Poets re-assessed

 I have only admiration for anybody who has written a book. Obviously all the more if it turned out to be worth reading. Although for a few years, many years ago, I had the dedication for the long haul and gladly prepared for and successfully delivered more or less respectable performances in the 12 Hour cycling discipline, that was probably on account of an obession and the collateral adrenalin rush. It had to be done, for reasons that have since become less obvious, but it's not clear that the same imperatives apply to me writing a book.

I don't particularly care what the book would be about. I might even write one on dry stone walls or the history of Stenhousemuir FC if I thought I could. I hope the idea of a novel has finally been banished for good.

C20th is my version of poetry in English from 1898-1999 and it might just be possible because there are various bits I did earlier that can be dragged in, I've had almost 50 years reading the raw material and by now I feel as if I know what I think.

However, with the distractions of reading good books rather than writing a bad one, chess, horse racing, music and gazing at unripening tomatoes, it's not easy to apply oneself to the office hours required to achieve anything book length in less than 'far too long'. I'm far too ready to allow myself to think that adding 500 words here or there constitutes a shift and it's not even 15000 words yet, which was an undergraduate dissertation in 1980. I try to excuse it all on a capacity for concise summing up and a laudable aversion to long-windedness that I bring to book writing but not to this website.

However, sticking at it gives me the alibi of making believe I'm doing something but, as each chapter tries to find a shape for itself, there's precious little reason to pretend to be objective, space can be filled by recycling as many of the generalisations and even prejudices I've become so comfortable with and, so, in with the workmanlike analysis goes a hearty dose of opinion.

I've ever increasingly not understood why Ted Hughes was made such a fuss of, notwithstanding the impact his first poems made; Elizabeth Bishop's gradual ascendency to the very peak of critical acclaim is entirely justified, though. Where Eliot's status seemed almost god-like in the 70's, it no longer does and, I found today, that it's mostly about Prufrock. Auden accompanies Ms. Bishop when doing his best work; Thom Gunn, to who I devoted so much of my hero worship for several decades, certainly doesn't get anything like a chapter to himself, and I'm not yet sure which bits of Larkin writing to drag back into service but he's central, very, very central to the agenda, such as there has to be one.

It's not a waste of time doing it. I should spend more time on it and do it properly, perhaps. Not for anybody else's sake but for mine. It's like playing at home with the crowd on your side, telling yourself what you think and then congratulating yourself for having got it right.