The Ragman Totts, Ian Caws, 1990
Am struggling with Caws. This is unemphatic poetry and its surface is inconspicuous. But it gets more fascinating as you read more poems. It has not attacked the conventions of the 1950s and so can look like something conservative and unoriginal. But it doesn’t have a 50s aesthetic, and anyway the 1950s already had poetry, it’s not all in the innovations.
The Ragman Totts were a smuggling gang of the 1780s, in Sussex, where Caws is based. It is a sort of joke name, the kind of elusive titling a gang might choose. The Internet tells me “The gang's unusual name originates from their practice of wrapping cloth rags around their cartwheels to muffle the sound of squeaky wheels on their midnight smuggling runs.” The poem about them starts
Rain falls into my sleep,
Around my shoes as I walk the shoreline.
Images jolt me out of shape
And the sound is the tide again,
Hissing at the walls of this attic room.
The poems seem at first all to have a maritime theme, on a quiet coast. That is not quite right but they are very consistent and concentrated. That is the striking thing – everything sticks to the same psychological set-up and they build up in density. That is why he doesn’t feature much in anthologies- I don’t have a note of any that he is in. The forty or so poems of ‘Ragman’ feel like parts of one pattern. This stability shows great formal concentration and also gives the feeling of life being led, of the weight of a life. His gaze is steady and intent.
It is valid to say that he is expressing how time feels as it is passing and how a landscape feels around human presence. That is generic, but perhaps it is the valid description of what Caws is doing. It doesn’t matter that other people do it badly. In “Houseboat” he sees a coupe making love, on the boat, with the curtains undrawn. The speaker passes them and says [I] “Cover up my face with wind, host/ Always to doubt and loath/ To share”. Then
No formula
They seem to say, no equals sign
Exists any more: to define
Is to negate. I lay
The image aside once again[.]
This is not “pastoral”, as one quote alleges, and the poems often show doubt, often record drownings. William Oxley said “What I mean is that his poems are subtle and blended like the finest malt whiskies.” This has no descriptive force.
A poem from a 2020 volume runs in part
I watch moonlight decorate the river
And think of other days. It is the owls
Who have made the difference and perhaps
They will return. It is the owls crying
Across the land, their notes that would hover
Above the dark town like cathedral bells.
It is the owls and the silence that keeps
Them in our memory now, renewing
Something [.]
(from “When the Owls Left the Hangar”)
G.B.H. Wightman, best known as an enemy of modernity in the 1970s struggle at the Poetry Society, writes 'The world he inhabits is that of Blake, Traherne and Vaughan. It is a world where the substantial turns insubstantial and the present is enveloped in time. Caws enlarges our consciousness by writing of what is beyond our sight.' This isn’t inaccurate, but it projects Caws back into poetry as it was 200 or 300 years ago. Again, this lacks descriptive force. Caws is not a religious poet, and he is a man of his time. It does record the enthusiasm which readers of Caws often feel. As I read the poems I think also of RF Langley, Peter Bennet, and Harry Guest.
Brian Fewster said "I state the content tentatively, since a poem by Caws is like a late Turner, so full of movement and shimmering light that it isn't always easy to see what's going on.” And “While recognising a strong talent at work, I sometimes found this style too much like hard work. Amid the indirection, ambiguity and fractured narrative, I yearned for something that was hard-edged and sharply focused.” and:
“The qualification in the first line is typical. Many of the poems have a family resemblance. A scene is sketched in. A question is posed. Before it is answered a different question follows, and the scene often unravels into a general bewilderment. Some of them seem to be about the difficulty of knowing what question to pose in the first place. They have the ambiguity of conversations overheard out of context, the intensity of urgent half-remembered dreams.”
I think Brian wanted to feel confused. He resisted composing facts into an intelligent whole, as part of a protest. I think he understood the (modern) poems very well, but regarded being inexplicit as cheating. Caws' work is sharply focused - forceful and intent. Caws is not a fan of perfect metrical regularity or of unambiguous relations between facts. Bewilderment is not in the poems, not in the ones I read. Although – the title about leaving the hangar clashes with the references in the poem to hanger, a hanging wood. The wood is the hangar in which the owls, as flying vehicles, rest – so maybe there is a hanger/ hangar pun.
The website (the poet’s page at poetrypf.co.uk) records his birth in 1945 and collections starting in 1975 and going up to 2020. Most of these are not on the second-hand market (abebooks) and the others are expensive. I am buying lots of books just now and I cannot immediately pursue the Caws question. I concede that I should have got into this decades ago so as not to embarrass myself now. I notice that he did two collections with Salzburg university Press – their choices are very eccentric but this is probably a laudable achievement for them.
Monday, 14 September 2026
Sunday, 13 September 2026
Travelogue - more doubts
Am still in the phase of checking ‘Travelogue’, which may go on for years. Am looking at Alan Rooss’s poem ‘Racing at Kassar Said’ (circa 1958?) and have just googled the name to find it is a hippodrome in Tunisia. That helps me to think about the poem, but there is a further dreadful possibility that I would be deciding whether his poem is accurate. That is absurd, but the book involves me in writing about roughly 60 poets, mainly describing foreign parts, and sometimes criticising what they say. The possibilities for factual error are endless, and this is where my book could spring a leak and trickle away. It is mainly about incomprehension. So, do I have to know about sixty territories… to avoid glaring errors… a tale of incomprehension? This is genuinely insoluble, so I am just trying to curtail my claims and so reduce exposure. You can’t write about the Empire without making claims about what the empire was like.
I searched ‘Autumn Sequel’ (1953) by Louis MacNeice, and did find something about the Empire and colonial wars. In Canto X, he is in a news room at the BBC, and stories about several colonial wars flit past. He recalls a moment, not in 1953 but perhaps 1943, when he was in India and there was trouble. Suez and Kenya pass by. There is trouble in Kenya, but he focuses on a regiment being sent there to clear it up, the Enniskillen Fusiliers, and on people he used to know who served in that regiment. He refers to them as the Skins. They came from Northern Ireland as he did. Lots of detail about this, but we don’t find out what the trouble in Kenya is, that the white settlers had stolen Kikuyu land, that younger Kikuyu were trying to take it back, that there were local nationalists with a strong economic cause feeding popular support. He just doesn’t have time for this. He doesn’t even tell you whether it was a black versus white struggle. The news stories are just scenery. He is only interested in people who are listening to him, preferably face to face. He goes to the pub with the newsmen so they have to listen to him. The stories might as well be sports stories. MacNeice had developed a completely conversational way of writing, cheerful and chatty, fluent, neatly metrical and rhymed, but never intense at any point. This solved certain problems of accessibility but didn’t leave behind poetry which we can enjoy now. One noticeable feature is that he has abandoned modernism altogether. I am not sure he ever wrote a modernist poem. However, I think this style of 1953 was an innovation, and that he was going in the direction which the poetry business followed. I think he had worked for the BBC for 11 years by then – broadcasting created the “fireside chat” quality and removed the distance between speaker and listener. MacNeice has also removed that gap. This cosy style was an advanced development; it suited the new world of public readings which was going to come on in the 1960s. But that conversational quality tended to produce forgettable poems. Television developed a typically flat world, where events in a greater world receded to the twilight while affable personalities produced most of the signal. Evidently MacNeice had pioneered this, and it follows that there was an idea of intimate banality which came before television, which TV was simply captured by. I am not writing about MacNeice.
Am reading Gooch’s book on the wars of Mussolini, 1935 to 1943. He remarks, or quotes someone in a strategy meeting remarking, in March 1943, saying that Italy (its empire) is vulnerable from Toulon to Rhodes once Tunisia has fallen to Montgomery. The question of where to place your garrisons is unanswerable. This is the nightmare of the infinite perimeter, and it affects all empires eventually. The attack is always going to come at a weak spot. What if we apply it to the British one…in 1940 there was a perimeter from Hong Kong to Capetown. Every expansion brings more exposure to foreign aggression, or to internal politics, and every increase of power increases that exposure. The climax of Empire was so brief that it is hard to find.
The stage of the book I am in is one of trying to reduce the perimeter size.
I stumbled across Ariel Dorfman’s book on Violencia y imaginacion en America (1970) and found that it deals with the most famous Magic Realist novels (adding Arguedas and Juan Rulfo). He screens out the ‘marvels’ and focuses on the violence. Clearly they are all extremely violent. This is a complete shift of perspective. The novels in question deal with the history of the regions where they are set (Cuba, Guatemala, Colombia) and that history is strikingly violent. This redefines the novels as being political and containing history. His first subject is Borges… I am surprised to see Borges treated as a model of violence in art, and I don’t think he is interested in recording the political history of Argentina. His heroes are playing metaphysical games which involve death. He is, however, nostalgic for gaucho stories which are like Westerns. The claim is that the Borgesian human “Mata o muere para salir del laberinto y entenderlo momentaneamente, transciende al violencia al usarla come instrumento de su desajenacion, derrotanda la muerte en la boca misma del Muerte, la muerte mia o el asesinato como manera de fijar algo eterno, digno, significativa [.]” I find this hard to believe. Dorfman tells us that Borges is denying and killing his own being because he hates America, and his whole work is a denial of the reality of America, especially its violence. So, he is really writing about America and violence the whole time. This is taking over Borges’ silence and running away with it.
* I recently acquired two anthologies, from 1953 and 1956 respectively, which can serve as a check on my thesis that poets did not agitate for decolonisation and did not foresee, or even react to, the rapid decline of Empire. (The books are New Poems 1953, edited by Robert Conquest and two associates, and Poetry Now, 1956, edited by G.S. Fraser.) The finding is largely that the thesis is right. I am not seeing poems calling for decolonisation. But no idea works 100%, and it is valuable to comb through the exceptions. We can start with Lawrence Durrell’s poem on ‘Alexandria’. Egypt was under British hegemony for a century or so, and when Durrell was living in Alexandria it was a city loosely within British influence, which came to an end in 1953. It is a good poem. We know that Durrell had friends in the local community, probably all of them Christian and more European than the average Egyptian. It is a good poem. But I don’t see anything about the presence of the Empire or about its end. It is not a political poem. In Fraser’s anthology, there is a poem by Sidney Keyes. It cannot be later than 1942, because Keyes was killed in that year. That happened in Tunisia. The poem is about Carthage, a city in what is now Tunisia. The theme is the collapse of the Carthaginian empire, overthrown by Rome. I can’t prove that the poem relates to the 1940s, and I especially have difficulty attributing a specific value to its inexplicit message. In 1942, the empire collapsing was most obviously the Italian one, with its many far-flung provinces rapidly falling to other armies. But there may be a reference to the fate of the British Empire, which in spring 1942 was just about emerging from a phase of crisis which looked terminal.
Rome remember, the courts of learning are tiled
With figures from the east like running nooses.
The desolate bodies of boys in the blue glare
Of falling torches cannot stir your passion.
Remember the Greeks who measured out your doom.
Remember the soft funereal Etruscans.
The last two stanzas are more explicit as a warning to the Romans that North European barbarians will bring their state to an end. The stanza quoted is startlingly vivid but basically ambiguous. The ambiguity is the power, I think. I can’t easily enrol this in a political argument. A poem by Julian Symons is about the gap between political perception and daily life in an uneasy affluence. The politics are described in a terse four lines which are clearly Marxist. Since that implies anti-imperialism, we can see the poem as anti-imperialist. However, the lack of detail deprives it of any poetic weight. Symons has political certainty, but that has hardened into a dogma and he can’t break it down to show something happening inside a poem. His poem published in 1956 has little psychological content.
I see that Symons wrote about the events in the South Sudan in the 1880s (England's pride : the story of the Gordon Relief Expedition, 1965). I presume this is a Marxist interpretation, and it probably disagrees a lot with Scawen Blunt’s version. Even more obscurely, his brother AJA Symons published a biography of Emin, Governor of Equatoria, in 1928. Emin Pasha was a German governor of a region technically part of South Sudan, near Uganda, who retreated south to avoid the Mahdist army which captured Omdurman in 1885. He was a Muslim convert.
The 1953 book has a poem by G. Rostrevor Hamilton called “The African” which is an early response to the few Commonwealth immigrants who were in London in 1953. Hamilton is sitting opposite an African (or possibly just a Caribbean of African heritage?) on public transport, and reacting with shock. This is not a hostile poem, but the poet finds the African to be completely out of context in London, and writes about that. He applies an old-fashioned and schematic psychology to his subject. Hamilton wonders “beyond his waking/ Quiet behaviour what still potent background/ Vast and primeval worked, what violence/ Ancestral[.]”. This isn’t very far from the Fascist view of Africans, even if the tone of the poem is not aggressive. The poem offers a moment of literary authority which we now see as complete ignorance, a defensive reaction to cover confusion. Hamilton thinks he knows about the “ancestral” mind of his subject and doesn’t give him a word to speak of his own. He gets credit for registering that immigrants existed, in a literary landscape which generally didn’t register anything, but less credit for letting the subject really get into the poem. This is not at all a good poem. Hamilton sees a Black person on the commuter train and then sees 20 white swans on the Thames. Why does this image follow? Is he relieved because they are white and because they belong where they live? If you wanted to write a Fascist poem, the image sequence of “ancestral blood thirst” plus “white birds on a river” would fit perfectly.
I spent a day reading old runs of ‘Poetry Review’, available on the shelf in Cambridge University Library. I was looking for racist poems but I went through 5 years’ worth of issues without finding any. I found the experience depressing so I am discontinuing. Instead, I am using a poem in Brooks and Faulkner’s classic anthology of imperialist poetry. This feels like cheating, but it serves as a reminder of how good that anthology is. The deeper question is whether the supposed Left-liberal hegemony is a real thing. Clear evidence on that is not available. After some work, I think it might be fairer to say that it holds for the period after about 1965, when there was a cultural revolt which had Afro-American music as one of its favourite staples. I think the situation in the 1950s was still one of near-universal passive racism, a common belief that coloured races were incapable of self-government (even if this might change after another 100 years of White rule). The poems I looked at rarely talked about politics, and I was not struck by critical or protest poems. Poetry Review was culturally conservative and it is likely that their audience was also politically conservative. That is not explicit in the pages of the magazine. One has to ask how many poems of the mid-century could have offended conservative opinion.
I don’t see any trace of poets who support Reform UK, so I think there is a Left-liberal hegemony, it is a real thing and presumably has a history. I don’t have that history, but I can say that if the poetry world wasn’t so full of Left people I wouldn’t have spent my life inside it. I can’t see my life being any better if there were one or a hundred Reform UK poets, or Restore Britain poets, rattling away. Reading, or skimming, old issues of Poetry Review was depressing, not so much because I couldn’t find the evidence I was interested in, as because the people writing it were so stupid and their judgments were so numbing and irritating. I didn’t want to spend another 40 hours doing this. There were moments of interest. So in the 1957 volume, page 165, you find a review of Christopher Logue’s book (his second book, I think), “The thoughts… are too private in their expression to be often shared by reviewer or reader.” We also hear about “an obsession with the macabre, both in life and in death[.]” So it tells you you won’t understand it. If Poetry Review dismisses a book in 20 words, there must be something of value in it. So, there was something happening in the 1950s! Logue was, three or four years later, viewed as a wholly public poet. Strange, and actually the privacy is simply because his style is bold and compressed.
Another fascinating moment is in the 1923 volume, at page 89, when someone has a snit about attacks on rhetoric. Obviously, this was already a controversy by 1923. That is well before close reading was invented. So, the decline of rhetoric cannot be due to the advent of close reading and the New Criticism. PR only registers new ideas as things to ridicule and be indignant about. It is a detector programmed not to detect what is happening. However, this is evidence of something, I think.
I am trying to read Beaton’s biography of George Seferis. It records (p.229) a moment around 1945 when English poets are trying to translate the poet from Smyrna and finding that they always make him sound like Eliot. This is an interesting moment. Is it a failure report? I had always assumed that Seferis was much influenced by Eliot. But, maybe that is an effect of translation? Maybe it doesn’t sound like the Waste Land at all, in Greek? Tinos Malanos wrote a book (in 1951) claiming this influence. Seferis wrote an essay refuting the idea (which was never published). (Beaton, p.295) Seferis translated a lot of Eliot’s poetry. The translators were born in a certain time… they knew Eliot backwards. Maybe they could make anything sound like Eliot because that is what they were saturated in. This is relevant, because I touch on Seferis and the ability of English poets (Rex Warner, Philip Sherrard, etc.) to translate him. That scene, about 1941 to 45, of poets hanging out in Alexandria, of Personal Landscape, of English people understanding Seferis in Greek, is a moment when English culture actually gets close to a foreign culture. One possibility is that the translation goes so well because Seferis was a cosmopolitan and anglophile and had absorbed so much English poetry. But maybe that isn’t true. Maybe it’s more that you can make Seferis sound like Eliot, and he then sounds less like the real Seferis. Maybe it’s very hard for us to get someone who grew up in Smyrna, on the Aegean, in the Ottoman Empire, and whose father was heavily involved in the “language quarrel”, between two variants of standardised modern Greek. The Greek town of Smyrna was destroyed in 1922. A brilliant translation can be a screen behind which everything strange hides. Cavafy went to school in England and his English quality is much stronger.
The Prince of Wales’ African Book (words by St John Adcock, 1926) may be the source Sitwell used for Gold Coast Customs. This is an obscure area. What she says may in fact be true, for the Gold Coast in the 1820s.
A note on Prynne’s poem “Aristeas”. It is possible to connect the tale about Aristeas flying above the sea and seeing cities, ships etc. with Siberian tales of the shaman leaving his body and flying out to see distant things. However, this bird’s eye view is hard to find in Siberian shaman literature. Reitzenstein (in his book on Hellenistic wonder-tales) lists a series of Greek writers who describe the world as if seen from high above – an imaginary vantage point. If we return to Aristeas, he came from Proconnesus, a trading port at the end of a long trading route leading all the way to Siberia, in fact through the countries which the Arimaspeia describes. The “bird’s” perspective describes a map, and the 7th C date puts us in the early days of maps. These were in fact the cognitive means by which merchants could go to Central Asia and return. Aristeas’ knowledge is what merchants on Proconnesus, and in other Black Sea ports, really possessed. There is a perspective implied in a flat rendition of a portion of the Earth. So the “overflight” belongs to Greek knowledge and not to Siberian.
I searched ‘Autumn Sequel’ (1953) by Louis MacNeice, and did find something about the Empire and colonial wars. In Canto X, he is in a news room at the BBC, and stories about several colonial wars flit past. He recalls a moment, not in 1953 but perhaps 1943, when he was in India and there was trouble. Suez and Kenya pass by. There is trouble in Kenya, but he focuses on a regiment being sent there to clear it up, the Enniskillen Fusiliers, and on people he used to know who served in that regiment. He refers to them as the Skins. They came from Northern Ireland as he did. Lots of detail about this, but we don’t find out what the trouble in Kenya is, that the white settlers had stolen Kikuyu land, that younger Kikuyu were trying to take it back, that there were local nationalists with a strong economic cause feeding popular support. He just doesn’t have time for this. He doesn’t even tell you whether it was a black versus white struggle. The news stories are just scenery. He is only interested in people who are listening to him, preferably face to face. He goes to the pub with the newsmen so they have to listen to him. The stories might as well be sports stories. MacNeice had developed a completely conversational way of writing, cheerful and chatty, fluent, neatly metrical and rhymed, but never intense at any point. This solved certain problems of accessibility but didn’t leave behind poetry which we can enjoy now. One noticeable feature is that he has abandoned modernism altogether. I am not sure he ever wrote a modernist poem. However, I think this style of 1953 was an innovation, and that he was going in the direction which the poetry business followed. I think he had worked for the BBC for 11 years by then – broadcasting created the “fireside chat” quality and removed the distance between speaker and listener. MacNeice has also removed that gap. This cosy style was an advanced development; it suited the new world of public readings which was going to come on in the 1960s. But that conversational quality tended to produce forgettable poems. Television developed a typically flat world, where events in a greater world receded to the twilight while affable personalities produced most of the signal. Evidently MacNeice had pioneered this, and it follows that there was an idea of intimate banality which came before television, which TV was simply captured by. I am not writing about MacNeice.
Am reading Gooch’s book on the wars of Mussolini, 1935 to 1943. He remarks, or quotes someone in a strategy meeting remarking, in March 1943, saying that Italy (its empire) is vulnerable from Toulon to Rhodes once Tunisia has fallen to Montgomery. The question of where to place your garrisons is unanswerable. This is the nightmare of the infinite perimeter, and it affects all empires eventually. The attack is always going to come at a weak spot. What if we apply it to the British one…in 1940 there was a perimeter from Hong Kong to Capetown. Every expansion brings more exposure to foreign aggression, or to internal politics, and every increase of power increases that exposure. The climax of Empire was so brief that it is hard to find.
The stage of the book I am in is one of trying to reduce the perimeter size.
I stumbled across Ariel Dorfman’s book on Violencia y imaginacion en America (1970) and found that it deals with the most famous Magic Realist novels (adding Arguedas and Juan Rulfo). He screens out the ‘marvels’ and focuses on the violence. Clearly they are all extremely violent. This is a complete shift of perspective. The novels in question deal with the history of the regions where they are set (Cuba, Guatemala, Colombia) and that history is strikingly violent. This redefines the novels as being political and containing history. His first subject is Borges… I am surprised to see Borges treated as a model of violence in art, and I don’t think he is interested in recording the political history of Argentina. His heroes are playing metaphysical games which involve death. He is, however, nostalgic for gaucho stories which are like Westerns. The claim is that the Borgesian human “Mata o muere para salir del laberinto y entenderlo momentaneamente, transciende al violencia al usarla come instrumento de su desajenacion, derrotanda la muerte en la boca misma del Muerte, la muerte mia o el asesinato como manera de fijar algo eterno, digno, significativa [.]” I find this hard to believe. Dorfman tells us that Borges is denying and killing his own being because he hates America, and his whole work is a denial of the reality of America, especially its violence. So, he is really writing about America and violence the whole time. This is taking over Borges’ silence and running away with it.
* I recently acquired two anthologies, from 1953 and 1956 respectively, which can serve as a check on my thesis that poets did not agitate for decolonisation and did not foresee, or even react to, the rapid decline of Empire. (The books are New Poems 1953, edited by Robert Conquest and two associates, and Poetry Now, 1956, edited by G.S. Fraser.) The finding is largely that the thesis is right. I am not seeing poems calling for decolonisation. But no idea works 100%, and it is valuable to comb through the exceptions. We can start with Lawrence Durrell’s poem on ‘Alexandria’. Egypt was under British hegemony for a century or so, and when Durrell was living in Alexandria it was a city loosely within British influence, which came to an end in 1953. It is a good poem. We know that Durrell had friends in the local community, probably all of them Christian and more European than the average Egyptian. It is a good poem. But I don’t see anything about the presence of the Empire or about its end. It is not a political poem. In Fraser’s anthology, there is a poem by Sidney Keyes. It cannot be later than 1942, because Keyes was killed in that year. That happened in Tunisia. The poem is about Carthage, a city in what is now Tunisia. The theme is the collapse of the Carthaginian empire, overthrown by Rome. I can’t prove that the poem relates to the 1940s, and I especially have difficulty attributing a specific value to its inexplicit message. In 1942, the empire collapsing was most obviously the Italian one, with its many far-flung provinces rapidly falling to other armies. But there may be a reference to the fate of the British Empire, which in spring 1942 was just about emerging from a phase of crisis which looked terminal.
Rome remember, the courts of learning are tiled
With figures from the east like running nooses.
The desolate bodies of boys in the blue glare
Of falling torches cannot stir your passion.
Remember the Greeks who measured out your doom.
Remember the soft funereal Etruscans.
The last two stanzas are more explicit as a warning to the Romans that North European barbarians will bring their state to an end. The stanza quoted is startlingly vivid but basically ambiguous. The ambiguity is the power, I think. I can’t easily enrol this in a political argument. A poem by Julian Symons is about the gap between political perception and daily life in an uneasy affluence. The politics are described in a terse four lines which are clearly Marxist. Since that implies anti-imperialism, we can see the poem as anti-imperialist. However, the lack of detail deprives it of any poetic weight. Symons has political certainty, but that has hardened into a dogma and he can’t break it down to show something happening inside a poem. His poem published in 1956 has little psychological content.
I see that Symons wrote about the events in the South Sudan in the 1880s (England's pride : the story of the Gordon Relief Expedition, 1965). I presume this is a Marxist interpretation, and it probably disagrees a lot with Scawen Blunt’s version. Even more obscurely, his brother AJA Symons published a biography of Emin, Governor of Equatoria, in 1928. Emin Pasha was a German governor of a region technically part of South Sudan, near Uganda, who retreated south to avoid the Mahdist army which captured Omdurman in 1885. He was a Muslim convert.
The 1953 book has a poem by G. Rostrevor Hamilton called “The African” which is an early response to the few Commonwealth immigrants who were in London in 1953. Hamilton is sitting opposite an African (or possibly just a Caribbean of African heritage?) on public transport, and reacting with shock. This is not a hostile poem, but the poet finds the African to be completely out of context in London, and writes about that. He applies an old-fashioned and schematic psychology to his subject. Hamilton wonders “beyond his waking/ Quiet behaviour what still potent background/ Vast and primeval worked, what violence/ Ancestral[.]”. This isn’t very far from the Fascist view of Africans, even if the tone of the poem is not aggressive. The poem offers a moment of literary authority which we now see as complete ignorance, a defensive reaction to cover confusion. Hamilton thinks he knows about the “ancestral” mind of his subject and doesn’t give him a word to speak of his own. He gets credit for registering that immigrants existed, in a literary landscape which generally didn’t register anything, but less credit for letting the subject really get into the poem. This is not at all a good poem. Hamilton sees a Black person on the commuter train and then sees 20 white swans on the Thames. Why does this image follow? Is he relieved because they are white and because they belong where they live? If you wanted to write a Fascist poem, the image sequence of “ancestral blood thirst” plus “white birds on a river” would fit perfectly.
I spent a day reading old runs of ‘Poetry Review’, available on the shelf in Cambridge University Library. I was looking for racist poems but I went through 5 years’ worth of issues without finding any. I found the experience depressing so I am discontinuing. Instead, I am using a poem in Brooks and Faulkner’s classic anthology of imperialist poetry. This feels like cheating, but it serves as a reminder of how good that anthology is. The deeper question is whether the supposed Left-liberal hegemony is a real thing. Clear evidence on that is not available. After some work, I think it might be fairer to say that it holds for the period after about 1965, when there was a cultural revolt which had Afro-American music as one of its favourite staples. I think the situation in the 1950s was still one of near-universal passive racism, a common belief that coloured races were incapable of self-government (even if this might change after another 100 years of White rule). The poems I looked at rarely talked about politics, and I was not struck by critical or protest poems. Poetry Review was culturally conservative and it is likely that their audience was also politically conservative. That is not explicit in the pages of the magazine. One has to ask how many poems of the mid-century could have offended conservative opinion.
I don’t see any trace of poets who support Reform UK, so I think there is a Left-liberal hegemony, it is a real thing and presumably has a history. I don’t have that history, but I can say that if the poetry world wasn’t so full of Left people I wouldn’t have spent my life inside it. I can’t see my life being any better if there were one or a hundred Reform UK poets, or Restore Britain poets, rattling away. Reading, or skimming, old issues of Poetry Review was depressing, not so much because I couldn’t find the evidence I was interested in, as because the people writing it were so stupid and their judgments were so numbing and irritating. I didn’t want to spend another 40 hours doing this. There were moments of interest. So in the 1957 volume, page 165, you find a review of Christopher Logue’s book (his second book, I think), “The thoughts… are too private in their expression to be often shared by reviewer or reader.” We also hear about “an obsession with the macabre, both in life and in death[.]” So it tells you you won’t understand it. If Poetry Review dismisses a book in 20 words, there must be something of value in it. So, there was something happening in the 1950s! Logue was, three or four years later, viewed as a wholly public poet. Strange, and actually the privacy is simply because his style is bold and compressed.
Another fascinating moment is in the 1923 volume, at page 89, when someone has a snit about attacks on rhetoric. Obviously, this was already a controversy by 1923. That is well before close reading was invented. So, the decline of rhetoric cannot be due to the advent of close reading and the New Criticism. PR only registers new ideas as things to ridicule and be indignant about. It is a detector programmed not to detect what is happening. However, this is evidence of something, I think.
I am trying to read Beaton’s biography of George Seferis. It records (p.229) a moment around 1945 when English poets are trying to translate the poet from Smyrna and finding that they always make him sound like Eliot. This is an interesting moment. Is it a failure report? I had always assumed that Seferis was much influenced by Eliot. But, maybe that is an effect of translation? Maybe it doesn’t sound like the Waste Land at all, in Greek? Tinos Malanos wrote a book (in 1951) claiming this influence. Seferis wrote an essay refuting the idea (which was never published). (Beaton, p.295) Seferis translated a lot of Eliot’s poetry. The translators were born in a certain time… they knew Eliot backwards. Maybe they could make anything sound like Eliot because that is what they were saturated in. This is relevant, because I touch on Seferis and the ability of English poets (Rex Warner, Philip Sherrard, etc.) to translate him. That scene, about 1941 to 45, of poets hanging out in Alexandria, of Personal Landscape, of English people understanding Seferis in Greek, is a moment when English culture actually gets close to a foreign culture. One possibility is that the translation goes so well because Seferis was a cosmopolitan and anglophile and had absorbed so much English poetry. But maybe that isn’t true. Maybe it’s more that you can make Seferis sound like Eliot, and he then sounds less like the real Seferis. Maybe it’s very hard for us to get someone who grew up in Smyrna, on the Aegean, in the Ottoman Empire, and whose father was heavily involved in the “language quarrel”, between two variants of standardised modern Greek. The Greek town of Smyrna was destroyed in 1922. A brilliant translation can be a screen behind which everything strange hides. Cavafy went to school in England and his English quality is much stronger.
The Prince of Wales’ African Book (words by St John Adcock, 1926) may be the source Sitwell used for Gold Coast Customs. This is an obscure area. What she says may in fact be true, for the Gold Coast in the 1820s.
A note on Prynne’s poem “Aristeas”. It is possible to connect the tale about Aristeas flying above the sea and seeing cities, ships etc. with Siberian tales of the shaman leaving his body and flying out to see distant things. However, this bird’s eye view is hard to find in Siberian shaman literature. Reitzenstein (in his book on Hellenistic wonder-tales) lists a series of Greek writers who describe the world as if seen from high above – an imaginary vantage point. If we return to Aristeas, he came from Proconnesus, a trading port at the end of a long trading route leading all the way to Siberia, in fact through the countries which the Arimaspeia describes. The “bird’s” perspective describes a map, and the 7th C date puts us in the early days of maps. These were in fact the cognitive means by which merchants could go to Central Asia and return. Aristeas’ knowledge is what merchants on Proconnesus, and in other Black Sea ports, really possessed. There is a perspective implied in a flat rendition of a portion of the Earth. So the “overflight” belongs to Greek knowledge and not to Siberian.
Friday, 21 August 2026
travelogue - more progress
Travelogue
Am now (August 2026) reading around the subjects in Travelogue to check that I have not made outstanding mistakes. This is tedious because most of it is repetitive and not productive (of lurking errors). The tedium encourages me to have new ideas which obviously are NOT going to fit into a structure which is good as it is.
I left out Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. He was too arrogant to form sensible policies. Alan Moorehead says in The White Nile (1960) that when the Mahdi’s forces took Omdurman they massacred several thousand, enslaved everyone who survived, and ravished the women as a first step. “Human beings were the chief loot, but there was great wastage of them at first.” When news reached London, Blunt wrote “Unexpected and glorious news of the fall of Omdurman… I could not help singing all the way down [into the country] on the train.” He just didn’t know what he was talking about. He had left the Foreign Office (11 years in the Diplomatic Service) and was promoting his own personal foreign policy, without the benefit of the local intelligence which the FO itself had. I sympathise with his resistance to colonialism, but he is just someone you don’t want on your side. This is the equivalent of someone in the 2020s being a big fan of Hamas.
In a democracy, we have the right to criticise the government’s foreign policy. That still applies even when we are not “area specialists”. Someone like Blunt discredits this role of democratic opposition. That is why I don’t want him in my book.
August Closs. A chance encounter with an essay in Antaios (volume for 1964) showed me a reference to Closs’s 1936 article in which he claims that shamanism is a key to the Germanic religion as it was practiced 2000 years ago in Northern Europe. This is interesting because it shows that connection being made before Eliade’s 1951 book – although Eliade co-edited Antaios, in fact. The link explains the mysterious fact that “Wodan, id est furor” (Wodan, that is fury), was the statement made by bishop Adam of Bremen in the 12th C, when there still were pagans around. If you translate “furor” as “spirit possession”, then you can make a link to shamanism in Siberia, which was reasonably well studied by anthropologists (including those exiled for their political activities). The etymology is convincing, a word which gives us meanings like “rage” in German and “insane” in Middle English and Scottish (“I mun waxen wode”). But the idea that all states of ecstasy, trance, possession, etc. resemble Siberian shamanism is not tenable. It is a link with no specific content. Moreover, the written records we have of Wodan legends do not contain this trance aspect at all. The date when he acquired the name may have been far distant from the stage when literate monks (or others) came to write down Norse mythology. There is no instance where “wood” means “possessed by a spirit”, and it seems odd that Woden would be possessed by a spirit if he was a high god. I find the link between Siberia and Northern paganism fascinating, but the more I know about it the less real it seems. You have to strip the Siberian thing of every specific feature to make the match. But, if you do that, where is the intellectual gain?
There was a religion in Iron Age Northern Europe. And I don’t think it involved wise men sitting around reading works of theology and discussing philosophy. But it is the link with Siberia which I find questionable. Of course, this would bind Europe to the Third World. So many people have found shamanism fascinating, and tried to import it into the West in various forms.
Love of country
One of the sources I looked at, possibly Herbert Palmer, said that people after 1918 began to write patriotic poetry through writing in detail about their tiny bit of the country, so “love of country” in small-scale pictures. I have not gone into this at all. The sequel would be that the impact of the First World War had moved patriotic feeling away from the Army and the Navy and towards the countryside (urban scenes did not arouse the same feelings). That is, patriotic poetry continued but it no longer took the form which it had done between 1890 and 1920. I think it’s well-known that people fighting in the Second World War thought of scenes from the cherished English countryside when they asked themselves what they were fighting for. Such scenes were not heroic and certainly not arguments in favour of expansion. I have not explored this, and I think the problem in distinguishing propaganda from simple landscape or nature poetry (and painting etc.) is pervasive. If you look at the art and films which the official organs of propaganda encouraged, or funded, during the second war, some part of it is clearly the rural, the picturesque, the sentimental. There was a whole mythology of England, and to some extent of Wales and Scotland. And when people thought of war aims, they often thought of lovely villages and old woods. I know what the propaganda czars were thinking about, and that they thought a lot about how to portray the English countryside. But, the message of those paintings etc. is that here is something old and vulnerable. Something under threat from aggression and mechanization. The anti-war message is obvious. Of course, at the time this meant defence against invasion, and the defence obviously took military forms. But it was the same set of messages and emotions which pacifists liked to imagine. It just isn’t militarist. It also tends to be against the State, because in favour of very small areas which can be thought of as home. One of the cultural events of 1940 was a project funded by the Pilgrim Trust to record aspects of the countryside. This was often done in watercolour, which was more suited to painting outside, on the spot. The theme is vulnerability and the small-scale. The results are fascinating and very moving. But the editors of the book, from the 1980s I think, which collected and showed these images, pointed out that the immediate stimulus was anxiety that the British war effort would destroy all these things, turn them into tank training grounds and so on. Many guns, much concrete. The stress between love of country and militarism was obvious. That stress explains why creative people had gone off militarism and territorial aggression. It also explains why they stopped being patriotic in one way but went on being patriotic in another way. Anyway, it is ridiculous to think of some poem about wild flowers as instantly being nationalistic.
It is inaccurate to think of British poets as all trooping off into individualism in the 1920s. Some of them did. Few of them were happy about the gigantic efforts of the world war which had just finished. Fewer wanted a repeat. Many of them had grave doubts about the State and the ruling classes. But a belief in the community united most of them, and the issue was more how to express this.
A different version of the book would be if I were looking for patriotic poetry and foregrounding the successes. I didn’t do that, but after all love of country is something most writers share. Michael Powell’s 1944 film “A Canterbury Tale” is a good subject if we want to think about patriots in the 20th C. Its protagonist turns out to be carrying out small acts of vandalism (pouring glue in the hair of courting couples?) because he wants to defend a beautiful Kent, as something for tired warriors to come home to. The couples involve American soldiers, in Kent to help win the war. He is genuinely in love with his country. This is a portrait of patriotism; and the film is about patriotism. But the story is profoundly ambiguous. This cluster of feelings was not easy to simplify.
Am now (August 2026) reading around the subjects in Travelogue to check that I have not made outstanding mistakes. This is tedious because most of it is repetitive and not productive (of lurking errors). The tedium encourages me to have new ideas which obviously are NOT going to fit into a structure which is good as it is.
I left out Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. He was too arrogant to form sensible policies. Alan Moorehead says in The White Nile (1960) that when the Mahdi’s forces took Omdurman they massacred several thousand, enslaved everyone who survived, and ravished the women as a first step. “Human beings were the chief loot, but there was great wastage of them at first.” When news reached London, Blunt wrote “Unexpected and glorious news of the fall of Omdurman… I could not help singing all the way down [into the country] on the train.” He just didn’t know what he was talking about. He had left the Foreign Office (11 years in the Diplomatic Service) and was promoting his own personal foreign policy, without the benefit of the local intelligence which the FO itself had. I sympathise with his resistance to colonialism, but he is just someone you don’t want on your side. This is the equivalent of someone in the 2020s being a big fan of Hamas.
In a democracy, we have the right to criticise the government’s foreign policy. That still applies even when we are not “area specialists”. Someone like Blunt discredits this role of democratic opposition. That is why I don’t want him in my book.
August Closs. A chance encounter with an essay in Antaios (volume for 1964) showed me a reference to Closs’s 1936 article in which he claims that shamanism is a key to the Germanic religion as it was practiced 2000 years ago in Northern Europe. This is interesting because it shows that connection being made before Eliade’s 1951 book – although Eliade co-edited Antaios, in fact. The link explains the mysterious fact that “Wodan, id est furor” (Wodan, that is fury), was the statement made by bishop Adam of Bremen in the 12th C, when there still were pagans around. If you translate “furor” as “spirit possession”, then you can make a link to shamanism in Siberia, which was reasonably well studied by anthropologists (including those exiled for their political activities). The etymology is convincing, a word which gives us meanings like “rage” in German and “insane” in Middle English and Scottish (“I mun waxen wode”). But the idea that all states of ecstasy, trance, possession, etc. resemble Siberian shamanism is not tenable. It is a link with no specific content. Moreover, the written records we have of Wodan legends do not contain this trance aspect at all. The date when he acquired the name may have been far distant from the stage when literate monks (or others) came to write down Norse mythology. There is no instance where “wood” means “possessed by a spirit”, and it seems odd that Woden would be possessed by a spirit if he was a high god. I find the link between Siberia and Northern paganism fascinating, but the more I know about it the less real it seems. You have to strip the Siberian thing of every specific feature to make the match. But, if you do that, where is the intellectual gain?
There was a religion in Iron Age Northern Europe. And I don’t think it involved wise men sitting around reading works of theology and discussing philosophy. But it is the link with Siberia which I find questionable. Of course, this would bind Europe to the Third World. So many people have found shamanism fascinating, and tried to import it into the West in various forms.
Love of country
One of the sources I looked at, possibly Herbert Palmer, said that people after 1918 began to write patriotic poetry through writing in detail about their tiny bit of the country, so “love of country” in small-scale pictures. I have not gone into this at all. The sequel would be that the impact of the First World War had moved patriotic feeling away from the Army and the Navy and towards the countryside (urban scenes did not arouse the same feelings). That is, patriotic poetry continued but it no longer took the form which it had done between 1890 and 1920. I think it’s well-known that people fighting in the Second World War thought of scenes from the cherished English countryside when they asked themselves what they were fighting for. Such scenes were not heroic and certainly not arguments in favour of expansion. I have not explored this, and I think the problem in distinguishing propaganda from simple landscape or nature poetry (and painting etc.) is pervasive. If you look at the art and films which the official organs of propaganda encouraged, or funded, during the second war, some part of it is clearly the rural, the picturesque, the sentimental. There was a whole mythology of England, and to some extent of Wales and Scotland. And when people thought of war aims, they often thought of lovely villages and old woods. I know what the propaganda czars were thinking about, and that they thought a lot about how to portray the English countryside. But, the message of those paintings etc. is that here is something old and vulnerable. Something under threat from aggression and mechanization. The anti-war message is obvious. Of course, at the time this meant defence against invasion, and the defence obviously took military forms. But it was the same set of messages and emotions which pacifists liked to imagine. It just isn’t militarist. It also tends to be against the State, because in favour of very small areas which can be thought of as home. One of the cultural events of 1940 was a project funded by the Pilgrim Trust to record aspects of the countryside. This was often done in watercolour, which was more suited to painting outside, on the spot. The theme is vulnerability and the small-scale. The results are fascinating and very moving. But the editors of the book, from the 1980s I think, which collected and showed these images, pointed out that the immediate stimulus was anxiety that the British war effort would destroy all these things, turn them into tank training grounds and so on. Many guns, much concrete. The stress between love of country and militarism was obvious. That stress explains why creative people had gone off militarism and territorial aggression. It also explains why they stopped being patriotic in one way but went on being patriotic in another way. Anyway, it is ridiculous to think of some poem about wild flowers as instantly being nationalistic.
It is inaccurate to think of British poets as all trooping off into individualism in the 1920s. Some of them did. Few of them were happy about the gigantic efforts of the world war which had just finished. Fewer wanted a repeat. Many of them had grave doubts about the State and the ruling classes. But a belief in the community united most of them, and the issue was more how to express this.
A different version of the book would be if I were looking for patriotic poetry and foregrounding the successes. I didn’t do that, but after all love of country is something most writers share. Michael Powell’s 1944 film “A Canterbury Tale” is a good subject if we want to think about patriots in the 20th C. Its protagonist turns out to be carrying out small acts of vandalism (pouring glue in the hair of courting couples?) because he wants to defend a beautiful Kent, as something for tired warriors to come home to. The couples involve American soldiers, in Kent to help win the war. He is genuinely in love with his country. This is a portrait of patriotism; and the film is about patriotism. But the story is profoundly ambiguous. This cluster of feelings was not easy to simplify.
Wednesday, 12 August 2026
Matthew Mead as Cold War poet
The Cold War
After evoking (in Travelogue)the absence of good pro-Cold War poetry, I can't resist mentioning someone who wrote excellent poetry about everyday life in the Cold War, without actually being enthusiastic about it. So we should talk about Matthew Mead a bit. Mead (1924-2009) was best known as a translator from German poetry, and he was living in Germany in the Sixties. He had acquired German as part of Army service, in some way. He published Identities in 1967 and The Administration of Things in 1970. It is obvious that being learned in modern German literature made him sophisticated – no cheap effects. He also did not partake of English literary fashions. Mead’s theme, as suggested by his liking for a (largely forgotten) poet named Heinz Winfried Sabais, is “living through the shared experiences of a generation and reaching the truth through loss of generalisations”. Reaching the truth is the artistic drive. The generation is not mainly English, but in fact German and Russian. Take this passage from ‘A Poem In Nine Parts’, which was published, as part of the original series of Migrant Press pamphlets, in 1960:
Skirts, head-scarves, skin-tight slacks.
Lips of blood, breasts by e.e. cummings,
Girls hurry up the hill against the wind
To work at the sweet-factory.
Is it true that two women
(Furtseva and Pauker)
Trudge middle-aged
Like a theory of increasing misery
Yet nyloned, sandalled, stiletto-heeled,
Girls hurry up the hill
To hive as worker-queens,
Climbing to an eight a.m. start
With the jounce of a gay proletariat
In a confection of spring sunshine.
This proletariat hurrying up the hill
Is gayer, at a guess, George,
Than any proletariat you have seen.
Hey yeeorgi, Georgi Karpov!
Does the committee still meet Wednesdays
To smash the occasional ikon?
Furtseva and Pauker were senior female politicians (in the Soviet Union and Rumania, respectively) in the post-war era. “Served with distinction in illegal and violent regimes”, roughly. Pauker actually fell from power in 1953. The shot of female workers walking down the street towards a factory could be in a hundred European films. The poem is addressed to Georgi Karpov, in this case as “minister of religion” – in the Soviet Union that actually meant being an atheist-materialist whose job it was to arrest people for “religious propaganda”. The factory is in the West, presumably in Germany – the girls are wearing the branded products of “consumerism”. The comparison with top female communists is sarcastic. The theme is how abstract ideologies fare when mapped onto concrete, documentary, scenes – how generalised ideas are traps. Female factory workers are not much impressed by abstractions. The poetry is about sobering up from Marxist intoxication. This makes his poetry seem oddly out of date in 1970; the questions he is answering relate to the period after the death of Stalin, rather than the Sixties. Mead’s subject matter is broadly similar to that of Jack Beeching. With both, there is a kind of emotional anti-climax after the Twentieth Congress and destalinisation. But ‘Nine Parts’ makes its statement about politics concrete while being complex enough to bring about a “potential space” in which the imagination can work.
I thought his best poem was “From a Provisional Capital”, which is an account full of novel-like detail of life in Bonn. Yes, it was a provincial town, chosen as the capital partly to avoid jealousy by all the large towns of each other. The poem is mainly about German women of a certain generation being unmarried, and their matching men lying in graves deep inside the Soviet Union.
Mead does not have the heroic qualities which would set him beside Kipling. And so, we still have a gap in the series of patriotic poets. This is what I argue in 'Travelogue'. But there was good poetry about the Cold War, and Mead wrote some of it.
There was a Penguin Modern Poets (in 1970?) which had Mead, Beeching, and Harry Guest. It was vital in pointing out poets whom common opinion had missed. It is still a thing one must possess.
After evoking (in Travelogue)the absence of good pro-Cold War poetry, I can't resist mentioning someone who wrote excellent poetry about everyday life in the Cold War, without actually being enthusiastic about it. So we should talk about Matthew Mead a bit. Mead (1924-2009) was best known as a translator from German poetry, and he was living in Germany in the Sixties. He had acquired German as part of Army service, in some way. He published Identities in 1967 and The Administration of Things in 1970. It is obvious that being learned in modern German literature made him sophisticated – no cheap effects. He also did not partake of English literary fashions. Mead’s theme, as suggested by his liking for a (largely forgotten) poet named Heinz Winfried Sabais, is “living through the shared experiences of a generation and reaching the truth through loss of generalisations”. Reaching the truth is the artistic drive. The generation is not mainly English, but in fact German and Russian. Take this passage from ‘A Poem In Nine Parts’, which was published, as part of the original series of Migrant Press pamphlets, in 1960:
Skirts, head-scarves, skin-tight slacks.
Lips of blood, breasts by e.e. cummings,
Girls hurry up the hill against the wind
To work at the sweet-factory.
Is it true that two women
(Furtseva and Pauker)
Trudge middle-aged
Like a theory of increasing misery
Yet nyloned, sandalled, stiletto-heeled,
Girls hurry up the hill
To hive as worker-queens,
Climbing to an eight a.m. start
With the jounce of a gay proletariat
In a confection of spring sunshine.
This proletariat hurrying up the hill
Is gayer, at a guess, George,
Than any proletariat you have seen.
Hey yeeorgi, Georgi Karpov!
Does the committee still meet Wednesdays
To smash the occasional ikon?
Furtseva and Pauker were senior female politicians (in the Soviet Union and Rumania, respectively) in the post-war era. “Served with distinction in illegal and violent regimes”, roughly. Pauker actually fell from power in 1953. The shot of female workers walking down the street towards a factory could be in a hundred European films. The poem is addressed to Georgi Karpov, in this case as “minister of religion” – in the Soviet Union that actually meant being an atheist-materialist whose job it was to arrest people for “religious propaganda”. The factory is in the West, presumably in Germany – the girls are wearing the branded products of “consumerism”. The comparison with top female communists is sarcastic. The theme is how abstract ideologies fare when mapped onto concrete, documentary, scenes – how generalised ideas are traps. Female factory workers are not much impressed by abstractions. The poetry is about sobering up from Marxist intoxication. This makes his poetry seem oddly out of date in 1970; the questions he is answering relate to the period after the death of Stalin, rather than the Sixties. Mead’s subject matter is broadly similar to that of Jack Beeching. With both, there is a kind of emotional anti-climax after the Twentieth Congress and destalinisation. But ‘Nine Parts’ makes its statement about politics concrete while being complex enough to bring about a “potential space” in which the imagination can work.
I thought his best poem was “From a Provisional Capital”, which is an account full of novel-like detail of life in Bonn. Yes, it was a provincial town, chosen as the capital partly to avoid jealousy by all the large towns of each other. The poem is mainly about German women of a certain generation being unmarried, and their matching men lying in graves deep inside the Soviet Union.
Mead does not have the heroic qualities which would set him beside Kipling. And so, we still have a gap in the series of patriotic poets. This is what I argue in 'Travelogue'. But there was good poetry about the Cold War, and Mead wrote some of it.
There was a Penguin Modern Poets (in 1970?) which had Mead, Beeching, and Harry Guest. It was vital in pointing out poets whom common opinion had missed. It is still a thing one must possess.
Tuesday, 28 July 2026
Travelogue- More notes
Travelogue- More, blog 4
I am wondering about the dataset of “poetry relating to the Third World and Britain” which I used. It stops at 55 titles, although I have just added one more. Is there an excuse for not going up to 100? Yes, that it would just bulk out the book without adding new ideas. But, of course, there must be more such books of poetry, and there must be ideas I don’t know about.
From an email: “But I couldn't find any poetry saying that the Empire should be shut down. It was about to happen, but nobody wrote a poem saying, go ahead and do it. People were too concerned with the condition of the working class, and with European politics. This is my main result and I’m quite unhappy about it.
It is embarrassing. There should be an Adrian Wetherspoon, who was at Oxford with Auden, got a Blue in flower arranging, had an affair with Spender, and wrote a 1936 book called “Give the Empire back, you chaps!”. Worked for the BBC. Became professor of Suburban Studies at the university of Wellingborough.”
Last night (night of 25 July) I had a dream in which I found a new example for the Travelogue of poems, a complete set of poems about Egypt written by Peter Porter. I am flailing to find examples and this even in my sleep. Of course, those Egypt poems don’t exist. The joy of finding has taken me over.
Porter does in fact mention Ancinet Egypt:
And victims sitting in the tireless hall
Before the second paper of the afternoon
Are answering shadows. Who’d start
The heron of the Eighteenth Dynasty
From painted reeds; who’d say Paul
To a persecutor from a quarterly?
The blind man is called in as
Adviser and the tone-deaf President
Buys Wagner’s bed – our only protection
Sacred objects with a patina
Of fear. And that there are too many
Of us will never refer to one.
(from ‘There Are Too Many of Us’ in The Last of England, 1970)
This is just a passing moment, two lines long. I am glad to say that my unconscious was not completely making stuff up.
* There is an argument that modernist poetry in Britain was inherently anti-imperial because it started with rejection of the inherited British values. I have not written the book in these terms. Local enemies of modernism disliked it from the point of view that the youth of Britain had to be super-patriotic in order to provide the raw material for future Imperial wars. They vocally objected to Modernism and other things, because they distracted from this super-patriotism. But their whole position was poorly considered and inaccurate. We can’t just take over their ideas about modernism. Mostly, they amount to one more deposit of bad language which we don’t need to consult.
I do admire the courage of certain individuals in the inter-war period, breaking with family values, parental values, the school’s values, the Church, and so forth. It is unusual for artists to forgo approval. There was a biographical drama involved in becoming modern. You can argue that to enter modernist art is to lose the old values, dissolved in doubt, if only for three hours, or for the duration of an evening. But the outcome of this “deprogramming” was to re-program yourself and connect with a small elite, say 1% of the population of Europe. This actually meant becoming international, in a certain way. If we consult Haftmann’s Modern Painting (1964 version), for example, it has a helpful appendix listing 1200 Modernist painters (up to 1964), and almost none of them belong to the Third World. We do find the Cuban Wifredo Lam and a couple of Mexican muralists. This is pointing in the wrong direction – it moves you away from empire-building but gives you a wholly European perspective. Apparently, the phase of doubt then stops, as you simply come to identify with the modernist world and its members.
Modernism did have an imperialist wing – Marinetti and a whole group of Futurists sympathising with Mussolini.
I like the modernists. I think they started with a deep scepticism about authority. That certainly is a threat to the psychological bases of the empire, because its narrative had so many utterly impressive authority figures, the ones they made statues of. But the anti-authority attitude would be equally scathing about the leaders of the new democracy which the freeing of any colony would bring into being. I am just not impressed by blanket rejection of authority. I think you can have people who are hypersensitive, who withdraw into private worlds, who create entire artistic worlds as a sequel to that… that does not automatically make them political geniuses.
I think the principle of doubt can take you anywhere. It certainly doesn’t reach the end of its potential quickly, if at all. I just don’t think that scepticism can instantly be redefined as being anti-imperial. That definition would surely be satisfied by a statement like, “I believe in democracy and no colony is democratic”.
Am reading Sathnam Sanghera’s book on the aftermath of the Empire. He says “the British Empire was the single most significant incubator, refiner, and propagator of white supremacy in the history of the planet. […] Most British imperialists were proudly racist and, as British imperialism peaked, prominent journalists and authors throughout the British empire corresponded and conspired to spread ideas of white supremacy across the planet. Many of the proudly white supremacist politicians, thinkers and diplomats of British empire coalesced around various international racial ‘crises’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…” This is terrific, and if you don’t get this you don’t get anything. (Empireworld, p. 176) Modern sensitivity to racial epithets (and so on) follows from an era where racial abuse, and its congeners like corporal punishment and humiliation, were daily practice wherever white people encountered coloured ones. It is easy to forget this, because the memory has been whitewashed; but it is necessary to remember.
This is something where the norm (of abuse) which was there in the 1950s was replaced – first of all in the (verbal) manners of a tiny minority, say 1%, and which spread, often via the media. But, the spread to 100% of the media didn’t mean a spread to 100% of the population. Modernisation has had geographical, social, educational limits, like other processes. So today maybe 30% of the population haven’t given up the ground-level racism – and these are the Reform UK voters. And there is this sharp separation between the verbal-attitudinal norms in the media and the norms in the group of people they associate with. So, their out of date attitudes to race have been coupled to a resentment of the media, and of the kind of person who works in the media.
There are probably hundreds of major works on the Empire, and its connection to the homeland, which I haven’t read. But none of the ones I have read pays attention to poetry. This is the gap which justifies me in writing. I pick up what other historians regard as unimportant.
I googled ‘imperialist poetry’ and got a list of 10 poems which included ‘The Waste Land’. Allegedly, it refers to many cities which are a part of empires. I don’t really buy this. The cities were part of empires at various stages of their history, because almost all of Europe and south west Asia was in that category, and that is the imaginative world in which Eliot’s poems in Waste Land and its group were set. So, this is a wrong note. But linking it to a Spenglerian view of history is reasonable…. Of course, we never really get an explanation in the poems of what that view is, and it isn’t a reproduction of Spengler, it takes his framework and produces a shadow of it, changing all the terms. Spengler had that sort of suggestive power. Eliot’s characters all seem to live in a state of exhaustion and indifference, and that isn’t really affected by the exotic cities which they visit. “Burbank with a Baedeker”, so he is engaged on cultural tourism, and the poem is set in Venice – but the poetry visits many cities, so it doesn’t much matter which one it is. The idea of ancient cities links up to the idea of a culture which is too old and a person who is too cultured. The poem refers to ruins, and Venice is the capital of an empire that ceased to exist at the end of the 18th century, but the poem doesn’t say if that outcome is good or bad. The Grail story is set in an Arthurian realm which is theoretically part of the Roman Empire, which he was defending. Does that make Waste Land, with its Grail theme, a poem about Imperialism? This is attractive but meaningless.
Sanghera also talks about “the rule of law” as an aspect of the imperial order. But, if the government itself displaced earlier governments by force, and abolished the customary and communal law of the land, and then imposed laws with no need for consent or democratic consultation, is that actually law? It is rule, but how can it be law if the government itself is illegitimate? He is partly paraphrasing another scholar (Keally MacBride), but the point is very well made (Empireworld, p. 158).
I have had a leaflet put through my door which promotes the Restore Britain party. It has a lot about repatriating legal immigrants, not just illegal ones. Send them all back, in a word. They are simply aiming at people who think that Reform UK is too far Left. And, they got 7% of the votes cast in the last by-election in England. This is the atmosphere I am writing in.
* Am developing doubts about the history of the novel. The link of realism to tight series of observations, such as public accounts, is good. But reading about the ‘Tristan’ of Thomas makes me think that something completely different is happening, to do with recognising the inner narratives of characters. This would push us towards a less simple idea of Western literature, with multiple currents acting in different directions, even if in the same centuries. Of course, empathy involves close observation, and in general links to realistic knowledge because both work in rich, highly literate, self-conscious societies. But still they aren’t the same thing.
Can’t explain why I have written a history of fiction inside a book which is about poetry. I can’t write such a history of poetry. I think comparing poetry is more difficult. It is a lot easier to compare fantastic prose like the Early Modern Irish romances to the realist novel than to compare poetry from the same two periods. The prose is less subjective, in some way. Poetry since the rise of the novel assumes that the characters are part of a novel. This is a basic pattern of imagination since everyone began reading novels all the time. But, how to prove that.
I just don’t think psychology, as the growing force of change in Western literature since Tristan, is part of science. It is something different. The love theme involves idealisation, which is just about the opposite of observation. You have the court of Arthur and the perfection of the knights, objects which you envy and desire to imitate, nothing to do with historical truth or accountability. The fascination with the loved person, the introspection looking into what love means and how you really feel, are barely related to science. Searching for an ideal is quite different from searching for the truth.
Religion offers perfection (and unreality) in many ways. It can’t be true that psychology came into art from religion. Rather, Christian interest in the soul was weak in the beginning and developed very gradually. Some force made it develop, and this force was latent in the culture, and we have to seek its real origins, rather than presenting Religion as an effect which has no cause itself.
The increasing character complexity in the romances and their love stories is linked to literacy. But the audience for something like “Tristan” was not exclusively literate, rather it was for recitation to a mixed audience of whom some were not literate, even if they belonged to the richer strata.
Describing what is Western is basic to describing the differences between Westerners and the Third World people they have come into contact with. But, it is only going to appear in my write-up if it is simple enough to be described quickly. I don’t want 100 chapters on 100 features of the West.
The romances and their psychology do identify the West, because all that did not happen in Byzantium, despite its large numbers of priests and monks, its many literate individuals. Of course, that idea suggests that I should go and read late Byzantine literature, to see how far this idea is really true. By reading the early fiction, am I going to come up with a new idea about the history of changing cognition? Both the Thomas Tristan and Men of Maize are overwhelming in their scope, vortices which make me forget everything else.
If we say “the cultural industry in the West has thirty genres and shoots off in every direction”, the history of it collapses and becomes unwritable. Everything you can say is true and nothing is cogent.
I am wondering about the dataset of “poetry relating to the Third World and Britain” which I used. It stops at 55 titles, although I have just added one more. Is there an excuse for not going up to 100? Yes, that it would just bulk out the book without adding new ideas. But, of course, there must be more such books of poetry, and there must be ideas I don’t know about.
From an email: “But I couldn't find any poetry saying that the Empire should be shut down. It was about to happen, but nobody wrote a poem saying, go ahead and do it. People were too concerned with the condition of the working class, and with European politics. This is my main result and I’m quite unhappy about it.
It is embarrassing. There should be an Adrian Wetherspoon, who was at Oxford with Auden, got a Blue in flower arranging, had an affair with Spender, and wrote a 1936 book called “Give the Empire back, you chaps!”. Worked for the BBC. Became professor of Suburban Studies at the university of Wellingborough.”
Last night (night of 25 July) I had a dream in which I found a new example for the Travelogue of poems, a complete set of poems about Egypt written by Peter Porter. I am flailing to find examples and this even in my sleep. Of course, those Egypt poems don’t exist. The joy of finding has taken me over.
Porter does in fact mention Ancinet Egypt:
And victims sitting in the tireless hall
Before the second paper of the afternoon
Are answering shadows. Who’d start
The heron of the Eighteenth Dynasty
From painted reeds; who’d say Paul
To a persecutor from a quarterly?
The blind man is called in as
Adviser and the tone-deaf President
Buys Wagner’s bed – our only protection
Sacred objects with a patina
Of fear. And that there are too many
Of us will never refer to one.
(from ‘There Are Too Many of Us’ in The Last of England, 1970)
This is just a passing moment, two lines long. I am glad to say that my unconscious was not completely making stuff up.
* There is an argument that modernist poetry in Britain was inherently anti-imperial because it started with rejection of the inherited British values. I have not written the book in these terms. Local enemies of modernism disliked it from the point of view that the youth of Britain had to be super-patriotic in order to provide the raw material for future Imperial wars. They vocally objected to Modernism and other things, because they distracted from this super-patriotism. But their whole position was poorly considered and inaccurate. We can’t just take over their ideas about modernism. Mostly, they amount to one more deposit of bad language which we don’t need to consult.
I do admire the courage of certain individuals in the inter-war period, breaking with family values, parental values, the school’s values, the Church, and so forth. It is unusual for artists to forgo approval. There was a biographical drama involved in becoming modern. You can argue that to enter modernist art is to lose the old values, dissolved in doubt, if only for three hours, or for the duration of an evening. But the outcome of this “deprogramming” was to re-program yourself and connect with a small elite, say 1% of the population of Europe. This actually meant becoming international, in a certain way. If we consult Haftmann’s Modern Painting (1964 version), for example, it has a helpful appendix listing 1200 Modernist painters (up to 1964), and almost none of them belong to the Third World. We do find the Cuban Wifredo Lam and a couple of Mexican muralists. This is pointing in the wrong direction – it moves you away from empire-building but gives you a wholly European perspective. Apparently, the phase of doubt then stops, as you simply come to identify with the modernist world and its members.
Modernism did have an imperialist wing – Marinetti and a whole group of Futurists sympathising with Mussolini.
I like the modernists. I think they started with a deep scepticism about authority. That certainly is a threat to the psychological bases of the empire, because its narrative had so many utterly impressive authority figures, the ones they made statues of. But the anti-authority attitude would be equally scathing about the leaders of the new democracy which the freeing of any colony would bring into being. I am just not impressed by blanket rejection of authority. I think you can have people who are hypersensitive, who withdraw into private worlds, who create entire artistic worlds as a sequel to that… that does not automatically make them political geniuses.
I think the principle of doubt can take you anywhere. It certainly doesn’t reach the end of its potential quickly, if at all. I just don’t think that scepticism can instantly be redefined as being anti-imperial. That definition would surely be satisfied by a statement like, “I believe in democracy and no colony is democratic”.
Am reading Sathnam Sanghera’s book on the aftermath of the Empire. He says “the British Empire was the single most significant incubator, refiner, and propagator of white supremacy in the history of the planet. […] Most British imperialists were proudly racist and, as British imperialism peaked, prominent journalists and authors throughout the British empire corresponded and conspired to spread ideas of white supremacy across the planet. Many of the proudly white supremacist politicians, thinkers and diplomats of British empire coalesced around various international racial ‘crises’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…” This is terrific, and if you don’t get this you don’t get anything. (Empireworld, p. 176) Modern sensitivity to racial epithets (and so on) follows from an era where racial abuse, and its congeners like corporal punishment and humiliation, were daily practice wherever white people encountered coloured ones. It is easy to forget this, because the memory has been whitewashed; but it is necessary to remember.
This is something where the norm (of abuse) which was there in the 1950s was replaced – first of all in the (verbal) manners of a tiny minority, say 1%, and which spread, often via the media. But, the spread to 100% of the media didn’t mean a spread to 100% of the population. Modernisation has had geographical, social, educational limits, like other processes. So today maybe 30% of the population haven’t given up the ground-level racism – and these are the Reform UK voters. And there is this sharp separation between the verbal-attitudinal norms in the media and the norms in the group of people they associate with. So, their out of date attitudes to race have been coupled to a resentment of the media, and of the kind of person who works in the media.
There are probably hundreds of major works on the Empire, and its connection to the homeland, which I haven’t read. But none of the ones I have read pays attention to poetry. This is the gap which justifies me in writing. I pick up what other historians regard as unimportant.
I googled ‘imperialist poetry’ and got a list of 10 poems which included ‘The Waste Land’. Allegedly, it refers to many cities which are a part of empires. I don’t really buy this. The cities were part of empires at various stages of their history, because almost all of Europe and south west Asia was in that category, and that is the imaginative world in which Eliot’s poems in Waste Land and its group were set. So, this is a wrong note. But linking it to a Spenglerian view of history is reasonable…. Of course, we never really get an explanation in the poems of what that view is, and it isn’t a reproduction of Spengler, it takes his framework and produces a shadow of it, changing all the terms. Spengler had that sort of suggestive power. Eliot’s characters all seem to live in a state of exhaustion and indifference, and that isn’t really affected by the exotic cities which they visit. “Burbank with a Baedeker”, so he is engaged on cultural tourism, and the poem is set in Venice – but the poetry visits many cities, so it doesn’t much matter which one it is. The idea of ancient cities links up to the idea of a culture which is too old and a person who is too cultured. The poem refers to ruins, and Venice is the capital of an empire that ceased to exist at the end of the 18th century, but the poem doesn’t say if that outcome is good or bad. The Grail story is set in an Arthurian realm which is theoretically part of the Roman Empire, which he was defending. Does that make Waste Land, with its Grail theme, a poem about Imperialism? This is attractive but meaningless.
Sanghera also talks about “the rule of law” as an aspect of the imperial order. But, if the government itself displaced earlier governments by force, and abolished the customary and communal law of the land, and then imposed laws with no need for consent or democratic consultation, is that actually law? It is rule, but how can it be law if the government itself is illegitimate? He is partly paraphrasing another scholar (Keally MacBride), but the point is very well made (Empireworld, p. 158).
I have had a leaflet put through my door which promotes the Restore Britain party. It has a lot about repatriating legal immigrants, not just illegal ones. Send them all back, in a word. They are simply aiming at people who think that Reform UK is too far Left. And, they got 7% of the votes cast in the last by-election in England. This is the atmosphere I am writing in.
* Am developing doubts about the history of the novel. The link of realism to tight series of observations, such as public accounts, is good. But reading about the ‘Tristan’ of Thomas makes me think that something completely different is happening, to do with recognising the inner narratives of characters. This would push us towards a less simple idea of Western literature, with multiple currents acting in different directions, even if in the same centuries. Of course, empathy involves close observation, and in general links to realistic knowledge because both work in rich, highly literate, self-conscious societies. But still they aren’t the same thing.
Can’t explain why I have written a history of fiction inside a book which is about poetry. I can’t write such a history of poetry. I think comparing poetry is more difficult. It is a lot easier to compare fantastic prose like the Early Modern Irish romances to the realist novel than to compare poetry from the same two periods. The prose is less subjective, in some way. Poetry since the rise of the novel assumes that the characters are part of a novel. This is a basic pattern of imagination since everyone began reading novels all the time. But, how to prove that.
I just don’t think psychology, as the growing force of change in Western literature since Tristan, is part of science. It is something different. The love theme involves idealisation, which is just about the opposite of observation. You have the court of Arthur and the perfection of the knights, objects which you envy and desire to imitate, nothing to do with historical truth or accountability. The fascination with the loved person, the introspection looking into what love means and how you really feel, are barely related to science. Searching for an ideal is quite different from searching for the truth.
Religion offers perfection (and unreality) in many ways. It can’t be true that psychology came into art from religion. Rather, Christian interest in the soul was weak in the beginning and developed very gradually. Some force made it develop, and this force was latent in the culture, and we have to seek its real origins, rather than presenting Religion as an effect which has no cause itself.
The increasing character complexity in the romances and their love stories is linked to literacy. But the audience for something like “Tristan” was not exclusively literate, rather it was for recitation to a mixed audience of whom some were not literate, even if they belonged to the richer strata.
Describing what is Western is basic to describing the differences between Westerners and the Third World people they have come into contact with. But, it is only going to appear in my write-up if it is simple enough to be described quickly. I don’t want 100 chapters on 100 features of the West.
The romances and their psychology do identify the West, because all that did not happen in Byzantium, despite its large numbers of priests and monks, its many literate individuals. Of course, that idea suggests that I should go and read late Byzantine literature, to see how far this idea is really true. By reading the early fiction, am I going to come up with a new idea about the history of changing cognition? Both the Thomas Tristan and Men of Maize are overwhelming in their scope, vortices which make me forget everything else.
If we say “the cultural industry in the West has thirty genres and shoots off in every direction”, the history of it collapses and becomes unwritable. Everything you can say is true and nothing is cogent.
Sunday, 26 July 2026
Edward Lucie-Smith
News has reached us of the death of the connoisseur Edward Lucie-Smith (1933-2026). As he remarks, “I am quite well known as a poet and have published several collections of poems and used to run a famous, dare I say it?, poetry group in London in the 1950s and 1960s.” He will be remembered for his classic Penguin British Poetry since 1945 (1970), and for leaving the poetry scene and staying away for roughly 45 years. His reputation around 1972 was a someone who constantly dashed from one end of the country to the next, always being on the scene when something poetic was happening. He apparently knew everyone and everything at that time, which is why his anthology is so good. I find it is the best anthology published in my lifetime. He misses some people, but his inclusion line is better than any other anthology of modern British poetry.
The anthology involves terse remarks on each poet, in which he identifies the artistic interests which back each one. We get an image of a long series of sites, perhaps like gardens in a leafy suburb, where in each one an idea is nurtured and eventually gives rise to poems. This has the advantage of not referring everything to the deep interior of a solitary poet. He comes close to a history of the audience, which is what we would all like to have. It seems he worked for ten years in advertising, where you ask all the time “why does someone want to buy this”, and that may have been a fruitful question when applied to poetry. So, with Bunting we have the idea that “poems should be full of concrete processes and not abstract ones”, which goes along with an admiration for the North, and for the rural, and this persuaded a whole group of people and not just Bunting. These groups possess solidarity, and the poem expresses that solidarity. Consuming poetry, people are moved by specific ideas, like surrealism or Pop poetry, and not by belonging to economic group C3(b) or anything so schematic. There is a link between the market and the poet, and to some extent (!) the poet is fulfilling hopes which are shared, and older than the poem. "He breaks down the separation between wish and fulfilment." (quoting myself) Taken together, these remarks are the best account of British poetry in that time. He was very concise but also right.
He collects 86 poets in that book. It is a strong selection, to the point where you can use it as a reference datum. If he only has 6 women poets, or 7%, that figure can be used as a reference point for the scene before feminism. If he only includes one protest poem, that allows us to conclude that ‘protest poems’ were a feature of the 1960s but not really a big thing. His decision to exclude Auden and Spender is a coup – he is saying that the scene has to move on. It is not 1938 any more. If he never identifies anyone as gay, that is evidence for a taboo set in stone – it was about to change, but in 1970 the truth was just unmentionable. After all this time, you can probably say who they were.
What he says is memorable and cogent. Only with trepidation do I say that he is unconvincing about Barry Cole and Christopher Middleton. It is hard to explain what Middleton is really for (and you can’t do it in 100 words). One has to compare Roddy Lumsden’s anthology, Identity Parade, which Lumsden explicitly says is modelled on the Lucie-Smith book. Lumsden doesn’t have anything convincing to say about anybody. He is willing to reproduce the marketing line about each poet and unwilling to attempt characterisation or criticism. Business insiders do tend to end up without any opinions. Lumsden seems unwilling to think that style exists outside a poet and can be shared by several poets. Of course, that is not to discount the poems themselves. That is what you pay for.
His later career involved writing art books, which seems to have been a lucrative living on its own. An AI-generated summary says he was mainly involved in the art world from the late 1960s, so the Penguin book is part of his exit route as well as a climax. A web page credits him with “over 100” books, so he knew his market. He also produced astonishingly explicit gay erotica, photographs (possibly paintings as well? I couldn’t confirm that). I think this began in the late 1990s. I suspect that he had bad feelings about the poetry world, which is not friendly towards anthologists. Or grateful for knowledge. I don’t have a record of that. Anyway, writing books like “Sexuality in Western Art” was going to reach a much wider audience and make much more money. Evidently he had the energy to stage couples of nubile young men cavorting in a studio under strong lighting. The camera does not lie. Good for him.
An interview says ”I still collect antiquities rather than contemporary art.” He was interested in antique art rather than the contemporary. Also “I have written a lot of books … maybe more than any other art writer now living. You have to remember that in many art books, texts are fairly short. It’s the illustrations that count. I think if you looked online, you might find substantially more than 100 of my titles – I’ve lost track.” Advertising constantly involved the combination of text and visuals, and he was certainly fluent in doing that.
(Interviewer identified as Michael, I couldn’t find any surname. Thank you, Michael Thingy! Good interview! Date was April 2017.)
The anthology involves terse remarks on each poet, in which he identifies the artistic interests which back each one. We get an image of a long series of sites, perhaps like gardens in a leafy suburb, where in each one an idea is nurtured and eventually gives rise to poems. This has the advantage of not referring everything to the deep interior of a solitary poet. He comes close to a history of the audience, which is what we would all like to have. It seems he worked for ten years in advertising, where you ask all the time “why does someone want to buy this”, and that may have been a fruitful question when applied to poetry. So, with Bunting we have the idea that “poems should be full of concrete processes and not abstract ones”, which goes along with an admiration for the North, and for the rural, and this persuaded a whole group of people and not just Bunting. These groups possess solidarity, and the poem expresses that solidarity. Consuming poetry, people are moved by specific ideas, like surrealism or Pop poetry, and not by belonging to economic group C3(b) or anything so schematic. There is a link between the market and the poet, and to some extent (!) the poet is fulfilling hopes which are shared, and older than the poem. "He breaks down the separation between wish and fulfilment." (quoting myself) Taken together, these remarks are the best account of British poetry in that time. He was very concise but also right.
He collects 86 poets in that book. It is a strong selection, to the point where you can use it as a reference datum. If he only has 6 women poets, or 7%, that figure can be used as a reference point for the scene before feminism. If he only includes one protest poem, that allows us to conclude that ‘protest poems’ were a feature of the 1960s but not really a big thing. His decision to exclude Auden and Spender is a coup – he is saying that the scene has to move on. It is not 1938 any more. If he never identifies anyone as gay, that is evidence for a taboo set in stone – it was about to change, but in 1970 the truth was just unmentionable. After all this time, you can probably say who they were.
What he says is memorable and cogent. Only with trepidation do I say that he is unconvincing about Barry Cole and Christopher Middleton. It is hard to explain what Middleton is really for (and you can’t do it in 100 words). One has to compare Roddy Lumsden’s anthology, Identity Parade, which Lumsden explicitly says is modelled on the Lucie-Smith book. Lumsden doesn’t have anything convincing to say about anybody. He is willing to reproduce the marketing line about each poet and unwilling to attempt characterisation or criticism. Business insiders do tend to end up without any opinions. Lumsden seems unwilling to think that style exists outside a poet and can be shared by several poets. Of course, that is not to discount the poems themselves. That is what you pay for.
His later career involved writing art books, which seems to have been a lucrative living on its own. An AI-generated summary says he was mainly involved in the art world from the late 1960s, so the Penguin book is part of his exit route as well as a climax. A web page credits him with “over 100” books, so he knew his market. He also produced astonishingly explicit gay erotica, photographs (possibly paintings as well? I couldn’t confirm that). I think this began in the late 1990s. I suspect that he had bad feelings about the poetry world, which is not friendly towards anthologists. Or grateful for knowledge. I don’t have a record of that. Anyway, writing books like “Sexuality in Western Art” was going to reach a much wider audience and make much more money. Evidently he had the energy to stage couples of nubile young men cavorting in a studio under strong lighting. The camera does not lie. Good for him.
An interview says ”I still collect antiquities rather than contemporary art.” He was interested in antique art rather than the contemporary. Also “I have written a lot of books … maybe more than any other art writer now living. You have to remember that in many art books, texts are fairly short. It’s the illustrations that count. I think if you looked online, you might find substantially more than 100 of my titles – I’ve lost track.” Advertising constantly involved the combination of text and visuals, and he was certainly fluent in doing that.
(Interviewer identified as Michael, I couldn’t find any surname. Thank you, Michael Thingy! Good interview! Date was April 2017.)
Sunday, 28 June 2026
The constellation of lacuna
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.
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.
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