Laurie Smith explores how poetry may help us to survive.
I want to suggest that the poetic imagination is currently undergoing radical change and that, if poets are attentive to this, it will lead to poetry of greater strength, variety and influence than Britain has seen for nearly 200 years. I will consider why the change is happening now, its causes and possible consequences, and therefore the conditions in which the writing of great poetry can be nurtured. In effect, I am attempting to sketch a theory of the poetic imagination and, sensing scepticism about whether this is possible, recall J M Keynes’ comment that economists who dislike theory, or claim to get along better without it, are simply in the grip of an older theory. This is likely to be true of readers and writers of poetry too.
If the imagination can be nurtured it can also be stifled and, to describe the harm done by the older theory, we can start by considering why all the indisputably great 20th century poets in English are American (Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Lowell, Plath) or Irish (Yeats, Heaney). There are various British possibles: Edward Thomas, Owen, Auden, Dylan Thomas and Hughes would be on most lists, and some would make a case for Bunting, Empson, Larkin, W S Graham or R S Thomas. Taking the five about whom there is little doubt, the achievement of the first two is limited by their premature deaths and that of the others are fundamentally flawed – Auden by emotional and moral evasiveness no longer disguised by his skill with language, Thomas by the sacrifice of meaning to sound and Hughes by the constriction of his subject matter to non-human nature. As Hughes himself wrote, “Maybe if I didn’t live in England, I wouldn’t be driven to extremes, to writing about animals”.
Each of these British poets extended the range of poetic language and/or feeling, but temporarily only. They have had imitators, but none has affected the central tradition of British verse which runs unbroken from Tennyson, Arnold and Browning, through Hardy and Kipling, through Georgians such as Blunden and Masefield, through Thirties poets such as Spender, Barker and Day Lewis, through the Movement whose most durable monument is Larkin, and so on to the 1980s.
Obviously there have been changes in style between 1830 and the present: a modernisation of language including the abandonment of archaisms; a cautious willingness to write without rhyme though not usually without recognisable metre; a lessening of overt rhetoric. But none of these changes has affected the central tradition of English verse since the early 19th century, the essential feature of which is language which is restrained, always grammatical and valued both thoughtful decoration – the well-placed adjective, metonymy or simile – and for plangent cadence, often expressing a sense of loss.
Such poetry does not take risks, neither with language nor with subject matter. It does not attempt symbolism, nor delight in the musicality of words, nor express political commitment other than a simple nostalgic conservatism. It is, in short, the poetic embodiment of British diffidence, the embedded belief that it is bad manners to express strong emotion openly and that such feelings should be alluded to obliquely or ironically.
This is the central point made in Al Alvarez’s famous introduction to The New Poetry (1962) which he subtitled ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ (and about which he was interviewed in Magma 33) – that British diffidence or gentility had prevented a meaningful response to the innovations of modernism in the early 20th century. I am suggesting that the same diffidence prevented a meaningful response to the innovations of the early 19th century too.
My central point is that this 150-year failure of the British poetic imagination is now ending and that the conditions are now right for British poets to write great poetry again. The rest of this article looks at how this may be achieved and, in particular, the imagination from which poetry springs is undergoing change.
The history of a failure
How did this failure come about? The other face of diffidence is conformism – the wish by poets to conform to, and therefore confirm, the expectations of the society in which they live. Non-conformists seek to extend their audience’s expectations by experiment and it is significant that Keats, who has good claim as almost the last great British-born poet, was also one of the last original British-born experimental poets. This conformism is illustrated by the treatment of the two most significant experimental poets in English to appear between the death of Keats and the publication of Prufrock – Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In this respect New England was like Britain; T W Higginson, Dickinson’s literary mentor, refused to support publication of her poems in their original form and, after her death, prepared a selection of her work for publication by smoothing rhymes, replacing “provincialisms” and regularising metre and punctuation. A similar function was fulfilled for Hopkins by Robert Bridges who expressed worried incomprehension in Hopkins’ lifetime and delayed publication of his poems for 27 years after his death on the ground that the public was not ready for them.
I have suggested that, apart from Hopkins, the last great British-born poet was Keats, the youngest of the generation that included Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley. It was the last generation in which poetic radicalism was allied to, indeed arose from, a radicalism both of emotional commitment (now described distractingly as romanticism) and of political belief. To reread these poets is to marvel, first, at how readily metaphor becomes symbol; second, at how potentiality of mankind and of the self are seen as one; and, third, at the range of means available to each poet so that, for example, abhorrence of tyranny can be expressed both lyrically in London and Ozymandias and dramatically in America and Prometheus Unbound. Poems like The Tyger, Kubla Khan and Keats’ Odes have an ecstatic quality not achieved in English poetry before or since; and Keats in particular, as the most experimental poet after Blake, consciously extended the resources of English poetry in the directions of musicality of language and symbolic drama.
This outpouring of great poetry seems to have had two sources. The first I have summarised as a belief that the potentiality of mankind and of the self are one. The political potentiality of mankind had been demonstrated by the American revolution and, more ambiguously and temporarily, by the French, but the central importance of the self was irresistibly argued by Rousseau in his Confessions (1788). It is hard to underestimate the effect of this book throughout Europe. Hazlitt commented wonderingly in 1816 on “the power which he [Rousseau] exercised over the opinions of all Europe, by which he created numberless disciples, and overturned established systems.” It led to the radicalism of Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1798), to Wordsworth’s willingness to write personally, if increasingly intermittently, throughout a long writing life and to an outburst of confessional writing in prose – works like De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), Lamb’s Confessions of a Drunkard (1822) and Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris (1823) – from which British taste quickly recoiled. It also provided the basis for Tennyson’s masterpiece, In Memoriam, written over 10 years to exorcise the misery of the loss of Arthur Hallam.
The second source of great poetry was, paradoxically, a limited education in English literature. Eighteenth century education was extraordinarily permissive by later standards. Boys who received formal education were sent to day or boarding schools chiefly to learn Latin and, if they were able enough, Greek together with such arithmetic as was necessary for daily life. Almost the only English literature taught in schools was Shakespeare and Milton, and the Bible was read at Sunday service. Having undergone such an education, the boys (and their sisters who were normally educated at home) were free to read whatever their father’s library contained or could be borrowed from friends or the new lending libraries, at a time (it is hard to imagine) when almost no reading was necessary. For bright boys, Rousseau’s Confessions were more interesting than collections of sermons or practical treatises on estate management.
During the 1830s and 40s, however, British education underwent rapid change. Forward-looking headmasters like Dr Arnold of Rugby perceived that Britain needed large numbers of young men, educated to a consistent standard, to manage an industrial base of increasing technological complication, to run an increasingly complex bureaucracy and to administer an expanding empire. Under these men and their followers, boys’ schools were transformed from laissez-faire establishments of indolent learning and much free time which, at worst, was spent in drinking, gambling and riot, into centres of purposeful education. The values to which the schools were increasingly dedicated were those of efficient administration of a potentially volatile work force or native population: fair play, self restraint, consistency and the superiority of the generalist to the technical expert.
Schools were ruthlessly adapted to inculcate these values. Pupils’ free time was severely curtailed; competitive sport was encouraged and soon made obligatory; and the curriculum was modernised. In particular, more English literature was introduced and each work was required to fulfil two criteria: stylistic excellence to provide a model for pupils’ writing, and moral or spiritual uplift.
This ideological penetration of the 19th century education system was soon complete. Girls’ boarding schools were founded to instil the same values, as were more day grammar schools for both sexes. Elementary and secondary-modern schools, seeking to promote the same values, completed system which remained intact until the 1970s despite incomplete comprehensivisation. It is only through the current decline of British education that opportunities for the poetic imagination are now beginning to re-emerge.
In an educational system designed to produce readers and writers of efficient prose, poetry was inevitably valued not as the expression of personal emotion with all the attendant complications, but as an expression of universal emotion. “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed” remained the touchstone of poetic taste and ordained that poetry should be treated as a form of heightened prose – readily comprehensible, grammatical appropriately decorated and metrically regular. Poetry was taught chiefly by means of anthologies and these show clearly how poetry was subsumed to ideology. The most successful were Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Verse (1861) which contained no poems by writers living at the time of publication, implying that certifiably great poetry was written only in the past; Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) which included every plausible poet since the death of Wordsworth in 1850, represented by one or two poems only, in a long sequence of poems almost impossible to distinguish on grounds of authorship, style or subject matter; and Algernon Methuen’s Anthology of Modern Verse (1921) which was compiled to demonstrate that “the good poets of the twentieth century have not been nearly so revolutionary as is sometimes imagined”. This backward-looking collection outsold all others and, having been reprinted 49 times, was still in widespread use in schools in the 1960s.
Critics like Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Kristeva and Eagleton have written illuminatingly about the power of dominant language modes over people without dominance, whether colonised peoples, women or those perceived as criminal or mentally ill, and about the strategies that writers within these categories have used to evade or subvert the dominant mode. The effect of a dominant language mode on those for whom it is intended has been less noticed and for the British poetic imagination the consequences have been unfortunate.
While American and Irish people are encouraged from childhood to use language to express themselves – to express feeling, describe vividly, persuade others as equals – the English (and their proxies in Scotland and Wales) have been educated to use language as control – to control their own feelings by denying or minimising them and to control others by suggesting, through fluency, grammatical precision, irony or accent, that they are inferior.
This British perception of language has clearly been inimical to poetry. Central to it is an instinct for ‘correctness’ and avoidance of risk. There has been little of the easy movement between formal and demotic, high-flown and casual, which characterises much American and Irish verse. Kipling wrote his Barrack-Room Ballads in the language of the common man as he understood it and his other poems in formal style. A 20th century English poet would not have been able to write, like Yeats, “I must lie down where all the ladders start, / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart” or, with Pound, lamenting the deaths of the First World War:
[Hugh Selwyn Mauberley]There died a myriad,
And of the best among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilisation.
One consequence of this restriction of register in British poetry is that its irony has normally been defensive, plangent, inward-looking. It is rare to find the outgoing universalising irony of Stevens meditating on the beauty of change on a rubbish dump in The Man on the Dump or Lowell’s terrified but wry response to imminent nuclear holocaust in Fall 1961 (“We have talked our extinction to death”).
A final consequence of the dominant perception of language is that there has been little sense of relationship or community in British verse. British poets have typically written to themselves, or to a friend addressed rather formally, or to a lover for whom desire is expressed obliquely. To read many books of modern verse is to be present at a series of solitary meditations. Warmth, passion, even celebration of friendship are conspicuously lacking. An English person is unlikely to have written
[Yeats – The Municipal Gallery Revisited]You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that. Come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.
nor, of a fishing acquaintance killed in a bombing,
[Heaney – Casualty]How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe’s complicity?
”Now you’re supposed to be
An educated man,”
I hear him say. “Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.”
Irrespective of the political background, there is an intimacy here which appears in much of Heaney’s work, as in much of Yeats’. These writers instinctively assume that they will be listened to – that they, the people about whom they write and their readers are all equal. By contrast, the British have been conditioned to find intimate but equal relationships uncongenial or, at least, inexpressible – Borges writes of “close (male) English friendships that begin by excluding confidences and very soon dispense with dialogue”. Owen achieved a kind of community in the trenches, but to read the other major British poets of the 20th century – Edward Thomas, Auden despite his protestations of solidarity, Dylan Thomas, Larkin, Hughes – is to be struck by their solipsism or, in Kafka’s phrase, their “frozen sea within”.
I should add that the educational system described above was devised, like all other aspects of public life, by men and that men controlled publication like all other aspects of commercial life. Few women poets achieved professional publication in the period. It is significant that more women poets than men are now published in poetry magazines and by little presses, though not as yet by mainstream publishers.
Imagination and emotion
To escape over 150 years of systematic stifling of the imagination will not be easy, but for several reasons the opportunity has now arisen. To make sense of it, it is helpful to consider three of the attempts to analyse the poetic imagination that have been made in the period – all of them flawed, but all containing valuable insights.
The first is Coleridge’s attempt in Biographia Literaria (1817) to distinguish between the imagination (“the modifying or transforming power”) and the fancy (“the aggregating power”). Wordworth opposed the distinction and Coleridge was easily distracted into psychological arguments which we now see as worthless. He was clear what the imagination could achieve, as in the great peroration in Chapter XIV (“a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order”, etc), but he never quite manages to define the fancy. However, almost in passing he illustrates the distinction, taking two moments when a character in a poetic drama loses their sanity. The first is Belvidera in Otway’s Venice Preserv’d:
Say not a word of this to my old father,
Murmuring streams, soft shades and springing flowers,
Lutes, laurels, seas of milk and ships of amber.
The second is King Lear:
What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?
The first is fanciful. It uses random association because that it what mad people are supposed to do, but the use is mechanical – aggregative in Coleridge’s word. The second is imaginative. Shakespeare renders the onset of insanity as the moment when Lear cannot distinguish between Poor Tom’s suffering and his own. The examples show how crucially the imagination depends on emotion, that truth-to-feeling is what enables the mind both to conceive a reality different from what actually exists and to do so in a way that enables other minds, temporarily, to accept that different reality as true. This process underpins all successful imaginative writing. For poetry, it helps to explain why poems created without a basis in feeling, however artful and intelligent, are finally unsatisfying. At bottom they are mechanistic, aggregative, fanciful; one thinks, for example, of Ashbery, Anne Carson, J H Prynne, Jorie Graham and John Kinsella.
To illustrate the point one need only compare the warmth of Frank O’Hara’s A Step Away from Them, Avenue A and Now that I am in Madrid and can think, and the affection with which they are widely held, with any of the poems of John Ashbery, a poet who, as it happens, shares a number of similarities with O’Hara.
The second attempt to analyse the poetic imagination is Wallace Stevens’ first and finest essay, The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words (1942). Stevens had proposed the establishment of a Chair in the Imagination at Harvard and this was his first attempt to persuade academics and administrators of its necessity. The project failed and, reading the essay, it is not difficult to see why. It is written with the eloquence and grandeur of Stevens’ poetry and to read an essay on aesthetics that enacts its meaning as well as expounds it is somewhat unsettling. (Two parts of a later critical work, Three Academic Pieces, are written as poems. It is typical of Stevens’ consistency that he noted such a possibility in 1899 at age 20 – “The best poetry will be rhetorical criticism” – and first achieved it aged 63.) More unacceptably, he argues that the quality most lacking in modern poetry is nobility, a concept which, though defined widely, is so alien to a modern democracy as to ensure that his views were largely dismissed as eccentric.
However, the essay makes one point of immense and continuing value. Stevens insists that the power of the imagination to transform reality is what enables people to cope with the pressure of reality and that, as that pressure is greater than ever before, so is the need for poetry that responds adequately to it by producing the “supreme fictions” by which we can live. For Stevens, the “pressure of reality” is not only the pressure of social relations and political events; it is the pressure of an awareness of a culture stretching back millennia, of scientific developments, of income tax and (he was writing in 1942) of a sense of pervasive and mounting violence. Against this pressure, the poet’s role “is to help people to live their lives. He has had immensely to do with giving life whatever savor it possesses. He has had to do with whatever the imagination and the senses have made of the world.”
Unfortunately Stevens does not explain how the poetic imagination helps people to lead their lives, but he returns to the topic of violence in the peroration with which the essay ends. He is trying to persuade his audience to accept the importance of nobility in poetry:
But as a wave is a force and not the water of which it is composed, which is never
the same, so nobility is a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed, which are never the same. Perhaps this description of it as a force will do more than anything else I can have said to reconcile you to it. It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
Stevens is making two points that had not been made in quite this way before and have not been pursued in the context of poetry since: that the imagination is “a violence from within that protects us from violence without” and that it has something to do with our self-preservation. In psychological terms, violence is emotional so that Stevens, with Coleridge, sees the wellspring of the imagination as emotion. How powerful feelings are expressed through the complexities of form and language is central to the writing of successful poetry and it is successful insofar as it potentially helps readers “to live their lives”, that is, to help give lives meaning through enabling other minds to accept, however temporarily, that a different reality – a more vibrant or beautiful one – is true. I will return to this shortly.
The centrality of violence leads to the third work on the poetic imagination, Al Alvarez’s introduction to The New Poetry (1962). This is narrower than The Noble Rider, being concerned with recent British literary history rather than the aesthetics of modern poetry generally, and Alvarez both limits and overstates his case by presenting the large-scale political conflicts of modern life – “two world wars, the concentration camps, genocide and the threat of nuclear war” – as especially suitable topics for poetry. But Alvarez’s central point is the same as Stevens’. What Stevens calls “the pressure of reality”, Alvarez calls “the forces of disintegration”. In both cases the poet’s task is to face such pressure, such forces, and through their imagination to transmute them into poetry.
What poetry needs, in brief, is a new seriousness. I would define this seriousness
simply as the poet’s ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience
with his full intelligence; not to take the easy exits of either the conventional response or choking incoherence.
Alvarez’s other contribution is to describe, for the first time, the process by which the modernist innovations brought to Britain by Eliot and Pound have been stifled. He argues that there have been three “negative feed-backs”: in the 1930s a turning away from experimental poetry to politically committed verse led by Auden with “traditional forms in a chic contemporary guise”; in the 1940s a rhetorical anti-intellectualism led by Dylan Thomas; and in the 1950s the deliberate emotional flatness and technical neatness of the Movement, of which Larkin was the most eminent member. The effect of these negative feed-backs, argues Alvarez, has been to reassert British gentility. “And gentility is a belief that life is always more or less orderly, people always more or less polite, their emotions and habits always more or less decent and more or less controllable.”
I have previously sketched the function of poetry in British education since the 1830s together with its consequences, and Alvarez’s comment confirms that this was still potent in the 1960s. Change has been minimal for much of the time since 1962, but is now clearly happening. Alvarez’s major contribution was to show that change was both difficult and urgent, and that without it no worthwhile British poetry would be written.
Freeing the imagination – some pre-conditions
I have argued that the poetic imagination has been stifled in Britain since the 1830s by an education system ruthlessly designed to produce efficient administrators and business managers. Change is inevitably slow because the effects of an education are long-lasting – people tend to retain the values instilled at school for a further 50-plus years. But radical change is now possible through the current decline of the English education system (Scottish education has always been somewhat protected from English excess and, since the creation of the Welsh Assembly, Wales is beginning to establish its own education system.)
Put briefly, the values that sustained the English education system from the 1830s have been steadily and mostly covertly abandoned since the 1970s and have been replaced, not by other values, but by a largely value-free system dedicated primarily to assessment. To an extent unknown in the rest of the world, schools compete for pupils on the basis of published tables of test and examination results. Teachers’ energies are therefore chiefly devoted to ensuring success in tests and examinations, the requirements of which are frequently changed. The curriculum has gradually been extended and its content of commensurately reduced. In particular, no corpus of generally admired literature, including poetry, is now taught beyond the reduced syllabus requirements of GCSE, AS and A Level English and English Literature courses. Apart from the limited selections set for GCSE, no anthologies of poetry are widely accepted as ‘good’ and therefore widely used. Schools usually teach poetry as a minor aspect of topic modules and, as required by the National Literacy Strategy, concentrate on functional features of form (identify three similes; give two examples of alliteration) rather than meaning, let alone enjoyment. One consequence of this overall change is Britain’s rapid movement down the international comparisons of educational achievement researched by Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for the OECD, by which Britain is the only country to drop from above average to average in English, Maths and Science between 2000 and 2007.
A positive consequence of this decline is freedom from the constricting view of poetry that dominated British education for 150 years. Not having been taught poetry according to the established ideology and often lacking any meaningful experience of poetry at all, many people seek poetry as adults, both as readers and as writers. One indication of this is the great increase in poetry writing courses. In 1975 there were three such courses in the whole of Greater London; now there are dozens. All the MA courses in Writing have been established in the last 20 years and the last 10 years has seen the rise of the Poetry School, the first national educational institution dedicated solely to understanding and writing poetry. There has probably never been a time when so many people read, study and write poetry. The time is clearly propitious for a revival of the poetic imagination in Britain.
How might this work in practice? For readers of poetry, the imagination seems to have two kinds of power. The first is that it enables us to enter the experience of others and, if we wish, make that experience ours. These are the poems or parts of poems to which we return again and again because they speak deeply to us. Negatively they are Eliot’s “fragments I have shored against my ruin”; I suspect, for example, that “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many. / I had not thought death had undone so many” has resonated with every daily commuter who has ever read it. More positively, they are the poems of which Neil Astley writes in the introduction to his groundbreaking anthology Staying Alive: “the [poem] photocopied by a friend , now a personal talisman pinned to the kitchen noticeboard or kept in a wallet”.
Poetry can thus transform reality and can help us escape, if temporarily, the numbness of daily routine. Most people have a stock of fragments, poetic and other, sometimes from songs, to turn to at times of despair or frustration. And these poetic resources are more precise than a scene of a play, film or novel in which we may imagine ourselves; first, because we remember the words more or less exactly as their sound is integral to their meaning and, second, we speak them as ourselves, not as a persona. They have become part of ourselves.
The second way in which the poetic imagination empowers readers is by keeping alive the potentialities of language, and therefore thought, against the ever-increasing pressure of technical language. Language is constantly developing to describe new technical processes and intellectual complexities rather than emotional subtleties. Take the word ‘joy’ – one of the words expressing strong emotion which, like ‘love’, ‘beauty’, ‘duty’, ‘tragedy’, are almost impossible to use without some degree of reservation or irony. It is possible that if the word ‘joy’ disappears, people will no longer be able to feel it (this is the premiss of Orwell’s Newspeak, after all) and will have to rely on such reductive alternatives as ‘thrill’ or ‘high’ with their neural or biochemical connotations. But if one can recall Wordworth’s “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / And to be young was very heaven” or Blake’s “bed of crimson joy”, the idea of joy remains expressible and the feeling itself accessible.
Freeing the imagination – a future for poetry
For poets, it may be helpful to consider good poetry, certainly all great poetry, as the product of three elements, or perhaps three interacting forces: poetic technique, the poet’s emotions and other people.
Technique has to be learned, of course, by reading and possibly by tuition. It requires practical awareness not only of poetic forms and versification, but also of the resources of language – meaning, register, tone, cadence – and of the various techniques of modernism such as unexpected narrative shifts, unexplained juxtapositions, ironic use of quotation and reference, playing of different registers of language against each other, playing of content against form. This is a great deal, but there is no alternative. Eliot’s answer to the comment that we know more than the writers of the past – “Precisely, and they are that which we know” – leads inevitably to the fact that, if we are to write to be read in the future, we must use everything that the past makes available to us.
Emotion has already been discussed at length. The third element – not commented on by Coleridge, Stevens or Alvarez – is that great poetry is not only addressed to other people; it is about a world that is actively shared with others, a common life led in a particular place at a particular time. It seems that no great poet has disregarded the daily life that he or she lived. Blake, for example, is regarded chiefly as a symbolic poet, but during the 1790s he lived at Hercules Buildings, Lambeth. Three streets away, past the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Palace, guarded by troops during the French Revolutionary scare (“And the hapless soldier’s sigh / Runs in blood down palace walls”), were some of the worst slums in London where he saw the “marks of weakness, marks of woe”; the gonorrheic prostitutes who “blight with plagues the marriage hearse”; the lapwings and other birds trapped on Kennington Common , caged and hanging in windows (“A robin redbreast in a cage / Puts all Heaven in a rage”) which he came to see as a metaphor for the people themselves. Walking towards Blackfriars to visit print dealers in the City, he would pass the Lambeth slaughterhouse (“The ox in the slaughterhouse moan”). Examples could be multiplied. The point is that, for all the vividness and originality of his imagination, much of Blake’s poetry is dense with references to the life he saw about him daily.
To make the point from another unexpected direction, the work of an apparently hermetic poet like Emily Dickinson is also full of the social experiences of a 19th century middle-class American woman. When she compares birdsong to badly played pianos (I dreaded that first Robin so), regrets that she is underdressed for her journey to Eternity (Because I could not stop for death), reports that a ghost wears expensive Belgian lace (The only Ghost I ever saw) or that God, like a good domestic employer, allows his angels free time in the afternoon (God permits industrious Angels), we are made sharply aware of the daily concerns of an Amherst lady. Like Stanley Spencer in Cookham, she saw transcendence in terms of the reality around her.
All great poetry is predicated on the belief that other people matter, not just as audience but as people whose lives can be enriched by one’s words, whose response to one’s words create the effect of those words and may, if one writes well enough, do so permanently. It follows that worthwhile poetry is addressed to the reader as an equal. When writing good poetry, even in Britain, we live in a de facto republic and this has always been the case. The reason why Chaucer can still be read with pleasure, unlike almost anything else of the 14th century, is that he writes about characters from his courtly and classical sources as if they were modern Londoners.
Lastly, it seems that the ability to speak personally to and for others is more urgent and necessary than before, for two reasons. The first is that the pressure to live in emotional isolation from other people is greater than ever. Marx noted that capitalism seeks to isolate people from each other by treating them as units of production in a system devised for competition, but through most of the 19th and 20th centuries people resisted isolation by maintaining, decreasingly, extended families and local community groups – religious, political, sporting, social. As the economic system has moved in the West from production to service industries, it has generated demand by promoting individual self-fulfilment as the greatest good. The intention is to persuade people that, by buying various goods and services, they will achieve happiness. The effect of this has been to set people’s expectations of personal happiness so high that they have become impossible to achieve with others, so that people prefer increasingly to live alone with the unhappiness that this often eventually brings. The experience of failing against one’s own estimation of oneself is more desolate and unforgiving than any other kind of failure.
The second reason for urgency is that we may be entering a period when, for the first time since the Middle Ages, the quality of everyone’s life will worsen owing to climate change. The extent of this and its impact on how people think and feel are unknowable as yet, but the experience of condemning one’s children and grandchildren to a life worse than one’s own may be difficult to bear. “A father’s no shield for his child”, as Lowell put it prophetically in Fall 1961.
Against this grim prospect poetry may seem slight but in fact it is very powerful. It gives a writer the opportunity to meet other people’s minds – not functionally as at work or in conversation over lunch, but nakedly. Poetry crystallises people’s feelings about themselves and the world, and if it can show people how to feel in new ways in response to unprecedented changes in the world, it will help us to survive. This requires great courage and great skill from the poet but, once heard, it is unmistakable. So, for example, Yeats is able to confess to undiminished sexual desire in advancing years while praying to icons for a peace after death which he knows is a fiction:
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity
In Lady Lazarus, Plath is able to admit her repeated suicide attempts while at the same time mocking her willingness to display herself through the image of a fairground freakshow: “There is a charge / For the eying of my scars, there is charge / For the hearing of my heart – / It really goes.” In The Tollund Man, Heaney images Northern Ireland as Iron Age Denmark:
Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
These are examples of “a violence from within that protects us from violence without” and the emotional suffering to which they speak – loss of shared religious faith, relationships as display rather than intimacy, fear that the threat of communal violence may never leave our cities now – is real and current. For those to whom these poems speak, personally and unpredictably, they may help them to live their lives. What is certain is that they will be read as long as English exists – as long, for example, as Wulf and Eadwacer in the 8th century Exeter manuscript, a woman’s desperate outcry to her absent lover to which people return, moved and fascinated, generation by generation – which is as good a definition of greatness as any. The hope is that British poets will now write as memorably and one senses that it cannot now be long.
Supported by Arts Council England