A Pecking Order

I'm not reading A.N. Wilson's book on Dante because I'm particularly interested in Dante. I was diverted to it after a review of the latest book on Dante and deciding that I'd rather read Wilson on anything, almost, except Seamus Heaney on who we don't seem to agree.

History is too much for me, there's so much of it. Wilson brings immense scholarship to all that he does (it seems to me) and even if the finer points of The Divine Comedy are likely to remain beyond me, the great thing about books like this is how they suggest as much as they can as best they can of such places as C13th Florence. Perhaps I first encountered such a thing in E.M.W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture which was on a reading list 40-odd years ago and is still remembered as amazing.

Good Grief, did they think that. But, then again, was the ongoing corruption of the Catholic Church, the schism with the Orthodox Christians further East or anything at all predicated on the existence of God, which always seemed to fit political expediency any different from those that concerned Tolstoy in C19th Russia or the hapless duplicity of how the world is being managed now. No, not at all. How could we have been so foolish, as teenagers, reading the NME or, preferably, Jackie, listening to David Bowie and T. Rex, to think that Clement Attlee, Roosevelt and even Harold Wilson had given us reason for optimism. My generation and those 10-15 years older than me benefitted enormously but it wasn't much use to anybody else.  And so I am left, apologetically really, with nothing better to do than read books as good as this.

I was most taken by a page or two (116-117) on which Wilson points out,

note the extraordinary sense of a pecking order.

My reticence in the face of objections in recent decades to any idea of a 'canon', of some writers being regarded as 'better' than others would not have allowed me to write 'pecking order' without inverted commas but Wilson finds no reason to use them.

 

The poets are being lined up in competition with one another.

 

Maybe all serious writers think like this to some extent.

 

In Dante, the streak of competitiveness is very, very strong...

 

So it looks as if poetry has always been a sport after all, however much we might like to think of it as a pleasure beyond the morbid league tables of three points for a win and let's hope to park the bus and get an away draw at Rotherham on a Tuesday night in November. 

We have all already liked one poem more than another. Such decisions have made us think we like this poet better than that and so we think they are 'better'. It remains entirely possible that there's something 'better' about the poetry of Ezra Pound or Geoffrey Hill that we don't quite 'get' compared to Wendy Cope that we think we do. But if there's been a 'pecking order' since 1260 and hundreds of years before, it is highly unlikely that an aberration of unduly zealous, inclusive liberalism can suddenly turn up and overturn all that in favour of some vague idea that every contribution is of equal value and that a good proportion of those who turn up to take 'A' levels deserve an A or A* grade. 

That would be like saying to an increasingly flawed succession of people who wanted to be Prime Minister (Blair, Gordon, Cameron, Thersea and the latest dreary dope we've have foisted upon us), that, okay, yes, you can be.

So, if you've folloed this circuitous ramble this far, we might like to wonder which poets in English have been top of the pecking order in living memory. It is going to be a shifting thing but for the time being and for my purposes, Auden, Larkin and Elizabeth Bishop look to have fairly secure places in it. After that, maybe the dust needs to settle a bit morte but I'll be damned if Seamus Heaney wasn't am,ong the best of his generation.

Having innovated himself to a prominent position by 20 years ago, Paul Muldoon has risked becoming a parody of himself. Sean O'Brien has bagged himself a large haul of the major prizes by staying mostly with tradition but doing it very impressively at his best and so is a sound and reliable pick in the same way that Hardy, Auden and Larkin are.

One isn't made Laureate without some relevant credentials and Ms. Duffy represents the period with some finely-made poems but, much to my surprise and not quite for the first time, I find an unlikely source of perceptive commentary in Private Eye, in their review of Simon Armitage's Oxford lectures,  A Vertical Art. I wonder who wrote it,

 

and yet over it there hangs the faint scent of elegy, the thought that chaos lurks just around the corner and that prescriptions (and proscriptions) of this kind will be completely anathema to the next generation of poets waiting to emerge from the nation's creative writing courses. Armitage's tenure as the UK's Mr. Poetry is set to last until 2029. It's a safe bet he will be the last proper poet to be appointed Laureate. 

 

They don't even put 'proper poet' in inverted commas. They really mean it. They have cited George the Poet and Kate Tempest ('zealously emoting') as examples of the way things are going. For a certain type of us, who may be of a certain age, such things only qualify as poetry by through our open-minded, inclusive definition of poetry that lets in all knids of bad poetry. If the poetry commentator at Private Eye is right then we are living on borrowed time and we are the dance band on the Titanic. But it is somehow a part of human nature to feel apocalyptic and it isn't over until it's over. It does seem like a generation of 'proper' poets are dying off and not being replaced by similar but who's to say.

It will be thin and unrewarding poetry that leaves future generations under nourished if they're right and poetry will be further diminished to a sub-category of stand-up performance and so one might expect some kind of renaissance, maybe like that of 1977 in pop music after the behemoths of old rock music had ground creativity to a standstill, bored us to paralysis and sent us gladly towards disco.

We will have to see what happens. There are more dangerous crises extending themselves exponentially across the planet. Those of us with time on our hands to concern ourselves with anxieties about pecking orders and the future of poetry are privileged and spoilt beyond our own knowing.