Marcus Cumberlege
The Ram
(leaving out initial quote)
o soleil, c’est le temps de la raison ardente
WATER dripping endlessly onto stone
I have almost disappeared
Where shall I lay my hands on fire?
O my Nubian bride
vestal of the burnished strands
Our tortuous years are served
at the wheel in the blood-lit chamber
pumping a bellows with air
The sanctuary is bruised open
the grey rock lifted from the heart’s cold door
Dance into the sunlight
shaking may-motes from your hair
As March strips back a snowy cloth
we'll tune the soothing instruments
Your fingers
combs & carding-tools
Your breasts
white sails in a breeze
That willowy pool
where flax lies steeped in summer
*
A HIGH wind rises out of Taurus
curls about the garden
bending the stems of sunflowers & tall delphiniums
heaping rubbish on burnt cities
Thunder & wine boom out of empty cinemas
negro spirituals blaze from a matchbox
The gale allows one fierce-eyed Mrs Mop
to stalk around the block on waxy slippers
A red-breasted sweater swans across the road
past junk-shop corner up righthand alley
a long blue Oldsmobile
speeds through the nineteen-fifties
sacred heart of the Claddagh
clutched between Air Force insignia wings
Everything moves
always
Rings on a rich man’s finger
coil round a dark girl's throat
Leaves of corrugated iron
no bigger than postage stamps
patched on the Connaught Moon
to keep the rain at bay
Woodlice creaking in cardboard
boxes of rotten sticks
*
WHERE the helpful strengths sleep:
Lion rampant & golden spurs
Kortrijk, 1302
Lion couchant
unfurl my flower-de-luce
They have said: destroy the self!
Perhaps they were right.
I am going under water
as daylight ebbs through a net
& the jawless fish of our bodies
glide from a sun-splashed deck
Darkness turns white
We trace the shadows of circles
with our hands
*
Too much air
will snuff out a match
The self is an omnivorous weed
thriving on states of vacuum
(think of Austria…)
But now the wind is quieter
Girl in a small bed reading
her world at peace
on the hinge of a freckled elbow
Mine a manuscript
lost in the Moorish dreams of Potocki
who filed down the silver ball
on a teapot-lid
& fired it into his brain
One gust has unstrangled a pair of brown stockings
hung out by the lady below
& eight or nine sparrows return
to tackle the seeds of a sunflower dead on the bin
Is it a smile or an ignis fatuus
blossoms on the fingertips of your sex?
Do I have your permission?
For it’s Sunday outside the pub!
I kneel to you
cupping my hands
water sponged onto pumice
Man is an elastic animal
possibly a kangaroo
The room is moistening
Ears peel off the walls
...**
I know that Marcus Cumberlege lived from 1938 to 2019 but I know very little else about him. The above is one half of a poem published in 1977 in a book called Firelines. He seems to be a figure who just flew past the radar.
I got this instant response from Simon Jenner:
Very impressed. Seems (obviously) part of a zodiacal cycle, with Aries Taurus and Leo. Maybe just truncated and left with those three signs as it had run its natural lyric course. Macleod might have approved.
Some local particulars maybe but elusive and not to be taken as more than figurative. The Claddagh seems more ring than place, perhaps, and we return to rings. The Connaught Moon imagery is curious: corrugated iron in tiny patches contrasts the obvious, as symbols of 1970s decay (though as this is a figurative time-warp with some places unchanged since the Fifties, one shouldn’t take this literally, unless as universal decay, left-behind spaces. I initially thought of this as figurative).
The Connaught Moon usually places it as the plush indoor garden court moments in the London hotel. Leading to rich men generally - the whole coercive and colonial capitalist trope: ringed hands round throats of dark girls etc.
So I need to unpack where the poet means. Is their vision of a UK so run-down that even the rich justle under a leaky corrugated roof, or is this somewhere else? And how would I know? By contrast we get hanging around pubs. a perennial sad Sunday haunt of disaffected suburban poets.
Or am I overthinking my overthinking? These tropes and gestures would have seemed far more instinctive and go-to at the time. There’s a cultural reach and grab-bag more familiar to readers and writers of 1977; though we were all there, grunting the end of adolescence in different ways….
(back to AD) I think this evokes how mysterious the poem is even though every line is so clear in itself. That scatter is the appeal of the poem. I think the poem touches at least 3 countries.
Sunday, 28 June 2026
Saturday, 27 June 2026
fashions in poetry
A few years ago, Waterloo Press had the concept for a handbook, possibly the Wellington Book of Modern Poets, which would have short pieces about 1000 poets. It would really have listed all the poets you wanted to know about. The logistics didn’t work out and the project remains in skeletal form, sort of like Brighton’s West Pier (near the Waterloo office). If you look at the Poetry Book Society website, you can actually find roughly 4000 items, mainly books, with attached blurbs. It is like the Wellington Book, only the write-ups are distracted by hype.
June 2026. I have been trying to locate poets unknown to me, primarily through the PBS website. It lists about 250 books a year (currently going back to 2019), and there are blurbs for (almost) all of them, by the publisher. So, you can pick possible winners using the blurbs as a semi-transparent screen through which something is visible. I am feeling good about this, having just released (through Litter magazine) reviews of four new poets: Imogen Cassels, Adam Piette, Daniel Hinds, Olivia McCannon. Two of these came from the PBS site. They all are very good, I thought. I would so much like to have a list of (almost) all the good poetry books of the 21st century, so that patterns of change or of creative optimism would become visible. I enjoyed the list of 207 poets which came back from the survey in Angel Exhaust 24, but I don’t feel it is a very comprehensive list. It suggests a spacious landscape but leaves a lot of the features out. I have also located Angela Leighton and Rhiannon Hooson through the same site, excellent poets.
I have been re-reading The Big Short, Michael Lewis’ 2010 book on hedge fund analysts who foresaw the sub-prime mortgage derivatives crisis of 2007-8 and made money by shorting the market. It presents dissidents of high intelligence who did the analytical work better than company officers of great banking corporations, and who rejected conventional analysis. This is exciting, and it is why Lewis’s book is much more interesting than most books on the crisis. But, that position is too indulgent. I don’t think the poetry business is quite so vulnerable to the dissidents as Lehman Brothers was. If the mainstream produces lots of good books, you lose your bet against them- and forfeit your money. More concretely, if you read 250 blurbs you definitely see a lot of hype. That argues a basic corruption, lurking in the process. But, I also think that a lot of the underlying product is very good. And, if you have the ability to read the hype correctly, you can let it lead you to the good stuff. The blurbs are not very honest, but they are not the poetry process itself.
I tend to regard the Blurb as like the sleeve of an LP – a piece of added value which can be beautiful in itself.
A lot of the books in these 250 or so blurbs sound very similar to each other.
I noted about 30 blurbs which describe trauma tourism. The poet has been affected by dire events, their nephew has died of plague, their cat has flu, their grandmother was a war criminal, etc., and this makes their poetry important.
Gothic/ body dysmorphia. This is an era where illnesses related to body dysmorphia, a loss of balance in the way the mind perceives physical proportions, are common and increasing. Literary opinion is able to relate this to the Gothic – horror is connected to violent reactions to the human body, and monsters are a realisation of certain pervasive fantasies. The Gothic is seen as a form of protest. If we read “[X] is a bestiary, a spell book, a scream and a guide book to the underworld of the hurts that haunt us now. […] You will want to follow Miranda down into this beautifully crafted world and go ‘hunting in the brine’ - there you’ll find a language, an utterance for all the wanting, breaking, losing and becoming that happens under the surface we call self”, we see the heroine of the Gothic romance taken as a model of sensitivity and anxiety.
One publisher in particular has a line of conservatism. One gradually realises that all their authors have the same profile, and that this favoured style involves rejecting every innovation which has arrived since the 1950s. In fact, this is 1950s poetry. The blurbs do not make this explicit, for example they do not say “find an intact world in which it is still 1955 and Churchill is still prime minister” or “enter a world where literary theory has never happened”. The message is clear at an unconscious level. And you can see that that publisher is turning down anything modern. This is a “truth with lack of evidence”.
My feeling about the ideas is that the best 200 poets have nothing to do with them, and they really reflect what the publishers think will sell. This is a way of describing the fashions of the time. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that poets read the blurbs, see what publishers like, and are encouraged by that to design their own poetry along the same lines. Everyone wants to get published. It is also possible that the poets are more original than the blurbs, and that the publicity material makes a lot of poetry sound the same when it isn’t. The point I want to make is that you can’t describe a central fashion of the era, in the way that Auden and MacNeice were central in the 1930s. You had a small elite then, and people badly want to sound like they were part of it. They did all sound like each other. The educated elite now counts millions of people, and it produces very diverse voices. There are predictable fashions in 2026, but they are nothing like central.
Of course, the theme of ecological disaster appears in dozens of these blurbs, and that is also something which the best poets write about. That is not a very recent idea (and we don’t suppose that governments are going to make the problem go away in the short term). This isn’t a special interest issue, it affects everyone.
Do the fashions reflect the wishes of the audience, as a pressure which only needs articulating, or the wishes of the publishers? I don’t see any evidence which would really get to the heart of this. It would be a dream for a historian if you could take the blurbs, existing text which it is easy to collect and store, and decide “this speaks for the wishes of the audience”. Because the history of the audience is always hard to write, and less studied. It would also be satisfying if we could say “the blurbs describe the ideal and then the poets strive to realise it and fail”. That is a big win for the historian, but obviously it’s not a very sound result. Hype must represent unfulfilled wishes in a distorted form… and you can't use a special mirror to reverse the distortion.
Undeniably, a lot of the write-ups present being gay, or being on the autistic spectrum, etc., as a selling point. I just wonder if the gay poets are appealing to an audience which isn’t gay. There is an element of protest here – we are hearing feelings which were repressed in the 1950s, we are protesting against the cultural norms of the Cold War. But, these are feelings which I didn’t have. They aren’t my feelings. Published poetry covers a wide spectrum but I have a strange feeling that people aren’t really more unusual and more complex than they were in 1955. Most of the blurbs just fly past me, an excitement which I am not feeling – maybe some of the poetry also rushes past my ears without ever touching me.
I didn’t mention poems about witches. These come in at about 1 or 2% of the list, so they aren’t a large phenomenon. Obviously, the audience read their Harry Potter and want poems about witches.
I have just bought (2nd hand, in Hay on Wye) an anthology, New Poems 1953, which can act as a check on what is new in new poetry. Nobody admitted to being gay in the 1950s. No poets, anyway. It just wasn’t a move that even existed. I suppose that unchanged in the 1960s… I can’t think of anyone who wrote poetry and admitted to being gay in the 1960s. This may just be my bad memory. Is that true? It would have been very difficult. And in the 1970s none of the older gay poets came out. Exceptions – Thom Gunn and James Kirkup. So the scene has been going through a phase of decompression, derepression, which has continued, probably, over half a century.
I think it’s difficult for poets today to say to themselves “when I write about the unusual aspects of my feelings it alienates most of the audience because they don’t have those feelings and don’t respond to the depiction of them”. But it may be true. It always has been true. And it may be the publishers saying “what is unusual, even perverse, even maladjusted, about you is what interests people most, so forget about writing poems about anything else”. This may be a moment of wisdom which is profoundly flawed, and which may disappear.
If the scene is so de-repressed, the editors can claim “we have no blocks on our perception so it is not possible for any gifted poet to be turned down by the editors, us”. That is a bit problematic. It is quite a gun to point at anyone who doesn’t play the usual tunes. I think there is a tier of poets who really don’t sound commercial to the editors and who really do have a fascinating artistic experience to offer. There still a line between insiders and outsiders. It may have moved a bit but it is still there.
By searching, I have found that the PBS on-line store goes back to 2016 and that it has roughly 4000 items. The search they offer scans the blurbs as well as just the titles. I searched this database with the word term “queer” and got 214 results. I searched with the term “avant garde” and got 11 hits, all of them European. More checks… the blurb writers are deathly afraid of the words experimental, avant garde, modernist, and probably see them as chilling the audience, killing sales. Well, I don’t think that there has been no avant garde poetry in Britain over the last 10 years. But, let’s be fair – they like the word “queer”, they are fine with it and a queer audience can probably also find the books they want.
(The 4000 count is not all books, it includes things like PBS press releases. But the lexical constraints are relevant in both cases.) (I know automated searches can produce stupid results. I used the string “nuance” and got 69 hits. The Find function certainly can’t tell you if the blurb writer is being sincere!) (“liminal” got 50 hits, another word which literate people use when they have no idea what to say.)
214 of 4000 is about 2%. The long-term percentage of gay people in the population is probably around 2%. Actually, the percentage of gay poets in 1955 was about 2%, it's just that they were all in a dark friendly closet together, somewhere between Soho and the BBC. I won't tell if you don't.
British Poetry Revival, one hit.
June 2026. I have been trying to locate poets unknown to me, primarily through the PBS website. It lists about 250 books a year (currently going back to 2019), and there are blurbs for (almost) all of them, by the publisher. So, you can pick possible winners using the blurbs as a semi-transparent screen through which something is visible. I am feeling good about this, having just released (through Litter magazine) reviews of four new poets: Imogen Cassels, Adam Piette, Daniel Hinds, Olivia McCannon. Two of these came from the PBS site. They all are very good, I thought. I would so much like to have a list of (almost) all the good poetry books of the 21st century, so that patterns of change or of creative optimism would become visible. I enjoyed the list of 207 poets which came back from the survey in Angel Exhaust 24, but I don’t feel it is a very comprehensive list. It suggests a spacious landscape but leaves a lot of the features out. I have also located Angela Leighton and Rhiannon Hooson through the same site, excellent poets.
I have been re-reading The Big Short, Michael Lewis’ 2010 book on hedge fund analysts who foresaw the sub-prime mortgage derivatives crisis of 2007-8 and made money by shorting the market. It presents dissidents of high intelligence who did the analytical work better than company officers of great banking corporations, and who rejected conventional analysis. This is exciting, and it is why Lewis’s book is much more interesting than most books on the crisis. But, that position is too indulgent. I don’t think the poetry business is quite so vulnerable to the dissidents as Lehman Brothers was. If the mainstream produces lots of good books, you lose your bet against them- and forfeit your money. More concretely, if you read 250 blurbs you definitely see a lot of hype. That argues a basic corruption, lurking in the process. But, I also think that a lot of the underlying product is very good. And, if you have the ability to read the hype correctly, you can let it lead you to the good stuff. The blurbs are not very honest, but they are not the poetry process itself.
I tend to regard the Blurb as like the sleeve of an LP – a piece of added value which can be beautiful in itself.
A lot of the books in these 250 or so blurbs sound very similar to each other.
I noted about 30 blurbs which describe trauma tourism. The poet has been affected by dire events, their nephew has died of plague, their cat has flu, their grandmother was a war criminal, etc., and this makes their poetry important.
Gothic/ body dysmorphia. This is an era where illnesses related to body dysmorphia, a loss of balance in the way the mind perceives physical proportions, are common and increasing. Literary opinion is able to relate this to the Gothic – horror is connected to violent reactions to the human body, and monsters are a realisation of certain pervasive fantasies. The Gothic is seen as a form of protest. If we read “[X] is a bestiary, a spell book, a scream and a guide book to the underworld of the hurts that haunt us now. […] You will want to follow Miranda down into this beautifully crafted world and go ‘hunting in the brine’ - there you’ll find a language, an utterance for all the wanting, breaking, losing and becoming that happens under the surface we call self”, we see the heroine of the Gothic romance taken as a model of sensitivity and anxiety.
One publisher in particular has a line of conservatism. One gradually realises that all their authors have the same profile, and that this favoured style involves rejecting every innovation which has arrived since the 1950s. In fact, this is 1950s poetry. The blurbs do not make this explicit, for example they do not say “find an intact world in which it is still 1955 and Churchill is still prime minister” or “enter a world where literary theory has never happened”. The message is clear at an unconscious level. And you can see that that publisher is turning down anything modern. This is a “truth with lack of evidence”.
My feeling about the ideas is that the best 200 poets have nothing to do with them, and they really reflect what the publishers think will sell. This is a way of describing the fashions of the time. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that poets read the blurbs, see what publishers like, and are encouraged by that to design their own poetry along the same lines. Everyone wants to get published. It is also possible that the poets are more original than the blurbs, and that the publicity material makes a lot of poetry sound the same when it isn’t. The point I want to make is that you can’t describe a central fashion of the era, in the way that Auden and MacNeice were central in the 1930s. You had a small elite then, and people badly want to sound like they were part of it. They did all sound like each other. The educated elite now counts millions of people, and it produces very diverse voices. There are predictable fashions in 2026, but they are nothing like central.
Of course, the theme of ecological disaster appears in dozens of these blurbs, and that is also something which the best poets write about. That is not a very recent idea (and we don’t suppose that governments are going to make the problem go away in the short term). This isn’t a special interest issue, it affects everyone.
Do the fashions reflect the wishes of the audience, as a pressure which only needs articulating, or the wishes of the publishers? I don’t see any evidence which would really get to the heart of this. It would be a dream for a historian if you could take the blurbs, existing text which it is easy to collect and store, and decide “this speaks for the wishes of the audience”. Because the history of the audience is always hard to write, and less studied. It would also be satisfying if we could say “the blurbs describe the ideal and then the poets strive to realise it and fail”. That is a big win for the historian, but obviously it’s not a very sound result. Hype must represent unfulfilled wishes in a distorted form… and you can't use a special mirror to reverse the distortion.
Undeniably, a lot of the write-ups present being gay, or being on the autistic spectrum, etc., as a selling point. I just wonder if the gay poets are appealing to an audience which isn’t gay. There is an element of protest here – we are hearing feelings which were repressed in the 1950s, we are protesting against the cultural norms of the Cold War. But, these are feelings which I didn’t have. They aren’t my feelings. Published poetry covers a wide spectrum but I have a strange feeling that people aren’t really more unusual and more complex than they were in 1955. Most of the blurbs just fly past me, an excitement which I am not feeling – maybe some of the poetry also rushes past my ears without ever touching me.
I didn’t mention poems about witches. These come in at about 1 or 2% of the list, so they aren’t a large phenomenon. Obviously, the audience read their Harry Potter and want poems about witches.
I have just bought (2nd hand, in Hay on Wye) an anthology, New Poems 1953, which can act as a check on what is new in new poetry. Nobody admitted to being gay in the 1950s. No poets, anyway. It just wasn’t a move that even existed. I suppose that unchanged in the 1960s… I can’t think of anyone who wrote poetry and admitted to being gay in the 1960s. This may just be my bad memory. Is that true? It would have been very difficult. And in the 1970s none of the older gay poets came out. Exceptions – Thom Gunn and James Kirkup. So the scene has been going through a phase of decompression, derepression, which has continued, probably, over half a century.
I think it’s difficult for poets today to say to themselves “when I write about the unusual aspects of my feelings it alienates most of the audience because they don’t have those feelings and don’t respond to the depiction of them”. But it may be true. It always has been true. And it may be the publishers saying “what is unusual, even perverse, even maladjusted, about you is what interests people most, so forget about writing poems about anything else”. This may be a moment of wisdom which is profoundly flawed, and which may disappear.
If the scene is so de-repressed, the editors can claim “we have no blocks on our perception so it is not possible for any gifted poet to be turned down by the editors, us”. That is a bit problematic. It is quite a gun to point at anyone who doesn’t play the usual tunes. I think there is a tier of poets who really don’t sound commercial to the editors and who really do have a fascinating artistic experience to offer. There still a line between insiders and outsiders. It may have moved a bit but it is still there.
By searching, I have found that the PBS on-line store goes back to 2016 and that it has roughly 4000 items. The search they offer scans the blurbs as well as just the titles. I searched this database with the word term “queer” and got 214 results. I searched with the term “avant garde” and got 11 hits, all of them European. More checks… the blurb writers are deathly afraid of the words experimental, avant garde, modernist, and probably see them as chilling the audience, killing sales. Well, I don’t think that there has been no avant garde poetry in Britain over the last 10 years. But, let’s be fair – they like the word “queer”, they are fine with it and a queer audience can probably also find the books they want.
(The 4000 count is not all books, it includes things like PBS press releases. But the lexical constraints are relevant in both cases.) (I know automated searches can produce stupid results. I used the string “nuance” and got 69 hits. The Find function certainly can’t tell you if the blurb writer is being sincere!) (“liminal” got 50 hits, another word which literate people use when they have no idea what to say.)
214 of 4000 is about 2%. The long-term percentage of gay people in the population is probably around 2%. Actually, the percentage of gay poets in 1955 was about 2%, it's just that they were all in a dark friendly closet together, somewhere between Soho and the BBC. I won't tell if you don't.
British Poetry Revival, one hit.
Wednesday, 20 May 2026
Travelogue - further
Travelogue
This is such a tangled and long-lasting story that I didn’t want to put it in the book. The story is that the obscurity and uncertainty of decolonisation contributed to the distrust of public officials which fuelled the rise of UKIP and Reform UK after 2009. Decolonisation was never popular and was never sold to the electorate as something which worked to their benefit. They never said yes and actually they were never consulted. The right-wing populist vote in 2016, or 2026, is continuous with the bloc of opinion which didn’t accept that the end of empire was the right policy in 1945-70. That bloc did not get the opportunity to vote against decolonisation and so was not counted or addressed.
It may be that the empire did not benefit most people in the metropole. It benefited the rich, other classes fought and died in wars without ceasing to be poor. Settlers did benefit, making new lives in the USA, Canada, or Australia. The final phase left a resentment that government didn’t fight to hang on to the colonies and didn’t preserve them as possible places where a white person could migrate to. The belief that the governors favour coloured people clung on to influence a belief that white people don’t get fair access to welfare services. There are no actual examples of this, but the modern discourse about removing racism sounds like an attempt to squeeze out white people. People believed the propaganda in favour of Empire.
I thought to explain to myself why decolonisation happened, via a book on policy 1945-70. The impression I got was of a chess game being played at high speed over 20 years, and that a commentary on the calculations which one player went through was just too complicated to set out. The situation kept changing and the goals had to be updated. This was never explained to the electorate and perhaps it couldn’t be. People don’t know why decolonisation happened because it was never explained, or not in a convincing way. But did this leave abiding distrust of the educated class? People noticed the failure to explain. A minority interpreted decolonisation as a sell-out and passed the feeling on to their children.
In almost every year, from 1945 to 1970, service personnel were fighting and dying to defend colonies. And at the end every territory was given up. One question is why the semi-legal possession of overseas territories was not given up at the start, for example when India and Pakistan were decolonised. The public were given clear messages about how vital it was to defend this territory or that, and they believed the messages. The political discourse, to the soldiers and their families, looked dishonest in retrospect. In fact, the whole process looks short on honesty. Telling the colonised in Malaysia or Rhodesia that policy was framed in their interests had a leakage effect whereby the white electorate in Britain got the impression that the government had no wish to help them. Telling the electorate that the empire favoured them would have a blow-back when 5 years later you told them that decolonising was in their interest. The communication with the public was of low quality.
For the government to consider the interests of the oppressed, in the colonies, represented a restriction of their loyalty to the electorate in the metropole. This was hardly a big problem, because the oppressed were, genuinely, oppressed. The empire did not exist to help the natives. But the population in the home islands could decide that their government was not fully loyal to them.
The distrust of Reform /UKIP voters goes all the way back to the era of decolonisation. Politicians did change their minds every year. The Winds of Change speech in 1963 confused the voters. It certainly wasn’t an idea that won votes. And it didn’t give a reason for retaining all the colonies which it didn’t affect. The electorate didn’t take the decisions. It was cooked up between the ministers and the officials. There was a democratic deficit.
There was a long-standing convention that the electorate were not consulted about foreign policy. It was felt that the relationships were too complicated and that policy needed long-term consistency which would be wrecked by the day to day hysteria of public opinion. This convention was not democratic at all, but it was in force in quite a similar way in other countries. Having an agreement with other governments, which you adhere to, limits the power of democracy – it limits what the voter can ask for. Our government is like other governments in observing contract law with regard to contracts – it is subject to the law (and not just to the voter). The policy making process was incredibly complex. It did not achieve any goals which the government actually saw as desirable at the beginning. Better targets were constantly being thrown out as unattainable. People outside the rooms where policy ideas were exchanged were automatically tuned out as having nothing to add. There was a strong, even effective, inside, but there was no outside. It was not a democratic process. The outcome gave democracy to many new countries. It was never popular in the metropole.
This claim relies on an idea of things which politicians didn’t say. More research might excavate moments where they did say what was necessary and got ignored. It is hard to accept that votes in 2026 might be affected by events in the 1950s. But we are dealing with very unmodernised sectors of political attitudes and with a depressive ground which people regress to when hope and ideals fail. And some ideas are very old – racism wasn’t suddenly invented and people are not suddenly converted to it. It is old and comes back like an infection lurking in the ground. Full employment sucks the vitality out of it but doesn’t really kill it.
The word “modernised” is worth a breakdown. At the most basic level, it means a split between different parts of public opinion. The most “advanced” sector is obviously the educated. They take in the ambitious, data-filled, newspapers, they read books, they are more exposed to new ideas – to the modernisation process. But it does not follow that every voter, every sector of opinion, will follow the same path. At this point we can redefine “modernised” as “liberal”. The change process is patchy and under-engineered – the state of affairs in 2026 can include a bloc which still rejects the project of decolonisation. Those people, as people, do not see themselves as unmodernised – instead they regard themselves as the undeceived, the ones who do not believe the propaganda of the elite, and who have brilliantly understood the real nature of the elite. They see themselves as the less deceived – to take in larger amounts of printed information turns you into one of the thoroughly deceived. You swallow it all.
*
This does not fit into my book partly because I am not writing primarily about politics. Also, because its statement is diffused over too long a period, and the idea of continuity is rather under stress. I think the theme raises ideas about the reason why poets wrote so little about the empire and decolonisation. They may simply have felt they didn’t have the specialised knowledge needed to form an opinion.
*
I have finished the Travelogue book but in this phase I can always change some of it.
(James Fountain suggested Eliot as a right-wing poet I don’t talk about)
(AD) Eliot was monarchist and traditionalist, pretty far Right. but his poetry reflects the questions he was asking, only. You can’t analyse it to find out what he thought about decolonising India, or Guyana, or whatever. Those questions never arise. He was mainly a religious poet.
There is a second level where you take his magazine the Criterion and analyse the whole mass of material to look for attitudes. I think it would show someone who was against the rise of socialism and even the rise of democracy. But it's not his own words.... too indirect, too frustrating. I was trying to find a copy, to read what Michael Roberts wrote for Criterion. That arose because Roberts supposedly promoted communism in poetry, Auden and his pals. But that is incompatible with him being chief poetry critic for the Criterion at the same time, and editing TE Hulme, who was pretty far Right. I didn't spend that crucial day ferreting through that magazine, but I don't think Roberts has a left-wing status and I don’t think the modernism he canonised has either.
(Simon Jenner says) What I think I hear is a kind of “hear no evil” tone deafness about empire. The poets’ imaginary was mostly shrunk to the UK, unless like Kipling you were born out there and couldn’t ignore it.]] (AD) Yes, that is what I found. I was pointing a camera at nothing happening. I had to adjust to that. The poets don’t register history happening but I can write about travel poetry and a sort of mythology of incomprehension.
War movies. There were 433 war films made in Britain in the 1950s and some critics have dismissed all of them Including such total write-offs, people disagree a lot about 50s war films. What guides the disagreements is an ideal – people have an ideal about British life in groups and get vexed because the films don’t reproduce it, or not completely. The interest is that these ideals are terribly interesting and the films release them into consciousness. The films don’t need to be especially good, and the acting does not have to be exceptional, for the ideals to emerge. Even if we only perceive them because they are appearing with blemishes and flaws.
I have been watching 50s war films recently, and I think the debates about them are relevant to poetry, in that war poetry kept away from the grand statements about British ideals and so we don’t have anything to apologise for 80 years later. Of course, that is also why poetry of that war is not remembered in a big way. People avoided writing ambitious poems. So – big war, small poems. It would be more stimulating if the poems aroused arguments about ideals – those ideals certainly exist, and arguing about them is how you get involved in politics. What my book is about is partly how poetry marginalised itself.
Robert Murphy says that the peak year for war films, based on lists of “Top 30” box office hits, was 1958. And 1954 was a low point for war films. This is an interesting pattern. The whole pattern is unstable, people got satiated. That is partly why the memory of the genre is so unenthusiastic. But it was one of the big areas of artistic achievement for Britain in the 1950s. Other genres of art were not so adapted to the times.
In her book, “David Jones Mythmaker”, Elizabeth Ward at a certain point, page 220, proves that Jones was criticising both the Empire and the German Reich, and dismisses the first arm on the grounds that our system was better than the Reich. She actually uses the term “Western democratic systems”, but at the date in question several of them were imperialist States– including Britain. I accept that the Empire did not undertake genocide (although remembering Mike Davis’ “Late Victorian Holocausts”) but I am keen to accept Jones’ critique of the undertaking. It did not protect the rights of subject population groups – it sponsored large-scale land grabs which produced a new class of the poor. I accept that Britain was, by 1940, a democracy, but not that all its dependent territories had any form of democracy. So as a “system” it was not democratic. There is no Nuremberg assize for trying the misdeeds of imperial overlords and plunderers, but that is what I have in mind in my book. I am not staging that trial, and I don’t have a court at my disposal, but the trial is what my actual dispositions are patterned in relation to.
Richard Overy, in his recent and magisterial book on the Second World War, says that the cause of that war was the wish of three rising powers– Germany, Italy, and Japan – to imitate and take the place of three older empires, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. This clearly puts Britain in the same category as the 3rd Reich. The Reich wanted to clear the good land of the Ukraine and Western Russia in order to colonise it. Britain had cleared the 13 Colonies and Australia in order to have access to the good land and settle it as if empty. We hardly have to guess where Hitler got his ideas of geography and "land clearance” from. So, I don’t buy Ward’s rebuttal of Jones’ critique of Empire. That stands although I admire “David Jones Mythmaker” greatly. She accepts that Jones was part of a milieu and that he shared its opinions. She goes on to establish what those opinions were. A lot of other Jones scholarship is simply exculpatory. To put it simply, a political Catholic saw the problems of the 1930s as the result of misuse of power by the Protestants and the Jews.
I take it from Gary Love’s article (“‘Real Toryism’ or Christian democracy? The political thought of Douglas Jerrold and Charles Petrie at the New English Review, 1945–50”) that the Right-Catholic group in question became much less antisemitic once Hitler had made the attitude undesirable. A Catholic circle sited outside the Conservative Party and sympathetic to Fascism moved steadily towards the Con Party once appeasement had failed. The necessity of war made them patriotic again. And there was a democratic current of great strength in the 1940s which affected even the Far Right. So, Jones’ comment of April 1939 may not reflect where he stood in 1945. His essay “Art and Democracy” may be an attempt to overcome his aversion towards the latter – a wish shared by his editor, Bernard Wall, and the readers of the magazine where it was first published.
The writers on political history I have consulted are admirable in many ways, but they don’t seem interested in poets. That certainly leaves an opening where I can write something necessary. And poetry became unimportant – but historians seem to have forgotten about a period where it was important, admittedly by echoing what was in the newspapers and also national myth.
We know that Jones was very interested in Jackson Knight’s book The Cumaean Gates (1936), which is about the theme of labyrinths (subtitle, “Reference of the Sixth Aeneid to Initiation Pattern”). Knight devotes a chapter to the labyrinth, actually a sort of puzzle with forbidden steps and one right path, found by John Layard on Malekula (in the New Hebrides). The passage I quoted from ‘The narrows’ mentions a labyrinth. It is the bad terrain where his "cosmocrats" (i.e. imperialists) are lost. The Kensington Mass says "Down the meander and crooked labyrinth of time and maze/ of history or historia". It would be right up my street, in a book on poetry and the Third World, to link Malekula to a poem by Jones. The connection doesn’t work at all, sadly. Jones refers to a crooked labyrinth twice, but the sense is that “the complications of world affairs in the late Thirties (or 1940s) are more than politicians can manage”. A link to initiation rites, of which the labyrinth is a feature, is just not there. Jackson Knight makes that connection between Third World rituals and Roman antiquity, it’s very interesting, but that link did not affect Jones and he did not develop an interest in the non-European world. Knight mentions W H Perry and was obviously stimulated by that “hyperdiffusionist” school represented by Perry and Elliot Smith. This was one way in which intellectuals, between the wars, acquired some knowledge of Third World cultures, and in which those cultures were seen as parts of one big human pattern. I’m sure this was benign. I just don’t see any trace of Jones following those paths.
It's interesting that Jackson Knight specifies in the Notes that he contacted Layard directly and got a lot of information from him by word of mouth or in letters. This explains why Cumaean Gates came out in 1936 and has information which Layard published in 1942. However, Layard also published at least one article in the learned periodical Man which Knight does not cite. I see that Layard gave a talk about Malekula at the 1937 Eranos gathering in Ascona. Jackson Knight reproduces a maze pattern from an Etruscan vase of circa 600 BC and says that the same pattern is found incised on a megalith at Bryn Celli Ddu in Anglesey, so possibly around 3000 BC (says wikipedia). This is fascinating, and the whole comparative approach is, but I find it hard to agree that the two instances are part of the same pattern of ideas, or illustrate the same myth. He says that the way into the (megalithic) chambered tomb, if you enter, is a spiral maze.
Part of the basic tests for a proposed link between two widely separated phenomena is complexity. The megalith incision which Jackson Knight points to is simply a curved zigzag line repeated. That is not very complex. Secondly, neither of the patterns he reproduces actually shows a maze. A maze has a path through it, and the Bryn Celli Ddu pattern doesn’t. A maze is a structure, whether built in masonry or in hedges. Neither of his examples visibly, provably, refers to an upright structure.
To be exact, the Etruscan vase picture refers to a sort of dance carried out on horseback. It follows an intricate path, which looks like a maze if you draw it. This was called, by Romans, a Troy dance, and a word on the Etruscan vase is “truia”, which must direct us to the Troy dance. It appears in Aeneid V.
I think Knight’s idea is stimulating if it asks us to think of what Europeans knew in the Bronze Age, and how an idea could have travelled from North Italy to Anglesey. It is exciting even if his idea isn’t proven. Knight had broken with some key inhibitions.
The Anglesey stone he discusses was not upright, but found buried. It is now known as the Pattern Stone and is kept in the National Museum of Wales.
There is definitely a link between Layard and Peter Redgrove, and also with David Harsent. I just don't think there is a link with Jones.
This is such a tangled and long-lasting story that I didn’t want to put it in the book. The story is that the obscurity and uncertainty of decolonisation contributed to the distrust of public officials which fuelled the rise of UKIP and Reform UK after 2009. Decolonisation was never popular and was never sold to the electorate as something which worked to their benefit. They never said yes and actually they were never consulted. The right-wing populist vote in 2016, or 2026, is continuous with the bloc of opinion which didn’t accept that the end of empire was the right policy in 1945-70. That bloc did not get the opportunity to vote against decolonisation and so was not counted or addressed.
It may be that the empire did not benefit most people in the metropole. It benefited the rich, other classes fought and died in wars without ceasing to be poor. Settlers did benefit, making new lives in the USA, Canada, or Australia. The final phase left a resentment that government didn’t fight to hang on to the colonies and didn’t preserve them as possible places where a white person could migrate to. The belief that the governors favour coloured people clung on to influence a belief that white people don’t get fair access to welfare services. There are no actual examples of this, but the modern discourse about removing racism sounds like an attempt to squeeze out white people. People believed the propaganda in favour of Empire.
I thought to explain to myself why decolonisation happened, via a book on policy 1945-70. The impression I got was of a chess game being played at high speed over 20 years, and that a commentary on the calculations which one player went through was just too complicated to set out. The situation kept changing and the goals had to be updated. This was never explained to the electorate and perhaps it couldn’t be. People don’t know why decolonisation happened because it was never explained, or not in a convincing way. But did this leave abiding distrust of the educated class? People noticed the failure to explain. A minority interpreted decolonisation as a sell-out and passed the feeling on to their children.
In almost every year, from 1945 to 1970, service personnel were fighting and dying to defend colonies. And at the end every territory was given up. One question is why the semi-legal possession of overseas territories was not given up at the start, for example when India and Pakistan were decolonised. The public were given clear messages about how vital it was to defend this territory or that, and they believed the messages. The political discourse, to the soldiers and their families, looked dishonest in retrospect. In fact, the whole process looks short on honesty. Telling the colonised in Malaysia or Rhodesia that policy was framed in their interests had a leakage effect whereby the white electorate in Britain got the impression that the government had no wish to help them. Telling the electorate that the empire favoured them would have a blow-back when 5 years later you told them that decolonising was in their interest. The communication with the public was of low quality.
For the government to consider the interests of the oppressed, in the colonies, represented a restriction of their loyalty to the electorate in the metropole. This was hardly a big problem, because the oppressed were, genuinely, oppressed. The empire did not exist to help the natives. But the population in the home islands could decide that their government was not fully loyal to them.
The distrust of Reform /UKIP voters goes all the way back to the era of decolonisation. Politicians did change their minds every year. The Winds of Change speech in 1963 confused the voters. It certainly wasn’t an idea that won votes. And it didn’t give a reason for retaining all the colonies which it didn’t affect. The electorate didn’t take the decisions. It was cooked up between the ministers and the officials. There was a democratic deficit.
There was a long-standing convention that the electorate were not consulted about foreign policy. It was felt that the relationships were too complicated and that policy needed long-term consistency which would be wrecked by the day to day hysteria of public opinion. This convention was not democratic at all, but it was in force in quite a similar way in other countries. Having an agreement with other governments, which you adhere to, limits the power of democracy – it limits what the voter can ask for. Our government is like other governments in observing contract law with regard to contracts – it is subject to the law (and not just to the voter). The policy making process was incredibly complex. It did not achieve any goals which the government actually saw as desirable at the beginning. Better targets were constantly being thrown out as unattainable. People outside the rooms where policy ideas were exchanged were automatically tuned out as having nothing to add. There was a strong, even effective, inside, but there was no outside. It was not a democratic process. The outcome gave democracy to many new countries. It was never popular in the metropole.
This claim relies on an idea of things which politicians didn’t say. More research might excavate moments where they did say what was necessary and got ignored. It is hard to accept that votes in 2026 might be affected by events in the 1950s. But we are dealing with very unmodernised sectors of political attitudes and with a depressive ground which people regress to when hope and ideals fail. And some ideas are very old – racism wasn’t suddenly invented and people are not suddenly converted to it. It is old and comes back like an infection lurking in the ground. Full employment sucks the vitality out of it but doesn’t really kill it.
The word “modernised” is worth a breakdown. At the most basic level, it means a split between different parts of public opinion. The most “advanced” sector is obviously the educated. They take in the ambitious, data-filled, newspapers, they read books, they are more exposed to new ideas – to the modernisation process. But it does not follow that every voter, every sector of opinion, will follow the same path. At this point we can redefine “modernised” as “liberal”. The change process is patchy and under-engineered – the state of affairs in 2026 can include a bloc which still rejects the project of decolonisation. Those people, as people, do not see themselves as unmodernised – instead they regard themselves as the undeceived, the ones who do not believe the propaganda of the elite, and who have brilliantly understood the real nature of the elite. They see themselves as the less deceived – to take in larger amounts of printed information turns you into one of the thoroughly deceived. You swallow it all.
*
This does not fit into my book partly because I am not writing primarily about politics. Also, because its statement is diffused over too long a period, and the idea of continuity is rather under stress. I think the theme raises ideas about the reason why poets wrote so little about the empire and decolonisation. They may simply have felt they didn’t have the specialised knowledge needed to form an opinion.
*
I have finished the Travelogue book but in this phase I can always change some of it.
(James Fountain suggested Eliot as a right-wing poet I don’t talk about)
(AD) Eliot was monarchist and traditionalist, pretty far Right. but his poetry reflects the questions he was asking, only. You can’t analyse it to find out what he thought about decolonising India, or Guyana, or whatever. Those questions never arise. He was mainly a religious poet.
There is a second level where you take his magazine the Criterion and analyse the whole mass of material to look for attitudes. I think it would show someone who was against the rise of socialism and even the rise of democracy. But it's not his own words.... too indirect, too frustrating. I was trying to find a copy, to read what Michael Roberts wrote for Criterion. That arose because Roberts supposedly promoted communism in poetry, Auden and his pals. But that is incompatible with him being chief poetry critic for the Criterion at the same time, and editing TE Hulme, who was pretty far Right. I didn't spend that crucial day ferreting through that magazine, but I don't think Roberts has a left-wing status and I don’t think the modernism he canonised has either.
(Simon Jenner says) What I think I hear is a kind of “hear no evil” tone deafness about empire. The poets’ imaginary was mostly shrunk to the UK, unless like Kipling you were born out there and couldn’t ignore it.]] (AD) Yes, that is what I found. I was pointing a camera at nothing happening. I had to adjust to that. The poets don’t register history happening but I can write about travel poetry and a sort of mythology of incomprehension.
War movies. There were 433 war films made in Britain in the 1950s and some critics have dismissed all of them Including such total write-offs, people disagree a lot about 50s war films. What guides the disagreements is an ideal – people have an ideal about British life in groups and get vexed because the films don’t reproduce it, or not completely. The interest is that these ideals are terribly interesting and the films release them into consciousness. The films don’t need to be especially good, and the acting does not have to be exceptional, for the ideals to emerge. Even if we only perceive them because they are appearing with blemishes and flaws.
I have been watching 50s war films recently, and I think the debates about them are relevant to poetry, in that war poetry kept away from the grand statements about British ideals and so we don’t have anything to apologise for 80 years later. Of course, that is also why poetry of that war is not remembered in a big way. People avoided writing ambitious poems. So – big war, small poems. It would be more stimulating if the poems aroused arguments about ideals – those ideals certainly exist, and arguing about them is how you get involved in politics. What my book is about is partly how poetry marginalised itself.
Robert Murphy says that the peak year for war films, based on lists of “Top 30” box office hits, was 1958. And 1954 was a low point for war films. This is an interesting pattern. The whole pattern is unstable, people got satiated. That is partly why the memory of the genre is so unenthusiastic. But it was one of the big areas of artistic achievement for Britain in the 1950s. Other genres of art were not so adapted to the times.
In her book, “David Jones Mythmaker”, Elizabeth Ward at a certain point, page 220, proves that Jones was criticising both the Empire and the German Reich, and dismisses the first arm on the grounds that our system was better than the Reich. She actually uses the term “Western democratic systems”, but at the date in question several of them were imperialist States– including Britain. I accept that the Empire did not undertake genocide (although remembering Mike Davis’ “Late Victorian Holocausts”) but I am keen to accept Jones’ critique of the undertaking. It did not protect the rights of subject population groups – it sponsored large-scale land grabs which produced a new class of the poor. I accept that Britain was, by 1940, a democracy, but not that all its dependent territories had any form of democracy. So as a “system” it was not democratic. There is no Nuremberg assize for trying the misdeeds of imperial overlords and plunderers, but that is what I have in mind in my book. I am not staging that trial, and I don’t have a court at my disposal, but the trial is what my actual dispositions are patterned in relation to.
Richard Overy, in his recent and magisterial book on the Second World War, says that the cause of that war was the wish of three rising powers– Germany, Italy, and Japan – to imitate and take the place of three older empires, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. This clearly puts Britain in the same category as the 3rd Reich. The Reich wanted to clear the good land of the Ukraine and Western Russia in order to colonise it. Britain had cleared the 13 Colonies and Australia in order to have access to the good land and settle it as if empty. We hardly have to guess where Hitler got his ideas of geography and "land clearance” from. So, I don’t buy Ward’s rebuttal of Jones’ critique of Empire. That stands although I admire “David Jones Mythmaker” greatly. She accepts that Jones was part of a milieu and that he shared its opinions. She goes on to establish what those opinions were. A lot of other Jones scholarship is simply exculpatory. To put it simply, a political Catholic saw the problems of the 1930s as the result of misuse of power by the Protestants and the Jews.
I take it from Gary Love’s article (“‘Real Toryism’ or Christian democracy? The political thought of Douglas Jerrold and Charles Petrie at the New English Review, 1945–50”) that the Right-Catholic group in question became much less antisemitic once Hitler had made the attitude undesirable. A Catholic circle sited outside the Conservative Party and sympathetic to Fascism moved steadily towards the Con Party once appeasement had failed. The necessity of war made them patriotic again. And there was a democratic current of great strength in the 1940s which affected even the Far Right. So, Jones’ comment of April 1939 may not reflect where he stood in 1945. His essay “Art and Democracy” may be an attempt to overcome his aversion towards the latter – a wish shared by his editor, Bernard Wall, and the readers of the magazine where it was first published.
The writers on political history I have consulted are admirable in many ways, but they don’t seem interested in poets. That certainly leaves an opening where I can write something necessary. And poetry became unimportant – but historians seem to have forgotten about a period where it was important, admittedly by echoing what was in the newspapers and also national myth.
We know that Jones was very interested in Jackson Knight’s book The Cumaean Gates (1936), which is about the theme of labyrinths (subtitle, “Reference of the Sixth Aeneid to Initiation Pattern”). Knight devotes a chapter to the labyrinth, actually a sort of puzzle with forbidden steps and one right path, found by John Layard on Malekula (in the New Hebrides). The passage I quoted from ‘The narrows’ mentions a labyrinth. It is the bad terrain where his "cosmocrats" (i.e. imperialists) are lost. The Kensington Mass says "Down the meander and crooked labyrinth of time and maze/ of history or historia". It would be right up my street, in a book on poetry and the Third World, to link Malekula to a poem by Jones. The connection doesn’t work at all, sadly. Jones refers to a crooked labyrinth twice, but the sense is that “the complications of world affairs in the late Thirties (or 1940s) are more than politicians can manage”. A link to initiation rites, of which the labyrinth is a feature, is just not there. Jackson Knight makes that connection between Third World rituals and Roman antiquity, it’s very interesting, but that link did not affect Jones and he did not develop an interest in the non-European world. Knight mentions W H Perry and was obviously stimulated by that “hyperdiffusionist” school represented by Perry and Elliot Smith. This was one way in which intellectuals, between the wars, acquired some knowledge of Third World cultures, and in which those cultures were seen as parts of one big human pattern. I’m sure this was benign. I just don’t see any trace of Jones following those paths.
It's interesting that Jackson Knight specifies in the Notes that he contacted Layard directly and got a lot of information from him by word of mouth or in letters. This explains why Cumaean Gates came out in 1936 and has information which Layard published in 1942. However, Layard also published at least one article in the learned periodical Man which Knight does not cite. I see that Layard gave a talk about Malekula at the 1937 Eranos gathering in Ascona. Jackson Knight reproduces a maze pattern from an Etruscan vase of circa 600 BC and says that the same pattern is found incised on a megalith at Bryn Celli Ddu in Anglesey, so possibly around 3000 BC (says wikipedia). This is fascinating, and the whole comparative approach is, but I find it hard to agree that the two instances are part of the same pattern of ideas, or illustrate the same myth. He says that the way into the (megalithic) chambered tomb, if you enter, is a spiral maze.
Part of the basic tests for a proposed link between two widely separated phenomena is complexity. The megalith incision which Jackson Knight points to is simply a curved zigzag line repeated. That is not very complex. Secondly, neither of the patterns he reproduces actually shows a maze. A maze has a path through it, and the Bryn Celli Ddu pattern doesn’t. A maze is a structure, whether built in masonry or in hedges. Neither of his examples visibly, provably, refers to an upright structure.
To be exact, the Etruscan vase picture refers to a sort of dance carried out on horseback. It follows an intricate path, which looks like a maze if you draw it. This was called, by Romans, a Troy dance, and a word on the Etruscan vase is “truia”, which must direct us to the Troy dance. It appears in Aeneid V.
I think Knight’s idea is stimulating if it asks us to think of what Europeans knew in the Bronze Age, and how an idea could have travelled from North Italy to Anglesey. It is exciting even if his idea isn’t proven. Knight had broken with some key inhibitions.
The Anglesey stone he discusses was not upright, but found buried. It is now known as the Pattern Stone and is kept in the National Museum of Wales.
There is definitely a link between Layard and Peter Redgrove, and also with David Harsent. I just don't think there is a link with Jones.
Saturday, 18 April 2026
An inquiry into the Empire
travelogue
This is a blog about a book which I have just finished (April 2026) but which I will hang on to while I think about it. The current title is “Travelogue of picturesque peoples”. The subject is British poetry and the Empire – but actually areas outside the Empire too. The subject is also the culture of the Right in Britain, how its relationship with poetry changed after 1920, and how privatisation works in the arts. It is an extension of a series of blogs which I posted, on nationalism and poetry.
There was a possible sequence where I would talk about the Nuremberg trials and say that there was no such juridical intervention in the aftermath of the British Empire. Nobody ever got dragged into court as a result of the Amritsar Massacre or the Black and Tan war. It would follow that you look at Europe around 1960 and see that the Germans are trying very hard to come to terms with the Nazi past and people in Britain don’t even see that there is a problem with the imperial past. So, in Britain, there was a gentle transition to a post-imperial condition without also a disenchantment, an amdission, a critical re-living of the collective past and of collective illusions. In Germany, by 1960, there were a lot of people who were genuinely ex-Nazis – they had given the ideas up and recognised the errors of the national movement. In Britain, I don’t think there was a large body of ex-imperialists. Their activities changed because the Empire had gone, or was on the way to breaking up, but they hadn’t otherwise changed their view of race or of the colonial past. So that process of repentance might still be in the future. Young people who live through it in a rush, without the usual restraints, may have a hard time. They may come out as extremists. There is a sector of the Right which is defined by its members’ unwillingness to accept the basic lessons of what happened in colonialism and what suffering it caused.
So, why didn’t I write this up for the book. It seemed too backward-facing. And it seemed authoritarian, as I was unwilling to define one version of the Past and one set of acceptable attitudes. Maybe also because it doesn’t coincide with the poetry I was writing about. Describing what poets don’t do has a limited reach. Although I do have time to admire something like David Ashford’s John Company, dealing with the colonial past in India, or Jay Gao’s Katabasis, which deals with an effectively colonial war in Iraq. I have to observe how late in the day this critical memory is coming.
A topic I don’t include is 50s war films. Information is that there were 443 British war films made during the 1950s. My feeling is that these war films give an insight into Reform voters, the patriotic vote. I want to make a connection because my goal is to end up with one society, one government. We are all in the same boat. The problem with these films was partly their continuity with wartime propaganda. Stuart Hylton’s book on the home front records how the main street of Reading was bombed. The newspapers could not report the story even though everyone could see that their shopping street wasn’t there any more. Only several weeks later could they run the story. The media world was heavily controlled by the government. After the war, people wanted the untold stories. The stories had directly affected their lives. The films never supplied this.They tried to revive the uncritical mood of the war years and avoided the risk of showing what had gone wrong. Also, war films were amazingly popular. This meant that the industry was too eager to go with projects that were badly thought out and without the requisite talent and intelligence. The contract between the industry and the audience was not kept, and so the films got a bad reputation. There is a claim that the collective films were brought to an end by the enmity of a bloc of intellectuals, but the film industry had no interest in intellectuals. The reasons why the series came to an end are as I have set out already. The Sixties came along with a boom in satire and in subversion which was not conducive to war films. Certain parts of the audience interpreted this as a lack of concern for the broad collective, an exit from ideals of coherence and shared effort. Although anti-authoritarian, it could be interpreted as a hasty exit from the social contract.
Robert Murphy, on-line, has suggested that there was a dip in the popularity of war films between 1943 and 1950. People just got fed up with the war, and wanted entertainment at night. This would explain why the Fifties war films, however successful, were influenced by nostalgia and unwilling to explore deeper issues about the war. He also says that the post-1950 variant was more oriented towards officers as heroes than the wartime variant of film. I had not been aware of this, but during the war the unstated rules of propaganda meant that there was a stress on collective thinking, and working-class characters, as an inevitable part of the package. This suggests that the task of propaganda actually raised the standards of the film industry, dragging it out of the clutches of showbiz and towards something more memorable and less individualistic.
The historian A D Harvey, in a book about large-scale wars ("Britain in three world wars, 1793-1945"), asks the question whether there were two separate sets of war aims in the Second World War. One would be to defend the Empire and keep it in being, one would be an anti-fascist crusade which would have democracy and freedom as its goals. The latter obviously implies decolonisation. He asks which one was predominant during the war and goes into statements of the time to resolve the question. I don’t think the evidence is conclusive, especially because a large faction of opinion was concerned with defending the British Isles and saw invading Germany, seizing the Ruhr, destroying the Wehrmacht, as the only way to achieve that goal. A stand-off in the English Channel and North Sea was not enough to bring about peace. Still, Harvey has raised (esp. at pages 509-519) a question which had been un-asked before then. Another reason why this issue is inconclusive is that politics was not much in evidence during the war. I don’t think people were asking “what are our war aims”; their aim was to win, and return to peace; instead, the question became important because propaganda demanded that there be some named reason for fighting. The idea of a Welfare State became very popular, but surely fighting a war was not necessary in order to found it.
The propaganda of wartime and the speeches of the 1945 general election campaigns had not told people that India was about to be liberated and the majority of the population of the Empire about to leave and start their own democracy. The word “Empire” fell out of legal use in 1947, as it had referred to India. It was replaced by “Commonwealth”. A certain fraction of the population of the Home Islands saw this as not the result of the war which they had expected. A certain idea came into circulation which held that the sub-continent had wrongly been taken away from the British people, and that an educated minority had betrayed the people, carrying out a plan which nobody had been allowed to vote on, and making a decision behind closed doors. The outcome was visibly a lot more democracy for India, Pakistan and Ceylon. It was not an issue which had been explained and debated democratically in Britain. People felt vaguely that the reward for victory in a major war was an expansion of territorial power, not the opposite. There was no film which explained Indian politics and the last, weakening, phase of the Raj, and probably no audience for such a film. The film industry was part of the world of entertainment, even if it rose above that occasionally. Bhowani Junction (1956) doesn’t really fill the gap (“MGM’s drama aflame with love and revolt”).
I am still reading histories of the imperial mind-set, but I must say none of them seems to have any interest in poetry. The links between imperialism and “naval poetry” in the period roughly 1897-1920 are obvious and important, but historians seem to have filed them under “omit”. This at least justifies my project.
I was reading a book on-line about Fascism in Britain between the wars and saw a list of the committee of the Right Book Club. One of these was Trevor Blakemore, credited as “a poet”. "Another notable collection, The Flagship: and Other Poems, appeared in 1915 from Erskine Macdonald, including patriotic naval imagery amid the era's global tensions." I can see several books of his in the second-hand market. I am letting myself off reading them. There was lots of naval poetry in 1915. Clearly, he was associated with the outside Right, whether Tory dissidents or something further out. But I can’t be sure that he was able to articulate those ideas in poetry. And I find it unlikely that he was influential, someone whose symbolic discourse appealed to wider circles even in the extremist wing. His name does not appear in Herbert Palmer’s 1938 book, which describes well over 100 poets of the time. It follows that Blakemore wasn’t on the map.
(US policy and the Empire)
I have been reading Max Hastings’ book Armageddon, about the last 8 months of the war in Europe. Of interest to us is his discussion of Roosevelt and how the US-Britain relationship deteriorated in the last year of the war, not least because of Montgomery and his arrogance. Simultaneously, Roosevelt was completely deceived by Stalin and didn’t realise that he was going to turn Eastern Europe into a cluster of satellite states for the next 45 years. The Americans were very angry about Britain sending troops to Greece in late 1944, to prevent a communist take-over. They saw this as establishing a “sphere of influence”, and thought it was just the same as Stalin occupying Poland. But the big question is why the US didn’t insist on the decolonisation of the British Empire. It was just a matter of chance that this didn’t happen. Nobody in Washington wanted to expend a single American life to defend the Empire. This rift didn’t reach the surface because of a series of chance events, for example that defending India 1941-44 was the same as fighting the Japanese, so that the imperial war aim coincided with the US war aim. This was true in half a dozen other situations, and the split just never quite reached the surface. Compare the US-Soviet Union split, which didn’t come to the surface until 1947 or so. It could have happened that the US presided over the end of the British Empire, in the spirit of 1776. After the Cold War became established as the new bundle of doctrines, the US wanted the Empire to survive for long enough to install anti-communist parties as the new and legitimated political elites in the various colonies. That is, as part of restricting Soviet or Chinese influence. The point is that the foreign policy posture of the US in December 1944 was completely different from its posture in December 1947. And this is something I have avoided getting into; foreign policy involved multiple players and rapid shifts of direction which demand too much effort to describe. It is easy to describe British decolonisation at its end point, but complicated to describe how the few thousand people involved in policy shifted from being aggressively pro-Empire towards being in favour of rapid decolonisation tempered only by anti-communism. Simply about Greece, I am sure it is a good thing that Greece didn’t live under a communist dictatorship from, say, 1944 to 1990. Also, I am sure that Britain did not plan to reduce Europe to a British sphere of influence in the way that Stalin reduced eastern Europe to Soviet satellites. Roosevelt failed to follow the development of European politics and did not understand the possibilities.
America did not, in 1946, take the stance that Europe had to decolonise and that it could use the power of the dollar (and of US export goods) to enforce this outcome. It was always a possible stance. My guess is that alienation from the Soviet Union, and world communism, made the decolonisation (and anti-Western European) stance impossible. The US could not adopt both stances at once. The path towards decolonisation – a desirable outcome, a democratic outcome – was more tortuous than that. But US politicians were never pro-imperialist, let alone their voters.
The US set up the United Nations but did not accompany that with a promise to break up the British, Dutch, and French Empires. A missed opportunity? It is worth posing the question, why was this not the initial “theme music” of the UN.
For our purposes, the question is why the Labour Party, or the political class more widely, did not explain decolonisation to the electorate. I think the answer was that the various decisions to decolonise and break up the Empire were taken very reluctantly, and came unexpectedly, as the result of crises. Foreign policy was, in this case, removed from the sphere of democracy. The electorate would probably have said No. The outcome was a residual electoral faction of voters who thought that the elite were in the embrace of foreigners and were consequently traitors to the British people. The suspicion that holding on to the Empire would have benefited the ordinary people, in many or most constituencies, was the basis for a ressentiment which could be mobilised against immigrants, against the ex-colonies, against globalisation, and against the politicians (more obviously, the politicians in Brussels). By a freak of chronology, this ressentiment has been a big political factor in the period 2008-2026.
This is a blog about a book which I have just finished (April 2026) but which I will hang on to while I think about it. The current title is “Travelogue of picturesque peoples”. The subject is British poetry and the Empire – but actually areas outside the Empire too. The subject is also the culture of the Right in Britain, how its relationship with poetry changed after 1920, and how privatisation works in the arts. It is an extension of a series of blogs which I posted, on nationalism and poetry.
There was a possible sequence where I would talk about the Nuremberg trials and say that there was no such juridical intervention in the aftermath of the British Empire. Nobody ever got dragged into court as a result of the Amritsar Massacre or the Black and Tan war. It would follow that you look at Europe around 1960 and see that the Germans are trying very hard to come to terms with the Nazi past and people in Britain don’t even see that there is a problem with the imperial past. So, in Britain, there was a gentle transition to a post-imperial condition without also a disenchantment, an amdission, a critical re-living of the collective past and of collective illusions. In Germany, by 1960, there were a lot of people who were genuinely ex-Nazis – they had given the ideas up and recognised the errors of the national movement. In Britain, I don’t think there was a large body of ex-imperialists. Their activities changed because the Empire had gone, or was on the way to breaking up, but they hadn’t otherwise changed their view of race or of the colonial past. So that process of repentance might still be in the future. Young people who live through it in a rush, without the usual restraints, may have a hard time. They may come out as extremists. There is a sector of the Right which is defined by its members’ unwillingness to accept the basic lessons of what happened in colonialism and what suffering it caused.
So, why didn’t I write this up for the book. It seemed too backward-facing. And it seemed authoritarian, as I was unwilling to define one version of the Past and one set of acceptable attitudes. Maybe also because it doesn’t coincide with the poetry I was writing about. Describing what poets don’t do has a limited reach. Although I do have time to admire something like David Ashford’s John Company, dealing with the colonial past in India, or Jay Gao’s Katabasis, which deals with an effectively colonial war in Iraq. I have to observe how late in the day this critical memory is coming.
A topic I don’t include is 50s war films. Information is that there were 443 British war films made during the 1950s. My feeling is that these war films give an insight into Reform voters, the patriotic vote. I want to make a connection because my goal is to end up with one society, one government. We are all in the same boat. The problem with these films was partly their continuity with wartime propaganda. Stuart Hylton’s book on the home front records how the main street of Reading was bombed. The newspapers could not report the story even though everyone could see that their shopping street wasn’t there any more. Only several weeks later could they run the story. The media world was heavily controlled by the government. After the war, people wanted the untold stories. The stories had directly affected their lives. The films never supplied this.They tried to revive the uncritical mood of the war years and avoided the risk of showing what had gone wrong. Also, war films were amazingly popular. This meant that the industry was too eager to go with projects that were badly thought out and without the requisite talent and intelligence. The contract between the industry and the audience was not kept, and so the films got a bad reputation. There is a claim that the collective films were brought to an end by the enmity of a bloc of intellectuals, but the film industry had no interest in intellectuals. The reasons why the series came to an end are as I have set out already. The Sixties came along with a boom in satire and in subversion which was not conducive to war films. Certain parts of the audience interpreted this as a lack of concern for the broad collective, an exit from ideals of coherence and shared effort. Although anti-authoritarian, it could be interpreted as a hasty exit from the social contract.
Robert Murphy, on-line, has suggested that there was a dip in the popularity of war films between 1943 and 1950. People just got fed up with the war, and wanted entertainment at night. This would explain why the Fifties war films, however successful, were influenced by nostalgia and unwilling to explore deeper issues about the war. He also says that the post-1950 variant was more oriented towards officers as heroes than the wartime variant of film. I had not been aware of this, but during the war the unstated rules of propaganda meant that there was a stress on collective thinking, and working-class characters, as an inevitable part of the package. This suggests that the task of propaganda actually raised the standards of the film industry, dragging it out of the clutches of showbiz and towards something more memorable and less individualistic.
The historian A D Harvey, in a book about large-scale wars ("Britain in three world wars, 1793-1945"), asks the question whether there were two separate sets of war aims in the Second World War. One would be to defend the Empire and keep it in being, one would be an anti-fascist crusade which would have democracy and freedom as its goals. The latter obviously implies decolonisation. He asks which one was predominant during the war and goes into statements of the time to resolve the question. I don’t think the evidence is conclusive, especially because a large faction of opinion was concerned with defending the British Isles and saw invading Germany, seizing the Ruhr, destroying the Wehrmacht, as the only way to achieve that goal. A stand-off in the English Channel and North Sea was not enough to bring about peace. Still, Harvey has raised (esp. at pages 509-519) a question which had been un-asked before then. Another reason why this issue is inconclusive is that politics was not much in evidence during the war. I don’t think people were asking “what are our war aims”; their aim was to win, and return to peace; instead, the question became important because propaganda demanded that there be some named reason for fighting. The idea of a Welfare State became very popular, but surely fighting a war was not necessary in order to found it.
The propaganda of wartime and the speeches of the 1945 general election campaigns had not told people that India was about to be liberated and the majority of the population of the Empire about to leave and start their own democracy. The word “Empire” fell out of legal use in 1947, as it had referred to India. It was replaced by “Commonwealth”. A certain fraction of the population of the Home Islands saw this as not the result of the war which they had expected. A certain idea came into circulation which held that the sub-continent had wrongly been taken away from the British people, and that an educated minority had betrayed the people, carrying out a plan which nobody had been allowed to vote on, and making a decision behind closed doors. The outcome was visibly a lot more democracy for India, Pakistan and Ceylon. It was not an issue which had been explained and debated democratically in Britain. People felt vaguely that the reward for victory in a major war was an expansion of territorial power, not the opposite. There was no film which explained Indian politics and the last, weakening, phase of the Raj, and probably no audience for such a film. The film industry was part of the world of entertainment, even if it rose above that occasionally. Bhowani Junction (1956) doesn’t really fill the gap (“MGM’s drama aflame with love and revolt”).
I am still reading histories of the imperial mind-set, but I must say none of them seems to have any interest in poetry. The links between imperialism and “naval poetry” in the period roughly 1897-1920 are obvious and important, but historians seem to have filed them under “omit”. This at least justifies my project.
I was reading a book on-line about Fascism in Britain between the wars and saw a list of the committee of the Right Book Club. One of these was Trevor Blakemore, credited as “a poet”. "Another notable collection, The Flagship: and Other Poems, appeared in 1915 from Erskine Macdonald, including patriotic naval imagery amid the era's global tensions." I can see several books of his in the second-hand market. I am letting myself off reading them. There was lots of naval poetry in 1915. Clearly, he was associated with the outside Right, whether Tory dissidents or something further out. But I can’t be sure that he was able to articulate those ideas in poetry. And I find it unlikely that he was influential, someone whose symbolic discourse appealed to wider circles even in the extremist wing. His name does not appear in Herbert Palmer’s 1938 book, which describes well over 100 poets of the time. It follows that Blakemore wasn’t on the map.
(US policy and the Empire)
I have been reading Max Hastings’ book Armageddon, about the last 8 months of the war in Europe. Of interest to us is his discussion of Roosevelt and how the US-Britain relationship deteriorated in the last year of the war, not least because of Montgomery and his arrogance. Simultaneously, Roosevelt was completely deceived by Stalin and didn’t realise that he was going to turn Eastern Europe into a cluster of satellite states for the next 45 years. The Americans were very angry about Britain sending troops to Greece in late 1944, to prevent a communist take-over. They saw this as establishing a “sphere of influence”, and thought it was just the same as Stalin occupying Poland. But the big question is why the US didn’t insist on the decolonisation of the British Empire. It was just a matter of chance that this didn’t happen. Nobody in Washington wanted to expend a single American life to defend the Empire. This rift didn’t reach the surface because of a series of chance events, for example that defending India 1941-44 was the same as fighting the Japanese, so that the imperial war aim coincided with the US war aim. This was true in half a dozen other situations, and the split just never quite reached the surface. Compare the US-Soviet Union split, which didn’t come to the surface until 1947 or so. It could have happened that the US presided over the end of the British Empire, in the spirit of 1776. After the Cold War became established as the new bundle of doctrines, the US wanted the Empire to survive for long enough to install anti-communist parties as the new and legitimated political elites in the various colonies. That is, as part of restricting Soviet or Chinese influence. The point is that the foreign policy posture of the US in December 1944 was completely different from its posture in December 1947. And this is something I have avoided getting into; foreign policy involved multiple players and rapid shifts of direction which demand too much effort to describe. It is easy to describe British decolonisation at its end point, but complicated to describe how the few thousand people involved in policy shifted from being aggressively pro-Empire towards being in favour of rapid decolonisation tempered only by anti-communism. Simply about Greece, I am sure it is a good thing that Greece didn’t live under a communist dictatorship from, say, 1944 to 1990. Also, I am sure that Britain did not plan to reduce Europe to a British sphere of influence in the way that Stalin reduced eastern Europe to Soviet satellites. Roosevelt failed to follow the development of European politics and did not understand the possibilities.
America did not, in 1946, take the stance that Europe had to decolonise and that it could use the power of the dollar (and of US export goods) to enforce this outcome. It was always a possible stance. My guess is that alienation from the Soviet Union, and world communism, made the decolonisation (and anti-Western European) stance impossible. The US could not adopt both stances at once. The path towards decolonisation – a desirable outcome, a democratic outcome – was more tortuous than that. But US politicians were never pro-imperialist, let alone their voters.
The US set up the United Nations but did not accompany that with a promise to break up the British, Dutch, and French Empires. A missed opportunity? It is worth posing the question, why was this not the initial “theme music” of the UN.
For our purposes, the question is why the Labour Party, or the political class more widely, did not explain decolonisation to the electorate. I think the answer was that the various decisions to decolonise and break up the Empire were taken very reluctantly, and came unexpectedly, as the result of crises. Foreign policy was, in this case, removed from the sphere of democracy. The electorate would probably have said No. The outcome was a residual electoral faction of voters who thought that the elite were in the embrace of foreigners and were consequently traitors to the British people. The suspicion that holding on to the Empire would have benefited the ordinary people, in many or most constituencies, was the basis for a ressentiment which could be mobilised against immigrants, against the ex-colonies, against globalisation, and against the politicians (more obviously, the politicians in Brussels). By a freak of chronology, this ressentiment has been a big political factor in the period 2008-2026.
Monday, 30 March 2026
Hugh Creighton Hill
Acrostic without lights
Porticos and portcullises, backcloth of the cultured life
loggias and pergolas and stone Arcadian dignity
arrange me statically along a line of personal history
intended before my time, so far as I know, to frame me
now and for ever in quiet dedication.
The photograph is hallucination: such poses
halt and redirect a mind otherwise confused and amazed,
opaque, hammered into pattern; imposed from outside
under an alien oligarchy: for the present avalanche of spite
gathers in the lull and pours and tumbles in the storm
huge and incoherent, vehement, violent, inhumanly human
to crush, to age, to harass and always to humiliate –
such is the fact, the confounded norm, of quotidian horror.
Oh, that a dream might live, the moonlit guitars to entangle
nocturnes in the daylight of blackbirds and thrushes.
Early and late the rectangle of apprehension fences
normality with an incomprehensible madness:
tangible walls of hate grow like the beanstalk, piercing
elysian suppositions above walls of infantile fancy,
reaching to hell over hell to bring down ogres
incredibly vocal, incalculably vicious, their lineaments
neolithic with rage, and combining in a flush of terror
Gothic imps, Polyphemus, and blaspheming satyrs.
May both abominable visions dissolve, may squalid fog
yield to autumnal mists, and daubed walls drop like leaves!
Failure is nothing compared with the crippled mind:
inheritance droops, the proud discomfited heart
flags in its regular beat, the soul aspiring towards truth
tails off in compromise when days bring only the night :
is there no home for hurt ambition, no hospitable porch
embroidered with clematis where anxiety can sit
the live-long hours in harmless contemplation
holding a life-long wish in both numb hands?
Yesterday’s shame still lingers: today is for living,
eavesdropping, suspecting and fearing and work:
and all my vague tomorrows exist in a trembling faith
retching or praying or singing, or calm in the light.
another poem from Hill. This one is from a Glasgow poetry magazine circa 1956, which Peter Manson put on-line. This is another "kind of" stage in the revival of modernism, pre-Migrant. It is "The Poet". The acrostic inside the poem reads "Plain thoughts on entering my fiftieth year". The modernist elements interest me, although the autobiographical theme is fairly conventional, could even be 16th C. The poem post-dates his pamphlet, Some propositions from the universal theorem.
I have just discovered that the publisher which issued "Some propositions" was run by Robert Cooper. He ran Artisan. "In the early 1950s, still living in Liverpool, Robert Cooper edited a ‘little magazine’ (as they are known) of poetry entitled Artisan. He also set up a press called Heron, which published, alongside Artisan, a number of collections of poetry, including work by Vincent Ferrini and Alan Brownjohn’s debut. The second issue of Artisan (Spring 1953), ‘Nine American Poets’, was dedicated to the verse of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson[.]" In 1957, he went to university - giving up his job as a journalist to better himself. I think he was doing, around 1954, what Migrant were doing in 1960. But in 1957 he gave up that activity. Migrant got a lot further. The other factor is the arrival of texts. The "neo-modernist" things got going with "City" and "Briggflatts". The texts available in 1954 just weren’t so impressive. But, arguably, the new creativity followed the arrival of an ecology in which it could breathe - in the form of an audience and of publishing outlets. So we should consider also "The Poet" (the Glasgow magzine) and Artisan.
Porticos and portcullises, backcloth of the cultured life
loggias and pergolas and stone Arcadian dignity
arrange me statically along a line of personal history
intended before my time, so far as I know, to frame me
now and for ever in quiet dedication.
The photograph is hallucination: such poses
halt and redirect a mind otherwise confused and amazed,
opaque, hammered into pattern; imposed from outside
under an alien oligarchy: for the present avalanche of spite
gathers in the lull and pours and tumbles in the storm
huge and incoherent, vehement, violent, inhumanly human
to crush, to age, to harass and always to humiliate –
such is the fact, the confounded norm, of quotidian horror.
Oh, that a dream might live, the moonlit guitars to entangle
nocturnes in the daylight of blackbirds and thrushes.
Early and late the rectangle of apprehension fences
normality with an incomprehensible madness:
tangible walls of hate grow like the beanstalk, piercing
elysian suppositions above walls of infantile fancy,
reaching to hell over hell to bring down ogres
incredibly vocal, incalculably vicious, their lineaments
neolithic with rage, and combining in a flush of terror
Gothic imps, Polyphemus, and blaspheming satyrs.
May both abominable visions dissolve, may squalid fog
yield to autumnal mists, and daubed walls drop like leaves!
Failure is nothing compared with the crippled mind:
inheritance droops, the proud discomfited heart
flags in its regular beat, the soul aspiring towards truth
tails off in compromise when days bring only the night :
is there no home for hurt ambition, no hospitable porch
embroidered with clematis where anxiety can sit
the live-long hours in harmless contemplation
holding a life-long wish in both numb hands?
Yesterday’s shame still lingers: today is for living,
eavesdropping, suspecting and fearing and work:
and all my vague tomorrows exist in a trembling faith
retching or praying or singing, or calm in the light.
another poem from Hill. This one is from a Glasgow poetry magazine circa 1956, which Peter Manson put on-line. This is another "kind of" stage in the revival of modernism, pre-Migrant. It is "The Poet". The acrostic inside the poem reads "Plain thoughts on entering my fiftieth year". The modernist elements interest me, although the autobiographical theme is fairly conventional, could even be 16th C. The poem post-dates his pamphlet, Some propositions from the universal theorem.
I have just discovered that the publisher which issued "Some propositions" was run by Robert Cooper. He ran Artisan. "In the early 1950s, still living in Liverpool, Robert Cooper edited a ‘little magazine’ (as they are known) of poetry entitled Artisan. He also set up a press called Heron, which published, alongside Artisan, a number of collections of poetry, including work by Vincent Ferrini and Alan Brownjohn’s debut. The second issue of Artisan (Spring 1953), ‘Nine American Poets’, was dedicated to the verse of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson[.]" In 1957, he went to university - giving up his job as a journalist to better himself. I think he was doing, around 1954, what Migrant were doing in 1960. But in 1957 he gave up that activity. Migrant got a lot further. The other factor is the arrival of texts. The "neo-modernist" things got going with "City" and "Briggflatts". The texts available in 1954 just weren’t so impressive. But, arguably, the new creativity followed the arrival of an ecology in which it could breathe - in the form of an audience and of publishing outlets. So we should consider also "The Poet" (the Glasgow magzine) and Artisan.
Saturday, 14 March 2026
B-movie
My new pamphlet, ‘B- Movie: Serial of Seven Stars’ is now available from Equipage. It follows up my previous Equipage pamphlet, 'Alien Skies', from 1992.
‘B- Movie: Serial of Seven Stars’ is an attempt to recapture the feverish and irrational mythology of the B-movie, initially based on the classic Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and on the neglected pre-1921 serials which realised the “roulette principle” that coherence reduces the shock value of any plot event. It reacts to that key line from Cobra Woman: it’s a wild dream of her decaying brain. Less credibly, it enters the world of manga and kaiju eiga to describe a monster, liberated from beneath Arctic ice, developing a craving for human males as impossibly cute and moe subjects of reptile fetishism, in a lunatic exaggeration of bishonen style, in a fervour of idealism and romantic craving. More broadly, a cast of methodologically suspect occult scholars pursue seven figurines, the polychrome minstrels, said to contain matter which had leaked through from another universe, detected by subtle and eerie distortions of geology and building fabrics. This quest re-enacts the Storage Wars series, in which junk dealers bid on sealed, abandoned storage lockers. A role is also played by the author’s autobiographical experiences of interviewing ruined horror directors for the Journal of Pulp Critique.” The project aims to restore the lost innocence of film serials circa 1915.
** Notes
‘Lud’s Gateway’ began as a poem for Iain Sinclair's birthday, based on themes from ‘Suicide Bridge’, and a tribute to Storage Wars. It was published in the Sinclair tribute volume. Later, I added twelve more poems. The Wars franchise involves junk dealers bidding on sealed, abandoned, storage lockers, and sealed lockers recur in the poem. Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb was a 1972 film based on The Jewel of Seven Stars, a novel by Bram Stoker. Other themes come from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Cobra Woman, La ragazza che sapeva troppo, All the colours of darkness, Zero for tomorrow, Ultus, the Avenger, Scotland Yard jagt Dr Mabuse, Here’s Las Vegas, Kiss Me Deadly, A Walk through H, Muzzle flash in the glass labyrinth, The Tidal Field of the Dark Star, A First-Year Library of Corrosion, and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times.
As well as the B-Movie sequence, there are two other poems, "Homage to Kathleen Byron" and "Locked Up", which is about the outsider artist Madge Gill.
In Seven Stars, a sorceress from Ancient Egypt is entombed but uses magic to bring about reincarnation. When the stars have rotated back to the position they were in at the moment of her death, she will be reborn into a human form who is also the daughter of the archaeologist who brought the sarcophagus back to London. The daughter has seven fingers on each hand, matching the Seven Stars of Tera's star group. In the film, the event requires the re-assembly of parts of her magic equipment, now scattered. In the poem, the parts are seven figurines, the polychrome minstrels, and finding them requires a search based on Storage Wars.
‘B- Movie: Serial of Seven Stars’ is an attempt to recapture the feverish and irrational mythology of the B-movie, initially based on the classic Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and on the neglected pre-1921 serials which realised the “roulette principle” that coherence reduces the shock value of any plot event. It reacts to that key line from Cobra Woman: it’s a wild dream of her decaying brain. Less credibly, it enters the world of manga and kaiju eiga to describe a monster, liberated from beneath Arctic ice, developing a craving for human males as impossibly cute and moe subjects of reptile fetishism, in a lunatic exaggeration of bishonen style, in a fervour of idealism and romantic craving. More broadly, a cast of methodologically suspect occult scholars pursue seven figurines, the polychrome minstrels, said to contain matter which had leaked through from another universe, detected by subtle and eerie distortions of geology and building fabrics. This quest re-enacts the Storage Wars series, in which junk dealers bid on sealed, abandoned storage lockers. A role is also played by the author’s autobiographical experiences of interviewing ruined horror directors for the Journal of Pulp Critique.” The project aims to restore the lost innocence of film serials circa 1915.
** Notes
‘Lud’s Gateway’ began as a poem for Iain Sinclair's birthday, based on themes from ‘Suicide Bridge’, and a tribute to Storage Wars. It was published in the Sinclair tribute volume. Later, I added twelve more poems. The Wars franchise involves junk dealers bidding on sealed, abandoned, storage lockers, and sealed lockers recur in the poem. Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb was a 1972 film based on The Jewel of Seven Stars, a novel by Bram Stoker. Other themes come from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Cobra Woman, La ragazza che sapeva troppo, All the colours of darkness, Zero for tomorrow, Ultus, the Avenger, Scotland Yard jagt Dr Mabuse, Here’s Las Vegas, Kiss Me Deadly, A Walk through H, Muzzle flash in the glass labyrinth, The Tidal Field of the Dark Star, A First-Year Library of Corrosion, and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times.
As well as the B-Movie sequence, there are two other poems, "Homage to Kathleen Byron" and "Locked Up", which is about the outsider artist Madge Gill.
In Seven Stars, a sorceress from Ancient Egypt is entombed but uses magic to bring about reincarnation. When the stars have rotated back to the position they were in at the moment of her death, she will be reborn into a human form who is also the daughter of the archaeologist who brought the sarcophagus back to London. The daughter has seven fingers on each hand, matching the Seven Stars of Tera's star group. In the film, the event requires the re-assembly of parts of her magic equipment, now scattered. In the poem, the parts are seven figurines, the polychrome minstrels, and finding them requires a search based on Storage Wars.
Saturday, 7 March 2026
Heraldic universe?
Lawrence Durrell wrote an essay in 1942 called ‘The Heraldic Universe’, and this seems to connect with him trying to write like George Seferis, at that time. This ‘heraldic’ thing has little meaning. I think it’s just a way of saying “I want my work to be memorable”. That points to a fear of stories being dissolved into sociology, political theories, collective stories which are very predictable. What Durrell describes is just “art”, really. Fixed, just as a detective story printed in 1930 still reads the same way that it did in 1930. I can see that the anxiety is genuine.
It is hard to say why The Waste Land or Seferis poems seem to be eternal and linger in the mind for years afterwards. Why they seem to be outside the pool of narrative generally. I just know that they possess that quality. Any art that lingers in your mind achieves a static quality and falls outside Time. The static quality isn’t something which Durrell invented. Some patterns fascinate us. We go on processing them.
I saw a mention (in Roger Bowen’s book) of an essay by an Arab critic who claimed that the Alexandria Quartet misrepresented Egypt and hadn’t got the real Egypt. I think this sums up what Durrell wanted to avoid – he totally didn’t want to tell typical stories and to be sociologically valid. This is true, but I don’t think it’s true that he had a new theory of Time.
Nobody wants their stories to be owned by some academic or Party member or government official or priest. That sums up what novelists DON’T want. Poets too, I suppose.
The “heraldic” thing also reminds me of Edwin Muir and of George Mackay Brown. I think they were both concerned to evade sociology and the predictability of stories which are based in statistics and State knowledge. But I think the ‘heraldic’ word is a miss, the idea is really that stories would be like the Morte D’Arthur, so about knights but not simply heraldic. And The Waste Land has that basis in the Grail Quest and Jessie L Weston’s analysis of it.
I did read the whole Quartet, a long time ago, but I can’t remember any of the characters. Durrell knew that Cavafy and Seferis had that arresting quality, the ability to write personal myth, and he was fascinated by both of them. His theory applies to them, I suspect. It didn’t mean that he could write so strikingly. His theory describes what he wanted to achieve, not what he was actually capable of.
"Nobody wants their stories to be owned by some academic or Party member or government official or priest." Well, that goes for everybody. Maybe what people ask from an artist is that they build something which doesn't collapse in the face of sociology. Maybe the start point for a writer is to abandon sociology, religion, and so forth. That is square one.
It is hard to say why The Waste Land or Seferis poems seem to be eternal and linger in the mind for years afterwards. Why they seem to be outside the pool of narrative generally. I just know that they possess that quality. Any art that lingers in your mind achieves a static quality and falls outside Time. The static quality isn’t something which Durrell invented. Some patterns fascinate us. We go on processing them.
I saw a mention (in Roger Bowen’s book) of an essay by an Arab critic who claimed that the Alexandria Quartet misrepresented Egypt and hadn’t got the real Egypt. I think this sums up what Durrell wanted to avoid – he totally didn’t want to tell typical stories and to be sociologically valid. This is true, but I don’t think it’s true that he had a new theory of Time.
Nobody wants their stories to be owned by some academic or Party member or government official or priest. That sums up what novelists DON’T want. Poets too, I suppose.
The “heraldic” thing also reminds me of Edwin Muir and of George Mackay Brown. I think they were both concerned to evade sociology and the predictability of stories which are based in statistics and State knowledge. But I think the ‘heraldic’ word is a miss, the idea is really that stories would be like the Morte D’Arthur, so about knights but not simply heraldic. And The Waste Land has that basis in the Grail Quest and Jessie L Weston’s analysis of it.
I did read the whole Quartet, a long time ago, but I can’t remember any of the characters. Durrell knew that Cavafy and Seferis had that arresting quality, the ability to write personal myth, and he was fascinated by both of them. His theory applies to them, I suspect. It didn’t mean that he could write so strikingly. His theory describes what he wanted to achieve, not what he was actually capable of.
"Nobody wants their stories to be owned by some academic or Party member or government official or priest." Well, that goes for everybody. Maybe what people ask from an artist is that they build something which doesn't collapse in the face of sociology. Maybe the start point for a writer is to abandon sociology, religion, and so forth. That is square one.
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