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. 

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig was not one of the later additions to the Anthology, still being remembered in the time after the first names went in. He was among the first names. Most timely it was, though, having been back through the Collected to decide which three of his go in, that BBC4 saw fit to show a couple of old programmes from the archives late last night. There might not be vast amounts of such material stored away and we might have seen much of it but it is good use made of minority air time.

The two programmes used a lot of the same pieces of film of him, there not being much. He came across as rather more pleased with himself than I remembered but those who are 'any good' have some right to do that. Perhaps his main achievement, that allowed the writing of his impressive body of work, was throwing away his first two books of inaccessible poems at the age of 37. It allowed him to become one of the names worth preserving from C20th poetry for the fine example he set.

He is an extreme instance of a poet whose later work was very different from where he began. It wasn't a matter of 'development', though. He started all over again. One can entertain oneself by thinking of different ways in which there can be said to be 'two kinds of poet'.

Those who change significantly and those who don't change much is one. Betting without MacCaig who disowned the poet he had been and successfully re-invented himself as a better one, my long-standing guru of all such things, Thom Gunn, turned around completely from the strictly metrical poems that often found the individual at odds or feeling separate from the world to free verse and the discovery of community with others- to put it mildly.  That he could do both and achieved some synthesis between those two polar opposite ways of working is what ultimately made him as great as he was.

There is a shift in Larkin, elsewhere identified as a 'hardening of the arteries', that does him no favours, but he hasn't changed beyond recognition. Yeats is re-made from Romantic to Modernist. Hughes moves from the capturing of the natural world into less successful mythical excursions. Sylvia gains in intensity but obviously finishes before we can see where her extraordinary talent might have led.

Whereas, I'm not sure that Hardy's poems are any different from first to last except that the return to poems, from novels, was in some ways a bigger move. 

 

Formal metre and rhyme v. free verse is perhaps the most obvious divide but surely, surely, it's better to do both as and when while it's not wrong to be one or the other. Although those never attempting some sort of formal discipline need, for me, to be convincing in their chosen relaxations or else we might think they can't do it.

Timothy Steele's metronomic metre was doctrinal, seemingly as important to him as anything he had to say while using it. At its worst, the far worse alternative is that described by Jane Greer, quoted here at Anecdotal Evidence , where in poetry terms the cart has been put before the horse, the art has been sacrificed for a course of unmitigated self-indulgence and stretches the definition of what poetry is. It can be poetry if it wants to be in the same way that I can be a snooker player if I want to say I am. But I'm no good at snooker and the poets to who Jane was referring are bad poets.

 

Some years ago I introduced a session at Portsmouth Poetry Society to try to see if there was a difference between poetry written by male and female poets. It wasn't envisaged that an outright answer would be arrived at but I hoped that the point was that 'poetry' was about the putting together of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and that both genders did that. Since then, I've found that there are by now 72 other genders and so the question has become considerably more complicated but at least it will be simplified again once Donald Trump has established a right-wing hegemony across much more than the share of the world he was elected to manage and the number is reduced back to two, or maybe one and a half.

I hope it doesn't in any way associate me with him if I suggest that the art of writing is genderless and not to be weaponized by either misogynist Republicans or feminism.

 

There are possible divides between perceived Classical/Romantic; something purportedly impersonal and objective v. autobiographical and 'confessional'; light verse and its opposite; highbrow/lowbrow/middlebrow; poems to hear out loud or those for the page. Tragical, Historical, Pastoral.

I'm sure we would all love to see the Venn diagram that placed poets on the complex map, accurately categorized, and where we and everybody else was on it so that we could complain that it was wrong. But the art of a rambling item like this is to make it look as if one knew where one was going with it. Norman MacCaig openly admitted he didn't know where his poems were going while he was writing them and they didn't get titles until they were done and he could see where he had arrived.

I'd be glad to be somewhere near him on the Venn diagram once it's done.  

More Dana

 Where has he been all my life, Dana Gioia. It's like you've been on nodding terms with someone for 30 years and then suddenly find yourself infatuated. It's hard to believe there's another name I'm aware of that I would take to quite so readily if I investigated further but there could be. One would never know.

Barrier of a Common Language is sub-titled 'an American Looks at Contemporary British Poetry'. For once, he might have added because his point is that British poetry has been almost ignored by American readers since about 1945. Except by him, who knows it well and has read most perceptively. It's a slim book, as most of his are but one would rather have a slim book of such insight and, sometimes, humour than three times the quantity without the quality. Evidence by my essay gathers as Larkin is the most referenced poet in the book who, like him, didn't over publish but what he did put in print was all worth having compared to, say, Ted Hughes whose Moortown book elicits precious little sympathy.

Charles Causley and Wendy Cope are praised, as English as any poet could be expected to be; Thom Gunn is admired, as is James Fenton and Craig Raine both appreciated for what he did while also exposed for it. We don't hear much about Charles Tomlinson any more and Gioia sheds some light on Tony Connor and Dick Davis who might never have been widely read in Britain never mind the USA. It's all alarmingly good and all the better, of course, for being on the right side. I'm trying to think of a book one could admire that makes a case contrary to how one sees it oneself. There surely out to be such a thing.

Good books can often lead to others and Gioia directs us to Donald Davie's collected reviews in Poet in the Imaginary Museum. I then sat outside flicking through Letters to Monica to find it derided there but we don't let that worry us because Larkin derided most of his rivals. 

I seem to be ordering these books from sellers who find it difficult to provide them in timely fashion or at all but my impatience doesn't help. I don't know if an essay has ever been compiled quite so slowly, bit by bit, as further material is added. It might have been better to wait until I had the whole picture and then plan the full sweep of it. That would have obviated the necessity of removing claims that turned out to be entirely erroneous. I have an obvious starting point and an idea of where to finish so it's only a matter of fitting in the material in between to get from one to the other.

Famous

The Heaney Letters flow on by, either repetitively or with recurrent leitmotifs.

He became his own industry which is a mark of his enormous success and I daresay he wouldn't have had it any differently but such celebrity comes at a cost. Whereas by now 'celebrities' are celebrated for being celebrities and that will do, it was previously required that they were celebrated for something. Heaney spends so much of his time travelling the world that editor, Christopher Reid, remarks that he might have had special notepaper printed with EI 117, the flight out of Dublin, as his address. In receipt of 15 letters a day, it's not in his nature to become tetchy about it but reading this book revises one's picture of him away from rural Ulster, the culture of Irish legends or peat bogs to that of airports, commitments, engagements, trying to avoid commodification and ever belately keeping up with correspondance. He does it all with good grace as best he can but not all of us would envy the schedule of lectures, readings, the Oxford job, Harvard, the craic that he maintains a devotion to, the books to write, read and know about while still ostensibly needing the time for reflection required to produce his poems.

Perhaps in some way he did become the factory of the product that his own industry depended on. There have been some who found fault with what he did but surely there are always those who take exception to success. 

I won't hear of it although I might not have taken on quite so many projects myself.

I've never been entirely sure about the debt he owed to Ted Hughes. Hughes, born in 1930, is as much of Heaney's generation, born 1939, as he is of the one before. It's more usual for one's main role model to come from an age difference more like that of Hardy, whose poems began circa 1900, and Larkin, born in 1922, but there are no rules- as ever- about such things.

But Heaney explicitly acknowledges Hughes in birthday wishes in 1990,

the verifying and releasing power 'Lupercal' et al had on me in 1962. 

And you can't say fairer than that however many parallels one wants to find between the nature, the violence and the deep sense of history. One might say the language and music, too, but that might be where any such essay comparison needed to do a bit more work than outline the obvious. Hughes, some might suspect, seems to relish the vigour and alpha-male aspects of nature and appears to be lone, selfish and destructive whereas Heaney is communal and gentler.

There's an essay in it but it's not one I'd attempt. They are neither of them ironic enough but Heaney is the much better poet. He may well have found things in Hughes that he could develop towards his own purposes. You feel you're in good company with Heaney, in safe hands. You don't always think so with Ted.  

Fumi Otsuki and Sarah Kershaw at Lunchtime Live!

Fumi Otsuki and Sarah Kershaw, Portsmouth Cathedral, May 26 

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. I had to admit, I'd run out of opening lines from famous novels to adapt in concert reviews and so, unrelated to the violin and piano concert by Fumi Otsuki and Sarah Kershaw, we end with Beckett, Murakami not having anything remotely suitable to offer.

Something of an innovation today was a few seasonal lines of Ted Hughes to read alongside the music, the 'soft excitements' of Hughes in one of his gentler moods perhaps being the relevant words to link with the programme.

Parry's restful, elegiac song in the Andante from his Violin Sonata in D was such a thing and the Cavatina by Joachim Raff was similar if becoming more impassioned and Fauré, who has been doing well in lunchtime concerts recently, completed a section of C19th music with a late Romantic Sicilienne.

The tempo quickened for the Allegro from Schubert's Violin Sonata, D.384 with its lively games on Fumi's fretboard and Sarah implying she'd make a good job of any Mozart in the accompaniment. In an odd misattribution, the following Sicilienne in E flat major was once thought to be by Maria Theresia von Paradis, a contemporary of Mozart's, but has since been awarded to Samuel Dushkin who came 150 years later. 

Possibly the highlight for me was a Melodie from Gluck's Orfeo and Euridice. While it's hardly for me to feel sorry for a talent like Gluck, I don't think he's as famous as he should be on the back of two wonderful operas and more so this was a most welcome outing for a piece where the baroque can almost be heard becoming 'classical'.

Entirely different, we were brought right up to 2021 and, I'm sure, the most recent composition I've heard, with Fumi's own Piano Sonatina no. 1, played by Sarah. Two movements of staccato, the first successfully hiding Vaughan-Williams's Lark from me, led to the more fluid and rolling third which paid different homage to V-W. I found out that the Sonatina no.2 is in the process of being written or else there would have been no need of this being no.1.

Having been delivered to the landscape of Gloucestershire by a circuitous route, Herbert Howells's Pastorale brought us back to the folk song we had begun with and those undulating meadows of farmland, birdsong and nostalgia and that's where Fumi and Sarah left us, with a gorgeous Spurn Point by Vaughan-Williams which might well be Yorkshire's answer to Land's End but compares with his Lark Ascending, the difference being that while the lark eventually disappears from us, this doesn't quite.

It was a beautifully conceived programme given with sincerity and sympathy, deserving of a bigger audience than it got but that is for those who weren't there to regret. There was nowhere better in Portsmouth to be.  

45 Years On

Thanks to Emma Thompson, Anrhony Hopkins and Helena Bonham-Carter et al, I think Howard's End finally clicked. Quite good isn't it. Sadly, it's 45 years too late to help with the 'A' level I did so badly in, like a well-backed favourite that ran unplaced.

The 'only connect' theme, I thought, related to the arty Schlegels and the monied Wilcoxes but I always thought it was about Leonard Bast and still do, his death being caused by a bookcase full of books landing on him surely symbolic of him being crushed by 'culture'. However, it was disconcerting to see Emma Thompsin and Anthony Hopkins married some decades before they so painfully weren't in The Remains of the Day. 

Perhaps now I should go back to The Knight's Tale and Paradise Lost, re-take that exam, get the grade I was supposed to get and then get a place at a better university than the one I went to.

--

In the second year at that university, an essay was required to be 3000 words. That went up to 5000 in the third year. While that seemed substantial at the time, it doesn't amount to all that much these days. 3000 words is what The Importance of Almost amounts to, a comparison of Gunn and Hughes with Larkin that takes up four and a half pages of the new issue of About Larkin. I'm not overly concerned to see myself in print these days but it looks well in the august journal and shows me still in business and glad to have Rainyday Woman in print as one of my better efforts of recent years.

25 footnotes in a 3000 word essay shows the way things have gone in the last 40 years when 4 footnotes and a general bibliography sufficed for a 15000 word dissertation on Marvell in 1981.

But About Larkin is no Teddy Bear's Picnic for those who prefer to pore benignly over the finer detail of the life and work of poets of bygone days. Good Lord, Stewart Lee is brought to account in forthright terms for a contribution of his. Poetry can still be a battleground like it was in the 1960's and 70's once somebody decides to take exception. It is presumably a healthy thing that differences can be aired but it is to be hoped that some decorum and etiquette can be maintained.

Otherwise in About Larkin 53, John Boaler's Awkward Reverence does good work in defining why Larkin feels a bit like George Orwell, there's a summary of a collection of Monica Jones's school prizes, an account of young Larkin's teenage family holidays in Nazi Germany and a very un-Larkinesque poem by Cliff Forshaw that explores available typefaces as much as the language but, as ever, 'poetry is a wide church'. Although John Whitbourn provides plenty of evidence that Roseanne Cash took up lines from Larkin poems it not obvious to me that the relationship is symbiotic and that Larkin can be assumed to have had a taste for Country. 

But December this year sees the next Larkin Society conference in Hull and the call for papers momentarily makes me think about the next little essay I've made a start on. Surely not, standing up in front of the accumulated Larkin cognoscenti to outline lots of things they know already. No, I couldn't. It's a long way to Hull and I can't see what I'd gain by it.  

The Loss of Faith

 I don't know what a loss of religious faith would be like. Harrowing for those who depended on it, I dare say, but I'm not aware of having had any to lose.

Like a lot of young boys, and now girls and middle-aged men, I had a comparable devotion to football and I've lost that and become agnostic about it. I didn't think I'd go through the same process with poetry but maybe I'm like an A. N. Wilson of English poetry, the 40-odd years of involvement and trying leaving me with piles of books, all sorts of thoughts and memories but a lack of certainty about what it all means and if it matters. It is at least as bad as Sean O'Brien's line that,

art is all there is and might not be enough.

It's probably worse than that, though. But aged about 14 I decided that pop music was no good and spent a year listening to Beethoven and Shostakovich but eventually found it necessary to come back, re-invented as a 'soul' rather than 'rock' admirer and so these conditions can pass.

 

It possibly began with an idea of 'avoiding bad practice' in poetry, like sentimentality, bad rhymes, didacticism, virtue signalling, grand gestures - the list grew, as my friend Pauline once described a tree, 'like Stalin's Russia'. I need to acknowledge another debt to Prof. O'Brien before the final, big one, by quoting him, sadly the best I have as a favourite living poet, in his novel, Afterlife, where Jane Jarmain who was writing poetry 'as if she thought it was possible'. Although I took that as one of the many examples of dark humour in that book at the time, it has become increasingly worrying that, no, it's never good enough. It can never achieve the condition of music, of Bach or of the Cello Suites, of which more next time because Steven Isserlis's book on them arrived today and life inevitably underwent an upturn as a result.

Many people say that poetry taught at school put them off it, whether because it was Robert Browning or they weren't impressed by alliteration, assonance, zeugma or the part standing for the whole, erm, synecdoche. A few were excited by it whereas I probably thought it was better than learning the Periodical Table, valencies or Boyle's Law. But as with singing hymns, which I very much enjoyed, or listening to the lesson from the Bible, which I took less pleasure in, 'education' presented one with something one could choose to accept, reject or modify to one's own preferred version. Thus, while accepting that much Christian teaching is based on worthy moral principles, the back story appears wildly far-fetched, one can take from poetry the bits one likes without it meaning wholesale reading of The Faerie Queen, Walt Whitman and the vast swathes of contemporary poetry that aren't much good. It's not a matter of identifying an alliterative line and thinking one's 'got it'. That doesn't matter. Neither is it a matter of making pronouncements like, just as an example, Carol Ann Duffy's 'poetry is the music of being human'. It is a matter, though, of my much-repeated adage, lifted shamelessly from Danny Baker, of 'all you have to be is any good'.

I noticed in the schedules this week that Radio 3's The Essay was on the subject of Ted Hughes. I'm not very excited about that until seeing that Tuesday night's edition is Sean's essay on Hughes v. Larkin. I thought I might 'build back' via a reliable, authoritative commentary on an issue that's always been central to my poetry agenda. Prof O'Brien has long been in the habit of explainimng things that I knew already but couldn't have put quite so....O'Brienesquely. The talk was from Hull in 2018 but I'm not aware of it having been available unless you were there to hear it at the time. It's here for a while yet, though,

The Essay, R3, 5/10/21

The starting point for the comparison can hardly avoid being The New Poetry in which Al Alvarez championed the risk-taking Hughes over the 'genteel' Larkin. Among Sean's other ways of differentiating these two highly differentiated poets were the raw v. the cooked, the shaman v. the rationalist and the alleged outsider v. the establishment figure. What thrilled me the most, though, was his identification of Wodwo as still 'good' Hughes but containing 'the seeds of his downfall', specifically in a line from Fern, followed by the 'bravura set of negations' in Crow, which is exactly where I thought Hughes went wrong and of which Sean says he took up with other poets rather than Hughes like a completist disappointed that his favourite band had had a hit. And then, most pertintently came the 'sprawling incoherence' of Gaudete. I'm so glad he thought that, too, because that is the very place where I agree with my friend Jeff that Hughes is 'unreadable'.

Hughes contiunes to overproduce as if 'as a means of survival' whereas Larkin wrote less and less and ground to a halt. Sean's not quite partisan enough, and far too clever, to unequivocally take sides in the old, old game of poetry wars but one comes away with a sense of where his sympathies lie and if he finishes with the quote that 'it's hard to lose either when you can have both', yes, you can have both but his excursion into thoughts about taste and judgement might make us think Larkin wins, probably about 3-1, for him with no need to go into extra time.

I was intending to begin by citing Dover Beach on the subject of the loss of faith. How many long years has my Matthew Arnold sat there behind me untouched. If I were as devoted to poetry as some people I know with a more profound commitment to it, it wouldn't have. I was ever the dilettante, never the first class honours student. Sean makes the point that both Hughes and Larkin had a 'regard for language' that surely is the minimum requirement for a poet and what I thought it was but look what's happened to Kate Clanchy.

I don't know anything about her book that won prizes, was subsequently found to be racist and then Michael Morpurgo got himself embroiled and found himself apologetic, too. What I'm fairly sure of is that Kate considered herself on the right side of all admirably 'woke' sympathies but then found she wasn't. 

It's dangerous out there. Words mean things. They might not mean the same things to those who read them as they did to those who wrote them. It might be safer in the abstract, and possibly more moving, element of solo cello music. 

 

Retirement Diary

 It may still be a false dawn to think we are post-plague. There's still deaths in three figures each day and the more of the Prime Minister's brand of clueless optimism one hears the less - the even less - one is inclined to be encouraged by it. But one presses on because, really, what else can one do and it appears I've arrived at a period of contrived busy-ness that one needs to make the most of while one can. I hardly get a day off what with the walks, the concerts, today's visit to Scrabble Club and a go at indoor bowls on Weds as part of Portsmouth's very worthy two weeks of festival for the over-60's. I'm wondering if the office will take me back so I can have a rest.

Yoko got it right when I told her I was going to Scrabble Club. God help them that have to play you.

First go, my letters spell out FLORINS, I stick it on the end of DUET, score 76 and the game is already all but over. I apologize to the nice, kindly people who've just turned up for a gentle social morning and on my next turn show them that but for the want of an I to latch onto, I had QUAGMIRE for another 50 bonus.

I'm really not someone you want at almost any sort of genteel gathering. The librarian said they were thinking of having chess. I dread to think. Meanwhile I'll maybe get put back in my place at indoor bowls. I haven't played bowls for about 45 years.

But libraries are good, aren't they. It means, even in this day and age, not all books have to be bought and then found shelf space for. This little local facility had David Copperfield, the autobiography of Ruby Walsh, more cycling books than any library would have had 20 years ago and so I'll be a customer, I'm sure. Whether they'll get me the new Paul Muldoon to save me the expense of buying another dose of sublime mystification, I don't know, but I'll do what I can to keep such an admirable service in work.

 

Maybe they can get me Katherine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare, the new Sebastian Faulks, Glyn Maxwell's On Poetry, a biography of Edmund Spenser and all kinds of things for when I've finished Balzac's A Harlot High and Low in which we follow Lucien back to Paris with all the usual expectations of flying too high and crashing disastrously but with plenty of profound reflections on the nature of ambition, society, 'love' and money on the way.

It is with much regret that I record that poetry is not my friend at present. My persistence in undermining all the shortcomings I think I find in it have eventually persuaded me there's not enough left to like about it. Is it not mostly what so many outside of the poetry community think it is, a lot of preciousness indulged by critics who only compound the problem by trying to show that they 'get it'. At best it is a magician's trick done with language and at worst it is transparent virtue signalling. 

I very much hope it isn't and some time spent with a selection of time-honoured favourites will dispel my doubts. The Essay on the wireless this week is devoted to Ted Hughes which might not help much. A well-respected friend describes him as 'unreadable' and if I don't quite go that far, I do know what he means post-Wodwo. Tomorrow, Tuesday night's essay is Sean O'Brien making the comparison between Hughes and Larkin first established by Alvarez. One might reasonably expect that to be authoritative common sense but it will be interesting to see along which lines Prof O'Brien makes his distinction.

But tune in here first to read about Maria Luc and her Debussy, Chopin and Prokofiev in Chichester. What more could one reasonably want.

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.

Simon Armitage - A Vertical Art

 Simon Armitage, A Vertical Art (Faber)

The prompt arrival of this book was most welcome. I'd been waiting for it since long before it was even a forthcoming title having heard the podcast of the lecture on raptors with special reference to Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. But there's plenty of us want the book, to have the words on the page to look at and concentrate on rather than having to listen.

The lectures are the main part of the job of Oxford Professor of Poetry, three a year for the four-year term. Prof. Armitage was it from 2015 to 2019.

Previous incumbents include such names as Auden, Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon and James Fenton. If General Elections can return the most unsuitable of Prime Ministers sometimes, the democracy by which Oxford graduates elect their Poetry Professor seems to work with some vanity candidates and the equivalent of Monster Raving Loonies being summaarily passed over. With his Queen's Medal, CBE, FRSL, this Professorship and then the laureate job, Simon's now only missing the Nobel Prize from a Grand Slam. If that seems like over-achievement, to me if nobody else, it might be due to some squint in my perception that makes poets older than me look more important than those younger and maybe also that Simon adopts a modest demeanour and rather than being the grand old curmudgeonly highbrow that was Prof. Hill, he dupes us into thinking he's still that nice lad from Marsden, Mrs. Armitage's boy. Well, he knows what he's doing, as these lectures-made-into-essays amply demonstrate.

To start with the raptors, what I most wanted was the last word in commentary on Gunn's Tamer and Hawk, the masterpiece analysis of the masterpiece poem. Like any close reader (with books by Tom Paulin and Paul Muldoon some years ago now finding poems re-echoing more than a Prince Far I dub album), Simon finds things that are there to be found that the poet may or may not have consciously put there but most won't be unwise enough not to take credit for. The language sometimes does those things for you and are probably among those things that Sean O'Brien once called the 'earned surplus' which I took to mean if you get it right then even more things happen for you. In the first line, for instance,

I thought I was so tough,

he doesn't think it's,

stretching the point...to notice at a subtextual level the word 'thou' hiding

I don't know if he means once, in 'thought', or also in four out of the five letters in 'tough', re-arranged, but since it's Saturday, I have been doing The Times crossword. But I would certainly not have thought of that and I'm not convinced Gunn did, either, but it's one example of how, as he says elsewhere, it's in the reader rather than the poet that the poem takes place and, after thirty years of reading all sorts of poetry professionally, how alert he has become. It is symptomatic of the professional that he is tempted to read The Hawk in the Rain by Hughes as a 'poem about writing' in the same way that The Thought-Fox explicitly is,

This is a poem in which the serried furrows of ploughed land are lines; in which each clay-clogged step is a poetic 'foot', etc, etc.

Well, yes, no and maybe but as a later lecture discusses the 'state of the nation' of poetry and its place in universities and how it can lead to excesses of its own, and the horrors of inbreeding, it is difficult to say quite where the line should be drawn between that which is of genuine interest and entirely admissable and where it should stop. Some people in Oxford University have been inventing the Astro-Zeneca vaccine, others are involved in arcane thinking about words put decorously on a page while, at the bottom end of the evolutionary chain, blond yobbos commit vandalism for vandalism's sake in the name of the Bullingdon Club and are then let out into society to put into practice what they learnt there.

  

Not all poets are as deserving of our attentions. Well, not mine anyway, but as well as astute insights into a selection of those that surely are- Elizabeth Bishop, Hardy, Gunn - Prof. Armitage demonstrates the most catholic, with the smallest and most commendable 'c' possible, range of interests by talking about Walt Whitman, Edmund Spenser, some fairly postmodern Americans and Kae Tempest. It's possible I'll give Spenser a closer look one day but not one day soon but I'll manage without the rest of them. Not being quite up to date with the latest trends in political correctness and staying on the right side of 'cancel culture', it had escaped my notice that Kate Tempest is now Kae Tempest and should not be referenced with gender-specific pronouns. I was bemused by what looked at first like appalling proof-reading so I was glad of the internet and thus got myself updated.

I hope my ignorance of what goes on in other silos of the poetry community is no offence. My offence is having no time for Kae's work. It is to Simon's great credit that he has time for it. When he goes to heaven, his reward will be that he can hear more of it. When I go to hell, that's all there will be.

We wait a long time before the 'vertical art' of the title is explained. Poems usually start at the top and make their way down the page, when on paper, whereas music takes place in its own time and paintings don't tell you where to start. But, as Simon is ever circumspect in distancing himself from any ready-made assumption, I wasn't going to assume it was that. It might not be quite so simple for Prof Armitage who, uncharacteristically, abandons his immaculate common sense and, maybe having spent too much time on campus, eventually tells us that,

poetry is a vertical art, its verticality extending from orchestrated line endings and managed intervals. 

 

There really is no need for that when common or garden Danny Baker had the recipe for anything and everything in his phrase, 'all you have to be is any good'. Do whatever you like but let's see the benefit of it.

But Simon is making a case for the poetry that has been written since some of it saw fit to abandon the structures that it, whether that meant English, European or all poetry, thought it had to observe. Poetry, he says, has had to find other ways to differentiate itself from prose, and has, and although they might have been difficult to appreciate at first, the so-called New Generation that in 1994 he was co-opted into, did so without being Modernist, by being more Bishop and Larkin than Pound, Eliot or W.S. Graham, led, let us think and hope, into a world in which all and any types of poetry are possible and available. You make your choice just the same as you do between all the available flavours and combinations of them as you would in an ice-cream parlour.

He makes the point that such things matter to so very few people. But to those of us that it does matter, it matters very much. If anyone had so much time on their hands that they thought they might like to know what the poetry world was like by now, this is a snapshot that details all its grandeur and its failings. 

Prof. Armitage spoke, and then wrote, with the laconic wit that provided as many laugh out louds as Alexei Sayle did in his books except they came from different directions. Much of the Armitage humour is in-house, at the expense of other poets or the poetry industry but even Lexi would have been proud of,

in May 2015, nine people were killed when rival motorcycle gangs, including the Cossacks and the Bandidos, explored a difference of opinion in the car park of the Twin Peaks restaurant and sports bar.

 

Let's hope that there is a difference between poetry and stand-up 'comedy'. Or perhaps it doesn't matter any more. Some of the stories Simon tells in the in-between bits of his readings are as good as what Alexei does. All you have to be is 'any good'.

John Sutherland - Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me

 

John Sutherland says he is, and we can take his word for it, 'the last living, breathing, still actively writing, witness to what Monica Jones actually was in her prime and in the flesh'. She was the long-term female companion, as much as any of them were allowed to be, of Philip Larkin, whose reputation as a great curmudgeon, one of the finest English poets of the C20th and, on the sly, a bit of a ladies' man, was outstaying the detriment the political incorrectness that they shared had brought to it.

Sutherland wants to set the record straight about Monica while he still can. I'm glad of it mainly because the stories of monochrome Oxford in the 1940's and 50's, the acerbic distain for certain colleagues, the inspirational lecturing and refusal to publish anything arrive as great refreshment after equally quickly taking in the lifestyle of needy promiscuity in leather bars pursued in San Francisco and New York by Thom Gunn in his letters.

I was very glad to be given, many years ago, a copy of Brenda Maddox's biography of Nora Barnacle which was, of course, equally about James Joyce. If we need to know all we possibly can about the artist as well as the art then such books as these are essential. Jane Glover's Mozart's Women and Alexander Larman's Byron's Women testify to an approach via the lady friend as if such biographical forensics had long overtaken Dubliners, the Magic Flute or The Whitsun Weddings as the proper focus of our attention.

I always liked Monica and she needed as little defending, for me, of the sort Larkin was provided with in James Booth's Life, Art and Love. It was not just that she wore a kilt to lecture on Macbeth, the 'squalor' that Anthony Thwaite found she had been living in before she died, it was much more that, as an academic in a time when academics were expected to find something to publish themselves about, she put nothing into print. There could have been a book about George Crabbe, we now know, but it didn't happen. She just wouldn't do it.

Not everybody liked her and why she devoted herself to Larkin, with his pathological distaste for permanent attachments, isn't obvious because she, like anybody, might have done better. Better than the duplicitous, awkward mummy's boy who happened to be the superb administrator of a university library who found himself also the finest and most frugal poet of his generation having first thought himself to be a novelist. 

She wasn't given much thanks for the devotion she came to give him. Never mind the portraits of her painted as Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim or Augusta Bax in the unpublished novel by Larkin, she is perceived as 'garrulous' by others and Larkin takes it upon himself to explain to her, from the distance of Belfast by letter, how to conduct herself in polite conversation. Sutherland is not so partisan that he leaves out the downsides, though, which are unmitigated anti-semitism, sympathy for far right politics and, less distressingly, an inappropriate dress sense on occasions.

Sutherland has had access to the uncatalogued letters of Monica to Larkin that are in the Bodleian Library so now, seeing everything from the opposite side, one is less inclined to indulge Larkin's highly compartmentalized life in which he keeps his girlfriends apart both geographically and as little aware of each other as he can. Only now do we see the full impact his conduct had on those he is 'close to', where 'close' doesn't seem the right word. He was, 

a maestro of the unprogressive relationship

and he keeps his women 'trapped in aspic'.

Monica is for many years relegated to second position, in Leicester, while Larkin enters into a different, less sexual, relationship with Maeve Brennan who he sees daily at work in Hull. She gets routine weekend visits when she's lucky, goes to the Lord's test and has a holiday in Sark but otherwise, seeing academic writing as the menu rather than the meal, she is landed with a heavy lecturing load in Leicester's English Dept while others make bigger names for themselves. She is never promoted.

Her desperation and loneliness lead her to excessive alcohol intake, loss of any feeling of self-worth and in her cottage at Haydon Bridge is plagued, with some justification, with worries about intruders. Her devotion to Larkin on the grounds of his great poetry comes at enormous cost and she doesn't achieve even the facsimile of marriage until their mutual need demands it and the end of the relationship with Maeve allows it, by which time Larkin has a new office romance.  While John Sutherland was well-placed to collect first-hand evidence during his time as one of Monica's star students and does a good job of evoking our sympathies for her, it is a dispiriting experience to come to terms with her story.

Larkin's reputation suffered after the Selected Letters and Andrew Motion's biography but seemed to be somewhat restored as his poetry was accorded a high place in the C20th canon and further letters showed him in a kinder light but this book undoes much of that re-habilitation. With Ted Hughes shown to be something of a monster at times in accounts of his life and Thom Gunn's letters revealing the extent of his incontinent promiscuity (which was entirely his own business), one is left to reflect if keeping to the text without reference to biographical detail wasn't a better idea after all but it's too late now.

While it's easy to say, ahh, poets - mad, bad and dangerous, etc., the only difference between poets and non-poets is that they write poems. Any other special distinction allowed to poets is only part of their own publicity and mystique. It's the selfishness, the idiosyncracy and disregard for others that one is left feeling sorry about but it's not only poets that are capable of that.

Monica lived on reclusively for seventeen years after Larkin's death. At the first Philip Larkin Society conference in Hull in 1997 we were told she was aware of what was happening but was unable to attend. Maeve was there, gentle and unassuming, on the guided walk round Hull. But Monica had attended all the doctoral inaugurations as consort in the later years when poetry had all but given Larkin up. She had provided the word 'blazon' for An Arundel Tomb and, in this account, been a big influence on the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse in all its Georgian, anti-Modernist retro-chic.

What survives of Larkin is some meticulously made, very fine poems but not Love. Whatever it is finally decided love is, it won't be that.

 

The Thom Gunn Letters

 The Letters of Thom Gunn, ed. Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler and Clive Wilmer (Faber)

It was said in the 1950's that three new poets were the new dominant figures in the English poetry being written then - Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. Since then, if some of Larkin's lines have passed into the language and Hughes has continued to be regarded as 'major', Gunn's reputation has been less secure.

Larkin has had three full-length biographies, three selections of letters, a minor industry of critical studies, various memoirs from those who knew him and even the 4-CD set of his favourite jazz records. Hughes has been the subject of two biographies, a large volume of letters and been played by Daniel Craig in the film of Sylvia, in whose prolifically documented life he also has a major part. Some of us for who Gunn was at least as important if not more so might have thought he was worthy of at least something like the same sort of coverage. We have waited until now for this significant step in the right direction and I'm sure we are grateful. The introduction makes it clear it is not a biography but it serves much the same purpose. Having seen Michael Nott designated as the 'official biographer' on the internet, that might be still to come but there isn't much to complain about now we have this to put alongside Clive Wilmer's annotated Selected Poems and those autobiographical essays that Gunn himself provided. There would be some justification for a Complete Poems, and even Complete Prose, because the notes here and the bibliographies show that much remains uncollected but, in the same way that one can be made to wonder if one should be reading other people's correspondance that might have been meant to be private, it might not be fair to read poems that the poet didn't see fit to collect. Larkin wasn't done any favours by his Complete Poems and can be regarded as the better poet if only because his three major books represent something not far from his Selected, it's just that his selection process took place at a much earlier stage and was more fastidious.

If the Hughes letters are tormented by grief, overrun by superstition and forever trying to organize lucrative collector's editions of his work, Larkin's were firstly deliberately politically incorrect before he was revealed as a sentimental cartoonist of cute animals to the foremost among his girlfriends and then slavishly devoted to his mother. If I've long thought there were reasons to find Gunn closer to Larkin than to Hughes in their poems in some ways, it has always been obvious that they couldn't have been much further apart as personalities. Larkin is by now well-documented as the fogey retreating into social awkwardness, provincial, becoming more cynical and insular, some of which was both pretence and a means of defence whereas Gunn is nothing if not adventurous, becomes more attuned to America than England and makes his way towards a deep sympathy and humanity. We most of us knew about the drugs and the promiscuity if we took the time to care but I certainly didn't appreciate the scale on which it happened. Don't let anybody tell you the 1960's were exaggerated. It wasn't just The Grateful Dead. Once Thom Gunn was involved he kept it going for himself with great dedication for the rest of his life.   

If Larkin and Hughes in their different ways appeared 'right-wing', Gunn calls himself 'socialist', is genuinely anti-Republican and liberal but above all his agenda is hedonist. If we are all ruled by our compulsions, Gunn is increasingly devoted to his convulsions. He knows what he wants and he knows how to get it. By the end we might be bored by the unending procession of 'tricks' but he's still exhilarated. In December 1993 he writes of his drug intake,

I'll probably kill myself doing this kind of thing one of these days. Still, it's worth it

 

and in 2004, that is what happens - doing both of those things, the evidence seemed to suggest.

 

Seeing the poems mentioned as they are written and collected into books serves to emphasize that the trajectory of the poems was entirely autobiographical, from the Existentialist angst, through the LSD, hippy culture, gay liberation and AIDS to mature retrospectives. Not all poets' work lends itself to quite such direct associations with the life but for one who valued, prized and exemplified 'impersonality' in his work, he is more concerned with himself in it than one might have expected. He reflects in 2003,

I may not be a modest person, but I do believe in modesty in poetry.   

Perhaps it's not easy being one of the most talented of one's generation - most of us wouldn't know - and he employs a leitmotif of studied self-deprecation throughout his life before realizing he is a 'minor celebrity' in his later years. 

He is an exacting and forensic critic of other poets, expressing considerable reservations even about those he is happy to nominate as best, like Wallace Stevens, but his sympathies shift, as inevitably they will, from early admirations for Yeats and Auden to amendments of initial dismissals of Pound and Ginsberg to praising them in the highest terms later. Of his contemporaries, he accepts Larkin's expertise who in 1954 was 'fifteen times as good as me' but not what he employs it to say and never has a bad word for Hughes. His discriminating tastes never prevent him from, or possibly allow him to, some savaging of those things he finds fault with. 

Of his own work, the 'stylistic uncertainties' identified by Edward Lucie-Smith in 1970, as Gunn moved to free verse via syllabics, had already been acknowledged in a letter to his mentor, Yvor Winters, in 1966,

I have decided to give up free verse (I gave up syllabics two years ago), since I don't seem to be doing very well with it.

Free verse was due to return later but what might have looked like Lucie-Smith not appreciating Gunn's development towards being a poet equally adept in either form, he successfully read Gunn's mind at the time. Not that he got any thanks for it. The Poetry Wars were being fought vigorously then and Gunn wasn't above it all.

An insight into the economics of poetry at a time when not all poets had academic posts in university Creative Writing departments is offered by Gunn's reaction to winning £10k for the inaugural Forward Prize in 1992 for The Man with Night Sweats, which made his arbitrary decision to delay his next book until then also a lucky one. An amount like that made a difference to him and allowed him to think of retirement but in the event he continues teaching until 2000, when he is 69, by which time he can be offered $80k for a term of ten lectures and talk about whatever he likes and the property he bought in Haight is worth $1m, compared to the $33k he paid for it in 1971 due to the proximity of Silicon Valley and resultant gentrification of San Francisco. But, most laudibly, as one would hope, money wasn't the point of it for a 'poet', such rarified angels as they like to be.

 

700 pages took me a week to read, which is very good going by my standards. It was admittedly a book I've wanted and anticipated for longer than its editors conceived it, I dare say, but their scholarship has made it worth the wait and it's not obvious that a separate biography would add much more. There is no longer any excuse for not 'getting it'. It is all here. It might not have done Gunn any great favours in adding to my own regard for him as iconic but nothing about the life can detract from the paragon examples of his best poems. The wording of the law clearly states 'between consenting adults in private' and private is maybe where some of this material could have remained but the effect of the Gunn letters is only equal and opposite to that of the Larkin letters. I don't regard myself as strait-laced but some of the later pages here served as something of an education. 

As Sean O'Brien wrote in his tribute,

The only rule was endless latitude.

Let the unready falter and retire -

 

and, as so often, he's right. It might be either this or Mr. Bleaney. But most of us find a position somewhere in between. 

The Thom Gunn Letters

 Earlier today I think I had the feeling that those first prospectors in the Yukon must have had when they spotted something bright and shiny in the river. I knew there were a few Autumn books that would need ordering soon and found that the new title by August Keinzahler isn't due until November. However, I also noticed him as one of the editors of a forthcoming Letters of Thom Gunn, along with Clive Wilmer and Michael Nott. While being well aware of who August K and Clive W are, I hadn't heard of Michael so looked up what I could find out and found him referred to in one place as Gunn's 'official biographer'.

Good Heavens.

With the letters due in March next year, those of us who care have the prospect of 800 pages to sustain us through a winter I was quite looking forward to but now it might as well rain until March, but it sounds for all the world like there will be a biography after all. Having ascertained several years ago that such a thing was in preparation, I had rather given up on ever seeing it and I'm not sure it's this, either, although who's to say.

With three volumes of letters, three full biographies and various memoirs about Philip Larkin and the biographies of Ted Hughes by Jonathan Bate and Elaine Feinstein, plus his letters being well behind us now, Gunn's reputation has not kept up with his 1950's contemporaries with who he made so many of the headlines in English poetry. But perhaps some balancing of the account is eventually to take place. Anybody who thought chess wasn't exciting should have seen the Carlsen-Nakamura match on Chess24 today. Those who think books aren't equally so need to know how excited I am about these far-off, long-awaited publications. The order for the letters is already in place.

I found the news, which is not the sort of story that makes the front page of the newspapers, at an opportune time. Today I also looked at the Word document of my very embryonic idea of a Gunn book that I found last saved 10 weeks ago on 1780 words. It had seemed to me that if you want a job doing, you sometimes have to do it yourself and although not very well qualified for the job, I might cobble together a survey of the poems with some biography from my not-quite-completist shelf of Gunn books. I do at least have one letter that the Faber volume won't have and, having typed 'letters of Thom Gunn' into Google, I see that others have them, too. So, whether my jejune effort at filling what I thought was a gap in the market remains worth pursuing, I don't know. It was a labour of love rather than a commercial project or contribution to scholarship anyway but it now seems a bit premature to spend the winter gradually bashing it out when so much previously unseen material is to become available as soon as the clocks go forward again.

But it's outrageously good news for those of us who have remained faithfully Gunn admirers in times of some dearth of material on the subject. It either saves me a pointless endeavour or it gives my chronic enthusiasm some coat-tails to catch hold of. But since others are showing off their letters from Thom, maybe I ought to share mine. I'm surprised I've not done it before. It now is transparently a polite reply to a fan letter that was implicitly imploring its hero to say something kind about one's own work and he was kind enough to do that at whatever cost to his integrity ( ! ).

Anne Stevenson - About Poems

Anne Stevenson, About Poems (Bloodaxe)

This is not a new book but is worth a slightly belated look. It is seven lectures or talks given in Newcastle, Durham and Ledbury before being brought together in this volume in 2017. Anne begins with a poem called How Poems Arrive that exemplifies much of what she goes on to say about the process of poetry, a brilliant poem the only problem with it being that it is a poem only about poetry whereas something like The Thought-Fox is also about the fox.
The recurring theme is how poems are sound, ahead of meaning - 'how poems are not about', and form and content somehow merge. She cites Elizabeth Bishop among others as an exemplar of how poems are best done. She is preaching to the converted when I read her saying so although I wouldn't sign up to any such manifesto and would prefer to stress that any poem can succeed on whatever terms it chooses. Or fail. Poets that write about poetry inevitably tend to make their way of doing it the prescribed way of doing it and tend to close off all areas of the endeavour that don't comply with theirs.
Anne's agenda, in as far as it can be called such, is very close to what I'd like to think is mine, though, and these pieces are as much of a pleasure to see expressed those things I'd like to say but are best left to those who are better qualified to say them, as in the interviews that Norman MacCaig gave elsewhere.
She is more of an admirer of Robert Frost than I am but one comes away more persuaded by someone who you recognize as wise counsel and I was grateful of her insights into Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens, which is a way into his poetry even if it is an early poem not typical of his later, more opaque style. She also explains how certain contemporary poetry, for her and others among us, lost its way,
To my old, bound-to-be-disapproving eyes it looks as if our youth culture, happy with its gunge-level clothes, punk music and junk food, has been pleased to spawn a kind of throwaway poetry that everyone is encouraged to enjoy (as at a poetry slam) but no one much cares to remember.

If, on the one hand, modernism took a high-church, difficult line, it is not to say that any counter-revolution should dispense with rigour completely.
American poets are the focus of much of her discussion, as well as Auden, both as paragon examples and those whose practice she doesn't always approve of. The final piece is a talk re-assessing her biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter Fame, which is no less sympathetic to the role Ted Hughes played in her tragedy but shifts what blame can be allocated more towards the psychiatric treatments of the 1950's.
Anne was one of the first to publish commentary on Elizabeth Bishop's poems and although I have a fair collection of books on Ms. Bishop, I don't have hers. Writing as lucid and intelligent as hers is valuable and not to be missed so I'll soon be having a look at that and whatever else there is, including more of the poems that I don't have enough of.

Things It Was Good To See

It was good to see Shiskin holding on in the first at Cheltenham and an early strike for Racetrack Wiseguy from the Three Wise Men's Preview. One never worries too much when a horse of Mr. Henderson's drifts in the market but since Shiskin was a late replacement in the actual treble I did (for the beaten Benie des Dieux), it was galling not to have the 6/1 SP multiplying the others up quite lucratively. The week is all about Copperhead tomorrow for me and the treble won't be landed until Thyme Hill wins on Friday so it might not make any difference. Racing such as it was today can actually be enjoyable with not much at stake. I hadn't realized that.
--

It was good to see life imitating art, as it were, as sunlight spread onto the wall below the Hammershoi yesterday, rhyming with the effect up on the right of the painting. The light source in the painting is hard to fathom since the shadows of the furniture legs and that light on the wall seem to suggest it comes from three different angles but I'm looking at the picture a lot since it went up and I might solve its riddle yet, or accept it as poetic license.
---
It was good to see, and hear, that Bells on Sunday this week came from Crediton, more specifically the Church of the Holy Cross and the Mother of Him who Hung Thereon.
I remember some of the names of the churches when we went to Prague, in the last millennium, such as Our Lady of the Snows but Crediton is not intimidated by such poetry and goes for some syntactical exactitude.
The ringers from Exeter went and did that old party favourite, Cambridge Surprise Maximus. When all else of a fondly imagined old England has finally gone, let there still be Bells on Sunday, with its details of the bells, their tuning and history and well done to John Taylor of Loughborough for making so many of them.
---
It was good to see Montaigne keeping up his own good work as he made passing comment on poetry.
I'm sure all his readers like to recognize themselves in Montaigne and think themselves like him because, like Shakespeare, he puts into words what they thought but had ne'er so well expressed.
We can't be sure that he quite lived up to all his ideals but he is modest in his claims for how well he succeeds and they aren't really 'ideals' as much as ways to live, sensible and sceptical of others. While the essays might be full of him, he's not 'full of himself' and I can only join in the chorus of approval that comes from everybody, it seems, who has read him.
What he says about poetry is that it's a 'frivolous, subtle art, all disguise and chatter and pleasure and show', which is useful to remember when its readers and writers sometimes imagine it to be profound, 'the music of being human' and the deeply meaningful gift bestowed upon only a handful of special people. It isn't really that, is it. Not most of the time.
--
But it was good to see the Thom Gunn book grow to 1250 words.
It is my second attempt at such a thing, the first having been twenty years ago. It's a retirement project, really, but one must make a start or perhaps one never will.
It hasn't got a title but it has got a plan. Having read Ian Sansom's work of fan appreciation about Auden last year, September 1, 1939, I thought I could do that about Gunn. So I'm giving it a go. There's no saying how long it will be before I realize it's beyond me.
I suppose it's 3/1 that I'll soldier on and finish it, 10/1 that I'll be satisfied with it and make it available and 33/1 that I'll be so pleased with it that I'll show it to a publisher who agrees with me and it sees print.
In the meantime, I have something to say I'm working on.

The Ted Hughes evening went very well with the good people of Portsmouth Poetry Society last week and, as often happens, I came back with an improved opinion of the subject under discussion having seen what others appreciated about it, which is always a Good Thing To See.
--
It was good to see the arrival of the John Eliot Gardiner L'incoronazione di Poppea having heard this devastating final love duet on the wireless,

except that Monteverdi operas are not quite as full of highlights as those of Mozart or Puccini. While the music is a very pleasant accompaniment to reading, it distracts one not very often. I should have known that from when I saw Il ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, which tells the long story before giving you a tune at the end. Monteverdi is a fine thing at his best and undeserving of the comparison I'm going to make. It's called 'Lost in Translation' Syndrome in which one sits through an hour and a half of inconsequential film before it inexplicably finishes with a Jesus & Mary Chain track.
--
It was good to see the faces of various real people incorporated into the architecture of Chichester Cathedral last week, having previously been introduced to Doug, who is one of them, aged 93 and the only person still living to have been so honoured. He was in charge of Works there for thirty years. I can't be sure that he's any of the three in this picture.

--

And finally, it will be good to see the arrival of John Carey's A Little History of Poetry that Amazon e-mailed to say would arrive today but as yet hasn't. But it usually does if they say it will.
86 this year, John Carey is the doyen of doyen literary commentators - I try to avoid the overtones of the word 'critic'- and famous for the essential book on Donne, Life, Mind and Art, as well as his less essential opinion of Bob Dylan as a poet. I'm sure his book, however little, will raise big questions and I'm looking forward to it. It might be reviewed here by Friday if it's short enough and it rains sufficiently to keep me happily excused from outdoors.
Because it's good to see exactly what I want of a week off. Cheltenham on the telly, the music library at hand, the books throughout with Montaigne, Rilke and Graham Swift's essays close by, the one to write on the computer, where the chess set also is. It reflects what Montaigne says about his library although he is sensible enough to warn that one does need to get out a bit, too.

Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes is the subject of this evening's Portsmouth Poetry Society meeting. I have produced this piece by way of introduction and circulated it to those likely to be there in the hope of saving them having to listen to me for any longer than necessary.
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In the 1950’s, so some books tell us, English poetry saw the arrival of a new generation of poets, and the three major figures were Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. They were not similar. One could see them as three points, or sides, of a triangle.

The joint Selected Poems of Gunn and Hughes bracketed them together misleadingly. Contractual difficulties meant that Larkin was not included. It might have made it clearer that Gunn and Hughes were not such an item if Larkin had been there to chaperone them but any semblance of kinship, based on machismo and attitudes of violence, at least briefly, seemed to lead to a misunderstanding. Gunn adopted ‘postures for combat’ towards the world, either ironically or as a disguise, whereas Ted’s early poems recognized, captured and possibly celebrated nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ and the violence is as real as anything in poetry can be said to be ‘real’.

In the famous introduction to The New Poetry, in 1962, Al Alvarez went to great lengths to compare Hughes’ A Dream of Horses with Larkin’s At Grass, that describes retired racehorses, and conclude in favour of the perceived risk-taking, vital and exciting Hughes poem compared to the ‘gentility’ of the Larkin poem, which he concedes is ‘more skilful but less urgent’. The implications of what Alvarez was saying were darker than that, though, and so it turned out.    

Hughes’s first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published to some critical acclaim and so he can never really have known what it was like not to be a poetry superstar. His first three books were dominated by, but not exclusively about, animals and nature- birds of prey, a fox, jaguar, otter and they were admired for their animal nature. Crow: from The Life and Songs of the Crow, in 1970, developed the theme by re-making the Creation story with the uncompromisingly pitiless figure of Crow in the place of God. Of those poems he said, ‘the idea was originally just to write his songs’,

songs with no music whatsoever, in a super-simple and a super-ugly language which would shed everything except just what he wanted to say

He also explained that its free verse style had been adopted because,

the very sound of metre calls up the ghosts of the past and it is difficult to sing one’s own tune against that choir.

For better and worse, Crow was a great success and further enhanced Ted’s reputation. For better because it was a major new thing in English poetry and was exciting at the time and probably still is for many. For worse possibly because it took him off further into that method of myth-making, primitive, some might say ‘anti-poetry’. In pop music terms it might be compared with heavy metal, very broadly. From then on, most of his books were themed, rugged free verse on such subjects as Prometheus, the Seasons, the dark narrative of Gaudete, The Remains of Elmet about Yorkshire and Moortown Diaries about farming in Devon.

John Betjeman died in May 1984. It was widely assumed that Larkin would be the next Poet Laureate but he didn’t want the job so Ted was appointed in December.

Raincharm for the Duchy appeared in print remarkably quickly, sub-titled ‘A Blessed Devout Drench for the Christening of His Royal Highness Prince Harry’, a long poem about torrential downpours in Devon that looked as if it might have been co-opted into service as a first laureate poem but even if it was, it was an impressive way to start. Not much else done in exchange for the sherry bears comparison with it.

Wolfwatching in 1987 had been a partial return to the earlier books of shorter poems, its title taken from one about an animal in captivity in London Zoo hearing the sound of distant traffic.

Before his death in 1998, Birthday Letters was published, the poems saved privately over all the years since the death of Sylvia. In some places these were regarded as some kind of atonement and Seamus Heaney, having read them in manuscript, said that to read them,

is to experience the psychic equivalent of "the bends". It takes you down to levels of pressure where the undertruths of sadness and endurance leave you gasping.

Not all of us think they are his best poems but the fascination with that relationship ensured that they received much attention.

He was the last of the Laureates who had the job for life. In Andrew Motion and Carol Ann Duffy we now have two living ex-laureates. Few will deny that Ted Hughes was a major figure in English poetry. Even fewer are likely to argue that he wasn’t controversial.