Serial cyclical zeniths

The original Selected Poems of Joseph Macleod has sold out, so there is going to be a small reprint. I was thinking about a new edition.

  Possibly the edition can be improved. After 24 years, I think a rethink is possible. (NB I was doing the work in 2000 and 2001, although it didn’t get into print until 2009.) We know more now than we knew then.

  The reprints of the plays have duplicated some of the texts. And there are so many unpublished poems I left out. It seems a bit heartless to leave them out again. And, I found more than one new poem not among the typescripts.

  Overall, maybe we could remove twelve pages of (now) duplicated poems and inject ten pages of unfamiliar poems. They would be (I think) ‘Earthscape’ ‘Open Letter to the Countess of Sutherland’ ‘Tristia’ and ‘The last wolf’.

   However, Simon (Jenner) has advised me that the printer still has the production file of the 2009 edition, so that it is quite a lot cheaper if we reprint it unaltered. I think we could manage a 5% improvement, but I dislike the cost. The original version has reached quite a few people, and is still serviceable. Waterloo will put the resources into other Macleod books.

It seems shameless to leave the introduction unaltered. However, I think it always left most questions unanswered, and it hasn’t got worse in that sense. I can see that the introduction doesn’t even attempt an artistic evaluation of Macleod, but it is its fixed limits that make it able to stand up without being changed. There has been some very important work on Macleod since 2001, but it is reasonable to ask people to go and look for it. For example, we now have ‘Hidden sun’, James Fountain’s monograph on Macleod, and since you can’t summarise that it is sensible to ask people to go and read it.

  I assumed, in 2001, that because there were 200 Macleod poems in typescripts in the National Library of Scotland, they were all there. However, later information has made it clear that, where he published a poem, the typescript usually isn’t in that archive. He kept the printed versions. You have to know which magazine the poem was in in order to go and look for it. I saw a poem on 4 July, in the university library, which I had never seen before. (in Botteghe Oscure for 1957.)
The Macleod conference was on July 5th. Even after 26 years of fairly strong interest in Macleod, I was swept away by all the new information and new ideas. It is all happening. This means that anything I write now will become obsolete rather quickly.
I think we can say that Macleod was remarkably gifted, unusually prolific, and never saw most of that prolific work published. This combination may be unique, at least in its extent. I say this to excuse myself for not grasping more about Macleod at an earlier stage. This is also why the conference threw me into a torrent of new information and new ideas.

Macleod at the BBC

Macleod at the BBC Joseph Macleod (1903-84), a rather marginalised poet, published A Job at the BBC (1945) after leaving them. It is rather paranoid but documentation now coming to light has suggested to several Macleod scholars that he was right to be suspicious. He describes the firm as being run by people with no official title or job, and these people also censored his scripts and prevented him from workng.

I don’t mean to upset you further, Andrew, (and it upsets me greatly to recall and write this), but I found out a great deal when I went to the BBC Written Archive at Reading in 2007. I was only 27, so I reckon I could have pushed a bit more if I’d gone at my present age - but I was quite pushy and maybe my youth helped extract that little bit extra information. The Head Curator, a lady in her 60’s, was remarkably abrupt and clipped in her speech with me from the get-go. She knew exactly who Macleod was and what he was “about” she told me. She showed me a set of files from the early period of his employ and was strangely reluctant to show the ones from 1943 onwards. I photographed a great deal of it with my digital camera, as surprisingly I was permitted to do, but I’d brought it just in case. When I got up to leave, having seen the scandal of Macleod’s being bundled out of the BBC due to his accent and leftish leanings by the then Director General Lindsay Wellington and also the surprising (and, bizarrely, later super-famous as (not the best) Oxbridge boat race commentator) thorn in Macleod’s side - Head of Presentation, John Snagge - I mentioned the scandal of 1945 and how Macleod had clearly had been swiftly removed from his position after reading Churchill’s election defeat, to which the strict curator replied very defensively and I thought even aggressively- “Macleod was NOT removed. He RESIGNED!” I decided not to argue - though the papers I’d just seen and photographed showed a mighty row took place before he departed. 
(email from James Fountain, author of the only book about Macleod)

I have just copied this from the BBC website:
"By that stage [1985], a policy of flatly denying the existence of political vetting - not just stonewalling, but if necessary lying - had been in place for five decades.
As early as 1933 a BBC executive, Col Alan Dawnay, had begun holding meetings to exchange information with the head of MI5, Sir Vernon Kell, at Dawnay's flat in Eaton Terrace, Chelsea. It was an era of political radicalism and both sides deemed the BBC in need of "assistance in regard to communist activities". These informal arrangements became formal two years later, with an agreement between the two organisations that all new staff should be vetted except "personnel such as charwomen". The fear was that "evilly disposed" engineers might sabotage the network at a critical time, or that conspirators might discredit the BBC so that "the way could be made clear for a left-wing government"."
Macleod had sympathies with the Soviet Union (publishing three books about Soviet theatre) and his problems with BBC management almost certainly related to his uncertain security status, rather than anything else.
His book does not mention a purge of leftists already on the staff, in the later 1940s, but I hear persistent rumours that this is what took place, even if MI5 had been vetting new recruits since 1935. The radically changed conditions of the Cold War brought more polarised attitudes towards hapless staff members. Presumably this had not happened when Macleod was writing his 1945 memoir – the Cold War had not then begun.
My feeling is that the archivist reacted so extremely because she knew what James were looking for and because she had had other people looking for evidence of the same process. Because the process had occurred and it is of considerable interest.
What upsets me is the ability of a large organisation to cover up new ideas and opinions and then to cover up the fact that a cover up had taken place. Suppression was itself suppressed from the record. So meetings that never got minuted, people in vetting jobs that aren't shown in the organogram or in a job title, decisions hidden behind fake “performance issues”. The frame itself is not visible even though it is the restriction on what is visible.
James also mentioned the yawning gap between the coverage by the British media of Middle Eastern politics and what had actually happened. This brought us to a new theme – Robert Fisk, writing about the great war against the truth, is dealing with the large scale, but the BBC coverage of what happens in Britain can only distort subtly, because the audience have the means of comparing the broadcast with the reality. So we as cultural historians are tracking subtle distortions. We are directed at the small scale. This is our situation. But perhaps long practice has also given us the ability to detect what was never entered into the record. The skill we admire is that of detecting the frame and seeig where the cut-off is.

Joseph Macleod, 'Earthscape'

Joseph Macleod

Work continues on Macleod. James Fountain’s work is coming out as a book from Waterloo. I read much of his archive, in Edinburgh, in the very cold first week of January 2001. I realised recently that there are some other poems which aren’t in the Macleod archive in the NLS. While looking in New Verse for something else I was disturbed to find in issue 3 a 1934 Macleod poem, 'Earthscape', which was not in the archive. It is one of his best. I think he tended to type single copies of poems and send them to magazines, so that if they were published the magazine kept the typescript and Macleod retained nothing. Slightly alarming if you want to be a Macleod expert! For the moment, it seems that the body of texts we have is incomplete.

This is the poem:

Earthscape

they are excavating under the briars of paestum

a parian fragment of an old Goddess:

tackle is hoisting

the earthy torso up.

the season is nearly over

and russet roseleaves in recognition

deserting hips and sere bedeguars

sacrifice themselves

in libation Upon her.

she is Cold as they prise her up:

they are forcing her out of season:

for spring is her time, whoever she,

spring is her time to return

not this,

unrecognised by spade or diggers

another to join many

a goddess evading collection,

her Return from death to antiquity

the fall of a crabapple is pointing

like a single bell.

on sard hard edge of a distant mountain

a drab clad man

is he sitting? standing?

too minute for a thick finger to indicate.

walls of a harem in a narrow street

are peeling open:

corner of a house on the opposite side disclosing

half a group of women, looking:

as thirsty enclosed cattle look

on boats that row up and down a river:

with large round eyes

on orientals thronging the streets

merchandising without wine

obedient to books their authors have forgotten.

the stripes on the feminine clothes

Swing to the distant rock:

but the Scale is incommensurate.

miniature parables

to the sun does he compose?

among the stars hymenopterous mysteries?

and humbly lay his forehead on the rock?

heraldic Light is quartering the escutcheon,

how Dare we call this sunlight pitiless?

tenderly it warms the chilled widowed,

only in daylight the tortured wife has peace,

gently it revives dim philosophers,

compensates exhausted gunners

moleminers and batclerks

and trousered savages knowing only

that something has changed in the world,

who cluster to carry in annual procession

a mutilated image of a virgin.

through men's provinciality

she Returned from her virginity

to fulfil herself in vain.

her open eyes are not fixed on her child any more

nor question heaven any more

but Rise to the receding mountain.

is he a Demiurge?

a steward of the heavenly bodies?

their banker, telling each how its account stands

and where at any hour it ought to be?

away from him an eagle and a fulmar

are swinging: they will cross

over the valley

hillside woods where jays fight

finches flash in honeycomb leaflight

badgers freshen warrens

bees lie crazily with careful orchids

and lonely oxlips.

over vetched fields they will cross

and jackdaws playing with rooks and performing plovers,

watermeads in which

blue herons fish and rushes flower,

just visible roofs of a country town:

too High for little eyes to se:

Uncaricatured,

for they are getting rare now

and were beautiful.

he does not see them.

to know everything he has made himself Astigmatic:

two men on two rocks

disregarding two landscapes

slightly superimposed.

where his height meets level ground

is a quiet Group.

twisted aluminium and torn matter

an aeroplane stands with its tail erect

and crushed nose

driven deep in earth.

from the silence, from the suspense

is made the recognition of Death.

the workers from the jam factory

shocked and astonished, Watch:

navvies have come to Watch

with hops and wheat in their bellies:

respectful reporters chase away

bran-fed inquisitive pullets, and Watch:

vegetable sheep and potato pigs

come up to watch:

and the sleepless sun pours down.

the bulk of the corpse-to-be

balances the bulk of the old earthgoddess.

Many goddesses, Many women,

little richness in barren Apices:

but brown Earth is an honest Plinth

that underlies

and is replenished by the sun.

I, as I painted this

becoming conscious of foliage

on my breast and back and shoulders,

paint in the bottom corner

as symbol and signature

the Hands that have touched me.

(This is on-line with the whole of that issue of New Verse at a site called modernists.com. I am not making any claim to copyright of the poem. As it is missing from the Selected Poems, it seems likely to evade notice altogether, which is why I am including it here.)

The poem makes an equation between this statue emerging from the earth and a flier crashing to his death and plunging into the earth. Like is exchanged for like in a kind of balance. It goes on to describe the state of the observer - who finally sprouts leaves in a transformation, the usual punishment for a mortal who observes a goddess too closely. The perspective bent by squinting strain mirrors the precipitous path of the aeroplane, downwards. The Virgin, carried around in procession, is a middle term between the buried statue and the pilot. the "hands that have touched me" may refer to a type of icon known as "akheiropoieton", not made by (human) hand. As I pointed out, what may be the most successful poems are scattered in magazines and don't show up if you go through all the folders in the archive. Describing the work entire is not tractable as he was simply too prolific - between the visible and the invisible. I can't wholly approve of the move into documentary. The reasons are excellent but I wish he'd gone on with the modernist style.

I located an essay by Macleod in Little Reviews Anthology for 1949. Bearing in mind that ‘Adam Drinan’ was a pseudonym for Macleod, check out what he says about Drinan: “Writing in English, George Bruce and Adam Drinan from the East Coast and the West respectively, rediscover the traditions of their people in a style that is simple, accurate, vivid and deep. George Bruce's output at the moment is small, but he is always alive and compelling […] Drinan is more graceful. He explored such relics of Celtic forms and rhythms as have survived the onslaught of the Presbyterian Church. But he is also a Marxist, and his awareness of to-day never allows him any indulgence in Celtic Twilights. He has a faculty for translating into poetry the light, colour, people and living conditions of the islands and the West Coast; and it is significant that his poems, as I have been told, have been read to and approved by Kintyre fishermen. Also significant is the rumour that his forthcoming volume of poems is about the London blitz.”

The blitz poems must be “The Macphails of London”, a typescript of which is in the National Library. The anthology reprints material from little magazines, in this case from ‘Anvil’, a miscellany edited by Jack Lindsay, which suggests a link to the Communist Party. This would explain the name Anvil, linking poetry with virtuous metal-workers. The essay is titled “Poet and People”, and despite the links with communism and Scottish nationalism it avoids dogma, even if it doesn’t really answer any questions about the nature of poetry. Macleod had close relations with both the BBC (he worked for them for eight years) and the Party, and while those relationships with authoritarian and centralized organizations were likely to crush creativity, this is not certain and he did produce some good work in that period. He wrote a whole book about his disillusion with the BBC and its loyalty tests, but I have yet to see an equivalent document about the Communist Party. Quite possibly Lindsay and the group around him weren't a pain to work with, and the BBC were more oppressive with loyalty tests, political dossiers, personnel people vetting dossiers, etc. James Fountain has detected Macleod’s name on the list of “crypto communists” which George Orwell produced in 1948. There was a BBC purge of left-sympathising employees in the later forties, although Macleod had resigned in 1945 and I don’t think he was part of a purge at all. The purge is part of oral memory but I haven’t seen anything about it in print. Released MI5 files don’t describe internal BBC procedures and probably only capture a fraction of the process.

The Ecliptic - re-issued after 86 years

Joseph Macleod, The Ecliptic (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2016)

As you probably know, The Ecliptic was written in 1928 and published by Faber in 1930. It is about 1500 lines long. This is the first time it has been republished, and Richard Owens is responsible for the edition. It has the status of modern classic (for me) and because of the curious poetic politics of the 1930s it had emerged, even by 1936, as a Neglected Modern Classic.

This is an exotic text. The first time I encountered it, in around 1983, I couldn’t get to grips with it. It stood, then, as a symbol of what was unknown, excessively distinctive and developed, about the discarded cultural past. This enabled it, of course, to function as an identification object for poets who were uneasily reaching out and finding themselves as part of the unknown present. The poem starts:

The silence of the snow-turf has rooted itself in the terrain:

  Starved on the frozen stream wander the water-voles.

Earth is revoked. Withheld, the sky goes out in a purple

  Skeleton toga, brooched with embalmed pyramidal buds.

But that stain is winter-rubbed, those branches the tits have rifled:

  Now there is no new leaf turned by the zephyrs of green.

The wind is too stale to be young: the kiss of shrubs and sighing,

  Clockwise working like the cogwheels of the stars,

Obediently come to life like Japanese flowers in water,

  Missel-thrush to schedule mates, primroses rehearse,

Star-trained, without new endeavour of spring, wherein Procyon

  Touched and thrust in a first frenzy of absolute joy

A star-toccata freely. She is no autonomous mistress,

  Spring is caught in the law. Winter abides her king.

The subject, of Winter, is apparent; the scheme which this passage will fit into is less apparent. Time has allowed a closer approach to the poem. It follows the Ecliptic, that is the apparent course of the Sun which takes it through a series of constellations, identified by speculators in Alexandria with principles of fortune (the astrological “signs”), Aby Warburg wrote a famous paper (1912) which identified the 36 divisions of the “birth” year (the decans, each of ten days) with the emblematic figures in a cycle of fresco paintings (of 1469-70) in Ferrara. However, in 1928 Warburg had not yet come to England, there was no Warburg Institute in London, and an influence on Macleod seems out of the question. Examination of the 36 decans does not produce something which you can find again in The Ecliptic. Adrian Stokes, Macleod’s best friend, worked for many years on the Quattrocento - but was hardly doing this in 1928, so again an influence on The Ecliptic does not seem likely. In fact, after long searching we don’t know of any direct model for the poem. I may have to swallow my words if someone now comes up with one. I think rather that Macleod invented the subject and the themes of the poem. He is clear that it relates to the phases of an individual life - very different from the decans, ‘birth windows‘ which assign to a human, on the day of nativity, character which pursues them throughout life. The fact that, of close contemporaries of Macleod at Oxford, Aldous Huxley and Anthony Powell both wrote works drawing on Zodiac imagery (if we accept that the twelve books of A Dance to the Music of Time correspond to zodiac signs), points to something in the air. This something was not in fact a belief in astrology. More credibly, it was the influence of the ballets russes and an expectation that truths could be shown by the expressive motion of humans (or other creatures), arranged in formal schemes which drew on the fabulous imagery of past cultural styles. Thus, in the Leo section of The Ecliptic, the lion is a physical lion - but of course he is really a human, condemned to act like a lion in order to bring us certain truths. He has a distinctive way of moving:

Standeth he still and glowers

All four feet firm on sand,

Like waterspouts, like factory towers,

Flatness to flatness mounting, and

His tail brooming anger

Like coloured atmosphere before a storm.

Now he goes on intent,

Low as a king-snake glides,

Slow as a snake that hides,

Neck from shoulders bent,

Head like a lamp alert,

Then he stops on the scent

All four feet on the sand,

Growling and growling.

Then with a rush the storm breaks into battle.

Dust chokes his eyes and throat

Turning his leonine roar into a rattle;

He is tumbled about

Like a little boat,

Loins and back buffeted, he is thrown out.

His muffled breathing from the blanket he withdraws

Sits on his haunches like a cat:

Then rises and crouches,

Crouches and springs, he knows not what at,

With glaring fangs and cusping claws

Into the dust and the darkness

Prowling and prowling.

And then a battle royal is started

A lion and a thunderstorm:

The lion blind, the enemy dumb,

Vaguely shaped as electric-hearted

Fires sway in the northern scene.

Heat and daydust of summer landscape,

As brides in a bridebed lie and wonder,

Are ready to give themselves to thunder.

But the lion treads them to a morass,

A tawny force on a tawny mass,

Rolling on his adversary’s noise,

Invisible, intangible, infrangible.

Then he again recoils to rest:

 - but does not utter - movement replaces words, or, to frame Macleod, the poet is writing a verbal description of the moments of a creature that itself cannot utter.

How do I know that the twelve sections are phases of one life? This is odd when the author wrote the poem at age 25. The answer is that the poem has a preface with short prose commentaries on each section by Macleod. ‘Each sign thus contributes to a single consciousness. […] this is not intended to be a typical, or a unique, but merely a single, consciousness’. The prose libretto was added, in fact, at Eliot’s request. I understand that the starting point was "Then we learned that the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo (where I'm writing from) has a heavily revised, heavily annotated manuscript copy of The Ecliptic which Macleod sent to Charles Abbott in the 1940s at Abbott's request." (Rich Owens, personal communication, 2008), but in fact the new text is stated to be collated from two different typescripts, both in the US. Macleod’s libretto is of limited use. Thus for ’Gemini’ it says:

Conscious of  loss by order of authority, he identifies this with the loss of his first passion, and finds it expressive of eternal loss. This leads him to revolt against all control and authority, and so to destandardize himself at the cost of disintegrating himself.

The summary does not get us close to what is happening when we are in the middle of the poem. All the same, it is helpful to be sure that the symbols connect to the life of one individual rather than to some scheme, whether Spenglerian, Freudian, or otherwise, affecting the whole of our culture. But - in practice such acute insights into the life of one individual do inspire us to think about the organisation of culture. Besides, if “all control and authority” are being rejected, the institutions of society are in question. The idea of a self “disintegrating” was quite widespread during the 1920s, and leads us towards wider cultural phenomena of the time, rather than towards one room where one individual has drunk one glass of wine too many.

                1930 was just a short while before the advent of a world economic crisis and of Fascism wiped out the audience for modernist work - a set of individuals, hardly millions in number, whose attention was firmly redirected towards other things. What is elusive about Ecliptic is partly that it is saying something about human destiny and about the flaws of our culture, but yet it has no foundation in organised knowledge - in statistics, sociology, or theories of psychology. What we are seeing is the creation of a mythical whole, not the illustration of tropes which we recognise and find comforting. In that era self-knowledge was not penetrated by schemas of organised and authorised knowledge. The Ecliptic is a wonderful poem but it belongs with a style of English poetry of the time, neglected by taste but intelligently gathered together by Sidney Bolt in his anthology Poetry of the 1920s. Common to many of these poets was the wish to write cultural criticism, to write poems reflecting that genre which had more or less been invented by Oswald Spengler, in 1918; and the wish to achieve detachment, to create freestanding forms which would embody ideas in the manner of a geometrical figure or a work of visual art. The dominant form of the time was the ballet, the ballet of Diaghilev. Sacheverell Sitwell is the only one of these poets who wrote a libretto for a Diaghilev ballet; his work offers perhaps the most vivid comparison to Macleod’s, and is today even more neglected than his. Macleod writes quasi-ballets or pictures of the seasons (like the Withheld, the sky goes out in a purple/ Skeleton toga, passage just quoted), but both are meant to be a visible language, incarnating Time, vitality, and decay. The unrecognisability of Ecliptic is inseparable from its radical originality: it opens onto an uncoded space rather than being a documentary or expounding a political programme.

I asked my spiritual adviser if it was OK to mention the Selected poems of Macleod which I edited (for Waterloo). The reply was that no, I couldn’t mention it, but I could mention the fact that I hadn’t mentioned it. There was a rumour about material being found in the Buffalo typescript that wasn’t in the published book - sections on the ‘transitions’ (solstices?), I believe - but Owens has chosen not to include these, probably because a rigorous approach to editing would take the author’s decision on what the extent of the text was as binding - like all other authorial decisions.

I just want to mention a sampler which Macleod claims to have used in the first section. This was stitched by a girl aged 12 in 1806. The girl was named Ann Annall and her name also means an annal, i.e. the cycle of a year. Anna, an old Roman goddess, Anna perenna, had associations with the year - and her name may mean “ring”. The ecliptic is also an annal, an annual ring. The sampler belonged to John Fothergill, who ran an inn near Oxford in the 1920s and wrote memoirs.

Swansea is now twinned with Ferrara and has a “Tower of the Ecliptic”, with reference to the Schifanoia frescoes. This was built in 1989.

Poems missing from the record

Poems missing from the record

The posting on Spender elsewhere on this site discusses Spender’s complex and highly motivated rebuilding of his poetic record, with the 1985 Collected being an especially fragile and minimal version, which quite probably leaves out half of his published poetry. The possibility of 'rigging the past to fit alliances and positions in the present' is on the pitch somewhere, although I would emphasize that there are many other possibilities. Anyway, if you cut part of the written record the reasons why you do it are inherently not in the record, and any reasons you offer are subject to suspicions of being just as heavily edited as the texts themselves.

I thought to talk about 'missing texts' because it is a natural extension of talking about 'missing poets', which has been my main topic as a historian.

Spender's two Collecteds leave out his verse play 'Trial of a Judge' and his long poem 'Vienna'. Given the small extent of his Collected (and what survives in it), these texts are important for any historical understanding of Spender’s achievement. However, the 'authorised' version also leaves out quite a few poems from Ruins and Visions and Poems of Dedication.

My feeling is that Spender spent a great deal of his life preventing the truth about who he really was from coming out, and re-editing his poems was part of this. This is hardly separable from his reform of his own early communist position - the god that failed, quote - and this is one of the most courageous and conscious aspects of his career. How can you convict all the others of being totalitarian cat's-paws and then go on to criticise Spender for rethinking everything and repenting and outspokenly attacking dictatorship, concentration camps, and the whole package? Would we admire someone so "conscious" that they stuck to the positions they grabbed at the age of eighteen and totally ignored the passage of history and such unpoetic things as events? Personally I find Spender one of the most sympathetic poets of the whole 20th century.

Anyone setting out to recover the history of modern British poetry is going to be faced with the possibility that, besides the poets whose names you don't know, the Collecteds you gather up by the well-known names have been reconstructed to suit the central official position (that is, the position of conformist oppressive smugness which denies its own existence). If you just look at the final version, vetted by all the bureaucrats, you may completely misunderstand the course of events.

One view is that poets as they get older come to identify with the bourgeoisie and experience a greater anxiety at not conforming. They come to know their patrons and to realise that they are the same people they are attacking. Another is that older poets reject their own work out of pure and elevated aesthetic concerns, so that the poems they keep are the better ones. When I started out in this business, I was being told that compromise was the ideal, that I should idealise Auden because he was totally compromised and this was the distilled wisdom of the ages. This was in 1972 or 1973.

Over the past five or ten years, the reissue programme of Shearsman and Salt has put into print the vast majority of the recent poetry that I am interested in. Almost perversely, this draws attention to the poets who have not featured in this convulsive resurgence of the past - Martin Thom, Brian Marley, Paul Gogarty, Dunstan Thompson. The effort of gorging on and absorbing all this wonderful material is inevitably going to delay a proper understanding of the whole. With the poets prominent enough to have been given Collecteds, the question of the pressure to conform requires further analysis so that we can know the history of what has been forgotten. My impression is that the group of people involved in the poetry business is cohesive and that they have had a cultural programme which they have been well equipped to translate into a package of actions. The scheme to promote Auden and demote Dylan Thomas is the most prominent of these. Of course it is possible to agree with this sort of central club-room of poetic gossip as well as to disagree with it. If you stick around on the scene you find the past being rewritten in different ways as time flows on.

In 1974, I read in a book by Martin Seymour-Smith about two outstanding ‘documentary poems’ by Charles Madge which had never been printed. They were ‘The Storming of the Brain’ and ‘The Father Found’. In 2008, I was allowed to write the commentary accompanying the first publication of one of these in the Cambridge Literary Review. This was a rare privilege. As the other one was in his 1994 collected/selected from Anvil, they are both ‘out there’ now. As the poems date from circa 1949-50, this was quite a delay. The literary history of that time needs to be rewritten to accommodate them.

Of course a very large proportion of the older poets of interest, I mean before the 1970s, have never been re-published. I only came across this problem when I read Logue's 1959 volume, Songs, which surfaced in North Finchley Library for 50p, in around 1991, and which was the volume which set me off on this project. After reading this really very distinguished book quite a lot, I looked at Logue's retro-selected -and discovered that he had edited away almost everything. There were two even earlier volumes which he had simply eliminated from the official record. We are bound to note that Spender and Logue have one thing in common, that is being prominent political poets - arguably the most distinguished political poets of their respective generations. The ability to react so comprehensively and brilliantly to political events as they were happening may actually be connected to a need to discard poems once the events they reflected or summed up had ceased to be current. Then, the poems disappeared into the same cellar of the recent past as the events they described - and as the political personalities who guided and pretended to interpret those events. Both poets have in common a certain lightness - they genuinely responded to passing events, rather than simply turning out more poems based on their personal and inflexible style modules.

There is something else they have in common. Logue's early volumes, Wand and Quadrant and Devil, Maggot, and Son, were both indebted to the Apocalyptic style. His debut was clearly related to Dylan Thomas and George Barker. So we can guess that the project of recuperating the New Romantic poets is not confined to the period books of the poets who were never republished but also the period books of poets who deleted their own New Romantic poems from the written record. This was a daunting challenge and I am not sure we ever cleared it up altogether. (I think James Keery has written about this somewhere but I am not sure where that essay is available.) The most notable examples were Logue, Spender, Norman MacCaig and Lawrence Durrell. With Durrell, the final Collected reinstates all his New Romantic poems - leaving the first Collected as something slightly suspicious.

I was looking at the current Collected Auden today and find it leaves out one book altogether - The Orators. This book is significant to me as an example of the influence of Lawrence, part of a great line of Lawrence imitation during the 1930s, which sheds light not least on Foray of Centaurs, a book by Joseph Macleod which was never issued during the 1930s and for which I was trying to reconstruct a context, seventy years later. I think it is urgent to read Foray - and Vienna, and The Orators.

Barry MacSweeney was in court, as an apprentice journalist, a school-leaver, at one of the two most famous child-murderer cases of the century. Something like thirty years later, he wrote a book of poems about the redemption of that child. This cannot be published because it is not fictionalised and some of the characters might sue to protect their character.

The list of missing MacSweeney books, actually existing or not, is not short. When I interviewed him, we discussed Pelt Feather Log. I think this was announced by Grosseteste, I can’t really remember. Barry couldn’t remember either whether it had been published or whether he had written it. The ‘pelt feather’ connects, very probably, with the feathers grown by the Irish legendary character Sweeny (Suibhne Geilt) in the tale of Sweeney’s madness (as the word geilt was translated by a Latin writer as ‘volatilis’, i.e. ‘poultry’). Sweeney could fly, hence had a feather pelt. Sweeny was also MacSweeney, by a simple mythical transformation. The image connects with a ‘fetherham’ (pelt of feathers) appearing in a poem by Chatterton and connected (by Barry) to Chatterton’s own soar upwards and fatal fall, another biography appropriated by Barry to show his own life. Bladud (in Geoffrey of Monmouth) also had a flying cloak, soared, and fell on London. This appears in Iain Sinclair’s other version of British myths, which overlaps with Barry’s.

Toad Church definitely does exist, I now have a photocopy of the typescript. And someone has sent me a photocopy of 'Pelt Feather Log'.

In an issue of Poetry Information, Barry announced a set of projects he was working on. "Black Torch, book 1, a first part of a long projected work, drawing on the political/social activity of Northumberland and Durham miners, will be published by London Pride Editions this autumn. Much of it is in Northumbrian dialect. Book 2, half finished, works around John Martin's diaries -he is the Northumbrian painter- tracts by radical Baptist ministers, and the trial of T. Dan Smith. Book 3 is planned to be based on tape recordings with residents of Sparty Lea and the Allen Valley in Northumberland." For Black Torch, there is only ‘Book 1’, as published, and Book 4, which is the elegy to his grandfather published in the new british poetry and elsewhere. I am not sure any of the others actually got written, as we discussed this when I interviewed him in 1995. 'Other works include a series of poems on 1950s British B movies and a sequence of stories about working as a reporter in Newcastle and elsewhere.' - also unknown and perhaps unwritten. I have just been reading The British B Film, by Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane, a strange and moving work which probably goes as deep into that lost world as anyone ever will. They watched 500 of these films and have surely resurrected whatever is living and breathing from that lower depth of cinematic banality. One of the typical characters of those ‘supporting films’ is the journalist, and it’s possible that this was Barry’s identification figure. Of course this was the trench-coated investigative journalist uncovering crimes; this works if you see British society as based on crime, and a whole range of Barry’s poems can be seen as ‘fearless exposés’ describing the crimes of the ruling elite against the mass of the population. The story of T Dan Smith was presumably the great story of Barry’s career, although he chose not to write down what he knew. Smith’s rise and fall may make him the original source for the Chatterton figure in Barry’s personal myth.

Notes on 'Foray of Centaurs' by Joseph Macleod

Foray of Centaurs - line by line notes

Publishing Foray of Centaurs (in Cyclic Serial Zeniths from the Flux, the selected poems of Joseph Macleod) comes with the realisation that one is revoking the decision made by Eliot 70 years ago not to publish it – an awesome feeling. Actually, I think Herbert Read was the person who read and declined it. He said it was “too classical” – three years later Faber published Sacheverell Sitwell’s Canons of Giant Art, which includes a more classicising account of the same Centaur myth. And, actually – Eliot was wrong.

Notes
(these are textual notes so if you don't have the text they will make no sense at all)

(Mount Pelion)
keep a curious oneness: dance in unison (the leader of the dance calls out instructions to the dancers)
cannibal dendrophagy: not too sure about this. This works if the centaurs are partly trees, rather than partly horses. 'dendrophage' is 'tree eater'. puddling: they trample what is on the ground as they dance
Ancestors: apparently an idea that the Centaurs are descended from trees. This is not a Classical idea, but I find that Chiron’s mother was Philyra, which would mean “linden spirit”, so perhaps Macleod decided that Centaurs were descended from trees. And grew from ‘cotyledons’ – which would explain why there are no female Centaurs?
the twisted coil: must be the figure the dancers make
Heoigh: a cry the Centaurs give as they dance
riotous a new sun: first reference to the Sun, a leitmotif of the poem
Cuts the gut: strums the strings of the lyre (imagined as made from the shell of a tortoise)
Hexagon: possibly a ring of six swords, a figure within the Sword Dance

(Lapith Labour)
The scene shifts to England, where horses, related to the Centaurs, are kept in servitude.
Glossy roundels spun: using roulette as a metaphor?
But who’s to tend machines: a passage difficult in detail whose theme seems to be the problems of automation. In the absence of economic problems, social problems are those of surplus leisure – and self-fulfilment.

(Great West Road)
We follow on with a scene showing a public holiday. It is a road which leads into London from the West – a ribbon development. Someone rich drives by in a car with his daughter, who is going to be married in a later scene. There has been a disturbance which we later find out to have been the Centaurs passing by. The scene moves to Fleet Street.
Entirely circular to the square: earlier, we had “the entire circle copse-square”. a leitmotif – meaning what?
dormice. What are all these dormice doing here?
teemed to the mould: reproduced from the (same) matrix
The Lapith (English) crowd defeats them by laughter (the “pink odour of derision”)
Theseus, speaking in rhyme, announces that the Centaurs are to be their deities (hallows) –to whom they pray. Theseus is remotely controlled by Heracles, the real holder of power.

(Sanctification specimens)
These are mainly the prayers offered up to Centaurs by the ordinary people of London. The first is an exception – the description of a carving of a group of centaurs. Its theme seems to be depersonalisation, and the breakthrough to a deeper, shared, reality.
Chameleon-throned: the foam (aphros) from which Aphrodite was born refracts light (and resembles this marble)
This idea of the organisation of behaviour by chemical messengers (a “civilised plant”) is typical of Macleod’s interests, and is related to his theories on theatre (seen as a collective identity).
Animated Gazette: newsreel
We dedicate: models were typical offerings left in temples. This one is an offering to the Theatre – seen as a form of romantic relief.
This sugared shell – another offering (or sanctification specimen), a bit of icing from the wedding-cake.
A grave from the parish: i.e. a pauper burial
Chalked: i.e. in white clown make-up
polygonal hippanthropus: probably, a sculpture of a Centaur, the word means 'horse-man'
Arion: a poet
episode: kind of small poem (episodeion)
Atthis: a castrated figure (from Catullus, poem 69)


(The spurious wedding)
mart: market
hatchments: armorial bearings showing ancestry
poppyheads: ornamental carvings on pews
Theseus delivers a sermon expounding an utterly weird fire-based cosmology. The lance and cup imagery is slightly more familiar – from the Grail legend.

swallow fledglings: symbols of fertility?
Collect: part of the service (a reading from Scripture)
I am not quite sure why the wedding is spurious, but presumably it lacks that biological vitality which the Centaurs embody.

(The world bursts like a pod)

Scene of bored and conventional guests. Heracles is planning the downfall of the Centaurs by getting them drunk.
At sea dolphins torpedo convoys: what? how? The gorse pods: the same image appears in a section of The Ecliptic. Gorse is rather common in Surrey, where Macleod grew up. The bursting of the yellow or orange pods is a symbol of the sexuality of plants.
dud crumps: shells that fail to explode
plasmic: plasma, a kind of hot gas
reefline: a high-up part of the rigging of a ship
rubber… mastic symptoms of fear and shock
Chiron is expecting the horses to start a revolution, but they are too intimidated. The centaurs, inflamed by wine, assault the women at the wedding, as at the wedding of Hippodamia in the original myth. Chiron wants a revolution, but not an outburst of ill-directed violence. He sings a song recalling Thessaly. the human engineer: Lenin wanted writers to be the engineers of human souls; a depraved and totalitarian image. There is some connection between the automation we saw bemoaned earlier on, and this political manipulation.

(Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs) This is the event which Ovid wrote an elaborate description of, and which was the subject of a frieze of the Parthenon – of which some parts are now in the British Museum. The first intent of the Centaurs is conquest, but they are distracted by lust for the women. The whole poem is an 'animation' of the figures in this frieze in the British Museum.
Ruisshle: I have not found any entry for this in any Scots dictionary. The closest I have got is a gloss in a novel by Samuel Crockett for a similar word which he glosses as “wrestle” and which refers to the noise made by a high wind in vegetation. I now think it is the same word as English "rustle", but louder.
fleering showing their teeth in a threat gesture
viale (Italian word) broad path in a formal garden
eyebright ephebus: some of the victims are boys
Heracles has ordered a large number of troops to hide in the garden – he foresaw the whole course of events. Indeed, it has happened before.
My body fills with air: I think this is a subjective description of Hippodamia responding to Eurytion? An obscure passage. Hemlock – spontaneous but unwelcome feelings? Some odd affinity between this compressed air and the turbine motors which the soldiers are about to use to spread gas?
The closing telescope of the spire: this whole passage is a description of detumescence.
The following passage seems to be a personal reminiscence of erotic experience, in the image of a boat entering harbour and docking. (“graceful of act” etc.) The victims ponder sexual frustration and social restrictions; Theseus delivers a sermon on the shocking event. The Centaurs are to be deprived of their souls and consigned to physical labour, which will liberate the humans. This is thematically confusing – is this a metaphor for the working class? For the subject races of the Empire? Anyway, we are back with the problem of leisure. A force arrives to subdue the Centaurs with a gas which is also laughter. Chiron is struck with an incurable wound from a poisoned arrow. Eurytion alone is turned to stone – presumably as a punishment for stealing the bride (who is also turned to stone).
Flat is the glass: tanks looked like parallelograms at this date (tilted armour tends to deflect the impact of incoming munitions); the glass is the slit the commander looks out of.
An entire circle: leitmotif

(Piccadilly Circus)
this thick disc: the paving of Piccadilly Circus itself, a round area seen as a disc because there is a hollow space beneath it containing an underground station
the entire periphery: another “entire circle”
pastures: a reference possibly to the Elysian fields, the “meads of asphodel”
diurnal scale: I think this relates to the octave and twelfth mentioned below? As intervals. Somehow this relates to the geometry of the sun (from which anything “diurnal” proceeds). The segment is part of a circle – an incomplete circle. Their days are an endlessly repeating cycle? This resembles the circular drive of the escalator? (“stairs’ drum”)

(Palais de danse)
where people go to recover a part of the Centaur energy (?), while still exhausted by automation.
Keep a curious oneness: cf. the Centaur dance in Canto I.
from the entire circle, hall-square: the circle in a square motif
cloth-besplashed piston,/of open induction mouths etc.: comparing the dancers’ bodies to machines
melting memory… parthenic: excitement makes it seem like your first sexual encounter (parthenic = virginal)

(Idle death, busy pain)
back to Thessaly. Death is idle because Chiron is immortal, still with his arrow-wound unhealed. Chaldaeans set up an aerodrome.
the circle of mountains is entire: the circle leitmotif. Of which “broken cycloid” is a counter-example.
Jack-i'-the-Green: a figure of English folklore, symbolic of spring and the fertility of plants. This whole passage is difficult, but I think we are seeing bonfires as part of a seasonal ritual, and these “raddle” (=turn red) the mountains.
obelisk cf. cone and pyramid, probably the shape of the bonfire heap. Cf. also the shape of man, described as a “cone” in the wedding service in a previous canto.
squib, a kind of firework or explosive charge
cowry cf. the cowries worn by the Centaurs for their dance
pink air: cf. the “pink odour of derision”
clarion shell: I don’t understand this (maybe a conch that you blow into?)
The Chaldaean mages (from northern Iraq in modern terms) invented the Zodiac (where Chiron is being equated with the Sagittary) and appear as insurance employees because of their expertise in mathematics (and at fortune-telling). In Latin, astrologers were known as mathematici.
carp-pond: where Chiron had thrown it in disgust at seeing Heracles’ plan work
lime-trees: Philyra was a lime-spirit. Chiron gives up his immortality so that he can die. Under the aegis of dance, eternal cyclical motion is accompanied by a cyclical song.

(Horse-child)
Eurytion and Hippodamia now de-petrified.
Stiff share: a ploughshare, which so far as I am concerned is the same as a coulter.
Stereoscope: invented by Charles Wheatcroft in 1837. Mainly used for viewing photographs – to yield an apparent 3D effect.
Marriage-prostitutes: Engels said that bourgeois marriage was just a form of prostitution
Gone native: a phrase which in the days of the Empire referred to all kinds of sinful behaviour. Interracial sex was probably the primary association of the phrase.
In square box the roundels: the circle in a square motif. We saw the word roundel earlier, in a passage about horses winning races.
Pull of the chemical sun: more sun imagery, and presumably the “circle” imagery refers to the sun’s annual course.
amphitheatrical sky-signs: possibly in Piccadilly Circus, seen as an amphitheatre. It was a showcase for big neon displays – which must have been fairly new in 1930.
pink gas: cf. “pink odour of derision” Or possibly we are just back with the Zodiac (and the pink gas is the sky at sunset).

Notes on the poet Joseph Gordon Macleod

Waking a Lost Sound: Joseph Macleod


In the 1930 volume of Poetry (Chicago) which contains the original Objectivist anthology is an essay by Basil Bunting on modern British poetry which praises Joseph Macleod (1903-84) to the skies. If not for this, the name of Macleod would still be buried in obscurity. Everyone, in the 1970s, interested in the sources of the new avant-garde, went back to that anthology; no one could resist reading what Bunting had to say. And so people began to search for Macleod's rare and untraceable books. And so, eventually, Cyclic Serial Zeniths from the Flux, the selected poems of Joseph Macleod, came to be released, which everyone will soon be familiar with. It has a long fact-bulging introduction (by me), so this note will just deal with marginal or obscure aspects of the Macleod Story.

I have a recurring anxiety dream in which I lose control of my wordprocessor and find myself down on the lawn gazing longingly up at the window where I can see a radge/hypercool culturato helming the next big thing. And so, did I select the right Macleod poems for reissue? A week spent in the National Library of Scotland back in January 2001 revealed that Macleod was one of the most prolific poets of the 20th century. I put together a package of 128 pages because it seemed affordable. There must be another 800 pages for someone to dig up. Why did I only pick one book from The Ecliptic rather than the whole thing? We, the River, a documentary-epic poem from about 1937, has never been printed. I really liked it, although it's unfinished and the impetus hardly sustains the whole length of something which sets out to explain the whole agricultural economy of Huntingdonshire. All I can say is that the typescripts are all in the National Library. Among many very Scottish things.

Foray of Centaurs and The Ecliptic are two book-length poems which form a discrete phase in the poet's work. The Ecliptic was written in 1928 and published in 1930, at the same time and in the same livery as Auden's Poems, also from Faber. Faber, inexplicably, turned down Foray of Centaurs (composed 1930) and went with the Wyster. Macleod rewrote Foray in 1936 and this is the only version we now have. By 1936, everything had changed.

I couldn’t work out the significance of the geometry in Foray – I can register it at the level of a visual motif recurring in a film, but I can’t attach a discursive meaning to it. The figures of the Centaurs’ dance in Canto I are described with a precision which suggests their physical existence prior to the poem. The bean shape of the dance echoes the “cotyledon” seed from which the Centaurs are held to grow. How does this vegetable reproduction tally with the symbolism of the Centaurs as dynamos of sexual energy? I think 'cotyledon' may include a sonic echo of 'cotillion'. However, the “incomplete circle” may be more significant, because it recurs throughout the poem. The circle motif may relate to the circuit of the year drawn by the sun – and there is a strand of sun imagery about fertility which seems central to the poem, as an abiding energy in contrast to the temporary and unnatural repressed state of the Lapiths. The odd fire religion which the Lapiths observe is also related to this. (The seasonal fires on Mount Pelion may symbolise the fire of the sun and be lit at the solstice.)

Macleod was a theatre producer in the early 1930s and had the faculty of visualising complex motion. Foray has this starting point of the writer imagining intricate and highly choreographed movement and then using daring language to describe it. This is why it is difficult (but repays close reading). The poetry starts from something already highly complicated, artificial, charged with meaning. It really takes off when describing dance and architecture. We could logically set out on a study of it by studying art history. Instantly we would realise that these two early poems have an affinity for the ballets russes and for everything associated with them. They belong to a sensibility which withdrew with the arrival of the Depression, which closed down the avant garde and oriented everyone, not least Macleod, towards social action and so towards documentary and ideology. Any reconstruction of the ballets russes today is likely to consult the writings of Adrian Stokes, who had the advantage of seeing the productions (at least those of the 1920s) and of mixing socially with the company. Stokes was at school with Macleod and was a lifelong friend. Foray is partly a series of dances.

The poetic milieu in which the two long poems belong is perfectly reconstructed by Sydney Bolt's 1967 anthology Poetry of the 1920s. It is unfortunate that he does not include The Ecliptic. There is an essay where Macleod identifies his influences as Aldington, Lawrence, and WJ Turner. Examination of the section where Bolt collects poems by these three will shed all kinds of light on the style of The Ecliptic and Foray. It also includes Herbert Read - who, as reader for Faber, rejected Foray. We may reflect that Turner was a ballet critic and Read an art critic (Sacheverell Sitwell, bizarrely omitted by Bolt, wrote art history as well as poetry). Fitting Macleod into this context gives us little in the way of restrictions - it was a moment when poets could use any material and make the most dizzying jumps of association. It was also a moment when poetry was dominated by visual art - which in fact offered a shared culture as a foundation for these jumps, unit structures of a liberated awareness. Take these passages:

There is yellow lightning among the trees
Impassible foliage-bearers, dense dreams
Of running water - itself so clear, transparent!
Uplifted trunks of a myriad buried elephants
Petrified into solid stone
Buried in clear yellow glass;
Resting upon other layers of elephants
Their trunks turned downwards in the solid rock
Pre-historic tree-ferns!

How flimsy the lighting seems,
The wavering of a candle flame in polished steel -
So still the waters, the hills, and the vegetation;
The priest of white stone, the altar,
The crepe-hung Moon!

(WJ Turner)

Our structures are of steel and glass
their subtle struts not obvious
we build with space in space
and by ingenuity produce
our aerial houses high towers
our winding stairs -
all is in light
above-board and ought
to win the approval of the masses
[...]
No need to multiply instances.
But we must reduce the area of glass:
we have avoided darkness
our structures are transparent -
only the skeleton visible and adamant
lies like a net embedded criss-cross.
This would fail as an ambush
therefore blacken the glass
fill in the mesh
with soil and cement
any opaque element
so that their eyes cannot penetrate
partitions or discover remote
repetitions of plane and space.

(Herbert Read)
The similarity to the idiom of early Macleod is obvious. We have to underline the structural liberty - the creation from intense concrete images and dizzying jumps of association of new worlds, ambiguous and disturbing. Around 1930 the set-up was quite close to allowing the poem to go anywhere the poet wanted it to go. All these poets saw an inexhaustible significance in geometry. The creation of simple yet primal shapes - or the isolation of structure-giving forms in the real world - was essential to their creative effort. And so we return to the broken circle:

Deliberately broken cycloid, bitten pediment,
correctly ovolated entablature
and hexastyle unpinned by utile dummy or urn:
the lawn's compaction and the tailored topiary,
salvias uniform in column of platoons,
the muted parterre quasi-semi-italianate:
these masses gather, these lines join
where apsed marquee lies anchored
within the balustrade,
and the wedding breakfast is spread, and metal peacocks
share mulberries with enamelled chinese pheasants.
(Foray of Centaurs)

I find this just as exciting as I found Bolt's anthology when I read it about 25 years ago. Two long poems develop religions based on energy cults and lead up to the New Romantics. These are Fall of a Tower by Francis Berry, 1943, and Foray of Centaurs, 1935. The marriage ceremony in Foray is bizarre and unfamiliar. We seem to see a cult of pure energy, without personal gods. However, it is very similar to the energy religion described in Fall of a Tower. I believe that the link is DH Lawrence - to be exact, the religious system he describes in 'Apocalypse', which says that the sun is a living being. (This cluster of ideas is developed also in Etruscan Places and The Man Who Fled.) I found an explanation in Richard Aldington's introduction to 'Apocalypse'. The title may ring a bell - this is probably where the New Apocalypse group of the 40s and late 30s got their initial ideas from. This group represented a radical return to Lawrence, but in fact there was a strong current of lawrentian poetry throughout the 30s. We can in fact see the 1930s as a contrast between two poetic groups: the Auden clique and the followers of Lawrence. The latter group were pushed right into the darkness by the Auden gang. Along with Foray we should mention Aldington's Life Quest, as well as Fall of a Tower, one of Berry's major works - and Sacheverell Sitwell, clearly influenced by Lawrence. I got a glimpse of this while researching the background to the Apocalypse group, for a book called Origins of the Underground. Something which kept cropping up is the neo-pagan cultic 'new life' community at Ascona (in Switzerland) who almost indisputably gave Lawrence his ideas about the sun. Lawrence got these German ideas from his wife.

It's a good idea to read Foray along with Fall of a Tower. Berry also wrote a long poem about centaurs - 'Mediterranean Year'. Something curious is the recurrence of a theme - namely the murder of a king by the Centaurs - in both Foray:

Resplendently then
the captain cowry-necklaced in the midst
is crowned with a rosette of steel
buttressed by six boulders.
The sun rises. All yell. The lyre is struck. Swords lock.
Triumphant the captain's head
from six sides severed
totters on his shoulders: and
another furred ancestor is lost in the fragrant forenoon.

- and 'Mediterranean Year':

The circuit malice of the horsemen Killers narrows-
Converging on the King like knived and beckoning prows,
With outstretched clumsy arms the purple King is crying -
With his own royal robes they swaddle him to death.
Then throbs his flesh beneath the hand and club marauders
And as the drowning Elk in puckered marsh, he moans.
Melt under earth the long bronze horns:
Stuffed with ash the tired iron urns:
Death divides your rare dear flesh -
Kiss and keep me, kiss.


I do not find this in any of the ancient myths about the Centaurs. Berry can't have read the unpublished Foray. The regicide does not seem to connect to the rest of Foray particularly.  My first attempt to locate sources for the Centaur dance came up empty. I speculated that Macleod had invented it. However, a simple Google search (on “sword dance beheading”) in January 2018 has uncovered a whole stream of references to beheading as part of a sword dance within a Mummers' Play, with resurrection by the Doctor as the climax of the play. Some of these have the Captain as the beheaded figure – so Macleod’s execution of a king as part of the dance was based on folk sources after all. Cf. >>The plays are closely related to the English mummers plays and parallel the Greek folk play in Thrace. In the dance the swords are interlocked at one point, forming a “rose,” or “lock,” that is held aloft and placed around the neck of a performer in mock decapitation. Often the “beheaded” falls “dead,” to be revived by a “doctor, a fool, a man-woman, or other subsidiary character. The roots of these dances are in ancient vegetation rites of death and renewal, possibly in sacrifice of a leader to ensure fertility.  <<

Macleod uses the phrase "swords lock", and the word "captain", obviously a reference to this movement in the Sword Dance. And in particular:

>>The Grenoside Sword Dance is a unique sword dance. Although many of the moves it contains can be found in other sword dances, the dancers wear clogs and perform a breakstep between figures. The dance also features the ritual 'beheading' of the captain near the beginning of the dance. <<

>> It made a great impression on Sharp. He was particularly interested in the ritual slaying of the Captain/Fool and speculated in his book that this represented some previous human/animal ritual sacrifice or slaughter. The Grenoside dance was the most complex single dance that Sharp would see. <<

The severed head is the gap in the "broken cycloid". It is likely that Macleod associated the Centaur, as man-horse, with the Hobby Horse in the mummers' plays. The "folk play" in Thrace may also have been stimulating - Foray is set in Thessaly, which is where the Greeks bred horses, but Thrace is not so far away. My attention was drawn to locked sword beheading by a Ngaio Marsh detective novel, Off With His Head (1957), which is all about folklore. The theme is likely to connect to the ideas of J. G. Frazer (as Marsh suggests) and perhaps to the execution of Tsar Nikolai II. The real-life source explains why Macleod and Berry use the same motif. Berry eliminated the swords but keeps the ritual king-murder.

Auden began with The Orators, work heavily influenced by Lawrence (Kangaroo). A few years later, he led English poetry off towards documentary - which is also where Macleod went, switching from ballet to documentary film as the visual source of his poems. The overlap of Macleod and Auden is interesting. The portrait of sexual frustration in Foray is compelling, but the mythical liberation by the irruption of rough primeval urges is both lawrentian and deeply embarrassing. It was an editorial temptation to kind of leave that part out. It's fortunate that the whole story is so distantiated and defamiliarised.

It is puzzling how a bloc which venerates modernism leaves out all the native modernists and stops with Eliot and Pound. The Twenties saw a lot of modernism in poetry. It seemed to me after reading Bolt that British poetry had gone seriously wrong in 1930, with thirty years of wandering in the wilderness before things got back in the groove in the 1960s, with a generation of students who had swallowed Read's doctrine that the Modernist Revolution was what really happened in the 20th century. The reconstruction left out dance, which didn't leave a record of recoverable objects - but in general Read was right, I think. You can get fed up with his Mottram-like partisan zeal, but if you look at the rival line represented by late Auden, Betjeman, John Fuller (Auden's editor), Fuller's friend James Fenton, and Glyn Maxwell, it seems like we've had 50 years of the wrong people in charge. While this background doesn't bring us a step closer to the youthful Macleod of 1928, it does help to explain why Macleod's name is unknown. I understand that James Keery has now extended his re-analysis of the poetic history of the 1940s back into the 1930s, still puzzling over silences in the official version.

**
This was published in Richard Price's magazine Painted, Spoken. It is issued here for the convenience of people who didn't get to see Painted, Spoken.
A reissue of The Ecliptic edited by Rich Owens has now come out from Flood Editions. I understand that Owens has a typescript of 'The Ecliptic' which includes several sections not in the published version.