The World Cup and other stories

 If I press the 'info' button on the TV remote control to get details on the Radio 5 coverage of the (Men's Football) World Cup, it says,

Several teams from around the world compete against each other in a prestigious tournament in order to emerge victorious and win the title. 

Strangely it assumes we know it concerns men's football. There might be an octogenarian don at Oxford, expert in Xenophon or Tacitus who was unaware, or maybe those heroic people in the Andaman Islands who murdered an intruder because they wisely don't want to know about the rest of the world but otherwise most people with cable TV would be aware of the above. So it's tempting to suspect an ironist at work at Virgin Media.

I once found a dictionary that defined 'kangaroo' as (something like), two-legged marsupial that progresses in a succession of flying bounds. It was Dr. Johnson but it should have been.

 

An idea I had to provide my empty turf account with some easy cash was to lay heavily into an odds-on dead cert in the early stages. Brazil were 8/13 to beat Morocco but I did some research. Brazil have been a bit of a mess recently, it said, and Morocco are no pushover. So I kept my powder dry, turned on the match half an hour in and found Morocco 1-0. And it's as good as winning the bet as it is not to do it when it loses. Better, in fact, at the odds.

Sadly my allegiance to Baby Doc Duvalier and Wyclef Jean's Haiti went unrewarded last night so my low level of interest in this capitalist rip-off has already waned from its low starting point. I read a preview that convinced me the final will be between Spain and Argentina, once we get anywhere near a stage that can be called the 'finals'. Perhaps I'll check in the newspaper in a few weeks' time to see if it transpires as such.

--

Meanwhile, still some fallout from the recent Evening with Philip Larkin, I dip randomly into the James Booth biography at bedtime and have just read Michaelmas Term at St. Bride's from his anthology of early fiction. If anybody said at the time - and I might have- that such a book was scraping the Larkin barrel then it was worth the scraping. I will be back into the sophistication of Henry James all too soon but, for enjoyment, would gladly stick with Brunette Coleman, Larkin's female alter ego and nom de plume in these just slightly suspect fictions of teenage girls that young Larkin clearly spent a lot of time on and made a good job of.

Like Jill, it is an Oxford novel about an ingenue in the rarefied atmosphere of class-ridden dreaming spires. Also autobiographical are the details of some jazz records, literary citations including mention of Edward Thomas's book on Oxford, and -using an Oxford comma there, more horse racing following the interest in the Oaks from the previous episodes about Mary's time at Willow Gables. Although Larkin was a cricket man more than one of the turf.

What appeals about the world of Larkin, beyond all the obvious things about one of one's favourite writers, is the refreshing austerity of his time. If austerity as a government policy has a bad name, one can look back on it as a bracing, healthy way of life unencumbered by 'doom-scrolling' and the like. There were books and there was music and they somehow got by in what might seem like a grey world but it was more subtly shaded than the overblown gaudiness of what we are offered now.

And the ubiquitous evidence of failing standards in education when journalists at respectable institutions like the BBC and Times Radio can report such things as 'South Korea coming from behind to win 2-0'. Presumably they had been 0-0 down. You can't take anything on trust from such reports. You have to work it out for yourself. They must have won 2-1.  

--

At long last, I've taken to using the machine that has the capacity to play cassettes to play cassettes. It's taken so long that its capacity to play CD's failed quite a while ago. But the first of the drawerful of elderly cassettes have so far come up tremendously well after decades of disuse. I collected all sorts of things from the radio, thinking that the medium would be there always and not be supplanted by CD, mini disc, download, streaming and all.

The Poetry Prom with Betjeman introducing the very rare occasion when Larkin read The Whitsun Weddings to a live audience; Sean O'Brien visiting Auden's northern mining landscape, that sort of thing. Now I only have to wait for the tapes of August Kleinzahler, possibly Paul Muldoon and I think there's Auden himself, to resurface. It's like archaeology up there but, like laying down a wine and forgetting about it, it's treasure worth finding. 

Edward Thomas on Richard Jefferies

 Edward Thomas does Richard Jefferies something of a disfavour in his critical biography. It's a brilliant, clear sighted and appreciative account but it quotes so heavily from the Jefferies books that one feels as if one has been provided with the salient points, a generous selection of highlights and know Jefferies well enough from it without needing to go to the original texts unless one wants the fine detail. It's such a great tribute of close reading and deep appreciation that it threatens to eclipse the need for its subject.

I've had it here for years but it soon became apparent that I'd only ever read the first chapter, which is a survey of the countryside south of Swindon that I know not quite as well as they did from having ridden through parts of it on a bike in the 1990's.

Thomas and Jefferies are kindred spirits in many ways, being so attentive to nature. Thomas was really a city man, though, and appreciated the countryside as a visitor. Coate, when Jefferies was there, wasn't on the outskirts of Swindon, it was a separate place. Thus Jefferies is, or first was, the sort of rural man who, however thoughtful and dreamy he might have been, loved the natural world in the same way as Ted Hughes did and King Charles III once did, who both saw fit to kill it whether by gun, fishing rod or other device. To the credit of Jefferies, he at least progressed to a preference for watching a bit longer and preferring to delay or make less use of his weaponry. Whereas Hughes often seemed to be reducing animals to their visceral parts and Jefferies sometimes becomes all mystical about what nature has to offer, it is Thomas whose sensitivity to the elements might appear more mainstream to us now, who get our milk from Tesco and much of our countryside from train windows.  

The autobiographical The Story of My Heart, the hymn to female beauty The Dewy Morn and the novel without a plot, Amaryllis at the Fair, look like the places to go in due course, perhaps Amaryllis first, but, as has happened before, I intend to go further into a writer and then another turns up - and here comes Henry James- but Jefferies has been tremendous value so far and I'm by no means finished with him yet. 

Bunting, Jefferies, Edward Thomas

Books, like events, can be overtaken by others more pressing. Basil Bunting's letters were a diversion but not a priority for me. Having reached the end of the first part, I'll go back to them one day when more attractive propositions are harder to find. It's a good place to leave it, in December 1938, just as Bunting has told Ezra Pound where he stands vis a vis Ezra's unpalatable views,

You know as well as any man that a Jew has the same physique and a similar amount of grey matter as the rest of us. You know as well as any man that to hold one individual guilty of the sins of another is an abomination. You know as well as any man that the non-Jews have contributed their fair share, of the bankers and other millionaires of doubtful honesty...

Every anti-semitism, anti-niggerism, anti-moorish, that I recall in history was base...

and so, whatever one might decide about Bunting's poetry in due course, he has made his point and deserves much credit for that. I'm still not convinced I'm going to like him but that one letter makes the £1 I spent on the book £1 well spent and I'm glad of having read it.

--

There's an equally memorable, if entirely different passage in Restless Human Hearts by Richard Jefferies. There are several but one in particular for me. These shifts into meditation in some loose way are reminiscent of how Tolstoy makes his books the length they are, extrapolating lines of thought at intervals in his involved narrative.   

I've had to make a diagram to keep track of the relationships and dynamics between the characters in Restless Human Hearts. The title is rightly in the plural. Quite how all the infatuations relate to each other remains to be seen but I'm ready to guess that the vain, glamorous but hideous Carlotta is to be contrasted with the almost unearthly Heloise. 

The second part has already become melodramatic with a duel and a tragic riding accident and critics who find the book flawed- as only Jefferies's second attempt- might have a point but, such reservations aside, it still makes for great reading.

The pages that I was most taken by reflecting,

What a curious system it is to teach us, not only at school, but at home, and in the early part of our life, ideas and feelings which we must afterwards spend years in endeavouring to unlearn...

and the next long paragraph,

We know so much nowadays. Everything has been done. Every possible emotion has been felt in every imaginable manner. Every combination conceivable of human relationship has been worked out, and the quarry is empty....

And that was in 1875.

That by 2026 it seems to us that maybe it wasn't quite the case then suggests that if it seems so now, it might not be so yet, either. And thus might never be. As with Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement of the 'end of history', we are all tempted to think we've arrived at a crucial point only for the next generation to find themselves in among the next pile of theories, wonders, crises and absurdities. It must be a state of mind to think everything has been done rather than a piece of cultural analysis.

Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Derrida then Baudrillard all came and went but none of them turned out to be the last word. To arrive at Boulez two hundred years after Bach shows that it's not always linear progress. Surely pop music has run its course but only older people whose time has come and gone would say so. Mark Radcliffe on Sounds of the 70's said that the Bowie and T. Rex sounded so 'fresh' and could have been made now. But, no, they sounded tremendous because they were from the 1970's.

 

Alongside the Jefferies novel, I'll go further into the Edward Thomas biography of him that I remember the first chapter of- the detailed, evocative description of Wiltshire- which is gorgeous. And from there, we will see how far Jefferies Studies can go. There's no shortage of material. 

However, two other books due this week will be making their demands. 

Oh Mother, What Did You Do? Pose and Repose in the Life, Letters and Poetry of Thom Gunn by Graham Dixon promises a reassessment that will be interesting to assess, mostly because it depends what sort of assessment it reassesses.

Paul Bessell's Finding Dad might not prove to be uplifting, it being Peter Bessell's son's findings about his life which is likely to be louche, salacious and probably scandalous although it depends where one's scandal threshold is set. The story of Jeremy Thorpe, my teenage political hero, seems a bit quaint, a bit Midsomer Murders, post-Boris, in the Age of Trump and so quite cosy. We will see. I wouldn't have ordered it if I expected it to be a vindication of Bessell including evidence for his beatification.  

Shakespeare in Oxford and other stories

 When one's life is one big holiday, time spent anywhere else but at home is only an excursion, not really any more of a holiday than one was having anyway. Not being in favour of travel for travel's sake, I don't go as far as I might but a few days up the road, or railtracks as it was, proved to be time well spent.

Swindon doesn't feature large on the literary map but Richard Jefferies and his museum there turned out to be a rewarding visit. Restless Human Hearts, the early three-part novel from 1875, is highly readable, clearly delineated and with pertinent passages worth quoting that, in due course, I surely will. I knew of Jefferies only from the fact that Edward Thomas wrote a book on him and that he had lived in that place by Coate Water. With the likes of Thomas Hardy for competition, success as a novelist was never going to be easy but he stuck at it with some conviction, it seems, before making more of a name as a nature writer while Thomas progressed from countryside prose to major poetry status. Having reached a suitable place at which to leave Basil Bunting aside, I'll gladly divert to the more likeable Jefferies for the foreseeable.

The bus pass gets one to Oxford and back. I don't know if it was exam time but a number of young people around town in gowns made me wonder if they still wear them while reproducing their versions of Suetonius.

I was reacquainted with the gorgeous Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean, spent a few minutes with Walter Sickert's Brighton Pierrots so familiar from my front room and don't know why the internet can't find me the de Hooch that I'm sure I saw there in among all the ancient porcelain. But a major personal breakthrough came thanks to the kind lady in St. Michael's Church whose forebearance allowed me to expatiate on some Shakespeare biography.

The font over in the opposite corner. Shakespeare once stood next to it when it was in another church.

Yes, in St. George's.

He stood next to it at the christening of William Davenant, his godson.

Yes.

Who was born to Jane, or Jeanette, landlady of the inn where he stayed on his way from London to Stratford.

Yes.

Good. So can you tell me where that inn was, at no. 5 Cornmarket Street.

And, yes, she could. I'd been counting from the wrong end and finding a shoe shop. If you count from the other end, you find the Golden Cross, set back from the street in a courtyard and exactly the detail I was looking for.

Not only that but if you go on the right day in September, they will show you the room that Shakespeare stayed in.

I said I'm ready to accept that Shakespeare was the real father of Davenant, as later claimed by the boy. There might have been a bit of a trend for actual fathers being designated as god fathers in those days. She said, yes, in those parts it is widely believed to be so.

Without it being classed as a conspiracy theory, in any way subversive or unpatriotic. Just something that happened. And I found that most 'refreshing'.

I didn't want to outstay my welcome and appear any more of a bore than I had been already. Oxford surely has its share of them. So I'm glad I didn't think to ask whether there was any correlative local pride taken in the Earl of Oxford's claim to authorship, or that made on his behalf. Because that is a conspiracy theory, it is nonsense and it's a shame that such low-level rumour-mongering is allowed to pass as some kind of scholarship. Except it makes for a bit of a diversion, cul-de-sac though it turns out to be.

So, yes. Not a holiday but a useful day out and I felt much the better for it.   

Edward Thomas Fellowship Walk

Accustomed as I am to walking fair distances, it's not so often these days up gradients like the Shoulder of Mutton or on surfaces of lesser integrity than Portsmouth pavements. They don't set a particularly high standard but downhill on stony uneven woodland paths it's best to minimize the risk.

One can't get to the most essential sites of interest with regard to Edward Thomas without making the effort, though, so home to Fratton station, Petersfield Station to Bedales School, the Fellowship walk advertised as strenuous in places, four and a half / five miles was all of that so I was glad of a lift back to Petersfield station before taking the home stretch from Fratton 'at my own pace'. That's at least 10 miles with hard bits. I was expecting more from the well-deserved first draught of Kronenbourg just now but the most memorable such thirst-assuaging moments have been provided by Amstel.

It was all worth it, though, and one doesn't spend time with quite such an erudite group of like-minded types as the Edward Thomas Fellowship very often. You can mention most C20th poets, poems and related things there and not need footnotes. But firstly, Good Lord, Bedales School. Sumptuous, of course, but you don't need to be an ardent Trotskyite to take one look at it and think it should be VAT-able. From there it's not far to the Steep war memorial with the name Edward Thomas on it. While I've been on most of the paths on today's route, I've not done them in the snaky pattern they were covered in today which took us to halfway up the Shoulder of Mutton's precipitous incline before a welcome sit down and some poems read out, many from somebody's obviously much-loved and much-used copy of Edna Longley's Annotated Collected Poems, using the Sarsen stone appropriately as a lectern.

There were three opportunities to consider views of the land he never saw before while hearing his language not to be betrayed which perhaps finished most evocatively at the Bee House, where Thomas lived before the Red House, by kind permission of its current incumbents of what is now a much extended and glorious place to live as long as you don't find you need to nip out for some milk and are happy to go everywhere by motor vehicle. The Bee House is, we were reliably, informed where Thomas was most impressed by birdsong. There are competing sounds over a hundred years later and not all days show it off in quite such conducive October summer days as he found himself up there when exposed to less clement elements. The season have redefined themselves since his day in a postmodern way that he might not have appreciated. Such idylls are hard won but the walk I did from the railway would have been his routine way home which sheds some light of the relative hardiness of him then and how easy some of us expect life to be now.

Of course, the poems but they are almost only the starting point of a gathering in which so many other discussions can spring from them. For those immersed in the subject on a daily basis maybe that all seems not unusual but I'm better off on the fringe of such society, if not most societies, and it comes to me as if I'm Alice through the looking glass or suddenly in Narnia via the wardrobe to find a world like that where those indigenous to it know exactly what they're doing and they're doing it very nicely thank you. It is great to see it going on and entirely my privilege to have been accommodated by them. It's hard to think of anywhere I'd rather have been, especially as I've got Sean O'Brien next week and Errollyn Wallen two weeks after that.

Busy month, with such special occasions on top of the musical 'day job' as I can by now call it. Thank you very much for being there, the Edward Thomas Fellowship.  

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Edward Thomas Study Centre

 Portsmouth and its surrounding area are well served for choirs, their concerts, lunchtime piano recitals and the like but it's not everybody who can live quite so close by places associated with two of their favourite dozen poets.

Having waited patiently for summer to pass, it's suddenly time to fit in some of those days out that haven't happened yet. Next week I must return to Warblington to visit Rosemary Tonks where she is buried but The Edward Thomas Study Centre in Petersfield is another of those little places one needs to know about that make a trip worthwhile.

It's not as big as you'd quite reasonably expect but there's not an inch of space wasted and it is immacualately presented. It's more library than museum but it won't be found wanting for much in Thomas and Thomas-related literature. For the asking, one can see books signed by Thomas but, as advised by Jeremy Mitchell there, don't ever be persuaded by a book of his poems signed by Thomas because they weren't published until after his death. Not that I'd stretch to the asking price for any such thing but, as with John Donne and Auden, the Signed Poetry Books feature here will have to be glad of a photograph and accept that no such signed book will ever grace my shelves.

There isn't much to see in most towns these days now that they've become generic versions of each other with their Gregg's, charity shops and supermarkets but Petersfield retains considerable charm with its famous, labyrynthine second-hand bookshop (which didn't have any Dostoyevsky) and kindly atmosphere almost redolent of Camberwick Green but maybe it only seems like that to one like me who is attuned to the mean streets of Portsmouth.

The very fact that there is an Edward Thomas Study Centre is something to be glad of. It couldn't be called a reading room but some of us who are devoted enough to books like looking at them for their own sake in the same way that trainspotters enjoy seeing locomotives without taking a ride on them.

If I'd known there was a visitors book I might have thought of something appropriate to write in it in advance but even when I've thought of lines to say in advance I sometimes forget them in the pressure of the moment and ad lib as best I can.

Some people left and some people came.

It might not look much but the genuine Edward Thomas cognoscenti should appreciate what it is meant to mean. I hardly felt worthy of signing so soon after wit, raconteur and all-round oddball talent, Gyles Brandreth, who had attended nearby, upmarket Bedales school. I'm very glad I finally made the effort and got there. The stated objective of societies like the Edward Thomas Fellowship is to,

Perpetuate the memory of Edward Thomas and foster interest in his life and works,

and, yes, of course it is but we wouldn't want it catching on too much, would we. It's not such a bad thing that it is our own little secret so that when you meet people like Jeremy and distract him from his work it seems like you've shared something special.   

Edward Thomas Annual Walk, a Road Not Taken

We didn't actually make it to the Edward Thomas Fellowship walk and talk today. Not to worry. Worse things happen at sea. I'd done some homework, though, and don't want that to go to waste. It's been a while since I spent any amount of time with these poems. As well as Edna Longley's Annotated Collected Poems, there's the studies by Stan Smith and Andrew Motion on the shelves, half a dozen of his prose books, the biography by Matthew Hollis and the memoir by Eleanor Farjeon attesting to a time when he almost certainly was a Top 6 Poet of mine. He might have slipped out of that top echelon, through no fault of his own, but would remain a candidate for top dozen or maybe twenty.

Collected Poems was rarely a more fitting title than when applied to those of Edward Thomas. 'Calm and Collected', it could go as far as to say. There, that's the line I'm so keen to put my name to, hoping against hope that nobody's used it about anybody else before although I do now find Cool, Calm and Collected Poems by Carolyn Kizer but I'd never heard of it. Thomas's affinity with, and celebration of, the natural world and uncomplicated, plain way of explaining it doesn't sit easily with the difficulties of his tormented personality that among other things had him going out for a walk from the family home with the intention of killing himself. It's easy to do a bit of amateur psychology and diagnose a preference for solitude over society that was at the bottom of his attachment to the elements, plant life, the open countryside and 'travelling' men. If I remember one thing from Stan Smith's book it was his idea of being a 'superfluous' man.

On the walk round some of the sites associated with him in the Steep area of Petersfield, the Red House where he lived for a time is along the road from the sarcen stone at the top of the steep Shoulder of Mutton hill which isn't easy to walk down never mind go up. But Wind and Mist, one of a number of poems that return to the elements of wind and precipitation, belies any unilateral devotion to the weather. One might have thought the view from the top up there across such a view of land that he 'never saw before' would be idyllic but it was too exposed to storms or,

   the eye watching from those windows saw,

Many a day, day after day, mist - mist

Like chaos surging back - and felt itself

Alone in all the world, marooned alone.

 

It is kindly weather that Thomas wants companionship from, more like 'the sweetness of a shower' as witnessed in Tall Nettles.

One is glad it's still possible to 'learn something new every day' and find that the website First Known When Lost takes its name from an exquisite little Thomas poem in which he's counter-intuitively only sensitive to his rural surroundings when a feature of them, a copse, is suddenly not there any more but it's a familar feeling, not missing something until it's gone.

This afternoon's talk was by Suzanne Conway, The Longing of Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, looking at Like the touch of rain and Hardy’s At Castle Boterel, which my homework suggests equally depend on appreciating things more once they weren't there which Hardy especially made a career out of. Suzanne also appeared at last year's Larkin Society conference and so she's ticking a lot of good boxes. After Thomas, Hardy and Larkin, I wondered which fourth poet she might add. I was hoping it might be more towards Auden than Housman and, finding Louis MacNeice mentioned among her articles, that's close enough.

The problem, not that I have much of one, with Edward Thomas is that 'he tells it as it is', which is a good thing, but that's about all. Certainly there's cadence and a gentle music, we are invited to share his uplifting moments and do, he's relaxed but deceptively precise in his syntax (you'll not hear me say 'voice') and one can hardly help but be sympathetic, like he is.

But there's not much distance or irony between what he says and what he means. Whitman or maybe Wordsworth would surely be the worst for that who must be the least ironic poets I can think of. There's not much in the way of symbolism or 'objective correlative' that I can find. The poems don't try to work on 'other levels' ( ! ) or achieve two things at once. Poetry doesn't have to do those things, of course, all it has to be is 'any good' on its own terms and Thomas is all of that. But he might in today's terms be erring towards 'virtue signalling', isn't he nice, isn't he 'good', we must admire his delicate soul.

I can live with all of that, because it's him, because a kindly teacher showed us Adlestrop in the fourth form and impressed those of us who were capable of being impressed by it and even Ted Hughes, I think, called him 'the father of us all', probably for the way forward he showed that C20th poetry in the English language could go. Larkin, Motion, maybe O'Brien and many others have learnt from his example either at first hand or by the way his lines assimilated into the way we did such things as poetry struggled to not be like early C19th poetry on the one hand and like Picasso's Desmoiselles d'Avignon on the other.

And I was glad to be reminded what a great work of scholarship Edna Longley's Annotated Collected Poems is. Any poet lucky enough, and good enough, to have an editor of her calibre to do such a job on them would be eternally grateful.

Painting a Ceiling and other stories

 I'm more impressed by Michelangelo this afternoon than I was this time yesterday having painted a ceiling this morning. The ceiling I painted was no more than two square metres in the porch where rain had got in before I had the guttering above done last year, it wasn't as high as the Sistine Chapel's and I

was only attempting to apply some silk white rather than anything on this scale but it gave me some small insight into the problems he must have encountered.

The main problem is that paint, like anything else that has weight, is subject to the effects of gravity. I think Michelangelo's paint would have been a bit thicker than mine and not so much of it would have dripped off his brush onto him, his ladder ( ! ) and the non-ceiling parts of the chapel. I don't think Pope Julius II would have been impressed to find his inner sanctum splattered with all the paint that missed the ceiling although Michelangelo would have inadvertently anticipated Jackson Pollock, the Dripper, by 450 years if he had.

There might not be many painters and decorators who provide reviews of local classical music concerts for the internet or poems and essays on poetry for any publications that'll have them and it's best if I keep my attempts at their sort of work to a minimum, too, but one can hardly ask a professional to come in and do such a small job. The painting took maybe twenty minutes but the wiping of surfaces afterwards took more than that.

Oh, what fun I had. 

It is best if we all stick to what we are good at. At school it was at an early stage that those who didn't look like being academic enough to do Latin were not persevered with but I think in my case they kept me doing Ancient Roman up to reading Caesar's De Bello Gallico and Ovid because I'd have been even worse at Woodwork and Metalwork. I wish one could have been taken off rugby union at an equally early stage but they could see I was quite good at sport, I just didn't like that one. Now, fifty years later, it's becoming apparent that it's dangerous. I could have told them that but, sadly, in Gloucester, rugby takes on the proportions of a religion more than just representing one's prescribed quota of exercise.

However, the painting of the Bosham Road Porch ceiling could count as a valuable apprenticeship for the much more ambitious project of the bedroom ceiling. I think I'll be looking for 'non-drip' although it would be best if that applied not only to the paint but the person applying it.

--

I was more at home in The Times on Saturday when the headline of a review of a new book on Anaximander called him, The greatest mind you've never heard of.

Well, I have, actually. There was a poem about him in my 2000 collection, Re-reading Derrida on a Train.

Yes, Anaximander, Jacques Derrida, Tycho Brahe, they're all in there. It's not easy to convince all of those who think painting a ceiling, putting up a fence or fitting a carpet is easy and I can see their point if they think what they do is more useful than what I do. I do, too.

--

Paul Morley's The Age of Bowie will be done with shortly. I've had plenty of reservations about it, below, but maybe I chose the wrong Bowie book to read. Morley is one of those writers who likes to be in his own books but there are things to be said for it in mitigation.

We have got as far as Let's Dance by page 430, out of 471, which is 1983. The book has gone into detail about the formative years and is called The Age of Bowie and spends most of its too many pages on that, which was the 1970's. We must be grateful that he doesn't go to such lengths to make such claims for the later work.

Bowie was a work addict as well as a drug addict and it's easy to forget the film career. As easy to forget as it is to believe that a generation not born when Hunky Dory came out knew him from his role in Labyrinth and not for Ziggy Stardust. That's like knowing Bing Crosby for Little Drummer Boy.

We are also reminded that Bowie worked with not only Marc Bolan but John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Nile Rodgers and Freddie Mercury, among others, but we can tell that Morley is making sure we know he has as little regard for Queen as any other right-minded pop-picker when he writes, of Under Pressure,

Queen haters who were Bowie lovers were torn at the time, as the man who had just been 'Low' and 'Lodger' should not be singing with someone who for musical snobs, or realists, of the time was a corny pop music equivalent of Bruce Forsyth.

So, Paul, your book is a 2:1. There's a lot of good work in it but it tries too hard and is over-written. You want too much to both capture the perceived elusiveness of Bowie and yet appreciate it. Putting more distance between yourself and your subject could have achieved something better and saved some repetition of the same idea being recycled time and again which might have been what Bowie was doing and how he fooled you into it. 

--

Edward Thomas is a poet celebrated by having a Fellowship rather than a Society in his honour. There's posh. I can't imagine that all the poets that have such groups fixated on every detail of their lives would have enjoyed the idea but what can they do.

Not get themselves famous is one thing they could have done, or hide the 'real' them behind a series of disguises like David Jones did as David Bowie and all the personae he inhabited as such so that Paul Morley could be one of all the Paul Morleys he's been by writing a book about them.

Honestly, it never stops.

However, the Edward Thomas Fellowship are likely to be good people. Their annual walk near Petersfield is on 5th March,

Edward Thomas Walk

I hope the weather is not inclement and one could make a day of it by attending the talk in the afternoon.

Sanity, sanity. All of it, one has every reason to hope, should be sanity.

Bleak and bleaker, in the midwinter

 One expects Sartre to be bleak. All the anguish and nothingness generated by a world one has to make up for oneself offer few comforts. Philosophy tends towards bleakness, reducing all that might be imagined to what is only ostensibly there, but even modern philosophers aren't quite as despairing as those that used to abdicate all responsibility and use God to explain it all. I found Nausea to be realistic rather than grim, though, and for all the negatives in his writing, he is reported as being sociable and good company, while rarely failing to find reasons to fall out with his fellow travellers.

Conversely, one might imagine Edward Thomas to be well-balanced and kindly on the evidence of his writing. The sympathy with nature, the generous outlook, the measured, gentle, expanding music of Adlestrop make him seem most companionable. But we must be careful not to conflate the writer and the writing. The short stories, mostly very short, in The Ship of Swallows are as beautifully written and measured in their pace as anything in the poems. Within the mechanics of sentence structure, his appreciation of the countryside is as convincing as in any writer and he evokes a richness of experience comparable with any of the English composers that were his contemporaries.

But that's not what he was like. Under the sub-heading of 'character' in the index of Mathhew Hollis's biography, Now All Roads Lead to France, there are entries on 'dislike of crowds', 'fatalism', 'inability to love', 'indecision', 'introspection', 'melancholia' and 'nihilism' and that is betting without the story of when he took his gun out with him on a walk with the intention of shooting himself. If one can find 'the joys of Spring' in his writing, they were less evident in his personality.

Thus it strikes one as startlingly honest to read The Attempt, a story so close to that real-life episode that it's not possible to believe it's entirely fictional. If one thought one was in for some fresh air, bucolics and rolling hills in the distance, there's more to it than that. The Attempt doesn't end in death but is more harrowing than those that do and one detects under the surface that it is a major pre-occupation.

Among other glimpses of autobiography, there's the description, in The Pilgrim, of one whose,

head was bare, and his brown hair was untidy, and longer than is necessary for whatever purposes hair may be supposed to serve. He might have been twenty-five, and I  put him down as perhaps a kind of poet, who made a living out of prose.

First published in 1928, it's not obvious here when that was written but it's possible he didn't really need the advice of Robert Frost to write poetry if it was written at the same time as those that were published in his lifetime.

The stories often end with a hint of mysticism and can be open-ended, as opposed to inconclusive, and are for the most part fine miniatures. Towards the end, The Land of Youth ambitiously moves into myth, folk lore and Tir Na Nog with less success and so I missed out the unpromisingly titled The Making of the Worlds, of Gods, and of Giants. I very rarely omit any of a book I'm reading but, on the other hand, only read things that I think I'm likely to admire and so rather than build towards its best pieces, the book feels like it ends in an unannounced appendix. It could have ended sooner but perhaps that wouldn't have represented what Thomas did so accurately. Nonetheless, if you are prepared to be jarred out of any comfort zone you might have thought you'd be indulging in and don't mind the darkness that lies not so far below the pastoral idyll, it's an essential book for all who think that Edward Thomas is as central to C20th English Poetry as, say, T.S. Eliot.

Existentialism and the Turf

 Bryony and Rachael got involved is too much of a duel early doors in the King George and spoiled each other's chances which led to a bit of a turn up, if any Irish win in a major UK race these days comes as a surprise. Bravemansgame established himself as top of the UK novice chasers, though, and carries forward a few little doubles and trebles to tomorrow and Wednesday, while Legal Rights was the well-backed good thing at Fontwell to keep us ahead. Niall Houlihan is already a jockey of some note while not yet out of the 'conditional' status.

Artificial, and ultimately meaningless, as horse racing and all sport is, it generates 'engagement' and some relief from the contingency, alienation and rootlessness of existentialist anguish and nothingness. There's much in Sartre I don't personally hold with, like the free will and his politics, such as they were, but Nausea is a tremendous novel. My friend on the train the other day noted how returning to books one thought were good many years ago can reveal them as great disappointments later in life but Nausea has if anything improved. It's as much a treatise on phenomenology and all that follows from Sartre's development from Heidigger as it is a novel but we are better off regarding all writing as 'writing' and worry less about whether it is fiction, poetry, philosophy or rambling internet posting.

Many years ago at a conference I met a post graduate student whose thesis was on Larkin and Existentialism, which had potential even if there might not have been much explicit Sartre in Larkin's poems. Certainly not as much as in Thom Gunn, whose The Sense of Movement was a very vogue-ish 1950's exercise in the fashion. It wasn't obvious that Larkin had read Sartre but it would come as no surprise if he had because despite his insistence on having no interest in continental literature he re-works a few French poets to his own ends. But there it was, as large as life, in Nausea,

Things have broken free from their names,

a very clear pre-echo, about twelve years previous, of, 

                                              they

Have slipped their names,

in At Grass, with reference to the retired racehorses but also chiming unmistakeably with the structuralist idea that the signifier and the signified have nothing but an arbitrary connection. The thing in the world and the word assigned to denote it are only associated with each other through the use of language. Otherwise, the world and language are two systems that are not linked.

Soon after that passage in Sartre, we are treated to the classic passage Six o'clock in the evening with the imposing immanence of the tree and its roots, the feeling of being superfluous,

We were a heap of of existents inconvenienced, embarrassed by ourselves, e hadn't the slightest reason for being here, any of us, each existent, embarrassed, vaguely ill at ease,

and whatever fault one finds with Sartre, one can't deny he's a fine writer. But, having identified such discomfiture, there is only so much of it one can take and so having a few quid on the risk-taking, the adventure, the vicarious races at Kempton and elsewhere makes one somehow released from such torment, exercising the illusion of free will by choosing one's preferred horse and living more vitally through it. With some shrewdness, one likes to think. One is divested of one's rootlessness by temporarily allowing the outcome of the race to be one's own outcome.

I'm sure the Portsmouth library catalogue will have the Roads to Freedom trilogy which I'm sure I haven't read all of even though I may have begun The Age of Reason once. That will begin the new year for me, I reckon.

Meanwhile, The Ship of Swallows is a small boook of short stories by Edward Thomas that had so far passed me by even though I had thought my collection of the poems, prose and the novel was a fair effort. It's gorgeous writing, with Thomas well aware of being of city origins and enjoying nature and the countryside as such, but maybe it's necessary to be like that, as Joyce found writing about Dublin in Trieste. Perhaps country people wouldn't notice their surroundings with the sensitivity he does. One only wants more of this finely-tuned writing and if there is any it's likely to be found out about at the Edward Thomas Study Centre which is conveniently not far away in Petersfield so that will be a nice day out one day soon. 

The Ship of Swallows really ought to be a book to own rather than borrow but so quickly has my attitude changed from buying everything I read to resisting the urge that I'll try not to.

 

I made a right mess of the Racetrack Wiseguy piece below, confusing the Grand National with the Welsh National as the race that Secret Reprieve didn't get into last season. A lot of what one thinks one knows is wrong. A lot of what one reads is also wring because it was written by people who think they know but are wrong. Many of us are more confused than we know. However, we stumble on, at least believing that we are enjoying ourselves in difficult circumstances and, as long as we think we do it's not obvious what role authenticity has.

Ivor Gurney by Kate Kennedy

 Kate Kennedy, Dweller in Shadows, a Life of Ivor Gurney (Princeton)

I needed persuading about Ivor Gurney's poetry and for the most part I still do. Julia Copus provided plenty of evidence to upgrade the impression I've long held about Charlotte Mew but Kate Kennedy has more of a job on with Ivor who is less easy to like.

One can form one's own impressions of poets from biographies and letters. Elizabeth Bishop is easy to like, as are Auden, and maybe Keats. One has to accept the shortcomings of Hardy, Edward Thomas and Larkin while retaining some residual sympathy for them, especially in the light of what they achieved. My big hero, Thom Gunn, was done few favours by his letters. I don't regret having not met Shelley, Baudelaire, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell or Byron.

Gurney can't have been an easy job for Kate Kennedy because it is a grim story not alleviated much by his poems but she does him what justice she can in this admirable work of detailed research and objective sympathy.

While 'war poetry' is often one of the first genres of 'poetry' readers are likely to be introduced to, its message being clear and not hard to sympathize with, it is only subject matter and it is somehow inevitable that poetry isn't sufficient for the job. The horrors of war for those that were there are possibly more than poetry is equipped to deal with but the best poets, and poetry, might need something more nuanced to bring the best out of them. Not all the most talented poets went to war but Gurney wasn't one of them. My interest in him relates to most of my school having been done in Gloucester and the area to which he was so attached. Barnwood House Hospital, which proved not secure enough to prevent Ivor's repeated escape attempts, was close to where we lived but Kate's caption to the photograph of it that says it was 'burnt down' is not supported by any memories in my immediate family or anything to be found on the internet.

One reads things from time to time that one has reason to doubt which makes one wonder how much else one has taken on trust that wasn't true. One thing that this book does much to establish, though, from Kate's research and evidence she was provided with, is that Gurney's mental instability was not entirely due to the trauma of war and subsequent damage. He had every right to it, having been injured twice, but witnesses from pre-war Gloucester report him being known to be 'batchy' and known as 'Crazy'. Well done, that man.

It's a complicated psychiatric case to take on for anyone whose interests are mainly literary and musical but if we begin at the beginning, the difficult, unloving mother is hard to omit from any attempt. Having formed close attachments to older women, possibly as surrogate mother figures, a major disruption occurs with the ending of what might have been a more appropriate relationship with a nurse, Annie Drummond, that immediately precedes the first mention of his identification with Beethoven. He has already found some kinship with the Gloucester poet, F.W. Harvey, who described himself in lines that might equally apply to Gurney, as walking,

             behind himself, as if to catch

The motive: - An accessory to the fact

Faintly amused, it seems,

Behind his dreams.

 

Those lines are more coherent that many of Gurney's that arbitrarily leave out the definite or indefinite article or habitually put adjectives after their noun whether for laboured emphasis or to accommodate a rhyme but Gurney's poems often look unfinished as well as clinging unhealthily to his much beloved Gloucestershire background with its deep traditions of elvering, big, brown River Severn and the story of an ox so fat it got stuck in the street between what came and went as Debenhams and the shops opposite. Gloucester and its idyllic surroundings begin to look like another substitute mother that he can love. 

Without wanting to encourage comparisons with another self-obsessed poet, Walt Whitman, or giving any credence to ideas that Gurney's vague associations made him any sort of Modernist like Ezra Pound, there are things worth having in his poetry, such as,

The nurses move like music through the room;

 

and, from this account, it seemed to me the best poetry came post-Barnwood, which had been 'more like a genteel retirement home for deluded generals than an asylum', in the early days of the less salubrious time spent in Dartford, in poems like Cut Flowers.

Comparisons with the genuinely inventive poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins aren't useful. Strings are pulled to find Gurney a job in the tax office in Gloucester but despite his short-lived best efforts he proves unemployable. Any amount of Freudian analysis leads drearily to questions about 'sexuality' and gets us nowhere. The biography 'takes off', in the wrong direction, and eventually demands our sympathy as Gurney's condition deteriorates, with moments of lucidity and heroic support from his life-long friend, Marion Scott, and gestures from the likes of Vaughan Williams but the world can be a cruel place and only has so much time to try to help those so locked into themselves that they are capable of believing themselves to be Beethoven or Shakespeare. There's not much comfort to be had. Gurney as a poet is no more than a poor man's Edward Thomas. If we go anywhere in search of something to make a case for him it needs must be as a composer, possibly in the song settings of poems by his contemoparies but, I suspect, better in the sonatas and other chamber music that took Brahms as a model.

There must have been any amount of talent that went astray or was wasted having not been aligned with some organizing principle, some direction or less of an inclination in the artist to indulge themselves. The pieces need to be made to fit together. Lesser talents than Ivor Gurney's have made more of themselves by having been better directed. We might compare where Gary Lineker and Paul Gascoigne eventually found themselves with respect to what gifts they were born with.

It's a sad story and if you must read the biography of a suicidal writer there are better writers and less grim stories available but Kate Kennedy's been through it on our behalf and, if you feel any need to know, it is all here. You will be forgiven if afterwards you only feel like retreating into something less dispiriting, like Balzac or the recent best-seller, Hamnet. That's what I did.

High Cloudlets and other stories

There is somewhere a picture of me in the bus stop at Adlestrop where they have the sign from the old railway station platform and the poem on a plaque on the bench. But the phrase, 'high cloudlets' came to mind looking up onto my own bit of sky yesterday and so the occasional series of photographs that suggest poems continues.

It is the view I get when looking away from my reading matter when outside. As a  supporter, but not member, of the Cloud Appreciation Society, it is often of interest and one can feel the same thought every time as aeroplanes make their way to or from Gatwick (I expect), that I'm glad it's not me up there but it's their choice so maybe they like it.

But yesterday was idyllic without me being as much a fan of summer weather as I was in the 1980's. A walk out to Milton Lock with some informed turf chat followed by a couple of hours with the latest book taken from the stockpile of recent purchases was simply as good as it gets and I've not felt as good for years as a result. It must be the Vitamin D.

The book at the moment is Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy, the Time-Torn Man, which I should have read years ago, intended to but didn't until now. It is, surely, one of the best books I've ever read. It qualifies on all the criteria that such
a high accolade might be decided on such as (necessarily) its subject matter but also the writing, how it works 'as a book' and, most crucially, how much one enjoys reading it. It's hard to imagine anything being more enjoyable than reading this. It prompts me to think about the 'Best Book in the House' idea, which might need to be more of a Top 20 than a Top 6 and probably done in genres first. But we will see. There's 3 x Balzac, 2 x Gogol, Anna Karenina and Laura Cumming on Velasquez lined up before Ivor Gurney arrives and, for all rejoicing, there is live concert music to look forward to in Chichester in early July, so one might look back fondly on lockdown as a time when there was nothing else to do.

--

I had been haunted by the phrase from a poem, 'we are astronomy', wondered where it came from and thought it might be me. It was but I was mis-remembering myself. 

It's from Horror in The Perfect Book,

The madness dispersing inside 

us is astronomy and, for all 

we know, the next cupboard or door

opened will reveal Vincent  Price,

the music that you love to dread

or all your nightmares come at once,

 

I still quite like it but am less sure about it now. It ought to evoke more than vastness and it might be a bit vague about that. Perhaps one day I will reassess myself and find that, actually, once I've put a line through all those poems I have doubts about, the Collected Poems will be a pamphlet of about a dozen.

While having all the virtue-signalling of frugality and self-criticism it might also be an ironic masterpiece to collect so few and possibly even send out that message to others.

If we saw only the very best work that poets did, we might appreciate the poetry more than the poet.

--

Coming soon, the most expedited of deliveries of a most wonderful new disc of Buxtehude, Schutz and Dijkman arrived conveniently before I went out today. It is just one more thing to look forward to in a packed programme.

It is a great thing that some people have so very little to complain about. It's an even better thing that I'm one of them.

    

British Poetry 2000-2020

 I have been noticing how we've already had twenty years of the C21st. It might not seem like it but a fifth of it's been done. Those of us who still think our subject is C20th Poetry had better give that further thought. I wonder if anybody's doing the 'definitive' anthology of the period to put alongside The New Poetry, the Motion/Morrison book, the other New Poetry and Identity Parade, if that counts, if any of them still count, if anybody is still permitted the idea of a canon. A little while back we were being told it was being abolished, that Shakespeare and Kate Tempest are both as worthy of our attention as each other. In some schools, in the generation after mine, school teams were picked on a rota basis rather than with a view to winning matches so they probably weren't as good as the teams I played in but with regard to poetry it does depend on somebody knowing which poems are better than others and, as a look through some old Poetry Review magazines showed a while back, that became more a matter of tribalism and old 'poetry wars' but maybe it was ever thus and at least each offered a point of view.

But, twenty years in, I have been comparing the first two decades of the C21st with those of the C20th. Without looking it all up, 1900-1920 seemed to be major in a major way with names like Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Edward Thomas, notwithstanding Wilfred Owen and reportage from WW1, and women like H.D. and Mina Loy at the forefront of Modernism, which was as big a revolution as any one cares to mention, but by all means provide your own names. Romanticism had made the individual and their preciousness a priority and after 200 years we don't seem to have recovered from that. The incoming French influence into English made Chaucer very different from Old English. The first Elizabethan Age is sold as a high point in English poetry. 

British. English meaning from England. English meaning 'in the English language'. Anybody needs to set their parameters but the barricades are largely down by now and it's Poetry and many of us aren't fluent enough in other languages to appreciate poetry in them sufficiently.

But 1900-1920 must have been an exciting time, with bad, old Ezra, the Dominic Cummings of English letters, showing everybody how it should be done henceforth. In retrospect, it looks like it, and then one looks to find what 2000-2020 have to offer.

Michael Donaghy was born in 1954 but died in 2004, much too soon, which already means that the 2000-2020 are like Argentina without Maradona. Paul Muldoon was perhaps at the height of his powers with Incantata in The Annals of Chile in 1994 and Hay in 1998 but subsequently proceeded to become more Muldonian than even he needed to be. Sean O'Brien has continued to provide powerful, highly accomplished commentary on what appear to be increasingly troubled times but despite an extensive list of highly talented poets writing in English - some of them in America and many in Ireland- he can't be expected to do it all on his own. There is much to be admired in the poetry of John Burnside, Carol Ann Duffy, Julia Copus, David Harsent, Don Paterson, the much-missed Roddy Lumsden -and I apologize to all the others I don't mention but this is a short essay rather than a directory - but it still doesn't feel like a period. It might be a good thing that it doesn't but the unfashionable idea of being 'great', like Bach or Mozart, meant taking the art to 'the next level' (for want of a better phrase).

If Roddy were still with us, he might defend his assertion that the current generation of new poets, a few years ago, were the best in the history of English poetry but it raised some eyebrows here if nowhere else, looking a bit like blurb for a generation he had done much to teach how to continue with ludic, Muldonian allusiveness. Nothing goes out of fashion quite as quickly as the avant-garde but all innovation contributes to the mainstream if it's worth taking in. (There we go. I haven't said it for a while so it was time I said it again).

I don't know if the Creative Writing industry has made poets so clever and self-aware that it has brought about some sort of ultra-plural paralysis, whether a liberal inclusiveness has not allowed anything to be regarded as 'elite' any more but, supposing there is an Eng Lit syllabus in unversities in 2100-2120, something is going to have to be on the reading list for the Poetry of the Early C21st. Or, isn't it. It won't all be Theory by then because even Terry Eagleton seems to have accepted that it isn't all Theory even now.

I was as dubious as any campus academic a few years ago when I heard it said of the Romantic Poets that 'there were six of them' and that's what happens when you have a syllabus or a canon but while contemporary poetry still has fine work in it, one can't help thinking that, like pop music, it doesn't have its Motown, Beatles, Prince, Bowie galaxy of impossibly great satars any more. On the other hand, one notices on University Challenge that when the music round consists of pieces of popular music to identify, a team with an average age of 20 listen to Roxy Music with blank looks. They know the festival artists of their generation well enough so perhaps those of us who thought poetry was about Eliot, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and Larkin need to move over. It might have been our game once but it doesn't remain so forever.  

Casual Chat about the Greatest Poet of the C20th

And we are talking 'English language' poet here. Unless one is fluent in every language that poetry has been written in, I don't know how one can say. Translations are interesting, useful, possibly even essential, but they aren't the 'poetry'.

I was alerted recently to some lines by Auden, including,
Time that tires of everyone.

And they were followed up in short order by the review in Saturday's Times of September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem by Ian Sansom which would be very much the sort of title to order notwithstanding anything in any circumstances. So, rather than embark upon Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann that has waited long enough and can wait a bit longer, I picked out Edward Mendelson's Later Auden that I bought many years ago but never read.
How many biographies of one's fourth (let's say) favourite poet does one need to read when there aren't any of one's favourite. Three seemed enough. Carpenter, Osborne, Davenport-Hines. 
And yet Mendelson impressed so much in his first two chapters that Early Auden was ordered in a less salubrious edition straightaway. As James Marriott, the reviewer in The Times says,
I could read trivia about him all day.

Except Mendelson is no William Hickey and he's not trivial. If I was intending to be a leading authority on Auden, I might need the depth of detail he provides on New Year Letter but I'm not and so I don't. I rarely miss a word of any book I'm interested in and am surprised at those who skim or speed read any book but I have to admit I jumped a paragraph or two that I might never need there. I'll know where it is if I ever need it.
But reading Mendelson, with Collected Shorter Poems 1927-57 close by, I remembered how I thought Auden might be the Greatest Poet of the C20th many years ago. In the meantime one has failingly tried to avoid any such grandiose debates but if you decide there must be such a thing the next step is to identify them.
One thing that counts against him is his 'facility', just how much wisdom he manages to churn out, sometimes rhymed in C18th style, that makes it look too easy if not trite. On the other hand, his humanity, liberalism and anti-fascism is to be admired and he tried his best in the times he lived in, which, considering the circumstances in Europe circa 1939, are starting to look not dissimilar to those the failure of democracy and shift to the bone-headed right that are happening again now.
So much for learning from history. It only takes two generations for us to forget.

If we did need to appoint a Greatest Poet of the C20th, W. H. Auden is a candidate, if not the 'front-runner', that epithet that had seemed to have become pre-fixed to Boris Johnson's name in his virtually unopposed escorting to the job he always wanted. Most kids in the generation before him just wanted to be train drivers. 

At least there are other choices available for those who don't like Auden enough.
Elizabeth Bishop might be too much the 'poet's poet', like an insider job who hasn't passed into the language via a Hugh Grant film and a poem like Stop all the clocks. The Greatest Poet might need to have broken through beyond poetry circles and written Night Mail even if many who know that poem don't know who wrote it.
Philip Larkin has passed into the language with a handful of memorable lines and been seriously suggested for the title in the twenty years since I heard Anthony Thwaite say, 'great, minor poet, like George Herbert'.
Eliot had been a 'good thing' a few decades ago when it looked as if he had changed everything, was the very touchstone of the 'modern' and there must be much we should still be grateful to him for. But I seem him friendless in the market after all he did, not only for racism but also for the unconsolably highbrow, which also rules out Geoffrey Hill, John Ashbery, Ezra Pound and, extending in other ways, those not highbrow enough and those who thought it was all about them. One might excuse Sylvia's 'confessionalism' because she was also a compellingly wonderful artist but none of the others can be considered because, of course,
Some might say dear old Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas are in the running.

The form is all in the books. If it's a question worth finding an answer to.
There might not yet be a consensus about who was the Greatest Poet of the C19th so it might be a bit soon to start dishing out prizes for that which was still being written only twenty years ago. 
 

Rain

Continuing our very occasional series of photographs taken to represent poems. It was a glorious thing to wake up to the sound of rain this morning.
Among any amount of others, it brought to mind Edward Thomas and Don Paterson, in particular,

I love all films that start with rain

Thank heavens for it, and for Don's poem. It's a shame I have to read 732 pages of The Poem in order to fully appreciate every potential aspect of it.
This series does not extend to pop songs and so the picture does not represent Bus Stop by The Hollies.

I Never Saw That Land Before

Ages and ages ago I posted a photograph of the cemetery in Portsmouth, said it reminded me of Eliot's line, 'I never thought death had undone so many', and undertook to take more pictures that brought poems to mind. Well, that hasn't happened.
I've seen some high windows and presumably missed any number of opportunities but on Butser Hill last week, not very far from genuine Edward Thomas territory, the scenery brought to mind his lines in I Never Saw That Land Before. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/248178
Perhaps it suffers from sincerity, almost preciousness, but many might see that as a virtue in our knowing, ironic age. Apart from the customary Thomas appreciation of the countryside, it undertakes to defend a 'language not to be betrayed' which makes it something of a manifesto poem and one to be admired.
I took some pictures while up Butser because, always a struggle, I did wonder if it might be my last walk up to Hampshire's highest point. It is quite shameful how much I suffer on such gradients and I should know because twenty years ago I was almost equally shamefully fit. But on such a day as last Thursday, it had to be done.

Edward Thomas Walk

Over the years of this website, there hasn't been as much about Edward Thomas as one might have expected, so here are some pictures of the walk near Steep which we did yesterday.

Matthew Hollis - Now All Roads Lead to France

Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France, The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber)

Sometimes you don't realize what you were missing until you've got it. Edward Thomas seemed fairly well served by commentaries and memoirs and so I wasn't really aware of the lack of a real biography. Eleanor Farjeon's book that covers the last four years, when looked at again, is really annotated letters from Thomas to her and there wasn't a biography by anybody that wasn't either friend or family.

Although, inevitably, Matthew Hollis's title tells us to expect the story of his last years, Thomas's early life is recounted in sufficient detail to make it a complete story. It is consummately well done, filling in with descriptions of other poets, the political situation that brings about the war and flashbacks to Thomas's family both seamlessly and right on time.

Although not advertised quite so clearly in the poems, Thomas was melancholic even beyond his contemporary in poetry, Hardy, and one of his greatest successors, Larkin. Dark moods and difficult relationships meant he rarely felt fulfilled or happy. His wife, Helen, would appear to have borne much of this in devout and long-suffering fashion. Thomas was by no means at home all the time and was not always an easy companion when he was. And she has first Eleanor Farjeon's and then the considerably more dangerous Edna Clarke Hall's rival charms to apparently contend with.

Thomas was a successful reviewer and a professional prose writer before meeting Robert Frost who was responsible for encouraging him to write poems. Hollis gives us a useful and comprehensive account of the Dymock Poets, the largely Georgian community that Frost was associated with. But the main significance of Thomas and his friendship with Frost was how they were both arriving at an idea of poetry that was between the haughty doctrine of Ezra Pound and the antiquated Georgian insistence on sentiment and traditional forms. It was speech rhythms and 'the sound of sense' that Frost was intent upon using and it was a very similar to what Thomas had been thinking and writing for some time, for example in relation to Robert Burns,

'It is as near to the music as nonsense could be, and yet it is perfect sense'.

Thomas's example, and when he begins to write poems he does so prolifically, has come to influence the next generations more than could have been imagined with Larkin, Andrew Motion and Glyn Maxwell to name only the few at the head of a long list of those openly acknowledging a debt to his understated, plain but lyrical style.

While Rupert Brooke is among the first to enlist for the war and one of the first of the poets to die, others follow but Thomas is uncertain. He is not nationalistic but also appreciates the necessity of defending the countryside he has such an understanding of.

Thomas's experience of the war was very different from that of the other soldier poets. Where Sassoon, Graves and others had rushed to enlist and then recoiled at the horror of their experience of the conflict. Thomas's war seemed to be running in reverse. ..the longer the war went on the more committed he appeared.

Hollis does well in not dwelling at all on the poignancy of Thomas's death, with his doubts about the war in the first place, his apparently lucky run of just missing shells and the end of the war being only so few days away. The books dispels some of the assumptions that might make Thomas such a popular figure. Not completely the saintly nature lover and sensitive soul of the poems and prose books, he was clearly difficult. And neither just someone who turned to poetry a few years before he was killed but a well-connected literary man from Oxford University. His legacy is perhaps now even more important than the poems he wrote but, in navigating a way between Pound and the Georgian anthologies, he remains central to English poetry in the twentieth century with an influence that is not abating yet.

Matthew Hollis has done a wonderful job in providing exactly the book that was required. Immaculately conceived with a well-judged balance of material from friends, family, the literary world and history, it is both sensibly and sympathetically written. The reader is left with nothing more they could have wished for from it.