A Little History of Poetry

John Carey,  A Little History of Poetry (Yale)

Little here means 300 pages but they are short pages. It is little compared to Michael Schmidt's monumental Lives of the Poets (1998) which did a similar job in much more detail.
Poetry means the canon of Western poetry in English augmented by that in other languages that fed into the process of arriving at where it finds itself now, from the point of view of an English poetry academic, of which John Carey is the doyen.
Thus beginning nearly 4000 years ago with The Epic of Gilgamesh, he provides a sweep through all those names one thinks of as 'canonical', even if in recent years there have been suggestions that there should be no such thing, as well as a cast of supporting names that many won't be familiar with. I wasn't. Being still alive appears to disqualify any poet that might have been included had they not been which leaves one thinking who they would be, or if Carey isn't prepared to confer such legitimacy on the living. But one can hardly imagine the job being done more succinctly, covering the necessary ground as best it can in such a short space and giving a sense of how the history twisted, turned and developed and how some of the poets relate to some of the others.
If you want to know how poetry managed to back itself into quite such a branch line of contemporary culture, you might have to read between the lines because it doesn't say. Perhaps it doesn't think it has.
Those who get chapters entirely to themselves, if that were an indicator of elite status, are Chaucer, Donne, Milton and Yeats. Ted and Sylvia share, as do Keats and Shelley. Auden has Spender (possibly the luckiest to get his name in) and MacNeice for company. Larkin doesn't quite dominate his chapter as much as one might think, with Gunn and Betjeman among his room-mates. Shakespeare has Marlowe and Sidney for company with Spenser bracketed with Wyatt, many of whose poems are 'unremarkable', and others. 
Auden is regarded by many critics as,
the greatest English-language poet since Wordsworth,
and presumably those critics are those that think Wordsworth was the greatest English poet working back from Auden. I'm not saying I disagree but you would have gone past Keats and the more worthwhile bits of Tennyson to get there. Not much persuaded me to do all that C18th reading I've been putting off for so long despite Pope being quotable. My own idiosyncratic canon mirrors Eliot's rediscovery of 'metaphysical' poetry which, it says here, wasn't metaphysical at all because that implies it was, in the case of Donne,
interested in propounding abstruse philosophy, and he was not.  
But I'm not convinced that's what it was meant to mean. I remember being asked 40 years ago, at University, what it meant and referring to Marvell's The Gallery and seeming to get away with it.

Halfway through the book we arrive at Tennyson who is not halfway through those 4000 years but that is only the same effect as the brightest stars in the sky being mostly those that are closest to us. As with our view of any such genre there seem to be more things closer to us worthy of our attention (see footnote). Without wanting to complain officially, I was disappointed that Wulf and Eadwacer didn't get a mention, and Fulke Greville might have crept in as well as a few more Romans but Carey has conspicuously and conscientiously extended the canon he would have been brought up with to include an alternative C18th, women and ethnic minorities that redress the weird, old certainties of a white male syllabus.
German, French and Russian poetries are apparently included for how they impacted on Modernism in English rather than any attempt to see poetry as something that occurs in all languages. And then, after that shockwave, there are as many American names as English and international 'big names' from other anglophone places but one can see the difficulties of living up to a title like this book has.
I was glad to see the hymn writers given their due, whose poetry was tremendous in the same way as cathedral architecture is tremendous, irrespective of its intentional tribute to God.
But two things came to my notice that it might not have been Prof. Carey's intention to stress.
In Wordsworth, Edward Thomas and others, there is a recurrent impulse to return to 'the real language of men', by which he meant 'of people', including Dorothy. Poetry seems to default to sounding daft if nobody ever tries to reset it.
And poetry's intention is to go beyond itself, to be more than its language. And it's really only any good when it achieves that.
What Carey can be thanked for is pointing out that Thomas Hardy,
seems to have realized, earlier than T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, that something drastic was needed to renovate English poetry.
It's been a while since I said here how the much maligned (in places) 'mainstream' is liberal, inclusive, democratic and is actually all there is. Each generation brings with it another set of self-styled upstarts who think they are revolutionaries, in the same way that teenagers of any period think they invented sex and their ancestors didn't get it. But they did. The mainstream is constantly shifting and accepting of the new, if and when it is worthwhile. It is the autocratic avant-gardistes who consign themselves to the status of passing fads. Ask Sigue Sigue Sputnik.    
It's a brilliant book, easy to read and non-academic, that both benefits and suffers from being as little as it is on such a big subject.

 

Footnote. Let's not include pop music in that. We all have our own standpoint for pop music, like September 1971, for instance.

Laura Cumming - On Chapel Sands

Laura Cumming, On Chapel Sands (Chatto & Windus)

Laura Cumming's retrospective memoir and investigation was listed in most of the Books of the Year lists I saw as well as being featured on Radio 4 but that wasn't why I read it. My first summer holidays were spent on Chapel sands and many more of my mother's were so it was a fitting choice of Christmas book for her and another that I greedily sat and read before the recipient, gradually spoiling it for them with my previews. But there's plenty left to enjoy. It is a compelling detective story that uncovers strange past family events.
Laura's mother went missing on Chapel St. Leonard's beach as a three year old before being found again a few days later. None of the previews I saw revealed the ending so I won't spoil it any further and won't do that either.
Childhood in the 1920's and after could be made a repressive regime of rules and behavioural expectations,
everything about eating seemed rude,

and the mysterious disappearance of Hugh Green, son of a local bigwig in Chapel, leaves an emptiness in his family that is compared to the discovery that a fancy, ornamental cake in a shop window is actually cardboard and hollow.
Laura's mother, known as Betty, aged 13, is accosted by a woman on a bus with a photo that purports to be evidence of who she really is; the Blanchard bread van from Hogsthorpe delivers to seemingly every house but theirs; going back to Chapel to enquire about the apparent abduction so many years previous, Laura is met with a silence that suggests the local people remember and know something.
If Laura hadn't found the answer there wouldn't have been a book but she broadens out the detail into a period piece that meditates on both economic and emotional austerity, various types of loss, downgraded expectations and stoic acceptance.
What one doesn't realize, perhaps - or I didn't- is that one's sympathies might for much of the time be misplaced but the reader isn't to know any more than those whose lives were lived on false premises did. They are the last to know.
There is much to be admired in the heroic, ordinary lives of those who may or may not be seen as the victims and Laura goes as far as she can in understanding those we might think of as the wrongdoers and takes the opportunity where she can of using her day job as art critic of The Observer to inform her account with parallels in art history.

It's probably best if we don't go back to Chapel because it won't be like we remember it on Tomlinson's Caravan Park where my grandfather had his caravan, a short walk over the sand dunes where one had to be first to see the sea. The perils of starfish and jellyfish on the beach probably aren't there any more, Walter Keeton won't be on holiday from his work batting at Trent Bridge and neither will Alfred Tennyson be there before him. It will be less genteel, probably the worse for it, and one can't go back but there are more ghosts there than even we knew about.
Any book that is read in a day can be highly recommended on that evidence alone because I didn't put it down much. There are only about half a dozen such books that I've ever done that with.

Rallentando

There must be other things to do. It might not be this quite as often as it has been.

Having not written a poem since The Perfect Book, somehow lost track of what by now constitutes the current state of the art form and called a halt to having the nerve to nominate what I think are the best poems of the year, it only remains to add in that I've just about used up all my available vocabulary for the consideration of music, on record or in concert, and I don't need to bother the internet with what I think.
So, it isn't over here but there is likely to be less of it.

Adding John Batchelor's biography of Tennyson to the poetry biography shelf has now caused that accommodation to overflow and the various minor re-organisations of books are no sooner achieved than another issue comes up. But it was a very good book. It confirmed Tennyson as fitting the pattern that many artists comply with, doing his best work before being famous, being famous because of it and then maintaining celebrity status with lesser efforts and/or indulging himself, not least as the archetypal 'poet', long-haired, exotic in hat and cloak, other-worldly and apparently incapable of doing anything else but write poetry. It's his sort that got poetry a bad name.
Rosa Baring, his big early infatuation, was no fool, and
confessed that all poetry in those days seemed to her mere 'jangledom'

Not much has changed beyond the possibility of adding in smartarse, chic, self-regarding and often virtue signalling. Which is not to say that, at its best, it can still sometimes claim to be the second-highest art form.
It was a pity there wasn't more about Alfred's younger brother, Septimus, who was reported to have once introduced himself as,
Septimus, the most morbid of the Tennysons.

Tennyson himself took a dim view of literary biography. Well, don't get rich and famous, then, turning down baronetcies before making it known you'd like one after all.  
Good Grief. They only demurred about giving him the peerage because they didn't think he could afford the role (but he could) and then he only voted in the Lords twice.
So, that having been immense fun, it's Mozart's letters now, yet another invasion of privacy but so far so irresistible.

Of course, having only ever been a dilettante, whether at football, cricket, cycling or any sort of writing, there can be a sort of inevitability and ungracious resignation about not doing things any more. It really doesn't matter at all but if something suggests itself as needing to be done, I'll do it. It isn't over til it's over.

A Ticket to the Ryder

My least favourite sporting event of the year is not the silly horse racing team game at Ascot in August, the Shergar Cup, nor is it any car racing, none of the football, the T20 cricket, all overhyped box office products of little consequence that they may be - it is the Ryder Cup.
I remember how desperate they were to make it competitive that they had to bring Europe in to help the UK out, since when it has been sold to those who do as they are told as something of awesome significance. But, no, golf's bad enough without reducing it to this tedium. It means avoiding Radio 5 all weekend, which isn't that hard to do, and hoping it doesn't intrude into the Danny Baker Show.
It only demonstrates to me that if you want to sell something badly enough, there are usually people dumb enough to buy it. As if it's worth keeping Oliver Kamm's relentlessly repetitive grammar column in The Times on Saturday because market research tells them it is a contributory factor in making some people buy the paper because reading him makes them feel clever. (It worked on me for a little while).
--
Which is seconded by our old mate, Jacob. That was a consummate performance on Question Time, attentive, well-organized, polite and impressive. So much so that one hardly noticed, among the two other yobs representing the more bullish gender, Rod Liddle and the Labour stalwart, that his main argument for Leave is to benefit his extensive portfolio of worldwide investment funds which, in the midst of that brouhaha, he was able to confess with impunity.
He is very good at what he does. He might say he doesn't want to unseat the Prime Minister, only to change her mind on one thing. I'm the same with him. I'd like somebody that good to lead a centrist, Roy Jenkins-type revival, so I've only got to change his mind about virtually everything, plus perhaps his hairstyle, and we'll be fine.
--
Another weekend, another long lie down. In fact the first for three weeks, and thus overdue. I mean, doing things and going places is all very well but it eventually doesn't compare with indolence, that one can learn to grow into.
It is so glamorous and tempting that I wonder what would happen if I didn't write anything. No more poems, not the Red Herring book, perhaps not even this. Would it be possible to read a book, attend a concert or listen to a new record without wanting to say something about it. It would be difficult and I might not even bother to think anything about them if I didn't. It seems a bit Buddhist, or some such thing, but might be worth a try.
Meanwhile, the distracted process continues whereby one isn't committed enough to one book (The Waves) before another turns up that one would prefer to read (Jane Glover's Handel in London), which is betting without the few weeks' worth of things put by. It becomes a sort of flow, opting to allow the choicest words to flow over one for the sake of it, not worrying too much what they mean but knowing, to one's deep satisfaction, that one isn't going to have to review it for the TLS, with such informed erudition, but just let it happen.
It's a new biography of Housman, that Amazon have at £11.50, not £25, for 500 pages, they have in there this week. Can't they shift it, I wonder. On the other hand, does Housman deserve to be the next poet whose biography I read when I haven't read one of Tennyson yet.
But I have an idea that it might be possible for the onset of age to bring with it a glimpse of the peace that passeth all understanding, and that might be something worth having.   

Observer reports poetry boom

Sunday's Observer reported a new 'poetry boom', a renaissance in the art marked by sell-out festivals, soaring sales and all kinds of mayhem and mania going on.
It is a story that is recycled every few years, usually coinciding with no new discovery about Shakespeare or other satisfyingly esoteric news to fill half a page with. If there's been no recent sighting of a beast on Bodmin Moor, nobody building a moon rocket in a garden shed or no teenage school student eloping with a teacher, then it must be time to wheel out the one about a new fashion for poetry.
It happened in the sixties with Adrian Mitchell, Ban the Bomb and the Liverpool Poets deciding that the likes of Edmund Spenser were too boring for them, and it's happened regularly since. The estimable John Cooper-Clarke could be forgiven if he has tired of being cited as in the vanguard but he probably won't if it keeps him in work.
What it means, of course, is performance poetry and this time it's Kate Tempest downgrading the art to an accessible level that abhors such deliberate difficulty as that espoused by Geoffrey Hill. It doesn't mean that suddenly, rather than pilates or model railways, some of non-campus lower middle class have taken to composing gently ironic sestinas or crafting syllabic sonnets to soothe away the anxieties of our difficult times. Would that it were, Mr. Ponsonby, would that it were.
So let's not be too alarmed. The disparate network of fuzzily overlapping societies, groups, magazines and readings is probably not going to be over-run by hordes of ranting doggerel-mongers full of pent-up anger and righteousness. They have always come and gone. Neither is it likely that any of our more eminent names, like Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage or Andrew Motion, those three successive Poet Laureates in no particular order, are suddenly to become the sort of national figure that Tennyson was and we should all be grateful for that, including them.
No, it was no more than another recondite piece of journalism swindling readers of their time and money by providing them with some words to read on a Sunday. It is unlikely to cause any more waves than a few cosmopolitan types looking up from their coffee and thinking, wow, poetry, how marvellous.        

Top 6 - Alfred Tennyson

Andrew Motion on Tennyson, Royal Marines Museum, Portsmouth, June 23.

.

Andrew Motion presented his personal appreciation of one of his laureate predecessors in the fine surroundings of the Royal Marines Museum with views of the Solent across to Tennyson's Isle of Wight just out of the windows, over there.

He began by noting the surprising proximity of the dates of birth of Tennyson and Keats, given our perceptions of them now as representing very different ages. It was Hallam who switched Tennyson on to Keats, who only sold 200 books in his brief lifetime, and although they have a fascination with similar themes and exist in the same tradition, they are different in sensibility, Keats liking poems to press towards a conclusion while Tennyson's occur at a moment before something dramatic is about to happen.

He noted the ghost of Shakespeare in Ulysses and echoes of Homer throughout, but also a tendency in earlier Tennyson towards generalization, a consensus, that might sound glib to modern ears that has been overcome by the time of maturer poems like Audley Court.

Motion's best piece of literary critisim came in his finding in this, his favourite Tennyson poem, a pleasant feeling of being within a current moment yet of vulnerability to geological scales of time.

In In Memoriam he finds a tenderness in poems about his friend Hallam that is not apparent in poems about women although he was at pains not to suggest that this was homo-erotic in any way we might understand it now.

So, by choosing six Tennyson poems to read, joined together by these biographical and literary notes, Sir Andrew did me a great favour by unwittingly nominating a Top 6 of Lord Alfred, which were The Kraken, Ulysses, Audley Court, In Memoriam, The Princess and Crossing the Bar. But Andrew didn't choose these as a Top 6 and so I mustn't pass it off as such. In fact, perhaps the most moving poem of the evening was when Andrew was prevailed upon to give us one of his own and he chose his tribute to his friend and Tennyson scholar, Mick Imlah.

His manner is modest and careful and increasingly becoming like Prince Charles in a thoughtful mood. A genuine and humane man, he is English in that traditional, understated way that hopefully isn't completely out of fashion yet. He could have said more but he preferred to present more of a poetry reading rather than give a lecture and you don't get to see poets reading other poet's work so often these days. Or I don't, anyway.

So, using Andrew's sound choices to start with, I'll have to insert my personal favourites from the classic Tennyson and select the Top 6 as Mariana, The Lady of Shallott, The Lotos Eaters, Audley Court, In Memoriam, and Tithonus. In fact, I find myself changing most of it with the proviso that Andrew Motion knows much more about Tennyson than I do and, furthermore, my favourite Victorian poet is probably Matthew Arnold and have also always suspected that the corresponding period in French poetry has more to offer.

But none of that takes anything away from a generous and intimate evening, well supported for such an event in Portsmouth and my thanks to Andrew for returning here once more to give us the benefit of his view of this massive figure in English poetry. It's difficult to imagine a poet now being as big a public figure as Tennyson was in his day, not only of genuinely laureate status at the Queen's court but with a wide general readership, not operating as a marginal cultural figure on a university campus known to few beyond the province of specialist magazines and increasingly inward-looking shoe-gazers. If that's a problem for anyone, it would be up to them to wonder why it is so.