Academic taste: Further comments
This is part of a series on the possibility of poetry being led astray by an elite, and the resentful thesis that multiple varieties of poetry have been suppressed (as opposed to being published even when no good in a very tolerant scene). Last time we discussed the existence of an “academic taste”, linked to reactions and feelings within university English Literature departments. People talk about this, often, in connection with the poets that academics find uninteresting. “Allott was an academic and his anthology confirmed the disappearance of a range of poets, including Noyes and Watson.” Anthologies can’t erase memories, but they do provide a focus for memory.
The argument about academic taste is roughly:
(1) academics have selective attention and are not interested by a great deal of poetry that the rest of the audience like
(2) most of the serious reviews are now written by academics (since about 1960?), and most books of poetry don’t get reviewed
(4) reviews and syllabus choices influence publishers a great deal, and also affect word of mouth and consumer choice
(5) and this affects the books that retailers stock
(6) the publishing and retailing businesses are paralysed by academic prestige and inhibited from publishing kinds of poetry which would sell (but which are disapproved of by conservative academics).
(4) and (5) just aren't true. This is where the theory falls down. (6) is almost completely untrue. We could add a final idea, that “the poetry which uses/imitates entire cognitive processes also used by academics is favoured by academics”.
As for (6), I would think that Oxford University Press and Carcanet do favour the academic taste. (That is, OUP did before they abandoned the contemporary poetry market.) But unsophisticated poets could get published somewhere else. Carcanet define and satisfy a specialist taste, they appeal to a particular sector of the market and it is clearly not true that they are preventing other publishers from being successful.
Palmer describes for us maybe ninety poets of the inter-war period who just aren't read today. In fact, none of them were intellectuals, and that is connected with Allott’s decision not to include them in his large-scale retrospective anthology in 1962. Many of them were very popular in their day. Certainly Noyes and Watson sold a lot of books. But the market abandoned them – this is a much larger-scale event than the rejection, much later, of such kitsch-nationalist poets by Allott, Ian Hamilton, or other compilers of standard works. The popular market is much more voracious in forgetting and throwing away than the academic world. Everyone forgets the cultural product of last week so that they can consume the product for this week. It’s part of the consumption process.
It is only fair to define Allott’s book as a sequel to Michael Roberts’ 1936 Faber Book of Modern Verse, since Allott accepts almost every British poet who was in the 1936 selection. The converse applies – Roberts purged a large (if indefinite) number of poets who were still alive and whom he effectively defined as irrelevant. Roberts says that he has selected only poets who seem relevant to the future– an untenable claim, since he can have had no accurate idea of what was going to happen next. Anyway, the work of purging was done by Roberts and the (ten years younger) Allott just followed his pattern. Allott seems keen to follow the detailed examination which Roberts extols as part of creating new values. The attention to detail is supposed to carry out the liberation from outmoded values. This is a trick – it is all too obvious that if JC Squire had examined poets closely he would have ended up choosing poets which suited his taste, and that Roberts and Allott used “objectivity” to select poems by other Oxford graduates.
The way in which close reading is used on the text while being rigorously not applied to the person reading the text is still irritating. Roberts and his allies seem to be taking over the whole poetic scene, including its past. Their own ideological composition is therefore of the highest interest. But they blank this out. The lens is strong enough to disperse most of the poets writing, as at 1936. but it is invisible to itself. Reflexivity is being fundamentally denied. Saying that you’re The Future doesn't really cut it.
I see the problem in a different way. Poets are paranoid about being ignored. The academic conversation does validate some things, but leaves out maybe 99% of the work that gets published. This makes academics a target for paranoia. I think this is irrational. Academics aren’t there to write testimonials for x thousand bad poetry books. To dwell on that – academic writing only has status because it eliminates what is irritating when you dwell on it. It may be that poetry gets forgotten on a large scale – this doesn't mean that academics have to remember all the poets whom everyone else forgets. Thinking that the formal record in magazines like Critical Quarterly is the record that counts is just the kind of error that makes people annoyed with academics. But wherever I take a close look, most of the books being sold are the ones not getting “serious critical attention”; the academic conversation, or the memory it sets up, gives a consistently misleading version of what we were actually reading – in 1930, 1965, or now. Most poetry is not satisfying to do a close reading of, or to write about. But it may actually be pleasurable – the illusion is when you decide that all poetry is more intelligent than popular music. Actually, a great deal of poetry is simple in the way that pop music is, and it can reach a large audience with those qualities.
Geoffrey Hill is the classic example of a poet fully absorbed by academic life, writing difficult and opaque work that many people do not find gratifying. The bibliography of academic work on Hill is formidable – he seems to be a “safety shot” for someone who wants to research the modern period but is also deeply conservative. He is a safe academic asset for the uninspired. But, simultaneously, he reaches a great many people who otherwise find modern poetry dumbed-down and poppy and trivial. He is not a cult figure, although he probably was in the 1950s: Allott forced him to supply an explanation of his poem before Allott would consent to include it. But, I don’t think he is a basis for generalisations about academic taste. He spent much time not producing anything, and much of his work is unsatisfying because he was determined to produce, without a winning idea. This connects with emotional processes in Hill, quite well known by now, and not with some secret rules of academic existence. Work like Mercian Hymns and Speech! Speech! is spontaneous and emotionally rewarding, and that just shows that much of his work is hard going because it cost him too much effort to write it. It didn't excite him.
Were Hill’s inhibitions related to high “academic" standards? maybe, but academic status also gives some people an unnecessarily high self-regard and a tendency to talk highly-educated nonsense without ever wanting to stop.
I have spent considerable time recently studying catalogues which list all, or most, of the poetry books published in a given year. I am not sure how productive this is. But it underlines how diverse the business is. If you actually look at all the books published in 1977, they include a dizzying variety of poetry, most of it bad I expect. Most of it certainly wasn't academic. There never was a "stranglehold" of the academics. As I said, a magazine like Critical Quarterly, reviewing maybe 1% of the books coming out, only reviewed books of interest to their audience, who were mostly English teachers. They didn't block anybody else from reaching an audience. This is just a myth.
Sunday, 15 November 2020
Friday, 13 November 2020
Herbert Palmer - more and better
Palmer, two: more about Palmer’s 1938 book
This is some better detail on poetry between 1901 and 1938, as recorded by Palmer.
I don’t think Palmer was an idiot. I take that back. But there is a problem in that he hates modernism, and can only represent it through parody, and that he cannot find anything (else) significant happening after 1920. He doesn’t make this explicit, but the implication of all the detail he piles up is that the crisis was, not eccentric (and irrational?) poets writing under the influence of Dada and Surrealism, but the drying up of the main current of English verse, which had flowed ever since the Elizabethans. He doesn't push forward any new poets, after the fifth Georgian Book, as significant even in conservative terms.
I was disappointed, because what I wanted was to find out about poets who went on writing “nationalist-patriotic" poems after the fashion for that collapsed, and Palmer says there weren’t any. My thesis was that there was a sector of poets who weren't aware of fashions because they weren’t aware of the book market, and who continued dozens of forgotten verbal and cultural styles. This may not be true, or at least Palmer doesn't bear it out.
I also wanted something intimate about the thriving of kitsch, or at least about why poetry moved away from it. That is, if we view Noyes, Stephen Phillips, Francis Thompson, as kitsch. Palmer is not really interested by these poets and doesn't see the march away from that overripe style as especially important. Again, he doesn't give me information about poets who failed to notice the change of style and were still writing kitsch in 1930. This is frustrating. My impression is that poetry was more dominated by fashion, a hundred years ago, than it is now, because it was more linked to the commercial system. We seem to have poetry as an act of piety, almost, but buying a book is akin to buying a cake; it involves temptation, indulgence, and fascination with novelty.
This is what Palmer says about Sir William Watson, who got a baronetcy for a fulsome wartime poem praising Lloyd George– telling untruth to power, basically: “Only a few of his poems have a completely independent existence, for their music had to be felicitous to survive the conventional phrasing. The good in the man seemed to be well known, the bad was getting more frequent and self-evident; and as he was a rather pompous egotist (almost as bad a megalomaniac as John Davidson) and believed in himself beyond the confines of normality, all you could do was to shrug your shoulders and leave him alone. He could not develop. [...] He was a back number, and on the shelf.”
This is really good literary criticism. I don't think people are so honest today. Palmer carefully finds the good in Watson while making it clear just how bad he was. He doesn't use the word “kitsch” but really Watson is a prime example of it.
“By 1910 Kipling had had his day, his great vogue, and suddenly Masefield stepped triumphantly into his shoes.” - This is really interesting; it wasn’t the war which toppled Kipling, although obviously by 1920 a militarist seemed to be a monstrous thing. Militarism had been on the poetic agenda since 1897 (‘Admirals All’), and fashions rarely last so long.
Palmer writes interestingly about Modernism because he is so uninhibited: he is like someone locked in an environment he doesn't understand, bombarded with stimuli which he forms into multiple explanatory patterns, all of which are wrong. He gives us 58 pages on Modernism, all of which seems erroneous and overwrought to us today, since we know what the poets were really saying. But, actually, he found Modernism very stimulating: his reaction is full of new patterns, even though they are the result of disorientation and frustration.
“And as the rhythm of modern life is so mixed and jarred, and full of dissonances and artificial derivations, you do, of course, find the expression of all this in the rhythms and moments and quotations and kaleidoscope patterns of The Waste Land – which is suggestive of gramophone groanings, wireless adjustings, machinery buzzings, fog-horn explosions, cinema clackings, motor traffic, underground traffic, street wanderings, the tarred road, comic opera, jazz, typewriter clickings and sandwich-paper rustlings.”
Palmer doesn't differentiate between poetry having a cultural critique, and capturing negative features of an industrial civilisation, and poetry being unpleasant (and anti-aesthetic). But there is a deeper problem, which brings us up against Time issues: faced with a new rhythm, he wants to break it down and replace it with a familiar rhythm, whereas someone younger would assimilate to it, and hear the tune as it is being played. This rigidity presents itself as a belief in rules (always described as ‘eternal’). It is pretty much like hearing a jazz tune and interpreting it as just being a series of mistakes – you could improve it by removing all the syncopation and the blue notes. Palmer may have been rigid because he liked what was already there; this is speculative. Anyway, age makes for rigidity.
Palmer doesn’t mention the phenomenon of “bypass areas” and their populations; but, in 1938, he was clearly living in such a bypassed area, because he rejected the new poetry of the past (almost) twenty years. This would stand more exploration than he gives it; if you are part of the literary world for forty years (or more), and fashions change every five years, you may spend a lot of your life on a island – cut off from what is happening and repeating patterns you already know.
Maybe it is true that “poetry in the past twenty years has simply gone crazy and is just howling”, but it is also possible that you have lost your receptivity and your brain is just rejecting new patterns. It could be either, couldn't it.
I only have one real problem with Palmer’s classification. He discusses WJ Turner as part of the “moonlight school”, who dominated the fifth Georgian Book, and does not add to that; whereas I see Turner as a Modernist, and something like “The Seven Days of the Sun” can only be classified in that way.
He mentions one Katherine M Buck: “Another poet of ‘heroic’ dimensions is Katherine M Buck, who in the Wayland-Dietrich Saga has written ‘the world’s longest poem’, a gigantic unveiling of myth and folk-lore and barbaric customs, an enormous work revealing wide and massive scholarship and much knowledge of wild life in the country.” A bookseller’s list advises “9x6. 3608pp. Frontis, some b/w illus and maps. Ex-libris. This saga describing the legendary life and times of the Gothic King Theoderic the Great, remembered in Germanic legend as Dietrich von Bern, casts a fascinating light on the life and customs of the thirteenth century., showing our mediaeval forefathers as they lived and hated, loved and died." In 8 volumes (plus an Index volume). OK, that is quite long. We have sword and sworcery tales and so did they. Theoderic died in AD 526, not the 13th C.
I wanted to find confirmation of the thesis that poetry became more empirical and more preoccupied with fact and the testing of ideas. Palmer does not directly comment on this, but where he describes the Georgians you can fairly accurately interpret part of it as representing the rise of fact and the shunning of rhetoric. He lists 12 features of Georgian poetry – the careful breakdown is an empirical effort in itself, avoiding generalisations and the assumption of authority. There is also this comment on the development of Noyes in the Twenties –“It is interesting [to…] notice the post-War increase of a mystical and intellectual horizon and a more fastidious way with words.”
I am not sure about the mysticism.
I wanted to check if there were other verse dramas beside the ones of Phillips, but Palmer is not explicit about this. Flecker wrote the beautiful ‘Hassan’, but I think this was only produced after his death (by Basil Dean). In 1923. Choreography by Fokine, music by Delius. It was a big hit. A stray Web page informs me that Hassan was the last full-scale West End production of a verse drama until Murder In the Cathedral. I am not sure which production this means, since the 1937 production was at the Mercury Theatre, which is too far out (Notting Hill) to be West End. I am guessing the West End production came after the war.
It is convenient to think of “Georgian” poetry as being one single thing, but in fact the anthologies were conceived of as displaying a whole generation, and the poets were very diverse – quite apart from the 5th anthology being different from the first one. The most puzzling thing about Palmer is his identification of a “Second Georgian Revolt”. This is defined thus: “Even though the moon be not mentioned by name it is frequently felt. The landscape is hushed. The winds are still, with just faint clouds trailing their gauzy edges across its disk. The music of the verse is slow and mournful. The colours are uncertain, tending to dissolve into greys and dark greens and silvery blues. The Celtic Twilight has moved forward into the Georgian Moonlight.” This is the Moonlight School. It is surprising if many poets began doing the same thing, but Palmer remarks of the 4th and 5th Georgian Books - “Each of the post-War Georgian anthologies is excessively pastoralist. Now we are definitely confronted by the poetry of escape, not only from the ardours and horrors of War, but also from the demands and decisions of the peace that followed it.” Not a revolt, more of a wandering off into the woods.
I wanted to identify the point where poetry became associated with Left-liberal positions, so that people with Right attitudes kept them quiet and did not expect poetry to express them. Well, I couldn't locate this date before reading Palmer, and Palmer sheds no further light on it. I would guess that “1965” would be a good moment to look at. But the history of anti-Left cultural positions is more complex than people give them credit for. Filtering non-political poetry, and statements, to dig out pebbles of political thought, is exciting because it reveals things we don’t know about. The more unfamiliar they are, the less they are a significant part of the life of poetry, as opposed to some unconscious and interred layer of detritus. There isn’t really a heritage of Cold War Poetry, even if the Cold War was prominent in the news and in the way the poets reacted to the newspaper every day. Writing “empirical” poetry expressed a support of Cold War positions for some people – because it represented a rejection of ideology. But, the factual style was very widespread, and you could probably find people writing in a documentary, factual style who were actually Marxists if you asked about their political beliefs.
This is some better detail on poetry between 1901 and 1938, as recorded by Palmer.
I don’t think Palmer was an idiot. I take that back. But there is a problem in that he hates modernism, and can only represent it through parody, and that he cannot find anything (else) significant happening after 1920. He doesn’t make this explicit, but the implication of all the detail he piles up is that the crisis was, not eccentric (and irrational?) poets writing under the influence of Dada and Surrealism, but the drying up of the main current of English verse, which had flowed ever since the Elizabethans. He doesn't push forward any new poets, after the fifth Georgian Book, as significant even in conservative terms.
I was disappointed, because what I wanted was to find out about poets who went on writing “nationalist-patriotic" poems after the fashion for that collapsed, and Palmer says there weren’t any. My thesis was that there was a sector of poets who weren't aware of fashions because they weren’t aware of the book market, and who continued dozens of forgotten verbal and cultural styles. This may not be true, or at least Palmer doesn't bear it out.
I also wanted something intimate about the thriving of kitsch, or at least about why poetry moved away from it. That is, if we view Noyes, Stephen Phillips, Francis Thompson, as kitsch. Palmer is not really interested by these poets and doesn't see the march away from that overripe style as especially important. Again, he doesn't give me information about poets who failed to notice the change of style and were still writing kitsch in 1930. This is frustrating. My impression is that poetry was more dominated by fashion, a hundred years ago, than it is now, because it was more linked to the commercial system. We seem to have poetry as an act of piety, almost, but buying a book is akin to buying a cake; it involves temptation, indulgence, and fascination with novelty.
This is what Palmer says about Sir William Watson, who got a baronetcy for a fulsome wartime poem praising Lloyd George– telling untruth to power, basically: “Only a few of his poems have a completely independent existence, for their music had to be felicitous to survive the conventional phrasing. The good in the man seemed to be well known, the bad was getting more frequent and self-evident; and as he was a rather pompous egotist (almost as bad a megalomaniac as John Davidson) and believed in himself beyond the confines of normality, all you could do was to shrug your shoulders and leave him alone. He could not develop. [...] He was a back number, and on the shelf.”
This is really good literary criticism. I don't think people are so honest today. Palmer carefully finds the good in Watson while making it clear just how bad he was. He doesn't use the word “kitsch” but really Watson is a prime example of it.
“By 1910 Kipling had had his day, his great vogue, and suddenly Masefield stepped triumphantly into his shoes.” - This is really interesting; it wasn’t the war which toppled Kipling, although obviously by 1920 a militarist seemed to be a monstrous thing. Militarism had been on the poetic agenda since 1897 (‘Admirals All’), and fashions rarely last so long.
Palmer writes interestingly about Modernism because he is so uninhibited: he is like someone locked in an environment he doesn't understand, bombarded with stimuli which he forms into multiple explanatory patterns, all of which are wrong. He gives us 58 pages on Modernism, all of which seems erroneous and overwrought to us today, since we know what the poets were really saying. But, actually, he found Modernism very stimulating: his reaction is full of new patterns, even though they are the result of disorientation and frustration.
“And as the rhythm of modern life is so mixed and jarred, and full of dissonances and artificial derivations, you do, of course, find the expression of all this in the rhythms and moments and quotations and kaleidoscope patterns of The Waste Land – which is suggestive of gramophone groanings, wireless adjustings, machinery buzzings, fog-horn explosions, cinema clackings, motor traffic, underground traffic, street wanderings, the tarred road, comic opera, jazz, typewriter clickings and sandwich-paper rustlings.”
Palmer doesn't differentiate between poetry having a cultural critique, and capturing negative features of an industrial civilisation, and poetry being unpleasant (and anti-aesthetic). But there is a deeper problem, which brings us up against Time issues: faced with a new rhythm, he wants to break it down and replace it with a familiar rhythm, whereas someone younger would assimilate to it, and hear the tune as it is being played. This rigidity presents itself as a belief in rules (always described as ‘eternal’). It is pretty much like hearing a jazz tune and interpreting it as just being a series of mistakes – you could improve it by removing all the syncopation and the blue notes. Palmer may have been rigid because he liked what was already there; this is speculative. Anyway, age makes for rigidity.
Palmer doesn’t mention the phenomenon of “bypass areas” and their populations; but, in 1938, he was clearly living in such a bypassed area, because he rejected the new poetry of the past (almost) twenty years. This would stand more exploration than he gives it; if you are part of the literary world for forty years (or more), and fashions change every five years, you may spend a lot of your life on a island – cut off from what is happening and repeating patterns you already know.
Maybe it is true that “poetry in the past twenty years has simply gone crazy and is just howling”, but it is also possible that you have lost your receptivity and your brain is just rejecting new patterns. It could be either, couldn't it.
I only have one real problem with Palmer’s classification. He discusses WJ Turner as part of the “moonlight school”, who dominated the fifth Georgian Book, and does not add to that; whereas I see Turner as a Modernist, and something like “The Seven Days of the Sun” can only be classified in that way.
He mentions one Katherine M Buck: “Another poet of ‘heroic’ dimensions is Katherine M Buck, who in the Wayland-Dietrich Saga has written ‘the world’s longest poem’, a gigantic unveiling of myth and folk-lore and barbaric customs, an enormous work revealing wide and massive scholarship and much knowledge of wild life in the country.” A bookseller’s list advises “9x6. 3608pp. Frontis, some b/w illus and maps. Ex-libris. This saga describing the legendary life and times of the Gothic King Theoderic the Great, remembered in Germanic legend as Dietrich von Bern, casts a fascinating light on the life and customs of the thirteenth century., showing our mediaeval forefathers as they lived and hated, loved and died." In 8 volumes (plus an Index volume). OK, that is quite long. We have sword and sworcery tales and so did they. Theoderic died in AD 526, not the 13th C.
I wanted to find confirmation of the thesis that poetry became more empirical and more preoccupied with fact and the testing of ideas. Palmer does not directly comment on this, but where he describes the Georgians you can fairly accurately interpret part of it as representing the rise of fact and the shunning of rhetoric. He lists 12 features of Georgian poetry – the careful breakdown is an empirical effort in itself, avoiding generalisations and the assumption of authority. There is also this comment on the development of Noyes in the Twenties –“It is interesting [to…] notice the post-War increase of a mystical and intellectual horizon and a more fastidious way with words.”
I am not sure about the mysticism.
I wanted to check if there were other verse dramas beside the ones of Phillips, but Palmer is not explicit about this. Flecker wrote the beautiful ‘Hassan’, but I think this was only produced after his death (by Basil Dean). In 1923. Choreography by Fokine, music by Delius. It was a big hit. A stray Web page informs me that Hassan was the last full-scale West End production of a verse drama until Murder In the Cathedral. I am not sure which production this means, since the 1937 production was at the Mercury Theatre, which is too far out (Notting Hill) to be West End. I am guessing the West End production came after the war.
It is convenient to think of “Georgian” poetry as being one single thing, but in fact the anthologies were conceived of as displaying a whole generation, and the poets were very diverse – quite apart from the 5th anthology being different from the first one. The most puzzling thing about Palmer is his identification of a “Second Georgian Revolt”. This is defined thus: “Even though the moon be not mentioned by name it is frequently felt. The landscape is hushed. The winds are still, with just faint clouds trailing their gauzy edges across its disk. The music of the verse is slow and mournful. The colours are uncertain, tending to dissolve into greys and dark greens and silvery blues. The Celtic Twilight has moved forward into the Georgian Moonlight.” This is the Moonlight School. It is surprising if many poets began doing the same thing, but Palmer remarks of the 4th and 5th Georgian Books - “Each of the post-War Georgian anthologies is excessively pastoralist. Now we are definitely confronted by the poetry of escape, not only from the ardours and horrors of War, but also from the demands and decisions of the peace that followed it.” Not a revolt, more of a wandering off into the woods.
I wanted to identify the point where poetry became associated with Left-liberal positions, so that people with Right attitudes kept them quiet and did not expect poetry to express them. Well, I couldn't locate this date before reading Palmer, and Palmer sheds no further light on it. I would guess that “1965” would be a good moment to look at. But the history of anti-Left cultural positions is more complex than people give them credit for. Filtering non-political poetry, and statements, to dig out pebbles of political thought, is exciting because it reveals things we don’t know about. The more unfamiliar they are, the less they are a significant part of the life of poetry, as opposed to some unconscious and interred layer of detritus. There isn’t really a heritage of Cold War Poetry, even if the Cold War was prominent in the news and in the way the poets reacted to the newspaper every day. Writing “empirical” poetry expressed a support of Cold War positions for some people – because it represented a rejection of ideology. But, the factual style was very widespread, and you could probably find people writing in a documentary, factual style who were actually Marxists if you asked about their political beliefs.
Wednesday, 11 November 2020
Noyes and rhetoric, five: the academic dominance of taste?
Noyes and rhetoric, five
Event A
We are investigating the linked populist Right theses about culture, about being too Left-liberal, not representing most of the population, reflecting the views of a metropolitan elite, being unpatriotic and secular, being fashion-driven and obsessed with small formal distinctions, etc. I don’t like any of these theses but it seems part of being civic to discuss them.
This time we are going to discuss a theory that poetry was taken over, in the 1950s, by an academic taste which rewrote history to erase everybody who wasn’t intellectual, made it impossible for poetry to be popular, and linked the fate of poetry to the academy. We will call this event A, for brevity. I don’t see any detailed or explicit statement of this; it is a significant fact that the populist arguments are never made at length, they are circulated mainly as anecdotes, suggestions, insults, etc. This asymmetry is important – the complete set of academic statements about poetry is matched only by a range of populist positions which are couched in allusive and fragmentary ways and quite well suited to life as brief subjective and angry comments in social media sites. However, we have for the period 1901-38 a source, Herbert Palmer’s book (see previous blog), which is so remote from other treatments that it acts as evidence that an academic taste existed – being whatever Palmer disagrees with, crudely.
Two of the main shifts during the 20th century were the decline of nationalism and religion, two emotional patterns which abidingly resisted evidence and plugged directly into intuition, or prejudice. This shift applies to culture at large as well as to poetry. Because universities are dedicated to finding evidence to test theories and attitudes, and because they have a belief in objective knowledge, it may be that spending time in academia encourages the poet to deploy evidence in poetry. That is, they would introduce facts in order to explain states of mind, or tenets of belief, rather than simple assertion, or use of symbolic images. Such poems would do well in Close Reading classes. We would call this an empirical kind of poetry. Testable knowledge competes with prejudice or ideology (intellectual speculation) as the authoritative source of the information which is the substance of poetry. This sounds convincing, but, as my last few posts have argued, the rise of facts and checking is much wider than poetry, and is part of a civilisation based on technical knowledge and on the purchase of commodities. However, the move away from religion did happen earlier among the educated.
Attributing the change of taste exclusively to the universities is clearly wrong. Two key moments in this event were the publications of FR Leavis’ New Bearings In English Poetry (1932) and of Kenneth Allott’s Penguin Contemporary Poetry (editions in 1950 and 1962). It is reasonable to think that these were influential on how poetry was read, and in fact that the taste which they condemned (by omission in Allott’s case) came to be seen as kitsch. Allott underwrote a view in which Eliot and Auden were the major poets of the 20th century (up to 1960), and this did tend to equate intelligence with good poetry. Noyes does not feature in Allott’s book; he had sold a lot of books, but has made an exit from the market-place. We can see these two books as bad moments for Noyes, without having to accept that everybody fell into line when these two academics proposed a line. It is equally credible that the poetry public was composed of obstinate and non-suggestible people, who acted by intuition, were conservative in bias, and had limited exposure to “taste-makers”. We can propose an alternative explanation for Noyes’ exit, namely that his poetry actually is kitsch. Without getting too deeply into the evidence (there is too much of it), Noyes is also omitted from Yeats’ Oxford Book of Modern Verse. I counted about 85 poets who are treated in detail in Palmer's book (with more than half a page, roughly) and found that only 15 of them make it into Allott's anthology. Allott was culling the literary stock as well as recording it. Admittedly, Allott does not start until 1918 - but he does include Laurence Binyon, and Palmer says Binyon was too old to be included in the first Georgian Book.
When in 1967 the little Penguin book The Mersey Sound sold a hundred thousand copies (eventual sales even higher), it was possible to see this as a revolt against a dominant academic taste. My suspicion is that it was never dominant. Most people who were reading poetry were not reading books about poetry, and the role of “serious” reviews in getting poetry known is always controversial. The Liverpool poets reached their audience, I would think, first by live readings and then by word of mouth. The books which the serious reviewers praised (always temperately) did not necessarily sell very well at all; which is not proof of “dominance”. I am happy to agree that there was a large anti-intellectual taste in the Sixties which liked pop poetry, but I have to insist that there was a large anti-intellectual public taste in the 1950s. It may have been true that the Close Reading reviewers, in Critical Quarterly for instance, were out of step with the market. The strange thing is that they wanted this: they were a reform group and this is only possible if you start by being out of step. Actually, this was a reason for buying their books, or Critical Quarterly itself.
The situation of academics in a country where there are very few graduates encourages them to take up the attitudes of a minority, either as rebels and martyrs, or as an elite acting out behaviour models to be copied. The position of serious reviewers, up until the Seventies at least, was of people who knew reading techniques, or maybe moral principles, which everybody else didn’t: this was only possible if you were a minority, and consensus would destroy it as a position (or as a commodity).
It is interesting that Allott omits Rudyard Kipling, from his book labelled 1918-60. It is awkward to locate the real significance of this, since Kipling barely published any poetry after 1919 ('The Years Between'); quite probably he was someone who wrote great poetry but who was politically unacceptable in 1960. I am doubtful that Allott was staking out new territory here: Kipling disappeared partly because he was a militarist and people had bad memories of the Great War, partly because he was an imperialist and the empire became emotionally unfashionable after 1945. Surely these attitude shifts came from outside the poetry community.
The word “hegemony” is often used here. That would be to say, the universities had a hegemony on literary taste after 1950 (or after 1930? or 1980?). I suspect that hegemony is anything that someone else believes that you don’t. There is a piece of false logic – books about poetry are bound to be written by more or less intellectual people because anyone else would get bored and so flake out. It is credible that both the people who read books about poetry aren't typical of people who read poetry. The books have to be interesting, and so they have to contain ideas– even if a lot of poetry readers are afraid of ideas. I can accept that academics take over some of the jobs as critics (and partly as editors) from a group of freelance agents, (like Read or DS Savage) but not that the written record catches the movement of the market. Let us cite Poetry Review, and Herbert Palmer’s 1938 book Post-Victorian Poetry, as counter-evidence – expressions of views which are completely non-academic and anti-intellectual. I have looked at a few issues of Poetry Review from the 1950s, and they are scarily unintelligent. They ran an attack on modern poetry and then a set of letters which agreed in being scared of “modern poetry”. My point is that people who found it helpful to set out their ideas at length, in words, were exceptional, and exceptionally intellectual, cultivated, and modern. They are possibly where modern taste came from. But the others could be in the majority without leaving much of a record behind – their views were prejudices and had been learnt informally rather than from ambitious theoretical writings.
An area where event A is real is in the teaching of poetry in schools. Certainly the teachers are influenced by the academic degrees which they studied for. People who reject poetry probably can associate that with bad memories of lessons at school. But this is misleading; after all people don’t learn about rock music or cinema from school, but they enjoy them. School is associated with poetry because teenagers don’t read it much outside school – so the rejection is a social thing, pervasive and the product of voiceless and intangible processes. The school part would not be important if poetry hadn't already vanished from a normal consumption pattern. It is irrational to make the school central in the formation of taste. Admittedly, people who give a lot of time to poetry as adults mostly have favourable memories of poetry at school. If they liked their teachers, that is contact with the university, at one remove.
There is something simpler than “hegemony”, namely that, where huge numbers of people were going to university and eventually becoming graduates, the “academic” taste spread for basic numerical reasons. The theory of “close reading” is that you take your primary aesthetic reaction and find what signs inside the fabric of the verse brought the reaction about. In theory it is completely permissive and so should not bring about assimilation, that is, reduction of attitudes that don’t conform to the rest of the class. Most people don’t find that it is quite so neutral.
I don’t have suggestions about poets who should be celebrated and advanced in front of Eliot and Auden. It is clear that there are some stylistic features which link Francis Thompson, William Watson, Noyes, and Stephen Phillips, and that all of those poets have been kicked into the long grass by modern taste (since about 1930). But those stylistic features add up to kitsch.
If we consider British poetry 1900 to 1938, I would think that the poets who are still read are like this:
War Poets (probably Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon)
Robert Graves
Edward Thomas
TS Eliot
Dylan Thomas
WH Auden
women poets (in a lump, in revisionist anthologies only)
Stephen Spender
Hugh MacDiarmid
Note that I omit poets who had made a reputation before 1900 (so, for instance, Housman, Hardy, Kipling). We know that many poets well-known at the time have now lapsed from memory.
Palmer’s record on this list is like this.
War Poets (probably Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon) admires – but features Robert Nichols, Owen, Sassoon, and Graves
Robert Graves -present
Edward Thomas Palmer likes him a lot
TS Eliot ridiculed
Dylan Thomas not mentioned
WH Auden brief mention (says “whose verse […] seems to have excommunicated more than it has communicated – including, of course, the English language”.
women poets – favourable if vague chapter on women poets)
Stephen Spender tiny mention (says SS was influenced by Robert Bridges)
Hugh MacDiarmid mentioned but not discussed
I am not sure if people still read the poetry of DH Lawrence and Edith Sitwell. Bunting was born in 1900 but his poetry up to 1951 is negligible, and it is his two late long poems which people mainly read.
I have suggested that the contrast between Palmer and (say) Allott is between naive taste and academic taste. But an alternative view is that they are simply two different generations and that the changes in taste were chronological. They would correspond to shifts in taste affecting furniture or clothes. I think shifts in time give scholars difficulty because they imply that the scholar is subject to forces they can’t control and not on a raised vantage point outside Time. Academics these days want to write about poetry in terms of gender, class, or ethnic group. These do not offer an account of why poetry changed. They may not offer more than a very crude account of differences in taste. That is, the view through identity politics may fail when the usual empirical tests, looking for evidence and asking for the basic theory to have a visible trace in the texts, are applied.
Allott was an academic and his anthology confirmed the disappearance of a range of poets, including Noyes and Watson. But, this was probably not controversial at the time. My guess is that Allott was rather selfless and that his selection is of very high quality. He wasn’t carrying out some kind of coup d’etat. In fact Palmer already basically writes Noyes off – he likes his 1920s poem on the history of science but basically says his early work, hugely popular, was kitsch. This is pretty much what I felt about Noyes. Allott would have been eccentric to pack Noyes into his anthology in 1962.
The reason for a constant change of taste may be as simple as the fact that nobody buys the same book of poetry twice. The commercial sense wants to acquire and put out new product all the time. If you don’t issue new books every quarter, you don’t have a business. Change is there absolutely all the time and is not dependent on theoretical reforms or sociological changes.
Event A
We are investigating the linked populist Right theses about culture, about being too Left-liberal, not representing most of the population, reflecting the views of a metropolitan elite, being unpatriotic and secular, being fashion-driven and obsessed with small formal distinctions, etc. I don’t like any of these theses but it seems part of being civic to discuss them.
This time we are going to discuss a theory that poetry was taken over, in the 1950s, by an academic taste which rewrote history to erase everybody who wasn’t intellectual, made it impossible for poetry to be popular, and linked the fate of poetry to the academy. We will call this event A, for brevity. I don’t see any detailed or explicit statement of this; it is a significant fact that the populist arguments are never made at length, they are circulated mainly as anecdotes, suggestions, insults, etc. This asymmetry is important – the complete set of academic statements about poetry is matched only by a range of populist positions which are couched in allusive and fragmentary ways and quite well suited to life as brief subjective and angry comments in social media sites. However, we have for the period 1901-38 a source, Herbert Palmer’s book (see previous blog), which is so remote from other treatments that it acts as evidence that an academic taste existed – being whatever Palmer disagrees with, crudely.
Two of the main shifts during the 20th century were the decline of nationalism and religion, two emotional patterns which abidingly resisted evidence and plugged directly into intuition, or prejudice. This shift applies to culture at large as well as to poetry. Because universities are dedicated to finding evidence to test theories and attitudes, and because they have a belief in objective knowledge, it may be that spending time in academia encourages the poet to deploy evidence in poetry. That is, they would introduce facts in order to explain states of mind, or tenets of belief, rather than simple assertion, or use of symbolic images. Such poems would do well in Close Reading classes. We would call this an empirical kind of poetry. Testable knowledge competes with prejudice or ideology (intellectual speculation) as the authoritative source of the information which is the substance of poetry. This sounds convincing, but, as my last few posts have argued, the rise of facts and checking is much wider than poetry, and is part of a civilisation based on technical knowledge and on the purchase of commodities. However, the move away from religion did happen earlier among the educated.
Attributing the change of taste exclusively to the universities is clearly wrong. Two key moments in this event were the publications of FR Leavis’ New Bearings In English Poetry (1932) and of Kenneth Allott’s Penguin Contemporary Poetry (editions in 1950 and 1962). It is reasonable to think that these were influential on how poetry was read, and in fact that the taste which they condemned (by omission in Allott’s case) came to be seen as kitsch. Allott underwrote a view in which Eliot and Auden were the major poets of the 20th century (up to 1960), and this did tend to equate intelligence with good poetry. Noyes does not feature in Allott’s book; he had sold a lot of books, but has made an exit from the market-place. We can see these two books as bad moments for Noyes, without having to accept that everybody fell into line when these two academics proposed a line. It is equally credible that the poetry public was composed of obstinate and non-suggestible people, who acted by intuition, were conservative in bias, and had limited exposure to “taste-makers”. We can propose an alternative explanation for Noyes’ exit, namely that his poetry actually is kitsch. Without getting too deeply into the evidence (there is too much of it), Noyes is also omitted from Yeats’ Oxford Book of Modern Verse. I counted about 85 poets who are treated in detail in Palmer's book (with more than half a page, roughly) and found that only 15 of them make it into Allott's anthology. Allott was culling the literary stock as well as recording it. Admittedly, Allott does not start until 1918 - but he does include Laurence Binyon, and Palmer says Binyon was too old to be included in the first Georgian Book.
When in 1967 the little Penguin book The Mersey Sound sold a hundred thousand copies (eventual sales even higher), it was possible to see this as a revolt against a dominant academic taste. My suspicion is that it was never dominant. Most people who were reading poetry were not reading books about poetry, and the role of “serious” reviews in getting poetry known is always controversial. The Liverpool poets reached their audience, I would think, first by live readings and then by word of mouth. The books which the serious reviewers praised (always temperately) did not necessarily sell very well at all; which is not proof of “dominance”. I am happy to agree that there was a large anti-intellectual taste in the Sixties which liked pop poetry, but I have to insist that there was a large anti-intellectual public taste in the 1950s. It may have been true that the Close Reading reviewers, in Critical Quarterly for instance, were out of step with the market. The strange thing is that they wanted this: they were a reform group and this is only possible if you start by being out of step. Actually, this was a reason for buying their books, or Critical Quarterly itself.
The situation of academics in a country where there are very few graduates encourages them to take up the attitudes of a minority, either as rebels and martyrs, or as an elite acting out behaviour models to be copied. The position of serious reviewers, up until the Seventies at least, was of people who knew reading techniques, or maybe moral principles, which everybody else didn’t: this was only possible if you were a minority, and consensus would destroy it as a position (or as a commodity).
It is interesting that Allott omits Rudyard Kipling, from his book labelled 1918-60. It is awkward to locate the real significance of this, since Kipling barely published any poetry after 1919 ('The Years Between'); quite probably he was someone who wrote great poetry but who was politically unacceptable in 1960. I am doubtful that Allott was staking out new territory here: Kipling disappeared partly because he was a militarist and people had bad memories of the Great War, partly because he was an imperialist and the empire became emotionally unfashionable after 1945. Surely these attitude shifts came from outside the poetry community.
The word “hegemony” is often used here. That would be to say, the universities had a hegemony on literary taste after 1950 (or after 1930? or 1980?). I suspect that hegemony is anything that someone else believes that you don’t. There is a piece of false logic – books about poetry are bound to be written by more or less intellectual people because anyone else would get bored and so flake out. It is credible that both the people who read books about poetry aren't typical of people who read poetry. The books have to be interesting, and so they have to contain ideas– even if a lot of poetry readers are afraid of ideas. I can accept that academics take over some of the jobs as critics (and partly as editors) from a group of freelance agents, (like Read or DS Savage) but not that the written record catches the movement of the market. Let us cite Poetry Review, and Herbert Palmer’s 1938 book Post-Victorian Poetry, as counter-evidence – expressions of views which are completely non-academic and anti-intellectual. I have looked at a few issues of Poetry Review from the 1950s, and they are scarily unintelligent. They ran an attack on modern poetry and then a set of letters which agreed in being scared of “modern poetry”. My point is that people who found it helpful to set out their ideas at length, in words, were exceptional, and exceptionally intellectual, cultivated, and modern. They are possibly where modern taste came from. But the others could be in the majority without leaving much of a record behind – their views were prejudices and had been learnt informally rather than from ambitious theoretical writings.
An area where event A is real is in the teaching of poetry in schools. Certainly the teachers are influenced by the academic degrees which they studied for. People who reject poetry probably can associate that with bad memories of lessons at school. But this is misleading; after all people don’t learn about rock music or cinema from school, but they enjoy them. School is associated with poetry because teenagers don’t read it much outside school – so the rejection is a social thing, pervasive and the product of voiceless and intangible processes. The school part would not be important if poetry hadn't already vanished from a normal consumption pattern. It is irrational to make the school central in the formation of taste. Admittedly, people who give a lot of time to poetry as adults mostly have favourable memories of poetry at school. If they liked their teachers, that is contact with the university, at one remove.
There is something simpler than “hegemony”, namely that, where huge numbers of people were going to university and eventually becoming graduates, the “academic” taste spread for basic numerical reasons. The theory of “close reading” is that you take your primary aesthetic reaction and find what signs inside the fabric of the verse brought the reaction about. In theory it is completely permissive and so should not bring about assimilation, that is, reduction of attitudes that don’t conform to the rest of the class. Most people don’t find that it is quite so neutral.
I don’t have suggestions about poets who should be celebrated and advanced in front of Eliot and Auden. It is clear that there are some stylistic features which link Francis Thompson, William Watson, Noyes, and Stephen Phillips, and that all of those poets have been kicked into the long grass by modern taste (since about 1930). But those stylistic features add up to kitsch.
If we consider British poetry 1900 to 1938, I would think that the poets who are still read are like this:
War Poets (probably Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon)
Robert Graves
Edward Thomas
TS Eliot
Dylan Thomas
WH Auden
women poets (in a lump, in revisionist anthologies only)
Stephen Spender
Hugh MacDiarmid
Note that I omit poets who had made a reputation before 1900 (so, for instance, Housman, Hardy, Kipling). We know that many poets well-known at the time have now lapsed from memory.
Palmer’s record on this list is like this.
War Poets (probably Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon) admires – but features Robert Nichols, Owen, Sassoon, and Graves
Robert Graves -present
Edward Thomas Palmer likes him a lot
TS Eliot ridiculed
Dylan Thomas not mentioned
WH Auden brief mention (says “whose verse […] seems to have excommunicated more than it has communicated – including, of course, the English language”.
women poets – favourable if vague chapter on women poets)
Stephen Spender tiny mention (says SS was influenced by Robert Bridges)
Hugh MacDiarmid mentioned but not discussed
I am not sure if people still read the poetry of DH Lawrence and Edith Sitwell. Bunting was born in 1900 but his poetry up to 1951 is negligible, and it is his two late long poems which people mainly read.
I have suggested that the contrast between Palmer and (say) Allott is between naive taste and academic taste. But an alternative view is that they are simply two different generations and that the changes in taste were chronological. They would correspond to shifts in taste affecting furniture or clothes. I think shifts in time give scholars difficulty because they imply that the scholar is subject to forces they can’t control and not on a raised vantage point outside Time. Academics these days want to write about poetry in terms of gender, class, or ethnic group. These do not offer an account of why poetry changed. They may not offer more than a very crude account of differences in taste. That is, the view through identity politics may fail when the usual empirical tests, looking for evidence and asking for the basic theory to have a visible trace in the texts, are applied.
Allott was an academic and his anthology confirmed the disappearance of a range of poets, including Noyes and Watson. But, this was probably not controversial at the time. My guess is that Allott was rather selfless and that his selection is of very high quality. He wasn’t carrying out some kind of coup d’etat. In fact Palmer already basically writes Noyes off – he likes his 1920s poem on the history of science but basically says his early work, hugely popular, was kitsch. This is pretty much what I felt about Noyes. Allott would have been eccentric to pack Noyes into his anthology in 1962.
The reason for a constant change of taste may be as simple as the fact that nobody buys the same book of poetry twice. The commercial sense wants to acquire and put out new product all the time. If you don’t issue new books every quarter, you don’t have a business. Change is there absolutely all the time and is not dependent on theoretical reforms or sociological changes.
Herbert Palmer and the disappearance of entire swathes of poetry
Leering out of the Darkness: Herbert Palmer (1880-1961)
I have been reading about human fossils, and people winning arguments by making exact measurements. With poetry, you can’t zoom in and the results are not reproducible. People can’t agree whether something is made of stone, or of bone. Let alone whether it’s a rib or a talus.
The start point is a 1938 book by Palmer in which he abolishes modern poetry. The book is ‘Post Victorian Poetry’ and brief checks suggest that it remained in print until 1978. The key statement is this: "Surely Mr Eliot never intended The Waste Land to be taken quite so seriously, at least not quite so constructively, especially as it exhibits too many of the features of a hoax...If The Waste Land means anything to me in relation to 2030, it is that The Waste Land will truly be a waste land, unknown and unhonoured, leering out of the darkness at all other English poetry, which will be equally unknown and unhonoured." I have just ordered the book from the Internet, but I did read it about 25 years ago, so I know what the proposition is. Palmer was writing from the point of view that everything to do with Eliot was corrupting and menacing, and I come from the position that Eliot was the most significant poet between the wars, and fundamental to the poetic taste which has flourished since the last world war. There is a complete incompatibility between me and Palmer, and the question is whether we are all fundamentally different from each other and any public statement reflecting taste, e.g. claiming that Eliot was the vital poet in the inter-war era, is by nature unable to reflect a collective truth.
The point of this blog is not to resurrect Palmer (I think he was an idiot) but to explore the subjectivity inherent in the judgement of poetry. This is also the question of whether it is worthwhile writing about poetry (and whether I wasted 20 years when I was doing that every day). I am talking about a situation where I talk to an (imaginary) room with 100 people in it, expound very detailed and convincing views on several books of poetry, and at the end half the room disagree with me. That can’t be success. But there is another way of defining failure – if I read a book in a vanished style, say a book by Noyes or Palmer, and dislike it, that can be defined as a performance failure. Let’s draw the camera closer to home. I read Fiona Sampson’s “Beyond the Lyric”, about poetry roughly 2000 to 2014, and I couldn't relate to the judgements and descriptions at all. My stunned reaction was that maybe other people read my books and couldn't relate to those, either. I had written something like 2500 pages of criticism, so this was a big worry. Suppose Fiona read one of my books, would it mean anything to her? The pebble we are looking at… actually the pebble is me, and I’m just one of a million pebbles on the shore of a sea which makes pebbles to pass the time.
I think calling something “post Victorian poetry” is stupid. You can't describe an era by saying “the era when Victoria was not on the throne”. It is vacuous. My conclusion is that the logical title would have been “modern poetry” and Palmer already had traumatic associations with the word “modern” and was impelled to avoid it. Palmer’s subject area is roughly “everything EXCEPT modernity”, so he writes about whatever was not touched by stylistic reforms. There is an obvious link between this “refuge from modernity” and the UKIP style right-wing populism, which since about 2000 has been, largely, a reaction against globalisation, with (less centrally) a revolt against modern culture because the urge is against everything which the “metropolitan elite” like. There is a class of people for whom the word “modern” represents anxiety – and mention of “London-based literati” arouses suspicion.
Palmer’s attitude is roughly that, where there had been “legislation to change taste” between 1905 and 1938, he rejected the legislation in each case, so that he condemned the poetry welling up from each new idea and favoured the poetry which was written in a “refuge zone”, so out of fashion and ignoring the reforms of taste. This is useful because it sharpens our understanding of those legislative acts. They are the shared history of poetry, it would seem. It is especially interesting to examine poetry from the “refuge zone”, because that would shed light on what the reforms were, and what they were trying to do. We would like to know who originated the new ideas, and how they publicised their new ideas to a scattered world of readers (who were very attached to what they already liked). Is there a sociology of innovation? and, if so, which strata produce the innovations?
Actually, it is more accurate to say that Palmer’s taste froze at a certain point in his life. He finds the Georgian reforms quite acceptable but does not then go on to assimilate the new ideas of the 1920s.
There is another argument here. Culture makes people converge. You sit there in a reading, you all have the same reactions at the same moment. You breathe in synchrony. If you take part in poetry readings, and in reading poetry, for forty years, you naturally get closer to other people in the same scene. This makes it reasonable to think that you can speak to other people, reasonable to publish your judgements and expect them to be meaningful outside your own front door. Of course, it makes certain moments of the conversation developmental, because they are where you realise what other people's version is. You then converge on that, for the sake of the conversation and for the sake of poetry itself. Those moments are also where you realise what a poet is about, what they are aiming for. And the gratification in poetry is partly the pleasure of pleasing the poet – you get what they are saying and feel happy. The gratification is a conditioning stimulus, it affects how you react next time. It builds a new organ. You feel “symbolic” approval, and this is possibly what separates people who give a lot of time to culture from others who don’t. But the developmental moments are when you read a convincing page by a critic, for example, or look at the selection page of an anthology, or maybe at a publisher’s list. Those are moments when you find a piercing light being shed on your own reactions, but also a similar light poured onto other people's feelings. This lets you detect norms – and you are then able to assimilate them, maybe right away or maybe after a couple of years. To repeat, if you go through a lot of this you become aware of where other people's sensibility runs and of where you stand in relation to the “centre” of poetry. It is reasonable to think that there is a collective conversation about poetry, and that the poetry is an extension of the conversation. I like the sound of this. But that is why it is disturbing, or worthwhile, to read someone like Palmer and find that there was a completely different conversation going on, and that Palmer rejected every inter-war poet whom we still find interesting, while having an audience for his opinions, and a “constellation”, an “asset network” of anti-modern poets whom he favoured (and whom he thought were going to dominate the Future when all this materialist and urban frenzy had died away). Maybe we only remember one of several inter-war literary cultures. Maybe the majority of the reading public found “modernism” alien and not at all pleasurable.
I find that Palmer uses the word “Georgian revolt”. I find this interesting, because I picked it up from Robert H. Ross’s book (1965, English edition 1967) and used it as a chapter title (in a book called “Centre and periphery”). Is this from Palmer? or did someone, Edward Thomas maybe, use it around 1914? To be exact he has two chapters on the First and Second Georgian Revolts. So, apparently, I am recycling Palmer's idea. Another point is that Faber published Palmer’s book ‘Season and Festival’ in 1943, even though he had gone on record as the world's most determined anti-Eliot figure in 1938. Palmer published a poem called Cinder-Thursday (described in his book-list as “a parody”), which would seem to be a parody of 'Ash-Wednesday'. A bookseller describes it thus “A parody of T.E. Eliot's Wasteland and Ash Wednesday.” OK, Eliot didn’t mind being parodied. Not sure who this TE Eliot was.
Ancillary evidence is RL Mégroz’s book Modern English Poetry 1882-1932, published in 1933, which I used to have a copy of. I found it very sympathetic, but he seemed to like everything and in the end it wasn’t possible to read the scores of lesser poets whom he enjoyed. Mégroz is not even close to Palmer, or to other versions of the landscape as reflected by “The Faber Book of Modern verse”, 1936, or the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse.
Palmer makes visible a sort of absolute strangeness. His whole outlook on poetry is meaningless to me – a non-repeatable observation. I want to turn that strangeness into a pebble and hold it in my hand. And it cuts both ways – I represent absolute strangeness for another observer. Maybe even for someone the same age as me, but with different cultural assets or investments. I rely on the power of empathy to conclude that by writing for long enough I can make my reactions “learnable”, and so that the whole makes the individual parts clear.
That idea of agreeing “this one is a stone and that one's a piece of bone” does not seem possible to achieve for the period 1900 to 1938, certainly not for Palmer’s favoured poets, whom we now regard as kitsch and religion at one remove. I reported (in my previous four blogs) that empiricism was the successful reform of the early decades of the 20th C. However, at the outset there were probably readers who regarded such adherence to facts as inherently disappointing and unartistic, and felt that “verbal magic” was where poetry lived. “We” never means everyone.
I have been reading about human fossils, and people winning arguments by making exact measurements. With poetry, you can’t zoom in and the results are not reproducible. People can’t agree whether something is made of stone, or of bone. Let alone whether it’s a rib or a talus.
The start point is a 1938 book by Palmer in which he abolishes modern poetry. The book is ‘Post Victorian Poetry’ and brief checks suggest that it remained in print until 1978. The key statement is this: "Surely Mr Eliot never intended The Waste Land to be taken quite so seriously, at least not quite so constructively, especially as it exhibits too many of the features of a hoax...If The Waste Land means anything to me in relation to 2030, it is that The Waste Land will truly be a waste land, unknown and unhonoured, leering out of the darkness at all other English poetry, which will be equally unknown and unhonoured." I have just ordered the book from the Internet, but I did read it about 25 years ago, so I know what the proposition is. Palmer was writing from the point of view that everything to do with Eliot was corrupting and menacing, and I come from the position that Eliot was the most significant poet between the wars, and fundamental to the poetic taste which has flourished since the last world war. There is a complete incompatibility between me and Palmer, and the question is whether we are all fundamentally different from each other and any public statement reflecting taste, e.g. claiming that Eliot was the vital poet in the inter-war era, is by nature unable to reflect a collective truth.
The point of this blog is not to resurrect Palmer (I think he was an idiot) but to explore the subjectivity inherent in the judgement of poetry. This is also the question of whether it is worthwhile writing about poetry (and whether I wasted 20 years when I was doing that every day). I am talking about a situation where I talk to an (imaginary) room with 100 people in it, expound very detailed and convincing views on several books of poetry, and at the end half the room disagree with me. That can’t be success. But there is another way of defining failure – if I read a book in a vanished style, say a book by Noyes or Palmer, and dislike it, that can be defined as a performance failure. Let’s draw the camera closer to home. I read Fiona Sampson’s “Beyond the Lyric”, about poetry roughly 2000 to 2014, and I couldn't relate to the judgements and descriptions at all. My stunned reaction was that maybe other people read my books and couldn't relate to those, either. I had written something like 2500 pages of criticism, so this was a big worry. Suppose Fiona read one of my books, would it mean anything to her? The pebble we are looking at… actually the pebble is me, and I’m just one of a million pebbles on the shore of a sea which makes pebbles to pass the time.
I think calling something “post Victorian poetry” is stupid. You can't describe an era by saying “the era when Victoria was not on the throne”. It is vacuous. My conclusion is that the logical title would have been “modern poetry” and Palmer already had traumatic associations with the word “modern” and was impelled to avoid it. Palmer’s subject area is roughly “everything EXCEPT modernity”, so he writes about whatever was not touched by stylistic reforms. There is an obvious link between this “refuge from modernity” and the UKIP style right-wing populism, which since about 2000 has been, largely, a reaction against globalisation, with (less centrally) a revolt against modern culture because the urge is against everything which the “metropolitan elite” like. There is a class of people for whom the word “modern” represents anxiety – and mention of “London-based literati” arouses suspicion.
Palmer’s attitude is roughly that, where there had been “legislation to change taste” between 1905 and 1938, he rejected the legislation in each case, so that he condemned the poetry welling up from each new idea and favoured the poetry which was written in a “refuge zone”, so out of fashion and ignoring the reforms of taste. This is useful because it sharpens our understanding of those legislative acts. They are the shared history of poetry, it would seem. It is especially interesting to examine poetry from the “refuge zone”, because that would shed light on what the reforms were, and what they were trying to do. We would like to know who originated the new ideas, and how they publicised their new ideas to a scattered world of readers (who were very attached to what they already liked). Is there a sociology of innovation? and, if so, which strata produce the innovations?
Actually, it is more accurate to say that Palmer’s taste froze at a certain point in his life. He finds the Georgian reforms quite acceptable but does not then go on to assimilate the new ideas of the 1920s.
There is another argument here. Culture makes people converge. You sit there in a reading, you all have the same reactions at the same moment. You breathe in synchrony. If you take part in poetry readings, and in reading poetry, for forty years, you naturally get closer to other people in the same scene. This makes it reasonable to think that you can speak to other people, reasonable to publish your judgements and expect them to be meaningful outside your own front door. Of course, it makes certain moments of the conversation developmental, because they are where you realise what other people's version is. You then converge on that, for the sake of the conversation and for the sake of poetry itself. Those moments are also where you realise what a poet is about, what they are aiming for. And the gratification in poetry is partly the pleasure of pleasing the poet – you get what they are saying and feel happy. The gratification is a conditioning stimulus, it affects how you react next time. It builds a new organ. You feel “symbolic” approval, and this is possibly what separates people who give a lot of time to culture from others who don’t. But the developmental moments are when you read a convincing page by a critic, for example, or look at the selection page of an anthology, or maybe at a publisher’s list. Those are moments when you find a piercing light being shed on your own reactions, but also a similar light poured onto other people's feelings. This lets you detect norms – and you are then able to assimilate them, maybe right away or maybe after a couple of years. To repeat, if you go through a lot of this you become aware of where other people's sensibility runs and of where you stand in relation to the “centre” of poetry. It is reasonable to think that there is a collective conversation about poetry, and that the poetry is an extension of the conversation. I like the sound of this. But that is why it is disturbing, or worthwhile, to read someone like Palmer and find that there was a completely different conversation going on, and that Palmer rejected every inter-war poet whom we still find interesting, while having an audience for his opinions, and a “constellation”, an “asset network” of anti-modern poets whom he favoured (and whom he thought were going to dominate the Future when all this materialist and urban frenzy had died away). Maybe we only remember one of several inter-war literary cultures. Maybe the majority of the reading public found “modernism” alien and not at all pleasurable.
I find that Palmer uses the word “Georgian revolt”. I find this interesting, because I picked it up from Robert H. Ross’s book (1965, English edition 1967) and used it as a chapter title (in a book called “Centre and periphery”). Is this from Palmer? or did someone, Edward Thomas maybe, use it around 1914? To be exact he has two chapters on the First and Second Georgian Revolts. So, apparently, I am recycling Palmer's idea. Another point is that Faber published Palmer’s book ‘Season and Festival’ in 1943, even though he had gone on record as the world's most determined anti-Eliot figure in 1938. Palmer published a poem called Cinder-Thursday (described in his book-list as “a parody”), which would seem to be a parody of 'Ash-Wednesday'. A bookseller describes it thus “A parody of T.E. Eliot's Wasteland and Ash Wednesday.” OK, Eliot didn’t mind being parodied. Not sure who this TE Eliot was.
Ancillary evidence is RL Mégroz’s book Modern English Poetry 1882-1932, published in 1933, which I used to have a copy of. I found it very sympathetic, but he seemed to like everything and in the end it wasn’t possible to read the scores of lesser poets whom he enjoyed. Mégroz is not even close to Palmer, or to other versions of the landscape as reflected by “The Faber Book of Modern verse”, 1936, or the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse.
Palmer makes visible a sort of absolute strangeness. His whole outlook on poetry is meaningless to me – a non-repeatable observation. I want to turn that strangeness into a pebble and hold it in my hand. And it cuts both ways – I represent absolute strangeness for another observer. Maybe even for someone the same age as me, but with different cultural assets or investments. I rely on the power of empathy to conclude that by writing for long enough I can make my reactions “learnable”, and so that the whole makes the individual parts clear.
That idea of agreeing “this one is a stone and that one's a piece of bone” does not seem possible to achieve for the period 1900 to 1938, certainly not for Palmer’s favoured poets, whom we now regard as kitsch and religion at one remove. I reported (in my previous four blogs) that empiricism was the successful reform of the early decades of the 20th C. However, at the outset there were probably readers who regarded such adherence to facts as inherently disappointing and unartistic, and felt that “verbal magic” was where poetry lived. “We” never means everyone.
Wednesday, 28 October 2020
Noyes and Rhetoric, four
Noyes and Rhetoric, four: legislation?
↔
It seems fair to start with an unorthodox thesis about the collapse of rhetorical poetry. This is, that the new order of things put stress on facts rather than flowery language, on evidence rather than beautiful fantasies. These values were native to prose (and, as things evolved, also to photographs, or arguments based on numbers and shown by graphics, as opposed to purely verbal ones). In the theatre, actors moved to a more matter of fact, conversational, understated, delivery. This was not suited to verse, and in fact verse drama vanished from the stage (having done quite well between roughly 1900 and 1914). All of this is compatible with the eclipse of poetry. The market share of poetry books fell rapidly and decisively. It moved to the margins of the bookshop world. This applied mainly to living poetry – work by dead poets remained popular and established, and of course this work was normally in a high rhetorical style, in a language far removed from speech. The rise of fact, numbers, and empiricism did not give rise to a new kind of poetry, but to the eclipse of poetry as part of the cultural market-place.
So, during the 20th C we have a democratic process whereby most of the reading public migrates away from living poets. In parallel, we have various shifts of taste enacted within whatever nucleus of readers poetry retains. With these, we have to distinguish between unanimity and legitimacy. Each of the changes probably had a significant minority which opposed it, at least for a couple of decades. But, just as a 52:48 split is enough to produce a legitimate government, a consensus in the poetry world doesn't mean 100% of the interested audience (or, certainly, of the population which has no idea what is going on in poetry).
It is possible to see radical changes to the rules of poetry either as the product of organic changes, or of arbitrary actions by a metropolitan elite which they impose on the public more or less as a legislative coup – a moment of setting the rules without democratic assent. The de-legitimated can't legitimate or de-legitimate. This doesn't sound wholly fair.
The changes in 20th C would include these (at least):
the abandonment of a consistently rhetorical style
the preference for empirical knowledge, for concrete objects, the record of the senses, measurements, technical knowledge, etc.
the abandonment of religious-militarist-nationalist poetry
the change from regular metre to free verse
the abandonment of religion in favour of secular forms of interpreting behaviour
the jettison of the New Romantic style in favour of something more severe
the shift to hedonism and the present tense in the Sixties
the rise of a Formalist style, so metrical regularity, in association with Christian, conservative attitudes, during the Cold War
the spread of feminism, and consequent stigmatisation of anti-feminist attitudes, during the 1970s and 1980s
I have omitted “the shift whereby everything had to be Left-liberal and usually a protest about something”, because I am not so sure about this. I did not mention modernism, because that was always a minority thing, and cannot be said to be a consensus preference.
It will be seen that the departure from religion was incomplete.
It is arguable that all of these prevailed over only parts of the field, and that at any point there were poets who followed different paths without being excluded from the sites of visibility.
It seems very likely that all of these represented the wishes of some large fraction of the reading public at the time, so the idea of a “metropolitan elite” running things is not quite plausible. New ideas have a source somewhere, but these “new rules” could not have spread if the interested audience had not given their assent. The existence of a fringe of resentful people, semi-participants is undeniable – especially among poets. But it does not follow that the resentful agreed with each other (or even that they had developed a real alternative). They were more the ones who were bottom of the shortlist, as it were. It does not seem likely that people who paid to be published by a vanity press also legitimated the editors who turned them down. Most likely, they rejected the legitimacy of those editors.
I looked at Allott’s Penguin anthology of Contemporary Poetry (re-published as Mid-century Poetry). Date window, 1918 to 1960. This contained a 7% share of women poets and a 39.5% share of poets who had studied at Oxford University. (I apologise for quoting these figures frequently.) It is open to anyone to argue that the right to speak was given to the socially dominant groups, and that aesthetic judgement was fatally entangled with reverence for the possession of power; that is, that voices associated with power were taken as more worth listening to, their language as the authoritative kind of language. That is - that the powerless are unconvincing?
I gave up on this after looking at poets who were left out of Allott’s selection. I think it is a very good anthology, and that the strange distribution patterns we are looking at are to do with the sociology of the country, during the mid-century, and not with bias on Allott’s part. He could not anthologise poetry which had not been written.
There is a pendant to the dominance of the educated (and those successful in the education system’s rankings). I did some work on the British Library Catalogue for 1960 (the year when Allott’s anthology stops, although the publication date was 1962). I was trying to download a list of all poetry titles published in 1960 – this may not have succeeded, as there is a lack of tags by which you could identify them. All the same, I was taken aback to realise that one third of the titles came from vanity presses. This was a check on the legitimacy of the self-legitimating. The legitimate poetry world was surrounded by figures who thought their poetry was important, who had presumably been rejected by reputable publishers, who had, probably, not worked out what the modern style was, and who (probably) had a good deal of resentment for the editors and reviewers “in post” I am going to quote something from 1951 (I apologise for having quoted this before). This is the testimony of someone who had read a great deal of amateur poetry for a special purpose. I will include the comments I made myself.
“The idea of a reservoir beneath our feet was tapped into by the Festival of Britain. Along with so many other examples of the obscure, eccentric, and charming, they drilled for the wellspring of amateur poets, using the simple method of offering a prize for the unknowns. (To be exact the known were only excluded by the need for the poems to be unpublished.) The judges were an awesome battery of old-fashioned taste and connoisseurship. The scripts were either a long poem or a collection of short poems and 2,093 of them rolled in. Most of the scripts have long since been burnt and restored to the Elements. However, John Hayward’s emotive summary survives: ‘There was [...] a great deal of very bad verse, ranging in ineptitude from the expanded cracker-motto to grandiloquent failure to imitate Paradise Lost. There were the great Imperial sagas from the first week of the Creation to VE Day; the sacred oratorios and the patriotic hymns; the epics of rural life and odes to British Industry. There were the oddities which relieved the monotony of the judges’ task – poems written on cardboard, or in coloured chalks, or on scraps of paper, or in block capitals; poems engrossed on vellum with illuminated capitals, or with calligraphic title-pages, and bound with loving care, complete with leather thongs or silk ties. There were the eccentrics and the moonstruck, bemused and halting followers of Blake and Smart, with their obscure cosmic visions and their fearful prophecies of imminent damnations underscored in blood-red ink. And above all, there was the vast chorus of those content to chant in monotonous unison the joys of love and springtime, with special emphasis on bird-song at morning and starshine at night.’ Hayward sounds a bit battered. Maybe there is no wonderful reservoir of bashfully authentic naive poetry? He observes that the entries showed a remarkable lack of response to the prestige of Hopkins, Eliot and Yeats: ‘Their sources, if any, would seem to have been [...] entirely of nineteenth century origin, and principally of the Romantic period.’"
It has been said of Hayward that "He was sometimes called the most malicious man in London". Reading bad poetry makes you malicious. This body of work probably includes much of the poetry coming out from vanity presses in 1960, although I can’t confirm that by reading the texts. What struck me was that there had been a whole series of “legislative acts”, which had made poetry of the previous phase obsolete and validated the poetry of the new phase. Hayward was identifying poetry as bad for being out of date – he was not also asking why this legislation had been passed (or who had passed it). The genre of the "great Imperial sagas from the first week of the Creation to VE Day” sounds very much like something Noyes would have written. The conclusion is that there had been legislative shifts of taste several times during the 20th century, and that a large number of poets had not been sufficiently involved in new poetry publication to realise that the rules had changed. The shifts were evidently “partly a consensus”, that is, they were a consensus only for people well-informed enough to know what modern poetry (since 1940, or since 1900?) was like.
It is odd that the critics claim originality as the key for favoured poets, but the first thing that they have to do is to assimilate all the changes of the last twenty years, to become up to date. It is hard to explain how these two things coincide.
I believe that art is a very social thing, and that much of what is happening during the reading of a book of poetry, or going round an exhibition, is assimilation. If you consume a lot of culture, you assimilate to the symbols and stylistic gestures it uses. Culture is not going to work unless you do this. The start point in reading a poem is identifying with the feelings and ideas in the poem, this is temporary but as you read thousands of poems the acquisition becomes permanent, and you have moved towards where the poets are.
Painters may talk about their sources of inspiration in personal revolt, but in actual fact they are reading art magazines every week and they partake of the “language of modern art” as laid down in those magazines. So also for poets, I think.
So reading one poem gets you close to the poet. Rhythm makes your breaths coincide. You are thinking the same thing at the same time. Thousands of people reading books of poetry creates an impressive solidarity. This is the “dominant taste”. As you empathise with the poet, you get closer to the poet and to the other readers. My feeling is that “the excluded”, the ones who published with vanity presses (probably 2000 volumes over a 40-year period, sad to say), hadn't been reading modern poetry, missed the socialisation process, and just didn’t know what modern taste was. The books and magazines were freely on sale, but they didn’t have the shopping knowledge to go and get hold of them. Changes to poetry are validated by the wishes of the market (they reject some innovations and assimilate others), they are not arbitrary acts by individuals or cliques. But to get with modern taste you need to be reading modern poetry.
Let’s return to the count in Allott’s anthology. 39.5% Oxford graduates. Obviously being an insider has an effect. These people hung out with people who frequently read modern poetry and so they understood what the market wanted. They could connect the language of poems with the language of conversation – a barrier which tumbled. There are too many implications to unfold. Thinking about the insiders, about the inside itself, allows us to understand more about the outsiders. Modern poetic language is not secret – it is always being published. But you can be such an outsider that you fail as a shopper, never find it. So ‘New Signatures’, 1932, put the new poetry thing on record. It was freely on sale. But if you were cut off you wouldn’t find out that this was the new thing, or that it even existed. It had nine poets, who already knew what the “new thing” was. But you could join in. (Was it five Oxford, three Cambridge? sparing the details.) We will talk more about Michael Roberts later.
We can define the legislation of poetry more accurately by looking at the people who didn’t hear about it and whose activity was not affected by it. Everybody wants to legitimate themselves but the ones whose self-legitimation goes over control what happens next. Is this related to UKIP’s anti-metropolitan contention? it’s related but it isn’t the same thing.
Watson’s paper is “The Silent Revolution in Methods of Advocacy in English Courts", 2016.
Watson makes clear that part of the old-style courtroom was blatant unfairness. Advocates sought to polarise emotions in order to discredit the other side. This involved abusing witnesses – the goal was to make the accused, and everyone who testified somehow in his favour, seem absurd, inferior, and disgusting. This is notably similar to what tabloid newspapers do today – an archaic pattern which forces of objectivity have tried to suppress. One big change, he records, was that judges became much more forceful about preventing barristers from bullying witnesses. It became harder to show “educated man exposing uneducated witness as unreliable and mendacious” as a scene which decided a jury.
I discuss this because it might seem as if nostalgia for “great speeches” were in order. Oratory did not always have an idealistic basis. The link with melodrama in theatre is obvious. The twentieth century was just cooler in manner, more curious about the facts.
If we look at Noyes’ poem, the basis in prejudice is obvious. He writes about Trafalgar but makes the French and Spanish fleets evaporate. The link between depersonalising the French and the Spanish, and erasing any differences among the British to assert aggressive group identity, is all too obvious. The underlying structure of separating mankind into allies and enemies, and thriving on the uncontrolled forces of aggression and depersonalisation, is exactly what Watson is talking about for the criminal courts, and it is a formula for violence.
A basic part of modernity is not seeking a split between heroes and villains. This crosses many realms of human (symbolic) activity. That split worked very well for older advocates, politicians, and playwrights.
It seems fair to start with an unorthodox thesis about the collapse of rhetorical poetry. This is, that the new order of things put stress on facts rather than flowery language, on evidence rather than beautiful fantasies. These values were native to prose (and, as things evolved, also to photographs, or arguments based on numbers and shown by graphics, as opposed to purely verbal ones). In the theatre, actors moved to a more matter of fact, conversational, understated, delivery. This was not suited to verse, and in fact verse drama vanished from the stage (having done quite well between roughly 1900 and 1914). All of this is compatible with the eclipse of poetry. The market share of poetry books fell rapidly and decisively. It moved to the margins of the bookshop world. This applied mainly to living poetry – work by dead poets remained popular and established, and of course this work was normally in a high rhetorical style, in a language far removed from speech. The rise of fact, numbers, and empiricism did not give rise to a new kind of poetry, but to the eclipse of poetry as part of the cultural market-place.
So, during the 20th C we have a democratic process whereby most of the reading public migrates away from living poets. In parallel, we have various shifts of taste enacted within whatever nucleus of readers poetry retains. With these, we have to distinguish between unanimity and legitimacy. Each of the changes probably had a significant minority which opposed it, at least for a couple of decades. But, just as a 52:48 split is enough to produce a legitimate government, a consensus in the poetry world doesn't mean 100% of the interested audience (or, certainly, of the population which has no idea what is going on in poetry).
It is possible to see radical changes to the rules of poetry either as the product of organic changes, or of arbitrary actions by a metropolitan elite which they impose on the public more or less as a legislative coup – a moment of setting the rules without democratic assent. The de-legitimated can't legitimate or de-legitimate. This doesn't sound wholly fair.
The changes in 20th C would include these (at least):
the abandonment of a consistently rhetorical style
the preference for empirical knowledge, for concrete objects, the record of the senses, measurements, technical knowledge, etc.
the abandonment of religious-militarist-nationalist poetry
the change from regular metre to free verse
the abandonment of religion in favour of secular forms of interpreting behaviour
the jettison of the New Romantic style in favour of something more severe
the shift to hedonism and the present tense in the Sixties
the rise of a Formalist style, so metrical regularity, in association with Christian, conservative attitudes, during the Cold War
the spread of feminism, and consequent stigmatisation of anti-feminist attitudes, during the 1970s and 1980s
I have omitted “the shift whereby everything had to be Left-liberal and usually a protest about something”, because I am not so sure about this. I did not mention modernism, because that was always a minority thing, and cannot be said to be a consensus preference.
It will be seen that the departure from religion was incomplete.
It is arguable that all of these prevailed over only parts of the field, and that at any point there were poets who followed different paths without being excluded from the sites of visibility.
It seems very likely that all of these represented the wishes of some large fraction of the reading public at the time, so the idea of a “metropolitan elite” running things is not quite plausible. New ideas have a source somewhere, but these “new rules” could not have spread if the interested audience had not given their assent. The existence of a fringe of resentful people, semi-participants is undeniable – especially among poets. But it does not follow that the resentful agreed with each other (or even that they had developed a real alternative). They were more the ones who were bottom of the shortlist, as it were. It does not seem likely that people who paid to be published by a vanity press also legitimated the editors who turned them down. Most likely, they rejected the legitimacy of those editors.
I looked at Allott’s Penguin anthology of Contemporary Poetry (re-published as Mid-century Poetry). Date window, 1918 to 1960. This contained a 7% share of women poets and a 39.5% share of poets who had studied at Oxford University. (I apologise for quoting these figures frequently.) It is open to anyone to argue that the right to speak was given to the socially dominant groups, and that aesthetic judgement was fatally entangled with reverence for the possession of power; that is, that voices associated with power were taken as more worth listening to, their language as the authoritative kind of language. That is - that the powerless are unconvincing?
I gave up on this after looking at poets who were left out of Allott’s selection. I think it is a very good anthology, and that the strange distribution patterns we are looking at are to do with the sociology of the country, during the mid-century, and not with bias on Allott’s part. He could not anthologise poetry which had not been written.
There is a pendant to the dominance of the educated (and those successful in the education system’s rankings). I did some work on the British Library Catalogue for 1960 (the year when Allott’s anthology stops, although the publication date was 1962). I was trying to download a list of all poetry titles published in 1960 – this may not have succeeded, as there is a lack of tags by which you could identify them. All the same, I was taken aback to realise that one third of the titles came from vanity presses. This was a check on the legitimacy of the self-legitimating. The legitimate poetry world was surrounded by figures who thought their poetry was important, who had presumably been rejected by reputable publishers, who had, probably, not worked out what the modern style was, and who (probably) had a good deal of resentment for the editors and reviewers “in post” I am going to quote something from 1951 (I apologise for having quoted this before). This is the testimony of someone who had read a great deal of amateur poetry for a special purpose. I will include the comments I made myself.
“The idea of a reservoir beneath our feet was tapped into by the Festival of Britain. Along with so many other examples of the obscure, eccentric, and charming, they drilled for the wellspring of amateur poets, using the simple method of offering a prize for the unknowns. (To be exact the known were only excluded by the need for the poems to be unpublished.) The judges were an awesome battery of old-fashioned taste and connoisseurship. The scripts were either a long poem or a collection of short poems and 2,093 of them rolled in. Most of the scripts have long since been burnt and restored to the Elements. However, John Hayward’s emotive summary survives: ‘There was [...] a great deal of very bad verse, ranging in ineptitude from the expanded cracker-motto to grandiloquent failure to imitate Paradise Lost. There were the great Imperial sagas from the first week of the Creation to VE Day; the sacred oratorios and the patriotic hymns; the epics of rural life and odes to British Industry. There were the oddities which relieved the monotony of the judges’ task – poems written on cardboard, or in coloured chalks, or on scraps of paper, or in block capitals; poems engrossed on vellum with illuminated capitals, or with calligraphic title-pages, and bound with loving care, complete with leather thongs or silk ties. There were the eccentrics and the moonstruck, bemused and halting followers of Blake and Smart, with their obscure cosmic visions and their fearful prophecies of imminent damnations underscored in blood-red ink. And above all, there was the vast chorus of those content to chant in monotonous unison the joys of love and springtime, with special emphasis on bird-song at morning and starshine at night.’ Hayward sounds a bit battered. Maybe there is no wonderful reservoir of bashfully authentic naive poetry? He observes that the entries showed a remarkable lack of response to the prestige of Hopkins, Eliot and Yeats: ‘Their sources, if any, would seem to have been [...] entirely of nineteenth century origin, and principally of the Romantic period.’"
It has been said of Hayward that "He was sometimes called the most malicious man in London". Reading bad poetry makes you malicious. This body of work probably includes much of the poetry coming out from vanity presses in 1960, although I can’t confirm that by reading the texts. What struck me was that there had been a whole series of “legislative acts”, which had made poetry of the previous phase obsolete and validated the poetry of the new phase. Hayward was identifying poetry as bad for being out of date – he was not also asking why this legislation had been passed (or who had passed it). The genre of the "great Imperial sagas from the first week of the Creation to VE Day” sounds very much like something Noyes would have written. The conclusion is that there had been legislative shifts of taste several times during the 20th century, and that a large number of poets had not been sufficiently involved in new poetry publication to realise that the rules had changed. The shifts were evidently “partly a consensus”, that is, they were a consensus only for people well-informed enough to know what modern poetry (since 1940, or since 1900?) was like.
It is odd that the critics claim originality as the key for favoured poets, but the first thing that they have to do is to assimilate all the changes of the last twenty years, to become up to date. It is hard to explain how these two things coincide.
I believe that art is a very social thing, and that much of what is happening during the reading of a book of poetry, or going round an exhibition, is assimilation. If you consume a lot of culture, you assimilate to the symbols and stylistic gestures it uses. Culture is not going to work unless you do this. The start point in reading a poem is identifying with the feelings and ideas in the poem, this is temporary but as you read thousands of poems the acquisition becomes permanent, and you have moved towards where the poets are.
Painters may talk about their sources of inspiration in personal revolt, but in actual fact they are reading art magazines every week and they partake of the “language of modern art” as laid down in those magazines. So also for poets, I think.
So reading one poem gets you close to the poet. Rhythm makes your breaths coincide. You are thinking the same thing at the same time. Thousands of people reading books of poetry creates an impressive solidarity. This is the “dominant taste”. As you empathise with the poet, you get closer to the poet and to the other readers. My feeling is that “the excluded”, the ones who published with vanity presses (probably 2000 volumes over a 40-year period, sad to say), hadn't been reading modern poetry, missed the socialisation process, and just didn’t know what modern taste was. The books and magazines were freely on sale, but they didn’t have the shopping knowledge to go and get hold of them. Changes to poetry are validated by the wishes of the market (they reject some innovations and assimilate others), they are not arbitrary acts by individuals or cliques. But to get with modern taste you need to be reading modern poetry.
Let’s return to the count in Allott’s anthology. 39.5% Oxford graduates. Obviously being an insider has an effect. These people hung out with people who frequently read modern poetry and so they understood what the market wanted. They could connect the language of poems with the language of conversation – a barrier which tumbled. There are too many implications to unfold. Thinking about the insiders, about the inside itself, allows us to understand more about the outsiders. Modern poetic language is not secret – it is always being published. But you can be such an outsider that you fail as a shopper, never find it. So ‘New Signatures’, 1932, put the new poetry thing on record. It was freely on sale. But if you were cut off you wouldn’t find out that this was the new thing, or that it even existed. It had nine poets, who already knew what the “new thing” was. But you could join in. (Was it five Oxford, three Cambridge? sparing the details.) We will talk more about Michael Roberts later.
We can define the legislation of poetry more accurately by looking at the people who didn’t hear about it and whose activity was not affected by it. Everybody wants to legitimate themselves but the ones whose self-legitimation goes over control what happens next. Is this related to UKIP’s anti-metropolitan contention? it’s related but it isn’t the same thing.
Watson’s paper is “The Silent Revolution in Methods of Advocacy in English Courts", 2016.
Watson makes clear that part of the old-style courtroom was blatant unfairness. Advocates sought to polarise emotions in order to discredit the other side. This involved abusing witnesses – the goal was to make the accused, and everyone who testified somehow in his favour, seem absurd, inferior, and disgusting. This is notably similar to what tabloid newspapers do today – an archaic pattern which forces of objectivity have tried to suppress. One big change, he records, was that judges became much more forceful about preventing barristers from bullying witnesses. It became harder to show “educated man exposing uneducated witness as unreliable and mendacious” as a scene which decided a jury.
I discuss this because it might seem as if nostalgia for “great speeches” were in order. Oratory did not always have an idealistic basis. The link with melodrama in theatre is obvious. The twentieth century was just cooler in manner, more curious about the facts.
If we look at Noyes’ poem, the basis in prejudice is obvious. He writes about Trafalgar but makes the French and Spanish fleets evaporate. The link between depersonalising the French and the Spanish, and erasing any differences among the British to assert aggressive group identity, is all too obvious. The underlying structure of separating mankind into allies and enemies, and thriving on the uncontrolled forces of aggression and depersonalisation, is exactly what Watson is talking about for the criminal courts, and it is a formula for violence.
A basic part of modernity is not seeking a split between heroes and villains. This crosses many realms of human (symbolic) activity. That split worked very well for older advocates, politicians, and playwrights.
Sunday, 18 October 2020
Rhetoric around 1920, part 3
Militarist poetry and Alfred Noyes- part 3
This is a third post in a series about Alfred Noyes and the militarist-imperialist poetry which ruled the roost from some point in the 1890s until some undefined point in the 1920s. The core message is that the left-liberal climate of poetry has lasted for a hundred years and has a right to dominate proceedings. This post is about Noyes but the realm also involves William Watson, Kipling, Henry Newbolt, and no doubt others.
Noyes was half-way between Kipling and Swinburne. Does this sound like kitsch? yes, it sounds like kitsch. But, be fair. “The Torch-Bearers” (poem in three volumes) is not kitsch. He grew up.
If you look at “Nelson’s Year”, the point is really the Battle of Trafalgar, his greatest victory and the moment which the poem celebrates the centenary of. The poem does not describe any concrete aspects of the engagement. If you imagine it as a physical event, it is obvious that the core is homicidal. 2500 Spanish and French sailors were killed. Secondly, the Spanish and French were equal to the British. There was no certainty of victory and the three fleets were rather similar in the technology they were using. Nelson won by using better gunnery tactics – his enemies were aiming high, to shoot masts and yards away and make their enemy immobile, and they fired from a long distance, inaccurately; Nelson's captains held their fire until very close in, fired accurately, and aimed at the hulls – to kill the enemy crew. The homicidal quality is what brought victory. The other side had more ships and probably fired more shots. The patriotic remembrance, like Noyes’ poem, leaves out all the facts. This act of memory forgets everything. This is like the process of abstraction, where you take too many concrete facts and deal with ideas, but is really the dissolution of all contact with reality – you end up with a sort of sugary vapour. It is obvious that any element of facts and empiricism (examining ideas) would strengthen the narrative and just erase most of what Noyes has written. My guess is that the bullshit quality of naval propaganda and the anti-realist quality of highly rhetorical poetry are two different things. Highly wrought poetry does not have to be nationalist propaganda.
Part of the process which both Noyes and Kipling have gone through, on the way to their poetry, is the injection of religious language into secular, militarist contexts. I find this exceptionally nauseating. Secularisation does not give you the right to redefine war and territorial aggression as divinely ordained. Another part is simply silencing. You can't re-shoot the Battle of Trafalgar to make the French and Spanish disappear, and replace them with a kind of Spirit of History, sent from God, who decrees that England would dominate the oceans and seize the less well defended territories of the world. It is too obvious that the spiritual and vaporous stuff has arrived to replace the facts which have been made to vanish.
To avoid me drifting off into abstraction and misrepresentation, let me quote Noyes:
And there were all those others, Drake and Blake,
Rodney and Howard, Byron, Collingwood;
With deathless eyes aflame for England’s sake,
As on their ancient decks they proudly stood, –
Decks washed of old with England’s purplest blood;
And there, once more, each rushing oaken side
Bared its dark-throated, thirsty gleaming brood
Of cannon, watched by laughing lads who died
Long, long ago for England and her ancient pride.
(from ‘The Phantom Fleet’)
(That is Byron the admiral, not the poet.) I can’t find any record of John Byron actually winning a battle – and he served in the American Revolutionary War, which Britain lost. My information is that at the Pageant of Empire, in London in 1924, there was a series of songs set to music by Elgar, and reaching a huge audience during the course of the Pageant performances. At least one of these ("The Immortal Legions") had a text by Noyes. The pageant seems to have been a completely unrealistic, sentimental, and imperialist act of group illusion, stripped of any element of fact but with lavish theatrical means. This was the natural home of Noyes’ poetry, and my impression is that he was a very talented hack who would do anything for money and acclaim. I say talented– his poetry is like film music, capable of endless emotional climaxes, flowing through inexhaustible tonal variations, but unlistenable outside the overheated drama it is nailed to. He wrote very talented, very bad, poetry.
At the risk of repetition, let me supply two quotes from the wikipedia article on Noyes:
"Noyes first visited America in February 1913, partly to lecture on world peace and disarmament and partly to satisfy his wife's desire that he should gather fresh experiences in her homeland. His first lecture tour lasted six weeks, extending as far west as Chicago. "
"In 1913, when it seemed that war might yet be avoided, he published a long anti-war poem called The Wine Press. One American reviewer wrote that Noyes was "inspired by a fervent hatred of war and all that war means", and had used "all the resources of his varied art" to depict its "ultimate horror". The poet and critic Helen Bullis found Noyes' "anti-militarist" poem "remarkable", "passionate and inspiring", but, in its "unsparing realism", lacking in "the large vision, which sees the ultimate truth rather than the immediate details"." (Bullis thought that war healed most ills.)
This is why I think Noyes was a hack – he had clearly understood, in 1913, how awful modern war was, but all the same he took a propaganda job when war came and spent all day producing propaganda. It is only fair to say that he stopped writing patriotic poetry in the 1920s, and avoided it for the next 30 years. This is part of the argument which says that poetry had learnt from the factual evidence about the Great War and had fundamentally moved away from nationalism. Poets learnt that you could not do a merger of religion and nationalism, to put it simply. People stopped believing that any poem which has the Destiny of the Nation inside it was more important, more large-scale. than any poem which was about a few ordinary people.
Also, some idle talk about ‘The Blind Goddess’, the 1948 film of Patrick Hastings’ play. The plot is that there is, around 1946, a refugee relief organisation in Central Europe. The money is being filtered away by the prominent people in charge, including an English lord, who has siphoned off £500,000 for personal use. The refugees are freezing or starving, whichever. An idealistic administrator, secretary to the noble lord, tries to blow the whistle. He is informed by a Czech administrator, who is murdered in the opening scene (but this is made to look like suicide). The noble lord sues the idealistic but wet young chap for libel. His lawyer is Eric Portman, also the star of the film, also the father of the young chap’s girlfriend. In a courtroom scene which lasts an hour (possibly more than that), he demolishes the young chap. However, he is relying information supplied by the lord and his solicitor, and is persuasively arguing a completely false case. He wins. The same day as the verdict, information arrives (partly from his daughter) which shows him that he has misled the court. He reverses the injustice. The plot winds up, the lord jumps under a car, the young people marry. We never get to see any of the refugees – it is a very stagy film.
The real theme of the film is how a barrister can bring about a miscarriage of justice by accepting the information in the brief given to him (which the conventions say he should do). This is the "blind" bit. The contrast of oratorical styles does not come up – Portman argues in the modern style, being very courteous, never raising his voice, avoiding emotion. It is interesting that this factual style is shown, in the film, as persuading a jury of a false conclusion. It is the style which Hastings was famous for.
This is a good film – perhaps one has to have watched infeasible numbers of bad English Forties films to appreciate how good it is.
A useful website about Pageants has this quote from pageant master Frank Benson: "In a 1920 volume, Rejoice Greatly: How to Organise Public Ceremonies, Benson argued that pageantry was ‘Not only… the festal garb of Nations, their “robe of glory”’, but also
the expression of their inmost natures… Pageantry shows the nation in its mating plumage. It marks the tides of National life. It shows us a people romancing about itself, striving to make the reality fit the dream or to materialise the vision. Because it is all this and much more, Pageantry enables us to appraise the degree of National vitality, estimate the quality, nature and intensity of National culture.…"
This is quite explicit about falsification. Benson was aware that what he was setting up was false – quite unlike the real national past. This is the natural home of Noyes’ poetry – whether the pageants followed him, or he followed them, the phony scenes and fake collective emotion which the pageants staged for (possibly) a million people are exactly matched to his poems. These fantasies shed light on the term ‘ideology’. This word is used in different senses, for example someone can say “I have an ideology and it is Marxist” and this is something they own and assert, or elsewhere ‘ideology’ can mean any view which is dogmatic and resists evidence. The nationalist fantasy of the pageants shows us what was later called ‘ideology’ – a rewrite of history in which the other side vanishes and the record only shows victories. Someone who spends hours or days in this fantasy state is less capable of rational thought. It really isn't so hard to see why poetry moved away from this realm of feeling.
The collapse of nationalist/fake-religious poetry led to two possible outcomes. One was poetry which dealt with history, but from a Left angle, dissolving invested and frozen blocs of power in favour of the mass of humanity. Moments of history were bars in a larger score, this movement of history outwards and downwards. Or, you could have mere privatisation, poems dealing with domestic relationships, and factual matters within the reach of the sense organs, as carried around by a single person. These outcomes were radically different from each other.
The original claims about “metropolitan taste”, as part of the UKIP set of theories, challenged the right of the people in charge of culture to legislate about taste. Given how much income from the market influences culture, these claims are problematic. I must admit that I find it hard to show why tastes change, which is obviously a big step beyond tracing where these changes occurred. If Watson suggests that the growing education of jurors affected courtroom rhetoric, that suggests that the move away from the older style was an attempt to reach ordinary people, since they supplied the juries. If it is true that the changes affected barristers in jury trials, actors, politicians and poets, in more or less the same way, then the people who run poetry did not have any choice in the matter: public taste was changing altogether and we can't find what legislature ordained that the rules should change. If you can’t locate the legislature, you can’t demand reform or submit a claim for judicial review. But perhaps we can change these rules almost on a household basis. If we can’t locate them, we are entitled to break them – to resist signing the contract.
We will pursue this "legislature" in a future post.
This is a third post in a series about Alfred Noyes and the militarist-imperialist poetry which ruled the roost from some point in the 1890s until some undefined point in the 1920s. The core message is that the left-liberal climate of poetry has lasted for a hundred years and has a right to dominate proceedings. This post is about Noyes but the realm also involves William Watson, Kipling, Henry Newbolt, and no doubt others.
Noyes was half-way between Kipling and Swinburne. Does this sound like kitsch? yes, it sounds like kitsch. But, be fair. “The Torch-Bearers” (poem in three volumes) is not kitsch. He grew up.
If you look at “Nelson’s Year”, the point is really the Battle of Trafalgar, his greatest victory and the moment which the poem celebrates the centenary of. The poem does not describe any concrete aspects of the engagement. If you imagine it as a physical event, it is obvious that the core is homicidal. 2500 Spanish and French sailors were killed. Secondly, the Spanish and French were equal to the British. There was no certainty of victory and the three fleets were rather similar in the technology they were using. Nelson won by using better gunnery tactics – his enemies were aiming high, to shoot masts and yards away and make their enemy immobile, and they fired from a long distance, inaccurately; Nelson's captains held their fire until very close in, fired accurately, and aimed at the hulls – to kill the enemy crew. The homicidal quality is what brought victory. The other side had more ships and probably fired more shots. The patriotic remembrance, like Noyes’ poem, leaves out all the facts. This act of memory forgets everything. This is like the process of abstraction, where you take too many concrete facts and deal with ideas, but is really the dissolution of all contact with reality – you end up with a sort of sugary vapour. It is obvious that any element of facts and empiricism (examining ideas) would strengthen the narrative and just erase most of what Noyes has written. My guess is that the bullshit quality of naval propaganda and the anti-realist quality of highly rhetorical poetry are two different things. Highly wrought poetry does not have to be nationalist propaganda.
Part of the process which both Noyes and Kipling have gone through, on the way to their poetry, is the injection of religious language into secular, militarist contexts. I find this exceptionally nauseating. Secularisation does not give you the right to redefine war and territorial aggression as divinely ordained. Another part is simply silencing. You can't re-shoot the Battle of Trafalgar to make the French and Spanish disappear, and replace them with a kind of Spirit of History, sent from God, who decrees that England would dominate the oceans and seize the less well defended territories of the world. It is too obvious that the spiritual and vaporous stuff has arrived to replace the facts which have been made to vanish.
To avoid me drifting off into abstraction and misrepresentation, let me quote Noyes:
And there were all those others, Drake and Blake,
Rodney and Howard, Byron, Collingwood;
With deathless eyes aflame for England’s sake,
As on their ancient decks they proudly stood, –
Decks washed of old with England’s purplest blood;
And there, once more, each rushing oaken side
Bared its dark-throated, thirsty gleaming brood
Of cannon, watched by laughing lads who died
Long, long ago for England and her ancient pride.
(from ‘The Phantom Fleet’)
(That is Byron the admiral, not the poet.) I can’t find any record of John Byron actually winning a battle – and he served in the American Revolutionary War, which Britain lost. My information is that at the Pageant of Empire, in London in 1924, there was a series of songs set to music by Elgar, and reaching a huge audience during the course of the Pageant performances. At least one of these ("The Immortal Legions") had a text by Noyes. The pageant seems to have been a completely unrealistic, sentimental, and imperialist act of group illusion, stripped of any element of fact but with lavish theatrical means. This was the natural home of Noyes’ poetry, and my impression is that he was a very talented hack who would do anything for money and acclaim. I say talented– his poetry is like film music, capable of endless emotional climaxes, flowing through inexhaustible tonal variations, but unlistenable outside the overheated drama it is nailed to. He wrote very talented, very bad, poetry.
At the risk of repetition, let me supply two quotes from the wikipedia article on Noyes:
"Noyes first visited America in February 1913, partly to lecture on world peace and disarmament and partly to satisfy his wife's desire that he should gather fresh experiences in her homeland. His first lecture tour lasted six weeks, extending as far west as Chicago. "
"In 1913, when it seemed that war might yet be avoided, he published a long anti-war poem called The Wine Press. One American reviewer wrote that Noyes was "inspired by a fervent hatred of war and all that war means", and had used "all the resources of his varied art" to depict its "ultimate horror". The poet and critic Helen Bullis found Noyes' "anti-militarist" poem "remarkable", "passionate and inspiring", but, in its "unsparing realism", lacking in "the large vision, which sees the ultimate truth rather than the immediate details"." (Bullis thought that war healed most ills.)
This is why I think Noyes was a hack – he had clearly understood, in 1913, how awful modern war was, but all the same he took a propaganda job when war came and spent all day producing propaganda. It is only fair to say that he stopped writing patriotic poetry in the 1920s, and avoided it for the next 30 years. This is part of the argument which says that poetry had learnt from the factual evidence about the Great War and had fundamentally moved away from nationalism. Poets learnt that you could not do a merger of religion and nationalism, to put it simply. People stopped believing that any poem which has the Destiny of the Nation inside it was more important, more large-scale. than any poem which was about a few ordinary people.
Also, some idle talk about ‘The Blind Goddess’, the 1948 film of Patrick Hastings’ play. The plot is that there is, around 1946, a refugee relief organisation in Central Europe. The money is being filtered away by the prominent people in charge, including an English lord, who has siphoned off £500,000 for personal use. The refugees are freezing or starving, whichever. An idealistic administrator, secretary to the noble lord, tries to blow the whistle. He is informed by a Czech administrator, who is murdered in the opening scene (but this is made to look like suicide). The noble lord sues the idealistic but wet young chap for libel. His lawyer is Eric Portman, also the star of the film, also the father of the young chap’s girlfriend. In a courtroom scene which lasts an hour (possibly more than that), he demolishes the young chap. However, he is relying information supplied by the lord and his solicitor, and is persuasively arguing a completely false case. He wins. The same day as the verdict, information arrives (partly from his daughter) which shows him that he has misled the court. He reverses the injustice. The plot winds up, the lord jumps under a car, the young people marry. We never get to see any of the refugees – it is a very stagy film.
The real theme of the film is how a barrister can bring about a miscarriage of justice by accepting the information in the brief given to him (which the conventions say he should do). This is the "blind" bit. The contrast of oratorical styles does not come up – Portman argues in the modern style, being very courteous, never raising his voice, avoiding emotion. It is interesting that this factual style is shown, in the film, as persuading a jury of a false conclusion. It is the style which Hastings was famous for.
This is a good film – perhaps one has to have watched infeasible numbers of bad English Forties films to appreciate how good it is.
A useful website about Pageants has this quote from pageant master Frank Benson: "In a 1920 volume, Rejoice Greatly: How to Organise Public Ceremonies, Benson argued that pageantry was ‘Not only… the festal garb of Nations, their “robe of glory”’, but also
the expression of their inmost natures… Pageantry shows the nation in its mating plumage. It marks the tides of National life. It shows us a people romancing about itself, striving to make the reality fit the dream or to materialise the vision. Because it is all this and much more, Pageantry enables us to appraise the degree of National vitality, estimate the quality, nature and intensity of National culture.…"
This is quite explicit about falsification. Benson was aware that what he was setting up was false – quite unlike the real national past. This is the natural home of Noyes’ poetry – whether the pageants followed him, or he followed them, the phony scenes and fake collective emotion which the pageants staged for (possibly) a million people are exactly matched to his poems. These fantasies shed light on the term ‘ideology’. This word is used in different senses, for example someone can say “I have an ideology and it is Marxist” and this is something they own and assert, or elsewhere ‘ideology’ can mean any view which is dogmatic and resists evidence. The nationalist fantasy of the pageants shows us what was later called ‘ideology’ – a rewrite of history in which the other side vanishes and the record only shows victories. Someone who spends hours or days in this fantasy state is less capable of rational thought. It really isn't so hard to see why poetry moved away from this realm of feeling.
The collapse of nationalist/fake-religious poetry led to two possible outcomes. One was poetry which dealt with history, but from a Left angle, dissolving invested and frozen blocs of power in favour of the mass of humanity. Moments of history were bars in a larger score, this movement of history outwards and downwards. Or, you could have mere privatisation, poems dealing with domestic relationships, and factual matters within the reach of the sense organs, as carried around by a single person. These outcomes were radically different from each other.
The original claims about “metropolitan taste”, as part of the UKIP set of theories, challenged the right of the people in charge of culture to legislate about taste. Given how much income from the market influences culture, these claims are problematic. I must admit that I find it hard to show why tastes change, which is obviously a big step beyond tracing where these changes occurred. If Watson suggests that the growing education of jurors affected courtroom rhetoric, that suggests that the move away from the older style was an attempt to reach ordinary people, since they supplied the juries. If it is true that the changes affected barristers in jury trials, actors, politicians and poets, in more or less the same way, then the people who run poetry did not have any choice in the matter: public taste was changing altogether and we can't find what legislature ordained that the rules should change. If you can’t locate the legislature, you can’t demand reform or submit a claim for judicial review. But perhaps we can change these rules almost on a household basis. If we can’t locate them, we are entitled to break them – to resist signing the contract.
We will pursue this "legislature" in a future post.
Sunday, 11 October 2020
Rhetoric around 1920, part two
Rhetoric around 1920, part 2
I am going to quote the legal historian, Andrew Watson (this is the summary of a paper of his):
"George Keeton wrote, in 1943, about 'a silent revolution in methods of advocacy as practiced by the English Bar over the last fifty years'. Changed standards of etiquette, professional rules and greater control exerted by judges over these years led to a vast increase in courtesy in interactions with judges and between counsel. The conduct of prosecutions had also improved. They were generally no longer carried out in a sneering hectoring manner with witnesses mercilessly browbeaten or bullied. Dramatic types of 19th Century advocacy, in which counsel was prepared to use mannerisms, tricks of speech and gestures to heighten the effects of their pleas to juries, was replaced by a conversational and matter of fact tone. The idea that to cross-examine meant to examine crossly had almost vanished. Appeals to juries were now to reason combined with a controlled, subtle and focused appeal to emotion. Jury trials in civil cases had continued to decline. Advocacy before judges was concerned with facts and the law, not oratorical flourishes. Fewer criminal trials before juries took place as the jurisdiction of the magistrates had widened further. The more restrained and conversational style of advocacy before criminal juries may have been to some extent influenced by that of the civil courts, where the leaders of the bar appeared more often and increasingly without juries. Two dominant members of the bar during the first half of the 20th Century were Patrick Hastings and Norman Birkett. Their styles, because of triumphs linked with them, were influential on those of other barristers. Hastings was a master of direct forcible speech without any embellishments or ornamentation and prized brevity. Unlike Hastings, Norman Birkett believed that the advocate ought to use the full range of English speech. Other factors lay behind the mainly conversational and matter of fact advocacy that had become established. These include a widely held suspicion of rhetoric and, very importantly, better informed and greater educated juries. Jurors were less susceptible than their predecessors to theatrical gestures and melodrama, which had largely been replaced in literature and on the stage by introspection and realism, references to God and the Bible, elegant and flowery, but empty, speech and appeals to strong emotion and prejudice. In a more scientific age jurors expected more of an appeal to reason. The success of barristers such as Hardinge Giffard, John Holker, Charles Russell and Edward Clarke, during the closing decades of the previous century, may have been because they appreciated early on the changes that were occurring to juries. Attempting to catch the eye of the press to help create a reputation, useful to generate work, was an important factor behind the emotive, vividly worded and aggressive advocacy of the early Victorian period and afterwards. The later decline of court reporting in the newspapers, removing much of the gallery from the stage, may well have contributed to the more subdued form of speech."
(Andrew Watson)
"Other factors lay behind the mainly conversational and matter of fact advocacy that had become established. These include a widely held suspicion of rhetoric and, very importantly, better informed and greater educated juries. Jurors were less susceptible than their predecessors to theatrical gestures and melodrama" - surely this is the history of poetry as well, and we could just replace “the courtroom” with “the poem”.
Watson talks about the start of a more factual-objective style of courtroom advocacy in the 1890s (actually he says “closing decades”). This underlines the slow nature of the changes in poetics – a simpler and anti-rhetorical style was already there in the 1890s (Housman, Kipling, Hardy), but it was decades later that other styles became decisively unfashionable and so “pompous” and “ridiculous”. If the audience is composed, at any point, of people aged 20 to 70, it is credible that any profound shift of taste takes four or five decades to become dominant, as opposed to being attached to a specific group which is surrounded by living alternatives.
I find this passage very enlightening for what happened in poetry. What he says about prejudice is enlightening – certainly if you look at Noyes and Kipling then patriotic prejudice is a big part of their message, and the neglect of fact is all tied up with that. So we would say that the collapse of the national “drug high” of World War patriotism around 1925 meant a radical change in poetry. Patriotic poetry began to sound murderous as well as false. But we have quickly to look back at Watson – barristers were shifting towards a cooler and more factual style, respecting the rational judgement of jurors, already in the 1890s.
Watson is implying that judges and jurors had completely different ways of reacting to the speeches of advocates. The factual style spread from “the civil courts”, where judges listened to arguments about contracts and the law of contracts. He is implying that judges preferred the law to gusty emotions. But, in a jury trial, everything you say is heard by both judge and jury.
Watson quotes an older source, Keating, as attaching the change to "fifty years", so starting around 1893 and still prevalent in 1943.
If you follow these posts, you will know that I began writing about Kipling and Noyes in connection with the rise of UKIP. The smash of the “portentous patriotic poem” in the 1920s was the start of the “left liberal bubble”. Reading Noyes and Kipling explains why poetry gave up on writing about big battles which killed lots of foreigners. At the same time, I read Norman Jope’s article (in Tears in the Fence) about Michael Sullivan, a xenophobic poet who was apparently in sympathy with UKIP and Farrage and who had a poem in the Plymouth Herald every week for two years (around 2013 to 2015). Sullivan has just died aged 66. Apparently he was in mid-poem. (Death was in May 2019.) Some poems are lethal. Someone thought that Plymouth needed militarist, patriotic poetry. Sullivan’s poems are pastiches of Kipling's patriotic and naval poetry (The Five Nations, etc.). The Herald reports “His knowledge of guns was so extensive he had been a Home Office consultant and edited a shooting magazine and the Tackle and Guns trade publication, and penned a book called The Rough Shooter’s Guide.” So there is at least some poetry which is outside the anti-capitalist sentiment of the majority.
While writing this someone has been on the radio telling us that 17,000 sailors of the Royal Navy died suppressing the slave trade. I think there is something suspect about this figure. Only 500 British sailors died at Trafalgar. It must refer to ships sinking while on patrol, not to sea-fights with slave-runners. But it is also incomplete – why not tell us how many British seamen died while taking part in the slave trade? or how many Navy men died in fights for the West Indies colonies, which were profitable and totally reliant on slave labour? After the first fact, there are several others.
We have been conversing about the quasi-Biblical aspect of Noyes and Kipling – where they know what Destiny is Uttering. But Kipling’s poems were also close to music-hall recital – they had a large colloquial element and some were (in the 1970s) adapted as folk-songs. Something similar is true of Noyes. Think about the naval rivalry with Germany, the new militarist interest which marked British politics so much from 1890 to 1914. The core is British sea power, although that also means trade, access to markets, secure control of the colonies and of overseas sources of raw materials. A warship is a symbol for all that power, for nationhood. But, the vital part of the ship is sailors. Militarism has to seduce the working classes. So the militarist poet is going to look at popular song, folk music. Noyes writes fake folk material – this is a big component of his work up to 1920. The obvious solution was sea shanties, as in his ridiculous poem “Forty Singing Seamen”. I was taken aback to read in N.A. M. Rodger’s history of the Navy that the Navy banned singing – the key was silence so that commands could be heard. It was a very precise business, like running trains. So, no tradition of song in the Navy (after 1800). I was taken aback because I had seen so many fake sea shanties, in the poets of a certain era. “Drake’s Drum”, and what have you.
If you are going to write the history of the folk style in British poetry, you have to thread in the use of it by nationalists. It looks to me as if we are seeing a take-over of folkness by the Left, seizing it from the Right. Edward Thomas was close to folk-song, it was part of the Georgian thing, and this is completely different from the ‘folk style’ deployed by Noyes and Henry Newbolt. Today, we expect folk to be associated with protest songs, the authenticity of the poor, the corruption of the rich and cultured. That is not necessarily where folk came from.
The decline of sailing ships meant the death of sea shanties. Cecil Sharp went round old ex-sailors and collected a couple of hundred of them. Very impressive. Sharp was most probably in the Right current, enthused by the Nation and interested in simple songs as a response to the extension of the franchise to the working class, and the urge to co-opt the lower classes to prevent them from taking over the State and directing it to their own interests. Sharp was part of ‘Leitkultur’, middle-class guidance and avoidance of change. Bourgeois guardianship.
The history of “folk song language” in poetry is unnaturally complex.
I am going to quote the legal historian, Andrew Watson (this is the summary of a paper of his):
"George Keeton wrote, in 1943, about 'a silent revolution in methods of advocacy as practiced by the English Bar over the last fifty years'. Changed standards of etiquette, professional rules and greater control exerted by judges over these years led to a vast increase in courtesy in interactions with judges and between counsel. The conduct of prosecutions had also improved. They were generally no longer carried out in a sneering hectoring manner with witnesses mercilessly browbeaten or bullied. Dramatic types of 19th Century advocacy, in which counsel was prepared to use mannerisms, tricks of speech and gestures to heighten the effects of their pleas to juries, was replaced by a conversational and matter of fact tone. The idea that to cross-examine meant to examine crossly had almost vanished. Appeals to juries were now to reason combined with a controlled, subtle and focused appeal to emotion. Jury trials in civil cases had continued to decline. Advocacy before judges was concerned with facts and the law, not oratorical flourishes. Fewer criminal trials before juries took place as the jurisdiction of the magistrates had widened further. The more restrained and conversational style of advocacy before criminal juries may have been to some extent influenced by that of the civil courts, where the leaders of the bar appeared more often and increasingly without juries. Two dominant members of the bar during the first half of the 20th Century were Patrick Hastings and Norman Birkett. Their styles, because of triumphs linked with them, were influential on those of other barristers. Hastings was a master of direct forcible speech without any embellishments or ornamentation and prized brevity. Unlike Hastings, Norman Birkett believed that the advocate ought to use the full range of English speech. Other factors lay behind the mainly conversational and matter of fact advocacy that had become established. These include a widely held suspicion of rhetoric and, very importantly, better informed and greater educated juries. Jurors were less susceptible than their predecessors to theatrical gestures and melodrama, which had largely been replaced in literature and on the stage by introspection and realism, references to God and the Bible, elegant and flowery, but empty, speech and appeals to strong emotion and prejudice. In a more scientific age jurors expected more of an appeal to reason. The success of barristers such as Hardinge Giffard, John Holker, Charles Russell and Edward Clarke, during the closing decades of the previous century, may have been because they appreciated early on the changes that were occurring to juries. Attempting to catch the eye of the press to help create a reputation, useful to generate work, was an important factor behind the emotive, vividly worded and aggressive advocacy of the early Victorian period and afterwards. The later decline of court reporting in the newspapers, removing much of the gallery from the stage, may well have contributed to the more subdued form of speech."
(Andrew Watson)
"Other factors lay behind the mainly conversational and matter of fact advocacy that had become established. These include a widely held suspicion of rhetoric and, very importantly, better informed and greater educated juries. Jurors were less susceptible than their predecessors to theatrical gestures and melodrama" - surely this is the history of poetry as well, and we could just replace “the courtroom” with “the poem”.
Watson talks about the start of a more factual-objective style of courtroom advocacy in the 1890s (actually he says “closing decades”). This underlines the slow nature of the changes in poetics – a simpler and anti-rhetorical style was already there in the 1890s (Housman, Kipling, Hardy), but it was decades later that other styles became decisively unfashionable and so “pompous” and “ridiculous”. If the audience is composed, at any point, of people aged 20 to 70, it is credible that any profound shift of taste takes four or five decades to become dominant, as opposed to being attached to a specific group which is surrounded by living alternatives.
I find this passage very enlightening for what happened in poetry. What he says about prejudice is enlightening – certainly if you look at Noyes and Kipling then patriotic prejudice is a big part of their message, and the neglect of fact is all tied up with that. So we would say that the collapse of the national “drug high” of World War patriotism around 1925 meant a radical change in poetry. Patriotic poetry began to sound murderous as well as false. But we have quickly to look back at Watson – barristers were shifting towards a cooler and more factual style, respecting the rational judgement of jurors, already in the 1890s.
Watson is implying that judges and jurors had completely different ways of reacting to the speeches of advocates. The factual style spread from “the civil courts”, where judges listened to arguments about contracts and the law of contracts. He is implying that judges preferred the law to gusty emotions. But, in a jury trial, everything you say is heard by both judge and jury.
Watson quotes an older source, Keating, as attaching the change to "fifty years", so starting around 1893 and still prevalent in 1943.
If you follow these posts, you will know that I began writing about Kipling and Noyes in connection with the rise of UKIP. The smash of the “portentous patriotic poem” in the 1920s was the start of the “left liberal bubble”. Reading Noyes and Kipling explains why poetry gave up on writing about big battles which killed lots of foreigners. At the same time, I read Norman Jope’s article (in Tears in the Fence) about Michael Sullivan, a xenophobic poet who was apparently in sympathy with UKIP and Farrage and who had a poem in the Plymouth Herald every week for two years (around 2013 to 2015). Sullivan has just died aged 66. Apparently he was in mid-poem. (Death was in May 2019.) Some poems are lethal. Someone thought that Plymouth needed militarist, patriotic poetry. Sullivan’s poems are pastiches of Kipling's patriotic and naval poetry (The Five Nations, etc.). The Herald reports “His knowledge of guns was so extensive he had been a Home Office consultant and edited a shooting magazine and the Tackle and Guns trade publication, and penned a book called The Rough Shooter’s Guide.” So there is at least some poetry which is outside the anti-capitalist sentiment of the majority.
While writing this someone has been on the radio telling us that 17,000 sailors of the Royal Navy died suppressing the slave trade. I think there is something suspect about this figure. Only 500 British sailors died at Trafalgar. It must refer to ships sinking while on patrol, not to sea-fights with slave-runners. But it is also incomplete – why not tell us how many British seamen died while taking part in the slave trade? or how many Navy men died in fights for the West Indies colonies, which were profitable and totally reliant on slave labour? After the first fact, there are several others.
We have been conversing about the quasi-Biblical aspect of Noyes and Kipling – where they know what Destiny is Uttering. But Kipling’s poems were also close to music-hall recital – they had a large colloquial element and some were (in the 1970s) adapted as folk-songs. Something similar is true of Noyes. Think about the naval rivalry with Germany, the new militarist interest which marked British politics so much from 1890 to 1914. The core is British sea power, although that also means trade, access to markets, secure control of the colonies and of overseas sources of raw materials. A warship is a symbol for all that power, for nationhood. But, the vital part of the ship is sailors. Militarism has to seduce the working classes. So the militarist poet is going to look at popular song, folk music. Noyes writes fake folk material – this is a big component of his work up to 1920. The obvious solution was sea shanties, as in his ridiculous poem “Forty Singing Seamen”. I was taken aback to read in N.A. M. Rodger’s history of the Navy that the Navy banned singing – the key was silence so that commands could be heard. It was a very precise business, like running trains. So, no tradition of song in the Navy (after 1800). I was taken aback because I had seen so many fake sea shanties, in the poets of a certain era. “Drake’s Drum”, and what have you.
If you are going to write the history of the folk style in British poetry, you have to thread in the use of it by nationalists. It looks to me as if we are seeing a take-over of folkness by the Left, seizing it from the Right. Edward Thomas was close to folk-song, it was part of the Georgian thing, and this is completely different from the ‘folk style’ deployed by Noyes and Henry Newbolt. Today, we expect folk to be associated with protest songs, the authenticity of the poor, the corruption of the rich and cultured. That is not necessarily where folk came from.
The decline of sailing ships meant the death of sea shanties. Cecil Sharp went round old ex-sailors and collected a couple of hundred of them. Very impressive. Sharp was most probably in the Right current, enthused by the Nation and interested in simple songs as a response to the extension of the franchise to the working class, and the urge to co-opt the lower classes to prevent them from taking over the State and directing it to their own interests. Sharp was part of ‘Leitkultur’, middle-class guidance and avoidance of change. Bourgeois guardianship.
The history of “folk song language” in poetry is unnaturally complex.
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