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.
Friday, 21 August 2026
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.
Saturday, 27 June 2026
fashions in poetry
A few years ago, Waterloo Press had the concept for a handbook, possibly the Wellington Book of Modern Poets, which would have short pieces about 1000 poets. It would really have listed all the poets you wanted to know about. The logistics didn’t work out and the project remains in skeletal form, sort of like Brighton’s West Pier (near the Waterloo office). If you look at the Poetry Book Society website, you can actually find roughly 4000 items, mainly books, with attached blurbs. It is like the Wellington Book, only the write-ups are distracted by hype.
June 2026. I have been trying to locate poets unknown to me, primarily through the PBS website. It lists about 250 books a year (currently going back to 2019), and there are blurbs for (almost) all of them, by the publisher. So, you can pick possible winners using the blurbs as a semi-transparent screen through which something is visible. I am feeling good about this, having just released (through Litter magazine) reviews of four new poets: Imogen Cassels, Adam Piette, Daniel Hinds, Olivia McCannon. Two of these came from the PBS site. They all are very good, I thought. I would so much like to have a list of (almost) all the good poetry books of the 21st century, so that patterns of change or of creative optimism would become visible. I enjoyed the list of 207 poets which came back from the survey in Angel Exhaust 24, but I don’t feel it is a very comprehensive list. It suggests a spacious landscape but leaves a lot of the features out. I have also located Angela Leighton and Rhiannon Hooson through the same site, excellent poets.
I have been re-reading The Big Short, Michael Lewis’ 2010 book on hedge fund analysts who foresaw the sub-prime mortgage derivatives crisis of 2007-8 and made money by shorting the market. It presents dissidents of high intelligence who did the analytical work better than company officers of great banking corporations, and who rejected conventional analysis. This is exciting, and it is why Lewis’s book is much more interesting than most books on the crisis. But, that position is too indulgent. I don’t think the poetry business is quite so vulnerable to the dissidents as Lehman Brothers was. If the mainstream produces lots of good books, you lose your bet against them- and forfeit your money. More concretely, if you read 250 blurbs you definitely see a lot of hype. That argues a basic corruption, lurking in the process. But, I also think that a lot of the underlying product is very good. And, if you have the ability to read the hype correctly, you can let it lead you to the good stuff. The blurbs are not very honest, but they are not the poetry process itself.
I tend to regard the Blurb as like the sleeve of an LP – a piece of added value which can be beautiful in itself.
A lot of the books in these 250 or so blurbs sound very similar to each other.
I noted about 30 blurbs which describe trauma tourism. The poet has been affected by dire events, their nephew has died of plague, their cat has flu, their grandmother was a war criminal, etc., and this makes their poetry important.
Gothic/ body dysmorphia. This is an era where illnesses related to body dysmorphia, a loss of balance in the way the mind perceives physical proportions, are common and increasing. Literary opinion is able to relate this to the Gothic – horror is connected to violent reactions to the human body, and monsters are a realisation of certain pervasive fantasies. The Gothic is seen as a form of protest. If we read “[X] is a bestiary, a spell book, a scream and a guide book to the underworld of the hurts that haunt us now. […] You will want to follow Miranda down into this beautifully crafted world and go ‘hunting in the brine’ - there you’ll find a language, an utterance for all the wanting, breaking, losing and becoming that happens under the surface we call self”, we see the heroine of the Gothic romance taken as a model of sensitivity and anxiety.
One publisher in particular has a line of conservatism. Gradually one realises that all their authors have the same profile, and that this favoured style involves rejecting every innovation which has arrived since the 1950s. In fact, this is 1950s poetry. The blurbs do not make this explicit, for example they do not say “find an intact world in which it is still 1955 and Churchill is still prime minister” or “enter a world where literary theory has never happened”. The message is clear at an unconscious level. And you can see that that publisher is turning down anything modern. This is a “truth with lack of evidence”.
My feeling about the ideas is that the best 200 poets have nothing to do with them, and they really reflect what the publishers think will sell. This is a way of describing the fashions of the time. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that poets read the blurbs, see what publishers like, and are encouraged by that to design their own poetry along the same lines. Everyone wants to get published. It is also possible that the poets are more original than the blurbs, and that the publicity material makes a lot of poetry sound the same when it isn’t. The point I want to make is that you can’t describe a central fashion of the era that we are in, in the way that Auden and MacNeice were central in the 1930s. You had a small elite then, and people badly wanted to sound like they were part of it. They did all sound like each other. The educated elite now counts millions of people, and it produces very diverse voices. There are predictable fashions in 2026, but they are nothing like central.
Of course, the theme of ecological disaster appears in dozens of these blurbs, and that is also something which the best poets write about. That is not a very recent idea (and we don’t suppose that governments are going to make the problem go away in the short term). This isn’t a special interest issue, it affects everyone.
Do the fashions reflect the wishes of the audience, as a pressure which only needs articulating, or the wishes of the publishers? I don’t see any evidence which would really get to the heart of this. It would be a dream for a historian if you could take the blurbs, existing text which it is easy to collect and store, and decide “this speaks for the wishes of the audience”. Because the history of the audience is always hard to write, and less studied. It would also be satisfying if we could say “the blurbs describe the ideal and then the poets strive to realise it and fail”. That is a big win for the historian, but obviously it’s not a very sound result. Hype must represent unfulfilled wishes in a distorted form… and you can't use a special mirror to reverse the distortion.
Undeniably, a lot of the write-ups present being gay, or being on the autistic spectrum, etc., as a selling point. I just wonder if the gay poets are appealing to an audience which isn’t gay. There is an element of protest here – we are hearing feelings which were repressed in the 1950s, we are protesting against the cultural norms of the Cold War. But, these are feelings which I didn’t have. They aren’t my feelings. Published poetry covers a wide spectrum but I have a strange feeling that people aren’t really more unusual and more complex than they were in 1955. Most of the blurbs just fly past me, an excitement which I am not feeling – maybe some of the poetry also rushes past my ears without ever touching me.
I didn’t mention poems about witches. These come in at about 1 or 2% of the list, so they aren’t a large phenomenon. Obviously, the audience read their Harry Potter and want poems about witches.
I have just bought (2nd hand, in Hay on Wye) an anthology, New Poems 1953, which can act as a check on what is new in new poetry. Nobody admitted to being gay in the 1950s. No poets, anyway. It just wasn’t a move that even existed. I suppose that unchanged in the 1960s… I can’t think of anyone who wrote poetry and admitted to being gay in the 1960s. This may just be my bad memory. Is that true? It would have been very difficult. And in the 1970s none of the older gay poets came out. Exceptions – Thom Gunn and James Kirkup. So the scene has been going through a phase of decompression, derepression, which has continued, probably, over half a century.
I think it’s difficult for poets today to say to themselves “when I write about the unusual aspects of my feelings it alienates most of the audience because they don’t have those feelings and don’t respond to the depiction of them”. But it may be true. It always has been true. And it may be the publishers saying “what is unusual, even perverse, even maladjusted, about you is what interests people most, so forget about writing poems about anything else”. This may be a moment of wisdom which is profoundly flawed, and which may disappear.
The blurbs suggest that editors believe that only people who are social deviants have an inner life worth recovering; an intense area of frustration and resistance which blossoms forth as poems when the individual is liberated. And, so, that only marginalised and victimised people can write poetry. I really don’t have to accept this idea.
If the scene is so de-repressed, the editors can claim “we have no blocks on our perception so it is not possible for any gifted poet to be turned down by the editors, us”. That is a bit problematic. It is quite a gun to point at anyone who doesn’t play the usual tunes. I think there is a tier of poets who really don’t sound commercial to the editors and who really do have a fascinating artistic experience to offer. There still a line between insiders and outsiders. It may have moved a bit but it is still there.
By searching, I have found that the PBS on-line store goes back to 2016 and that the searchable database has roughly 4000 items. The search they offer you scans the blurbs as well as just the titles. I searched this database with the find term “queer” and got 214 results. I searched with the term “avant garde” and got 11 hits, all of them European. More checks… the blurb writers are deathly afraid of the words experimental, avant garde, modernist, and probably see them as chilling the audience, killing sales. Well, I don’t think that there has been no avant garde poetry in Britain over the last 10 years. But, let’s be fair – they like the word “queer”, they are fine with it and a queer audience can probably also find the books they want.
(The 4000 count is not all books, it includes things like PBS press releases. But the lexical constraints are relevant in both cases.) (I know automated searches can produce stupid results. I used the string “nuance” and got 69 hits. The Find function certainly can’t tell you if the blurb writer is being sincere!) (“liminal” got 50 hits, another word which literate people use when they have no idea what to say.)
214 of 4000 is about 5%. The long-term percentage of gay people in the population is probably around 3.2%. (Website of National Census for the 2021 count: "Around 1.5 million people (3.2%) identified with an LGB+ orientation (“Gay or Lesbian”, “Bisexual” or “Other sexual orientation”).) Actually, the percentage of gay poets in 1955 was about 3.2%, it's just that they were all in a dark friendly closet together, somewhere between Soho and the BBC. I won't tell if you don't. 5% is a bit out of line with this, but only a bit. A generous cut... a flare.
British Poetry Revival, one hit.
June 2026. I have been trying to locate poets unknown to me, primarily through the PBS website. It lists about 250 books a year (currently going back to 2019), and there are blurbs for (almost) all of them, by the publisher. So, you can pick possible winners using the blurbs as a semi-transparent screen through which something is visible. I am feeling good about this, having just released (through Litter magazine) reviews of four new poets: Imogen Cassels, Adam Piette, Daniel Hinds, Olivia McCannon. Two of these came from the PBS site. They all are very good, I thought. I would so much like to have a list of (almost) all the good poetry books of the 21st century, so that patterns of change or of creative optimism would become visible. I enjoyed the list of 207 poets which came back from the survey in Angel Exhaust 24, but I don’t feel it is a very comprehensive list. It suggests a spacious landscape but leaves a lot of the features out. I have also located Angela Leighton and Rhiannon Hooson through the same site, excellent poets.
I have been re-reading The Big Short, Michael Lewis’ 2010 book on hedge fund analysts who foresaw the sub-prime mortgage derivatives crisis of 2007-8 and made money by shorting the market. It presents dissidents of high intelligence who did the analytical work better than company officers of great banking corporations, and who rejected conventional analysis. This is exciting, and it is why Lewis’s book is much more interesting than most books on the crisis. But, that position is too indulgent. I don’t think the poetry business is quite so vulnerable to the dissidents as Lehman Brothers was. If the mainstream produces lots of good books, you lose your bet against them- and forfeit your money. More concretely, if you read 250 blurbs you definitely see a lot of hype. That argues a basic corruption, lurking in the process. But, I also think that a lot of the underlying product is very good. And, if you have the ability to read the hype correctly, you can let it lead you to the good stuff. The blurbs are not very honest, but they are not the poetry process itself.
I tend to regard the Blurb as like the sleeve of an LP – a piece of added value which can be beautiful in itself.
A lot of the books in these 250 or so blurbs sound very similar to each other.
I noted about 30 blurbs which describe trauma tourism. The poet has been affected by dire events, their nephew has died of plague, their cat has flu, their grandmother was a war criminal, etc., and this makes their poetry important.
Gothic/ body dysmorphia. This is an era where illnesses related to body dysmorphia, a loss of balance in the way the mind perceives physical proportions, are common and increasing. Literary opinion is able to relate this to the Gothic – horror is connected to violent reactions to the human body, and monsters are a realisation of certain pervasive fantasies. The Gothic is seen as a form of protest. If we read “[X] is a bestiary, a spell book, a scream and a guide book to the underworld of the hurts that haunt us now. […] You will want to follow Miranda down into this beautifully crafted world and go ‘hunting in the brine’ - there you’ll find a language, an utterance for all the wanting, breaking, losing and becoming that happens under the surface we call self”, we see the heroine of the Gothic romance taken as a model of sensitivity and anxiety.
One publisher in particular has a line of conservatism. Gradually one realises that all their authors have the same profile, and that this favoured style involves rejecting every innovation which has arrived since the 1950s. In fact, this is 1950s poetry. The blurbs do not make this explicit, for example they do not say “find an intact world in which it is still 1955 and Churchill is still prime minister” or “enter a world where literary theory has never happened”. The message is clear at an unconscious level. And you can see that that publisher is turning down anything modern. This is a “truth with lack of evidence”.
My feeling about the ideas is that the best 200 poets have nothing to do with them, and they really reflect what the publishers think will sell. This is a way of describing the fashions of the time. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that poets read the blurbs, see what publishers like, and are encouraged by that to design their own poetry along the same lines. Everyone wants to get published. It is also possible that the poets are more original than the blurbs, and that the publicity material makes a lot of poetry sound the same when it isn’t. The point I want to make is that you can’t describe a central fashion of the era that we are in, in the way that Auden and MacNeice were central in the 1930s. You had a small elite then, and people badly wanted to sound like they were part of it. They did all sound like each other. The educated elite now counts millions of people, and it produces very diverse voices. There are predictable fashions in 2026, but they are nothing like central.
Of course, the theme of ecological disaster appears in dozens of these blurbs, and that is also something which the best poets write about. That is not a very recent idea (and we don’t suppose that governments are going to make the problem go away in the short term). This isn’t a special interest issue, it affects everyone.
Do the fashions reflect the wishes of the audience, as a pressure which only needs articulating, or the wishes of the publishers? I don’t see any evidence which would really get to the heart of this. It would be a dream for a historian if you could take the blurbs, existing text which it is easy to collect and store, and decide “this speaks for the wishes of the audience”. Because the history of the audience is always hard to write, and less studied. It would also be satisfying if we could say “the blurbs describe the ideal and then the poets strive to realise it and fail”. That is a big win for the historian, but obviously it’s not a very sound result. Hype must represent unfulfilled wishes in a distorted form… and you can't use a special mirror to reverse the distortion.
Undeniably, a lot of the write-ups present being gay, or being on the autistic spectrum, etc., as a selling point. I just wonder if the gay poets are appealing to an audience which isn’t gay. There is an element of protest here – we are hearing feelings which were repressed in the 1950s, we are protesting against the cultural norms of the Cold War. But, these are feelings which I didn’t have. They aren’t my feelings. Published poetry covers a wide spectrum but I have a strange feeling that people aren’t really more unusual and more complex than they were in 1955. Most of the blurbs just fly past me, an excitement which I am not feeling – maybe some of the poetry also rushes past my ears without ever touching me.
I didn’t mention poems about witches. These come in at about 1 or 2% of the list, so they aren’t a large phenomenon. Obviously, the audience read their Harry Potter and want poems about witches.
I have just bought (2nd hand, in Hay on Wye) an anthology, New Poems 1953, which can act as a check on what is new in new poetry. Nobody admitted to being gay in the 1950s. No poets, anyway. It just wasn’t a move that even existed. I suppose that unchanged in the 1960s… I can’t think of anyone who wrote poetry and admitted to being gay in the 1960s. This may just be my bad memory. Is that true? It would have been very difficult. And in the 1970s none of the older gay poets came out. Exceptions – Thom Gunn and James Kirkup. So the scene has been going through a phase of decompression, derepression, which has continued, probably, over half a century.
I think it’s difficult for poets today to say to themselves “when I write about the unusual aspects of my feelings it alienates most of the audience because they don’t have those feelings and don’t respond to the depiction of them”. But it may be true. It always has been true. And it may be the publishers saying “what is unusual, even perverse, even maladjusted, about you is what interests people most, so forget about writing poems about anything else”. This may be a moment of wisdom which is profoundly flawed, and which may disappear.
The blurbs suggest that editors believe that only people who are social deviants have an inner life worth recovering; an intense area of frustration and resistance which blossoms forth as poems when the individual is liberated. And, so, that only marginalised and victimised people can write poetry. I really don’t have to accept this idea.
If the scene is so de-repressed, the editors can claim “we have no blocks on our perception so it is not possible for any gifted poet to be turned down by the editors, us”. That is a bit problematic. It is quite a gun to point at anyone who doesn’t play the usual tunes. I think there is a tier of poets who really don’t sound commercial to the editors and who really do have a fascinating artistic experience to offer. There still a line between insiders and outsiders. It may have moved a bit but it is still there.
By searching, I have found that the PBS on-line store goes back to 2016 and that the searchable database has roughly 4000 items. The search they offer you scans the blurbs as well as just the titles. I searched this database with the find term “queer” and got 214 results. I searched with the term “avant garde” and got 11 hits, all of them European. More checks… the blurb writers are deathly afraid of the words experimental, avant garde, modernist, and probably see them as chilling the audience, killing sales. Well, I don’t think that there has been no avant garde poetry in Britain over the last 10 years. But, let’s be fair – they like the word “queer”, they are fine with it and a queer audience can probably also find the books they want.
(The 4000 count is not all books, it includes things like PBS press releases. But the lexical constraints are relevant in both cases.) (I know automated searches can produce stupid results. I used the string “nuance” and got 69 hits. The Find function certainly can’t tell you if the blurb writer is being sincere!) (“liminal” got 50 hits, another word which literate people use when they have no idea what to say.)
214 of 4000 is about 5%. The long-term percentage of gay people in the population is probably around 3.2%. (Website of National Census for the 2021 count: "Around 1.5 million people (3.2%) identified with an LGB+ orientation (“Gay or Lesbian”, “Bisexual” or “Other sexual orientation”).) Actually, the percentage of gay poets in 1955 was about 3.2%, it's just that they were all in a dark friendly closet together, somewhere between Soho and the BBC. I won't tell if you don't. 5% is a bit out of line with this, but only a bit. A generous cut... a flare.
British Poetry Revival, one hit.
Wednesday, 20 May 2026
Travelogue - further
Travelogue
This is such a tangled and long-lasting story that I didn’t want to put it in the book. The story is that the obscurity and uncertainty of decolonisation contributed to the distrust of public officials which fuelled the rise of UKIP and Reform UK after 2009. Decolonisation was never popular and was never sold to the electorate as something which worked to their benefit. They never said yes and actually they were never consulted. The right-wing populist vote in 2016, or 2026, is continuous with the bloc of opinion which didn’t accept that the end of empire was the right policy in 1945-70. That bloc did not get the opportunity to vote against decolonisation and so was not counted or addressed.
It may be that the empire did not benefit most people in the metropole. It benefited the rich, other classes fought and died in wars without ceasing to be poor. Settlers did benefit, making new lives in the USA, Canada, or Australia. The final phase left a resentment that government didn’t fight to hang on to the colonies and didn’t preserve them as possible places where a white person could migrate to. The belief that the governors favour coloured people clung on to influence a belief that white people don’t get fair access to welfare services. There are no actual examples of this, but the modern discourse about removing racism sounds like an attempt to squeeze out white people. People believed the propaganda in favour of Empire.
I thought to explain to myself why decolonisation happened, via a book on policy 1945-70. The impression I got was of a chess game being played at high speed over 20 years, and that a commentary on the calculations which one player went through was just too complicated to set out. The situation kept changing and the goals had to be updated. This was never explained to the electorate and perhaps it couldn’t be. People don’t know why decolonisation happened because it was never explained, or not in a convincing way. But did this leave abiding distrust of the educated class? People noticed the failure to explain. A minority interpreted decolonisation as a sell-out and passed the feeling on to their children.
In almost every year, from 1945 to 1970, service personnel were fighting and dying to defend colonies. And at the end every territory was given up. One question is why the semi-legal possession of overseas territories was not given up at the start, for example when India and Pakistan were decolonised. The public were given clear messages about how vital it was to defend this territory or that, and they believed the messages. The political discourse, to the soldiers and their families, looked dishonest in retrospect. In fact, the whole process looks short on honesty. Telling the colonised in Malaysia or Rhodesia that policy was framed in their interests had a leakage effect whereby the white electorate in Britain got the impression that the government had no wish to help them. Telling the electorate that the empire favoured them would have a blow-back when 5 years later you told them that decolonising was in their interest. The communication with the public was of low quality.
For the government to consider the interests of the oppressed, in the colonies, represented a restriction of their loyalty to the electorate in the metropole. This was hardly a big problem, because the oppressed were, genuinely, oppressed. The empire did not exist to help the natives. But the population in the home islands could decide that their government was not fully loyal to them.
The distrust of Reform /UKIP voters goes all the way back to the era of decolonisation. Politicians did change their minds every year. The Winds of Change speech in 1963 confused the voters. It certainly wasn’t an idea that won votes. And it didn’t give a reason for retaining all the colonies which it didn’t affect. The electorate didn’t take the decisions. It was cooked up between the ministers and the officials. There was a democratic deficit.
There was a long-standing convention that the electorate were not consulted about foreign policy. It was felt that the relationships were too complicated and that policy needed long-term consistency which would be wrecked by the day to day hysteria of public opinion. This convention was not democratic at all, but it was in force in quite a similar way in other countries. Having an agreement with other governments, which you adhere to, limits the power of democracy – it limits what the voter can ask for. Our government is like other governments in observing contract law with regard to contracts – it is subject to the law (and not just to the voter). The policy making process was incredibly complex. It did not achieve any goals which the government actually saw as desirable at the beginning. Better targets were constantly being thrown out as unattainable. People outside the rooms where policy ideas were exchanged were automatically tuned out as having nothing to add. There was a strong, even effective, inside, but there was no outside. It was not a democratic process. The outcome gave democracy to many new countries. It was never popular in the metropole.
This claim relies on an idea of things which politicians didn’t say. More research might excavate moments where they did say what was necessary and got ignored. It is hard to accept that votes in 2026 might be affected by events in the 1950s. But we are dealing with very unmodernised sectors of political attitudes and with a depressive ground which people regress to when hope and ideals fail. And some ideas are very old – racism wasn’t suddenly invented and people are not suddenly converted to it. It is old and comes back like an infection lurking in the ground. Full employment sucks the vitality out of it but doesn’t really kill it.
The word “modernised” is worth a breakdown. At the most basic level, it means a split between different parts of public opinion. The most “advanced” sector is obviously the educated. They take in the ambitious, data-filled, newspapers, they read books, they are more exposed to new ideas – to the modernisation process. But it does not follow that every voter, every sector of opinion, will follow the same path. At this point we can redefine “modernised” as “liberal”. The change process is patchy and under-engineered – the state of affairs in 2026 can include a bloc which still rejects the project of decolonisation. Those people, as people, do not see themselves as unmodernised – instead they regard themselves as the undeceived, the ones who do not believe the propaganda of the elite, and who have brilliantly understood the real nature of the elite. They see themselves as the less deceived – to take in larger amounts of printed information turns you into one of the thoroughly deceived. You swallow it all.
*
This does not fit into my book partly because I am not writing primarily about politics. Also, because its statement is diffused over too long a period, and the idea of continuity is rather under stress. I think the theme raises ideas about the reason why poets wrote so little about the empire and decolonisation. They may simply have felt they didn’t have the specialised knowledge needed to form an opinion.
*
I have finished the Travelogue book but in this phase I can always change some of it.
(James Fountain suggested Eliot as a right-wing poet I don’t talk about)
(AD) Eliot was monarchist and traditionalist, pretty far Right. but his poetry reflects the questions he was asking, only. You can’t analyse it to find out what he thought about decolonising India, or Guyana, or whatever. Those questions never arise. He was mainly a religious poet.
There is a second level where you take his magazine the Criterion and analyse the whole mass of material to look for attitudes. I think it would show someone who was against the rise of socialism and even the rise of democracy. But it's not his own words.... too indirect, too frustrating. I was trying to find a copy, to read what Michael Roberts wrote for Criterion. That arose because Roberts supposedly promoted communism in poetry, Auden and his pals. But that is incompatible with him being chief poetry critic for the Criterion at the same time, and editing TE Hulme, who was pretty far Right. I didn't spend that crucial day ferreting through that magazine, but I don't think Roberts has a left-wing status and I don’t think the modernism he canonised has either.
(Simon Jenner says) What I think I hear is a kind of “hear no evil” tone deafness about empire. The poets’ imaginary was mostly shrunk to the UK, unless like Kipling you were born out there and couldn’t ignore it.]] (AD) Yes, that is what I found. I was pointing a camera at nothing happening. I had to adjust to that. The poets don’t register history happening but I can write about travel poetry and a sort of mythology of incomprehension.
War movies. There were 433 war films made in Britain in the 1950s and some critics have dismissed all of them Including such total write-offs, people disagree a lot about 50s war films. What guides the disagreements is an ideal – people have an ideal about British life in groups and get vexed because the films don’t reproduce it, or not completely. The interest is that these ideals are terribly interesting and the films release them into consciousness. The films don’t need to be especially good, and the acting does not have to be exceptional, for the ideals to emerge. Even if we only perceive them because they are appearing with blemishes and flaws.
I have been watching 50s war films recently, and I think the debates about them are relevant to poetry, in that war poetry kept away from the grand statements about British ideals and so we don’t have anything to apologise for 80 years later. Of course, that is also why poetry of that war is not remembered in a big way. People avoided writing ambitious poems. So – big war, small poems. It would be more stimulating if the poems aroused arguments about ideals – those ideals certainly exist, and arguing about them is how you get involved in politics. What my book is about is partly how poetry marginalised itself.
Robert Murphy says that the peak year for war films, based on lists of “Top 30” box office hits, was 1958. And 1954 was a low point for war films. This is an interesting pattern. The whole pattern is unstable, people got satiated. That is partly why the memory of the genre is so unenthusiastic. But it was one of the big areas of artistic achievement for Britain in the 1950s. Other genres of art were not so adapted to the times.
In her book, “David Jones Mythmaker”, Elizabeth Ward at a certain point, page 220, proves that Jones was criticising both the Empire and the German Reich, and dismisses the first arm on the grounds that our system was better than the Reich. She actually uses the term “Western democratic systems”, but at the date in question several of them were imperialist States– including Britain. I accept that the Empire did not undertake genocide (although remembering Mike Davis’ “Late Victorian Holocausts”) but I am keen to accept Jones’ critique of the undertaking. It did not protect the rights of subject population groups – it sponsored large-scale land grabs which produced a new class of the poor. I accept that Britain was, by 1940, a democracy, but not that all its dependent territories had any form of democracy. So as a “system” it was not democratic. There is no Nuremberg assize for trying the misdeeds of imperial overlords and plunderers, but that is what I have in mind in my book. I am not staging that trial, and I don’t have a court at my disposal, but the trial is what my actual dispositions are patterned in relation to.
Richard Overy, in his recent and magisterial book on the Second World War, says that the cause of that war was the wish of three rising powers– Germany, Italy, and Japan – to imitate and take the place of three older empires, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. This clearly puts Britain in the same category as the 3rd Reich. The Reich wanted to clear the good land of the Ukraine and Western Russia in order to colonise it. Britain had cleared the 13 Colonies and Australia in order to have access to the good land and settle it as if empty. We hardly have to guess where Hitler got his ideas of geography and "land clearance” from. So, I don’t buy Ward’s rebuttal of Jones’ critique of Empire. That stands although I admire “David Jones Mythmaker” greatly. She accepts that Jones was part of a milieu and that he shared its opinions. She goes on to establish what those opinions were. A lot of other Jones scholarship is simply exculpatory. To put it simply, a political Catholic saw the problems of the 1930s as the result of misuse of power by the Protestants and the Jews.
I take it from Gary Love’s article (“‘Real Toryism’ or Christian democracy? The political thought of Douglas Jerrold and Charles Petrie at the New English Review, 1945–50”) that the Right-Catholic group in question became much less antisemitic once Hitler had made the attitude undesirable. A Catholic circle sited outside the Conservative Party and sympathetic to Fascism moved steadily towards the Con Party once appeasement had failed. The necessity of war made them patriotic again. And there was a democratic current of great strength in the 1940s which affected even the Far Right. So, Jones’ comment of April 1939 may not reflect where he stood in 1945. His essay “Art and Democracy” may be an attempt to overcome his aversion towards the latter – a wish shared by his editor, Bernard Wall, and the readers of the magazine where it was first published.
The writers on political history I have consulted are admirable in many ways, but they don’t seem interested in poets. That certainly leaves an opening where I can write something necessary. And poetry became unimportant – but historians seem to have forgotten about a period where it was important, admittedly by echoing what was in the newspapers and also national myth.
We know that Jones was very interested in Jackson Knight’s book The Cumaean Gates (1936), which is about the theme of labyrinths (subtitle, “Reference of the Sixth Aeneid to Initiation Pattern”). Knight devotes a chapter to the labyrinth, actually a sort of puzzle with forbidden steps and one right path, found by John Layard on Malekula (in the New Hebrides). The passage I quoted from ‘The narrows’ mentions a labyrinth. It is the bad terrain where his "cosmocrats" (i.e. imperialists) are lost. The Kensington Mass says "Down the meander and crooked labyrinth of time and maze/ of history or historia". It would be right up my street, in a book on poetry and the Third World, to link Malekula to a poem by Jones. The connection doesn’t work at all, sadly. Jones refers to a crooked labyrinth twice, but the sense is that “the complications of world affairs in the late Thirties (or 1940s) are more than politicians can manage”. A link to initiation rites, of which the labyrinth is a feature, is just not there. Jackson Knight makes that connection between Third World rituals and Roman antiquity, it’s very interesting, but that link did not affect Jones and he did not develop an interest in the non-European world. Knight mentions W H Perry and was obviously stimulated by that “hyperdiffusionist” school represented by Perry and Elliot Smith. This was one way in which intellectuals, between the wars, acquired some knowledge of Third World cultures, and in which those cultures were seen as parts of one big human pattern. I’m sure this was benign. I just don’t see any trace of Jones following those paths.
It's interesting that Jackson Knight specifies in the Notes that he contacted Layard directly and got a lot of information from him by word of mouth or in letters. This explains why Cumaean Gates came out in 1936 and has information which Layard published in 1942. However, Layard also published at least one article in the learned periodical Man which Knight does not cite. I see that Layard gave a talk about Malekula at the 1937 Eranos gathering in Ascona. Jackson Knight reproduces a maze pattern from an Etruscan vase of circa 600 BC and says that the same pattern is found incised on a megalith at Bryn Celli Ddu in Anglesey, so possibly around 3000 BC (says wikipedia). This is fascinating, and the whole comparative approach is, but I find it hard to agree that the two instances are part of the same pattern of ideas, or illustrate the same myth. He says that the way into the (megalithic) chambered tomb, if you enter, is a spiral maze.
Part of the basic tests for a proposed link between two widely separated phenomena is complexity. The megalith incision which Jackson Knight points to is simply a curved zigzag line repeated. That is not very complex. Secondly, neither of the patterns he reproduces actually shows a maze. A maze has a path through it, and the Bryn Celli Ddu pattern doesn’t. A maze is a structure, whether built in masonry or in hedges. Neither of his examples visibly, provably, refers to an upright structure.
To be exact, the Etruscan vase picture refers to a sort of dance carried out on horseback. It follows an intricate path, which looks like a maze if you draw it. This was called, by Romans, a Troy dance, and a word on the Etruscan vase is “truia”, which must direct us to the Troy dance. It appears in Aeneid V.
I think Knight’s idea is stimulating if it asks us to think of what Europeans knew in the Bronze Age, and how an idea could have travelled from North Italy to Anglesey. It is exciting even if his idea isn’t proven. Knight had broken with some key inhibitions.
The Anglesey stone he discusses was not upright, but found buried. It is now known as the Pattern Stone and is kept in the National Museum of Wales.
There is definitely a link between Layard and Peter Redgrove, and also with David Harsent. I just don't think there is a link with Jones.
This is such a tangled and long-lasting story that I didn’t want to put it in the book. The story is that the obscurity and uncertainty of decolonisation contributed to the distrust of public officials which fuelled the rise of UKIP and Reform UK after 2009. Decolonisation was never popular and was never sold to the electorate as something which worked to their benefit. They never said yes and actually they were never consulted. The right-wing populist vote in 2016, or 2026, is continuous with the bloc of opinion which didn’t accept that the end of empire was the right policy in 1945-70. That bloc did not get the opportunity to vote against decolonisation and so was not counted or addressed.
It may be that the empire did not benefit most people in the metropole. It benefited the rich, other classes fought and died in wars without ceasing to be poor. Settlers did benefit, making new lives in the USA, Canada, or Australia. The final phase left a resentment that government didn’t fight to hang on to the colonies and didn’t preserve them as possible places where a white person could migrate to. The belief that the governors favour coloured people clung on to influence a belief that white people don’t get fair access to welfare services. There are no actual examples of this, but the modern discourse about removing racism sounds like an attempt to squeeze out white people. People believed the propaganda in favour of Empire.
I thought to explain to myself why decolonisation happened, via a book on policy 1945-70. The impression I got was of a chess game being played at high speed over 20 years, and that a commentary on the calculations which one player went through was just too complicated to set out. The situation kept changing and the goals had to be updated. This was never explained to the electorate and perhaps it couldn’t be. People don’t know why decolonisation happened because it was never explained, or not in a convincing way. But did this leave abiding distrust of the educated class? People noticed the failure to explain. A minority interpreted decolonisation as a sell-out and passed the feeling on to their children.
In almost every year, from 1945 to 1970, service personnel were fighting and dying to defend colonies. And at the end every territory was given up. One question is why the semi-legal possession of overseas territories was not given up at the start, for example when India and Pakistan were decolonised. The public were given clear messages about how vital it was to defend this territory or that, and they believed the messages. The political discourse, to the soldiers and their families, looked dishonest in retrospect. In fact, the whole process looks short on honesty. Telling the colonised in Malaysia or Rhodesia that policy was framed in their interests had a leakage effect whereby the white electorate in Britain got the impression that the government had no wish to help them. Telling the electorate that the empire favoured them would have a blow-back when 5 years later you told them that decolonising was in their interest. The communication with the public was of low quality.
For the government to consider the interests of the oppressed, in the colonies, represented a restriction of their loyalty to the electorate in the metropole. This was hardly a big problem, because the oppressed were, genuinely, oppressed. The empire did not exist to help the natives. But the population in the home islands could decide that their government was not fully loyal to them.
The distrust of Reform /UKIP voters goes all the way back to the era of decolonisation. Politicians did change their minds every year. The Winds of Change speech in 1963 confused the voters. It certainly wasn’t an idea that won votes. And it didn’t give a reason for retaining all the colonies which it didn’t affect. The electorate didn’t take the decisions. It was cooked up between the ministers and the officials. There was a democratic deficit.
There was a long-standing convention that the electorate were not consulted about foreign policy. It was felt that the relationships were too complicated and that policy needed long-term consistency which would be wrecked by the day to day hysteria of public opinion. This convention was not democratic at all, but it was in force in quite a similar way in other countries. Having an agreement with other governments, which you adhere to, limits the power of democracy – it limits what the voter can ask for. Our government is like other governments in observing contract law with regard to contracts – it is subject to the law (and not just to the voter). The policy making process was incredibly complex. It did not achieve any goals which the government actually saw as desirable at the beginning. Better targets were constantly being thrown out as unattainable. People outside the rooms where policy ideas were exchanged were automatically tuned out as having nothing to add. There was a strong, even effective, inside, but there was no outside. It was not a democratic process. The outcome gave democracy to many new countries. It was never popular in the metropole.
This claim relies on an idea of things which politicians didn’t say. More research might excavate moments where they did say what was necessary and got ignored. It is hard to accept that votes in 2026 might be affected by events in the 1950s. But we are dealing with very unmodernised sectors of political attitudes and with a depressive ground which people regress to when hope and ideals fail. And some ideas are very old – racism wasn’t suddenly invented and people are not suddenly converted to it. It is old and comes back like an infection lurking in the ground. Full employment sucks the vitality out of it but doesn’t really kill it.
The word “modernised” is worth a breakdown. At the most basic level, it means a split between different parts of public opinion. The most “advanced” sector is obviously the educated. They take in the ambitious, data-filled, newspapers, they read books, they are more exposed to new ideas – to the modernisation process. But it does not follow that every voter, every sector of opinion, will follow the same path. At this point we can redefine “modernised” as “liberal”. The change process is patchy and under-engineered – the state of affairs in 2026 can include a bloc which still rejects the project of decolonisation. Those people, as people, do not see themselves as unmodernised – instead they regard themselves as the undeceived, the ones who do not believe the propaganda of the elite, and who have brilliantly understood the real nature of the elite. They see themselves as the less deceived – to take in larger amounts of printed information turns you into one of the thoroughly deceived. You swallow it all.
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This does not fit into my book partly because I am not writing primarily about politics. Also, because its statement is diffused over too long a period, and the idea of continuity is rather under stress. I think the theme raises ideas about the reason why poets wrote so little about the empire and decolonisation. They may simply have felt they didn’t have the specialised knowledge needed to form an opinion.
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I have finished the Travelogue book but in this phase I can always change some of it.
(James Fountain suggested Eliot as a right-wing poet I don’t talk about)
(AD) Eliot was monarchist and traditionalist, pretty far Right. but his poetry reflects the questions he was asking, only. You can’t analyse it to find out what he thought about decolonising India, or Guyana, or whatever. Those questions never arise. He was mainly a religious poet.
There is a second level where you take his magazine the Criterion and analyse the whole mass of material to look for attitudes. I think it would show someone who was against the rise of socialism and even the rise of democracy. But it's not his own words.... too indirect, too frustrating. I was trying to find a copy, to read what Michael Roberts wrote for Criterion. That arose because Roberts supposedly promoted communism in poetry, Auden and his pals. But that is incompatible with him being chief poetry critic for the Criterion at the same time, and editing TE Hulme, who was pretty far Right. I didn't spend that crucial day ferreting through that magazine, but I don't think Roberts has a left-wing status and I don’t think the modernism he canonised has either.
(Simon Jenner says) What I think I hear is a kind of “hear no evil” tone deafness about empire. The poets’ imaginary was mostly shrunk to the UK, unless like Kipling you were born out there and couldn’t ignore it.]] (AD) Yes, that is what I found. I was pointing a camera at nothing happening. I had to adjust to that. The poets don’t register history happening but I can write about travel poetry and a sort of mythology of incomprehension.
War movies. There were 433 war films made in Britain in the 1950s and some critics have dismissed all of them Including such total write-offs, people disagree a lot about 50s war films. What guides the disagreements is an ideal – people have an ideal about British life in groups and get vexed because the films don’t reproduce it, or not completely. The interest is that these ideals are terribly interesting and the films release them into consciousness. The films don’t need to be especially good, and the acting does not have to be exceptional, for the ideals to emerge. Even if we only perceive them because they are appearing with blemishes and flaws.
I have been watching 50s war films recently, and I think the debates about them are relevant to poetry, in that war poetry kept away from the grand statements about British ideals and so we don’t have anything to apologise for 80 years later. Of course, that is also why poetry of that war is not remembered in a big way. People avoided writing ambitious poems. So – big war, small poems. It would be more stimulating if the poems aroused arguments about ideals – those ideals certainly exist, and arguing about them is how you get involved in politics. What my book is about is partly how poetry marginalised itself.
Robert Murphy says that the peak year for war films, based on lists of “Top 30” box office hits, was 1958. And 1954 was a low point for war films. This is an interesting pattern. The whole pattern is unstable, people got satiated. That is partly why the memory of the genre is so unenthusiastic. But it was one of the big areas of artistic achievement for Britain in the 1950s. Other genres of art were not so adapted to the times.
In her book, “David Jones Mythmaker”, Elizabeth Ward at a certain point, page 220, proves that Jones was criticising both the Empire and the German Reich, and dismisses the first arm on the grounds that our system was better than the Reich. She actually uses the term “Western democratic systems”, but at the date in question several of them were imperialist States– including Britain. I accept that the Empire did not undertake genocide (although remembering Mike Davis’ “Late Victorian Holocausts”) but I am keen to accept Jones’ critique of the undertaking. It did not protect the rights of subject population groups – it sponsored large-scale land grabs which produced a new class of the poor. I accept that Britain was, by 1940, a democracy, but not that all its dependent territories had any form of democracy. So as a “system” it was not democratic. There is no Nuremberg assize for trying the misdeeds of imperial overlords and plunderers, but that is what I have in mind in my book. I am not staging that trial, and I don’t have a court at my disposal, but the trial is what my actual dispositions are patterned in relation to.
Richard Overy, in his recent and magisterial book on the Second World War, says that the cause of that war was the wish of three rising powers– Germany, Italy, and Japan – to imitate and take the place of three older empires, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. This clearly puts Britain in the same category as the 3rd Reich. The Reich wanted to clear the good land of the Ukraine and Western Russia in order to colonise it. Britain had cleared the 13 Colonies and Australia in order to have access to the good land and settle it as if empty. We hardly have to guess where Hitler got his ideas of geography and "land clearance” from. So, I don’t buy Ward’s rebuttal of Jones’ critique of Empire. That stands although I admire “David Jones Mythmaker” greatly. She accepts that Jones was part of a milieu and that he shared its opinions. She goes on to establish what those opinions were. A lot of other Jones scholarship is simply exculpatory. To put it simply, a political Catholic saw the problems of the 1930s as the result of misuse of power by the Protestants and the Jews.
I take it from Gary Love’s article (“‘Real Toryism’ or Christian democracy? The political thought of Douglas Jerrold and Charles Petrie at the New English Review, 1945–50”) that the Right-Catholic group in question became much less antisemitic once Hitler had made the attitude undesirable. A Catholic circle sited outside the Conservative Party and sympathetic to Fascism moved steadily towards the Con Party once appeasement had failed. The necessity of war made them patriotic again. And there was a democratic current of great strength in the 1940s which affected even the Far Right. So, Jones’ comment of April 1939 may not reflect where he stood in 1945. His essay “Art and Democracy” may be an attempt to overcome his aversion towards the latter – a wish shared by his editor, Bernard Wall, and the readers of the magazine where it was first published.
The writers on political history I have consulted are admirable in many ways, but they don’t seem interested in poets. That certainly leaves an opening where I can write something necessary. And poetry became unimportant – but historians seem to have forgotten about a period where it was important, admittedly by echoing what was in the newspapers and also national myth.
We know that Jones was very interested in Jackson Knight’s book The Cumaean Gates (1936), which is about the theme of labyrinths (subtitle, “Reference of the Sixth Aeneid to Initiation Pattern”). Knight devotes a chapter to the labyrinth, actually a sort of puzzle with forbidden steps and one right path, found by John Layard on Malekula (in the New Hebrides). The passage I quoted from ‘The narrows’ mentions a labyrinth. It is the bad terrain where his "cosmocrats" (i.e. imperialists) are lost. The Kensington Mass says "Down the meander and crooked labyrinth of time and maze/ of history or historia". It would be right up my street, in a book on poetry and the Third World, to link Malekula to a poem by Jones. The connection doesn’t work at all, sadly. Jones refers to a crooked labyrinth twice, but the sense is that “the complications of world affairs in the late Thirties (or 1940s) are more than politicians can manage”. A link to initiation rites, of which the labyrinth is a feature, is just not there. Jackson Knight makes that connection between Third World rituals and Roman antiquity, it’s very interesting, but that link did not affect Jones and he did not develop an interest in the non-European world. Knight mentions W H Perry and was obviously stimulated by that “hyperdiffusionist” school represented by Perry and Elliot Smith. This was one way in which intellectuals, between the wars, acquired some knowledge of Third World cultures, and in which those cultures were seen as parts of one big human pattern. I’m sure this was benign. I just don’t see any trace of Jones following those paths.
It's interesting that Jackson Knight specifies in the Notes that he contacted Layard directly and got a lot of information from him by word of mouth or in letters. This explains why Cumaean Gates came out in 1936 and has information which Layard published in 1942. However, Layard also published at least one article in the learned periodical Man which Knight does not cite. I see that Layard gave a talk about Malekula at the 1937 Eranos gathering in Ascona. Jackson Knight reproduces a maze pattern from an Etruscan vase of circa 600 BC and says that the same pattern is found incised on a megalith at Bryn Celli Ddu in Anglesey, so possibly around 3000 BC (says wikipedia). This is fascinating, and the whole comparative approach is, but I find it hard to agree that the two instances are part of the same pattern of ideas, or illustrate the same myth. He says that the way into the (megalithic) chambered tomb, if you enter, is a spiral maze.
Part of the basic tests for a proposed link between two widely separated phenomena is complexity. The megalith incision which Jackson Knight points to is simply a curved zigzag line repeated. That is not very complex. Secondly, neither of the patterns he reproduces actually shows a maze. A maze has a path through it, and the Bryn Celli Ddu pattern doesn’t. A maze is a structure, whether built in masonry or in hedges. Neither of his examples visibly, provably, refers to an upright structure.
To be exact, the Etruscan vase picture refers to a sort of dance carried out on horseback. It follows an intricate path, which looks like a maze if you draw it. This was called, by Romans, a Troy dance, and a word on the Etruscan vase is “truia”, which must direct us to the Troy dance. It appears in Aeneid V.
I think Knight’s idea is stimulating if it asks us to think of what Europeans knew in the Bronze Age, and how an idea could have travelled from North Italy to Anglesey. It is exciting even if his idea isn’t proven. Knight had broken with some key inhibitions.
The Anglesey stone he discusses was not upright, but found buried. It is now known as the Pattern Stone and is kept in the National Museum of Wales.
There is definitely a link between Layard and Peter Redgrove, and also with David Harsent. I just don't think there is a link with Jones.
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