Capistrum (an etymology)

Capistrum and related



I was leafing through a Scottish Gaelic dictionary and encountered a word cabstair, “bit (for a horse)”. But, I had just encountered a Welsh word, cebystr, ‘halter’. Evidently these two are the same word. But why? To get to it quickly, the word is not English but is Latin, ‘capistrum’, and is not present in Irish Gaelic.
Latin words do exist in Scottish Gaelic (MacInnes gives a figure of 250) but these mainly come from Latin-using monks and refer to ecclesiastical concepts rather than useful items of farm equipment, such as a tether. So the favoured source for a word like capistrum is spoken Latin. This was heard in the parts of Britain which were part of the Roman Empire, and numerous practical, physical, farming-related Latin words are preserved in Welsh. Spoken Latin could give a word like “capistr" in the Romano-British language spoken both in England and in Scotland south of the Antonine Wall.
My proposal is that cabstair in Gaelic comes from an unrecorded capistrum word in the P-Celtic of south-west Scotland, within the borders of the old Empire but close to or within the early settlement of Gaelic-speakers from Ireland.



Cabstair has shed a syllable present in capistrum – syncope, as we call it. (Conversely, cebystr is actually trisyllabic, there is an unwritten vowel in the str cluster. So both cabstair and cebystr have acquired a syllable not present in the Latin source. The development of a such a vowel is called anaptyxis.) I have the impression of having read about syncope in the P-Celtic language of southern Scotland, Cumbric as it is often called, but I don’t have the reference. This would delete unstressed syllables in trisyllabic words. An example would be the river-name Kelvin. This evidently comes from Latin calamus, in the sense of stubble or thatch, a local borrowing surviving in Welsh celefyn (with a noun singular formative -yn), 'stalk, stem'. The meaning is reedy river, flowing slowly down a very gentle gradient, as you can see by visiting it. But Kelvin represents a syncope with relation to celefyn.
The relics of Cumbric show an i-affection or Ruckumlaut, which shifts a to e in the syllable preceding an i or an e. This accounts for the evolution of calamus to celefyn, which shows a double i-affection. Another example is the place-name Peebles, agreed to mean “tents” and to come from Latin papilio. It is a plural and so records not papilio but papiliones, so that the pap has become peb. This parallels the Welsh word pabell (also ‘tent’), plural pebyll. But, cabstair does not show i-affection, as we would expect before the i in capistrum. This works if we suppose that the -i- was lost before the date of the i-affection.
Since the taming of the horse in Europe goes back to the early 3^rd millennium BC, it is surprising that items of horse technology needed to be borrowed, at around 400 AD, or therefore words to describe those items. I am asking for two loan steps (Latin to Cumbric and Cumbric to Gaelic). The sociology of this can only be speculative. I can comment that people were preoccupied with the horse, as people are with cars today. Simple items were subject to intense development and differentiation. There was a prestige economy around horse tack. This allowed for loan-words, within a rich vocabulary of terms for bits of equipment. It is surprising that the Gael needed to borrow any words relating to horses. The Roman Army certainly used a lot of horses.
Capistrum gives also the French word s’enchevêtrer, ‘get tangled up’, whose literal meaning is a horse getting tangled up in its own reins. So capistrum gives words meaning variously reins, tether, bit.

The Pet Canary of Pius XII

The Pet Canary of Pius XII

Peter Levi’s poem “Monologue spoken by the pet canary of Pius XII”, is an oblique poem I have never understood, although I must have read it around 1974, in Lucie-Smith’s anthology. Here is the poem.

Uccello cello cello

I love myself: it seems a dream sometimes

about the water spouting from tree-height,

and voices like a piece of looking-glass.

His shoulder had young pine-needles on it.

At night I used to wake when the big moonlight

swayed upward like a lighted playing-card,

and someone had uncombed the Great Hallel

with grimy fingers down the window-pane.

I am unable to read their faces

but the inscription like a neon sign

lights understanding in my thoughts and dreams.

The Spirit of God is gigantic:

white wings ripping aether bluer than air.

After I eat I plume myself bright yellow

Uccello cello cello

and hop about his borrowed finger:

the jewel in the ring without a scratch

and the white silk and the gold thread are mine.

Oh yes, I hop about and love myself.

I do not understand humanity,

their emotions terrify me.

What I like in him is his company

and the long fingers of the Holy Ghost.

(published 1966 I think). It is saying something like, “Pacelli was Hitler's sprightly pet songster”, but can't say this because Levi was a Jesuit priest and so subordinate to the Vatican at every moment. ‘Uccello’ means ‘bird’ (avicellus). This is a difficult poem but it is evidently a distancing from Catholic politics as they were from say 1918 to 1958. The line about “someone had uncombed the Great Hallel/ with grimy fingers down the window-pane” refers to Psalm 136 (and this is the Jewish term for that psalm, and it means “praise”). Psalm 136 “is a litany of thanksgiving about the beloved history and culture of the Israelites.” “It is used in the morning service on the Sabbath, festivals, and during the Passover seder.” It seems likely that Fr Levi, SJ, was pointing to the persecution of the Jews during Pacelli’s papacy, and to Pacelli’s notorious indifference to it. 136 says: and [God] redeemed us from our enemies: this is the key line and its function is to bring up what Pacelli didn’t do for the Jewish people. Much of the meaning of Levi’s poem is embodied in Psalm 136, and the poem needs to be considered as a commentary on the psalm, which we need to have in mind as we read the poem. As for the fingers, the canary later trills "and [I] hop about on his borrowed finger ... and the white silk and gold thread are mine". The papal arm (in a silk sleeve) on which the canary hops is perhaps a parody of the psalmist's "With a strong hand, and a stretched out arm".  So, I guess both references to fingers refer to the same hand - and it was Pacelli who 'uncombed the Great Hallel'. But there is a third reference, the last line describes "the long fingers of the Holy Ghost", so it may be that the Holy Ghost effaced the sacred text out of shame.

“I do not understand humanity” sounds like a self-description by Pius XII, the ultimate curial lawyer-bureaucrat. Why are the voices “like a looking-glass”? I don’t think it means ”cut-glass voices”, because mirrors are poured, not cut; but it does sound as if the voices are narcissistic, saying self-confident things about their right to rule Europe. They are the voices of the Curia and Vatican bureaucrats (but perhaps of other Italians, the Fascisti).

If you listen closely, you can just hear the “uccello” phrase as “pacello cello cello”. It looks as if the poem was written during the years of Vatican II, when it looked as if the Church were going to renounce its past as the voice of the land-owners, and when radicals from all over the world were meeting each other in Rome, eager for new ideas.

The interest of this is that after writing about David Jones and Hitler I wanted to think about left-wing Catholic poets. I am glad to have worked out the meaning, even if after a 45 year lag. For a Jesuit to attack a Pope was pretty awesome and demanded a certain lack of directness.

David Jones, enemy of democracy

David Jones, enemy of democracy

The turning-point is the close reading of a phrase in Jones’ April 1939 letter about reading Mein Kampf, where he refers to “the currish, leftish,  money thing.” The full sentence is "Anyway, I back him still against all this currish, leftish, money thing, even though I'm a miserable specimen and dependent on it." The "him" is Adolf Hitler. He was saying that he didn’t like Hitler, but didn’t prefer democratic, liberal politicians to him, because after all they contradicted all his values. I read this (in the book of his letters, Dai Great-Coat, p.93) but didn’t understand it, because I couldn't see how the money interest could be interchangeable with the Left when they were political enemies. However, Kevin Nolan has recently made me aware of the real meaning of the phrase.

Kevin directs me to Jewish dogs: an image and its interpreters, by Kenneth Stow. The blurb says 'Jewish Dogs is not a study of "anti-Semitism" or "anti-Judaism." Instead, this book argues that to anchor claims of supersession, Catholics have viewed Jews as metaphoric—and sometimes not so metaphoric—dogs. The dog has for millennia been the focus of impurity, and Catholicism fosters doctrines of physical purity that go hand in hand with those of ritual purity. The purity is that of the "one loaf" spoken of by Paul in Corinthians that is, at once, the Eucharist and the collective Christian Corpus, the body of the faithful. Paul views this "loaf" as physically corruptible, and as John Chrysostom said at the close of the fourth century, the greatest threat to the loaf's purity are the Jews. They are the dogs who wish to steal the bread that belongs exclusively to the children. Eventually, Jews were said to attack the "loaf" through ritual murder and attempts to defile the Host itself; the victim of ritual murder is identified with the Host, as is common in Catholic martyrdom. Pope Pius IX still spoke of Jewish dogs barking throughout the streets of Rome in 1871. Other Catholic clergy were dismayed. This book is thus as much a study of Catholic doctrinal history as it is a study of Jews.’

Stow was professor of Jewish History at the university of Haifa. The ur-passage on dogs is Matthew, 15, 26. Chrysostom means “golden mouth”, an epithet for a great orator. (This can include the ability to persuade people of things which they know aren't true.) The specific source of the obsolete word ‘currish’ is in The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, scene 1:

Gratiano: O, be thou damned, inexecrable dog,

And for thy life let justice be accused!

Thou almost makest me waver in my faith

To hold opinion with Pythagoras

That souls of animals infuse themselves

Into the trunks of men. Thy currish spirit

Governed a wolf who, hanged for human slaughter,

Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,

And whilst thou layest in thy unhallowed dam

Infused itself in thee, for thy desires

Are wolvish, bloody, starved, and ravenous.

Jones’ letter, it turns out, was connected to the work he was doing on an essay about Hitler for The Tablet. This was completed in May 1939 but never published; it “was considered too long for publication in the newspaper” and wasn’t re-located (on friends’ advice) because it was too pro-Hitler. (The Tablet was the main magazine for intellectual Catholics in England.) Jones scholars have turned it up, in his papers in an American archive (Boston College), and it is now in print. So the “currish” is used just after Jones had been reading Mein Kampf, and comes from an anti-Semitic tirade in an anti-Semitic play. The only possible context for saying “leftish money thing” is an anti-Semitic dogma that the Jews were in charge both of international capitalism and international Bolshevism, and both were the product of resentment of “Christian culture”. The idea is a stupid contradiction in terms everywhere except in this context of fear of “subversive Jewish intelligence”. The parts reinforce each other, the writer is explaining his (partial) sympathy for Hitler because of Hitler’s opposition to “the leftish, currish, money power” and we know very well that what Hitler was opposed to was “Jewish intelligence” as personified in big financiers and the Marxist parties of Russia and Germany. Is there any ambiguity left?

Dawson’s book (which I wrote about in an earlier blog, in November 2018) is a significant parallel to Jones’ unpublished essay, and both are accepting of Hitler and related figures because they start out from a complete distaste for liberalism and parliamentary democracy. (This is the analysis of Tom Villis, I have seen one essay of his but not his books on literary Fascism in England and Wales.) So they both regard Hitler’s regime as bad government, but are not passionately against it, because they regard democracy in Western (and central) Europe as bad government too.

I will quote Villis: “As Elizabeth Ward has pointed out, Wales thus provided the same function for Jones as France did for Belloc and ‘Merrie England’ for Chesterton, and even as ‘European culture’ did for Dawson and some of his disciples. This kind of transcendental nationalism can have reactionary implications. For Ward this ‘myth making’ – along with Jones’s connections with Order and Colosseum – mean that his poetry and art can be seen as part of the same ‘rejection of contemporary Western democracy’ which characterised other right-wing Catholic figures and, by implication, European fascism. [...] Jones’s views were not merely idiosyncratic but part of a wider revolt against liberal democracy reflected both in his Catholic contemporaries and wider European culture. Nevertheless, Ward’s characterisation of Jones has produced over the years the familiar over-anxious defence of his reputation from Catholic scholars.”

Up until 1945, there were quite a few European households, including educated ones, where "democracy" was a dirty word, free of underlying approval. This certainly includes some writers, including British poets. The 'war aims' campaign of the Allies sanctioned the word 'democratic' and made it unambiguously positive. Most of Europe had given up democracy before 1939, when Hitler began knocking over the various governments. Countries which had been set up as democracies in 1919 had given it up by 1939. This is the European context in which we can site pro-European writers like Jones and Saunders Lewis.
To reminisce, I did spend time in a university library trying to find sources on Jones’ ideas about politics, which is when I read Dawson, but I came up empty. Villis has got an awful lot further and this whole question probably needs to be re-thought based on his research. He mentions two inter-war Catholic magazines directly linked to the discussion circle which Jones was a member of, and which are likely to have brought up the questions which Jones was trying to answer in The Anathémata and elsewhere. As Villis has read these, we need to consult his work for a deeper understanding of Jones.

Jones was outside the “left-liberal bubble” which British poetry has been comfortably thriving inside since the 1920s. The story makes one even more inclined to sympathise with the literary consensus, and to feel defended by its values! How unattractive, to venture outside that consensus and find people steeping themselves in anti-Semitism and imperialism!

I feel that my body of work is weak on Catholic thought. Certainly I don’t want to write up inherited clichés about all Catholics being on the Right. So many modern British poets have been Catholic that this area needs close attention. I just don’t have that Catholic background. I have a close reading relationship with Heinrich Böll, a Left Catholic intellectual whose resistance to Hitler was integral to his Catholicism. I have great admiration for Böll. But his essay on the Catholic church in politics is devastating, it’s not so far from what the secular Left might say. I would also like to cite Peter Levi’s poem “Monologue spoken by the pet canary of Pius XII” (published 1966 I think), see next post. I would be glad to read a book about left-wing Catholics, like Levi. My scraps of knowledge suggest that Catholicism is incompatible with capitalism and extreme wealth, Catholic poets are surely in line with that.

Discussion of Pius XII (Pacelli) seems to omit his background as Nuncio to Bavaria just after the First World War, where he was close with German Catholic leaders, helped organise the suppression of the Soviet Republic in Munich in 1919, and approved of Hitler (whom he knew) as a figure in a concerted resistance to anti-Catholic elements of the Marxist Left. (He became nuncio to the Berlin government in 1920, when Bavaria was no longer technically a kingdom and a State.) To quote John Cornwell’s revelatory article in Vanity Fair in 1999, >>The German authorities in Rome, both diplomats and military commanders, fearing a backlash of the Italian populace, hoped that an immediate and vigorous papal denunciation might stop the SS in their tracks and prevent further arrests. Pacelli refused. In the end, the German diplomats drafted a letter of protest on the Pope’s behalf and prevailed on a resident German bishop to sign it for Berlin’s benefit. Meanwhile, the deportation of the imprisoned Jews went ahead on October 18. <<

As Cornwell says, John XXIII was a completely different kind of person.

I apologise for writing about this in haste, the day after I received Kevin’s emails, but I didn’t want to delay.

addendum. 
Villis mentions Charles Petrie as one of the participants in the discussion circle, led by Tom Burns, which Jones was part of in the Thirties and late Twenties. He was a historian, and by coincidence, I have read one of his books. It came out in the fifties and is titled The Jacobite Movement. (I read the 1958 edition but there were earlier ones.) I really admired it. I suppose he knew about the material because he had a sympathy for it (and was anti-Hanoverian at some level of his being), but it is unbiased history and doesn’t wander up any blind alleys. In fact, I was impressed by his ability to interpret Jacobite political styles in terms of Catholic devotion. For example, James II’s conduct while in exile was not the product of bigotry and stupidity, or not only of those, but was a performance, for the benefit of the observers whom he knew to be following every hour of his life, of contrition and acceptance of God’s tribulations, evoking a legend of the martyr-king with which his Catholic supporters would have been familiar. He accepted that his life as king was one of uninterrupted ritual, and that he was always re-enacting the life of some king or other. His occupying himself with religious activity was firstly suited to someone who has lost their material wealth, almost a form of realism, and secondly a sign that he had bowed to God’s judgement, although not also to the judgement of the House of Commons and the Protestant interest in Britain. James was imitating the life of Edward the Confessor. Petrie’s account of how this celebrity on-show behaviour, where everything is conspicuous, was a way of influencing Catholic public opinion (in the French Court and the Vatican, as well as as in susceptible parts of the British Isles) is profound. James could reach public opinion, in realms which had a high illiteracy rate and which were untouched by newspapers and modern news sources, by producing events which would fit into simple stories, and stories which people were already familiar with. His publicity followed the rules of folklore. The parties lined up behind the Hanoverian and Stuart interests were just not mirror images of each other. There is more modern work, by Murray Pittock and others, which one is inevitably going to read, but Petrie’s book has not been replaced. The political history of British Catholics, which is so important for Jones, goes back to the Jacobites (if not to the sixteenth century, indeed), and has abidingly been the story of the dynasty out of power and of a cultural vocabulary which differs from the *dominant one, either Protestant or secular.
(*Without collapsing into pedantry, it is quite likely that Jacobite sympathies were dominant in Ireland, Wales, and much of Scotland, at least during the 18th century. They were popular even if excluded from legal political activity and from the world of print.)
The opposition between the Stuart dynasty, first in power and then out of power, and the Westminster Parliament, is the background to Jones’ indifference to electoral politics and rejection of all politicians. It is part of the hereditary attitudes of British Catholics, which would have been available in whatever sources Jones assimilated, as a convert. 

Reconciliation? three –fights for the flag, Kipling

Reconciliation? three –fights for the flag, Kipling

note. This is part of a series which sets out from the analysis of UKIP voters, by Matthew Goodwin, Rob Ford, and others, that said they were a marginalised group, left behind by globalisation and de-industrialisation, who had resentments against their ‘representatives’ in politics and media which were partially justified. Goodwin said that mainstream politics had to address their complaints. These notes ask how the ‘elite’ which decides poetic taste is itself legitimated. Further, whether the left-liberal tenor of poetry itself tends to exclude people whose attitudes or anxieties are more power-oriented. This time we go back and re-read a book by Kipling which straightforwardly presents poetry about imperialism, and in favour of more imperialism. The reaction against this in the 1920s was a “founding moment” for the poetry world, a turn which it has never gone back on. Evidently everyone who is now inside the poetry world partakes of that rejection. But the past ten years have seen a weakening of the consensus positions in politics, so the cultural consensus may also be under threat.

I have been reading The Five Nations. This is really powerful stuff.  This poetry reminds me of Cecil B. de Mille’s silent films when you have a full orchestra blowing them along – it has that dreadful momentum even if you aren't going where it wants you to. It was published as a book in 1903 but the poems were in periodicals from 1897 on. You have to connect it with what was in the newspapers every day during that time – comments I have seen on the Net say it is “misunderstood”, but that is not really possible unless you don’t know what was in the papers at the time. This was mainly the failure of British arms in the Boer War and the expansion of the German Navy (and trained conscript army) undermining Britain’s ‘strategic position’. The poetry is so strong that it dragged English poetry behind it for 30 years. It is typical when you see poetry of this period that does not work that it is an attempt to relive Kipling’s model. I have also been reading a volume of Alfred Noyes (vol.1 of the 1926 Collected), which I got from the local second hand bookshop before it closed, as a comparison – Noyes’ poetry is also often about the Navy, and past naval victories, but isn’t very good.

As for the reading public, you can see that there might be a sector which wants Kipling-style rhythms and patriotism, but has no time for literary poetry. But obviously no-one can write this kind of poetry now. This isn’t so strange – Kipling was a one-off.

It’s different reading Noyes- he had a full-time job at the Admiralty writing propaganda, but he wasn’t really with militarist poetry. It’s all Kipling, really – him and the whole apparatus of imperialist patriotic tub-thumping. It’s delusional but it’s tied to something real. The empire was fragile, the forces inside it were too strong not to rip it apart over the course of several decades, but it was real in 1897. Why just him? I guess the mass of English poets were still bound to Romanticism, they were too fascinated by the sublime to want to include the reality of machines, money, and military violence. As a result they didn’t get hypnotised by those things. My feeling is that when Kipling writes, poems about the Royal Artillery in South Africa, all the details were right. And it’s full of details. But it’s also about blowing people’s bodies apart with HE shells. You can’t imagine Tennyson harnessing himself to that. His Morte d’Arthur warriors don’t have many reality-like qualities. Tennyson died in 1892, just after Kipling had started his rather sordid military poems (Barrack-Room Ballads, 1888). It’s still the sublime, the ideal which covers poetry in mist. Kipling took metre back to oral recitation and got rid of the sublime – modern reforms, but a kind of modernity which said yes to colonial wars and an arms race.

Noyes writes, “As on their ancient decks they proudly stood/ decks washed of old with England’s proudest blood". This is ridiculous (and the rhyme is fishy). Kipling is not ridiculous. Noyes gives the impression of knowing that he could be a best-seller by writing about warships, but not being really sincere about it. He was giving pacifist lectures shortly before the Great War – so far as he was emotionally involved, he wasn’t the bloodthirsty kind of patriot. Kipling is not ridiculous. He is critical of the imperial project but when you look at it he is saying you need to spend more money on cannon and warships. This is so much like Farrage – the message that you aren’t looking after your own interests, cunning foreigners are running rings round you, you trust your enemies. It’s still the same tune. So I guess you could write Brexit poetry, and I could even list the themes it would foreground. It’s also the same tune as Hitler- you are the greatest people in the world but you need to pursue self-interest 25 hours a day, you are so naive and trusting.

Kipling incorporates the working class into his poems. He shed all those mediaeval knights, who were land-owners almost by definition. But, this welcoming-in is co-axial with a new kind of war which needs mass levies as opposed to a small professional army, and which would therefore need the working class to step up as participants in the shared endeavour, for it to work. Kipling’s populism is double-edged. My reading of this democratic imperialism is that it involves a minority who know what the plot is and a majority who are doing the fighting or the factory work and only hear the intoxicating foreground music. The acute aspect of this is that you can accuse the ones who see through it of lack of patriotism. Oh, you say no to our big music.

The corrupt part of all this is how hard it is to bring the non-white races of the Empire on stage when Kipling pushes them off it so effectively. I can analyse his relationship with his audience but there is nothing to say about the people whose land is the main object of all this imperialist endeavour. Germany is expansionist and wants to take colonies away from “satiated” and “ageing” empires, this fills the foreground and the question of why the natives of those colonies were being prevented from governing themselves vanishes behind the action.

I will quote again the passage that Norman Jope highlighted from the “Plymouth Laureate” –

Now comes the hour. Where comes the man

to free the blade its sheath;

and raise again quick ‘Albion’,

lay bare its razor teeth?

To set Britannia’s heart arace,

and gorge those veins with flame;

cleave free her ill forged foreign chains,

this sceptred isle reclaim.

(‘Albion’)

Britannia sounds like a bulldog on a chain. The poem (by the ‘Laureate’ of Plymouth) is completely a Kipling knock-off, as I recognise now after reading “The Five Nations”. And it’s basically an attack on Brussels.

While reading, I kept hearing lines from Johnny Cash’s recital of “Oh bury me not (on the lone prairie)”. They just popped into my head. I guess this was a recitation piece from roughly the date of ‘Five Nations’, and that there was a whole genre of stage recitations which Kipling fitted into – he went to music halls and wrote poems which sounded like music-hall stage poems. Before radio, people made their own entertainment, and a wide range of people could memorise these pieces and deliver them at amateur concerts. Kipling’s poems are always dramatic monologues, they lend themselves to colourful delivery, and the rhythm makes them easy to memorise. There is a recognisable affinity between Kipling and country and western songs. I think this rhetorical populism has a much wider presence than Kipling, but it does not normally surface in literary anthologies. Tennyson wrote those terrific dialect poems which anticipate Kipling – a lot of Tennyson editions don’t print them. It is hard to get a complete Tennyson.

The historian of music-hall, Peter Bailey, describes it as Kipling’s ‘perfect bully-pulpit’, because ‘its ritual antiphony of posture and response inherited from melodrama with its hagio-demonology of heroes and villains', encouraged tribal patriotism, ‘a sort of incantatory collective self-admiration among audiences flushed with enthusiasm for themselves’.”

(from the Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, on-line; Peter Howarth is probably quoting Bailey from Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City.)

This could also be a reason why that sort of poetry doesn’t exist any more – it was linked to a genre of verse recitals which itself does not exist. TV closed down the music halls, during the 1950s. Radios and the gramophone displaced the amateur performance tradition. So, why doesn’t his poetry sound like the cultured poetry which existed before 1888? His metrics are new– free from Latin influence. This is a possible form of nativism, tainted almost at source by its link with the wish to dominate people from other nationalities. The gap between the cultivated and the popular ear connects to learning Latin through the medium of poetry as the main content of schools’ offering. The story of the 20th C is the story of the vacuum after the disappearance of Latin influence. The change (pointed to by the historian RCK Ensor) is due to the rise of intelligent people who had a secondary education which did not include Latin – a new class, almost. Their victory was due to a change of opinion affecting everyone, not literally to overrunning and wiping out their peers from grammar schools and public schools. Because Kipling was writing about working-class characters, it was convincing if he used a non-Latin, uncultivated metric to record their monologues. The old metrics collapsed – this is the shattering of the upper stratum. Does this sound like the message of UKIP about metropolitan elites? The literary audience hears sounds which other people don’t. That’s the point which makes their legitimacy vulnerable. Another literary system could vanish like the Latin-based ones. The question about natural English rhythms is an interesting one. There are so many answers – Kipling might be one. Many of the lines in ‘Five Nations’ are in two parts –like this:

Swift to my use in my trenches, where my well-planned ground-works grew,

I tumbled his quoins and his ashlars, and cut and reset them anew.

Lime is milled of the marbles; burned it, slacked it, and spread;

Taking and leaving at pleasure the gifts of the humble dead.

(‘The Palace’)

This AB structure is based on Biblical verses, what Louth described as parallelismus membrorum. But, if you read the Bible, you can hear that the sound of the parallelism is all over Kipling. So – it is not native English, or not all over. He was deeply influenced by the patterns of Hebrew poetry. (Which possibly come from Egyptian – but that’s a tangle of tempting issues.) It’s from the Authorised Version and it’s not free of foreign influences at all. There was a nativist metric during the first 30 years of the 20th C – with Masefield and Kipling, notably. This was in parallel with the rise of free verse, which was part of the same movement of liberation. It was an exploratory period. Meanwhile – Noyes actually writes some poems in hexameters. Kipling’s nativist sense of rhythm matches queasily well with his populist-nativist politics.

Did he give up writing poetry? The Years Between, in 1919,, was the last one – so his spring stopped flowing. It seems to have stopped during the War. No repentance but a dreadful silence. Unbelievable that the torrent of energy in 'Five Nations’ would just stop. But writing in favour of an arms race and mass conscription was going to lose its verve when you had a tangible arms race in being and an army of dead conscripts.The affair of poetry with imperial politics was really an affair with the Devil. The breakdown of that affair was utterly inevitable and even the poets most involved gave up on it, during the 1920s. Nobody could pick it up in the 1930s because it wasn’t there any more. It wasn’t silenced from outside – Kipling and Newbolt just lost their wish to write in that way. Unlike any other visionary poets, their fantasy became reality – and it struck them dumb.

Charles Jencks’ essay on Prince Charles as architectural critic has several sarky remarks about architects telling the wider public what they ought to like. This also applies to the patriotic poets – they are telling people they want to go out and die for the Empire. So there is a level of distrust of the “cultured class” based on its record of complying with what the government wants and getting a free ride off campaigns launched by the right-wing press. OK, but note that this is part of the UKIP message and a doctrine supporting right-wing populism. It follows from this history of complicity that the “left liberal bubble” have been right to take Kipling, Noyes, Newbolt and Watson off the menu. (It’s a simplification to connect imperialism with “the government”, actually it’s more accurate to point to commercial and business interests seizing assets, and white settlers seizing land, and a pressure from these two groups which the government too frequently gave way to. Imperialism was the early stage of globalisation, and in its ‘production model’ of 1850 to 1940 already had the media and business as powerful and irresponsible agents which governments tried to satisfy.)

Noyes’ poem ‘Forty Singing Seamen’ starts from a passage in the 14^th C fake "travellers’ tales” collection by Bernard de Mandeville and constructs a sort of dream-poem about drunken seamen in a wonderland somewhere in the realm of Prester John, so Ethiopia (a Christian land beyond the Moslem lands). It uses Mandeville as a sort of “naive art”, and uses a verse form which alludes to sea shanties and ballads, in fact several lines of folk-song. Although it doesn't show colonising activity, it has a sort of patriotic sludge underlying it – we are supposed to identify with the sailors because they “fight for the flag” on other occasions. This is a truly phoney poem, the language is inconsistent and unconvincing. I mention it because that deployment of naive imagery and of folk song is often seen as a sign of authenticity, but is equally compatible with the manipulation of opinion– a function necessary when the electorate includes everyone. I haven’t read Noyes “Drake – an English epic” (1908), but the catalogue entry tells me it is 497 pages long.

As for legitimation, the bottom line is that people who read modern poetry also own it and can legislate for taste around it. It is direct democracy, if you take part in the game you can have a say in what the rules are. The idea that people who don’t read modern poetry can decide what is good or bad about it is inherently stupid.

I think that octosyllabics are a natural rhythm for English poetry – Masefield was good at these. My reading of early north-west European cultures is that they had a whole variety of metres. These carried out various functions, or were just separate for no special reason. They just rolled that way. This suggests to me that a natural English rhythm would come in numerous varieties. Defining what is unnatural is also debatable. You could say that all art is unnatural –and you could say that any linguistic behaviour is natural.

Morris Cox

Morris Cox



Received emails from Kevin Nolan and J.E. Keery about a totally neglected poet, Morris Cox (1903-98). Cox was mainly a visual artist, a printmaker I believe, and lived in Stratford (East 15). Alan Tucker’s well-informed obituary for The Independent remarks that he went to West Ham Art School in 1916.  There was a book about his prints and his work as a printer in 1991: Gogmagog: Morris Cox and the Gogmagog Press. Roderick Cave commented “Morris Cox has been perhaps the most important, and certainly the most original private printer in Britain in the past forty years […]” (date – 1991).The poems included in this book were not then included in the Flashpoint retrospective.
The latest attributed date for a poem in Whirligig is 1945. This is from a 1940 poem about Ancient Egypt: At the foot of the mountain and getting power over the legs, walking with the legs and coming forth upon earth, on a staircase leading up to the roof with the feet tied together, changing into a lotus, changing into a phoenix, changing into a heron, changing into a serpent, changing into a crocodile, changing into the god who giveth light and not dying a second time: O golden hawk with human head! O man come back to see his home!

A whirligig is a child’s toy, a stick with a loose head which goes round in the wind. Toys are folk art. Secondarily, it means a fairground merry-go-round. That is also folk art. (The 'gig’ bit is because there was a carriage called a gig with very large wheels, rotation was very striking.) The cover design for the book, by Cox, is very beautiful. It shows what I think are whirligig heads, detached from their sticks and flying away. They look like flowers and the picture is mainly plant motifs. The lettering looks like the curved upper register, or fascia, of a merry-go-round, where the blazon goes, so “PIRELLI’S PRANCERS’ or whatever. This is from a 1967 poem, in the form of a Mummers’ Play:

 Below, tree-rods, thick budded, beaded, 
              Annie’s breasts and all 
         dot their shadowed undershed, 
              but Annie’s best of all. 

         Coddy seedlings sud and fidget, 
              Annie’s hair and all 
         blade their biddings, drive their blood, 
              but Annie’s best of all. 

(I guess ‘coddy’ refers to the codling moth, Cydona pomonella.) The 1958 British Council pamphlet on ‘Poetry To-day’ praises Cox and says “He throws words at the reader as if the reader were a coconut-shy.” (Geoffrey Moore wrote that) On page 59, he comes in between Causley and Christopher Logue, both of them interested in the language of folk song (Logue gave this up a few years later). Cox was in love with folk song, and his total declining of any moment of speaking as a 20th C human being who knows 20th C words is puzzling but surely raises the key question about his style. It gives the folk poems a certain irreducible consistency, but leaves the distance between us and the poems empty and mysterious. A brief dip into the dating of styles would tell us that in the 1960s pop music almost swept poetry away. In the 1950s, there was a Folk Boom in which Southern blues played a small part, leading up to a torrent of electrified blues in the guise of rock music, which took over everything. In the Fifties, there was a current of folk-related poetry, of which Cox is one part. My point is that this line of poetry came before the “folk boom” in music, so it was related but not an offshoot. The Fifties did not see exclusively Cold War conservatives writing formal verse. Cox was writing poetry in his folk style in the 1930s (according to the dates he supplied), and was starting from Lawrence, if anything. He considered that his break-through came in 1934. So here is his poem, dated 1934, ‘Earth’:

All• long  or• earth  ages  spin 
the  soft  to  unsoft  hardened  earthboll• 
grim  the  eggcrust•  knit  the  allwrasm 
clombond  hell . . 

all• long  or• earth  earks  and  cares 
and  drees  and  dreams• • 
while  day  by  day  by  dayred  mornlight 
eatgiver  grovels  in  the  grist 
and  awe  and  aware  hie  forth : 
to  rive  and  rise  and  reap  and  rot : 
and  tether  and  team  and  thrill  and  thrust : 
and  hulk  and  harrow  and  heave  and  heel . . 
O  evenrest  and  sleep! . .

“Erce’ is a name for an earth goddess in an Anglo-Saxon charm. This style is notable for a lack of any words whose stem is French or Latin, and in fact you can reach a sort of folkiness by deleting all those loan-words and replacing them with unfamiliar Anglo-Saxon words whose meanings are unclear but suggestive. (Allwrasm? Let me get back to you on that one.) Restricting vocabulary restricts, unsurprisingly, the range of propositions you can frame in words. He was a virtuoso in using those clanging monosyllables:


I stumbled, scrambled over bonerings,
over kneeknob, over shin,
slid the lank of rick and ricket,
trod the link of broken fingers,
ran with maggots in the marrow
and smelt the mouldy rug of hair.
I clambered, hobbled, reft and riven,
cracked with rack of rib and riddle,
(from ‘Mummers’ Fool', 1937/1955) On to 1967 -

  My one-eyed life of years no-years 
          watered the raindrops with its tears. 
          Monk-king-warriors with iron laws 
          tore the sweetness from my jaws. 
          yet I could wait while moving on, 
          die and be my new-born son, 
          scatter the limbs of the living folk, 
          cram the cock back into its yolk 
          and hide my heaven in the earth 
          until my death should give it birth. 

Now lying standing above below-stairs

         I can when I cannot unpair the pairs, 
          be together alone and sigh without breath, 
          be selfish and selfless in one living death. 
          For in day-night and howling dumb 
          you push and hold me with your thumb. 
          Brother is sister, all are kin, 
          all the children of my sin: 
          all me, all mine, though through another 
          I eat my father and beget my mother. 

          Thus truth from the hill-top bottom of a well 
          ever comes never in a heaven-bred hell. 

This is the end of the Mummers’ Play (another one, titled ‘A dialogue for National Folk Week’) and is spoken by a Fool who is presumably the spirit of fertility; he is “the old Adam” and everyone is a child of his original sin. This contains theological truths of a sort. A Fool is supposed to speak truths, but we can ask what kind of truths they are when unravelled. A fool’s bladder on a stick is quite like a whirligig. (There is also a reference to natural cycles, I guess.) The core of the above passage is, if anything, a denial of the reality of individual identity, irrelevant faced with the world of fertility and reproduction. A corpse nourishes the fields, so that you eat your ancestors. It follows that human attempts at reasoning, knowing the universe, etc., are illusory. This is a Myth, and it doesn't leave the poems with anything to say. All the paradoxes are an attack on practical reason.

The poems are mainly in a folk style, which emphasises the pagan elements of folklore – the Egyptian poem is an exception but fits in with the other poems. It is a sort of Mummers’ Play restored to high status and relieved of nonsense. The effect is an academically trained painter who consciously produces naive paintings. Cox isn’t completely alone in this – (I did a whole piece on literary poets writing folk poetry, with Tennyson leading the dance) –but it doesn't hold a conversation with us. Cox led a terribly isolated life, as a writer, but the poems sound isolated already. Folk poetry belongs to a community but this poetry does not belong to any community I can detect. We have to mention “Ritual Murder In Hyde Park”, because it’s such a great title for a poem. A footnote explains that it’s the sword-dance kind of Morris dance, which involves a pretend beheading at the climax: “where, fleeing the sword-edge, filling the cleft /his bewildered ghost untwins /with swift outflowing waft unweft.” What about “slid the lank of rick and ricket” - I find this obscure. The whole passage is about physical disintegration (prior to reincarnation), so the body is coming apart; you can ‘rick’ your neck, so ‘rick and ricket’ are both conditions of bones, and we are looking at bones here. ‘Slid’ is about bones parting, as cartilage disappears. But what is ‘lank’? Perhaps ’emaciation’? but, it’s an adjective. The syntax is a bit askew, frustrated by the monosyllables. The patterning is so powerful that it breaks some aspects of language which do not rapidly fit.  Since his publisher said No after Whirligig, (this is from Bradford Haas’ informative essay for Flashpoint) Cox set up his own press to print his poems."35 highly original, beautifully illustrated, hand-made limited edition books followed between 1957 and 1983." If the start date was 1957, this would be a very early example of small press activity in poetry. His pro-peasant attitude would have commended work he printed himself, wood, brass, paper, bodily effort, all that. This was called the Gogmagog Press, after two giants who featured in London pageants from an early date. He did a magazine called ‘Format’. I don’t detect much trace of him reading and publishing other poets, he wasn't really part of a scene. This is not unrelated to the scene ignoring him, you might think. These productions integrated visual design and text in a way which it would be hard to reproduce in digital print technology.
He used a font called Jefferson Gothic which imitates Gothic manuscript lettering and does not look like print.
I don't know why Whirligig only included poems at least nine years old. It wasn’t a reaction against the tepid Fifties scene, as Comfort thought. As Haas remarks, “by the time the book is published in 1954, the work included is already ten to twenty years old.” If we posit Cox as a novice in 1934, it becomes obvious that he is linked to Lawrence. The lawrentian strand did not do well in the 1930s, and that wasn’t just Morris Cox. Haas records Cox attending poetry readings at the Theosophical Society in the 1930s, I don’t know if he was reading magazines like The Quest or if we can connect him to any other Theosophical poets. His earliest work (in ‘Nine Nature Poems’) does have a Symboliste quality, rapturous, dreamlike, archaic, seduced by sound harmonies, which we can connect with a Theosophist ambience. One repeating theme of his work is resurrection as vegetation – the Mummers’ Plays are about the return to life of the plant world at the end of winter. The solstice is a symbol for death. He is more attracted to ‘folk ritual’, plays and dances than to songs, as sources. I think Haas is right to point to affinities between Cox and Ted Hughes – biology and death are so central to both of them. Also, both discard civilised language and use folk legends, consistently. They follow that experimental wilderness path of rejecting French and Latin words, and the cultured world which deploys them as its categories. But the “verse texture” makes them extremely distant from each other, Cox isn’t a proto-Hughes.

I looked at Harold Bayley's book, and it does seem to be a blueprint for Cox's poetry. Bayley's 18th century approach to etymology (so that Gog-Magog connects to "goggle-eyed" and no criticism is possible) prefigures the unchained sound-association which Cox built poems out of. "Archaic England" is junk, really, but you can see that it offers a world of weirdlore and interred folk knowledge, and that Cox spent his whole poetic life in such a world. subtitle "an essay in deciphering prehistory from megalithic monuments, earthworks, customs, coins, placenames, and faerie superstitions." Bayley cites Hadrian Allcroft on his title page, and is perhaps linked to Allcroft in a parallel world of nutters. The index finishes on page 894, but I do not think there is one page of sound scholarship among them. Bayley at p.195 says that "whirligig" means the sun, deriving from a Hebrew word og, meaning to go round, and cognate with giant, Gog Magog, and the surname Cox. Goggle and ogle are the same word.

(weird format problems with this - the blog software just doesn't want you to adjust things and ignores your wishes. this is the third release.)

What happened in the Seventies

What happened in the Seventies

We are going to start with Eric Mottram’s lists of poets in the ”British poetry revival”, in ‘catalogues’ for two successive weekend events at the Polytechnic of Central London, in 1974 and 1977. The first point is that you can compare two lists – 17 poets in the 1987 anthology A Various Art (all of whom were publishing in the Seventies) and 46 in Eric’s list. Only 7 of the AVA poets are on Eric’s list. This must be an indicator of the depth of talent in the Seventies. Clearly, a large number of people were in love with poetry. We have to ask, at the very least, what they were in love with. This total count of poets is so large it sounds like damage. But that just makes the period interesting.

In his first, 1974, essay Mottram lists, first of all, 17 of the poets in John Matthias’ 1971 anthology as:

David Jones Hugh MacDiarmid Basil Bunting

Christopher Middleton Charles Tomlinson Gael Turnbull

Roy Fisher Ted Hughes  Ian Hamilton Finlay

Christopher Logue Matthew Mead Nathaniel Tarn

Anselm Hollo Ken Smith Lee Harwood Harry Guest Tom Raworth.

I think he got the idea from Matthias. He then adds 19 poets Matthias left out:

Tom Pickard Bob Cobbing Stuart Montgomery Jeff Nuttall Allen Fisher Dom Silvester Houédard Jeremy Hilton Elaine Feinstein Michael Horovitz David Chaloner Andrew Crozier Peter Redgrove Barry MacSweeney Jim Burns Edwin Morgan Chris Torrance John James Peter Riley John Hall

Mottram wrote another catalogue for the 1977 PCL Conference. The anthology for that event added: Peter Finch, B. Catling, Iain Sinclair, Bill Griffiths, Colin Simms, Tom Leonard, David Tipton, J.P. Ward, Eric Mottram, and John Freeman. Total: 46 poets

Actually, any historian of the Seventies is going to be filling in the negative space left around Eric’s era definition, which is complete in itself.

Eric’s list redefines poetry as being cultural criticism, with poetry about love and the intimate sphere marginalised; this does not reflect a distrust of such poetry but a distrust of the public sphere.

Mottram says the centre of his document is the catalogue of small press resources, and his opening paragraphs make the focus the use of small-scale economics and the exclusion by established editors. Mottram was powerfully encouraging young poets to experiment. His style is compulsively aggregative – he sets up 40 wonderful artistic assets and then rolls them up together, and rolls 30 or 40 poets up together. None of the poets had all 40 assets, in fact it is doubtful they had more than four or five, so there is a gap between the position statement and the poems themselves. Flattening the opposition isn’t the same as accurate description.

Poets who will migrate into the underground during the decade and are not listed by Eric include Tony Lopez, Michael Haslam, Paul Evans, Steve Sneyd, Maggie O’Sullivan, Michael Gibbs, John Ash, Jeremy Reed, Denise Riley, Anthony Barnett, Ralph Hawkins, Asa Benveniste, Robert Hampson, Grace Lake, Tom Lowenstein, Gavin Selerie, Nigel Wheale, John Wilkinson, Rod Mengham, Martin Thom, Paul Brown, Ulli McCarthy, Brian Marley, Philip Jenkins, Peter Philpott and Paul Gogarty. Roughly, Eric’s list doesn’t include poets born after 1945. He is very strong on poets born in the 1930s.

There had always been an experimental fringe. Around 1960, though, a patch of the poetry scene changed radically and was the start of what Eric Mottram called the ‘British Poetry Revival’. Over a dense couple of years, books by Roy Fisher, Christopher Middleton, Peter Redgrove, Gael Turnbull, Matthew Mead, and others signalled the arrival of a new experimental sector. This area involved work, complexity, montage, ideas. As this word choice implies, the doctrine is that British poetry had expired (as a precondition for its ‘revival’). The new poetry deleted the local legacy, but had an ‘elective ancestry’, transfusions of poetic DNA from the original European modernist poetry and from the American avant-garde of the 1950s. Cultural history shows a new idealistic youth culture recognising itself (in 1967 with hippies and psychedelia, in 1968 with student revolts and a new anti-capitalist consensus with a million implications), and how this equates with a stylistic rift around 1960 is quite a puzzle, one which Eric does not mention.

Vitally, Mottram is claiming that only the rejected, only those who reject the poetic centre and write in an “anti-language”, are genuinely creative. It would be surprising if all the poets favoured by “mainstream editors” were bad. It is hardly true, either, that editors did not reflect the tastes of several thousand other people in the poetry-reading audience. His is not the only view. If you look at Lucie-Smith’s 1970 Penguin anthology, he includes about half of Mottram’s poets. So this poetry was already there in the High Street. To get the decade, it is important to read also the notes in Lucie-Smith’s anthology. He includes 86 poets, and relates each one to a microclimate of opinion which views work in that style as necessary. He breaks down the separation between wish and fulfilment. The ‘impresario’ who devises the style may not be the same person as the poet. Mottram perceives a gulf whereas Lucie-Smith shows us a continuous landscape, where the extreme regions are in contrast with each other. Mottram’s version is more exciting but Lucie-Smith’s is more convincing. If you actually read the texts, it is obvious that ‘mainstream’ poets like Kathleen Raine, Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Thwaite, Alan Ross, John Wain, Peter Porter and George Mackay Brown are producing significant work.

Within Eric’s list, it is visible that Montgomery, Hilton, Feinstein, Horovitz, Burns, Hollo, Torrance, Griffiths, Leonard, Tipton, and Freeman are not hot-shots with an option on the top spot. This clears the stage a bit. Also, Eric revisited the time for a 1988 anthology ('the new british poetry'), and his section of that book includes 6 poets who were publishing in the 1970s but are not in the PCL list: Denise Riley, Wendy Mulford, Asa Benveniste, Douglas Oliver, Paul Evans, Thomas A. Clark.

No generation is being described, because some of the poets named were already writing in 1930. The date “1960-74” is not quite right, because it ignores a poetic fringe in the 1950s. Mottram was inclusive but in that way did not identify a generation.

Eric does not identify features which all the 46 had in common. So it is a waste of time asking if any other poets shared these features – and it is logically false to say that “all poets who innovate are similar”. So writing the history of the “British poetry revival” is pointless. This makes it irrelevant to ask whether the “revival” continued after 1974, or whether someone belongs to it. No group was being identified, rather a perimeter of repression and an outlaw economy. If there is a lack of vocabulary for describing the “alternative wing” of British poetry over the last 45 years, that is hardly Eric’s fault. I doubt that one can speak of a tradition of the alternative, as opposed to spontaneous rejection of the conventional and ‘accessible’ poetry, affecting young poets persistently, so many people every year. I doubt that “everything which diverges then converges”. There are people who believe in the legacy and moreover that they can decide who is legitimately innovative and so on. This redefines innovation as property and themselves as the administrators of it. These claims are simply not credible. There are good reasons for scrapping the idea of legacy, of tradition, legitimacy, etc. as applied to the alternative sector.

Mottram’s essays of the Seventies were a breakthrough, at least for me (when I found them, 10 to 15 years late). But we have to allude to three omissions. First, he omits WS Graham. I have no idea why this is. Then, he omits JH Prynne. I guess this was jealousy – Prynne was a close friend and collaborator of Olson and Eric wanted to own the “Olson franchise”. Thirdly, he only lists one woman poet. This reflects Eric’s personal sensibility. No-one today finds his results on this repeatable. It is likely to be true that women were more attracted to the centre of events than to the periphery (and the “hermit/ recluse/ pioneer” role), and that the feminist cause persuaded poets to migrate to a cultural centre of events, where they could reach a large number of people and change the consensus. But feminism was part of “radical modernism” in 1974, possibly even the most important part. It was a critique of everything – making other lines of cultural critique look narrow in scope. Feminist poetry was going through an experimental phase in the early and mid-Seventies but it was quite possible to find significant women poets by 1977. Nicki Jackowska, Denise Riley, Penelope Shuttle, and Judith Kazantzis are examples. That 45:1 ratio is a disaster, I don't want to make any bones about it. Eric's cultural imagination just wasn't turned on by women (a few exceptions like Niedecker don't sew this back up). Eric was being authentic in verbalising feelings he actually had, but "authentic" can also mean blundering and unenlightened. I mean, if bypassing women poets is "authentic" then being a conservative who dislikes disturbing and innovative poetry is also "authentic". You can't define literary standards as being something internal to you - a process of debate and dialectic rightly follows that pristine and selfish experience of a poem.

Also - Matthias included George MacBeth but Eric removed that name from his PCL catalogue. Actually, MacBeth produced some terrific poetry during the 1970s and was an experimental poet. 

Mottram’s 1974 catalogue focusses on the business side: his interest is in autonomy, as part of a wider anti-capitalism and of a moment when there was an alternative everything. This replaces stylistic analysis. A key was certainly the overthrow of the system of cultural legitimation; hard as it is to recover this “soft” mechanism, a withdrawal of belief in cultural gatekeepers, a downturn in feelings of anxiety, marginality, and inadequacy, and a surging belief in the alternative and even rejected, must be part of the reason for a much greater number of people writing poetry seriously. Critics who decide at the outset that only books from major publishers need to be considered could not and cannot grasp the scene in the Seventies. However, dizzying as this expansion of activity is, we have to recall that the autonomous (or non-commercial, or zero-capitalisation) sector was not itself dominated by innovative poetry. If you are dredging up several hundred little magazines, you soon realise that most of them (90%?) were publishing poets who were quite conventional (as well as untalented); most people who wanted to write poetry weren’t skilled enough to be radical in style. I don’t want to be pedantic, but the implication that people who were working at a High Street publisher or magazine (or bookshop!) were necessarily stiff-necked and conservative is wrong; the Penguin Modern Poets series was the most important disseminator of the new poetry, and as it reached 80 poets (eventually) it hammered home the message that poetry was happening in a hundred places. (It didn't include the most famous poets, probably they just cost too much. The series was in the shops at 3/6 a volume, the only poetry books that a schoolboy was likely to buy.) I believe Tony Richardson ran the PMP series (and left after number 12 to start Paladin).

One generalisation would be that “from 1968 to 1980, talented young poets joined the alternative sector rather than the mainstream”. This would point to a gap in the history of the mainstream, a physical interruption. But no generalisations are fool-proof. In the 70s, we certainly have to reckon with Jeffrey Wainwright, David Harsent, and George Szirtes, gifted poets starting out but not swept away by “alternative” allures. I think the mainstream was in trouble (and that serious changes resolved this problem in the 1980s). 

I definitely haven’t mentioned all the people who wrote significant poetry during the 1970s, but I have set down some 80 names, so that’s enough for the moment. I feel that it is now possible to discuss the period as a whole. This is the result of prolonged effort by a number of people in wading through works straight off the photocopier that nobody reviewed when they came out (quite apart from shops refusing them shelf space). It has been a collective project. I’m not sure what the implications of this take-over by the obscurophiles and darkness lovers are, but we can recover the Seventies now – the goods are all there. That environmental quality, of unrestricted amounts of good work coming out to no fanfare, probably applies to the whole period since 1980 – it was something we were trying to get used to in the Seventies.
This only emerged after years of thinking about everything else, but by starting the “revival” in 1960 Eric wrote off the small avant garde of the 1950s, which I think deserves remembering. The fact that Poetry Review, or the universities, were promoting conservatism does not drag the Fifties to the side of the road and kill them off! So where Eric starts off his list with Bunting, MacDiarmid, and Jones, these were obviously thriving in the Fifties and didn’t suddenly come to life in 1960. Similarly for Tomlinson, Logue and Edwin Morgan. WS Graham doesn’t even get into the list. Concrete poetry was anti-linguistic but international, for that very reason Bob Cobbing (born 1920) was probably bashing away at Concrete, even if it’s hard to trace anything being published before the 1960s. Those objects (?) are scarce, were scarce even then. It’s true that, if you had searched bookshops, you wouldn’t have seen any books by these people. They were pretty marginal in the retail world. But, there is another point here. These poets were absolutely on the edge of the cultural world, well into the area where originality is redefined as eccentricity (and then low grasp of social reality and intellectual error). It’s too much to have them oppressed by the managers at the time and then written off again by the managers in the 1970s (or in 2020). We have to applaud their endeavours and support their defiance. We have just mentioned ten significant writers who were doing the avant garde thing in the 1950s. This is really too many to just be swept under the carpet to create an effect.

Obviously, there is another count, of people who would have been undertaking significant creative endeavours but were discouraged from doing anything serious by a cultural chill, the prevailing conformist atmosphere of the high Cold War. Eric Mottram is probably on this list.

Another point lost by the dating of the revival as a thing that started in 1960, like a train, is that Concrete poetry had two peaks, one after 1953 when Gomringer got it going, and one about 1972. I think there was a revolutionary feeling about the second outbreak, as if they had forgotten that Concrete internationally was a prominent feature of the 1950s (and a target for conservative culture critics). It’s a question of where you decide to point the camera.