English Literature can just as easily mean literature written in the English language as literature written by English people in England. Most anthologies of English poetry are wise to include an introduction by the editor to say how they approached their project. One will usually find Eliot, Sylvia Plath and other Americans in a collection of C20th English poetry as well as Scottish, Irish and Welsh poets and from places beyond. We would be surprised by now if we didn't.
It is, of course, insular and myopic to not see any further than one's own shores and much good work has been done to show that even Philip Larkin, who affected a cartoon Little Englander attitude, was well-read in other poetry and used, for example, Theophile Gautier and Baudelaire as models. Those of us not fluent in many languages are inevitably limited in which books we can read in the original which is a particular problem with poetry and not solely poetry's problem but there is no need to exacerbate these issues and erect further barriers by restricting our world view to one that stops at the airports or ferry terminals.
In the 1970's there wasn't any ostensible wrong perceived in the fact we read To Kill a Mockingbird, Mister Johnson, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Juno and the Paycock, plays set in places like Denmark and Verona as well as French literature that didn't relate entirely to France. I wonder what it is that this new directive is issued in fear of.
I only really write now that it has been quickly followed up by the European elections in which many of our neighbours have, like us, returned results reflecting a new surge in funny little nationalism. It had seemed like we were getting over that and that progress was being made but history, as we probably should have known, goes in circles rather than being a linear thing and these are ever decreasing ones on the current evidence.
But I like to try to find the advantage in any new situation if I can. I don't know how many more times a friend, colleague or acquaintance will ask if I can help their offspring with their Eng Lit studies. I'm always flattered to be asked and glad to help. Most people of my age have now seen their children through school exams but in future that job is likely to be made easier. As long as I know about Rupert Brooke, I'll be fine.
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I have always known that the job of the novelist was a much harder one than that of the poet. It's not just the time involved and the commitment required, it is simply the number of words you need to think of. Novelist is a full-time job and a proper one whereas poetry suits the dilettante very well and can easily be knocked off in one's spare time.
I don't need to be more than a few weeks into my most sustained effort yet to finally achieve my ambition of producing a 'novel' to have further evidence of how true that is. I come to it with a wealth of material, a very basic plot and three themes, as well as a reduced target of 40 thousand words, on the dubious pretext of just one website that defines a novel as less than the 50 thousand I thought it was that I had to aim for not to be a mere novella.
But my story goes from Monday to Friday, I've already finished Tuesday and I only have 12 thousand words. Where did Balzac get all his words from. Proust, George Eliot, Vikram Seth, any of them.
I could say that I've spent so long being so compact and lyrical that I have lost any facility for expansion but I remember introducing myself to a meeting of poets in Lancaster circa 1980 and saying that I wrote poems because I couldn't write novels.
It's not a big problem. Midtagspause will not be publishable in any form and nobody will ever want to read it even if I would let them. If it ends on 25 thousand words, it is only me that will be disappointed. But don't ever believe it when anybody tells you that it is poetry that is the highest literary art form. The highest art form is music in any case but the greatest achievement is in writing a good novel. All the publicity about the transcendence, the sublimity and the higher calling of poetry is put about by poets themselves. Only those poets who have also produced a novel worthy of the name know what having a proper job is like.
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But let me excuse Seamus Heaney from that charge straight away. Having lauded his essay on Dylan Thomas (recently below) from his Oxford lectures in The Redress of Poetry, I turned to his insights into Elizabeth Bishop and his commentary on the poem, The Sandpiper. It is sensational work, reminding me of his mate, Joseph Brodsky's, word by word examination of Hardy's Convergence of the Twain.
It restores one's faith in what one is doing, and my faith does need restoring from time to time. It sent me immediately back to my Elizabeth Bishop book and, not for the first time, I saw what sort of things can be achieved. And so it is by no means all a downer on poets. It becomes a reminder of why one is still at it.
And also a reminder of why whenever people like Michael Gove, if he did, get involved in administering the literature syllabus, then we need to know more about what he was thinking and why. It is far too important for people like him. Let us hope we hear from him soon.
