Michael Roberts and modernism

“The original Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), edited by Michael Roberts, was influential in forming the tastes of a generation and gave a concrete meaning to the phrase 'modern verse'. In order to keep the anthology a reasonably representative one containing poems written since 1936 there have been two revised editions - one by Anne Ridler in 1951 and one by Donald Hall in 1965.” - Faber’s anonymous and proprietary statement

Am stuck on providing evidence for the influence of Michael Roberts. I am trying to claim that there was a version of modern poetry which was defined by Roberts’ anthologies and which was cast in bronze by succeeding anthologies by Allott (1950, 2nd edition 1962) and Lucie-Smith (1970). This version gave people things to say and was taken up by the new breed of Eng lit Teachers, in sixth forms and universities, as the intelligent way to talk about modern poetry. Pupils who had seriously different views were likely to get low grades, not intersecting with the questions set in exam papers.
I am trying to find a literary historian who openly states this view, and this is proving difficult. I think it is a consensus view, but I would like to support that with quotes by qualified historians.

Three important facts emerge in the zone around this basic idea. One, there was a vital link between the developmental line or canon established by Roberts and the Close Reading method of talking or writing about poetry. Close reading in practice favoured modernism, even if in theory it was a neutral method. Two, accepting the value of modernism told you which poetry was important and intelligent. This allowed you to locate ways of being important and intelligent. The claim was never that all modern poetry passed this test; it actually gave you a yardstick which distinguished High from Low. Three, from what I can reconstruct there was a large group of people involved in modern poetry who neither liked modernist poetry nor accepted the scale of values of Roberts and Allott. This is obvious if you wade through back issues of Poetry Review for the 1950s. It is written for people who don’t like modernism.

Two more obscure facts emerge. One, people who are less cultured don’t perceive poems as being high or low. Two, chronology in poetry relies on style changing over time. That only applies to people who have the necessary group awareness, and are part of an artistic community. Other people may write poetry, but their style is abidingly out of date, unchanged by experiment or time passing. The missing link is evidently that out of date writers should be made available to out of date readers.
A little moment in Poetry Review for 1956 gives Ruth Pitter (quoted from a newspaper interview) saying this: Eliot contributed “to a disaster to English poetry… by taking it away from the common man and making it the province of the few”. (p. 5). Pitter’s lack of status as a sociologist means that we can’t take this as an oracular truth raised above any criticism. Instead, we have to ask why Eliot took over the scene if only a minority could understand him. Also, and not for the first time, why shouldn’t there be a venue where out of date poets meet their out of date audience and make each other happy. This venue actually was Poetry Review. The influence of Eliot and of the Faber Book are clearly much the same thing, and what Pitter says about Eliot would also apply to the poetry which Michael Roberts favoured. Am still struggling to find someone who defines the Faber Book as redefining the landscape, outside Faber’s own anonymous statements on the matter. However, reading significant historians is enjoyable in itself. My impression is that they don’t consider the “twilight” group whom Roberts left out (and Allott in his follow-up to Roberts). This would make Roberts simply a photographer, his ideas indistinguishable from reality. That also makes it hard to see what Roberts actually brought off.
A piece of concrete evidence may help here. The bound volume of Poetry Review for 1956 and 1957 has indices which show every poet who got published in the magazine over those two years, so greater than 100 poets. (I counted 108 names for 1956 and 144 names for 1957.) It is quite easy to compare this list with the inclusion list for Allott’s 1962 anthology. There are no overlaps at all. I think this shows (a) that Allott made a vital act of selection, which unambiguously follows Roberts’ ideas (b) the poets he rejected had a gathering place, the Poetry Review (and the Poetry Society which owned it) and a market.
It is only fair to record that Poetry Review updated itself in the mid-1960s (like everything else!) and that the reformed version had essentially moved towards the Roberts/ Allott line.
However, I am not going to plunge into a description of the “conservative” poets of P Review, because so far as I can see they are terrible poets and this would not be a good experience for me.
A problem here. I counted 150 poets in those 8 issues of Poetry Review. 50% of them are women. Allott’s upscale anthology, compiled in 1960, has only 7% women. PR is conservative and low-end poets. Allott is modernist and ambitious poets. The contrast suggests that modernism was not benign for women - not in the period Allott covers, say 1920 to 1960.
I think the background has to do with education. At the time, girls were much less likely to go to university and also less likely to complete the sixth form years, leading up to that. It was the slope on which the whole system was built. The group of women writing poetry were less educated than the group of men writing poetry. The women had had much less access to higher-level teaching, to the methods of Close Reading and intricate analysis of texts. This would explain why they were clustered in the conservative area of style.

I don’t think I can go and redeem any of the PR poets. They just ran bad poetry, consistently. I am unhappy about this whole area. The figures remind me of figures for vanity presses, when I got to grips with those, in the 1960s. The proportion of women in the vanity press lists was much higher than in the legitimate publishing area. So, possibly, there were lots of women writing poetry and they were more frustrated than male poets. They had less access to publication but probably also to literary knowledge, to styles and theories and innovations. They were outsiders. But, in the 1970s, the story changes. Girls were getting into higher education at a much higher rate, and the proportion of women in the vanity press world decreases. The outsiders are now less into vanity presses and more into the small press world, where there is an outsider audience present. It is much more benign.
This isn't going in the book, because I am mainly interested in the fate of nationalist poetry and it has no bearing on that.
Completists will want to know that one poet, Peter Redgrove, was in Poetry Review for 1956 and later appeared in Lucie-Smith’s culturally high anthology. Also, one of the poets in that year of the Review is Lucie-Smith himself.
A check is afforded by a 1956 anthology, Poetry Now, edited by GS Fraser. This has 84 poets but none of them appears in that list of 150 Poetry Review poets. He includes 9 female poets, so roughly 11%. This supports the idea that women clustered in the conservative sector.

travelogue - more progress

Travelogue

Am now (August 2026) reading around the subjects in Travelogue to check that I have not made outstanding mistakes. This is tedious because most of it is repetitive and not productive (of lurking errors). The tedium encourages me to have new ideas which obviously are NOT going to fit into a structure which is good as it is.

I left out Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. He was too arrogant to form sensible policies. Alan Moorehead says in The White Nile (1960) that when the Mahdi’s forces took Omdurman they massacred several thousand, enslaved everyone who survived, and ravished the women as a first step. “Human beings were the chief loot, but there was great wastage of them at first.” When news reached London, Blunt wrote “Unexpected and glorious news of the fall of Omdurman… I could not help singing all the way down [into the country] on the train.” He just didn’t know what he was talking about. He had left the Foreign Office (11 years in the Diplomatic Service) and was promoting his own personal foreign policy, without the benefit of the local intelligence which the FO itself had. I sympathise with his resistance to colonialism, but he is just someone you don’t want on your side. This is the equivalent of someone in the 2020s being a big fan of Hamas.
In a democracy, we have the right to criticise the government’s foreign policy. That still applies even when we are not “area specialists”. Someone like Blunt discredits this role of democratic opposition. That is why I don’t want him in my book.

August Closs. A chance encounter with an essay in Antaios (volume for 1964) showed me a reference to Closs’s 1936 article in which he claims that shamanism is a key to the Germanic religion as it was practiced 2000 years ago in Northern Europe. This is interesting because it shows that connection being made before Eliade’s 1951 book – although Eliade co-edited Antaios, in fact. The link explains the mysterious fact that “Wodan, id est furor” (Wodan, that is fury), was the statement made by bishop Adam of Bremen in the 12th C, when there still were pagans around. If you translate “furor” as “spirit possession”, then you can make a link to shamanism in Siberia, which was reasonably well studied by anthropologists (including those exiled for their political activities). The etymology is convincing, a word which gives us meanings like “rage” in German and “insane” in Middle English and Scottish (“I mun waxen wode”). But the idea that all states of ecstasy, trance, possession, etc. resemble Siberian shamanism is not tenable. It is a link with no specific content. Moreover, the written records we have of Wodan legends do not contain this trance aspect at all. The date when he acquired the name may have been far distant from the stage when literate monks (or others) came to write down Norse mythology. There is no instance where “wood” means “possessed by a spirit”, and it seems odd that Woden would be possessed by a spirit if he was a high god. I find the link between Siberia and Northern paganism fascinating, but the more I know about it the less real it seems. You have to strip the Siberian thing of every specific feature to make the match. But, if you do that, where is the intellectual gain?
There was a religion in Iron Age Northern Europe. And I don’t think it involved wise men sitting around reading works of theology and discussing philosophy. But it is the link with Siberia which I find questionable. Of course, this would bind Europe to the Third World. So many people have found shamanism fascinating, and tried to import it into the West in various forms.

Love of country
One of the sources I looked at, possibly Herbert Palmer, said that people after 1918 began to write patriotic poetry through writing in detail about their tiny bit of the country, so “love of country” in small-scale pictures. I have not gone into this at all. The sequel would be that the impact of the First World War had moved patriotic feeling away from the Army and the Navy and towards the countryside (urban scenes did not arouse the same feelings). That is, patriotic poetry continued but it no longer took the form which it had done between 1890 and 1920. I think it’s well-known that people fighting in the Second World War thought of scenes from the cherished English countryside when they asked themselves what they were fighting for. Such scenes were not heroic and certainly not arguments in favour of expansion. I have not explored this, and I think the problem in distinguishing propaganda from simple landscape or nature poetry (and painting etc.) is pervasive. If you look at the art and films which the official organs of propaganda encouraged, or funded, during the second war, some part of it is clearly the rural, the picturesque, the sentimental. There was a whole mythology of England, and to some extent of Wales and Scotland. And when people thought of war aims, they often thought of lovely villages and old woods. I know what the propaganda czars were thinking about, and that they thought a lot about how to portray the English countryside. But, the message of those paintings etc. is that here is something old and vulnerable. Something under threat from aggression and mechanization. The anti-war message is obvious. Of course, at the time this meant defence against invasion, and the defence obviously took military forms. But it was the same set of messages and emotions which pacifists liked to imagine. It just isn’t militarist. It also tends to be against the State, because in favour of very small areas which can be thought of as home. One of the cultural events of 1940 was a project funded by the Pilgrim Trust to record aspects of the countryside. This was often done in watercolour, which was more suited to painting outside, on the spot. The theme is vulnerability and the small-scale. The results are fascinating and very moving. But the editors of the book, from the 1980s I think, which collected and showed these images, pointed out that the immediate stimulus was anxiety that the British war effort would destroy all these things, turn them into tank training grounds and so on. Many guns, much concrete. The stress between love of country and militarism was obvious. That stress explains why creative people had gone off militarism and territorial aggression. It also explains why they stopped being patriotic in one way but went on being patriotic in another way. Anyway, it is ridiculous to think of some poem about wild flowers as instantly being nationalistic.
It is inaccurate to think of British poets as all trooping off into individualism in the 1920s. Some of them did. Few of them were happy about the gigantic efforts of the world war which had just finished. Fewer wanted a repeat. Many of them had grave doubts about the State and the ruling classes. But a belief in the community united most of them, and the issue was more how to express this.
A different version of the book would be if I were looking for patriotic poetry and foregrounding the successes. I didn’t do that, but after all love of country is something most writers share. Michael Powell’s 1944 film “A Canterbury Tale” is a good subject if we want to think about patriots in the 20th C. Its protagonist turns out to be carrying out small acts of vandalism (pouring glue in the hair of courting couples?) because he wants to defend a beautiful Kent, as something for tired warriors to come home to. The couples involve American soldiers, in Kent to help win the war. He is genuinely in love with his country. This is a portrait of patriotism; and the film is about patriotism. But the story is profoundly ambiguous. This cluster of feelings was not easy to simplify.

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.

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.

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.

An inquiry into the Empire

travelogue
This is a blog about a book which I have just finished (April 2026) but which I will hang on to while I think about it. The current title is “Travelogue of picturesque peoples”. The subject is British poetry and the Empire – but actually areas outside the Empire too. The subject is also the culture of the Right in Britain, how its relationship with poetry changed after 1920, and how privatisation works in the arts. It is an extension of a series of blogs which I posted, on nationalism and poetry.
There was a possible sequence where I would talk about the Nuremberg trials and say that there was no such juridical intervention in the aftermath of the British Empire. Nobody ever got dragged into court as a result of the Amritsar Massacre or the Black and Tan war. It would follow that you look at Europe around 1960 and see that the Germans are trying very hard to come to terms with the Nazi past and people in Britain don’t even see that there is a problem with the imperial past. So, in Britain, there was a gentle transition to a post-imperial condition without also a disenchantment, an amdission, a critical re-living of the collective past and of collective illusions. In Germany, by 1960, there were a lot of people who were genuinely ex-Nazis – they had given the ideas up and recognised the errors of the national movement. In Britain, I don’t think there was a large body of ex-imperialists. Their activities changed because the Empire had gone, or was on the way to breaking up, but they hadn’t otherwise changed their view of race or of the colonial past. So that process of repentance might still be in the future. Young people who live through it in a rush, without the usual restraints, may have a hard time. They may come out as extremists. There is a sector of the Right which is defined by its members’ unwillingness to accept the basic lessons of what happened in colonialism and what suffering it caused.
So, why didn’t I write this up for the book. It seemed too backward-facing. And it seemed authoritarian, as I was unwilling to define one version of the Past and one set of acceptable attitudes. Maybe also because it doesn’t coincide with the poetry I was writing about. Describing what poets don’t do has a limited reach. Although I do have time to admire something like David Ashford’s John Company, dealing with the colonial past in India, or Jay Gao’s Katabasis, which deals with an effectively colonial war in Iraq. I have to observe how late in the day this critical memory is coming.

A topic I don’t include is 50s war films. Information is that there were 443 British war films made during the 1950s. My feeling is that these war films give an insight into Reform voters, the patriotic vote. I want to make a connection because my goal is to end up with one society, one government. We are all in the same boat. The problem with these films was partly their continuity with wartime propaganda. Stuart Hylton’s book on the home front records how the main street of Reading was bombed. The newspapers could not report the story even though everyone could see that their shopping street wasn’t there any more. Only several weeks later could they run the story. The media world was heavily controlled by the government. After the war, people wanted the untold stories. The stories had directly affected their lives. The films never supplied this.They tried to revive the uncritical mood of the war years and avoided the risk of showing what had gone wrong. Also, war films were amazingly popular. This meant that the industry was too eager to go with projects that were badly thought out and without the requisite talent and intelligence. The contract between the industry and the audience was not kept, and so the films got a bad reputation. There is a claim that the collective films were brought to an end by the enmity of a bloc of intellectuals, but the film industry had no interest in intellectuals. The reasons why the series came to an end are as I have set out already. The Sixties came along with a boom in satire and in subversion which was not conducive to war films. Certain parts of the audience interpreted this as a lack of concern for the broad collective, an exit from ideals of coherence and shared effort. Although anti-authoritarian, it could be interpreted as a hasty exit from the social contract.
Robert Murphy, on-line, has suggested that there was a dip in the popularity of war films between 1943 and 1950. People just got fed up with the war, and wanted entertainment at night. This would explain why the Fifties war films, however successful, were influenced by nostalgia and unwilling to explore deeper issues about the war. He also says that the post-1950 variant was more oriented towards officers as heroes than the wartime variant of film. I had not been aware of this, but during the war the unstated rules of propaganda meant that there was a stress on collective thinking, and working-class characters, as an inevitable part of the package. This suggests that the task of propaganda actually raised the standards of the film industry, dragging it out of the clutches of showbiz and towards something more memorable and less individualistic.

The historian A D Harvey, in a book about large-scale wars ("Britain in three world wars, 1793-1945"), asks the question whether there were two separate sets of war aims in the Second World War. One would be to defend the Empire and keep it in being, one would be an anti-fascist crusade which would have democracy and freedom as its goals. The latter obviously implies decolonisation. He asks which one was predominant during the war and goes into statements of the time to resolve the question. I don’t think the evidence is conclusive, especially because a large faction of opinion was concerned with defending the British Isles and saw invading Germany, seizing the Ruhr, destroying the Wehrmacht, as the only way to achieve that goal. A stand-off in the English Channel and North Sea was not enough to bring about peace. Still, Harvey has raised (esp. at pages 509-519) a question which had been un-asked before then. Another reason why this issue is inconclusive is that politics was not much in evidence during the war. I don’t think people were asking “what are our war aims”; their aim was to win, and return to peace; instead, the question became important because propaganda demanded that there be some named reason for fighting. The idea of a Welfare State became very popular, but surely fighting a war was not necessary in order to found it.
The propaganda of wartime and the speeches of the 1945 general election campaigns had not told people that India was about to be liberated and the majority of the population of the Empire about to leave and start their own democracy. The word “Empire” fell out of legal use in 1947, as it had referred to India. It was replaced by “Commonwealth”. A certain fraction of the population of the Home Islands saw this as not the result of the war which they had expected. A certain idea came into circulation which held that the sub-continent had wrongly been taken away from the British people, and that an educated minority had betrayed the people, carrying out a plan which nobody had been allowed to vote on, and making a decision behind closed doors. The outcome was visibly a lot more democracy for India, Pakistan and Ceylon. It was not an issue which had been explained and debated democratically in Britain. People felt vaguely that the reward for victory in a major war was an expansion of territorial power, not the opposite. There was no film which explained Indian politics and the last, weakening, phase of the Raj, and probably no audience for such a film. The film industry was part of the world of entertainment, even if it rose above that occasionally. Bhowani Junction (1956) doesn’t really fill the gap (“MGM’s drama aflame with love and revolt”).

I am still reading histories of the imperial mind-set, but I must say none of them seems to have any interest in poetry. The links between imperialism and “naval poetry” in the period roughly 1897-1920 are obvious and important, but historians seem to have filed them under “omit”. This at least justifies my project.
I was reading a book on-line about Fascism in Britain between the wars and saw a list of the committee of the Right Book Club. One of these was Trevor Blakemore, credited as “a poet”. "Another notable collection, The Flagship: and Other Poems, appeared in 1915 from Erskine Macdonald, including patriotic naval imagery amid the era's global tensions." I can see several books of his in the second-hand market. I am letting myself off reading them. There was lots of naval poetry in 1915. Clearly, he was associated with the outside Right, whether Tory dissidents or something further out. But I can’t be sure that he was able to articulate those ideas in poetry. And I find it unlikely that he was influential, someone whose symbolic discourse appealed to wider circles even in the extremist wing. His name does not appear in Herbert Palmer’s 1938 book, which describes well over 100 poets of the time. It follows that Blakemore wasn’t on the map.

(US policy and the Empire)
I have been reading Max Hastings’ book Armageddon, about the last 8 months of the war in Europe. Of interest to us is his discussion of Roosevelt and how the US-Britain relationship deteriorated in the last year of the war, not least because of Montgomery and his arrogance. Simultaneously, Roosevelt was completely deceived by Stalin and didn’t realise that he was going to turn Eastern Europe into a cluster of satellite states for the next 45 years. The Americans were very angry about Britain sending troops to Greece in late 1944, to prevent a communist take-over. They saw this as establishing a “sphere of influence”, and thought it was just the same as Stalin occupying Poland. But the big question is why the US didn’t insist on the decolonisation of the British Empire. It was just a matter of chance that this didn’t happen. Nobody in Washington wanted to expend a single American life to defend the Empire. This rift didn’t reach the surface because of a series of chance events, for example that defending India 1941-44 was the same as fighting the Japanese, so that the imperial war aim coincided with the US war aim. This was true in half a dozen other situations, and the split just never quite reached the surface. Compare the US-Soviet Union split, which didn’t come to the surface until 1947 or so. It could have happened that the US presided over the end of the British Empire, in the spirit of 1776. After the Cold War became established as the new bundle of doctrines, the US wanted the Empire to survive for long enough to install anti-communist parties as the new and legitimated political elites in the various colonies. That is, as part of restricting Soviet or Chinese influence. The point is that the foreign policy posture of the US in December 1944 was completely different from its posture in December 1947. And this is something I have avoided getting into; foreign policy involved multiple players and rapid shifts of direction which demand too much effort to describe. It is easy to describe British decolonisation at its end point, but complicated to describe how the few thousand people involved in policy shifted from being aggressively pro-Empire towards being in favour of rapid decolonisation tempered only by anti-communism. Simply about Greece, I am sure it is a good thing that Greece didn’t live under a communist dictatorship from, say, 1944 to 1990. Also, I am sure that Britain did not plan to reduce Europe to a British sphere of influence in the way that Stalin reduced eastern Europe to Soviet satellites. Roosevelt failed to follow the development of European politics and did not understand the possibilities.
America did not, in 1946, take the stance that Europe had to decolonise and that it could use the power of the dollar (and of US export goods) to enforce this outcome. It was always a possible stance. My guess is that alienation from the Soviet Union, and world communism, made the decolonisation (and anti-Western European) stance impossible. The US could not adopt both stances at once. The path towards decolonisation – a desirable outcome, a democratic outcome – was more tortuous than that. But US politicians were never pro-imperialist, let alone their voters.
The US set up the United Nations but did not accompany that with a promise to break up the British, Dutch, and French Empires. A missed opportunity? It is worth posing the question, why was this not the initial “theme music” of the UN.
For our purposes, the question is why the Labour Party, or the political class more widely, did not explain decolonisation to the electorate. I think the answer was that the various decisions to decolonise and break up the Empire were taken very reluctantly, and came unexpectedly, as the result of crises. Foreign policy was, in this case, removed from the sphere of democracy. The electorate would probably have said No. The outcome was a residual electoral faction of voters who thought that the elite were in the embrace of foreigners and were consequently traitors to the British people. The suspicion that holding on to the Empire would have benefited the ordinary people, in many or most constituencies, was the basis for a ressentiment which could be mobilised against immigrants, against the ex-colonies, against globalisation, and against the politicians (more obviously, the politicians in Brussels). By a freak of chronology, this ressentiment has been a big political factor in the period 2008-2026.

The excluded

The excluded

The list below is a list of all the poets discussed in Herbert Palmer’s “Post-Victorian Verse”. With an exception – I took out the names of poets who feature in Michael Roberts’ Faber Book of Modern Verse, two years earlier. The point of the exercise is to define what Roberts did, in creating the image of the first decades of the 20th century which we still own (as part of our cultural assets), by giving shape to the poetry which he jettisoned (and which has usually remained jettisoned). This is part of a series of blogs, on this site, (label "history of taste") about canon formation, and readers may be aware that it all started with Kipling and his exit from the stage. What happened to Kipling?

Overlap of Palmer and Roberts is 11. So 81 excluded poets:
Laurence Binyon Edmund Blunden Siegfried Sassoon Edward Thomas Charles Williams Andrew Young J Redwood Anderson Lascelles Abercrombie A.E. Richard Aldington Maurice Baring Hilaire Belloc Wilfred Scawen Blunt Gordon Bottomley Robert Bridges Roy Campbell GK Chesterton Wilfred Rowland Childe Richard Church Austin Clarke Padraic Colum Elizabeth Daryush John Davidson W H Davies Walter De La Mare Charles Doughty John Drinkwater Michael Field James Elroy Flecker John Freeman John Gawsworth Wilfrid Gibson Douglas Goldring Lord Gorell Gerald Gould Thomas Hardy Maurice Hewlett FR Higgins Ralph Hodgson Frank Kendon Rudyard Kipling Wyndham Lewis F O Mann Edith Sitwell John Masefield Huw Menai Charlotte Mew Alice Meynell T Sturge Moore Thomas Moult George Meredith Henry Newbolt Robert Nichols Alfred Noyes Seumas O Sullivan Stephen Phillips Ruth Pitter Alan Porter Edgell Rickword Victoria Sackville-West William Kean Seymour Edward Shanks Horace Shipp Osbert Sitwell JC Squire James Stephens Muriel Stuart Edward Thompson Francis Thompson WJ Turner Sherrard Vines William Watson Dorothy Wellesley Anna Wickham Humbert Wolfe Richard Middleton THW Crosland James Mackereth Charles Dalmon AE Housman Ernest Dowson Ernest Rhys Kennneth Muir RN Currey John Betjeman Geoffrey Johnson Christopher Hassall Lionel Johnson Robert Ross Joseph Campbell Oliver Gogarty Patrick Kavanagh J D Beazley Hamish McLaren Herbert Trench Katharine Tynan Mary Coleridge Margaret L Woods Margaret Sackville Sylvia Lynd Viola Meynell Mary Webb Rachel Annand Taylor Eiluned Lewis Frances Cornford Susan Miles Blanaid Salkeld Nancy Cunard S Townsend Warner Rose Macaulay Katherine Mansfield Everest Lewin Ruth Manning Sanders Jan Struther Lilian Bowes-Lyon Robin Hyde R C K Ensor Katharine M Buck Hugh MacDiarmid Martin Armstrong Edwin Muir Gerald Bullett Henry Warren Philip Henderson Frederick Prokosch R L Megroz St John Adcock Frederick V Branford Robert Gathorne-Hardy

I don’t have the energy to read all these people. I think we can use the list as raw material without energetically reading 81 books. The subject we are thinking about is the difference between the successful poets, who get critics writing about them, and everyone else – an inchoate mass of thousands of people. I say “thinking about” because the benefits come from thinking about a process, rather than reading masses of poetry. We are not thinking only of the poets whom Palmer discusses but of the whole world of outsider poets, the ones for example who paid for publication. I am sure they were incredulous that Auden won the game and they lost because they never learnt a modern style. They did lose, and all I can do is work out the rules of the game. Roberts’ achievement was less in promoting individual poets than in offering a cultural stance, something which young people could adopt and direct their poetical ideas by. Without generalising in a rush, we can say that English teachers needed such a stance, and that quite a few of them used Roberts as a guide and then transmitted the stance to their pupils. If you were writing essays, you needed a basic position, to avoid drowning in possibilities. The pupils needed confidence, and the position which Roberts had worked out obviously made you feel confident, once you had grasped it. As I said, this is less specific than pushing a particular poet, but in fact Roberts was identified as the editor who had recognised Auden, and he derived prestige from his association with Auden and his friends (MacNeice, Spender, and Day Lewis). This was a phenomenon, and it was still enjoying that centrality in the early 1970s, when I became aware of the poetry scene. That power did not rely on asserting that everybody else was dim and couldn’t really write poetry. Readers may have assumed that – it is a silent message, if that is a kind of message.
The significant thing about this stance I mention (Roberts – modernism – close reading – science – loving Auden) is that so many people could acquire it and think it belonged to them. Somehow people reading Auden felt that they had the assets which he had, and not that the poetry was brilliant but excluding them. Cultural assets only mean something if large numbers of people feel that they have a share in them.
Within the 81 names, we probably want to remember Edward Thomas, Thomas Hardy, James Elroy Flecker, and AE Housman. Roberts had pushed things too far. Of course, you could argue that Housman and Hardy were too old, their work coming before Roberts’ rough cut-off line (for “modernity”) of 1910. In the cause of precision, I have to add that there might be poets who were not picked up either by Roberts or by Palmer, and do not feature in this list of 81. Of poets active in 1936, or soon before, I could mention Kathleen Raine, Mina Loy, and Joseph Macleod.
I admire Palmer’s efforts in recording so many poets. However, from the lookout point of 2026, it is obvious that most of the secondary poets active in 1920 or 1930 had to be forgotten. This is not something you can reproach Roberts for, the process of forgetting had to metabolise most of these poets. Roberts was not committing an act of violence.
There has been interest in Kipling as the victim of Left-wing attitudes, and in fact the thesis of a “Left-liberal bubble” was mainly based in the removal of Kipling from the stage. I think it is relevant to look at these 81 names as a group. Yes, the combination of imperialism and nationalism vanished from the stage, and neither Palmer nor Roberts like it very much. But the great majority of those 81 poets had nothing to do with imperialism and pro-war sentiments. Kipling is just one of the poets who moved into the twilight. Political poetry can go out of date. This process is much more general than the Left quietly disposing of the culture of the Right.
The current literary culture is focused on grievances. If you have a class of people writing poetry unsuccessfully, and these 81 names are just a tiny sample of those, you have to ask why they didn’t make it. Current opinion would link it to low status, as being women, working class, un-English, and so on. This may be the wrong approach. We are dealing with a market, with shops and retail, with a system of fashion. The issue may be style, rather than sociology. People don’t have a problem recognising that textile design, or interior design, or cinema films, can be out of date; they should also realise that poetry consumption is subject to quite similar forces.
I spoke of “giving shape to the poetry which he jettisoned”, but there are a dozen different styles represented in the list above. I am not totally happy to describe the 81 as representing “conservative taste”. Perhaps they were not out of date until the modern style of the early 1930s had defined them as being so. Once one style has won, all the others are out of date. But did they have unused expressive force? and did they resurface later? Auden’s early style looks like something less radical than some of the Modernist writers of the 1920s. That case is still open. However, for the most part the 81 were stylistic conservatives. That is what we are looking at.
Roberts was born in 1902. That means he spent his early teens watching ex-pupils a few years older than himself go up in gilt on the Honours board because they had joined the Army, gone to the Western Front and got shot. Or blown up. Young men born in 1901, 1902, 1903 all had that experience. They never quite got to hold a rifle. But a lot of them developed a visceral dislike of Kipling, who never saw a war he didn’t like. Modernism was the reaction of the survivors.
One of the reasons that Roberts won is that he was offering a complete package. He was offering matching shoes, handbag, and hat. He always writes as part of an argument, which the poets simply are evidence for. Palmer is much less consistent – he likes many different kinds of poetry. He writes like someone who loses arguments. At the time, streamlining was the ideal, and Palmer’s lines are amorphous or baggy because he is so inclusive. Roberts offered a complete model which students or sixth-form pupils could pick up. He helps in writing essays. But Palmer comes out better, because poetry really is very diverse, and Palmer allows that. The fact that Roberts leaves out Edith Sitwell and Edward Thomas points to a basic problem.
I think I have to re-do the count. Palmer's descriptions are so banal ("depth of feeling and precision of form") that I nodded off and missed some which should probably count. Sometimes he uses a quote where he can't think of anything to say, so should I count those. A re-run has added sixty more names. Perhaps his descriptions are generic because the poetry is also generic.