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 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.)