1990

F.T. Prince (1912–2003), was born in South Africa, lived in England for most of his life, and taught for two decades at the University of Southampton. His first collection caught T.S. Eliot’s attention and was published by Faber and Faber, but his subsequent books came from a variety of publishers, including Carcanet towards the end of his life: Collected Poems 1935–1992 (1993). His 1974 letter in Letters to an Editor is a vigorous defence of his changing verse-forms: ‘all “forms” are equally rigorous, and only seem less so if they are badly used’. He was an admirer of John Ashbery’s poetry, and the admiration was mutual. Introducing him to an audience at a New York reading in 1983, Ashbery said: ‘Prince is one of the best twentieth-century poets. Like Landor, he stands somewhat apart from mainstream modern poetry; like him, he is a poet to whom poets turn when they feel they cannot write, that is, he is a source of poetry.’1

FROM F.T. PRINCE

Southampton

2 July 1990


Dear Michael,


Would you be interested in this group of poems? I have been amusing myself this year with these and others on the same lines. These are the best so far, but I was hoping, and still am, to run to about twenty-five.

      The note on the reference-book would be needed, I think, because without it people might not realise that the starting point is heraldic family-mottoes.2

      I have been amused by the writing, but most of the mottoes are very boring.

With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Frank Prince


FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Manchester

15 July 1990


Dear Frank,


Thank you very much indeed for your letter of 2 July and for the fascinating mottoes. I love them. There is [a] split infinitive at the end of number six which makes me uneasy but apart from that they are extremely ‘spoken’ and compelling.

      Thank you for them!


With every good wish,
Yours ever,
Michael


FROM F.T. PRINCE

Southampton

27 July 1990


Dear Michael,


I hope you will be patient with me if I ask you to return the ‘Notes on Mottoes’ I sent you not long ago. As you know, they are part of a larger scheme, and I have been uneasy about it, and them, for some time. Some ‘guardian’ has now pronounced definitely against them.

      With my apologies for being a nuisance (but one must be allowed that sometimes?).

Yours sincerely,
Frank Prince


FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Manchester

31 July 1990


Dear Frank,

Further to your letter of 27 July and our phone conversation this morning, I return with the greatest reluctance your ‘Notes on Mottoes’. Of course you must be true to your Taskmistress Muse. On the other hand, these pieces are so thrifty and precise, and work together so well, that I cannot see how they might be improved except by extension.

      It would be wonderful if your second thoughts could be brisk and friendly to these poems so that I might still feature them in PN Review 76. But if they come later, they can expect to grace 77 or 78 – or 87 or 88 should we live so long.

      Is it foolish of me to ask whether you are building towards another collection, and if so, whether Peter Jay will be publishing it?3 I remember once making a serious error at Carcanet about your work. It is not an error which – given the opportunity of a second chance – I would repeat.


      With kind regards,
Michael

FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Manchester

7 August 1990


Dear Frank,


I am delighted to have Notes on Mottoes back again, with the extra pair which make the sequence even better. In (ii), is Quid prod sodali correct, or should it be pro?4 Or is this my error?

      Professor Hackett writes to warn me that 1991 is the Rimbaud centenary. He suggests – a suggestion I welcome – that you might be willing to write an essay on Rimbaud for PN Review.5 Would you do this for us? We would certainly welcome it – anything up to 5,000 words would suit our needs. We would need the piece by about March of 1991. I may ask one or two other poets whose work I respect to contribute too, though I do not envisage a formal ‘supplement’ or special issue. I have a strong resistance to much of Rimbaud, though he meant a great deal to me when I was an undergraduate and I was stunned by him again about seven years ago.

Warm greetings as always,
Yours ever,
Michael


FROM F.T. PRINCE

Southampton

8 August 1990


Dear Michael,


Yes, I would like to write on Rimbaud for PN Review. It would be an informal piece on my reading him and what I tried to get from it between the ages of 17 and, say, 22. I have not cultivated him for many years.

      As for prod, my Latin dictionary gives it as an alternative form of pro. I wish I were enough of a Latinist to be able to place some of the mottoes as tags from classical authors. Many are obvious, but I suspect there are more than one realises. I would like also to have time to look into the whole background – the dates of the various honours, the system by which the heralds chose or found the mottoes, etc. But my ‘little knowledge’ may be preferable to my losing myself in too much.6


      With best wishes,
Yours ever,
Frank Prince


*


My copy of Carcanet’s edition of Frank Prince’s Collected Poems 1935–1992 falls open naturally at ‘The Yuan Chen Variations’. I remember when reading the proofs remarking how the poems moved from long decisive lines in the early work to shorter and shorter lines, purer perhaps, but no less complex in their syntax and the demands they made of the reader, to speak them aloud in order to draw out their sense. This poem still fascinates me and frustrates my tongue. My first encounter with Prince was through his exemplary writing on Milton. I admired in particular The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse, which told me so much about the great Italians and gave Milton a European context. His work is certainly enabling, from the unforgettable first poem in the Collected, ‘An Epistle to a Patron’, to the last, entitled ‘Last Poem’, out of Hardy and his world of eloquent gravestones, where he awaits ‘My own silence’.


NOTES


  1. John Ashbery, ‘F.T. Prince’, PN Review 147 (September– October 2002); this issue contained several tributes to Prince on his 90th birthday.
  2. The mottoes referred to can be found in Fairbairn’s Crests of the Families of Great Britain and Ireland. Prince uses them as a starting point for his reflections, for example:

    Dulces ante omnia Musae

    ‘Sweet above all else the Muses’:

    Comes like a true sigh

    After wounds and bruises

    In body and mind,

    From one who looks

    About at last, to find

    Like balm, his books.

  3. Peter Jay (b.1945), poet and translator, set up Anvil Press in 1968, also expanding from the base of a magazine, New Measures. When he decided to close the press in 2015 to concentrate on his own writing, it was merged with Carcanet, the founders of both being old friends and Anvil ‘like family’, as MNS remarked. Anvil published Prince’s Later On (1983) and Walks in Rome (1987).
  4. Twelve ‘Notes on Mottoes’ were published in PN Review 76 (November–December 1990); ‘Quidni prod sodali’ (‘Why not, / For a comrade?’) is the first line of number ii. Nine more appeared in PN Review 80 (July-August 1991).
  5. F.T. Prince’s ‘Rimbaud after Sixty Years’ (PN Review 78, March–April 1991) was the only article about the poet in that issue, which had a set of tributes to Laura (Riding) Jackson at 90. Prince observed:
    Age and experience, years of professional middle-class life, may be of no advantage in dealing with so adolescent a genius. Yet I find that one 20th-century experience has a certain relevance: that of living through the turmoil of the emerging ‘youth culture’ of the 1960s in America and Western Europe. Hundreds of thousands – it seemed millions – of young people then acted out such attitudes as the seventeen-year-old Rimbaud brought from Charleville to Paris in 1871. But of course they were without his genius.
  6. Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay on Criticism’:

    A little learning is a dangerous thing ;

    Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

    There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

    And drinking largely sobers us again


THE YEAR IN BOOKS


      Christine Brooke-Rose, Verbivore

      Maurice Collis, The Grand Peregrination: Being the Life of Fernão Mendes Pinto

      Donald Davie, Collected Poems

      Donald Davie, Slavic Excursions: essays on Russian and Polish literature

      D.J. Enright, Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor

      Padraic Fallon, Collected Poems, introduction by Seamus Heaney and edited by Brian Fallon

      Richard Francis, The Land Where Lost Things Go

      Natalia Ginzburg, Voices in the Evening, translated by D.M. Low

      Fulke Greville, Selected Poems, edited by Neil Powell

      Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems, edited by P.J. Kavanagh

      John Heath-Stubbs, Selected Poems

      Richard Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity: selections, edited by Arthur Pollard

      Leigh Hunt, Selected Writings, edited by David Jesson-Dibley

      Brian Jones, Freeborn John

      Gabriel Josipovici, Steps: Selected Fiction and Drama

      William Law, Selected Writing, edited by Janet Louth

      Clarice Lispector, Near To the Wild Heart, translated by Giovanni

      Pontiero

      Rose Macaulay, They Went to Portugal, Too, edited by L.C. Taylor

      Henry Miller, Letters to Emil, edited by George Wickes

      Nicholas Moore, Longings of the Acrobats: selected poems, edited by Peter Riley, introduction by John Ashbery

      Edwin Morgan, Crossing the Border: essays on Scottish literature

      Edwin Morgan, Collected Poems

      Cristopher Nash, The Dinosaur’s Ball

      Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle, translated by Victoria Holbrook

      R.E. Pritchard (ed), Poetry by English Women

      Peter Sansom, Everything You’ve Heard Is True

      James Schuyler, Selected Poems

      Leonardo Sciascia, Death of an Inquisitor and other stories, translated by Ian Thomson

      Roger Scruton, The Philosopher on Dover Beach

      C.H. Sisson, In Two Minds: literary essays

      Iain Crichton Smith, Selected Stories

      Julian Symons, The Thirties and the Nineties

      Jeremy Taylor, Selected Writings, edited by C.H. Sisson

      Federigo Tozzi, Eyes Shut, translated by Kenneth Cox

      Kurt Tucholsky, Germany? Germany!, translated by Harry Zohn