The Loss of Faith

 I don't know what a loss of religious faith would be like. Harrowing for those who depended on it, I dare say, but I'm not aware of having had any to lose.

Like a lot of young boys, and now girls and middle-aged men, I had a comparable devotion to football and I've lost that and become agnostic about it. I didn't think I'd go through the same process with poetry but maybe I'm like an A. N. Wilson of English poetry, the 40-odd years of involvement and trying leaving me with piles of books, all sorts of thoughts and memories but a lack of certainty about what it all means and if it matters. It is at least as bad as Sean O'Brien's line that,

art is all there is and might not be enough.

It's probably worse than that, though. But aged about 14 I decided that pop music was no good and spent a year listening to Beethoven and Shostakovich but eventually found it necessary to come back, re-invented as a 'soul' rather than 'rock' admirer and so these conditions can pass.

 

It possibly began with an idea of 'avoiding bad practice' in poetry, like sentimentality, bad rhymes, didacticism, virtue signalling, grand gestures - the list grew, as my friend Pauline once described a tree, 'like Stalin's Russia'. I need to acknowledge another debt to Prof. O'Brien before the final, big one, by quoting him, sadly the best I have as a favourite living poet, in his novel, Afterlife, where Jane Jarmain who was writing poetry 'as if she thought it was possible'. Although I took that as one of the many examples of dark humour in that book at the time, it has become increasingly worrying that, no, it's never good enough. It can never achieve the condition of music, of Bach or of the Cello Suites, of which more next time because Steven Isserlis's book on them arrived today and life inevitably underwent an upturn as a result.

Many people say that poetry taught at school put them off it, whether because it was Robert Browning or they weren't impressed by alliteration, assonance, zeugma or the part standing for the whole, erm, synecdoche. A few were excited by it whereas I probably thought it was better than learning the Periodical Table, valencies or Boyle's Law. But as with singing hymns, which I very much enjoyed, or listening to the lesson from the Bible, which I took less pleasure in, 'education' presented one with something one could choose to accept, reject or modify to one's own preferred version. Thus, while accepting that much Christian teaching is based on worthy moral principles, the back story appears wildly far-fetched, one can take from poetry the bits one likes without it meaning wholesale reading of The Faerie Queen, Walt Whitman and the vast swathes of contemporary poetry that aren't much good. It's not a matter of identifying an alliterative line and thinking one's 'got it'. That doesn't matter. Neither is it a matter of making pronouncements like, just as an example, Carol Ann Duffy's 'poetry is the music of being human'. It is a matter, though, of my much-repeated adage, lifted shamelessly from Danny Baker, of 'all you have to be is any good'.

I noticed in the schedules this week that Radio 3's The Essay was on the subject of Ted Hughes. I'm not very excited about that until seeing that Tuesday night's edition is Sean's essay on Hughes v. Larkin. I thought I might 'build back' via a reliable, authoritative commentary on an issue that's always been central to my poetry agenda. Prof O'Brien has long been in the habit of explainimng things that I knew already but couldn't have put quite so....O'Brienesquely. The talk was from Hull in 2018 but I'm not aware of it having been available unless you were there to hear it at the time. It's here for a while yet, though,

The Essay, R3, 5/10/21

The starting point for the comparison can hardly avoid being The New Poetry in which Al Alvarez championed the risk-taking Hughes over the 'genteel' Larkin. Among Sean's other ways of differentiating these two highly differentiated poets were the raw v. the cooked, the shaman v. the rationalist and the alleged outsider v. the establishment figure. What thrilled me the most, though, was his identification of Wodwo as still 'good' Hughes but containing 'the seeds of his downfall', specifically in a line from Fern, followed by the 'bravura set of negations' in Crow, which is exactly where I thought Hughes went wrong and of which Sean says he took up with other poets rather than Hughes like a completist disappointed that his favourite band had had a hit. And then, most pertintently came the 'sprawling incoherence' of Gaudete. I'm so glad he thought that, too, because that is the very place where I agree with my friend Jeff that Hughes is 'unreadable'.

Hughes contiunes to overproduce as if 'as a means of survival' whereas Larkin wrote less and less and ground to a halt. Sean's not quite partisan enough, and far too clever, to unequivocally take sides in the old, old game of poetry wars but one comes away with a sense of where his sympathies lie and if he finishes with the quote that 'it's hard to lose either when you can have both', yes, you can have both but his excursion into thoughts about taste and judgement might make us think Larkin wins, probably about 3-1, for him with no need to go into extra time.

I was intending to begin by citing Dover Beach on the subject of the loss of faith. How many long years has my Matthew Arnold sat there behind me untouched. If I were as devoted to poetry as some people I know with a more profound commitment to it, it wouldn't have. I was ever the dilettante, never the first class honours student. Sean makes the point that both Hughes and Larkin had a 'regard for language' that surely is the minimum requirement for a poet and what I thought it was but look what's happened to Kate Clanchy.

I don't know anything about her book that won prizes, was subsequently found to be racist and then Michael Morpurgo got himself embroiled and found himself apologetic, too. What I'm fairly sure of is that Kate considered herself on the right side of all admirably 'woke' sympathies but then found she wasn't. 

It's dangerous out there. Words mean things. They might not mean the same things to those who read them as they did to those who wrote them. It might be safer in the abstract, and possibly more moving, element of solo cello music.