A Furnace of Paradox
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Art & Politics in Contemporary Poetry in the UK
Sebastian Barker
No Consensus
Do you imagine England would be happy to select eleven football players at random, on a strictly egalitarian principle, to represent it in the World Cup? Would any other country follow such a lead? The answer is a deafening, "No!"
Why is the answer so obvious? Because everyone who knows anything about football knows that all those who play football are not equally talented. Each country wants its best talents to represent it. And discovering who are the best talents is an activity in which each country invests a huge amount of intellect, understanding, passion, and emotion.
What matters in any match, of course, is an even playing-field. It is, what is more, universally acknowledged that without this the game is not fair. But because it is not conceivable that the beautiful game is not fair, we have a situation in Association Football in which the selection of the talented, over and above the talentless, is not only fair, it is also seen to be beautiful. And the beautiful game at its best is said to be poetry in motion.
Yet if we work this equation backwards, we find a very odd state of affairs. Not only is there no consensus in the UK as to who are the talented and who are the talentless poets, there is also no consensus as to what poetry is and what poetry is not. And when I say poetry I could just as easily say art.
How has this extraordinary state of affairs come about? And is it a sign of health or of sickness?
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Historical Records of Consensus
We have, at any historical point in the past, records of consensus concerning poetry. We see, in Gilgamesh , a Sumerian model. We have, in The Deluge , Inanna's Journey , and The Babylonian Creation , Mesopotamian models. We hear poetry embedded in the Pentateuch, notably 'The Song of Miriam' in Exodus 15:21. Ugaritic and Egyptian poetry of note predate David and the Psalms. Zarathustra's Gathas and the Parsi Zend Avesta come before Homer and Hesiod, the terrifying beauty of Lamentations , and the awesome eroticism of the Song of Songs . The poetry of Isaiah and Jeremiah, like the genius of Sappho, Archilochus, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, is a just background against which to consider the poetry of Job, Ecclesiastes, the Confucian canon, and the Tao Te Ching . The Latin verse of Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, and Horace is part of any consensus as to what poetry is -- and not without influence on the enduring mentality of monastic discipline in its educated contemplation of poetic principles. The Celts Taliesin and Aneurin, like Yannai of Palestine, predate The Koran , which is in itself a coherent and soaring Arabian consensus concerning the nature and identity of poetry. Caedmon, The Seafarer , Beowulf , Li Po and Tu Fu, do not injure our sense of a spectrum of poetry deliberately considered in its rich profusion.
Sa'Adiah Gaon, born in Egypt in 882, united Hebrew poetry and Hebrew philosophy; while Hrosvit of Saxony, famous for her learning, was in the 10 th century not only Canoness of Gandersheim Abbey but a playwright drawing on Latin models from Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Plautus, and Terence. By the 12 th century, 'the Matter of Britain', 'the Matter of France', and 'the Matter of Rome', had opened the doors to poetry as fable across the European peninsula, after the Islamic but before the Christian universities were established. The poetry of Omar Khayyam, Saadi, Rumi, and Hafiz, encapsulates the time of the Miracle Plays , the Mabinogion , and the Sagas , not to mention Dante and Chaucer, and introduces the time of François Villon, Michelangelo, and the poetic prose of William Tyndale. By the advent of John of the Cross, Shakespeare, and Milton, the origins of a strictly English poetry have taken on more of a European than an insular mantle.
Our historical points in time are not limited to the Anglo-Saxon poets, the troubadours, the English metaphysicians, or the Augustan masters of the heroic couplet. Pope and Johnson are demonstrably part of the visionary bedrock of Blake and Coleridge. There is no Lyrical Ballads , Keats, Heine, or Solomos, without the propulsion of the past and the prescience of the future whether in Wordsworth and Tennyson, the Brontës, Whitman, or Hopkins. On what consensus are Yeats, Owen, Housman, Eliot, Jones, and Kavanagh to be founded? Are Odysseus Elytis, Czeslaw Milosz, Dylan Thomas, and Seamus Heaney, metaphysicians, musicians of the bible, philosophical poets, poetic philosophers, or students of the mesolithic and the pleistocene? On what consensus exactly is any consensus formed?
It is because this question is comparatively difficult to answer -- in comparison with, say, In which city did Cavafy live? -- that the relationship between art and politics, in the world of contemporary poetry in the UK, is so difficult to define, let alone resolve.
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Who Lays Down Rules?
Who is going to lay down the ground rules? Michael Schmidt of Carcanet? Neil Astley of Bloodaxe? Paul Keegan of Faber? Alan Jenkins and Mick Imlah of the TLS ? Harry Chambers of Peterloo Press? Michael Mackmin of The Rialto ? Joy Hendry of Chapman ? Tom Leonard of Glasgow? David Perman of Rockingham Press? Paul Muldoon of New England? Stephen Stuart-Smith of Enitharmon Press? Or two dozen worthy others? Is it to Sean O'Brien that we must look, or the lyrical don Don Paterson of Picador? Nor must the inheritors of Kathleen Raine be overlooked. Craig Raine, of course, emanates the light of Areté from Oxford. And never say the universities are anything less than efficient in defining the consensus in any number of ways.
The consensus? A consensus of a thousand names? As in the rubric of W.S. Graham and the Renaissance: "Literature with courage is a thousand men."? Men? Does a consensus from the Renaissance rule out or rule in the poetry of the prehistoric, as in palaeolithic poetry with its unknown oral genii? Is Wendy Cope the older poet now to watch? Or Benjamin Zephaniah? Who will advance the cause of young Swithun Cooper? Where is the rooty-to-toot for the Smith/Doorstop Press, Poetry London , or Fiona Sampson of Poetry Review ? Whose is the opinion to be trusted? Whose ear has heard the holy word that walked among the ancient trees? Was it Michael Horovitz or John Hegley? Whose is the long ear in the valley of the forked tongue? Who is the donkey man or woman enough to carry the word of God? Is poetry the same as politics, perhaps, with the blood and the shit translated? Who has the last word in the audit of the first?
Michael Longley said, "the poet's the shaman, the musarum sacerdos , the priest of the Muses"; and David Jones said, " 'golden' betokens what is not patient of tarnish". Megalopsychia , Jones adds, is the most prized of the virtues, meaning magnanimous.
Is the dividing line between art and politics, in the current situation in the UK, defined by the sharpest perception of the dividing line between the musarum sacerdos and the political giant in the giant political arena? Is this why too much power in the poetry world always sends a warning signal back to the poet/critic/editor/writer to watch it ? Is too much power the evidence of none, when it comes to poetry? How do English poets today steer themselves between the devil of corruption and the deep blue sea of oblivion? Who will give up power for the simple truth of the priest of the Muses? Is The Oxford Book of Immortal Verse edited by a poltroon or a poet? Who's to say? And that is just the problem.
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A Furnace of Paradox
Because there is no consensus, because there is no recognisable and agreed historic-cum-prehistoric backdrop on which we can both feed and develop, there is a plethora, a pulverisation, a fecundity, a ferocity of nonsense, co-inhabiting with brilliance, making English poetry at the moment a furnace of paradox.
Is it better to be with or without a consensus? What says the North of England? What says the South West, or Patricia Oxley of Acumen ? What says Wales, or Robert Minhinnick, the ace of Poetry Wales ? Is a consensus of poets a contradiction in terms? Has one shaman ever reported the same spirit world as another? Do we bring in a scientist to judge? What is the scientific analysis of a poem?
Is the relationship between art and politics healthy in the UK precisely because democracy in it is not entirely dead? Is this because the politicians have not entirely taken over poetry and imposed the scientific analysis of art? A single Van Gogh will set you back millions of dollars, but the price of a single poem is beyond such meddlesome intrusion.
To say, "Poetry in the UK", is not the same as to say, "Poetry in the marketplace". The United Kingdom is not to be bought or sold; not, that is, as long as there are poets in it, the priests of the Muses, who have long since understood the meaning of the arbor philosophica , the philosophical tree. Since well before the invention of writing, Gilgamesh , or the implementation of the wheel, this was the World Tree, uniting the underworld, the earth, and the sky; hell, earth, and heaven. With the help of polymaths such as George Steiner, we no longer imagine the World Tree to be outside ourselves. Shoah came from the brain.
The Gods of earth and sea
Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree;
But their search was all in vain:
There grows one in the Human Brain.
[Blake, 'The Human Abstract']
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Politics and Poetry
Is it reasonable, therefore, to think that the true balance between poetry and politics is to be found in the recognition that poetry can never be separated from politics and, vice versa , politics can never be separated from poetry?
This is why when people tell me, Poetry is not important, I reply, Then neither is anything else. To say, as Auden did, "poetry makes nothing happen", is both to imply its unimportance and to be unconscious of nothing as the active part in a transitive sentence. Nothing happening is a sight commonly observed. The death of anyone or anything might be nothing happening. To think this, or the poetry of it, is unimportant, is to have missed the point of being alive in the first place. Poetry makes nothing happen? I beg your pardon. Is poetry to be held responsible for nihilism?
Politics is the degeneration of poetry into the prose, the money, the hubbub, and the mendacity of the marketplace, especially the marketplace of the mind. The rise of fundamentalism, elitism, racism, schism itself, is the demise of poetry.
With the birth of The Poetry Archive in The British Library on 30 th November 2005, under the watch of President Seamus Heaney and Directors Andrew Motion and Richard Carrington, and the immediate placement of the Archive on the internet, all published UK poets from across the board will be able in good time to be heard and read. So The Poetry Archive has created a consensus out of chaos in the UK, thanks to the three names mentioned and their co-workers. This is because, all in good time, the ears and eyes of the UK will be able to assess its deeply rooted literary merits, free from any of the factionalism so healthily around us today. And so it is that The Poetry Archive brings into being the catechism or the ear-whispered truths of poetry, in England under Blair, Brown, and the Wheel of Fortune. Poetry in the UK, it seems, is alive and well and living in the human rather than the inhuman voice.
First published in Hard Times , number 80, winter 2006, Berlin/Giessen, edited by John Hartley Williams
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