It's unlikely I'll move from A.N. Wilson's life of Dante to the Comedy or any other of his verse. As Wilson catalogues in his last chapter, Dante's Afterlife, successive generations will make of such writers what they will and not all of them until relatively recently made much of Dante. No doubt the point of the poetry, which is the words and how they add up to more than the sum of their parts, might be appreciated in the Italian and Wilson assures us that it isn't difficult to acquire sufficient Italian to do so. Easy enough for one of his calibre perhaps but I can't see me doing it after my short-lived attempt to learn German for the sake of the Bach Cantatas.
What one comes away with, among many things, is the poet's position in relation to the warring factions and politics of his time and place. My understanding of the history of Christianity was based on the Reformation and the beginnings of the Protestant church but now the earlier schism between the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic traditions looks equally as much of a power grab rather than the flimsy doctrinal disagreements it was predicated on and that should come as no surprise. The corruption, tyranny and self-interest that runs through the history of the popes makes the sagas surrounding the battle for the English monarchy seem like a little local difficulty and what God had to do with any of them, apart from as the most transparent pretext, is hard to fathom.
If one admires Wilson's detailed setting out of all the politics while largely choosing to let it pass by, one is very glad of his book for all the themes and ideas he picks out to explore along the way. Chapter XV, Medieval Autobiography, brings in Northrop Frye and,
'Most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore functional impulse to select only those events and experiences in the writer's life that go to build up an integrated pattern.'
In only a few hundred pages, a book has very limited capacity to cover much more than those parts of the early life that contribute to the story and how it builds to where it needs to get to. The life of a poet will highlight elements relevant to the development of the poetry at the expense of all the other things they might have been and, to some extent, might have been.
Gladly, not having had a life worth reporting to any audience willing to pay £20 for the hardback edition of it, I don't have to decide if my own story should aim at the low-grade sport, the very minor literary achievement, the work experience or anything else. It would peter out and find me in retirement on a Sunday afternoon explaining why I hadn't written it.
A second, major good point in the Dante is how,
There are, Bruni averred, two types of poet. The First is someone possesssed by 'furor'. This sort of poet is inspired. The second has trained to write poetry by laborious study of theology, philosophy, astronomy, arithmetic and history. And Dante, says Bruni..., was of the second sort.
Of course, Wilson has to say that 'perhaps all truly great poets are, in fact, something of both' but he doesn't entirely dismiss the proposition. Without it having to be that particular litany of disciplines that the poet needs to have studied now that we are not, so we are told, in the Middle Ages, the distinction is not far from one I once tried to make on the old 'Poets on Fire' forum when in provocative mode several years ago and was all but shot down for it had it not been for the supportive intervention of Roddy Lumsden.
Very broadly, we might put Ted Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Kate Tempest and Dylan Thomas in the 'furor' half and Larkin, Gunn and Auden among those who 'trained to write poetry'. While I very much sympathize with the second lot and could only ever think of belonging with them, it's not quite so 'us and them' and we must recognize allies who are more at home on the other side, like Rosemary Tonks in poetry, and like Ken Clarke and how John Major turned out to be in politics when Brexit push came to a belated rearguard action and insufficient shove.
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The David Essex book came with a couple of other 1970's-related items that provide hilarity and retrospective insight amid what is only really nostalgia. In the anthology of 70's memories, The Seventies- Good Times, Bad Taste by Alison Pressley, almost every page makes me want to tell an anecdote. An illustration of the 7-inch single, Fascist Dictator reminds me of the time, in 1977, when I went into Audiosonic, a record shop in Gloucester's precinct where two boys from our school worked, regarding themselves as 'in the know' and a part of the New Wave.
I went up to the counter and asked, 'Have you got Fascist Dictator by the Cortinas?'
No, they hadn't.
'Okay. Have you got Right to Work by Chelsea?'
No, they didn't have that, either. At which point I thought I'd better ask them an easier one.
'Have you got The Logical Song by Supertramp?'
The sniggering with which this third attempt to buy something from them was received seemed unbefitting, the conservative nature of Supertramp not being as raw and angry as my first two choices saw themselves but, gentlemen, it was you that worked in a shop that didn't have Fascist Dictator or Right to Work and where were you at the Anti-Nazi gigs in Brixton and Finsbury Park with The Clash, Misty in Roots, Steel Pulse, Elvis Costello and, I dare say, Sham 69.
The Jackie anthology has no such edgy concerns and would probably warn its readers off the sort of boy that concerned himself with fringe movements that may or may not have been monitored by the security services, innocent idealists dressed up as realpolitik activists as they were, especially if he wanted to kiss them, which enterprise Jackie seems to regard as a game of chess so strategic that even Anatoly Karpov would have struggled with it. But by far the biggest headline news from that book is the double page feature on 'Wanted Men', a set of pen portraits of fanciable singers, film stars and celebrities might have qualified them for inclusion in the Harmless Boys magazine that Lisa Simpson read. In hindsight, they might not have been as suitable as Donny Osmond and surely Rod wasn't even then but as well as him and The Fonz, John Travolta, it was always Leif Garrett then, and even Bob Geldof, none of who were likely to be at the local disco of a Saturday night in Gloucester, they feature the dishy, impossibly rich and aristocratic Prince Andrew.
'Wanted Men' indeed but no more wanted than some of those supported by the left once we arrived at university and took to reading Cosmopolitan instead of Jackie.
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I stuck with the marvellous John Burnside for the next episode of ostensibly more highbrow reading and have begun his survey of, mostly, C20th poetry, The Music of Time. Having been so impressed with his poems for some years and then recently taking in some fiction and memoir, he does himself no harm right up at the top of my pecking order in the first couple of chapters as a commentator on what he's read, of which there seems to be plenty.
I had better save further thoughts about it until after I've read it, which isn't always how I plan reviews, but it strikes me immediately that Larkin only features in a very small way in the index, Gunn and O'Brien not at all and we all might have our own such survey in us, that they would all be different and at least interesting to do even if nobody would read them.
I'd love to have a book to write and it isn't going to be a novel. I know what would happen, though. I'd set off one morning, beginning with some seminal poem from which I'd intend to expand to cover all my 40-odd years of thinking about poems and then it would only be a matter of how long it would last until I abandoned it.
The short form, the miniature, the poem itself, might be all I have, would that any more worth writing might occur to me.
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