It can't be 1974 again

I was compelled by Tristram Fane Sanders’ review in the TLS of my book Beautiful Feelings of Sensitive People. A fair account, I think. Several people have reacted with incredulity to his claim that I am a “working class” critic. Er, no. I have to confess to being a middle-class critic.
This may come from an over-eager reading of various caption biographies which have graced various books over the years. That bit about “worked as a labourer after leaving school” would be more complete if it read “after leaving boarding school worked in unskilled jobs for a year, partly in Germany, learning better German before going on to study Mod Langs at Cambridge”. I think various biographies may be misleading, or have been chopped up, and were not very detailed at the start. The part about working in Germany was relevant to poems I wrote in the late 1970s, and appeared on book jackets to that end. I got fed up with biographies because of times as the editor of little magazines where the caption biographies always took more time than the poems. No, you can’t change your biography again. No, you can’t win the poem inside the biography. I dislike biographies. People only need to know how I write.
“He writes with a peculiar, chilly, multi-layered irony, in an epigrammatic style.” Well, that's one answer. If you looked at 100 Cambridge cultural critics, that would be true of 95 of them. So, maybe I drank the Kool-Aid. I don’t really want to remember processes of circa 1974-6. I am quite keen on the fact that I switched to Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. The problem with discussion of my class origins is that they relate to the 1960s – since I was a child in the 1960s. Surely what matters is what happened after I was 18 and old enough to make decisions for myself. There is a point here – some behaviour patterns are acquired in childhood, and they may affect behaviour in later life. But children aren’t really conscious. Literature has to do with your existence as a conscious human being. It is outside the tier of the compulsive and repetitive. And modern literature asks you to be conscious – to exercise freedom. If someone doesn’t sound middle class or otherwise, over the course of an entire book, it is not their original speech patterns which are on stage or under the spotlight. I dislike this whole area of discussion, but that is helpful because almost all the poets I write about dislike the area too. They want to be conscious, personal, minds, and sociology denies that at every step. They don’t want to repeat infantile patterns. And they don’t want society to repeat and reproduce archaic patterns.

Right after leaving school, I worked in a metal fabrication shop on a contract making prison doors. They were made complicated by adding a big metal hatch that you could put food in through. We made the same doors as part of an order for a lunatic asylum. I found that instructive, but it’s like learning Welsh – it was good for me, but other people aren’t very interested. When I was reading Anglo-Saxon poetry, I found lots of stuff about using iron in one way or another – this felt familiar because I had spent a certain amount of time bashing iron and steel. I liked that. And that link did crop up in my poems.