In addition to a grasp of poetry’s origins, development and traditional schools, you should at the very least have a nodding acquaintance with one or more of the following new schools:
THE RUBICUNDS
The popular image of a poet is of a skeletal, consumptive figure, dying of starvation in a garret. When you read most poets’ work, it’s easy to see why this is such a popular and attractive image. But a select few have combined girth with verse and most of them wrote what may be described as accessible poetry. Tennyson was a large man. John Masefield worked as a deckhand on the old sailing ships.
At the turn of the century a beefy bevy of poets flourished – notably Oscar Wilde, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. What they lacked in physical dexterity, they made up for in metrical fluency and agility.
OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900)
Oscar Wilde’s most famous poem is ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. It’s still a powerful blast against capital punishment and it still generates hot tears of passion at the thought of Wilde’s imprisonment (for gross indecency with men). All of Wilde’s poetry is a delight to read – you could almost believe that he wished to communicate with his readers, which, sadly, would preclude him from being a great poet.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON (1874-1936)
GK Chesterton was very large and red, and was ill-inclined to stand for any nonsense. He called a spondee a spondee. His poetry is shot through with sentiment, religion and a rich thirst. He used his poetry to express his forthright views on almost every subject, and became very popular as a result. It’s hugely unfashionable to espouse his poetry today; it would be like whistling a bit of Eric Coates in the queue for a Prom on Boulez Night.
HILAIRE BELLOC (1870-1953)
Hilaire Belloc, a powerfully built man, not only wrote poems which are understandable, he even wrote poems which are funny: The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts, More Beasts (For Worse Children), The Modern Traveller, and, his best-known, Cautionary Tales For Children:
Now just imagine how it feels
When first your toes and then your heels,
And then by gradual degrees,
Your shins and ankles, calves and knees,
Are slowly eaten, bit by bit.
THE ONES YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW
‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur’ is one of those many poems that all have heard of, many have read, few can quote and none can recite. The bluffer can steal a march on others with the verse equivalents of the Golden Oldies by referring to ‘Famous Short Verses’, or quoting from this list of the Good Old Good Ones. Use them now, before everyone else does and while they are wildly out of fashion:
‘To Daffodils’, Robert Herrick
‘Sir Patrick Spens’, Anon
‘Against Idleness and Mischief
(How doth the little busy bee...)’, Isaac Watts
‘Loss of the “Royal George”’, William Cowper
‘The Tyger’, William Blake
‘To Daffodils’, William Wordsworth
‘Lochinvar’, Sir Walter Scott
‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, Sir Walter Scott
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Samuel Coleridge
‘Beth Gelert’, William Robert Spencer
‘Bishop Hatto’, Robert Southey
‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’, Lord Byron
‘Ozymandias’, Percy Bysshe Shelley
‘No! (November)’, Thomas Hood
‘Casabianca’ (The boy stood on the burning deck..), Felicia Dorothea Hemans
‘The May Queen’, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
‘The Revenge’, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
‘Break, break, break’, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
‘The Old Navy’ (The Captain stood on the carronade...), Captain Frederick Marryat
‘In the Workhouse: Christmas Day’1, George R Sims
‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’, Robert W Service
‘Vitaï Lampada’, Sir Henry Newbolt
‘The Listeners’, Walter de la Mare
‘Sea Fever’, John Masefield
THE ENGLISH COWPAT SCHOOL OF VERSE
There runs through English poetry a constant stream of verbal diarrhoea praising all things rural: cornfields, skylarks, meadows, rivers, brooks, cows, duck ponds, mole-catchers, horseflies, sexual deviants, hey-nonny-nons, nosy-parkers, animal carcasses, gin traps, etc. Significantly, such poems have only come into existence in the last couple of hundred years, i.e., since most of us stopped living in the country. Nowadays, some misguided local authority has only to chop down a diseased tree for someone to write a poem and send it to the papers, and almost every furred or feathered creature or parasite (with the possible exception of the tapeworm) has been the subject of a rapturous ode.
Poets of this school with the best yield are:
JOHN CLARE (1793-1864)
Clare was a herdboy, militiaman, vagrant, farmer and, finally, lunatic. He wrote wonderful poetry full of the buzzing of insects, the heat of noon, rush poles, hazelnuts, ivied oaks and so on.
Clare is regarded by those in the know as something of a special case, and someone for whom they feel great solicitude; be wary of saying anything negative about him (that he couldn’t punctuate for toffee, for example). When his name is mentioned, simply look soulful (his was a sad existence, after all – feted by the literary establishment, then largely discarded, spending his last 23 years in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum) and mutter the words, ‘Ah, the enclosures, the enclosures’. No one really knows much about the series of Enclosure Acts (which were passed between the middle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which removed previously existing rights of local people in respect of common land), other than that Clare railed against them in his poems. All that matters is that everyone thinks the whole enclosures business a Very Bad Thing, so no one will question you further on the matter.
EDMUND BLUNDEN (1896-1974)
It has been said that Blunden’s greatest service to poetry was his research into and discovery and publication of the hitherto unpublished poems of John Clare. Blunden’s own early poems were lavish in their praise of the pastoral, whether ‘blotched with mildew’, ‘black scowling pond’, ‘cornered weasel’, ‘sunlit vale’ or ‘many centuried tree’.
WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES (1871-1940)
Author of The Autobiography of a Super Tramp, Davies wrote short poems, full of comedy (he insisted):
Where bumble-bees, for hours and hours,
Sit on their soft, fat, velvet bums,
To wriggle out of hollow flowers ...
A famous freeloader, Davies was associated with the Dymock Poets, a group which included the much better poets Edward Thomas and Robert Frost who made their home near the Gloucestershire village of that name.
Davies’s most famous poem, ‘Leisure’ (a subject dear to many a poet’s heart), includes the lines:
What is this life if full of care
We have no time to stand and stare
One of the things about poetry is that it aims to express something universal (on the whole). These lines appear to be an example of this. Having lost a foot while jumping from one freight train to another, he bore his disability with equanimity, spending much of the rest of his life sitting, standing and staring without any apparent urgency.
WALTER DE LA MARE (1873-1956)
It’s probably best not to say anything yet about Walter de la Mare. Serves him right for writing about fairies and fancies and things called Tom Noddy. Almost entirely a ‘punishment poet’.
ALFRED EDWARD HOUSMAN (1859-1936)
Get extra bluffing points for knowing his first names as he’s always called AE. It’s still all right to talk about Housman because, although he wrote about cherry blossom, hawthorn, millstreams, nightingales, etc., he also wrote about people being hanged, battles, hard labour and all that.
GEORGIAN POETS
A complete bluff of a name, Georgian Poetry has nothing to do with any George at all, but is the name given to a body of English verse composed from about 1910 to 1930, much of it of a pastoral, rural or rustic nature (see also ‘The English Cowpat School of Verse’). The poetry itself rapidly became very unfashionable, although a grand bunch of people wrote it: AE Housman, WH Davies, Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Victoria (Vita) Sackville-West, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden and others. It was really the last flowering of English verse before it all went modern or whimsical, taking itself either too seriously or not seriously enough.
The surprising thing about the Georgian group is that it really was a group, with a real leader: Edward Marsh, one-time secretary to Churchill at the Admiralty. The group achieved great popularity for a limited period, but was dealt a swift death blow by Eliot’s The Waste Land.
AUDEN AND ELIOT
Try to get as little involved as possible with the two literary ‘giants’ of the twentieth century, WH Auden and TS Eliot. It’s always exhausting to take on people who have ‘given voice to the disillusionment of their generation’, and the race to be the best Auden/Eliot swot began many decades ago, so you’re already miles behind. But if you want to compete, here’s something to get you out of the starting blocks.
THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT (1888-1965)
Earn points again for knowing these names, as he is always referred to as TS. Open by saying that Eliot suffered all his life from deracination (being torn up by the roots) and aboulia.
Follow this by remarking on his study of Sanskrit and Pali. The only one of Eliot’s poems that isn’t a dreadful sweat to read is ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ (his earliest mature poem), and you can wax lyrical about ‘the mysterious interstices of this poem, its mixture of colloquialism and elegance, and its memorable ironies’, ending by stating that ‘the portrait of enervation was executed with contradictory energy’.
Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land, was written in Margate and Lausanne and published in 1922. It was thought outrageous at the time, but Eliot himself referred to it as ‘just a piece of rhythmical grumbling’. It has been hailed as bringing together various kinds of despair – for lost youth, lost love, lost friendship, lost value, lost fountain pen, etc.
Eliot’s other major work is the Four Quartets, and you get hundreds of points if you know their names: ‘Burnt Norton’ (1935), ‘East Coker’ (1940), ‘The Dry Salvages’ (1941) and ‘Little Gidding’ (1942).
WH AUDEN (1907-1973)
Double points for knowing that these initials stand for Wystan Hugh – poor chap. Auden cherished the belief that he was of Icelandic origin, which makes you feel that he had a greater claim to deracination than Eliot. When he went to Christ Church, Oxford, he confided in his tutor, Neville Coghill, that his ambition was to be a great poet – you could say that sort of thing in the mid-1920s and get away with it.
He was influenced by Eliot, and decided that poems should be ‘verbal artefacts’. He was also influenced by Homer Lane, and took as his theme for poetry ‘the healing power of uninhibited love’. Like Eliot he became a teacher (the boys knew him as Uncle Wiz), and then spent the rest of his life making Very Important Decisions. He decided it was wrong to defend freedom against fascism (but though he did go to Spain to volunteer as an ambulance driver for the republicans, he was not accepted for service and eventually came home after only a month).
George Orwell and Auden got into a spat when the former objected to the latter’s use of the phrase ‘necessary murder’ in his poem Spain, arguing that the phrase could only have been written by ‘the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled’. Having had his bluff successfully called, Auden got all sniffy about it for a while, then distanced himself from the poem altogether. After his little holiday in Spain, Auden decided to stay in the USA with his great friend Christopher Isherwood, though unkind people said it was easier to fight fascism (or not) from a distance. In fact, Auden left England for love, having met a young New York poet called Chester Kallman. They wrote the libretto for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress together, but it wasn’t always a happy relationship.
Say, loudly and confidently, that Auden wrote no decent poetry after leaving England, save ‘The Shield of Achilles’ and ‘In Praise of Limestone’ – he had a thing about rocks.
Auden was obsessively punctual, excessively funny in his youth and liked to mock his religious faith – he often referred to the Almighty as ‘Miss God’. In later life he had an overwhelming fear that he would fall down dead in his New York apartment and that his body wouldn’t be discovered for over a week. This was probably a ploy to have an interesting death and thus become a truly great poet. In fact, he died in Vienna on 29 September 1973 after a very successful reading of his poems. It seems a little excessive as an encore.
WILLIAM EMPSON (1906-1984)
Perhaps the bluffer’s best approach when the conversation turns to Eliot and Auden is to say, ‘What about Empson?’ A contemporary of Eliot and Auden, he wrote two volumes of verse, Poems and The Gathering Storm (a title pinched by Churchill), which are really difficult, full of analytical argument and imagery drawn from quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity.
THE EJACULATORY SCHOOL
This has been in existence for hundreds of years and will outlast Experimentalism, Birdyak and anything else the avant garde cares to invent.
Open any book of poetry and you will find small words of exhortation, amazement, shock or delight at the beginning of one line or another:
Oh how hideous it is... (Ezra Pound)
O fie upon the virgin beds... (Thomas Randolph)
Ah God! that it were possible... (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
Say! You’ve struck a heap of trouble... (Robert W Service)
Gush! – flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet... (Gerard Manley Hopkins)
Ah, what avails the sceptred race!
Ah, what the form divine... (Walter Savage Landor)
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer through the woods...
(William Wordsworth)
Alas! regardless of their doom
The little victims play! (Thomas Gray)
Some poets manage three ejaculations in one line:
O Peace, O Dove, O shape of the Holy Ghost
(Richard Watson Dixon)
But there are others who base their whole output on these (usually) monosyllabic openings:
But hark! the cry is Astur:
And lo! the ranks divide; (Thomas Babington Macaulay)
Dr Samuel Johnson began his ‘An Epitaph upon the Celebrated Claudy Philips, Musician, who died very poor’ as though about to admonish the poor deceased:
Philips!
JOHN BETJEMAN (1906-1984)
Betjeman used an enormous number of ‘ohs’, often at the beginnings of poems, but also broadened the Ejaculatory Vocabulary by including ‘Huzza!’, ‘Look up!’, ‘Come on, come on’, ‘Hark!’, ‘Take me, Lieutenant!’, ‘Row like smoke!’, ‘Behold!’, ‘Swing up!’, ‘Swing down!’, and some complete lines that only he could have written:
Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
Oh! full Surrey twilight! importunate band!
Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl’s hand!
Stop the trolley-bus, stop!
Early Electric! With what radiant hope
Men formed this many branched electrolier
Return, return to Ealing,
Worn poet of the farm!
Oh where’s mid-on? And what is silly point?
Do six balls make an over? Help me, God!
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-1859)
Macaulay relied heavily on ‘O!’ and ‘Ho!’ but was also a keen ‘Hark!’-ist, and often took the precaution of starting a poem with ‘Attend!’, presumably conscious that his audience might well be about to go to sleep.
Ho! strike the flagstaff deep, Sir Knight: ho!
scatter flowers, fair maids:
Ho! gunners fire a loud salute: ho! gallants,
draw your blades.
Hark! Hark! – What means the trampling
of horsemen on our rear?
Lo, I will stand at thy right hand...
Point out that Macaulay’s ejaculations are not in the same league as Betjeman’s, being used merely to retain the metre of the line. For lo! it’s trivial information of this kind that keeps the real expert at bay.
EDWARD FITZGERALD (1809-1883)
Fitzgerald’s most famous poem, the translation of ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur’, begins with even less optimism as to its reception than Macaulay had:
‘Awake!’...
as though the audience, or possibly the reader, is already asleep. (If you think it’s impossible to read poetry and be asleep at the same time, you’ve either never taught English Literature, or you’ve been very lucky, or you’ve never read anything from the eighteenth century.)
Fitzgerald, like Macaulay, was an ‘O!’ and ‘Oh!’ man, but, being more sensuous, he was also fond of ‘Ah!’, as though smacking his lips, or her bottom. As befits the author of ‘The Rubaiyat’, Fitzgerald had a full range of ejaculations:
Ah, my Beloved, fill the cup2...
Lo! some we loved...
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend...
Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There!
Oh, come with old Khayyam...
Ah, fill the cup2...
Oh, Thou, who didst with Pitfall and with Gin3...
Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
Ah, Moon of my Delight...
There are still people writing this sort of stuff today. You have been warned.
THE POPULAR SCHOOL
It is impossible to avoid poetry; it is almost as ubiquitous as dog mess, and just as nasty to step in. Even if you stay resolutely at home, shut in a darkened room, it will come thudding through your letter box in the form of greetings cards.
These verses represent Poetry for the Masses, the essence of which is the belief that trite sentiments are best immortalised in verse. Nobody would dream of translating the message of a greeting card into prose, but there are two mitigating circumstances:
Poet Laureate is the title given to a bard appointed by the UK government to write verse for occasions of national importance or significance. For his (or her, one should now also say, in light of Carol Ann Duffy’s appointment as the first female Poet Laureate in 2009) great sin, they are given an annual stipend of a butt of sack (approximately 600 bottles of sherry – i.e., about a tenth of a poet’s annual alcohol consumption) and charged with the duty of writing patriotic verse whenever the country does anything remotely embarrassing (diplomatic coup, Royal birth, going to war, clinching a trade contract with Taiwan, winning a bronze medal at the Olympics).
One thing that really should be included in the annual stipend is a chalice (poisoned, you understand) from which to drink the sack, so tricky a job is the Laureateship. Over the years the Poet Laureate has kept a lower or higher profile as they have seen fit; Wordsworth, for example, wrote not a jot during his tenure. Recent postholder Andrew Motion, who wrote plenty in the role, has remarked: ‘The day I stopped being Laureate, the poems that had been very few and far between came back to me’.
The main problem with the role, of course, is that poetry is jolly difficult to write to order; as a result, few laureates have ever written anything worthwhile. For example:
Across the wires the electric message came:
‘He is no better: he is much the same.’
from a poem about Edward VII’s illness written by Alfred Austin (appointed 1892).
A notable exception is Alfred, Lord Tennyson (appointed 1850), the longest holder of the post, who could even turn national disasters into such glories as:
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward.
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
(‘Charge of the Light Brigade’)
Bluffers should bone up on a few unknown ones, such as Nahum Tate (appointed 1692, died 1715) whose most famous poem was in praise of tea; Colley Cibber (appointed 1730, died 1757), an actor who also wrote plays of which playwright Congreve said, ‘They have in them things that were like wit, but in reality were not wit’; and Thomas Wharton (appointed 1785, died 1790) who revived the sonnet and edited a book ofverse called The Oxford Sausage.
WILLIAM TOPAZ MCGONAGALL, POET AND TRAGEDIAN (1825-1902)
McGonagall is the world’s finest bluffing poet ever, grossly and wickedly ignored until the 1950s. All his life this proud son of Dundee was the victim of hoaxes, practical jokes and leg-pulls, but his sublime muse rises above all this. Particular gems to look out for include the memorable trio of poems:
The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay
That has caused the Emperor of Brazil to leave
His home far away, incognito in his dress,
And view thee ere he passed along en route to Inverness...
The Tay Bridge Disaster
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remember’d for a very long time...
and
An Address to the New Tay Bridge
Beautiful new railway bridge of the Silvery Tay...
____________________
1 Possibly the best poem ever written: a magnificent diatribe about the twin evils of penury and false charity.
2 Fitzgerald was also very fond of emptying the cup.
3 Presumably this was what he liked to fill it with.