My main guides through the changing worlds of poetry in English are poets, particularly those who take an interest in their art and that of their fellow writers. Down the centuries poetry has been singularly blessed with articulate practitioners. They maintain a continuous conversation with one another, across languages and centuries. Poets live so long as their poems are heard, assimilated, handed on. The echo of Dante in Eliot or of Sappho in H. D. or Adrienne Rich is part of the larger continuity in which all of us who love the art have a right to participate as readers or writers. Among poet-critics of the twentieth century, Robert Graves, Randall Jarrell, C.H. Sisson, Donald Davie, Derek Walcott, Eavan Boland and John Ashbery were congenial companions, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound exigent (if not always agreeable) masters. Earlier companions and masters include Sidney, Dryden, Dr. Johnson—who provided my title—Coleridge, Shelley, Poe…
Lives of the Poets traces the development of poetry in English from the fourteenth to the threshold of the twenty-first century, taking non-English poetry into account when its impact is registered. When the book was written it could not have gone any further in time without becoming prophetic, and prophesies are always erratic. It could have started earlier, however. Lives of the Poets was launched in Cambridge in 1999, where my elder son, reading Anglo Saxon at the time, asked me why I had omitted the Old English poets. Chastened, I later put together a series of critical anthologies entitled The Story of Poetry, rooted in this book, and added the Anglo Saxon poems into the first volume, with a substantial introduction. At the launch of that book my son, still at Cambridge, said, “I think you were right in the first place to leave out the Anglo Saxons.”
Would it make sense to start this history of English poetry as far back as 657, with Cædmon? The scholar and critic A.R. Waller thought so. “And from those days to our own,” he wrote a century ago, “in spite of periods of decadence, of apparent death, of great superficial change, the chief constituents of English literature—a reflective spirit, attachment to nature, a certain carelessness of ‘art’, love of home and country and an ever present consciousness that there are things worth more than death—these have, in the main, continued unaltered.” Changes may seem to us more than superficial, the thematic constants more complex than they appeared to Waller. Sixty years after him, his argument persisted. “Microcosm and macrocosm, ubi sunt, consolation, Trinitarianism—these are but some of the ideas and motifs,” wrote Stanley Greenfield, “that Old English literature shares with the works of later writers like Donne, Arnold, Tennyson, and Milton.” The English poets he calls to the witness stand undeniably deploy the “motifs” he lists, but those motifs, singly or in combination, are characteristic of any Germanic literature—indeed, of almost any literature we might care to name. Old English poetry was already remote in time and temperament from Chaucer and Gower, who are six centuries closer to it than we are. Its affinities with Langland and the work of the Gawain poet, and with the alliterative verse of Richard Rolle of Hampole and surviving shreds of popular verse are, apart from the alliterative tic, remote in tone and manner.
The spirit of the Old English may survive in the Border Ballads but the line cannot credibly be drawn much further forward. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden used the old resources in selective ways, looking for antidotes to the prosodic decorums of their periods. But to them Old English was a language as foreign as Welsh or Icelandic, a poetic rather than an immediately linguistic or lexical resource. Old England is another country, Old English a language as foreign as German or Dutch. If we started there we would need to start again a few centuries forward. We are all the Norman Conquest’s post-colonials. I leave out the Anglo Saxons once again.
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The aspects of poets’ lives that matter in this context are those that gratuitously entertain us, for example the witch-crafted death of Robert Henryson, the libidinal vagaries of Robert Burns or the last medical consultations of Emily Dickinson; and those that clarify the development of their work and that of other writers. Inevitably, from the continuities between writers comes a sense of canon, though not a stable one. In each generation, some poets vanish, others re-emerge; only a few keep their heads continually above water even though, as in the case of Milton, fellow swimmers may do their damnedest to drown them for ever.
The colonial diaspora of English complicated and enriched things, bringing new energies and refreshing old. The early chapters of the book pursue a more or less linear chronology; later chapters make increasingly complex connections across times and continents. Injustice is done, and undone. The spurns that patient merit takes in its own age can be repaid tenfold in a later age, as in the cases of John Clare, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Frank O’Hara and James K. Baxter. The poets themselves are the chief narrators and critics so that we get to know them well before we reach their home chapters. Modern theorists portray canons as repressive constructs, and they can be, they have been. Each age has its history of deliberate omissions. But so long as our sense of canon is open and unstable, seeking to include rather than omit, it is a generous principle that underscores our sense of poetry as an open continuum.
Of the four voices that speak in the first chapter, Derek Walcott and Les Murray remain defining presences. Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky have died, and despite their legacy the sense of coherence imparted, at the end of last century, by this international poetic “superleague” (a journalistic term Blake Morrison coined for them, which helped rigidify a popular sense of where the Anglophone main stream ran) has weakened. “A time has come to speak unapologetically for a common language and to speak a common language of poetry. Almost.” My optimism fifteen years ago may still be prophetic, unless indeed the time that had seemed about to come has gone. The world of Anglophone poetry feels to me, as a publisher and editor with an international remit, more fragmented than it did in those bright days before the millennium turned, before 9/11 and the phosphorous and sodium dawns of the twenty-first century, with renewed nationalisms and bigotries, and a recrudescence of prescriptive aesthetics of various kinds keen to define, secure and exclude.
And the academy has continued to tighten its hold on every limb and organ of poetry: a majority of Anglophone published poets nowadays acquired their skills in writing schools and have in turn become teachers of poetry. The discourse (that very word, discourse, reeking of chalk dust) that surrounds poetry is often voiced in terms peculiar to the specialisms of the academy. Not that all critical and creative programs promote the same decorums: there is variety in the degree of emphasis each lays on aesthetic, political and commercial outcomes. And just occasionally in Britain a provocation elicits a unanimous response. On 1 June, 2014 spokesmen for the poetry constituencies were invited to be ruffled by the Guardian, and they obliged. The journalist Jeremy Paxman, clearly not feeling too fresh after chairing the judging panel for the Forward Poetry Prizes, having read 170 collections and 254 single poems, said: “I think poetry has really rather connived at its own irrelevance and that shouldn’t happen, because it’s the most delightful thing. […] It seems to me very often that poets now seem to be talking to other poets and that is not talking to people as a whole.”
Much of what he is reported as saying was intended to elicit the outrage that becomes news. Poets, he suggested, should be summoned before an inquisition of “ordinary readers” to explain themselves and justify their practice. Senior prize-winning professor poets from writing programmes rushed to the defenses. How frail those defenses have become. Professor Michael Symmons Roberts declared, “There is an awful lot of very powerful, lyrical, and readable poetry being written today,” and reassured Paxman that, “We are still a nation which feels it needs and reaches for poetry at key moments; what has been lost is the habit of buying and reading books of poetry,” that we turn to poetry, as we go to church, for consolation: funerals, weddings… and it survives on the radio. Contemporary poetry is not useful in these terms.
Professor Jeremy Noel-Tod cheerfully quoted Frank O’Hara, “If they don’t need poetry, bully for them. I like the movies too.” Still, there was a whiff of triumphalism: “Frank O’Hara was once patronised as a niche poet of the New York art scene. Fifty years later, he’s being recited by Don Draper on Mad Men and is one of the most influential voices around.” Not only radio: poetry makes it on to TV, too. Dr George Szirtes in the Guardian of 2 June went atavistic. “Poetry is as ancient as language itself, and the sense of the poetic precedes language. Animals could be charmed by music; mere drumming can heal the sick.” Language, which some believe is a crucial ingredient of poetry, hardly figures in his primeval argument. “The poetic even penetrates to football commentators who exclaim ‘Sheer poetry!’ at a particularly wonderful moment. They tend not to exclaim ‘Sheer prose!’ We feel poetry rather than understand it. We know it’s there because it gets under the skin of the conscious mind.” Not a felicitous metaphor, we might think. And this was as good as the argument got.
Poems can themselves reveal even more about poetry’s history than a poets’ prose. Nothing illuminates Chaucer’s so clearly as the poetry of Spenser, or Spenser’s as that of Milton and early Blake, or Milton’s as that of Wordsworth. Whitman lives, changed, in Pound and Lawrence, Herbert in Coleridge and Dickinson, Byron in Auden and Fenton. Each achieved poem is a gathered energy that transmits itself, undiminished, to attentive receivers. Its energy is generated by its occasion, which may be love or thanks, lament, rage, celebration, observation, or simply an engaging semantic accident or a rhythm; but it is also charged by poems that hover around it as echo, memory or example. Parody, homage, theft, adaptation: the generous energies are diminished only by ignorance. This is the singing school that mattered in the time before creative writing programs, its doors always ajar, its blackboards written and over-written, the books on desks and window ledges full of bright markers, marginalia, bus-tickets, gum-wrappers, love letters and pressed heather. It is the school that matters now, a free school requiring intelligence and imagination.