A. S. J. Tessimond

There probably isn't statistical evidence to support the idea that poets are more likely to be manic-depressive, hopeless romantics or lead unorthodox lives but, if there was, then A.S.J. Tessimond (1902-1962) would be a case study.

Being roughly of the Auden generation, he made a name for himself during his lifetime but the reputation has since slipped and he wouldn't now be among the first to come to mind when thinking of major C20th poets. However, it would only take a small shift in the tastes and fashions of the poetry world and he could make a comeback at any time.

Tessimond's poems have no sub-text, there is no game-playing textual games. What they intend to communicate is very much what the words express and they do so in formal, patterned lines that rarely venture into Modernist experiment. His appeal is in the humane, self-deprecating character and some finely-made lines. He writes about love and observes the social world around him with a sympathetic, sometimes satirical attitude.

Love is never quite satisfactory, it is a difficult business almost sure to end in disappointment and so it might be best to accept this from the beginning,

Reason says, 'Love a girl who does not love you? /Learn to forget her, learn to let her go !

but Tessimond's implicitly doomed view doesn't prevent his regular intoxication. It isn't surprising to find that among the anthologies that used his poems, Larkin's Oxford book found space for Jamaican Bus Ride in which the first image is of a 'gloomy and resigned' fowl in a basket.

Tessimond shares Larkin's capacity for hope of transcendence, though, and one can't read Portrait of a Romantic without suspecting it is a self-portrait,

He is haunted by the face behind the face. /He searches for lost frontiers and lost doors./He tries to climb the wall around the world.

More often, though, his view of the world is satirical, as in The Ad-Man, who is 'a trumpeter of nothingness, employed/ To keep our reason full and null and void.' In The British, which he might have called The English, 'We are a people easily made uneasy,/Especially wary of praise, of passion..' etc. And The Man in the Bowler Hat is, among other things, 'too busy with a living to live, / Too hurried and worried to see and smell and touch'.

Tessimond seems immediately familiar because his poems express such everyday concerns so lucidly and as such, he was a precursor to the Larkin-esque style of 1950's poets. Faber's issue of the Selected Poems in Not Love Perhaps should ensure that his poems aren't lost to posterity.