers (essentially) the poets whom Allott turned down. It frames Allott and recovers the negative space around his idea.
Why is it some figures are so emotional. They are just numbers.
I have already had a response about modernists not being hostile to women. I agree. But it is the proportions which count.
The gap between these two sets of figures is hard to blur away.
The question raised about the P Review data is what happens when it becomes a credible magazine, which we have read happened in the mid-1960s. I haven’t quite got to grips with this, but it looks as if the style changed when John Smith became editor in the summer of 1962. He raised the game, and Derek Parker went even further after he took over in 1966. So, the flagship magazine of English poetry actually starts running good poems (and intelligent reviews). This was a revolution. My speculation was that this also meant reducing the share of women poets down to about 10%, and to my dismay this is what the figures (from the contents lists) show. The 159 poets who were in the 1956-57 series just disappear. This is what reform means.
The last issue before John Smith took over has 32 poets of whom 14 are women. Two issues later, we have 17 poets of whom 3 are women. Three issues later, we have 20 poets of whom 4 are women. The ratio changes completely and it doesn’t recover for decades. In issue 57.1, 1966, we have 24 names of whom 4 are women.
I think it is credible that a large fraction of the members of the Poetry Society also got printed in the Society’s magazine. It was a club owned by its members, in that sense. So those 159 poets might represent 20% of the membership as things stood in 1956. I don’t have good data to support this, but I think that there was a good match between the beliefs of the Society membership and the magazine contents, and also that the magazine was written by Society members. John Smith’s reform may simply have been to seek material from people who weren’t Society members.
Where did the reactionaries go? I don’t know. The Poetry Society stopped supplying them, and presumably by 1965 its membership included a lot of people who weren’t anti-intellectual or anti-modern. Everything changed in the Sixties. But maybe not everybody?
My impression is that, in the 1960s, students and graduates came to a central position in the literary culture. They were, also, a male-dominated group. Only 20% were women. This led to a worsening of women's position in the poetry world, and especially in the innovative sector. I find it depressing that Lucie-Smith's 1970 Penguin anthology (covering the years 1945 to 1970) only includes 7% of women poets. The gender ratio was not changing fast in those years. However, everything has changed since 1970. Also, Lucie-Smith’s work is a classic source, both its poems and its prose. You can take it as a valid source of how unequal things were because it is so amazingly well-informed and well-designed.
My belief up to last week was that the 7% share in Lucie-Smith’s anthology just meant that women participated less in the poetry world as composers, in an autonomous role. But if you look at Poetry Review in the 1950s it looks more as if roughly 50% of the people trying to write poetry were women, and the problem instead was that they weren’t part of the world of modernism. That world is what is defined, helpfully, in anthologies selected by Michael Roberts, Kenneth Allott, and Edward Lucie-Smith. We need to consider what leads people to write unambitious and conservative poetry. My guess is that people with limited cultural capital, in a politically weak position, invest in weak forms which attract less criticism but which are almost bound to fail. In the 1950s, this involved affirmative culture (in the sense that Marcuse defined), piety (usually), adherence to rules which themselves go back a long way, avoidance of the whole set of innovations made in the 20th C, reliance on existing beautiful things like flowers, churches, and landscapes (at the expense of making forms out of language). This description applies equally to the 52% of male poets in (Fifties era) Poetry Review. All of them wondered why their poetry imitating great poetry of the remote past wasn’t also great. The attraction to weakness can be defined as meek – and perhaps the meek shall inherit the earth. Perhaps not.
So, my original position has collapsed and I no longer know why Lucie-Smith only included six women poets in his standard anthology for the period 1945-70. I have been thinking about this for ten years so that must make me a slow learner. It is still an interesting question. We can certainly ask why he left Kathleen Raine out… I think I know but I dispute the decision in any case.
I admit that the figures oscillate a bit. M Shand Smith sounds like a masculine name but there is a letter in PR signed “Madge Shand Smith”, so there you are. The counts may be out by one or two at any stage. The story is not complete unless we point to the share of women poets again reaching parity, which may have been in the 1990s. Guess – I haven’t developed those figures, I don’t enjoy spending a day in Cambridge University Library knocking figures together. It is a bureaucratic process. As for cultural capital, I guess that, as the proportion of women in the graduates of any year reached 50%, the share of women in poetic debuts also rose, and eventually their share in Poetry Review, which would include people born over several decades, tracked that and also reached 50%. That sounds like smooth progress, but first-person participants never remember it as being smooth and efficient. Yes, there probably was some kind of a guerrilla war being fought against it, where the combatants never admitted to the actions they undertook, and led a daytime life of conformism and virtue.
My belief up to last week was that the 7% share in Lucie-Smith’s anthology just meant that women participated less in the poetry world as composers, in an autonomous role. But, if you look at Poetry Review in the 1950s, it looks more as if roughly 50% of the people trying to write poetry were women, and the problem instead was that they weren’t part of the world of modernism. That world is what is defined, helpfully, in anthologies selected by Michael Roberts, Kenneth Allott, and Edward Lucie-Smith. We need to consider what leads people to write unambitious and conservative poetry. My guess is that people with limited cultural capital, in a politically weak position, invest in weak forms which attract less criticism but which are almost bound to fail. In the 1950s, this involved affirmative culture (in the sense that Marcuse defined), piety (usually), adherence to rules which themselves go back a long way, avoidance of the whole set of innovations made in the 20th C, reliance on existing beautiful things like flowers, churches, and landscapes (at the expense of making forms out of language). This description applies equally to the 52% of male poets in (Fifties era) Poetry Review. All of them wondered why their poetry imitating great poetry of the remote past wasn’t also great. The attraction to weakness can be defined as meek – and perhaps the meek shall inherit the earth. Perhaps not.
So, my original position has collapsed and I no longer know why Lucie-Smith only included six women poets in his standard anthology for the period 1945-70. I have been thinking about this for ten years so that must make me a slow learner. It is still an interesting question. We can certainly ask why he left Kathleen Raine out… I think I know but I dispute the decision in any case.
I admit that the figures oscillate a bit. M Shand Smith sounds like a masculine name but there is a letter in PR signed “Madge Shand Smith”, so there you are. The counts may be out by one or two at any stage.
I saw a piece in PR by John Bayliss, 1963, where he jovially refers to the story that ‘older members of the [Poetry] Society “were believed to roast admirers of ‘The Waste land’ over a slow fire’. He acts as if it were untrue. But can we believe him?
I counted, and found that Allott’s selection included a 60% share for people who had been either at Oxford or Cambridge. So, this 7% share of women connects to the relatively lower level of education for women up to 1960 (and even 1980, in fact). The link between education and poetry can be summed up as: the more you have of cultural capital the more able you are to generate cultural capital. For most of the 20th C, the domination of Oxbridge alumni and of men is the same data object, subject to the same laws of time and scale.
This connects with the figures I developed a few years ago showing that Allott’s anthology had roughly 60% people who had been to either Oxford or Cambridge. That social group also has a very low proportion of women (or, did in 1960). [ developed? – that makes it sound complicated] I find this very hard to take in. I sort of want to reverse the polarity and promote the 150 poets – but they are terrible, there is no way I can follow that up. Margaret Stanley-Wrench… give me a break.
We have spent so much time on Allott’s anthology. The Poetry Review data gives a whole new way of exploiting it, because it recovers (essentially) the poets whom Allott turned down. It frames Allott and recovers the negative space around his idea.
Why is it some figures are so emotional. They are just numbers.
I have already had a response about modernists not being hostile to women. I agree. But it is the proportions which count.
The gap between these two sets of figures is hard to blur away.
The question raised about the P Review data is what happens when it becomes a credible magazine, which we have read happened in the mid-1960s. I haven’t quite got to grips with this, but it looks as if the style changed when John Smith became editor in the summer of 1962. He raised the game, and Derek Parker went even further after he took over in 1966. So, the flagship magazine of English poetry actually starts running good poems (and intelligent reviews). This was a revolution. My speculation was that this also meant reducing the share of women poets down to about 10%, and to my dismay this is what the figures (from the contents lists) show. The 159 poets who were in the 1956-57 series just disappear. This is what reform means.
The last issue before John Smith took over has 32 poets of whom 14 are women. Two issues later, we have 17 poets of whom 3 are women. Three issues later, we have 20 poets of whom 4 are women. The ratio changes completely and it doesn’t recover for decades. In issue 57.1, 1966, we have 24 names of whom 4 are women.
I think it is credible that a large fraction of the members of the Poetry Society also got printed in the Society’s magazine. It was a club owned by its members, in that sense. So those 159 poets might represent 20% of the membership as things stood in 1956. I don’t have good data to support this, but I think that there was a good match between the beliefs of the Society membership and the magazine contents, and also that the magazine was written by Society members. John Smith’s reform may simply have been to seek material from people who weren’t Society members.
Where did the reactionaries go? I don’t know. The Poetry Society stopped supplying them, and presumably by 1965 its membership included a lot of people who weren’t anti-intellectual or anti-modern. Everything changed in the Sixties. But maybe not everybody?
My impression is that, in the 1960s, students and graduates came to a central position in the literary culture. They were, also, a male-dominated group. Only 20% were women. This led to a worsening of women's position in the poetry world, and especially in the innovative sector. I find it depressing that Lucie-Smith's 1970 Penguin anthology (covering the years 1945 to 1970) only includes 7% of women poets. The gender ratio was not changing fast in those years. However, everything has changed since 1970. Also, Lucie-Smith’s work is a classic source, both its poems and its prose. You can take it as a valid source of how unequal things were because it is so amazingly well-informed and well-designed.
My belief up to last week was that the 7% share in Lucie-Smith’s anthology just meant that women participated less in the poetry world as composers, in an autonomous role. But if you look at Poetry Review in the 1950s it looks more as if roughly 50% of the people trying to write poetry were women, and the problem instead was that they weren’t part of the world of modernism. That world is what is defined, helpfully, in anthologies selected by Michael Roberts, Kenneth Allott, and Edward Lucie-Smith. We need to consider what leads people to write unambitious and conservative poetry. My guess is that people with limited cultural capital, in a politically weak position, invest in weak forms which attract less criticism but which are almost bound to fail. In the 1950s, this involved affirmative culture (in the sense that Marcuse defined), piety (usually), adherence to rules which themselves go back a long way, avoidance of the whole set of innovations made in the 20th C, reliance on existing beautiful things like flowers, churches, and landscapes (at the expense of making forms out of language). This description applies equally to the 52% of male poets in (Fifties era) Poetry Review. All of them wondered why their poetry imitating great poetry of the remote past wasn’t also great. The attraction to weakness can be defined as meek – and perhaps the meek shall inherit the earth. Perhaps not.
So, my original position has collapsed and I no longer know why Lucie-Smith only included six women poets in his standard anthology for the period 1945-70. I have been thinking about this for ten years so that must make me a slow learner. It is still an interesting question. We can certainly ask why he left Kathleen Raine out… I think I know but I dispute the decision in any case.
I admit that the figures oscillate a bit. M Shand Smith sounds like a masculine name but there is a letter in PR signed “Madge Shand Smith”, so there you are. The counts may be out by one or two at any stage. The story is not complete unless we point to the share of women poets again reaching parity, which may have been in the 1990s. Guess – I haven’t developed those figures, I don’t enjoy spending a day in Cambridge University Library knocking figures together. It is a bureaucratic process. As for cultural capital, I guess that, as the proportion of women in the graduates of any year reached 50%, the share of women in poetic debuts also rose, and eventually their share in Poetry Review, which would include people born over several decades, tracked that and also reached 50%. That sounds like smooth progress, but first-person participants never remember it as being smooth and efficient. Yes, there probably was some kind of a guerrilla war being fought against it, where the combatants never admitted to the actions they undertook, and led a daytime life of conformism and virtue.
My belief up to last week was that the 7% share in Lucie-Smith’s anthology just meant that women participated less in the poetry world as composers, in an autonomous role. But, if you look at Poetry Review in the 1950s, it looks more as if roughly 50% of the people trying to write poetry were women, and the problem instead was that they weren’t part of the world of modernism. That world is what is defined, helpfully, in anthologies selected by Michael Roberts, Kenneth Allott, and Edward Lucie-Smith. We need to consider what leads people to write unambitious and conservative poetry. My guess is that people with limited cultural capital, in a politically weak position, invest in weak forms which attract less criticism but which are almost bound to fail. In the 1950s, this involved affirmative culture (in the sense that Marcuse defined), piety (usually), adherence to rules which themselves go back a long way, avoidance of the whole set of innovations made in the 20th C, reliance on existing beautiful things like flowers, churches, and landscapes (at the expense of making forms out of language). This description applies equally to the 52% of male poets in (Fifties era) Poetry Review. All of them wondered why their poetry imitating great poetry of the remote past wasn’t also great. The attraction to weakness can be defined as meek – and perhaps the meek shall inherit the earth. Perhaps not.
So, my original position has collapsed and I no longer know why Lucie-Smith only included six women poets in his standard anthology for the period 1945-70. I have been thinking about this for ten years so that must make me a slow learner. It is still an interesting question. We can certainly ask why he left Kathleen Raine out… I think I know but I dispute the decision in any case.
I admit that the figures oscillate a bit. M Shand Smith sounds like a masculine name but there is a letter in PR signed “Madge Shand Smith”, so there you are. The counts may be out by one or two at any stage.
Thursday, 8 October 2026
Michael Roberts and modernism
“The original Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), edited by Michael Roberts, was influential in forming the tastes of a generation and gave a concrete meaning to the phrase 'modern verse'. In order to keep the anthology a reasonably representative one containing poems written since 1936 there have been two revised editions - one by Anne Ridler in 1951 and one by Donald Hall in 1965.” - Faber’s anonymous and proprietary statement
Am stuck on providing evidence for the influence of Michael Roberts. I am trying to claim that there was a version of modern poetry which was defined by Roberts’ anthologies and which was cast in bronze by succeeding anthologies by Allott (1950, 2nd edition 1962) and Lucie-Smith (1970). This version gave people things to say and was taken up by the new breed of Eng lit Teachers, in sixth forms and universities, as the intelligent way to talk about modern poetry. Pupils who had seriously different views were likely to get low grades, not intersecting with the questions set in exam papers.
I am trying to find a literary historian who openly states this view, and this is proving difficult. I think it is a consensus view, but I would like to support that with quotes by qualified historians.
Three important facts emerge in the zone around this basic idea. One, there was a vital link between the developmental line or canon established by Roberts and the Close Reading method of talking or writing about poetry. Close reading in practice favoured modernism, even if in theory it was a neutral method. Two, accepting the value of modernism told you which poetry was important and intelligent. This allowed you to locate ways of being important and intelligent. The claim was never that all modern poetry passed this test; it actually gave you a yardstick which distinguished High from Low. Three, from what I can reconstruct there was a large group of people involved in modern poetry who neither liked modernist poetry nor accepted the scale of values of Roberts and Allott. This is obvious if you wade through back issues of Poetry Review for the 1950s. It is written for people who don’t like modernism.
Two more obscure facts emerge. One, people who are less cultured don’t perceive poems as being high or low. Two, chronology in poetry relies on style changing over time. That only applies to people who have the necessary group awareness, and are part of an artistic community. Other people may write poetry, but their style is abidingly out of date, unchanged by experiment or time passing. The missing link is evidently that out of date writers should be made available to out of date readers.
A little moment in Poetry Review for 1956 gives Ruth Pitter (quoted from a newspaper interview) saying this: Eliot contributed “to a disaster to English poetry… by taking it away from the common man and making it the province of the few”. (p. 5). Pitter’s lack of status as a sociologist means that we can’t take this as an oracular truth raised above any criticism. Instead, we have to ask why Eliot took over the scene if only a minority could understand him. Also, and not for the first time, why shouldn’t there be a venue where out of date poets meet their out of date audience and make each other happy. This venue actually was Poetry Review. The influence of Eliot and of the Faber Book are clearly much the same thing, and what Pitter says about Eliot would also apply to the poetry which Michael Roberts favoured. Am still struggling to find someone who defines the Faber Book as redefining the landscape, outside Faber’s own anonymous statements on the matter. However, reading significant historians is enjoyable in itself. My impression is that they don’t consider the “twilight” group whom Roberts left out (and Allott in his follow-up to Roberts). This would make Roberts simply a photographer, his ideas indistinguishable from reality. That also makes it hard to see what Roberts actually brought off.
A piece of concrete evidence may help here. The bound volume of Poetry Review for 1956 and 1957 has indices which show every poet who got published in the magazine over those two years, so greater than 100 poets. (I counted 108 names for 1956 and 144 names for 1957.) It is quite easy to compare this list with the inclusion list for Allott’s 1962 anthology. There are no overlaps at all. I think this shows (a) that Allott made a vital act of selection, which unambiguously follows Roberts’ ideas (b) the poets he rejected had a gathering place, the Poetry Review (and the Poetry Society which owned it) and a market.
It is only fair to record that Poetry Review updated itself in the mid-1960s (like everything else!) and that the reformed version had essentially moved towards the Roberts/ Allott line.
However, I am not going to plunge into a description of the “conservative” poets of P Review, because so far as I can see they are terrible poets and this would not be a good experience for me.
A problem here. I counted 150 poets in those 8 issues of Poetry Review. 50% of them are women. Allott’s upscale anthology, compiled in 1960, has only 7% women. PR is conservative and low-end poets. Allott is modernist and ambitious poets. The contrast suggests that modernism was not benign for women - not in the period Allott covers, say 1920 to 1960.
I think the background has to do with education. At the time, girls were much less likely to go to university and also less likely to complete the sixth form years, leading up to that. It was the slope on which the whole system was built. The group of women writing poetry were less educated than the group of men writing poetry. The women had had much less access to higher-level teaching, to the methods of Close Reading and intricate analysis of texts. This would explain why they were clustered in the conservative area of style.
I don’t think I can go and redeem any of the PR poets. They just ran bad poetry, consistently. I am unhappy about this whole area. The figures remind me of figures for vanity presses, when I got to grips with those, in the 1960s. The proportion of women in the vanity press lists was much higher than in the legitimate publishing area. So, possibly, there were lots of women writing poetry and they were more frustrated than male poets. They had less access to publication but probably also to literary knowledge, to styles and theories and innovations. They were outsiders. But, in the 1970s, the story changes. Girls were getting into higher education at a much higher rate, and the proportion of women in the vanity press world decreases. The outsiders are now less into vanity presses and more into the small press world, where there is an outsider audience present. It is much more benign.
This isn't going in the book, because I am mainly interested in the fate of nationalist poetry and it has no bearing on that.
Completists will want to know that one poet, Peter Redgrove, was in Poetry Review for 1956 and later appeared in Lucie-Smith’s culturally high anthology. Also, one of the poets in that year of the Review is Lucie-Smith himself.
A check is afforded by a 1956 anthology, Poetry Now, edited by GS Fraser. This has 84 poets but none of them appears in that list of 150 Poetry Review poets. He includes 9 female poets, so roughly 11%. This supports the idea that women clustered in the conservative sector.
I have already had a response about modernists not being hostile to women. I agree. But it is the proportions which count.
So, supposedly High anthologies:
GS Fraser, 1956 11% female
Allott, 1960 7%
Lucie-Smith, 1970 7%
Gatherings of Bad Poetry untouched by modernity:
Poetry Review 1956 48%
Poetry Review 1957 48%
The gap between these two sets of figures is hard to blur away.
We have spent so much time on Allott’s anthology. The Poetry Review data gives a whole new way of exploiting it, because it recovers (essentially) the poets whom Allott turned down. It frames Allott and recovers the negative space around his idea.
I counted and found that Allott’s selection gave a 60% share to people who had been either at Oxford or Cambridge. So, this 7% share of women connects to the relatively lower level of education for women up to 1960 (and even 1980 in fact). The link between education and poetry can be summed up as, the more you have of cultural capital the more able you are to generate cultural capital.
I sort of want to reverse the polarity and promote the 150 poets from P Review – but they are terrible, there is no way I can follow that up.
Am stuck on providing evidence for the influence of Michael Roberts. I am trying to claim that there was a version of modern poetry which was defined by Roberts’ anthologies and which was cast in bronze by succeeding anthologies by Allott (1950, 2nd edition 1962) and Lucie-Smith (1970). This version gave people things to say and was taken up by the new breed of Eng lit Teachers, in sixth forms and universities, as the intelligent way to talk about modern poetry. Pupils who had seriously different views were likely to get low grades, not intersecting with the questions set in exam papers.
I am trying to find a literary historian who openly states this view, and this is proving difficult. I think it is a consensus view, but I would like to support that with quotes by qualified historians.
Three important facts emerge in the zone around this basic idea. One, there was a vital link between the developmental line or canon established by Roberts and the Close Reading method of talking or writing about poetry. Close reading in practice favoured modernism, even if in theory it was a neutral method. Two, accepting the value of modernism told you which poetry was important and intelligent. This allowed you to locate ways of being important and intelligent. The claim was never that all modern poetry passed this test; it actually gave you a yardstick which distinguished High from Low. Three, from what I can reconstruct there was a large group of people involved in modern poetry who neither liked modernist poetry nor accepted the scale of values of Roberts and Allott. This is obvious if you wade through back issues of Poetry Review for the 1950s. It is written for people who don’t like modernism.
Two more obscure facts emerge. One, people who are less cultured don’t perceive poems as being high or low. Two, chronology in poetry relies on style changing over time. That only applies to people who have the necessary group awareness, and are part of an artistic community. Other people may write poetry, but their style is abidingly out of date, unchanged by experiment or time passing. The missing link is evidently that out of date writers should be made available to out of date readers.
A little moment in Poetry Review for 1956 gives Ruth Pitter (quoted from a newspaper interview) saying this: Eliot contributed “to a disaster to English poetry… by taking it away from the common man and making it the province of the few”. (p. 5). Pitter’s lack of status as a sociologist means that we can’t take this as an oracular truth raised above any criticism. Instead, we have to ask why Eliot took over the scene if only a minority could understand him. Also, and not for the first time, why shouldn’t there be a venue where out of date poets meet their out of date audience and make each other happy. This venue actually was Poetry Review. The influence of Eliot and of the Faber Book are clearly much the same thing, and what Pitter says about Eliot would also apply to the poetry which Michael Roberts favoured. Am still struggling to find someone who defines the Faber Book as redefining the landscape, outside Faber’s own anonymous statements on the matter. However, reading significant historians is enjoyable in itself. My impression is that they don’t consider the “twilight” group whom Roberts left out (and Allott in his follow-up to Roberts). This would make Roberts simply a photographer, his ideas indistinguishable from reality. That also makes it hard to see what Roberts actually brought off.
A piece of concrete evidence may help here. The bound volume of Poetry Review for 1956 and 1957 has indices which show every poet who got published in the magazine over those two years, so greater than 100 poets. (I counted 108 names for 1956 and 144 names for 1957.) It is quite easy to compare this list with the inclusion list for Allott’s 1962 anthology. There are no overlaps at all. I think this shows (a) that Allott made a vital act of selection, which unambiguously follows Roberts’ ideas (b) the poets he rejected had a gathering place, the Poetry Review (and the Poetry Society which owned it) and a market.
It is only fair to record that Poetry Review updated itself in the mid-1960s (like everything else!) and that the reformed version had essentially moved towards the Roberts/ Allott line.
However, I am not going to plunge into a description of the “conservative” poets of P Review, because so far as I can see they are terrible poets and this would not be a good experience for me.
A problem here. I counted 150 poets in those 8 issues of Poetry Review. 50% of them are women. Allott’s upscale anthology, compiled in 1960, has only 7% women. PR is conservative and low-end poets. Allott is modernist and ambitious poets. The contrast suggests that modernism was not benign for women - not in the period Allott covers, say 1920 to 1960.
I think the background has to do with education. At the time, girls were much less likely to go to university and also less likely to complete the sixth form years, leading up to that. It was the slope on which the whole system was built. The group of women writing poetry were less educated than the group of men writing poetry. The women had had much less access to higher-level teaching, to the methods of Close Reading and intricate analysis of texts. This would explain why they were clustered in the conservative area of style.
I don’t think I can go and redeem any of the PR poets. They just ran bad poetry, consistently. I am unhappy about this whole area. The figures remind me of figures for vanity presses, when I got to grips with those, in the 1960s. The proportion of women in the vanity press lists was much higher than in the legitimate publishing area. So, possibly, there were lots of women writing poetry and they were more frustrated than male poets. They had less access to publication but probably also to literary knowledge, to styles and theories and innovations. They were outsiders. But, in the 1970s, the story changes. Girls were getting into higher education at a much higher rate, and the proportion of women in the vanity press world decreases. The outsiders are now less into vanity presses and more into the small press world, where there is an outsider audience present. It is much more benign.
This isn't going in the book, because I am mainly interested in the fate of nationalist poetry and it has no bearing on that.
Completists will want to know that one poet, Peter Redgrove, was in Poetry Review for 1956 and later appeared in Lucie-Smith’s culturally high anthology. Also, one of the poets in that year of the Review is Lucie-Smith himself.
A check is afforded by a 1956 anthology, Poetry Now, edited by GS Fraser. This has 84 poets but none of them appears in that list of 150 Poetry Review poets. He includes 9 female poets, so roughly 11%. This supports the idea that women clustered in the conservative sector.
I have already had a response about modernists not being hostile to women. I agree. But it is the proportions which count.
So, supposedly High anthologies:
GS Fraser, 1956 11% female
Allott, 1960 7%
Lucie-Smith, 1970 7%
Gatherings of Bad Poetry untouched by modernity:
Poetry Review 1956 48%
Poetry Review 1957 48%
The gap between these two sets of figures is hard to blur away.
We have spent so much time on Allott’s anthology. The Poetry Review data gives a whole new way of exploiting it, because it recovers (essentially) the poets whom Allott turned down. It frames Allott and recovers the negative space around his idea.
I counted and found that Allott’s selection gave a 60% share to people who had been either at Oxford or Cambridge. So, this 7% share of women connects to the relatively lower level of education for women up to 1960 (and even 1980 in fact). The link between education and poetry can be summed up as, the more you have of cultural capital the more able you are to generate cultural capital.
I sort of want to reverse the polarity and promote the 150 poets from P Review – but they are terrible, there is no way I can follow that up.
Monday, 14 September 2026
Night of the Ragman Totts
The Ragman Totts, Ian Caws, 1990
Am struggling to describe Caws’ work. This is unemphatic poetry and its surface is inconspicuous. But it gets more fascinating as you read more poems. It has not attacked the conventions of the 1950s and so can look like something conservative and unoriginal. But it doesn’t have a 50s aesthetic, and anyway the 1950s already had poetry, it’s not all in the innovations.
The Ragman Totts were a smuggling gang of the 1780s, in Sussex, where Caws is based. It is a sort of joke name, the kind of elusive titling a gang might choose. The Internet tells me “The gang's unusual name originates from their practice of wrapping cloth rags around their cartwheels to muffle the sound of squeaky wheels on their midnight smuggling runs.” The poem about them starts
Rain falls into my sleep,
Around my shoes as I walk the shoreline.
Images jolt me out of shape
And the sound is the tide again,
Hissing at the walls of this attic room.
The poems seem at first all to have a maritime theme, on a quiet coast. That is not quite right but they are very consistent and concentrated. That is the striking thing – everything sticks to the same psychological set-up and they build up in density. That is why he doesn’t feature much in anthologies- I don’t have a note of any that he is in. The forty or so poems of ‘Ragman’ feel like parts of one pattern. This stability shows great formal concentration and also gives the feeling of life being led, of the weight of a life. His gaze is steady and intent.
It is valid to say that he is expressing how time feels as it is passing and how a landscape feels around human presence. That is generic, but perhaps it is the valid description of what Caws is doing. It doesn’t matter that other people do it badly. In “Houseboat” he sees a couple making love, on the boat, with the curtains undrawn. The speaker passes them and says [I] “Cover up my face with wind, host/ Always to doubt and loath/ To share”. Then
No formula
They seem to say, no equals sign
Exists any more: to define
Is to negate. I lay
The image aside once again[.]
This is not “pastoral”, as one quote alleges, and the poems often show doubt, often record drownings. "I search out
Myself today, lying washed up
Elsewhere, maybe from the storm." William Oxley said “What I mean is that his poems are subtle and blended like the finest malt whiskies.” This has no descriptive force.
A poem from a 2020 volume runs in part
I watch moonlight decorate the river
And think of other days. It is the owls
Who have made the difference and perhaps
They will return. It is the owls crying
Across the land, their notes that would hover
Above the dark town like cathedral bells.
It is the owls and the silence that keeps
Them in our memory now, renewing
Something [.]
(from “When the Owls Left the Hangar”)
G.B.H. Wightman, best known as an enemy of modernity in the 1970s struggle at the Poetry Society, writes 'The world he inhabits is that of Blake, Traherne and Vaughan. It is a world where the substantial turns insubstantial and the present is enveloped in time. Caws enlarges our consciousness by writing of what is beyond our sight.' This isn’t inaccurate, but it projects Caws back into poetry as it was 200 or 300 years ago. Again, this lacks descriptive force. Caws is not a religious poet, and he is a man of his time. He does not see the world as something which needs to be peeled away to find God; he is looking at the world in the hope of seeing it. Wightman does record the enthusiasm which readers of Caws often feel. As I read the poems I think also of RF Langley, Peter Bennet, and Harry Guest. And of the enthusiasm I feel for them.
Brian Fewster said (about Taro Fair, 2003) "I state the content tentatively, since a poem by Caws is like a late Turner, so full of movement and shimmering light that it isn't always easy to see what's going on.” And “While recognising a strong talent at work, I sometimes found this style too much like hard work. Amid the indirection, ambiguity and fractured narrative, I yearned for something that was hard-edged and sharply focused.” and:
“The qualification in the first line is typical. Many of the poems have a family resemblance. A scene is sketched in. A question is posed. Before it is answered a different question follows, and the scene often unravels into a general bewilderment. Some of them seem to be about the difficulty of knowing what question to pose in the first place. They have the ambiguity of conversations overheard out of context, the intensity of urgent half-remembered dreams.”
I think Brian wanted to feel confused. He resisted composing facts into an intelligent whole, as part of a protest. I think he understood the (modern) poems very well, but regarded being inexplicit as cheating. Caws' work is sharply focused - forceful and intent. Caws is not a fan of perfect metrical regularity or of unambiguous relations between facts. Bewilderment is not in the poems, not in the ones I read. I don't see "fractured". Although – the title about leaving the hangar clashes with the references in the poem to hanger, a hanging wood. The wood is the hangar in which the owls, as flying vehicles, rest – so maybe there is a hanger/ hangar pun.
The website (the poet’s page at poetrypf.co.uk) records his birth in 1945 and collections starting in 1975 and going up to 2020. Another AI trawl records that he died in 2020. I had not heard about this. Most of the books listed are not on the second-hand market (abebooks) and the others are expensive. I am buying lots of books just now and I cannot immediately pursue the Caws question. I concede that I should have got into this decades ago so as not to embarrass myself now. I notice that he did two collections with Salzburg University Press – their choices are very eccentric but this is probably a laudable achievement for them. There is no Selected.
The first time I heard Caws' name was in an email from Daniel Andersson circa 2003. Daniel wrote "I am writing currently a study on Ian Caws, whose experiential underpinning of a suddenly desubstantiated self in the face of the sudden intrusions of a Christian past and Christian landscape (alas, comfortably home counties for some) seem to provide as accurate and as horrifying an account of the difficulties of identity and the dangers and consolations of form as anything in Tom Raworth, for whose integrity of purpose I have of course great respect." and "Ian Caws is one of my favourite poets of the 1980s. He is a subtle, quiet formalist, recording the problems of christian faith in the Home Counties, full of understatement, and a great commentator on the seventeenth-century tradition of Herbert and Vaughan." I have not seen this study. "consolations of form" is a helpful idea. The 40 poems in Totts all repeat each other at some abstract level of patterning... not the same thematic, not the same syllable count, but at some level which we are sensitised to. He says too “In this way the poems in Herrick’s Women relate to each other and to the book as an entity.” Evidently he also thinks that the effect of 40 poems is greater than that of the poems taken separately. I think this is like an actor being consistent in playing a role. The poems get more persuasive if you read 20 of them.
The cover of Asylum Tea (2011) describes Caws, saying “he ran the county’s services for deaf people” (in West Sussex) at some stage. A text in ‘Herrick’s women’ describes the reading aloud of poems as unnecessary and says that the visual appearance of his poems is complete in itself. "Only to listen to poetry now is like drinking brandy from a tumbler." "Only on the page is the poem complete." Are these ideas linked? I do not know but I want to record it. That text says he was a social worker for 25 years.
Am struggling to describe Caws’ work. This is unemphatic poetry and its surface is inconspicuous. But it gets more fascinating as you read more poems. It has not attacked the conventions of the 1950s and so can look like something conservative and unoriginal. But it doesn’t have a 50s aesthetic, and anyway the 1950s already had poetry, it’s not all in the innovations.
The Ragman Totts were a smuggling gang of the 1780s, in Sussex, where Caws is based. It is a sort of joke name, the kind of elusive titling a gang might choose. The Internet tells me “The gang's unusual name originates from their practice of wrapping cloth rags around their cartwheels to muffle the sound of squeaky wheels on their midnight smuggling runs.” The poem about them starts
Rain falls into my sleep,
Around my shoes as I walk the shoreline.
Images jolt me out of shape
And the sound is the tide again,
Hissing at the walls of this attic room.
The poems seem at first all to have a maritime theme, on a quiet coast. That is not quite right but they are very consistent and concentrated. That is the striking thing – everything sticks to the same psychological set-up and they build up in density. That is why he doesn’t feature much in anthologies- I don’t have a note of any that he is in. The forty or so poems of ‘Ragman’ feel like parts of one pattern. This stability shows great formal concentration and also gives the feeling of life being led, of the weight of a life. His gaze is steady and intent.
It is valid to say that he is expressing how time feels as it is passing and how a landscape feels around human presence. That is generic, but perhaps it is the valid description of what Caws is doing. It doesn’t matter that other people do it badly. In “Houseboat” he sees a couple making love, on the boat, with the curtains undrawn. The speaker passes them and says [I] “Cover up my face with wind, host/ Always to doubt and loath/ To share”. Then
No formula
They seem to say, no equals sign
Exists any more: to define
Is to negate. I lay
The image aside once again[.]
This is not “pastoral”, as one quote alleges, and the poems often show doubt, often record drownings. "I search out
Myself today, lying washed up
Elsewhere, maybe from the storm." William Oxley said “What I mean is that his poems are subtle and blended like the finest malt whiskies.” This has no descriptive force.
A poem from a 2020 volume runs in part
I watch moonlight decorate the river
And think of other days. It is the owls
Who have made the difference and perhaps
They will return. It is the owls crying
Across the land, their notes that would hover
Above the dark town like cathedral bells.
It is the owls and the silence that keeps
Them in our memory now, renewing
Something [.]
(from “When the Owls Left the Hangar”)
G.B.H. Wightman, best known as an enemy of modernity in the 1970s struggle at the Poetry Society, writes 'The world he inhabits is that of Blake, Traherne and Vaughan. It is a world where the substantial turns insubstantial and the present is enveloped in time. Caws enlarges our consciousness by writing of what is beyond our sight.' This isn’t inaccurate, but it projects Caws back into poetry as it was 200 or 300 years ago. Again, this lacks descriptive force. Caws is not a religious poet, and he is a man of his time. He does not see the world as something which needs to be peeled away to find God; he is looking at the world in the hope of seeing it. Wightman does record the enthusiasm which readers of Caws often feel. As I read the poems I think also of RF Langley, Peter Bennet, and Harry Guest. And of the enthusiasm I feel for them.
Brian Fewster said (about Taro Fair, 2003) "I state the content tentatively, since a poem by Caws is like a late Turner, so full of movement and shimmering light that it isn't always easy to see what's going on.” And “While recognising a strong talent at work, I sometimes found this style too much like hard work. Amid the indirection, ambiguity and fractured narrative, I yearned for something that was hard-edged and sharply focused.” and:
“The qualification in the first line is typical. Many of the poems have a family resemblance. A scene is sketched in. A question is posed. Before it is answered a different question follows, and the scene often unravels into a general bewilderment. Some of them seem to be about the difficulty of knowing what question to pose in the first place. They have the ambiguity of conversations overheard out of context, the intensity of urgent half-remembered dreams.”
I think Brian wanted to feel confused. He resisted composing facts into an intelligent whole, as part of a protest. I think he understood the (modern) poems very well, but regarded being inexplicit as cheating. Caws' work is sharply focused - forceful and intent. Caws is not a fan of perfect metrical regularity or of unambiguous relations between facts. Bewilderment is not in the poems, not in the ones I read. I don't see "fractured". Although – the title about leaving the hangar clashes with the references in the poem to hanger, a hanging wood. The wood is the hangar in which the owls, as flying vehicles, rest – so maybe there is a hanger/ hangar pun.
The website (the poet’s page at poetrypf.co.uk) records his birth in 1945 and collections starting in 1975 and going up to 2020. Another AI trawl records that he died in 2020. I had not heard about this. Most of the books listed are not on the second-hand market (abebooks) and the others are expensive. I am buying lots of books just now and I cannot immediately pursue the Caws question. I concede that I should have got into this decades ago so as not to embarrass myself now. I notice that he did two collections with Salzburg University Press – their choices are very eccentric but this is probably a laudable achievement for them. There is no Selected.
The first time I heard Caws' name was in an email from Daniel Andersson circa 2003. Daniel wrote "I am writing currently a study on Ian Caws, whose experiential underpinning of a suddenly desubstantiated self in the face of the sudden intrusions of a Christian past and Christian landscape (alas, comfortably home counties for some) seem to provide as accurate and as horrifying an account of the difficulties of identity and the dangers and consolations of form as anything in Tom Raworth, for whose integrity of purpose I have of course great respect." and "Ian Caws is one of my favourite poets of the 1980s. He is a subtle, quiet formalist, recording the problems of christian faith in the Home Counties, full of understatement, and a great commentator on the seventeenth-century tradition of Herbert and Vaughan." I have not seen this study. "consolations of form" is a helpful idea. The 40 poems in Totts all repeat each other at some abstract level of patterning... not the same thematic, not the same syllable count, but at some level which we are sensitised to. He says too “In this way the poems in Herrick’s Women relate to each other and to the book as an entity.” Evidently he also thinks that the effect of 40 poems is greater than that of the poems taken separately. I think this is like an actor being consistent in playing a role. The poems get more persuasive if you read 20 of them.
The cover of Asylum Tea (2011) describes Caws, saying “he ran the county’s services for deaf people” (in West Sussex) at some stage. A text in ‘Herrick’s women’ describes the reading aloud of poems as unnecessary and says that the visual appearance of his poems is complete in itself. "Only to listen to poetry now is like drinking brandy from a tumbler." "Only on the page is the poem complete." Are these ideas linked? I do not know but I want to record it. That text says he was a social worker for 25 years.
Sunday, 13 September 2026
Travelogue - more doubts
Am still in the phase of checking ‘Travelogue’, which may go on for years. Am looking at Alan Rooss’s poem ‘Racing at Kassar Said’ (circa 1958?) and have just googled the name to find it is a hippodrome in Tunisia. That helps me to think about the poem, but there is a further dreadful possibility that I would be deciding whether his poem is accurate. That is absurd, but the book involves me in writing about roughly 60 poets, mainly describing foreign parts, and sometimes criticising what they say. The possibilities for factual error are endless, and this is where my book could spring a leak and trickle away. It is mainly about incomprehension. So, do I have to know about sixty territories… to avoid glaring errors… a tale of incomprehension? This is genuinely insoluble, so I am just trying to curtail my claims and so reduce exposure. You can’t write about the Empire without making claims about what the empire was like.
I searched ‘Autumn Sequel’ (1953) by Louis MacNeice, and did find something about the Empire and colonial wars. In Canto X, he is in a news room at the BBC, and stories about several colonial wars flit past. He recalls a moment, not in 1953 but perhaps 1943, when he was in India and there was trouble. Suez and Kenya pass by. There is trouble in Kenya, but he focuses on a regiment being sent there to clear it up, the Enniskillen Fusiliers, and on people he used to know who served in that regiment. He refers to them as the Skins. They came from Northern Ireland as he did. Lots of detail about this, but we don’t find out what the trouble in Kenya is, that the white settlers had stolen Kikuyu land, that younger Kikuyu were trying to take it back, that there were local nationalists with a strong economic cause feeding popular support. He just doesn’t have time for this. He doesn’t even tell you whether it was a black versus white struggle. The news stories are just scenery. He is only interested in people who are listening to him, preferably face to face. He goes to the pub with the newsmen so they have to listen to him. The stories might as well be sports stories. MacNeice had developed a completely conversational way of writing, cheerful and chatty, fluent, neatly metrical and rhymed, but never intense at any point. This solved certain problems of accessibility but didn’t leave behind poetry which we can enjoy now. One noticeable feature is that he has abandoned modernism altogether. I am not sure he ever wrote a modernist poem. However, I think this style of 1953 was an innovation, and that he was going in the direction which the poetry business followed. I think he had worked for the BBC for 11 years by then – broadcasting created the “fireside chat” quality and removed the distance between speaker and listener. MacNeice has also removed that gap. This cosy style was an advanced development; it suited the new world of public readings which was going to come on in the 1960s. But that conversational quality tended to produce forgettable poems. Television developed a typically flat world, where events in a greater world receded to the twilight while affable personalities produced most of the signal. Evidently MacNeice had pioneered this, and it follows that there was an idea of intimate banality which came before television, which TV was simply captured by. I am not writing about MacNeice.
Am reading Gooch’s book on the wars of Mussolini, 1935 to 1943. He remarks, or quotes someone in a strategy meeting remarking, in March 1943, saying that Italy (its empire) is vulnerable from Toulon to Rhodes once Tunisia has fallen to Montgomery. The question of where to place your garrisons is unanswerable. This is the nightmare of the infinite perimeter, and it affects all empires eventually. The attack is always going to come at a weak spot. What if we apply it to the British one…in 1940 there was a perimeter from Hong Kong to Capetown. Every expansion brings more exposure to foreign aggression, or to internal politics, and every increase of power increases that exposure. The climax of Empire was so brief that it is hard to find.
The stage of the book I am in is one of trying to reduce the perimeter size.
I stumbled across Ariel Dorfman’s book on Violencia y imaginacion en America (1970) and found that it deals with the most famous Magic Realist novels (adding Arguedas and Juan Rulfo). He screens out the ‘marvels’ and focuses on the violence. Clearly they are all extremely violent. This is a complete shift of perspective. The novels in question deal with the history of the regions where they are set (Cuba, Guatemala, Colombia) and that history is strikingly violent. This redefines the novels as being political and containing history. His first subject is Borges… I am surprised to see Borges treated as a model of violence in art, and I don’t think he is interested in recording the political history of Argentina. His heroes are playing metaphysical games which involve death. He is, however, nostalgic for gaucho stories which are like Westerns. The claim is that the Borgesian human “Mata o muere para salir del laberinto y entenderlo momentaneamente, transciende al violencia al usarla come instrumento de su desajenacion, derrotanda la muerte en la boca misma del Muerte, la muerte mia o el asesinato como manera de fijar algo eterno, digno, significativa [.]” I find this hard to believe. Dorfman tells us that Borges is denying and killing his own being because he hates America, and his whole work is a denial of the reality of America, especially its violence. So, he is really writing about America and violence the whole time. This is taking over Borges’ silence and running away with it.
* I recently acquired two anthologies, from 1953 and 1956 respectively, which can serve as a check on my thesis that poets did not agitate for decolonisation and did not foresee, or even react to, the rapid decline of Empire. (The books are New Poems 1953, edited by Robert Conquest and two associates, and Poetry Now, 1956, edited by G.S. Fraser.) The finding is largely that the thesis is right. I am not seeing poems calling for decolonisation. But no idea works 100%, and it is valuable to comb through the exceptions. We can start with Lawrence Durrell’s poem on ‘Alexandria’. Egypt was under British hegemony for a century or so, and when Durrell was living in Alexandria it was a city loosely within British influence, which came to an end in 1953. It is a good poem. We know that Durrell had friends in the local community, probably all of them Christian and more European than the average Egyptian. It is a good poem. But I don’t see anything about the presence of the Empire or about its end. It is not a political poem. In Fraser’s anthology, there is a poem by Sidney Keyes. It cannot be later than 1942, because Keyes was killed in that year. That happened in Tunisia. The poem is about Carthage, a city in what is now Tunisia. The theme is the collapse of the Carthaginian empire, overthrown by Rome. I can’t prove that the poem relates to the 1940s, and I especially have difficulty attributing a specific value to its inexplicit message. In 1942, the empire collapsing was most obviously the Italian one, with its many far-flung provinces rapidly falling to other armies. But there may be a reference to the fate of the British Empire, which in spring 1942 was just about emerging from a phase of crisis which looked terminal.
Rome remember, the courts of learning are tiled
With figures from the east like running nooses.
The desolate bodies of boys in the blue glare
Of falling torches cannot stir your passion.
Remember the Greeks who measured out your doom.
Remember the soft funereal Etruscans.
The last two stanzas are more explicit as a warning to the Romans that North European barbarians will bring their state to an end. The stanza quoted is startlingly vivid but basically ambiguous. The ambiguity is the power, I think. I can’t easily enrol this in a political argument. A poem by Julian Symons is about the gap between political perception and daily life in an uneasy affluence. The politics are described in a terse four lines which are clearly Marxist. Since that implies anti-imperialism, we can see the poem as anti-imperialist. However, the lack of detail deprives it of any poetic weight. Symons has political certainty, but that has hardened into a dogma and he can’t break it down to show something happening inside a poem. His poem published in 1956 has little psychological content.
I see that Symons wrote about the events in the South Sudan in the 1880s (England's pride : the story of the Gordon Relief Expedition, 1965). I presume this is a Marxist interpretation, and it probably disagrees a lot with Scawen Blunt’s version. Even more obscurely, his brother AJA Symons published a biography of Emin, Governor of Equatoria, in 1928. Emin Pasha was a German governor of a region technically part of South Sudan, near Uganda, who retreated south to avoid the Mahdist army which captured Omdurman in 1885. He was a Muslim convert.
The 1953 book has a poem by G. Rostrevor Hamilton called “The African” which is an early response to the few Commonwealth immigrants who were in London in 1953. Hamilton is sitting opposite an African (or possibly just a Caribbean of African heritage?) on public transport, and reacting with shock. This is not a hostile poem, but the poet finds the African to be completely out of context in London, and writes about that. He applies an old-fashioned and schematic psychology to his subject. Hamilton wonders “beyond his waking/ Quiet behaviour what still potent background/ Vast and primeval worked, what violence/ Ancestral[.]”. This isn’t very far from the Fascist view of Africans, even if the tone of the poem is not aggressive. The poem offers a moment of literary authority which we now see as complete ignorance, a defensive reaction to cover confusion. Hamilton thinks he knows about the “ancestral” mind of his subject and doesn’t give him a word to speak of his own. He gets credit for registering that immigrants existed, in a literary landscape which generally didn’t register anything, but less credit for letting the subject really get into the poem. This is not at all a good poem. Hamilton sees a Black person on the commuter train and then sees 20 white swans on the Thames. Why does this image follow? Is he relieved because they are white and because they belong where they live? If you wanted to write a Fascist poem, the image sequence of “ancestral blood thirst” plus “white birds on a river” would fit perfectly.
I spent a day reading old runs of ‘Poetry Review’, available on the shelf in Cambridge University Library. I was looking for racist poems but I went through 5 years’ worth of issues without finding any. I found the experience depressing so I am discontinuing. Instead, I am using a poem in Brooks and Faulkner’s classic anthology of imperialist poetry. This feels like cheating, but it serves as a reminder of how good that anthology is. The deeper question is whether the supposed Left-liberal hegemony is a real thing. Clear evidence on that is not available. After some work, I think it might be fairer to say that it holds for the period after about 1965, when there was a cultural revolt which had Afro-American music as one of its favourite staples. I think the situation in the 1950s was still one of near-universal passive racism, a common belief that coloured races were incapable of self-government (even if this might change after another 100 years of White rule). The poems I looked at rarely talked about politics, and I was not struck by critical or protest poems. Poetry Review was culturally conservative and it is likely that their audience was also politically conservative. That is not explicit in the pages of the magazine. One has to ask how many poems of the mid-century could have offended conservative opinion.
I don’t see any trace of poets who support Reform UK, so I think there is a Left-liberal hegemony, it is a real thing and presumably has a history. I don’t have that history, but I can say that if the poetry world wasn’t so full of Left people I wouldn’t have spent my life inside it. I can’t see my life being any better if there were one or a hundred Reform UK poets, or Restore Britain poets, rattling away. Reading, or skimming, old issues of Poetry Review was depressing, not so much because I couldn’t find the evidence I was interested in, as because the people writing it were so stupid and their judgments were so numbing and irritating. I didn’t want to spend another 40 hours doing this. There were moments of interest. So in the 1957 volume, page 165, you find a review of Christopher Logue’s book (his second book, I think), “The thoughts… are too private in their expression to be often shared by reviewer or reader.” We also hear about “an obsession with the macabre, both in life and in death[.]” So it tells you you won’t understand it. If Poetry Review dismisses a book in 20 words, there must be something of value in it. So, there was something happening in the 1950s! Logue was, three or four years later, viewed as a wholly public poet. Strange, and actually the privacy is simply because his style is bold and compressed.
Another fascinating moment is in the 1923 volume, at page 89, when someone has a snit about attacks on rhetoric. Obviously, this was already a controversy by 1923. That is well before close reading was invented. So, the decline of rhetoric cannot be due to the advent of close reading and the New Criticism. PR only registers new ideas as things to ridicule and be indignant about. It is a detector programmed not to detect what is happening. However, this is evidence of something, I think.
I am trying to read Beaton’s biography of George Seferis. It records (p.229) a moment around 1945 when English poets are trying to translate the poet from Smyrna and finding that they always make him sound like Eliot. This is an interesting moment. Is it a failure report? I had always assumed that Seferis was much influenced by Eliot. But, maybe that is an effect of translation? Maybe it doesn’t sound like the Waste Land at all, in Greek? Tinos Malanos wrote a book (in 1951) claiming this influence. Seferis wrote an essay refuting the idea (which was never published). (Beaton, p.295) Seferis translated a lot of Eliot’s poetry. The translators were born in a certain time… they knew Eliot backwards. Maybe they could make anything sound like Eliot because that is what they were saturated in. This is relevant, because I touch on Seferis and the ability of English poets (Rex Warner, Philip Sherrard, etc.) to translate him. That scene, about 1941 to 45, of poets hanging out in Alexandria, of Personal Landscape, of English people understanding Seferis in Greek, is a moment when English culture actually gets close to a foreign culture. One possibility is that the translation goes so well because Seferis was a cosmopolitan and anglophile and had absorbed so much English poetry. But maybe that isn’t true. Maybe it’s more that you can make Seferis sound like Eliot, and he then sounds less like the real Seferis. Maybe it’s very hard for us to get someone who grew up in Smyrna, on the Aegean, in the Ottoman Empire, and whose father was heavily involved in the “language quarrel”, between two variants of standardised modern Greek. The Greek town of Smyrna was destroyed in 1922. A brilliant translation can be a screen behind which everything strange hides. Cavafy went to school in England and his English quality is much stronger.
The Prince of Wales’ African Book (words by St John Adcock, 1926) may be the source Sitwell used for Gold Coast Customs. This is an obscure area. What she says may in fact be true, for the Gold Coast in the 1820s.
A note on Prynne’s poem “Aristeas”. It is possible to connect the tale about Aristeas flying above the sea and seeing cities, ships etc. with Siberian tales of the shaman leaving his body and flying out to see distant things. However, this bird’s eye view is hard to find in Siberian shaman literature. Reitzenstein (in his book on Hellenistic wonder-tales) lists a series of Greek writers who describe the world as if seen from high above – an imaginary vantage point. If we return to Aristeas, he came from Proconnesus, a trading port at the end of a long trading route leading all the way to Siberia, in fact through the countries which the Arimaspeia describes. The “bird’s” perspective describes a map, and the 7th C date puts us in the early days of maps. These were in fact the cognitive means by which merchants could go to Central Asia and return. Aristeas’ knowledge is what merchants on Proconnesus, and in other Black Sea ports, really possessed. There is a perspective implied in a flat rendition of a portion of the Earth. So the “overflight” belongs to Greek knowledge and not to Siberian.
I searched ‘Autumn Sequel’ (1953) by Louis MacNeice, and did find something about the Empire and colonial wars. In Canto X, he is in a news room at the BBC, and stories about several colonial wars flit past. He recalls a moment, not in 1953 but perhaps 1943, when he was in India and there was trouble. Suez and Kenya pass by. There is trouble in Kenya, but he focuses on a regiment being sent there to clear it up, the Enniskillen Fusiliers, and on people he used to know who served in that regiment. He refers to them as the Skins. They came from Northern Ireland as he did. Lots of detail about this, but we don’t find out what the trouble in Kenya is, that the white settlers had stolen Kikuyu land, that younger Kikuyu were trying to take it back, that there were local nationalists with a strong economic cause feeding popular support. He just doesn’t have time for this. He doesn’t even tell you whether it was a black versus white struggle. The news stories are just scenery. He is only interested in people who are listening to him, preferably face to face. He goes to the pub with the newsmen so they have to listen to him. The stories might as well be sports stories. MacNeice had developed a completely conversational way of writing, cheerful and chatty, fluent, neatly metrical and rhymed, but never intense at any point. This solved certain problems of accessibility but didn’t leave behind poetry which we can enjoy now. One noticeable feature is that he has abandoned modernism altogether. I am not sure he ever wrote a modernist poem. However, I think this style of 1953 was an innovation, and that he was going in the direction which the poetry business followed. I think he had worked for the BBC for 11 years by then – broadcasting created the “fireside chat” quality and removed the distance between speaker and listener. MacNeice has also removed that gap. This cosy style was an advanced development; it suited the new world of public readings which was going to come on in the 1960s. But that conversational quality tended to produce forgettable poems. Television developed a typically flat world, where events in a greater world receded to the twilight while affable personalities produced most of the signal. Evidently MacNeice had pioneered this, and it follows that there was an idea of intimate banality which came before television, which TV was simply captured by. I am not writing about MacNeice.
Am reading Gooch’s book on the wars of Mussolini, 1935 to 1943. He remarks, or quotes someone in a strategy meeting remarking, in March 1943, saying that Italy (its empire) is vulnerable from Toulon to Rhodes once Tunisia has fallen to Montgomery. The question of where to place your garrisons is unanswerable. This is the nightmare of the infinite perimeter, and it affects all empires eventually. The attack is always going to come at a weak spot. What if we apply it to the British one…in 1940 there was a perimeter from Hong Kong to Capetown. Every expansion brings more exposure to foreign aggression, or to internal politics, and every increase of power increases that exposure. The climax of Empire was so brief that it is hard to find.
The stage of the book I am in is one of trying to reduce the perimeter size.
I stumbled across Ariel Dorfman’s book on Violencia y imaginacion en America (1970) and found that it deals with the most famous Magic Realist novels (adding Arguedas and Juan Rulfo). He screens out the ‘marvels’ and focuses on the violence. Clearly they are all extremely violent. This is a complete shift of perspective. The novels in question deal with the history of the regions where they are set (Cuba, Guatemala, Colombia) and that history is strikingly violent. This redefines the novels as being political and containing history. His first subject is Borges… I am surprised to see Borges treated as a model of violence in art, and I don’t think he is interested in recording the political history of Argentina. His heroes are playing metaphysical games which involve death. He is, however, nostalgic for gaucho stories which are like Westerns. The claim is that the Borgesian human “Mata o muere para salir del laberinto y entenderlo momentaneamente, transciende al violencia al usarla come instrumento de su desajenacion, derrotanda la muerte en la boca misma del Muerte, la muerte mia o el asesinato como manera de fijar algo eterno, digno, significativa [.]” I find this hard to believe. Dorfman tells us that Borges is denying and killing his own being because he hates America, and his whole work is a denial of the reality of America, especially its violence. So, he is really writing about America and violence the whole time. This is taking over Borges’ silence and running away with it.
* I recently acquired two anthologies, from 1953 and 1956 respectively, which can serve as a check on my thesis that poets did not agitate for decolonisation and did not foresee, or even react to, the rapid decline of Empire. (The books are New Poems 1953, edited by Robert Conquest and two associates, and Poetry Now, 1956, edited by G.S. Fraser.) The finding is largely that the thesis is right. I am not seeing poems calling for decolonisation. But no idea works 100%, and it is valuable to comb through the exceptions. We can start with Lawrence Durrell’s poem on ‘Alexandria’. Egypt was under British hegemony for a century or so, and when Durrell was living in Alexandria it was a city loosely within British influence, which came to an end in 1953. It is a good poem. We know that Durrell had friends in the local community, probably all of them Christian and more European than the average Egyptian. It is a good poem. But I don’t see anything about the presence of the Empire or about its end. It is not a political poem. In Fraser’s anthology, there is a poem by Sidney Keyes. It cannot be later than 1942, because Keyes was killed in that year. That happened in Tunisia. The poem is about Carthage, a city in what is now Tunisia. The theme is the collapse of the Carthaginian empire, overthrown by Rome. I can’t prove that the poem relates to the 1940s, and I especially have difficulty attributing a specific value to its inexplicit message. In 1942, the empire collapsing was most obviously the Italian one, with its many far-flung provinces rapidly falling to other armies. But there may be a reference to the fate of the British Empire, which in spring 1942 was just about emerging from a phase of crisis which looked terminal.
Rome remember, the courts of learning are tiled
With figures from the east like running nooses.
The desolate bodies of boys in the blue glare
Of falling torches cannot stir your passion.
Remember the Greeks who measured out your doom.
Remember the soft funereal Etruscans.
The last two stanzas are more explicit as a warning to the Romans that North European barbarians will bring their state to an end. The stanza quoted is startlingly vivid but basically ambiguous. The ambiguity is the power, I think. I can’t easily enrol this in a political argument. A poem by Julian Symons is about the gap between political perception and daily life in an uneasy affluence. The politics are described in a terse four lines which are clearly Marxist. Since that implies anti-imperialism, we can see the poem as anti-imperialist. However, the lack of detail deprives it of any poetic weight. Symons has political certainty, but that has hardened into a dogma and he can’t break it down to show something happening inside a poem. His poem published in 1956 has little psychological content.
I see that Symons wrote about the events in the South Sudan in the 1880s (England's pride : the story of the Gordon Relief Expedition, 1965). I presume this is a Marxist interpretation, and it probably disagrees a lot with Scawen Blunt’s version. Even more obscurely, his brother AJA Symons published a biography of Emin, Governor of Equatoria, in 1928. Emin Pasha was a German governor of a region technically part of South Sudan, near Uganda, who retreated south to avoid the Mahdist army which captured Omdurman in 1885. He was a Muslim convert.
The 1953 book has a poem by G. Rostrevor Hamilton called “The African” which is an early response to the few Commonwealth immigrants who were in London in 1953. Hamilton is sitting opposite an African (or possibly just a Caribbean of African heritage?) on public transport, and reacting with shock. This is not a hostile poem, but the poet finds the African to be completely out of context in London, and writes about that. He applies an old-fashioned and schematic psychology to his subject. Hamilton wonders “beyond his waking/ Quiet behaviour what still potent background/ Vast and primeval worked, what violence/ Ancestral[.]”. This isn’t very far from the Fascist view of Africans, even if the tone of the poem is not aggressive. The poem offers a moment of literary authority which we now see as complete ignorance, a defensive reaction to cover confusion. Hamilton thinks he knows about the “ancestral” mind of his subject and doesn’t give him a word to speak of his own. He gets credit for registering that immigrants existed, in a literary landscape which generally didn’t register anything, but less credit for letting the subject really get into the poem. This is not at all a good poem. Hamilton sees a Black person on the commuter train and then sees 20 white swans on the Thames. Why does this image follow? Is he relieved because they are white and because they belong where they live? If you wanted to write a Fascist poem, the image sequence of “ancestral blood thirst” plus “white birds on a river” would fit perfectly.
I spent a day reading old runs of ‘Poetry Review’, available on the shelf in Cambridge University Library. I was looking for racist poems but I went through 5 years’ worth of issues without finding any. I found the experience depressing so I am discontinuing. Instead, I am using a poem in Brooks and Faulkner’s classic anthology of imperialist poetry. This feels like cheating, but it serves as a reminder of how good that anthology is. The deeper question is whether the supposed Left-liberal hegemony is a real thing. Clear evidence on that is not available. After some work, I think it might be fairer to say that it holds for the period after about 1965, when there was a cultural revolt which had Afro-American music as one of its favourite staples. I think the situation in the 1950s was still one of near-universal passive racism, a common belief that coloured races were incapable of self-government (even if this might change after another 100 years of White rule). The poems I looked at rarely talked about politics, and I was not struck by critical or protest poems. Poetry Review was culturally conservative and it is likely that their audience was also politically conservative. That is not explicit in the pages of the magazine. One has to ask how many poems of the mid-century could have offended conservative opinion.
I don’t see any trace of poets who support Reform UK, so I think there is a Left-liberal hegemony, it is a real thing and presumably has a history. I don’t have that history, but I can say that if the poetry world wasn’t so full of Left people I wouldn’t have spent my life inside it. I can’t see my life being any better if there were one or a hundred Reform UK poets, or Restore Britain poets, rattling away. Reading, or skimming, old issues of Poetry Review was depressing, not so much because I couldn’t find the evidence I was interested in, as because the people writing it were so stupid and their judgments were so numbing and irritating. I didn’t want to spend another 40 hours doing this. There were moments of interest. So in the 1957 volume, page 165, you find a review of Christopher Logue’s book (his second book, I think), “The thoughts… are too private in their expression to be often shared by reviewer or reader.” We also hear about “an obsession with the macabre, both in life and in death[.]” So it tells you you won’t understand it. If Poetry Review dismisses a book in 20 words, there must be something of value in it. So, there was something happening in the 1950s! Logue was, three or four years later, viewed as a wholly public poet. Strange, and actually the privacy is simply because his style is bold and compressed.
Another fascinating moment is in the 1923 volume, at page 89, when someone has a snit about attacks on rhetoric. Obviously, this was already a controversy by 1923. That is well before close reading was invented. So, the decline of rhetoric cannot be due to the advent of close reading and the New Criticism. PR only registers new ideas as things to ridicule and be indignant about. It is a detector programmed not to detect what is happening. However, this is evidence of something, I think.
I am trying to read Beaton’s biography of George Seferis. It records (p.229) a moment around 1945 when English poets are trying to translate the poet from Smyrna and finding that they always make him sound like Eliot. This is an interesting moment. Is it a failure report? I had always assumed that Seferis was much influenced by Eliot. But, maybe that is an effect of translation? Maybe it doesn’t sound like the Waste Land at all, in Greek? Tinos Malanos wrote a book (in 1951) claiming this influence. Seferis wrote an essay refuting the idea (which was never published). (Beaton, p.295) Seferis translated a lot of Eliot’s poetry. The translators were born in a certain time… they knew Eliot backwards. Maybe they could make anything sound like Eliot because that is what they were saturated in. This is relevant, because I touch on Seferis and the ability of English poets (Rex Warner, Philip Sherrard, etc.) to translate him. That scene, about 1941 to 45, of poets hanging out in Alexandria, of Personal Landscape, of English people understanding Seferis in Greek, is a moment when English culture actually gets close to a foreign culture. One possibility is that the translation goes so well because Seferis was a cosmopolitan and anglophile and had absorbed so much English poetry. But maybe that isn’t true. Maybe it’s more that you can make Seferis sound like Eliot, and he then sounds less like the real Seferis. Maybe it’s very hard for us to get someone who grew up in Smyrna, on the Aegean, in the Ottoman Empire, and whose father was heavily involved in the “language quarrel”, between two variants of standardised modern Greek. The Greek town of Smyrna was destroyed in 1922. A brilliant translation can be a screen behind which everything strange hides. Cavafy went to school in England and his English quality is much stronger.
The Prince of Wales’ African Book (words by St John Adcock, 1926) may be the source Sitwell used for Gold Coast Customs. This is an obscure area. What she says may in fact be true, for the Gold Coast in the 1820s.
A note on Prynne’s poem “Aristeas”. It is possible to connect the tale about Aristeas flying above the sea and seeing cities, ships etc. with Siberian tales of the shaman leaving his body and flying out to see distant things. However, this bird’s eye view is hard to find in Siberian shaman literature. Reitzenstein (in his book on Hellenistic wonder-tales) lists a series of Greek writers who describe the world as if seen from high above – an imaginary vantage point. If we return to Aristeas, he came from Proconnesus, a trading port at the end of a long trading route leading all the way to Siberia, in fact through the countries which the Arimaspeia describes. The “bird’s” perspective describes a map, and the 7th C date puts us in the early days of maps. These were in fact the cognitive means by which merchants could go to Central Asia and return. Aristeas’ knowledge is what merchants on Proconnesus, and in other Black Sea ports, really possessed. There is a perspective implied in a flat rendition of a portion of the Earth. So the “overflight” belongs to Greek knowledge and not to Siberian.
Friday, 21 August 2026
travelogue - more progress
Travelogue
Am now (August 2026) reading around the subjects in Travelogue to check that I have not made outstanding mistakes. This is tedious because most of it is repetitive and not productive (of lurking errors). The tedium encourages me to have new ideas which obviously are NOT going to fit into a structure which is good as it is.
I left out Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. He was too arrogant to form sensible policies. Alan Moorehead says in The White Nile (1960) that when the Mahdi’s forces took Omdurman they massacred several thousand, enslaved everyone who survived, and ravished the women as a first step. “Human beings were the chief loot, but there was great wastage of them at first.” When news reached London, Blunt wrote “Unexpected and glorious news of the fall of Omdurman… I could not help singing all the way down [into the country] on the train.” He just didn’t know what he was talking about. He had left the Foreign Office (11 years in the Diplomatic Service) and was promoting his own personal foreign policy, without the benefit of the local intelligence which the FO itself had. I sympathise with his resistance to colonialism, but he is just someone you don’t want on your side. This is the equivalent of someone in the 2020s being a big fan of Hamas.
In a democracy, we have the right to criticise the government’s foreign policy. That still applies even when we are not “area specialists”. Someone like Blunt discredits this role of democratic opposition. That is why I don’t want him in my book.
August Closs. A chance encounter with an essay in Antaios (volume for 1964) showed me a reference to Closs’s 1936 article in which he claims that shamanism is a key to the Germanic religion as it was practiced 2000 years ago in Northern Europe. This is interesting because it shows that connection being made before Eliade’s 1951 book – although Eliade co-edited Antaios, in fact. The link explains the mysterious fact that “Wodan, id est furor” (Wodan, that is fury), was the statement made by bishop Adam of Bremen in the 12th C, when there still were pagans around. If you translate “furor” as “spirit possession”, then you can make a link to shamanism in Siberia, which was reasonably well studied by anthropologists (including those exiled for their political activities). The etymology is convincing, a word which gives us meanings like “rage” in German and “insane” in Middle English and Scottish (“I mun waxen wode”). But the idea that all states of ecstasy, trance, possession, etc. resemble Siberian shamanism is not tenable. It is a link with no specific content. Moreover, the written records we have of Wodan legends do not contain this trance aspect at all. The date when he acquired the name may have been far distant from the stage when literate monks (or others) came to write down Norse mythology. There is no instance where “wood” means “possessed by a spirit”, and it seems odd that Woden would be possessed by a spirit if he was a high god. I find the link between Siberia and Northern paganism fascinating, but the more I know about it the less real it seems. You have to strip the Siberian thing of every specific feature to make the match. But, if you do that, where is the intellectual gain?
There was a religion in Iron Age Northern Europe. And I don’t think it involved wise men sitting around reading works of theology and discussing philosophy. But it is the link with Siberia which I find questionable. Of course, this would bind Europe to the Third World. So many people have found shamanism fascinating, and tried to import it into the West in various forms.
Love of country
One of the sources I looked at, possibly Herbert Palmer, said that people after 1918 began to write patriotic poetry through writing in detail about their tiny bit of the country, so “love of country” in small-scale pictures. I have not gone into this at all. The sequel would be that the impact of the First World War had moved patriotic feeling away from the Army and the Navy and towards the countryside (urban scenes did not arouse the same feelings). That is, patriotic poetry continued but it no longer took the form which it had done between 1890 and 1920. I think it’s well-known that people fighting in the Second World War thought of scenes from the cherished English countryside when they asked themselves what they were fighting for. Such scenes were not heroic and certainly not arguments in favour of expansion. I have not explored this, and I think the problem in distinguishing propaganda from simple landscape or nature poetry (and painting etc.) is pervasive. If you look at the art and films which the official organs of propaganda encouraged, or funded, during the second war, some part of it is clearly the rural, the picturesque, the sentimental. There was a whole mythology of England, and to some extent of Wales and Scotland. And when people thought of war aims, they often thought of lovely villages and old woods. I know what the propaganda czars were thinking about, and that they thought a lot about how to portray the English countryside. But, the message of those paintings etc. is that here is something old and vulnerable. Something under threat from aggression and mechanization. The anti-war message is obvious. Of course, at the time this meant defence against invasion, and the defence obviously took military forms. But it was the same set of messages and emotions which pacifists liked to imagine. It just isn’t militarist. It also tends to be against the State, because in favour of very small areas which can be thought of as home. One of the cultural events of 1940 was a project funded by the Pilgrim Trust to record aspects of the countryside. This was often done in watercolour, which was more suited to painting outside, on the spot. The theme is vulnerability and the small-scale. The results are fascinating and very moving. But the editors of the book, from the 1980s I think, which collected and showed these images, pointed out that the immediate stimulus was anxiety that the British war effort would destroy all these things, turn them into tank training grounds and so on. Many guns, much concrete. The stress between love of country and militarism was obvious. That stress explains why creative people had gone off militarism and territorial aggression. It also explains why they stopped being patriotic in one way but went on being patriotic in another way. Anyway, it is ridiculous to think of some poem about wild flowers as instantly being nationalistic.
It is inaccurate to think of British poets as all trooping off into individualism in the 1920s. Some of them did. Few of them were happy about the gigantic efforts of the world war which had just finished. Fewer wanted a repeat. Many of them had grave doubts about the State and the ruling classes. But a belief in the community united most of them, and the issue was more how to express this.
A different version of the book would be if I were looking for patriotic poetry and foregrounding the successes. I didn’t do that, but after all love of country is something most writers share. Michael Powell’s 1944 film “A Canterbury Tale” is a good subject if we want to think about patriots in the 20th C. Its protagonist turns out to be carrying out small acts of vandalism (pouring glue in the hair of courting couples?) because he wants to defend a beautiful Kent, as something for tired warriors to come home to. The couples involve American soldiers, in Kent to help win the war. He is genuinely in love with his country. This is a portrait of patriotism; and the film is about patriotism. But the story is profoundly ambiguous. This cluster of feelings was not easy to simplify.
Am now (August 2026) reading around the subjects in Travelogue to check that I have not made outstanding mistakes. This is tedious because most of it is repetitive and not productive (of lurking errors). The tedium encourages me to have new ideas which obviously are NOT going to fit into a structure which is good as it is.
I left out Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. He was too arrogant to form sensible policies. Alan Moorehead says in The White Nile (1960) that when the Mahdi’s forces took Omdurman they massacred several thousand, enslaved everyone who survived, and ravished the women as a first step. “Human beings were the chief loot, but there was great wastage of them at first.” When news reached London, Blunt wrote “Unexpected and glorious news of the fall of Omdurman… I could not help singing all the way down [into the country] on the train.” He just didn’t know what he was talking about. He had left the Foreign Office (11 years in the Diplomatic Service) and was promoting his own personal foreign policy, without the benefit of the local intelligence which the FO itself had. I sympathise with his resistance to colonialism, but he is just someone you don’t want on your side. This is the equivalent of someone in the 2020s being a big fan of Hamas.
In a democracy, we have the right to criticise the government’s foreign policy. That still applies even when we are not “area specialists”. Someone like Blunt discredits this role of democratic opposition. That is why I don’t want him in my book.
August Closs. A chance encounter with an essay in Antaios (volume for 1964) showed me a reference to Closs’s 1936 article in which he claims that shamanism is a key to the Germanic religion as it was practiced 2000 years ago in Northern Europe. This is interesting because it shows that connection being made before Eliade’s 1951 book – although Eliade co-edited Antaios, in fact. The link explains the mysterious fact that “Wodan, id est furor” (Wodan, that is fury), was the statement made by bishop Adam of Bremen in the 12th C, when there still were pagans around. If you translate “furor” as “spirit possession”, then you can make a link to shamanism in Siberia, which was reasonably well studied by anthropologists (including those exiled for their political activities). The etymology is convincing, a word which gives us meanings like “rage” in German and “insane” in Middle English and Scottish (“I mun waxen wode”). But the idea that all states of ecstasy, trance, possession, etc. resemble Siberian shamanism is not tenable. It is a link with no specific content. Moreover, the written records we have of Wodan legends do not contain this trance aspect at all. The date when he acquired the name may have been far distant from the stage when literate monks (or others) came to write down Norse mythology. There is no instance where “wood” means “possessed by a spirit”, and it seems odd that Woden would be possessed by a spirit if he was a high god. I find the link between Siberia and Northern paganism fascinating, but the more I know about it the less real it seems. You have to strip the Siberian thing of every specific feature to make the match. But, if you do that, where is the intellectual gain?
There was a religion in Iron Age Northern Europe. And I don’t think it involved wise men sitting around reading works of theology and discussing philosophy. But it is the link with Siberia which I find questionable. Of course, this would bind Europe to the Third World. So many people have found shamanism fascinating, and tried to import it into the West in various forms.
Love of country
One of the sources I looked at, possibly Herbert Palmer, said that people after 1918 began to write patriotic poetry through writing in detail about their tiny bit of the country, so “love of country” in small-scale pictures. I have not gone into this at all. The sequel would be that the impact of the First World War had moved patriotic feeling away from the Army and the Navy and towards the countryside (urban scenes did not arouse the same feelings). That is, patriotic poetry continued but it no longer took the form which it had done between 1890 and 1920. I think it’s well-known that people fighting in the Second World War thought of scenes from the cherished English countryside when they asked themselves what they were fighting for. Such scenes were not heroic and certainly not arguments in favour of expansion. I have not explored this, and I think the problem in distinguishing propaganda from simple landscape or nature poetry (and painting etc.) is pervasive. If you look at the art and films which the official organs of propaganda encouraged, or funded, during the second war, some part of it is clearly the rural, the picturesque, the sentimental. There was a whole mythology of England, and to some extent of Wales and Scotland. And when people thought of war aims, they often thought of lovely villages and old woods. I know what the propaganda czars were thinking about, and that they thought a lot about how to portray the English countryside. But, the message of those paintings etc. is that here is something old and vulnerable. Something under threat from aggression and mechanization. The anti-war message is obvious. Of course, at the time this meant defence against invasion, and the defence obviously took military forms. But it was the same set of messages and emotions which pacifists liked to imagine. It just isn’t militarist. It also tends to be against the State, because in favour of very small areas which can be thought of as home. One of the cultural events of 1940 was a project funded by the Pilgrim Trust to record aspects of the countryside. This was often done in watercolour, which was more suited to painting outside, on the spot. The theme is vulnerability and the small-scale. The results are fascinating and very moving. But the editors of the book, from the 1980s I think, which collected and showed these images, pointed out that the immediate stimulus was anxiety that the British war effort would destroy all these things, turn them into tank training grounds and so on. Many guns, much concrete. The stress between love of country and militarism was obvious. That stress explains why creative people had gone off militarism and territorial aggression. It also explains why they stopped being patriotic in one way but went on being patriotic in another way. Anyway, it is ridiculous to think of some poem about wild flowers as instantly being nationalistic.
It is inaccurate to think of British poets as all trooping off into individualism in the 1920s. Some of them did. Few of them were happy about the gigantic efforts of the world war which had just finished. Fewer wanted a repeat. Many of them had grave doubts about the State and the ruling classes. But a belief in the community united most of them, and the issue was more how to express this.
A different version of the book would be if I were looking for patriotic poetry and foregrounding the successes. I didn’t do that, but after all love of country is something most writers share. Michael Powell’s 1944 film “A Canterbury Tale” is a good subject if we want to think about patriots in the 20th C. Its protagonist turns out to be carrying out small acts of vandalism (pouring glue in the hair of courting couples?) because he wants to defend a beautiful Kent, as something for tired warriors to come home to. The couples involve American soldiers, in Kent to help win the war. He is genuinely in love with his country. This is a portrait of patriotism; and the film is about patriotism. But the story is profoundly ambiguous. This cluster of feelings was not easy to simplify.
Wednesday, 12 August 2026
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.
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.
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