Austerity Mainstream: A Monograph on the Lineage of British Political and Working-Class Poetry, its decline in representation by the post-Thatcherite Mainstream, and the emergence of a new Recusant counter-poetics

Introduction

In the so-called 'post-modern' poetic age where it is unfashionable to nail one's poetry to any particular political colour, or to too baldly - that is to say, directly, sincerely, non-ironically - express a particular ideological viewpoint, and where oppositely it is encouraged to concentrate on the particular rather than the general, the domestic rather than the social, the object rather than the concept, the tangible rather than the abstract, the material rather than the immaterial, the single issue rather than the world view, it is almost impossible to imagine that in times past poetry, in this case, British poetry, was once a literary form that was more commonly sceptical of established values, instinctively dissenting, and in certain periods, openly political, often of a radically left-wing timbre.

From Milton, through the Romantics, the Decadents, early Modernists, the internationalist Audenites, down to the undergrounds of Outsider and survivor poetry of the past three decades, British poetry has ever had the stain of radicalism on its sleeve, and perennially pined for a transformation of society along fundamentally anti-materialist, anti-capitalist lines; a social transcendence. The visionary social and metaphysical poet William Blake perhaps serves as the ultimate motif of this British poetic radical tradition, branding on the English psyche that incanted meme of the 'Dark Satanic mills' as an almost holy trope symbolizing everything spiritless and decadent that we as a nation should have guarded against. Thatcherism largely put paid to that aspiration, and while it was at it, had the temerity to hijack Blake's own socialistic hymn, 'Jerusalem', at its nauseous Union Jack-waving party rallies in the Eighties, via the adaptation of Sir Hubert Parry; as did the Tories also bastardise the socialist composer Gustav Holst's trope 'Thaxted' in his magisterial 'Jupiter' score of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice's song 'I vow to thee my country'. Over two decades, and the other Parliamentary tribe's barely distinguishable epic reign, down the line, we now also have in the tradition of ideological bowdlerization, the privatized National Rail's ditty that mutely replicates the ascending chords of Parry's 'And did those feet...' from Blake's radical revolutionary anthem 'Jerusalem', proverbially preceding some belligerent Estuary-accented rebuke as to 'putting feet on seats being anti-sowshawl', and the Orwellian ironies aren't lost on one. 'Post-modern' True Blue/New Lab society has slowly jettisoned the hard-won motifs and anthems of social solidarity and replaced them with a pastel patriotism where empty terms such as 'Britishness' abound, and few balk at an increasingly open prejudice against immigration; where a so-called Labour government make war on the poor and unemployed whom they have generally let down, even betrayed, in order to remain in power for its own sake; and where, perhaps unsurprisingly, the established poetry of the nation is in a - perhaps symbiotic - state of both aesthetic and ideological paralysis, incapable, as much as the political classes, of engaging an ever more alienated public. Perhaps then it is more than time for a grassroots shaking up of cultural purpose; for a reformation in common, social values; a rolling back of the devastation of unbridled individualism over the past three decades; and a return to more socially-engaged and redistributive, pre-Thatcherite politics and poetics. Because, only a relatively short step back in our national literary history - never more gauchely snubbed as it is today - reveals a rich and diverse tradition of radical dissent, both in politics and poetry, the two being more inextricable mediums in times' past than most post-modern apparatchiks could comprehend today. And for valuable contemporary left-wing cultural critics such as Terry Eagleton, who ask 'Where are the political and radical poets of today?' We can answer quite simply: We're here, we're still here, we never even went away - it's just our representation in the British poetry mainstream did. But our increasingly turbulent times are beginning to reek of new radical energies, and it's only a matter of time before this more political spirit tips in to the tureens of the mainstream, forcing it into an acquiescent overspill.



Political Radicalism in British Poetry - An All-Too Short History

The Roundhead Breed

Revisionism in literary criticism today cites the recusant undertones to some of Shakespeare's work, he being debatably of a closet-Catholic background, though in the main, the Bard was generally an establishment writer, especially subservient to the point of twisting history to suit the propaganda of the illegitimate Tudor dynasty he wrote under (many of the negative portrayals of the Plantagenet monarchs, John, Richards II and III et al, branding themselves dubiously on successive generations). The most obvious earliest examples of a whole swathe of politically fired poetics comes from the most turbulent period in our history, the Civil War, and its aftermath; just as the country divided into two broad - though internally stratified - factions, the Puritan-driven Roundhead Parliamentarians on one side, the High Church Anglican Royalists and Cavaliers on the other, so too did the poetry of the time demark its own aesthetic and propagandist battle lines. The so-called Cavalier poets - such as Richard Lovelace, Ben Jonson, Edmund Waller (and to some extent, Henry Vaughan, though he was essentially a metaphysical poet) - jostled with the massed ranks of largely Cambridge-grown metaphysical poets, many of whom were of the Puritan faith or persuasion - John Milton, John Bunyan, Andrew Marvell, and the lesser known hermetic author of Dagon's Downfall, Roger Crab - in a clash of politically and spiritually opposed literatures. Milton himself was the most absolutely steeped in the New Model England and architecture of its eventual Commonwealth, as secretary to Cromwell; acting as de facto Commonwealth Court Poet, he penned such orotund tub-thumpers as 'Sonnet XVI: To the Lord General Cromwell'. Meanwhile, Marvell toed the line to the victorious Parliamentarian regime with poems such as 'An Horation Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland'.

But some of the most compelling literature of the time, poetic in its own right, came from the ranks of those who embraced more radical ideas once demobbed from the New Model Army, or even while serving within it, such as the Leveller agitators (who marked themselves out with feathers of black and sea-green, and were periodically and symbolically purged for treason). John Lilburne was the most renowned pamphleteer among this pressure group of essentially democratic socialists, petitioning for universal suffrage and full democracy. On the more hands-on, near-Communist end of the spectrum, the Diggers put their ideas into practise by tilling patches of scrubland, most notably at St George's Hill in Buckinghamshire, where they were ultimately routed by Cromwell's Ironsides in the early 1650s. Their most remembered literary articulator was Gerrard Winstanley, whose beautifully impassioned tracts as to the evils of property and land ownership (after-effects of the Fall) and the intrinsic spiritual equality in all men, read almost like poetry in their own right. Somewhere in the middle of the metaphysical Cromwellian poets and the left-wing agitators, was the disillusioned ex-soldier, Roger Crab, an eccentrically religious haberdasher (hat-maker) from Buckinghamshire who gave all his material possessions to the poor, and became a sort of theosophical anchorite, living in hermetic reclusion and sustaining himself as an ethically vegetarian herbal doctor, subsequently hounded by the Cromwellian authorities for being a 'wizard'. He was an anti-sabbatarian, against the religious observation of Sundays that he believed was manifest idolatry, and in this could be seen as even more radically Puritan than the reputedly hair-shirt Commonwealth he lived under (though they did effectively ban Christmas). Between 1655-9 Crab published four idiosyncratic works, The English Hermite, Dagons-Downfall, A Tender Salutation and the intriguingly titled Gentle Correction for the High-flown Backslider. Crab is believed by many to have been the original inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter.

Essentially, these latter three dialectical writers were representative of the nuts-and-bolts radicalisms of the period, each forming part of a metaphorical paper army, a verbal and literary attempt to drive the Puritan Revolution to its farthest potential in terms of social and political transformation: at varying degrees, they each wrote to promote a form of egalitarian democracy which was way beyond the comprehension of the more conservative-minded Puritan and Presbytarian gentry represented by Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton (the fascinating transcripts of the dialectical Putney Debates illustrate the many differences in political and social interpretation of their shared Faith. Briefly, since in the Seventeenth century religion and politics, in a spiritual-material transconfiguration in the public consciousness, were essentially the same entity, it's germane to elucidate for the novice: those who held the balance of power, the Cromwellians, adhered more to the Calvinistic stricture of predestination, that some are born to salvation and others to damnation, which inevitably translated as a certain classist, propertied conservatism in material terms, while the fringe left-wing pressure groups, such as the Levellers and Diggers, were more inclined to the ideas of Pelagius, who believed 'Grace', the doctrine of intrinsic godliness in an individual, could actually be acquired in life through 'good acts', thus basically providing the earliest articulation of British egalitarianism, even 'socialist' thought, petitioning for redistribution of wealth and property, and some of their number such as Winstanley and Sexby, for the abolition of private property altogether. Much of this, of course, fell on deaf ears, and far from summoning in an egalitarian New Jerusalem, the Cromwellians actually only enabled a marginal shift in economic power that largely benefited their own emerging middle-class and, ironically, paved the way for mercantilism and, ultimately, capitalism. No doubt the final insult for ideological activists such as Lilburne and Winstanley was Cromwell's symbolic crowning as Lord Protector and attempt at dynastic rule through his younger son Richard (whose short-lived, disastrous reign led to the nickname 'Tumbledown Dick', and tipped power back into the hands of a usurped monarchy). Crab, on the other hand, was more a Millenarian, a spiritual idealist, who anticipated the Second Coming, and attempted spiritual self-perfection through material abstinence; but this transcendental aspiration can be interpreted as an immaterial translation of the nuts-and-bolts social reforms the Levellers and Diggers aspired to. In a similarly eccentric vein, there is also the later historical and theosophical footnote of MP and tract-writer John 'Translated' Asgill (1659-1738), who was slung out of both the English and Irish Parliaments for heresy on publishing a contentious pamphlet, An Argument Proving, that...Man may be Translated... (1700) which claimed that by legal right, and due to Christ taking Man's sins upon him at the crucifixion, Christians were not obliged to die, but could bodily 'translate' to Heaven at will if they so wished; he was posthumously nicknamed 'Translated' Asgill by his legion critics (Translated is a distant ancestor of mine on my father's mother's side, and features in a suitably metaphysical role in my long poem Clocking-in for the Witching Hour).

Graveyards Versus Augustans

While the 18th c. was dominated by the Neoclassicism of the Augustans in the mainstream - Alexander Pope and John Dryden in particular, and the conservative-minded journals The Tatler and The Spectator - it was a period as much as any other of counter-literatures and poetic dissent, mainly in the guise of the Nature and Graveyard poets, fringe schools that both laid the foundations for the likes of William Blake (who indeed later illustrated some of this canon) and the Romantics. Edward Young abandoned the Augustan tradition and embraced subjects such as melancholia, anathema to the neo-classicists, but in some senses, a tacit reconnecting with the seminal psychiatric dialectics of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which no doubt informed the mood-emphasis in poetry not only of Young and his peers, but also later of the Romantics, and their inheritors, such as Hartley Coleridge, and the gothic Brontes. The actual term Graveyard Poets arguably spawned from Robert Blair's long poem The Grave (1743); but it's Thomas Gray's sublime 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard', which perhaps most sums up this unconventional school. Among other stunning aphorisms, the poem coined the phrase 'Far from the madding crowd', which struck Thomas Hardy sufficiently as to name a novel after it. It is clear that this ostensibly rather melancholy poem is also laced with an acute sympathy for life's downtrodden, those who, to slightly subvert George Eliot's trope at the end of Middlemarch, 'rest in unvisited tombs' - a subject no doubt the Augustans would have balked at:

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

More specifically to the theme of this article, lesser known Graveyard poets such as Mark Akenside and Henry Kirke White, both sons of butchers who rose to some considerable literary standing during their lives, were arguably two of the earliest known working-class autodidactic voices to transcend the considerable snobberies of their age. Akenside, of a dissenting background, started out as a radical, pigeon-holed by a reactionary Samuel Johnson as possessing an "impetuous eagerness to subvert and confound, with very little care what shall be established" - though Akenside converted in the end to Toryism. Hailing more from a lower middle-class background was George Crabbe, son of a tax collector, but who too demonstrated autodidactic inclinations, and launched his own poetic career by self-publishing; his most acclaimed work, The Village (1783), was essentially one of the earliest English poems of social document, drawing on the nitty gritty of an un-romanticised rural life he had experienced personally; this socially didactic approach in some ways presaged the work of John Clare, nicknamed in his time 'The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet', which he literally was, being the son of a rural labourer. As well as writing extensively on nature with a true autodidactic genius for the subject, he also tackled more radical themes such as peasant rural life and his own mental and metaphysical demons. His biographer, Jonathan Bate, honoured him as 'the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced'.

On the cusp of the 19th century, possibly the most posthumously renowned genius-autodidact in English poetry was William Blake, who, though advantaged to some extent, hailing from a middle-class family, was not formally educated and came to demonstrate prolifically and startlingly a unique visionary oeuvre of both poetry and engraving, that was almost transcendentally gifted, and stylistically, almost completely self-influenced. It's difficult to underestimate the influence of Blake on practically all English poetry to come after him; along with Shakespeare and Milton, his oeuvre cast a vast shadow over everything that followed. His example was swiftly championed by the Romantics, then passed like a torch to subsequent generations and movements, such as Gothicism, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Decadents and Rhymers' Club, all the way up to Elitonian Modernism, and still further, to a Blakeian poetic sensibility still thriving today in the work of numerous poets outside the contemporary mainstream (such as Sebastian Barker, Niall McDevitt, and in my own attempts, particularly a long narrative poem based in a parallel utopian London, Keir Hardie Street). Apart from the plethora of social and political dialectic to be found throughout his oeuvre, from the lyrics and aphorisms of Songs of Innocence and of Experience to epics such as Milton and America, Blake very much embodied English radicalism in his rebelliously bohemian (in the truest sense of the term) lifestyle, perceived as mad by many of his contemporaries, a hands-on man of his times, as well as, conversely, prone to reclusiveness and an almost solipsistic individualism. A libertarian in many ways but with a heart palpably touched - every bit as much as Dickens after him - by the vivid iniquities of his time, particularly in the Capital, as in his brilliant 'London':

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
...

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

In such poems as this, and the heart-wrenching 'The Chimney Sweep', 'The Little Vagabond' and 'The Little Black Boy', Blake clearly demonstrates a deeply compassionate social conscience, and in some poems, particularly his timeless anthem against industrial capitalism, 'Jerusalem', a certain tub-thumping, pseudo-revolutionary energy:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?
...

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

As with the Romantics after him, Blake was an instinctive Republican, and was initially in sympathy with the American and French Revolutions, apparently sometimes wearing a Phrygian cap in order to symbolise this sense of solidarity with the continental radicals; but also being a compassionate humanitarian by nature - though on his own extraordinarily obscure metaphysical terms - was quickly disillusioned when France degenerated into Robespierre's bloody Reign of Terror. One might say that from then on, Blake turned his attention more to transcendental politics, championing a commendably Pelagian theological outlook, a belief in man's self-salvation through good acts, being core to his utter opposition to the more Calvinistic church dogmas of the times. Ultimately, his views could be summed up as essentially socialistic, metaphorically revolutionary (i.e. transformation of society through transformation of thought, as opposed to literal revolution), certainly anti-industrial and anti-capitalist, and significantly science-sceptic, as his poetic, spiritualistic challenge to the Enlightenment rationalists testifies:

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, mock on: 'tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
...

The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton's Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

Ultimately, and in spite of - arguably strengthened by - his mystical leanings, Blake was one of the first humanist voices in English literature, and debatably the first British poet to openly champion the poor and oppressed of society; a pioneer of social political poetry (as opposed to Milton's more hypothetical political oeuvre), and thereby a truly subversive, radical voice of his time, whose genius lies in his 'common touch', his capacity, in the main, to produce high literature in a communicable, accessible, class-transcending way, thus in effect returning the language to common ownership - a literary levelling.



Lions after Slumber: The Radical Romantics

The Romantics perhaps typified the political impulsion in British poetry, not only in their dissenting style - more sensuous, tangible use of language - counter-Enlightenment philosophy (nature over artifice, mystery over science, as articulated in Keats' 'Negative Capability'), and what would have seemed contradictory on a painterly level (think the aesthetic antagonisms between van Gogh and Gauguin), recourse to the imagination as a font of metaphorical truth; but in their choice of subjects, no matter how phantasmagorically vague or wistfully bucolic they might have sometimes appeared to be on the surface. Influenced not only by the revolutionary upheavals in America and France, but also by contemporary social idealists and reformist intellectuals such as Thomas Paine, William Hazlitt and Jeremy Bentham, the emotionalism of Goethe's novels, and the philosophy of Hegel, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge symbolically sealed the Romantic aesthetic with the publication of what was essentially a poetic manifesto of the time, Lyrical Ballads (1798). This seminal dual-collection radicalised English verse by introducing to it more methodically and deliberately (than, say, Clare before them) formulated patterns of everyday language and vernacular, in a direct assault on the stately Augustan standards immediately preceding them. But it was also the unusual choice of social realist subjects, juxtaposed with a pastoral, sometimes other-worldly surface (the latter aspects more so in Coleridge's contributions), that proved texturally and topically subversive for the period: poems such as 'The Idiot Boy' (about a mentally handicapped child who goes missing), 'The Female Vagrant' and 'The Old Cumberland Beggar: A Description', jarring profoundly with the lofty pretensions of Neoclassical themes. Although Wordsworth was to degenerate later into careerism, opportunism and Toryism (eventually succeeding Southey as Laureate), and Coleridge to fade into hallucinatory fragments, Lyrical Ballads, as with Blake's Songs of Innocence & Experience and Milton, were to indelibly adumbrate the more floridly political flourish of the second Romantic generation, and inestimably influence all future forms of English social and political poetry thereafter.

To turn then to that second generation of Romantics, and one of the more outspoken radical poets of our literature, the irrepressibly rebellious Percy Bysshe Shelley. We all know that Shelley's masterful 'Mask of Anarchy' was a poetic response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 - not simply in its blatant allusion to this horrific and tyrannical pogrom of peaceful protesting in Manchester, but also as reinforced in the marching iambic beat of the balladic form he chooses; this poem in itself could be seen as the first full-blooded example of British agitpoetry. Here is one of the most memorable verses:

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many- they are few.

'What is Freedom? - ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well-
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.
...

'Paper coin- that forgery
Of the title-deeds, which ye
Hold to something from the worth
Of the inheritance of Earth.
...

'Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free-
...

'The old laws of England- they
Whose reverend heads with age are gray,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo- Liberty!

It's not difficult to see how this almost tangibly radical, revolutionary rallying cry would have been perceived by the establishments of the time as palpably seditious. 'The Mask of Anarchy' is, along with Blake's 'Jerusalem', a de facto anthem of the Left, a beautiful tirade, but only one of a number of politically confrontational poems written by Shelley, such as the condemnatory and distinctly anti-patriotic sonnet 'England in 1819', the movingly candid attack on Napoleon's betrayal of Republicanism in 'Feelings Of A Republican On The Fall of Bonaparte', 'A New National Anthem', and the rousingly radical ballad against capitalism - basically a Marxian tract before Marx even existed - 'To The Men of England':

Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Wherefore feed and clothe and save,
From the cradle to the grave,
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat -- nay, drink your blood?

Wherefore, Bees of England, forge
Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,
That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of your toil?

But Shelley was no mere agitprop-poet; his was a deeply empathetic nature, a genuinely acute social conscience, as compassionate as it was angry, and one can only read his profoundly moving 'A Tale Of Society As It Is: From Facts, 1811' - about an old woman and her son, stricken with what nowadays we would called post-traumatic stress after serving in (presumably) the Napoleonic War, unable to support his mother, both condemned to inadequate charity alms and the uncaring judgments of others - feeling not only how tragic and pathetic it is that even now in the 21st century those on sickness benefits are treated with unconscionable scorn and intimidation, but also how shameful it is that the mainstream poets of today abjectly fail again and again to address, even vaguely, such fundamental social injustices as Shelley here illustrates, that still abound today in society in the wake of the Welfare State's ever-gradual dismantling:

VI.
Her son, compelled, the country's foes had fought,
Had bled in battle; and the stern control
Which ruled his sinews and coerced his soul
Utterly poisoned life's unmingled bowl,
And unsubduable evils on him brought.

VII.
And now cold charity's unwelcome dole
Was insufficient to support the pair;
And they would perish rather than would bear
The law's stern slavery, and the insolent stare
With which law loves to rend the poor man's soul--
The bitter scorn, the spirit-sinking noise
Of heartless mirth which women, men, and boys
Wake in this scene of legal misery.

In a single poem, Shelley uncompromisingly addresses the perennial (and arguably largely socially-induced) injustices of poverty, the exploitation and sacrifice of young working-class soldiers, their demobbed abandonment by the state that sent them to war (a more than potent issue today), stress-induced mental illness, the inadequacy of poor relief, and the social stigmatization of the unemployed and incapacitated. Nowadays, one is more likely to read poems in national supplements offering different perspectives on water, meditations on fruit, or self-indulgent exercises in limp eroticism by presenting a woman undressing from several different angles (cue Hugo Williams' boudoir-languishing oeuvre). In light of our ever-defragmenting post-recession society, I would personally nominate this poem for the next Poem for the Day anthology, Mr Motion, please.

Shelley's well-known radicalism aside, not many would instantly think that John Keats, far from simply being the frail wax-complexioned daydreamer he is often portrayed as, shared pretty much the same radical political convictions as his more vitriolic peer, only, in the main, disguised these behind the transfigurative cloaking-device of nature-based metaphor pioneered in Lyrical Ballads (even if the younger and more vitally talented poet was eventually bitterly disillusioned by the Tory-supporting opportunism of Wordsworth in his later years). So, as Tom Paulin argued in his The Secret Life of Poems, the sublimely pastoral 'Ode to Autumn' was an elusive metaphorical commentary on that same Peterloo Massacre, simply communicated in the poet's inimitably subtle use of natural imagery. Indeed, many, particularly the more tacitly political, mainstream voices of today who still champion Keats's sublime genius, often emphasize one of this poet's great strengths as his transcendental qualities, his non-partisan avoidance of contemporary political comment, his uncompromising idealisation of the imagination and beauty, his near-deification of poetry itself as above reproach and pettiness found in mortal artifice and social institutions. But it is becoming more and more apparent in revisionist criticism (spurred by the likes of Tom Paulin, and Keats' biographer Andrew Motion) that Keats, in his own sublime and subtly metaphorical way, was as much a political poet as his more outwardly vitriolic contemporary Shelley. Keats simply used different methods, chiefly, an impasto of verbalism and imagery, figurative density, to communicate his reaction to the political upheavals of his times.. As an anonymous 'friend' of the poet once said, Keats was in his opinion

'...of the skeptical and republican school . . . an advocate for the innovations which were making progress in his time . . . a fault-finder with everything established.'' But most biographers and critics leave it at that. The drama and the triumphs of his great creative year, and the awful pathos of his last year, have understandably dominated their accounts.

[quoted by a sceptical George Scialabba in his review of Motion's Keats biography in Boston Globe, 1998]

Keats was also touched partly by that unmistakeable autodidactic quality that stems from a patchier educational and material background than the more groomed Oxbridge voices; in spite of his evidently precocious genius in poetic ability (not surprisingly, he was an admirer of 'the Marvellous Boy' poet Thomas Chatterton, another autodidact precocious genius, who died in poverty-stricken obscurity after a brief published flourish), there was in much of his work that singular aspect of apparent naivety, more in tone than actual verbalism, which nevertheless strikes a chord even in the most cynical, and casts a curiously refreshing spell over the literature, blowing the cobwebs away. Keats was of course famously leapt on with the publication of his epic Endymion by both John Gibson Lockhart in the Tory Blackwood's Magazine who scathingly besmirched it as 'imperturbable driveling idiocy', and by John Wilson Croker of the equally Tory Quarterly Review, who belittled Keats as 'one of the Cockney school of poets', a disparagingly snobbish literary shorthand cherry-picking his autodidact imperfections, but more specifically insulting his lower middle-class origins and politics. But even in this ham-fisted assault, which many believed, including Shelley, had contributed to Keats' early death - there is one very rarely quoted trope of Croker's which refers almost flippantly to his 'gleams of genius', before launching in to a full-blown drubbing on the 'Cockney poet's' sheer temerity to compete poetically with the Oxbridge 'big boys', which exposes the true motives behind this editorial offensive: to corrupt the purpose of literary criticism by using it as a subterfuge for promoting class prejudice, for reasserting the social elite's specious claim of an hereditary birthright to high culture. Basically, the subtext of these reviews is simply, 'Stick to your station Mr. Keats', in exactly the same way that Hardy's aspiring autodidact-scholar, Jude Fawley, was told to stick to stonemasonry by an Oxford don, in spite of his palpable, even remarkable, abilities. [A major aesthetic war broke out sparked by the 'Cockney school' dialectic, which resulted in an editor's duel, between Keats's champion and John Scott of the liberal London Magazine, and one of Lockhart's vitriolic cronies, Jonathan Christie; it sadly resulted in the death of the former].

Born in London, conceivably in the East End - and quite possibly to the sound of Bow Bells - Keats may or may not have been Cockney; the son of a barman at The Hoop and Swan pub in Moorgate, he certainly wasn't from the typical background of most poets of his period, something of a lower middle-class stock, 'shabby genteel' (or as George Orwell's wife-to-be once said of her fiancee's family, 'on the shivering verge of gentility'), but with some social aspirations, since Keats was educated in a 'dame school', a kind of lower grade private elementary, his parents being unable to afford the exorbitant fees of Eton or Harrow. One might conjecture that a certain class-based insecurity in Keats impelled him to disguise any radical political sentiments in the cloaking of nature-based metaphor in the main, and while he certainly radicalised poetic language in English, he is ostensibly at one remove from the 'political poet' archetype we're exploring in this particular essay.

A less likely revolutionary was Lord Gordon Byron, whose foppish donning of a Greek-style fez, along with other sartorial, and literary, pretentions, can nevertheless be seen as almost self-parodying deceptions in light of one or two of his actual poems that dealt head-on with fundamental social and political paradigms, which one would assume should have been almost beyond his aristocratic comprehension (though apparently he and his family did have to rent some rooms out from their estate) - and yet, the following lines, from his strongly anti-capitalist - though disturbingly anti-Semitic in certain parts - political epic The Age of Bronze (1823), he lambasts the land-owning profiteers of the Napoleonic period through the concept of rent as an exploitative motif; this poem not only echoes some of the recurring dialectical leitmotifs of the likes of Gerrard Winstanley and his conviction that property was the root of all human evil, but also foreshadows in some ways the grittier social poems of the 'Yellow' 1890s, particularly John Davidson's outstanding poverty-ballad 'Thirty Bob a Week' (which will be discussed later):

See these inglorious Cincinnati swarm,
Farmers of war, dictators of the farm;
Their ploughshare was the sword in hireling hands,
Their fields manured by gore of other lands;
Safe in their barns, these Sabine tillers sent
Their brethren out to battle. Why? for rent!
Year after year they voted cent for cent,
Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions - why? for rent!
They roar'd, they dined, they drank, they swore they meant
To die for England - why then live? for rent!

In other verses of this political tirade, Byron shows he can, if not match, certainly echo, Shelley's 'Mask of Anarchy', and with him blaze a contrapuntal retort to the more emptily patriotic call to arms of the time with a continental Republican scorn of all monarchies:

On --- on --- on --- the thirst of war
Gasps for the gore of serfs and of their czar.

The example of Byron shows then that in times past in British poetry, even some among the highest ranks of mainstream literary fame of the day, demonstrated an almost intrinsically radical social and political engagement (that only goes to remind of that lingering question, what the Hell went wrong with poetry later on?).

Thomas Hood was a poet inclined towards compassionately driven expositions on the squalor that the less fortunate of his day had to endure, his often anthologised 'Song of the Shirt' being a lambasting of the capitalist work ethic. It would perhaps be erroneous to class the mutton-chopped Matthew Arnold as anything approaching a political poet, though his curious subject of an impoverished Oxford student who absconds to a gypsy caravan in 'The Scholar Gypsy' is certainly an intriguing one, echoing Wordsworth's earlier rural social studies in Lyrical Ballads and tapping in to aspects of Thomas Hardy's oeuvre, the latter being admittedly far more radically socially engaged, in the main, in his fictional canon (particularly his masterpiece on the philistinism - a term ironically coined by Arnold - of the class system in Jude the Obscure 1895).

The Victorian era is still commonly associated in England at least with two rather fustian, stately and establishment-tinged names, Tennyson and Kipling; one, the longest-serving Laureate whose often languorous verse is associated with commemorating Arthurian figures and military fiascos (he even grew his beard inordinately long in order to demonstrate a sense of solidarity with the soldiers in the Crimea), but whose oeuvre also occasionally surprised with sublime pieces such as 'The Kraken' and 'The Lotus-Eaters'; the other, whose Mockney khaki-songs (re Barrack Room Ballads) scored his generation so memorably and was so quintessentially Victorian that many often assume that he was also Laureate. Kipling can in some senses be seen as a political poet, albeit one who toed the Imperialist line of the times, and whose thumping patriotic timbre was ensured its posterity, not simply through its distinctive narrative on the colonial campaigns of the period, or barrel-rolling Mockney idioms, but mostly because of his sheer metrical mastery of the musical ballad form, inevitably adapted for the Victorian music halls. It would be difficult to argue that there was any true poetry in any subliminal or figurative sense in Kipling's work, but as an example of purely tub-thumping state verse, it is inimitable and disturbingly infectious. But Kipling was ever the champion of the put-upon working-class (often Cockney) colonial soldier, as immortalised in 'Tommy Atkins', and in the intriguing 'Gentleman Rankers', where he takes on the less typical subject of those educated men from the middle-classes who curiously chose to join up in the ranks rather than take officer commissions; in such poems as these, Kipling betrays a subtle inclination to exploring the demarcation of social classes in the army, and its occasional blurring.

But the mid to late 19th century was also a time of tremendous radical energy in art and literature, far from the fustian establishmentarianism of the likes of Tennyson, his Laureate successor the detrimentally tactless Alfred Austin, or Kipling. The nascent socialism of William Morris came to infuse every artistic genre he engaged in, from painting and designing through to polemic and poetry, and was of course accompanied by the utopianism of Ruskin and the politically radical Pre-Raphaelites. Morris is certainly one of the most nakedly partisan political poets in English, though it is more his aphorisms and sayings that formed his most startling tropes than his rather mock-Tennysonian/Late Romantic verse, much of which reads a little rhetorically, not to say flowerily. But Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement can be seen as an essential radicalising force which would significantly influence subsequent poetic schools along a more socially engaged timbre.

Arguably however the late Victorian era of poetry was, in the established mainstream, fustily reflective of the strained reign of a perpetually mourning monarch, and a certain stateliness, as opposed to inventiveness, of style was not easily conducive to much in the way of social engagement; a swathe of purely aesthetic innovation was detectable in some of Robert Browning's more ambitious poems, but the more imaginative prosodic strides into new verse forms came with the aristocratic Charles Swinburne, who invented the roundel, and of course Gerard Manley Hopkins, inventor of sprung rhythm, whose florid, even flowery collages of image can be a little difficult to stomach to the post-modernist eye, reading like a sort of tongue-twisting ultra-Romanticism, but whose work is again surprisingly popular among a 21st century mainstream who on the whole shun verbal-play and colour in language, and, in their prosaic distrust of adjective and adverb, couldn't be further removed from Hopkins' adverbial acrobatics.

Fin-de-siecle - Social Realists and Radical Rhymers

The 1890s, invariably referred to as the Yellow 90s (after the Yellow Book series of magazines) and the Decadent 90s, was an infinitely more nuanced and less explicit period of radical poetic shifts, not so much politically or ideologically sloganeering as Impressionistically social-realist, and in such an implicit trans-genre sense that the polemical novels of George Gissing, the gritty art of Walter Sickert and the subversive, Kipling-pastiche balladry of Anglo-Scot poet John Davidson, impress the mind in such an ergonomically merged sense, it's as if they are three parts of the same psychical suit. The Rhymers' Club consisted of such luminaries as WB Yeats and Oscar Wilde, but perhaps its most contextually fixed members were those such as Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Francis Thompson and John Davidson. Rather like the Pre-Raphaelites in painting before them, the Rhymers sought to re-invigorate the slightly stale, patriotic poetry popular at the time by a similarly curious combination of retro-stylistics, a philosophical introspection, but in an obverse sense, which was often radically didactic, especially on themes such as the individual oppressed by their society; re-employing the traditional rhyme, verse and ballad so as to assert unconventionally gritty topics within the armoury of recognised prosodic authority. Aesthetically speaking, as the late poet and scholar Derek Stanford pointed out in his 1965 biographical study of this period, Poets of the 90's, it was 'the prose element in verse that these poets desired to eliminate'. (To my mind, never more so than today, in the twenty-tens, does such a reformation in poetry need, once again, to be pursued). To the Rhymers' Club, substance mattered as much as the style of carriage that conveyed it, and in this slightly eccentric sense, they were true radicals among poets.

Probably the most distinctive and ambitious of the Club was John Davidson, who in one single poem, 'Thirty Bob a Week', from his breakthrough socially radical second collection Fleet Street Eclogues (1890), a sort of Kipling pastiche-ballad narrated by a lower-middle-class London clerk bemoaning the interminable bind of his rent-snatched salary, ingeniously captures through a sing-song Sickertesque impasto of trope and metaphor, the essential drive towards a social realism in poetry that typified the aims of his group - here are some excerpts:

For like a mole I journey in the dark,
A-travelling along the underground
From my Pillar'd Halls and broad Suburbean Park,
To come the daily dull official round;
And home again at night with my pipe all alight,
A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound.

And it's often very cold and very wet,
And my missus stitches towels for a hunks;
And the Pillar'd Halls is half of it to let--
Three rooms about the size of travelling trunks.
And we cough, my wife and I, to dislocate a sigh,
When the noisy little kids are in their bunks.
...

I ain't blaspheming, Mr. Silver-tongue;
I'm saying things a bit beyond your art:
Of all the rummy starts you ever sprung,
Thirty bob a week's the rummiest start!
With your science and your books and your the'ries about spooks,
Did you ever hear of looking in your heart?

To my mind, 'Thirty Bob a Week', in its candid intimacy, infectious sprung-rhythm, beautifully juxtaposed images of beauty and squalor, and compelling dialectic on the state of working poverty, is one of the most important and moving social poems in English - social, even though its themes are conveyed through an individual's monologue. So vivid is it in its vaudeville combo of period grubbiness and Cockneyish idiom, verbal pastiche and tonal authenticity, the reader is both entertained and startled by its figurative subtlety and cadence, Blakeian aphorism and implicit didacticism, reminded all at once of the rhythms of Victorian music halls (his debut collection was tellingly titled In a Music Hall (1891)), happy-sad sing-a-longs such as Daisy, Daisy, and heart-wrenching paintings such as Sickert's What Shall We do for the Rent? The poem is arguably also one of the earliest examples of an authentic proletarianisation of diction in English verse, in some ways a pastiche on Kipling's oeuvre, but in that sense therefore, an authentication of a patois that was in Kipling a caricature. TS Eliot was a later champion of Davidson's highly distinctive poetry, including his later longer aphorismic epics such as the saturnine Testaments, and there's little doubt that the former's modernist strides, especially in the use of blank verse and urban imagery, were greatly inspired by the latter's seminal example. Indeed, both 'Thirty Bob a Week', and the earlier long narrative atheist poem The City of Dreadful Night by James 'BV' Thomson (1874), would seem to have cast their stylistic and tonal shadows over much of Eliot's modernist masterpiece The Wasteland, with its mix of apocalyptic urbanity, and working-class verbal camaraderie, as in II. A Game of Chess ('You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique./ (And her only thirty-one')). It's this melancholic, proto-existentialist sense of urban alienation to poets such as Thomson and Davidson that singles them out as ahead of their times, very much proto-ghosting the first Modernists two decades and a World War later. Davidson was also a vitriolic polemicist, not only in some of his later more philosophical longer works such as The Triumph of Mammon (1907), a fire-and-brimstone, Promethean, definitive 'Satanic verse' epic, in its Nietzschean critique of Christianity as suppressor of human vitalism - which in some ways marks Davidson out as a kind of Dark Blake, if that's not an etymological tautology since 'Blake' means 'Dark' - but also in his criticisms of opportunistic mediocre versifiers, as in the following brilliantly figurative snippet:

The want of poetical power is the impelling force in the case of most versifiers. They would fain be poets, and imagine that the best way is to try to write poetry and to publish what they write. They will never see their mistake. Equus asinus still believes that the possession of an organ of noise is sufficient, with a little practice, to enable him to sing like a nightingale.

Scathing as it is, this is still arguably a commentary just as relevant regarding many of today's poetry mainstream 'names' as it was then. Davidson was detectably, not even in his later misanthropic atheism, anything so prosaic as a 'conservative', nor even a Darwinist (though conceivably Malthusian), but more something along the lines of a Marxian anti-capitalist anarchist, whose main criticism of Christianity (most lastingly in his Testaments), veiled in contentiously Nietzschean motifs, was of its historical capitulation to forces of capitalism:

My purpose in these Testaments is to aid in the overthrow of the rotten financial investment called Christendom: I perceive that this can be done only by purging the world of everything that is meant by spirit, soul, 'other' world, though all the literature and art and religion of the past should go with it.

Ultimately, Davidson's radicalism is one of secular anarchism, Nietzschean in the sense that it instinctively debunked and rejected all recognised religious and scientific moralities, and then attempted, but failed (though beautifully given his powers of language) to form its own philosophical path forward - and clearly a combination of this nihilistic dead-end, lack of money, critical obscurity - towards his later life - dogging asthma and terror of a fictive oncoming cancer, were what drove him to his eventual suicide at only fifty-two (shockingly, the second longest surviving among the 'Tragic Generation' of the Rhymers' Club, most of whom died either through tuberculosis, or committing suicide, by their early thirties) by jumping from a cliff in Penzance in 1909. But Davidson's earlier, social-existentialist poetry, as epitomised by 'Thirty Bob a Week', betrayed at the very least an unconscious political inclination in his choice of topic and tone; his was, certainly literarily speaking, a voice of the individual spiritually disenfranchised by capitalist materialism. In these senses, Davidson was a verse-equivalent of the social novelists of his times, Arthur Morrison, Arnold Bennett, George Gissing and the contemporaneously obscurer Robert Croker Noonan (aka Robert Tressell).

The Rhymers included in their number other notable voices, whom, in spite of subsequent critical classification as essentially a more introspective, non-political cabal - in the balder sense of commentary on the times - demonstrated much in their oeuvres of a Blakeian impulsion towards social documenting. The doomed Ernest Dowson, who died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-three, was one of the earliest examples of the working-class autodidactic breed of British poets. Son of an East End dock-worker, Dowson quite prodigiously mastered a traditionally 'bourgeois' form to the point of prosodic over-compensation, sometimes an almost overtly eloquent style, but he was a poet who never forgot his roots. In spite of his stylistic cloak of Decadent apparel echoing the continental influences of the Parisian scene of the time, Dowson wrote some beautiful verse that, in spite of ornate pretentions, betrayed a marked social conscience - and in the instance of 'To One in Bedlam', a sharply penetrating, empathetic insight into psychiatric distress and its woefully inadequate treatments of the period:

With delicate, mad hands, behind his sordid bars,
Surely he hath his posies, which they tear and twine;
Those scentless wisps of straw, that miserable line
His strait, caged universe, whereat the dull world stares.

Pedant and pitiful. O, how his rapt gaze wars
With their stupidity! Know they what dreams divine
Lift his long, laughing reveries like enchanted wine,
And make his melancholy germane to the stars?

...Better than mortal flowers,
Thy moon-kissed roses seem: better than love or sleep,
The star-crowned solitude of thine oblivious hours!

Arthur Symons, a son of the manse, and hardly working-class, nevertheless felt little solidarity with the gentile society of his upbringing, once having said 'I hate[d] commonplace and the middle-classes'; by this token, he wrote much poetry about the music hall, most particularly in London Nights (1895). Charles Gray was another of the Rhymers prone to modicums of empirical social document, as in this excellently evocative stanza from his poem 'Charleville':

On the green seats, small groups of grocermen
Absorbed, their sticks scooping a little hole
Upon the path, talk market prices; then
Take up a cue: I think, upon the whole...

Philosophically absorbed, introspective, 'Decadent', the Rhymers' Club nevertheless boasted a radical canon, not only aesthetically, but also in a new restless sense of exhaustion with the fustiness of the late Victorian era, its languorous and stately mainstream poetry, and a modernistic inclination. Partly inspired by contemporaneous Impressionism and Symbolism, the Rhymers worked towards a more intellectually gritty, pessimistic, humanitarian poetic; one that in terms of subjects, and in spite of surface pretentions, began to step down from the ivory towers and begin to explore and mingle with the 'lower classes' in society; poetry itching with an instinct to get its hands dirty with the grittier social realities of their times.

Fugitives Disguised as Georgians

While the philosophical charge of the Decadents and the social-realist subterfuge of the deceptively retro Rhymers' Club proved a temporary cul-de-sac until the likes of Eliot et al of the new avant-garde reconnected to their more subversive and ambitious features in the developments of early Modernism and Symbolism, the mainstream of the years leading up to the First World War continued in many ways directly from the late Victorian conventional traditions, creating in what is termed Georgianism, a generally genteel, artificially Romantic (that is, bucolic and pastoral but without, in the main, any polemical or dialectical subtexts) aesthetic. It's only been towards the end of the 20th century that Georgianism was reassessed by an increasingly formalised and apolitical mainstream poetic as a deceptively superficial period in English poetry; and while I would agree with this in the cases of one or two poets of that time, it is only because in their particular cases there is an easily definable variation, even deviation, in subject more so than style, from the general bourgeois complacency of the contemporaries they were classed with, for the Georgians, in their lack of aesthetic or topical ambition, and sense of 'safeness', were, along with the conventional Victorian poets, in many ways the closest relations to today's mainstream, both sharing in common the badly disguised conservative inclination towards naturalistic self-distraction and almost Olympian resistance to the social and political changes happening around them (one can see a clear lineage from the likes of Walter de la Mare and AE Housman through the Parochialism of Norman Nicholson and RS Thomas, the cultural solipsism of John Betjeman and Philip Larkin, down to the post-modern Oxbridge somnambulism of Alice Oswald, Andrew Motion, Fiona Sampson, Hugo Williams, Bernard O'Donoghue et al). I say bourgeois, since even those poets who have risen high in the ranks of the New Gen from relatively 'ordinary' backgrounds, Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, Sean O'Brien, Ian Duhig, Sharon Olds, have nevertheless, as Alan Bold expertly puts it in his Introduction to The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (1970), nevertheless on their way up embraced the restraints and limited horizons of the established middle-class aesthetics of their period:

...poets have been, in this country, cut off from industrial conflict. Though financially allied to the working class, they have had middle-class pretentions.

In other words, to be a 'middle class' poet, one does not have to have hallowed necessarily from such a social background; it's more in the adapting, the becoming, which often makes for even more bigoted and unreasonable bourgeois dogma in the upwardly mobile than in those born into affluence - the old 'I worked my way up' mantra that echoes frequently in the neo-Thatcherite dialectic of present day, ex-working-class high profile poets such as the ever-rebarbative and inverted elitist Don Paterson, who rails against every type of poet from the so-called amateur to the esoteric obscurantist - basically, against any type of poet that is not his type of poet.

But even in this apparently most complacent and static of poetic periods, there were at least three voices who transcended the constraints of the Georgian school, to produce poetry that deserves posterity through its sheer individuality. Ironically, one such voice is Harold Monro, doyen at the time of the emerging Georgian scene, having practically coined the term in the series of anthologies of Georgian Poetry he edited and published between 1911-12; and of course, by dint of his also being proprietor and founder of the Poetry Society, which started life as a rather bohemian bookshop-cum-reading venue-cum-B&B for young vagrant poets (the Torriano or Shakespeare & Co. of its time). Born in Belgian to Scottish parents, Monro had inherited a certain Gaelic dourness which worked entirely in his favour as a poet, lending much of his oeuvre an upholstering of neo-gothic melancholy, as in deeply unsettling poems such as 'Earth for Sale' and the masterful 'Living' which was very much a blueprint for Eliot's 'Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. But Monro also foreshadowed the suburban satire of poets such as Auden, Betjeman and Larkin, in brilliant pieces like 'Aspidistra Street' (that could have come from the pen of George Orwell's hapless Poplar poet Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying!) and 'Suburb'. While a fundamental Winstanleyism resonates from many of his poems, such as 'The Silent Pool', which figuratively superimposes the motif of property as something that separates us one another onto the human mind, the house of the head, which also isolates each of us in our thoughts, but triumphantly citing our language as a redemptive force that reconnects us ultimately to our commonality:

I am so glad that underneath our talk
Our minds together walk.
We argue all the while,
But down below our argument we smile,
We have our houses, but we understand
That our real property is common land.
'The Silent Pool'

But one of the most subtle and beautiful expressions of the sharing impulse in at the root of all romantic notions of Wintsanleyan socialism has rarely been more movingly represented than in these lines from Monro's sublime 'Real Property':

I will not have that harvest mown:
I'll keep the corn and leave the bread.
I've bought that field; it's now my own:
I've fifty acres in my head.
I take it as a dream to bed.
I carry it about all day...

Sometimes when I have found a friend
I give a blade of corn away.



Autodidact of a Super-Tramp

The Welsh-born, wooden-legged, itinerant poet WH Davies was catapulted into literary fame by his singular Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1907) - but his literal and literary wanderings had been hard-won through years in obscurity, and his first collection The Soul's Destroyer (1905) was self-published on his own expense which meant that he lived like a tramp for six months, carrying the manuscript in his coat pocket, while he saved up for the cost of its printing; it was worth this abject sacrifice since it garnered for him a crucial critical snippet from Arthur Adcock at - of all papers! - the usually ultra-reactionary Daily Mail, who recognised in Davies's debut, in his essay Gods Of Modern Grub Street, 'crudities and even doggerel... also...some of the freshest and most magical poetry to be found in modern books' - which has to be one of the best tributes made to the inimitable and essential distinctiveness of the autodidactic poetic voice. Davies's future as a recognised poet of his time was sealed finally by - the less surprising - patronage of George Bernard Shaw who negotiated a publishing contract for Super-Tramp. Prior to this, Davies had been housed in a small cottage rented out on his behalf by established poet Edward Thomas, in an extraordinary gesture of altruism.

Davies's case, both in poetic and social terms, however, can be seen as an exception to the rule of a still deeply unequal society, and even to a degree his experiences of vagrant extremes as an almost anchoritic, elected self-sacrifice - akin to Orwell's later pilgrimage among the homeless as documented in his Down and Out In Paris and London - by a wilful, eccentric, almost irrationally rebellious personality whose even most abjectly impoverished days adumbrated the promise of future familial inheritance. Modern cynics might even speculate as to whether there was an element of - admittedly masochistic - attention-seeking in Davies's quixotic travails and escapades, ripe ingredients for the caricature of 'Ape' or 'Beerbohm' once he had made his name; and certainly the subsequent 'cause celeb' media-package was entirely in place for a hypocritically classist bourgeois media to seize on as a tokenistic folk-figure of triumph against all odds; as well as acting as a conscience-fix for the Fabian literati who had snatched him from the jaws of trampdom and chaperoned him into their well-heeled circles. Nevertheless, cynicisms put to one side, there is among Davies's oeuvre some vital slices of social document, almost entirely observational as opposed to polemical or dialectical, that are as much of social-historical importance as they are poetic, as in the priceless observation-piece on pre-Welfare State healthcare 'The Hospital Waiting-Room'; Davies was also more than candid about his sporadic periods of vagrancy and unemployment, as in the dialectical epigram 'Beggar's Song':

Good people keep their holy day,
They rest from labour on a Sunday;
But we keep holy every day,
And rest from Monday to Monday.

And Davies too contributed to English poetry the beautiful appeal of the human soul, irrespective of its social class, to the right to sometimes be able to take a step back from the day to day and appreciate the simple things, for labour and duty not to deny our fundamental right to enjoy aspects to life, even to always come second, no matter the material cost, to the immaterially priceless illuminations noticeable only by the least busy, in 'Leisure':

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

In Davies there is an almost childlike sense of optimism, an inspirited naivety reminiscent of Clare, as in the poverty-enobling sentiments of 'Money', which tend towards the opposite of 'Leisure', in an almost hair-shirted affirmation of the Protestant Work Ethic:

Much have I thought of life, and seen
How poor men's hearts are ever light;
And how their wives do hum like bees
About their work from morn till night.

If there is irony in poems such as 'Money', it is not an obvious one, and it seems ultimately that Davies sought to convince himself, and his readers, that from hardship, hard work, and invariably the combo of both, there are certain psychic riches that material man often misses. The danger here of course, especially to the Marxian reader, is that such humbled dialectics only go to promote the iniquities of the capitalist yoke, to feed into classist Victorian hymnal tropes such as 'The rich man in his castle,/ The poor man at his gate,/ He made them, high or lowly,/ And ordered their estate' of All Things Bright and Beautiful, that have dogged the true and far more socialist message of original Christianity ever since. Davies, his poetry and his almost folkloric social pilgrimage then, presents something of a quandary in the lineage of social and political British poetry; though undoubtedly the social document aspect of many of his poems merits his inclusion in the radical canon, even if he was on the whole an only political voice in the simplest, almost nursery-style sense, as this verse from 'Rich and Poor' shows:

Without thy love I've no more wealth
Than seen upon that other shore;
That cold, bare bank he rows them to -
Those kings and misers made so poor.

More importantly than any partisanship, however, was Davies's compassion and sense of empathy for the downtrodden, as epitomised in poems such as 'The Heap of Rags' - and in this sense alone his was the heart of a socialist, if not the mind also.

Other more rogue voices of this period, included in Alan Bold's Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (1970; which will be discussed at length later), was J. Bruce Glasier, the political campaigner and original biographer - at least at the initial planning stage: he died before he could actually write it - of Keir Hardie, whose anthemic 'We'll turn things upside down' echoes much of William Morris's work - whose Socialist League numbered Glasier as a member - and an historical socialist reconnection to the Leveller and Digger tracts and pamphlets of the 1640s/50s, with perennial socialist leitmotifs such as 'Commonweal' (also the title of William Morris's socialist magazine); and of course the title itself, which recalls the broadside ballad The World Turned Upside Down, composed in protest against the Cromwellian suppression of Christmas festivities - Glasier's more broadly socialist rendering is very much a poem-song:

O, the world is overburdened
With the idle and the rich!
They bask up in the sunshine
While we plod in the ditch;
But zounds! we'll put some mettle
In their fingers and their thumbs
For we'll turn things upside down my, my lads,
When the Revolution comes! ...

Plain virtue may be wholesome,
And wondrous virtues may
Abound beneath ribs scant of flesh
And pockets scant of pay.
It may be poverty is best
If rightly understood;
But we'll turn things upside down, my lads!
We don't want all the good!



Sea-Change: Georgians in Khaki

Another Georgian era voice who is often overlooked by the leftist reader was John Masefield, who, although the second-longest serving Poet Laureate, was, we must remember, selected by the first Labour Prime Minister, James Ramsay-MacDonald (and prior to his famous volte-face on his party by forming a government with mainly Tories, when he was still more socially idealistic during his first premiership); undoubtedly there was a political dynamic behind this unusual choice when Rudyard Kipling was staring him in the face as the most obvious contender. Masefield also came from relatively humble origins compared to the proverbial establishment poet, hailing from a fairly average middle-class family, then embarking on a short-lived merchant navy career, and afterwards skidding down the class ladder somewhat, ending up as an autodidact bookworm surviving by working in a New York carpet factory. It was only after returning to England and marrying a classically educated teacher who helped him nurture his writing, that Masefield broke in to literary society with his best-selling Salt-Water Ballads; an Oxford Honorary Doctorate, and other honours, followed; softening the path for Ramsay MacDonald to reasonably recommend a more humbly stationed poet for Laureate in 1930. And Masefield certainly didn't let MacDonald down in his new and more progressive take on the office: there is much more in the poetry of Masefield than simply the saline ballads such as 'Sea Fever', he also wrote extensively on less obviously populist, more socially engaged, subjects, which however helped to make him the most popular Laureate up to that point, very much the laurel-wreathed People's Poet to WH Davies's de facto status as such. 'Cargoes' is a vivid lyric portraying British trade exports as rather shabby offerings compared to the exotic spices of other climates:

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

'Hell's Pavement' illustrates the seamier washed-up side to demobbed navies in Civvie Street:

He shipped a week later in the clothes upon his back;
He had to pinch a little straw, he had to beg a sack
To sleep on, when his watch was through

What's most striking about some of these poems is not so much than in themselves they are particularly political, but more that such socially engaged pieces should be penned by the then incumbent Laureate, sending signals through the society of the time that certainly, in many ways, and as Edward VIII once flippantly put it, 'we are all socialists now'; in terms of the cultural trickle-down effect, Masefield used his prestigious literary position as a vehicle to highlight the lives and privations of ordinary people, and in many cases, those of the times' underclass, in a subtly didactic sense that frequently disguised itself in the clothes of picaresque mock-Kipling balladry; but an inclination which might justly be cited as socialistic.

I'm inclined in the context of this article to skip past the archetypal Georgians such as Rupert Brooke, AE Housman, Robert Graves (a philosophical rather than political poet) and Edward Thomas - the latter's rather quaintly English, pastel-like verse is hardly the stuff of social poetry on any particular level anyhow (though aphoristically it has its lasting moments), and is also in many ways a clear distant influence on the post-modern lapse back into rather tame and prosaic light verse (no surprise that one of Thomas's chief modern day champions is the ex-Laureate Andrew Motion). It is tragic though, as it is slightly jarring given his actual poetry's lack of real engagement with the horrors of the Great War, that Thomas was to be one of its numerous recorded 'poet-casualties'.

Siegfried Sassoon, on the other hand, an accomplished Georgian before entering the First World War, underwent a swift and bitter metamorphosis into an angry humanitarian poet on seeing at first hand the unconscionable mass slaughter that a whole generation of young men were brought to due to an obscure familial dispute among the monarchies of Europe. This radicalised Sassoon both as a poet and as an individual, and his outspokenness against the futility of the War was no doubt the real reason for his temporary incarceration at Craiglockhart, under the euphemism of 'shell shock'; but in effect he was being rehabilitated for being a potentially rabble-rousing agitator of a similar timbre as John Lilburne's Leveller indignations whilst still serving in Cromwell's New Model Army back in the late 1640s. Sassoon then can certainly be seen as a war-grown poet radical, and poems such as 'Attack' and 'Counter-Attack' mark him out as a major anti-war voice, in many ways an example of how Edward Thomas's poetry might have developed had he lived to endure more of the War, assimilated and written on it.

If Sassoon was the Thomas of the trenches, the Wilfred Owen was the 'khaki' Keats, whose striking marriage of Keatsian sonnet-form with the lurid imagery of the mass slaughter, ensured his posterity and greatness, strongly influenced by though marginally superior to his friend and mentor Sassoon. Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori' is rather like an anti-rallying cry, khaki equivalent to Shelley's 'Mask of Anarchy', albeit a more despairing and harrowing piece of gory realism to the latter's Romantic remonstrance against the status quo. But arguably Owen's greatest poem is 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', whose hauntingly subversive title alone stamps it on the mind, along with its beautiful juxtaposition of Keatsian form with apocalyptic motifs; a bullet-splattered threnody. One has the distinct impression that had Owen survived the Great War, he would have instinctively drifted into domestic social and political themes, as his poem 'Disabled' - detailing a war-wounded, shell-shocked veteran in pre-Welfare State society - tantalisingly hints at in its gritty social realism:

He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had smothered them from him. ...

Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.
Only a solemn man who brought him fruits
Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul.
Now, he will spend a few sick years in Institutes,
And do what things the rules consider wise,
And take whatever pity they may dole.

Isaac Rosenberg, from a lower-middle class East End Jewish background was also among the greats of the War I poets, arguably a sharper imagist than his peers, and a beguiling lyricist, such as in poems like 'Louse-Hunting' - of half-Jewish stock, he also subtly tackled anti-Semitic themes; Ivor Gurney, also a composer, was a significant voice in realist War poetry, who survived the experience but tragically ended his days in poverty and obscurity. A far lesser known WWI veteran voice was John Corrie, a miner by trade, turned poet and dramatist in later life, who wrote some highly memorable political epigrams from a working-class (-conscious) perspective, as these excerpts testify:

'Eat more fruit!' the slogans say,
'More fish, more beef, more bread!'
But I'm on Unemployment pay
My third year now, and wed.
('Eat More')

How few there are with unsoiled hands,
And educated tongues,
Who'll stand by us, my working friends,
And help to right our wrongs.
('How few there are...')

It's hardly surprising that with the outbreak of the War in 1914, one of the early modernists, Wyndham-Lewis, should title the new emerging avant-garde poetry manifesto, BLAST. A blast it was, and one which would reverberate through the next two decades, dragging both American and English poetry out from the other end of the War into a period of aesthetic radicalism, during which traditional verse forms, tones and postures were ploughed up and turned on their heads, resulting in a new and entirely contemporary brand of poetry that was as revitalising as it was nihilistic, obscure and politically suspect. Excuse the correctness of the latter phrase, but the latent Nietzscheism of the Imagists, Symbolists and Modernists, their bacchanalian affirmation of the pre-Christian virtues of the flesh, physical might and prowess, even violence, leant itself disturbingly to the emerging power-ideologies of the Twenties and Thirties, until ultimately most of its prominent exponents - Eliot, Wyndham-Lewis, Ezra Pound, and to some extent, DH Lawrence - were unabashed sympathisers of nascent Fascism.

But it would be specious to classify these poets as political, or even radical, since in the main, their actual literary output was less concerned with politics as it was with more ancient-inspired philosophical dialectics, more Nietzsche than Hitler. Eliot, a master of metrical blank verse, aphorism and almost uniquely cadent prose-poetry, was above all a technical poet, a brilliant craftsman and sublime observer of the nihilistic post-War human condition, and seemingly no subject or style was beyond his abilities, as the sheer topical and technical variety on display in The Wasteland demonstrates - this poetic and stylistic tour de force was a seminal moment for the new Modernism, an excoriating obituary for an indelibly scarred post-War Europe, almost a suicide note for a morally gutted Western civilization, its apocalyptic, frequently obfuscating fragmentation of tone and style on the page was entirely revolutionary. But ultimately The Wasteland remains more a philosophical, even nihilistic, statement, than a political one (at least not in any ideological sense). 'The Hollow Men' is in a similar vein, and conceivably on one level, a polemic on the moral anarchy of capitalist society with its dehumanised scarecrow men stuffed with straw 'leaning together'. Arguably Eliot's most profoundly observed statement on the unbearable pressure on the human being to disguise its inner-turmoil behind a polite civilised veneer, is one of his earliest compositions, 'Prufrock' (1917). For the purposes of this essay however, it is necessary to depart promptly from the early Modernist canon, since it is more a philosophical than political poetic aesthetic in the main, albeit one with some striking digressions into social observation.

The understandable lapse into flapper-and-Charleston frivolity of the Twenties inevitably affected the literature and poetry of the period (bar Eliot, whose work stood with stark austerity against its frivolous backdrop), either pushing the more saturnine towards the obscurities of Modernism and the avant-garde, or, in the case of those on the other side of the social fence, still every bit as harsh and squalid as ever it had been; but the darkening skies of a Europe threatened by the a new vicious spectre, Fascism, would jolt the British poetry scene and its ancient university seats awake with a sharp intake of didactic political breath.



The Tub-Thumping Thirties: Silver-Spoon Socialists

As British poetry entered the increasingly politically turbulent Thirties, mainstream verse refreshingly embraced very much a left-wing aesthetic in reaction to the new wave of Fascist bigotry slowly darkening the continent; and most particularly, in relation to the vicissitude of the Spanish Civil War, triggered by a Fascist-aristocratic elite attempting a coup de tat against a democratic Republican government. For once, a nation's rebellion was no one born from a collective sense of social injustice, but from a better-equipped minority who sought to throw a progressive society back into the feudal dark ages. Little surprise that many men of letters, of an instinctively left-wing disposition, should have taken up both pens and arms in the fight against a threat of right-wing tyranny and dogma, and what was the first true battleground between the ideologies of the Left and the Right that the world had yet witnessed in such unambiguous demarcation; something of a modern day democratic secular Crusade against an outmoded, feudalistic Infidel. The unprecedentedly ideological character of the war in Spain saw something far different to the mass tropism of enlistment during the politically foggier First World War - which, if initially patriotically driven, later, was almost entirely an obligation, than politically spontaneous: a wave of young, mixed-class, chiefly left-wing Englishmen volunteering to fight on a foreign front, without any national obligation to do so; far from it in fact, since the British National Governments of the time - both under Conservative premiers, Stanley Baldwin, then Neville Chamberlain - were intransigent in their short-sighted non-interventionism.

Having since the mid Twenties risen to something of a pedagogic stature among his fellow 'left-wing' Oxford poet peers, it was hardly surprising that W.H. Auden should have gone on to pen one of the most widely read poems on the Spanish Civil War, 'Spain'; it's a work he later dismissed as dishonestly ideological, but in spite of partisan rhetoric, it is of value at the very least in that it was a partly empirical poem, Auden having volunteered- initially as an Ambulance driver, though apparently he ended up broadcasting for the Republicans instead - along with his contemporaries Stephen Spender, John Cornford, Christopher Caudwell, Robert Graves, mainly in the International Brigades (in battalions rather like the Artists' Rifles of WW1). There is, in spite of any accusations of silver-spoon 'socialism', or in some cases, 'champagne communism', something unimpeachably admirable about a young generation of left-wing literati at the outset of their careers, trooping out to a Spanish warzone to crusade in arms - as opposed to simply the sloganeering of the pen - to defend a socialist Republic against a Fascist military machine. It's easy today for cynics to simplify this voluntary engagement with an ideological conflict on the continent as naive - but then isn't 'naivety' a tag perennially pinned on anyone who argues in any principled (as opposed to pragmatic) way for a left-wing agenda? The fact remains that, while there was a detectable element of bookish, even quixotic abstractedness to the impulses of these young Oxbridge men of the pen rushing to volunteer in the International Brigades (echoing the Romantic impulse of Byron volunteering to fight in the Greek War of Independence), they at least made a heroic gesture in the cause of their ideals, which, no matter how theoretically rooted, were soon to have any spire-dreaming pretentions battery-blasted out of them, the reality of combat testing their principles to the limit. To take up arms in the cause of one's ideals, no matter how callow or gauche in origin, is unequivocally commendable, and if it was not entirely, or even that much, in their actual poetry that this generation of University voices fit the radical social-political canon of English verse, then it is absolutely implicit in their actions - and in the cases of Cornford and Caudwell, literal self-sacrifices.

Christopher St. John Sprigg (aka Caudwell) was one of the most promising voices to be silenced in the Spanish conflict, aged only 30, but already a highly accomplished Marxist literary scholar (his precociously erudite Illusion and Reality is now widely regarded as a classic leftist dialectical text). While he wrote some memorably disillusioned poems about his experiences on the Spanish front, such as the excellent 'The Firing Party', the potential scale of his wasted poetic talent is hinted at in his distinctively imaginative, metaphysical polemic, 'The Kingdom of Heaven', which reads almost like a nascent, more political Eliot-in-the-making:

I walked down a long, tiled corridor.
There were notices on the walls.
WHITE TIES PLEASE. NO NIGGERS. PLAY THE GAME.
DO NOT SPIT.

THIS WAS TO THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.

I went down the long tiled corridor
And at the end someone clattered lift gates.

GOING UP!

I preferred to walk and went up the stairs.

I rapped on the office door and asked for God.
The manager was bald and apologetic.
The manager told me God was out.

I walked back down the stairs, down the corridor.
There are offices it seems across the way.
He may be in there.

PLEASE USE THE SUBWAY.

I used the subway. I am still walking.
I have met many of my friends. Some of them are dead.
The place is well-organised. The commissionaires
Are civil, and put their harps aside
When one speaks to them.

Once there were animals here; insects even;
But they grew tired. They went out to play.
The curiosity of men seems endless.

Even I am too curious to blow my brains out.
I will go on walking although I know it is useless -
I heard the manager muttering in his sleep.

"If they find God the place will have to close.
That is why I tell them God is only Out.
Don't tell the boys God'll never be In."

Whether this poem was intended as a polemic against the bureaucracy of war, the unaccountability of politicians and the military, or the internecine feuds within the Republican cause, Stalin's ubiquitous but invisible propaganda war on the POUM, or, obversely, a satire on social hierarchy in capitalist society, is not entirely clear; it may perhaps be more a Marxist-atheist dialectic on 'God' as a human-constructed smokescreen for unaccountability, an anthropomorphic obfuscation for mortal responsibilities. Whatever the subtext - and there inevitably is one given who wrote it - this poem demonstrates a unique imagination flexing its still-developing poetic muscles.

Rupert John Cornford wrote grittily yet plaintively of the Spanish Civil War, as in his empirical poem 'Full moon at Tierz: Before the Storming of Huesca', which includes these engaging stanzas from its third and fourth sections:

Though Communism was my waking time,
Always before the lights of home
Shone clear and steady and full in view -
Here, if you fall, there's help for you -
Now, with my Party, I stand quite alone.

Then let my private battle with my nerves,
The fear of pain whose pain survives,
The love that tears me by the roots,
The loneliness that claws my guts,
Fuse in the welded front our fight preserves. ...

England is silent under the same moon,
From the Clydeside to the gutted pits of Wales.
The innocent mask conceals that soon
Here, too, our freedom's swaying in the scales.
O understand before too late
Freedom was never held without a fight.

Here there is detectably a domestic social conscience at work, a sense of solidarity - through the levelling of active service, never more emphatic than under the Communist banner of the International Brigades - with the working classes invoked in the line 'Clydeside to the gutted pits of Wales'; there are also political leitmotifs and metaphors, not simply bald terms such as 'Party' (though the concept of an actual political party operating as a literal army is a fascinating one, all the more for its historical reality), but subtler tropes such as 'welded front', which evokes the figurative image of socialism as a metallurgy of all men, singularly smelting all classes into one through a common cause. Cornford was a more subtle political poet than his work might ostensibly suggest.

However, for more focus on the of the internecine feuds of the Republican side, split ultimately as it was by factionalism between the POUM and the Kremlin-directed, Communist International Brigade, which he helped to set up, Tom Wintringham (brought to a new audience through the publication of his Collected Poems, We're Going On, ed. Hugh Purcell, Smokestack, 2006) contributed a more dialectical oeuvre, which charts his metamorphosis from committed Communist to eventual dissenter, and founder of the short-lived Commonwealth Party. Poems such as 'International Brigades', begin to betray a steady disillusion with the realities of the anti-Fascist battle in Spain, though ostensibly at this stage directed towards the non-interventionist policy of the British government:

Men are so tired, running fingers down football tables
Or the ticker-tape, or standing still,
Unemployed, hating street-corners, unable
--Earth-damned, famine-forced, worn grey with worklessness -
To remember manhood or marching, a song or a parable...
...

While the free men of Europe
Pile into Madrid.
The staff, corduroy-trousered, discuss when Franco will use it:
...

How many gas-masks by then?
Will Europe, will England, will you 'have given the gas-masks'
For the free men of Europe
Entrenched in Madrid?

Estado Mayor, Brigada Internacional,
28 November, 1936

Wintringham could be barbed towards the more theoretical communists of his day, as in poem 'Speaking Correctly', subtitled A Reply to C Day Lewis:

Marx for your map, Lenin theodolite -
This is a thing Smolny's October shewed -
Crag-contour pioneered, valley and peak's height
Known: all is ready? No, steel wire must be
Inseparable from concrete, you from me,
We from the durable millions. Then there's a road!

Another voice openly critical of, even occasionally excoriating towards the Oxford 'quadrangle-Communists', was the highly gifted Scottish Nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid (real name Christopher Murray Grieve), who penned a contentious epitaph to the Auden-Day Lewis set, 'British leftish poetry, 1930-1940':

Auden, MacNiece, Day Lewis, I have read them all,
Hoping against hope to hear the authentic call...
And know the explanation I must pass is this
- You cannot light a match on a crumbling wall.

This is quoted by Alan Bold in his Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (1970), following his interesting dialectical remarks on the Oxbridge 'leftish' British poetry community of that time, confessing his own suspicion that

...much of the poetry of the period displayed its political imagery like a trophy brought back from another country. For its impact it depended on the middle-class capacity to absorb shock. It charmed the class it pretended to eliminate.

The class-demarcation between politicised poets of the period is bitingly pitched in MacDiarmid's 'Third hymn to Lenin', which betrays a slightly unattractive whiff of inverted snobbery, though still puts an important point across, its last line a little ambiguous:

Michael Roberts and All Angels! Auden, Spender, those bhoyos, All yellow twicers: not one of them With a tithe of Carlile's courage and integrity. Unlike these pseudo I am of - not for - the working class.

Again, the timeless internecine dialectic of the Left emerges, and in this context, rather a domestic parallel to the ideological and strategic entropy that ravaged the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, resulting in its devastating defeat.

But though MacDiarmid has a valid point to make, it would be churlish not to concede that, at least by virtue of their hands-on - in the case of Spain - grappling with the political conflicts of the period, WH Auden and Stephen Spender earned the right to be taken more seriously as political poets of their period than their less empirically intrepid peers. Spender, often charged with the epithet of 'Pylon poet', was something of a polymath, a critic and poet, who frequently dealt with the contentious social issues of the times in much of his work; his was a kind of poetic reportage (and in that, a verse parallel to the social fiction and journalism of his contemporary George Orwell), and in one exceptionally poignant poem, 'Ultima Ratio Regum', he expertly fuses the inequalities of domestic England with the harsh realities of the Spanish front, in something of a socialist-inflected tribute to one of many anonymous working-class volunteers who, unlike the poet himself, had only social drudgery and unemployment to return to afterwards, but who, almost inevitably, dies in action against the Fascists:

The guns spell money's ultimate reason
In letters of lead on the spring hillside.
But the boy lying dead under the olive trees
Was too young and too silly
To have been notable to their important eye.
He was a better target for a kiss.

When he lived, tall factory hooters never summoned him.
Nor did restaurant plate-glass doors revolve to wave him in.
His name never appeared in the papers.
The world maintained its traditional wall
Round the dead with their gold sunk deep as a well,
Whilst his life, intangible as a Stock Exchange rumour, drifted outside.

O too lightly he threw down his cap
One day when the breeze threw petals from the trees.
The unflowering wall sprouted with guns,
Machine-gun anger quickly scythed the grasses;
Flags and leaves fell from hands and branches;
The tweed cap rotted in the nettles.

Consider his life which was valueless
In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.
Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive tree, O world, O death?

A poem such as this, to my mind, marks Spender out as a remarkable voice, especially in his marriage of stunning figurative imagery ('unflowering wall sprouting with guns') with lingering social motifs snagging on exceptionally phrased tropes ('The tweed cap rotted in the nettles'), inspired juxtapositions (unemployment/military enlistment), and sheer compassion of tone. And this is no one-off: Spender wrote quite extensively on themes of social division, and in educational terms too, as in the superb 'An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum', that talks with socialist eloquence about slum schoolchildren cramped in classes of 'sour cream walls' adorned with 'donations' of hand-me-down didacticism, blanched maps and Shakespeare busts, the poet appealing in a Blakeian spirit 'let their tongues/ Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open'. 'The Labourer in the Vineyard' is an equally powerful metaphorical piece, the sun-burnished vine worker pictured as a Greek sculpture, 'His tanned trousers form a pedestal', and culminating on the sublime symbolism of the stunted self-realisation of this class-victim: 'Flesh filled with statue, as the grape with wine'. From examples as these, I would go as far to say that a poem such as this moves me far more than anything I have ever read by Auden, whose stateliness of rhetorical tone, didactic pomp and high formalism of style too frequently echo with a classical hollowness to convince on an emotional level; but in whose shadow, nevertheless, Spender is placed posthumously.

This is not to say that Auden of course never delivered the goods in poetry - that would be like dismissing WB Yeats for being too mystical - and he did, in some brilliantly crafted pieces; but for me, Auden's strengths as a poet were more when he was writing from personal experience, as in 'Funeral Blues' (a true foreshadower of Philip Larkin's oeuvre, though he couldn't have been more politically different and un-idealistic if he'd tried). But on a social level, Auden, for me, has never really convinced; his is more an ideological didacticism than an earthy engagement with the grittier realities of class inequality, and to my mind Spender, in this regard specifically, is the superior poet. Both, of course, are political poets, employing different means and methodologies to enshrine their observations and principles in verse. Auden ultimately is seen as the prime voice of the Thirties, but this is arguably more as a result of his prolific scope and output, his vast range of subjects and styles, and certain latent authority of tone that demands to be listened to.

The unlikely communist poet C Day Lewis, another of the Oxford political poets though one more prone to the Audenesque abstracted approach than to the more humbled empiricism of Spender, did on occasions, as in certain sections of the Eliotonian epic The magnetic mountain, excel in true socialist sentiment allied with some stand-bearing aphorisms:

They that take the bribe shall perish by the bribe,
Dying of dry rot, ending in asylums,
A curse to children, a charge on the state.
But still their fears and frenzies infect us;
Drug nor isolation will cure this cancer:
It is now or never, the hour of the knife,
The break with the past, the major operation.
(32)

This is an especially incisive piece of polemic in its implication of a social aetiology for mental illness, three decades before such breakthroughs as RD Laing's Politics of Experience. Some of the metaphorical imagery, 'cancer', 'knife', 'major operation', are darkly ambiguous, either projecting forward to a Welfare State-style transformative social planning, or more sinisterly echoing the by-then discredited, twisted socialist flirtation with theories of social eugenicists as Fabians such as HG Wells and Aldous Huxley, and of course less guiltily considered by more right-wing Social-Credit converts, even Malthusians, such as TS Eliot.

Later in his career, Day Lewis could be seen to have compromised considerably both in style and personal politics, eventually becoming Laureate after Masefield; but as even before this taking up of the establishment mantle, radicalised commentators such as Geoffrey Grigson in New Verse lambasted Day Lewis for something even as subtle as becoming one of the selectors for the Book Society, an organisation he impeached as a 'Limited Company pimping to the mass bourgeois mind and employing 'distinguished' members of the literary underworld, adopters of literature as a profession, writers each of no more real existence than a tick lost in the last five minutes of a cuckoo clock. ...

Think of Hardy, Yeats, Housman, Flecker, Pound, Lawrence, Eliot, Graves, Auden, Spender, Madge - could one have gone so treasonably against what is real?

It's almost impossible to imagine any leading poetry commentators of today speaking out with such vitriol as to the transparent opportunism and betrayal of the common cause of more principled poetics with regards one of their number's taking up a position at the PBS; indeed, in the achingly conformist mainstream literary scene of today, far from any established coteries and committees being perceived as implicitly suspect and self-servingly hyperbolic towards certain networks of conventionally channelled poetics, any open criticisms of them are leapt on with accusations of 'poetry of envy' or 'chippiness' of the less 'successful', and any individuals caught haranguing the aesthetic status quo and its promotional machines are instantly outcast as mavericks or eccentrics. This appalling lack of dialect in contemporary poetry is indicative of the so-called progressively centrist 'consensus' in post-New Labour society in general, where modicums of token lip-service are paid to issues of equal opportunities while the same old tired discriminations are still implicitly in place; and worse still, entire poetry communities are tacitly ignored and side-lined to the margins of small presses and fringe journals. Interestingly, such radicalised criticisms of poetic convention of the period were as barbed against overly didactic traditional verse forms as they were against the pretentions of aspects of the avant-garde (andin many ways the Auden school's consciously formalistic counter-poetics was in a similar vein to the Rhymers' Club putsch against the mainstream courtly pomp of their time) - as Robin Skelton says in his Introduction to the Penguin Poetry of the Thirties:

One of the things which made New Verse so emphatically the magazine of the period was its radical distrust of anything worn out, evasive, shoddy, or meretricious, and its gay pillorying of those it felt to be pedlars of any kind of kitsch.

Ostensibly, this would seem to cover a wide range of styles, but what seemed to be the main animus here was one specifically directed towards any form of hortatory loftiness or posturing, no matter the style; and most particularly of all, an innate scepticism, even derision, regarding one-upmanship and naked careerism, especially among poets who had started out idealistically, and who thus were immediately culpable of moral hypocrisy once they were seen to cross over to the establishment. The attitude of the intrinsically anti-establishment, rampantly left-wing Thirties in England was indeed almost the diametric opposite to today's highly conformist, academically stratified and heavily policed mainstream poetry scene, in which very few practising poets - except a few small fringe radical dialectical groups who are mostly ignored - ever publicly challenge the prize-driven pecking order, but tend in the main to feign delight at jealously eyed peers who get most of the chicken-feed in the hope that their pretence of humility might ease the way towards their own future canonisation; or at the very least, certainly protect them against the tacit blacklisting meted out to those small number of poets who actually voice openly what the majority are really thinking.

There is little doubt that the Thirties marked probably the high watermark of English political poetry, in so far as it has ever so ubiquitously penetrated the mainstream scene - partly radicalised by the absurd slaughter of the First World War, and then again by the more transparently ideological war in Spain, the decade was indelibly coloured by progressive political ideas, that in the main the poets of the day whole-heartedly embraced, including, detectably, the most socially engaged Laureate of all, John Masefield. There was an almost gushing abundance of left-wing voices at this time - the Oxford-grown Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, Louis MacNiece, Edgell Rickword, Randall Swingler, active Communist and International Brigade veteran Tom Wintringham, and the more polymath Cambridge brigade of the doomed poets John Cornford and Communist proselytiser and polemicist Christopher Caudwell, and Michael Roberts (who eloquently and movingly explained his own form of socialism in the Introduction to the anthology New Country, 1933). Left-wing politics seemed indeed an implicit part of the poetry of the poetic aesthetic of those graduating from the ancient Universities, but its trickle-down effect in wider literary society also touched poets of less academic backgrounds, such as Clifford Dyment.

The political consciousness and energies of this decade that permeated the poetry scene, even to some extent coloured aspects to the music hall tradition. The rhyming verse in the guise of vaudeville song and even plain spoken word, was a medium in the Thirties employed by especially working-class entertainers, invariably to get a political or dialectical point across, through humour - though of course, never a truer word said than in jest. In some ways, and before the emergence of the first page- autodidact working-class voices who braved the uncharted waters of the printed word, the British proletariat's medium of vocal polemic was mainly through the songs of the music hall - in some senses a projection to the 20th century's emerging song-lyric culture, where working-class voices vented themselves through the more levelled medium of popular music; equally, an early blueprint for the poetry Spoken Word trend of the Sixties onwards. In many ways, these stage-strutting Cockney mountebanks were the working-class riposte to the likes of Kipling and his Cockney-mimicry, and Masefield's song-like verse. One interesting example of this new genre of stand-up poetry, was the subtly subversive Billy Bennett, who subtitled himself as 'Almost a Gentleman', famous for his portly figure and walrus moustache. Here are some excerpts from his wittily polemical songs:

I've just been elected to Parliament,
At Westminster I'm the big cheese,
I'm also a Knight of the Garter, it's right
In fact, I've got one on both knees.

'What do we need to unite us?' I cried,
Then a voice like a bolt from the blue
Shouted 'Social Reform, Party Reform,
And a good dose of chloroform, too.'
('The Member of Parliament')

Rum-ti-tum, rum-ti-tum, hear the beat of the kettledrum.
The army into a man will quickly mould yer.
"Cure or break, I will make a man of you," said Sergeant Blake.
"D'ye think I'm a lady, for goodness sake?"
Said Barracky Bert the Soldier.
('Barracky Bert the Soldier')

Other polemical popular songs of Bennett's included 'The Poor Hard-Working Man', 'The Dampoor Express', and 'She Was Poor But She Was Honest', which included the immortal verse, written by West & Lee:

It's the same the whole world over,
It's the poor what gets the blame,
It's the rich what gets the pleasure,
Isn't it a blooming shame?
('She Was Poor But She Was Honest', Weston & Lee)

There were, of course, some dissenters from the political colours of the times; one such, the South African poet Roy Campbell, technically brilliant, was regrettably a vocal supporter of the Spanish Fascists. Simultaneous to the expansion of left-wing political poetry in the Thirties, were Modernist voices such as the painterly David Jones; ex-pats and globetrotters including DH Lawrence, Laurence Durrell and Bernard Spencer; and the new emerging Surrealist and Symbolist school, largely continentally influenced, stylistically radical, while politically more ambiguous, including such influential alumni as George Barker, David Gascoyne, Edith Sitwell, Ruthven Todd and William Empson.

But arguably the only Modernist poet of this time to merge stylistic and linguistic experimentalism with detectably political subtext, was the distinctly individual Marxist-socialist Scottish poet Joseph MacLeod, whose prolific and highly ambitious oeuvre is only now in the 21st century beginning to be meet with a more consolidating critical recognition, through a recent Selected Poems published by Waterloo Press and edited and introduced by poet Andrew Duncan, which is much in demand and has received deserved coverage in the literary supplements, particularly in a comprehensive feature by Macleod-scholar and poet James Fountain in the TLS (an article which is in itself a brilliant overview of Macleod's life and work). MacLeod, also an actor, playwright and film scriptwriter, achieved early success as a poet with the publication - through Ezra Pound's recommendation - by TS Eliot's Faber of his debut zodiacal collection, The Ecliptic (1930) when he was 27. In spite of this prestigious debut, MacLeod's second collection, Foray of Centaurs, was considered 'too Greek', too esoteric even for TS Eliot's imprint; and although MacLeod's name then fell off the map of British poetry to some degree, he continued producing ever more ambitious poetry throughout his life, later experimenting by merging into the medium other literary genres he practised in, such as film scriptwriting, as in his surreal voice-poem Script from Norway (1953), which drew ingeniously on the amorphous commonality in dialect and dialectic of the Gaelic and Nordic languages and cultures. But MacLeod's most politically fascinating work was arguably The Men of the Rocks (1942), a sublimely metaphorical meditation on the Highland Clearances. MacLeod's tendency towards obscure, sometimes obfuscating diction and syntax undoubtedly denied him the wider audience his work deserved, and which his didactics and dialectics demanded; debatably then a flaw, but his oeuvre, now disinterred for posthumous reassessment, will likely have a lasting influence, in spite of its 'difficultness', as an imperfect but courageous effort to communicate the more macro-centric themes that concern us all through a beguiling though often hampering stylistic experimentalism, and, just as ambitiously, a recourse to provincial histories and dialects.



The Torching Forties

This leads us - or has already led us - finally into the Forties, because it is arguably towards the end of that decade that British mainstream poetry began to veer towards a new more conservative aesthetic, from which we might now trace - with the possible exception of the Poetry Revival of the Sixties, and certainly that of the politically engaged poetry of Christopher Logue, cue his poster-style polemic intoning mantras such as 'SMASH CAPITAL NOW' in his poem 'Know Thy Enemy' - the roots of the reductionist and deconstructionist post-modern poetry scene we have had over the past three decades, and whose seemingly impregnable dogma was arguably finally sealed and packaged for the long course in the materialist revolution of the Thatcher years (with great irony, a politically declining trend which seemed to set in at the tail-end of the vital social revolution of the 1945-51 Labour administration).

With the outbreak of a Second World War, the Audenites who had volunteered in Spain and waxed dialectically in their verse then and since, finally ashamed by Britain's avoidance of involvement - and more particularly, of the non-interventionist stance of a large portion of the left-wing Labour Party - began to defragment somewhat, the ever-vigilant New Verse pillorying Auden for absconding to America, and Day Lewis for accepting the Laureateship; and filling this gap while the next generation of war poets mustered their energies towards a new khaki verse aesthetic, the New Romantics, chiefly made up of non-University autodidacts, such as polytechnic-educated George Barker, Dylan Thomas (in some ways the verbal inheritor of Manley Hopkins), Henry Treece and Vernon Watkins, began to focus away from the macrocosmic politics of the Auden school, returning to the domestic microcosm of the Georgians, regional and parochial identities, leitmotifs and histories.

Only Barker and Thomas transcended such ostensible limitations through their ambition of scope in style and medium - Dylan of course working even more extensively in the medium of voice and radio broadcasting than Auden before him, his masterpiece Under Milk Wood being a far more verbally thorough exploitation of the medium than Auden's galloping inventory, Night Mail). But, apart from some poems influenced by the Spanish Civil War by Barker, and one or two socially engaged shorter poems by Thomas such as 'The hand that signed the paper', it would be specious to classify either as political poets. Far less so still those of the new Regionalism, such as RS Thomas and the accomplished though faintly Georgian voice of Norman Nicholson - in many ways, these latter two poets can be seen, albeit outsiders of their time, as the harbingers of the post-modern countrified versifiers who have risen to notice - and questionable acclaim - in the first decade of the 21st century.

But this move towards what we understand broadly as 'mainstream' today, was also partly paved in more urban, or specifically, suburban quarters, of the likes of John Betjeman (arguably the most popular Laureate of them all), and Philip Larkin, both fundamentally conservative-reactionaries against the post-War Planners and modernisers, both anti-progressive, wilfully nostalgic for the steam-engine and doilied tea-rooms of their respective boyhood Englands. While Larkin was probably one of the most consummate technical voices of the late 20th century, a precise and clipped voice but always one brimming with an infectious hint of desperation ('Aubade'), and a canny dialectical eye, albeit reactionary, even prudish, regarding the frenetic social changes of the 60s ('Annus Mirabilis'), he was almost instinctively an anti-political poet. So too Betjeman, unless one could count witty ditties like 'Slough' or prosaic tropes detailing the homes of the working classes as smelling of 'prams and Irish stew' as anything approaching the grit of social poetry; in spite of shortcomings however, Betjeman was a consummate craftsman of light verse, and on occasion, some surprisingly darker poems such as the exceptional death-meditations such as 'N.W.5 & N.6', in some ways a companion piece to Larkin's same-themed masterpiece, 'Aubade'.

But Larkin and his fellow Movement poets did pave the way for the more socially-engaged Group, which included the brilliantly epigrammatic Martin Bell, and the Gregory Fellow lineage which incorporated in its canon a score of exceptionally accomplished and socially engaged voices such as Thomas Blackburn, James Kirkup, David Wright, Peter Redgrove, Kevin Crossley-Holland et al (recently enshrined in an excellent anthology from Sixties Press, imprint of one of their true poetic inheritors, Barry Tebb). In some ways a more idiosyncratic and quirky, female riposte to the Betjeman-Larkin nostalgic-maverick line, was the inimitable Stevie Smith, a sort of witch of the antimacassars in verse, a sardonic commentator on suburban mores, but, in spite of some polemical poems on the absurdities of polite society, in any ideological sense, distinctly apolitical.

The Second World War produced a brutally truncated quartet of extremely gifted poets, all of whom were killed in action, three of whom were Oxford graduates - Keith Douglas, Sidney Keyes and Drummond Allison - and one of whom hailed from a less salubrious background, the Redbrick-educated Welsh poet Alun Lewis. Though none could be categorised in any specific sense as political poets, their voices were inevitably radicalised, at least on humanitarian grounds, through their first hand experiences of military conflict. Douglas's oeuvre is marked by a distinctly modernist, almost nihilistic tone and sharply aphorismic style, exceptionally imagistic at times, and in itself a deeply philosophical empirical reportage of the realities of war and the absurdities of militarism. But, to my mind, the more emotionally-charged, though equally philosophical, but less stylistically cerebral Alun Lewis was the Owen to Douglas's Sassoon.

A sometimes breathtakingly lyrical voice, Lewis owed much to his Welsh roots, and was in many ways a less indulgent, more spiritual progenitor to Dylan Thomas; his brilliant observational work on his experiences during the Second World War, its vivid humidity and tortured nihilism that almost sweats on the page along with the tropical war-torn jungles it describes, like Douglas, takes a rather introjecting philosophical approach to the subject of war; a chillingly compelling expression of how the individual is depersonalised, even disembodied from himself in the process of automatically following orders and necessarily acting against all formative moralities. His war poems also betray more than a hint of contempt for the chattering classes back home, the establishment and its media that beats the drum for others to march to, with more than a hint of Tressellian ragged-trousered dialectic:

And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities
Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees;
('All Day It Has Rained', Raiders' Dawn)

And;

Stiff-backed and parrot-wise with pamphlet learning,
We officiated at the slaughter of the riverine peoples
In butcheries beyond the scope of our pamphlets.
('From A Play', Raiders' Dawn)

But his poems written about the environment of his upbringing show more of a social inclination, as in 'The Mountain over Aberdare', which reads almost like a social-realist precursor to Under Milk Wood:

Our stubborn bankrupt village sprawled
In jaded dusk beneath its nameless hills;
The drab streets strung across the cwm,
Derelict workings, tips of slag
The gospellers and gamblers use
And children scrutting for the coal
That winter dole cannot purvey;
Allotments where the collier digs
While engines hack the coal within his brain;
Grey Hebron in a rigid cramp,
White cheap-jack cinema, the church
Stretched like a sow beside the stream...

Though my main purpose in this article is to try and shed light on some the lesser known, obscurer radical and social-political poets in the English canon, just as I try doggedly to also do today on the electronic pages of the Recusant, it is also germane for me to highlight just how much more politically and socially engaged the mainstream poetry of former periods was to the distinctly unengaged - and thus frequently un-engaging - mainstream poetry of today. But mention is essential here of some of the obscurer lineage of political English poets, and these rogue voices have come to my attention by recently reading Alan Bold's 1970 Penguin Book of Socialist Verse - a patchy anthology in its way, with one or two unlikely inclusions, but certainly an absolute must for any scholar of (international) left-wing verse. Bold's thorough-ploughing Introduction is a brilliant dialectic arguing unfashionably but very convincingly for the fundamental social and political function of poetry, the didactic and mnemonic purpose of verse form and rhyme in relaying timelessly relevant themes - such as social inequality - and the crucial oppositional heritage of much poetry, especially in relation to the more oppressive regimes. Bold argues further that poetry which deviates too far from the social and political realities of its time risks future irrelevance (something I've argued myself prior to reading him), and does, in the main, suggest that British, specifically English, poetry has in the main - bar the Thirties - resisted becoming too political:

Many of those who are professionally engaged in reducing poetry to a useful space-filler in periodicals take the view that ... poetry ... in these islands is essentially quiet.

While this might be very true of today's British mainstream - which Bold, writing in 1970, could not project of course - it has not, as he also argues, been the case historically in English poetry; he appropriately quotes from Blake's Milton by way of example. Interestingly, Bold is criticising the poetry mainstream of the Fifties and Sixties for being distinctly less socially and politically engaged than most of the generations before it, which is a view I agree with, and hope have come some way to proving this in this essay. It's also interesting that Edward Lucie-Smith's Introduction to Poetry Since 1945 (also Penguin) is so pedestrian and threadbare compared to Bold's, or Skelton's of the poetry of the Thirties and the Forties, as if it is symbiotically reductionist with much of what it represents in its ensuing pages: the more introspective post-War generations that have largely influenced all those since, and up to today's. It's however germane to mention one of the critical essays relegated oddly to the Appendix of Lucie-Smith's anthology, a polemical comment titled 'The Poetry of Politics' by American-born, expatriate though, England-practising poet Nathaniel Tarn extracted from an article, 'World Wide Open', from the International Times (1968), where the writer differentiates between a true political consciousness in poetry - the dearth of which in British poetry, as a consequence of absorbing the apolitical, more introspective American aesthetic, he despairs of - and the distinctly non-ideological evasions of comment on only single issues, by contemporary English poets:

...by politics I do not mean mere reference to Vietnam or Race, I mean a broad, positive concern for the fate of mankind everywhere in the world and for the relation of man to the natural environment in which he lives: politics of environment framing the politics of community. Here, the little-England poet cannot talk about politics because our politics is grey. If he attempts to deal with external affairs out of that greyness, he is forced to overcompensate with propaganda, and simple-minded rhetoric. Likewise, there is a danger, in an under-politicized situation, that broad-bottomed poets will attempt to sit on every available chair. And yet, in the world we inhabit, a poetry divorced from politics is as unthinkable as man divorced from society. ... The sheer scope, the authority of much of Ginsberg ... are unthinkable among us [the English]. There is a situation in which almost anything can be made into poetry, in which poetic courage can apply itself to almost any issue, personal or collective, and come up with an adequate answer. This is light years from our [the British's] own mournful mouthings over pints of beer, soiled sheets and garden implements.

Tarn then, crucially, attacks the ease of the domestic and quotidian in British poetry - not knowing then of course that it would become even more entrenched in the decades to come:

... Here [England], the poet either fails to refer to himself in the first person on pains of being accused of pretentiousness or turns his attention to the minor phenomena of nature in order to avoid his own involvement in society. ...if you [poets] play ecstatic games in which everything plus the kitchen sink must find its place in the poem, then doubts arise. We are [English poets] in danger of sinking into a welter of insignificance, a morass in which poetry dies out altogether and nothing is left but monomaniac discourse.

While the Fifties and Sixties had their significant dissenters, poets whom engaged as much with the external as the internal, they tended to be increasingly in the minority, and surprisingly less influential on succeeding generations of poets than many of their less-engaged or engaging contemporaries. But it seemed to be the trend since 1945 that most social commentary in poetry tended to be inflected with a more subjectivism. In this context, it was perhaps due as much to their fascinating personalities as much as to any polemical overtones that made the poetry of Thomas Blackburn, Martin Bell and James Kirkup (all, interestingly, Leeds University Gregory Fellows) stand out as more distinctly socially didactic than that of most of their peers.

Blackburn, particularly skilled in metrical blank verse, had an introverted, Confessional tone, and though his oeuvre was populated by its own mythological symbolisms, it was not as obsessively image-based as Expressionists like Sylvia Plath, but more lyrical, cadent and plaintive. What Blackburn brought to his poetry was a moving and intensely disturbing insight into the politics of his own personal experience (an almost Laingian self-exploration), drawn from a harrowing upbringing in which his Anglican-priest father's racial inferiority complex as to the family's mixed race (they were of Mauritian descent) drove him to scrubbing the young Blackburn's face with peroxide in order to lighten its pigmentation. Blackburn's subsequent severe mental health issues - and ultimate suicide - were then hardly surprising coming from such a dysfunctional background, conceivably exacerbated even in the bizarre echo of those formative traumas in the uncanny accident of his actual name; his boyhood skin having been literally burned of any hint of 'black', or rather tan.

Martin Bell, one of The Group, to my mind, stood out from his peers for his brilliantly candid and sour-mouthed polemic on the distinctly anomic lifestyle of the modern poet, a limbo of relative impoverishment punctuated by modicums of literary recognition, that disorientate as much as reassure, as touched on in his superb epigram 'Unsumcasane as Poet Maudit':

King then, but of words only. There's the rub.
Action is suspect and its end uncertain:
Stuck in a job, or browned off in a pub,
Or feted and then stabbed, behind a curtain...

Finally, James Kirkup deserves a mention as a distinctively polemical poet of his time, most famously of course for his single-issue dialectic on homosexuality, 'The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name', which among other achievements, practically got the poet excommunicated by the Catholic Church, not to mention by the comparatively safe-playing mainstream of his day. But where Kirkup's voice really stands out without recourse to gauche controversy-courting, is in a compassionate and empathetic poem such as his 'In a London Schoolroom', a beautifully image-driven observation of the privations of inner-city state education, and a worthy offshoot from Spender's 'An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum', that Kirkup earns a place in the social-political poetic canon, as these excerpts testify:

Arms in cool dresses shine, boys' throats are bare,
the murmuring blackboards quiver in a haze of chalk.
Summer has come, but will not enter
these open windows that the sunlight
blinds with heat and shutters with despair.
The tree of hands and faces tosses in the gales of talk. ...

There is no answer
to the question they have raised no hand to ask,
no cloudless holiday that would release
life that is sick, hope that was never there,
no task make plain the words they cannot learn to trust.

Other notable poets of comparable ability and a less-than-fashionable social dialectical inclination include Paul Mills, Peter Redgrove, Alan Browjohn, and the wittily polemical Dave Wright:

Academic achievements: BA, Oxon (2nd class);
Poetic: the publication of one volume of verse,
Which in his thirtieth year attained him no fame at all,
Except among intractable poets, and a small
Lunatic fringe congregating in Soho pubs.
('A Funeral Oration')



Part II

Austerity Mainstream: The Deconstruction of Ideologies in the Contemporary British Mainstream Poetry Scene of the last three decades

Against the Grain Again?

The mainstream of the past twenty or so years seems to have affected a tacit, arguably tokenistic leaning to the left-of centre/progressive agenda, which one could argue is a safe-seat for any poets who are conventionally ambitious - but it is a pose rarely if ever authentically or convincingly exposed in their actual poetry. The only occasions when this implicit non-interventionism is breached by any mainstream voices is in the case of 'single issues' - such as the Iraq War, the MPs' expenses scandal, the Banking Crisis, all highly vexing and massively important political issues, but all also non-partisan, non-ideological, universal - where outspokenness does not run the risk of poets being ghettoised as Reds, or, oppositely Reactionaries. So most remain somewhere 'healthily' in-between - and this lack of ideological commitment is inevitably reflected in the rather prosaic poetry that seems fashionable today; mostly non-committal, wilfully ambiguous and authorially neutered. But one lives and writes and watches in hope that with a series of such disastrous vicissitudes as Iraq, the Hutton Inquiry, the Banking Crisis etc. all very close to one another, a new, more politically engaged dialectic may finally start to return to British poetry, as the long-hailed 'workability' of unregulated capitalism begins to dismantle around us, giving possibly a new, revisionist verisimilitude to pre-Thatcherite social progressiveness, that was so brutally truncated before it had found its feet at the end of the Seventies. In short, a societal return to the Left, at least on some levels, is now more of a possibility than it has ever been since 1979, and it is hoped too, a simultaneous radicalising and re-inspiriting of a hitherto politically dead British mainstream poetics. Though we might hope - probably in vain - for a truly 'New Politics' (but where did we hear that one before?) of co-operation between practical opposites in the guise of this almost schizophrenic Liberal Democrat-Conservative administration, as with those disbanded numbers of the aborted 'Rainbow Coalition', a countering 'Rainbow Poetics', is required to rise to the times as an Oppositional dialectic. To obviate the still-possible 'Big Society', Britain will need a 'Big Poetry' - and daydreams of middle-class domesticity or style tricks of University faculties are unlikely to have a part to play in it. The mainstream will remain complacent at its peril.

To try and be a bit optimistic, British poetry could still yet open up in scope and purpose. Carol Ann Duffy has started very well as Poet Laureate politically speaking, almost betraying some element of partisanship in her vitriolic long poem in the Xmas issue of the Radio Times which, in spite of its rather gauche rhetoric, was a great use of her position, tub-thumping on three of the most vexing and unconscionable scandals of recent times: the Iraq invasion and aftermath, MPs expenses, and the banking crisis. All three are indeed single issues, and to a great extent have fired people of all political colours, due to the catastrophic national and global consequences of their respective mishandlings and outright deviances, but the second issue is certainly one that is most likely to vex the Left to the most red-faced extremes; and in this shoehorning-in of a transparent lambasting of the bankers in what is generally the comfortable and safe confines of Britain's leading television magazine, can conceivably be called 'radical', simply in its incongruity within the recognised remit of a Laureate. This interventionist poetic approach of a Laureate commenting as much on political events as on more formal state ones, is a very welcome take on the post by Duffy, and bodes promisingly for the future.

But in order to fulfil all this 'radical' promise, Duffy also needs to extend the same dialectical hand to the poetry culture itself, and shake it up equally, for more than ever is it an unattractive literary parallel to the fusty corruptions of our political constitution: it too is detectably muddied by one-upmanship, careerism, backroom deals, dubious honours, obfuscating protocols, partisanship, unrepresentative prize lists, snobbery, elitism, anti-elitism, poetical correctness (stylistic policing), Oxbridge passports, media monopolies and general skulduggery. Rather like New Labour slapping a one-off 50% tax on high earners in the discredited City, much more than Duffy's political gestures as Poet Laureate needs to be done for contemporary poetry to both become more relevant to our turbulent modern times and literarily, aesthetically and morally up to the job. William Blake once said 'Friendship is in Opposition' - and so too is poetry always at its more heartfelt, compassionate, powerful and important when opposing the status quo of conventional received wisdom and offering something different, better and in the most visionary of cases, transcendent.

Poetry has seemingly grown ever more establishmentarian over the past two decades, most noticeably during the first half of the Blair years with all its whitewashing 'progressiveness'. As a poet always critical of 'Britishness', or more specifically, 'Englishness', I remember when I was being mentored at an early stage in my career by an already established poet, only three years my senior, who was on the verge of bigger breakthrough into the British mainstream via the Next Gen promotion. At the time, I had not engaged on any level with contemporary poetry, though now I know through having explored the less represented, more underground scenes, that this was not because I didn't like or relate to any contemporary poetry, simply that I did not like or relate to any contemporary poetry I had been spoon-fed through the books and anthologies of the major imprints. Back then, I stopped at Larkin, and mainly read, at great length, past greats such as Blake, Keats and Shelley, some of the War poets, TS Eliot and Dylan Thomas - the poets who had chiefly inspired me to write poetry in the first place. So when asked by the mentoring co-ordinator of a scheme I'd been selected for through a competition, which living poet I would like as a mentor, I rather rebelliously - though sincerely - said, I can't really think of one (though if asked the same question today, I would be able to come up several names, none of whom, however, are 'mainstream' ones); I then cheekily asked if he could arrange a seance with the spirit of Blake perhaps. Originally I was to be matched up with James Fenton, but once it was clear he was at the time too ensconced in his post as Oxford Professor of Poetry, they had to shop around for an alternative.

I was matched with another, much younger, mentor, mainly on the basis that we she was a 'rhyme poet', as I was almost entirely at the time. But, although this mentor was extremely helpful in encouraging me at an early stage in my development as a poet, it became apparent through the course of a year or so of correspondence that our agendas in terms of themes were hugely different. Coming from a lapsed middle-class, materially impoverished background myself, my instinctive drive in poetry - as it still largely is today - was to write poems on social and political themes, mostly on the subject of poverty and social exclusion, both in terms of personal experience and objective witness. A little later, I was to start work on a play for voices about my time working in a night shelter for the homeless, Picaresque - I never received comment or reply from the mentor after sending the first draft of it to her. But I distinctly remember a certain impasse which unfortunately truncated this mentoring process: I was being advised to write more about myself than about issues outside of myself, and I instinctively resisted; indeed, it would have been anathema to me and what I felt was my poetic purpose at that time to have done otherwise. I've always had an introspective, confessional impulse in my poetry, but treated this as secondary to what I felt was the greater purpose, that of documenting, and commenting on, what I perceived as the devastating social effects of Thatcherite society, more specifically, of the moral and spiritual anarchy of rampant capitalism.

There was one poem I'd written that this mentor lambasted in particular - I think it was called something like 'English Sunset'. The poem compared contemporary English culture as artistically, intellectually and politically inferior to the French (I was a little biased at the time since my then-girlfriend was a Breton); by way of feedback, the mentor had scribbled throughout the poem numerous criticisms of the more anti-patriotic parts, and in such a defensive way that I sensed a certain knee-jerk insecurity. While the poem's dialectic was far from impartially toned, neither were the majority of her comments in response to it; her arguments against my 'downer' on the country I'd been brought up in - which in my own lifetime had starkly transformed from a gentler, more open-minded and intellectually rich society to one of vicious competitiveness and spiritless materialism - largely consisting of little lists of British cultural strengths and achievements. While some of this may or may not have had some truth, to my eyes, on my level, not exactly living in the most salubrious of situations at the time, intermittently unemployed or in pre-minimum wage temping jobs, and seeing day to day in such a city of jarring social and material extremes as Brighton, and at that time volunteering in the mushrooming homeless sector, the grotesque costs of successive socially ruthless governments, both blue and 'red': there was little doubt in my mind, and many on the traditional Left, even in the early days of Blairism, that the political scene had only changed clothes, not ideologies, and that now the main Parliamentary parties were converged on a tacit but implicit Thatcherite consensus; an indelible breed of 'pragmatic' torch-bearers set the tone for the future.

Early signs of Blair's long-term betrayal of Labour's core values first signalled by his routing of the party's essential Clause IV (though his tactical opportunism was explicit even before he swept into power, through his pre-election wooing of the Murdoch camp), was starting to emerge early on, long before the obfuscations surrounding the Iraq transgressions began to shake the dust from under the feet of his hitherto sanguine electorate. And most suspiciously of all, to my mind, was the new flourish of trendified patriotism that seemed to follow Blair into office; New Labour were now reclaiming the Union Jack from the Tories, as was the still active, though less frenetic, Britpop scene at the time. So should I have been so surprised by the rather populist views of my allotted poet mentor? Her nationally defensive attitude, more than her actual views, I would discover later on, echoed the implicit conservatism of the contemporary poetic mindset in general, and was as anathema to me as this mainstream's self-censored, apolitical, and broadly prosaic aesthetic. There seemed an almost symbiotic link to me between these three pre-eminent cultural scenes of the time, 'Britpop', 'New' Labour, and the 'New' Gen poetics.

For me, all three seemed ultimately superficial, and posturing certainly on any close inspection: they each claimed to represent something fresh and 'new' and very much centred in 'the now', but all three were heavily coloured by - even in many cases thoroughly derivative of - past movements, styles and slogans, except with a dab of gloss on top. 'Britpop', almost entirely retro, emptily aped the pre-electronic musical styles of the late Sixties and early Seventies, while simultaneously consigning the entirety of Eighties pop to the dustbin of history - and in that, distancing themselves from the political dialectic of the early part of that decade's music, which was almost diametrically opposite in quality to the tuneless Stock Aitken and Waterman aural atrocities that came to dominate the latter half. By parallel, 'New' Labour was debunking its own ideological past, again, particularly that of the Eighties, its principled wilderness years, by asserting itself now as the sensible son to a senile father, bowdlerising what it perceived now as coarse and obsolete terms such as 'socialist'; a party appealing more to - and more appealing to - the middle-class vote, thus eternally electable; while the reality was, Blair was simply tramping the red flag in favour of the blue one, and in spite of his 'Third Way' spin of the time, ultimately consolidating Thatcherism behind the thin veil of highly selective 'progressive' reform.

The poetry mainstream of this period then, in reflection of this vacuous national tone, went through its own process of self-bowdlerisation, their chief target, 'the abstract', in whatever guise: out with personal opinion, politics, social comment, the psychologically confessional, indeed, anything dialectical, and in with the tangible, the material, the object, the quotidian and mundane and the epicurean sense-indulging: sex and drugs and fruit and water. Now 'socialism' was a dirty word, and patriotism was okay again - cue 'Cool Britannia' - in the new society of having-your-cake-and-eat-it materialism tinged with a vaguely 'progressive' veneer; a pop group could be a rock band again but without having to be anti-establishment or 'political', and a prose writer could be a poet, without having to have a sense of prosody, cadence or figurative language. We're all capitalists now, but that's cool, because we're also 'progressives'; profit's not a bad thing; capitalism can be compassionate if it chooses to; patriotism isn't the monopoly of the Right; we can all be celebrities; and so on and so on. No surprise that all three media-packaged movements embraced the - distinctly un-'new' - emblem of the Union Jack again.

I'm not necessarily praising anti-patriotism - though I think a healthy scepticism, especially in a country where the George Cross and Union Jack are becoming ever more ubiquitous from shops to pubs to football matches, is almost always a healthy thing (remember the Romantics for instance?) - but I'm afraid, thinking as I do very much on the internationalist left-side of the fence, patriotism for me is, like nationalism, its frequently indistinguishable bedfellow, something always to be sceptical of. And to me, the British (or 'Brits' - that idiot abbreviation) are never more insipid and unlikeable than when they're being 'patriotic'. We've had the farcical 'Britishness' putsch of lugubrious Gordon, and now we're threatened with aristo-Cameron's Euro-sceptic Big Society, full of tea rooms and tacit blue-rinsed Fascists, to possibly look forward to. But any historical dialecticians know instinctively that a country is never more desperate and valueless than when it starts thumping the patriotic tub; and increasingly, with a clear blue water beginning to emerge between us and the USA following Obama's accession to the presidency - so ironically unwanted now that they finally have someone with both a brain and heart in power across the Atlantic - regarding our exaggerated post-War 'special relationship', Great Britain is increasingly becoming that poodle it acted as when Blair was in office at the dictates of Bush Snr; but now a neutered one who snaps mutely at the heels of a truly progressive president. And we can partly thank Blair's complicity with the unpopular Iraq invasion on that. If Britain was once the empire on whom the sun never sets, it's now turning more into the post-empire who doesn't realise the sun set on it decades back.

To compliment the new Union Jack-waving New Labour era, British poetry launched its New/Next Generation promotions with all its zeitgeist-affecting spin and media soundbite, to attempt to capture in the verse sphere this new sense of regenerative national energy. The trouble was, as with the political catalyst of the time and all its Brit-pop-buttressed empty populism, these 'Britpoet' promotions simply appeared impregnably choreographed by the establishment apparatchiks, suddenly sprung on a bewildered public, and legions of ignored poets, in the manner of a last-minute notice of a party in an exclusive end of town to which hardly anyone had actually been invited. No sense of inclusiveness or catholicity of preparations - just the proverbial shorthand of a media-package attempting to somehow gather together a so-called top twenty of contemporary poets, as if this relatively tight-knit company of voices, many almost indistinguishable from each other (and most no doubt connected in some sense), all published by an equally small and non-representative cabal of high profile imprints, represented the medium nationally. The problem with media-packaging an entire literary medium is that inevitably you only sift through a tiny portion of samples from a vast range, that means from the offset any attempt at a representative promotion is impossible; and therefore, ultimately futile and entirely self-serving. Rather than genuinely bring a public's attention to the variety and vitality of the poetry scene in all its many nuances and colours, it simply acted as an exclusive springboard for two dozen well-connected poets, some of whom were good but not spectacular, and some of whom were arguably mediocrities. Deconstructing these promotions is hardly difficult, even for the most well-meaning of us, since the promotion was instigated by the Poetry Book Society, representing largely the vested interests of an ever-Babel-like poetry hierarchy comprised of half a dozen high profile imprints, journals and of course the emerging poetry academies such as the UEA. Hardly representative then.

But what has always seemed palpably lacking, not only from such promotions, but also in published poetry representation in general, is the vast army of autodidactic voices, operating outside the recognised metropolitan institutions and networks, a large percentage of whom hallow not from the halls of Oxbridge but from patchier state educations, materially and economically deprived backgrounds. And for those poets reading this who might sigh knowingly to themselves as to the 'poetry trap' they each think they know so well, where prospective careers and professions are put on hold spontaneously, or even entirely aborted, for a life of letters and shabby genteelism, of anchoritic sacrifice of material status and economic security for the literary calling, but nevertheless paths made quaintly tolerable by taken-for-granted passport benefits of a middle-class educational and familial background and associated advantages bred-in thereby such as intellectual confidence, clipped enunciation and an intrinsic sense of expectation - this isn't the sort of willed and 'privileged' poverty, if you will, that is being cited here. More, in general, we are looking at those in the main who have hailed from economically, materially and educationally deprived, even impoverished, backgrounds, who have mostly not found a yellow brick road out of their disadvantaged beginnings via academia, due to being primarily creatively inclined; but who have nevertheless defied all predictions and doggedly devoted their lives to the pursuit of literature in spite of all the many odds stacked against them.

Crucially here, autodidacticism is a recurring theme, both in the acquiring of knowledge relating to the chosen field, and in cultivating the prosodic skills to enable its individual practice. In the sphere of literary and scholastic prose, one might instantly picture the young working-class Leicester lad, Colin Wilson, sleeping on Hampstead Heath by night while writing the classic philosophical work The Outsider in the wooden cool of the British Library by day, back in the late Fifties. Wilson was, at only 24, launched into literary fame as a genius with his best-selling thesis (published by the prestigious Victor Gollancz in 1956). Genius or not - the initial acclaim for his book was brief and lapsed soon after into equal and opposite criticism - Wilson was certainly a true autodidact in one of the most vividly abject senses of the word, and certainly in this, was possessed of a form of genius, to have mastered such a vast swathe of philosophical and literary knowledge entirely off his own back and then to have eloquently dissected it in such an original and thorough way; a very driven mind, certainly. But in the main, most literary autodidacts have had to wait quite a bit longer than Wilson before getting their feet in the door of publishing, let alone achieving universal, even national, recognition; and some, of course, possibly the majority (we will never know how many), waited and worked in vain, ending in obscurity - some since serendipitously disinterred for posthumous scrutiny and recognition, others forever denied any posterity beyond their own kin.

By way of another well-known and almost picturesque case of literary autodidacticism, the iconic itinerant Welsh poet WH Davies (b. 1871) was launched into fame and literary society in 1908 with his Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, and went on to become one of the most popular and prolific poets of his time; his success snapped him out of the jaws of hand-to-mouth hoboism at 37, which again was a massive achievement of self-salvation through literature. The roots of Davies's Trans-Atlantic itinerancy were apparently in the rather vague area of delinquency and an inbuilt resistance to imposed routine and labour (he basically went AWOL from his apprenticeship as a picture-framer), and it is hinted biographically that his family had means, but that any potential inheritances were too long in the offing for his voracious appetite for travel and independence; so into a somewhat wilful vagrancy he went, cultivating his own rootlessness (and perhaps there is some parallel here with George Orwell's spontaneous pilgrimage among the homeless of Paris and London, which was rather an eccentric form of undercover social journalism than a circumstantially conspired social pot-hole).

In some ways similar to Davies's years in the wilderness was the more transparently elected itinerancy of American poet Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931), who turned his back on the Hippocratic rite of passage paved for him by a medical family, and travelled sans means to New York, where he ended up sleeping rough on the streets and rather quixotically trading his self-printed poems for food, as immortalised by his first pamphlet's distinctly un-figurative title, Rhymes To Be Traded For Bread. Lindsay subsisted through this transubstantiation for over a year; and thereafter, periodically set out on the road to do the same again. A voluntary vagrancy that is impressively absolutist (think also Vincent van Gogh), even if a very different form of suffering for one's art to that of the ambition cramped by unavoidable poverty that has no familial safety-net (Lindsay's arguably irrational self-banishments however, in retrospective light of his eventual suicide due ostensibly to financial hardship in later life through having to support a family on irregular literary-related royalties, not to mention his detectably paranoid last words, "They tried to get me - I got them first!", does suggest that perhaps he was touched by some form of mental illness, possibly borderline schizophrenia).



Dig the New Breed: time for the Modern British Political Poetry Underground (1970s to Present) to emerge into the Light?

There is also the lineage of neglected poets whose impoverishment in terms of social status and connections are in part, if not entirely, due to drawing short straws genetically, rather than circumstantially, by dint of severely impairing psychiatric illnesses, most commonly in the poetry sphere, schizophrenia. Of course, many of the struggling voices trapped in this particular type of meta-psychical ghetto, are victims of a veritably knotted aetiology, in that those who have as well hallowed from materially deprived backgrounds might have developed their mental illnesses as a result of, or in reaction to, their formative hardships; while others are arguably plunged into social and material poverty as a result of developing inherited conditions; and some, invariably, might have started out in adult life at more educationally or socially privileged points, but then since, with their illnesses, lapsed into social decline and obscurity. Nevertheless, the psychiatrically afflicted form another significant section of this poetic underclass, by dint of the often insurmountable nature of their mental health issues. And what else, ultimately, apart from a battleground, is severe mental illness, but a form of psychic and emotional poverty? Not in the sense of austerity, since there is almost always an unbearably rich and nuanced clash of patterns and colours in thought and sense involved, especially in states such as schizophrenia; but in the sense of the sheer vicious erosion of the quality of one's mental and emotional life, particularly in relation to others, that constitutes an abject poverty of internal peace and happiness.

Outsider poetry, working-class poetry, survivor poetry, call it what you will, my experiences on the fringes of the poetry scene over the last decade - and in spite of the tokenistic, politically correct equal opportunities clauses clumsily shoehorned into Arts surveys and funding applications - has frequently brought me into ghettos of poetic activity, where under- or entirely un-published scribes produce their oeuvres, plunged in un-thumbed shadows, shunned by the arbitrary limelight of mainstream publishing. In such contemporarily figurative - though just as often literal - literary garrets, I have on more than a few occasions encountered neglected voices, that in general seem to represent a hidden community of present-day poets, a kind of poetic recusancy - hence the choice of name for my own webzine - where one is most likely to come across such frowned-upon unfashionablisms as radical political poetry, Confessionalism, Emotionalism, but almost in every case something which today seems genuinely rare in the mainstream: original voices. By 'original', in its negative sense naturally since absolute originality is theoretically impossible, I mean 'un-affected', 'untutored', and thus 'authentic' to the individual channel, lacking any sense of artifice or conventional replication, and frequently, by dint of a common thread of didacticism (i.e. self-tutored prosody), imperfect in form but thereby indicative of that certain inimitable outsider quality that historic 'unschooled' poets such as John Clare, WH Davies and Stevie Smith each demonstrated to distinction.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, it's within these least salubrious of circles that the most radicalised poetry is being written today. By 'radicalised', I mean in the context of subject (as opposed to radicalised style, the concentration of which is probably to be found in the more middle-class academically inclined experimentalism of such presses as Salt, Shearsman and Bluechrome), and very often specifically in the left-wing tradition of those living literally in the damp inner-city flats and bedsits that most starkly illustrate modern-day Marxian paradigms; those material disparities that the more well-heeled literary sets of 'shabby dabblers' frequently consign to historical 'cliché', assuming they no longer exist. But they do; even in New Labour Britain, and beyond. And although various Tsars of the Arts have - admirably though haphazardly - over the years initiated and facilitated various 'socially inclusive' schemes, they have so far merely scratched the surface of what is a vast underclass of literary talent in the UK today. More to the point, all such initiatives, no matter how well-intentioned, have ended up on the whole appearing slightly more tokenistic than truly transformative, rather half-hearted and embarrassed Blairite concessions to steeply shelved cultural inequalities still existent today in a society that postures on empty with regards equality; and has indirectly fed social ghettoising through the rapidly spreading germ of discriminative memes - or 'aspirational' patois - against those who are economically static; labels such as Chavs and badges such as ASBOs, and the draconically incriminating phrase 'benefit cheat' (when one might be perfectly justified, on an historical Marxist level, to argue that such a term is oxymoronic, since what else are benefits, the dole, alms, but an intrinsic form of ancestral cheating of the dispossessed heritage of the masses by the ancient land-grabbers, who systematically through the centuries manacled entire communities in the economic slavery of rent and employment?).

In parallel to the general economic drift in post-Thatcherite society at large, where over the past three decades the wealthiest in society have continued accumulating, so that, in spite of one or two redistributive gestures from the Labour government (the belated minimum wage, first petitioned for by Labour's original leader Keir Hardie in the 1890s, incidentally), the wealth gap has widened astronomically, almost in effect negating the paltry scraps thrown at the poorer sections of society during the past decade altogether. Just as the born-and-bred Labourites of the old industrial heartlands have felt utterly betrayed by the capitalised version of their former party over the past thirteen years, in the microcosm of literature, in this context poetry, those practitioners and apprentices at the bottom of the social heap have justifiably blazed in retaliation, almost entirely from a traditional left-wing standpoint, and kept up the radical tradition of co-operatively printed pamphlets of poetry and polemic in as grittily ideological a fashion as those social idealists and agitators of the 1640s and 50s - the likes of John Lilburne and the Levellers, Winstanley and the Diggers - who poured out an entire species of political and dialectical broadsides, revolutionising the printing process by putting the means of publication in the hands of the common man.

William Blake too, of course, famously printed his own poems with illustrations, and in such independent an impulsion as the drive of his very creativity, embodied absolutely the inalienable self-reliance of the artist, and, together with this instinctive Protestantism of approach, and his own innate anti-establishment radicalism, was very much continuing this line of political literary dissent and descent (excuse the pun). So too today, one is most likely to find the true politically radical poetry among the unsung ranks of small inner-city layman poetry workshops, co-operative printing presses, unsponsored community groups, and very often too, in the isolated lives of unaffiliated autodidacts, doing what most poets used to do in the days before Universities' institutionalisation of poetics: reading, absorbing, practising, drafting, and crucially, refining one's individual voice - often irrespective of contemporary conventions.



Where's There's Smoke... There's Fire: the British Radical Left Poetic Tradition of the Seventies to Today

There is an entire region-based map of the UK today pot-holed with various cottage industries of radical and political poetic practice, some more integrated than others. For example, in the North-East, the growth of a traditionally left-wing poetry has over the past three decades mushroomed - as much in response to the scorched earth industrial policies of Thatcherism as to the distinctly apolitical neutering of the metropolitan poetry mainstream - to such an extent that entire imprints have sprung up to try and publish and represent it: Five Leaves, Flambard, Smokestack, Red Squirrel, to name only a handful. Andy Croft's Smokestack is at the forefront of Northern political poetry, sporting a truly radical list of uncompromisingly leftist voices (socialist and Marxist. Five Leaves has published many fine socialist poets, as well as, among other distinctively un-commercial titles, the anthology of socialist poetry, Red Sky at Night (2003; eds. Adrian Mitchell and Andy Croft). The North-West too reciprocates such politically radical poetry: Alan Dent's unabashedly leftist poetry journal The Penniless Press has become something of a stalwart title of this scene, dedicatedly produced to a rebarbatively austere production standard in post-industrial Preston. And though he has been living down south in Surrey for some time now, the Leeds-bred poet and polemicist Barry Tebb still infuses his radical and indefatigable Sixties Press with more than a hint of Yorkshire grit. [Tebb's recent counter-mainstream anthology, Orphans of Albion - Poetry of the British Underground, only really a titular retort to Michael Horovitz's now famous Children of Albion of the Sixties, is one of the more extensive catalogues of the more dialectically dissenting poets of the past fifty or so years].

London, inevitably, is as ever a hive of infinitely varied literary sets and circles, but for the purposes of this article, we should take in the lower rungs of the deeply hierarchical top-down trickle, all the way from the impregnable offices of the Poetry Society - that does at least give vent to the city's literary refugees once a month with slots for Survivors' Poetry* - and the baroque porticos of the Royal Society of Literature, to the pockets of socially and literarily marginalised poetry co-ops that haunt dingy pubs and dilapidated libraries, tub-thumping their co-operatively printed polemical verse to threadbare numbers. The East End districts, in particular, are palpably active in what might be loosely termed 'outsider poetry' - being the output of those living on the social margins, many also on the psychiatric periphery of society. Parts such as Whitechapel and Hackney - the latter borough in particular, laced as it is with a richly deciduous history of political and literary radicalism, from the Parliamentarian and Leveller groundswell in the 1640s, through the Cable Street clashes against the blackshirts in the 1930s, to the veterans of Thatcher's psychiatric pogrom of the 80s and beyond; a heritage inevitably immortalised in Iain Sinclair's recent poetic prose geo-biography, Hackney - That Rose-Red Empire. From the Seventies onwards there has been a very active poetry movement in London's East End, and one which has travelled its own ideological and aesthetic course, with no grasping after mainstream acceptance or establishment recognition; very much an independent and co-operatively driven cottage industry of radically left-wing, neo-Blakeian poetics, manifesting in a series of anthologies, such as Pluto Press's Bricklight - Poetry from the Labour Movement in East London (1980), and Hackney Writers' Workshop's Where There's Smoke (1983). These anthologies brought many socially disadvantaged poets into their first publication.

The Hackney Writers' group, and the series of co-operatively produced anthologies they published during the late Seventies and early Eighties, are to my mind some of the most exceptional tributes to the intrinsic value, even in some instances, superior value, of the largely working-class, marginalised social and political poetry of the past thirty years; poetry's lineage of Jude the Obscures. Though how many would instantly recognise such a title as Where There's Smoke? The fact most of us wouldn't is shocking as it is so symptomatic of the timelessly classist nature of particularly English poetry publishing and representation. There has indeed been a brilliant flourishing of political poetry over the past three decades, but it has been largely sidelined to fringe presses by the mainstream establishments, and the more and more of it that is unearthed today bears witness to an obscured generation of autodidactic, marginalised voices, that in my opinion constitutes some of the most accomplished and relevant poetry of the last three generations - but which is still, in the mainstream, almost completely unrepresented, let alone archived; and will no doubt continue to be ignored in a posthumous pogrom of insecure resistance.

For instance, Ken Worpole is a name mainly known for his writing on architecture, landscape and public policy, but how many are also aware that he was (is) as well a highly accomplished poet, as with many in the Where There's Smoke, which anthologies the work of only one of no doubt many obscured poetry circles. The Hackney Writers' Workshop poets might be marginal political voices, but they each communicate their sentiments with the armoury of true poetic craftsmanship, and grasp of the figurative, not to say a natural verbal flare with language, to pull off dialectic in a distinctly un-agitprop, poetry-for-the-page sense. Worpole's 'The Florist's Shop' is a case in point, with its lyricism, stunning accumulation of urban and natural imagery, and confident Lawrentian line lengths:

Thick bunches of carnations drip, wrapped in paper cones
like megaphones.

The juxtaposition of paper cones with megaphones, and the serendipity of the rhyme, is in many ways indicative of the un-deliberate magic of true, unpretentious poetry. This quite startlingly image-rich, subtly dialectical poem closes on this brilliant trope:

In the florist's shop, with scissors, shears and wire,
Everything can be arranged - and it is.

Worpole's polemic - reaching something of a zenith in his sublime 'Here Be Dragons' - often focuses on the daily labours of the manual worker, as in the sublimely Tressellian 'The Philanthropists in White Trousers', which transforms painter-and-decorators into proletarian 'gods', dismantling their scaffolding as if a metaphysical stage-set, a 'contraption of wood and ropes', their overalls, 'celestial white apparel', like angels or priests. There is in Worpole's poetry a sharp socio-aphorismic sensibility at work, which is also reflected as strikingly in the work of his contemporaries, David Kessel and Howard Mingham. Kessel is a poet I have written on extensively since I first helped him collect it together for his 2005 Collected Poems O the Windows of the Bookshop Must Be Broken. Here are some excerpts testifying to Kessle's extraordinary aphorismic gifts:

Established poets are idiots and liars,
also by definition great poets sleep in gutters
love is pure contingency
the eyes are everything.
('Schizoid')

I fear this mountain I must climb more
than I fear fascism in a loved-one's eyes.
('Beautiful Ireland')

and the shockingly candid image:

The church is harder than my desire
though much less real,
as hard as my patronising lust,
and so I masturbate in the wet grass.
('Beautiful Ireland')

Anger at love that disturbs the malicious street
leaping in the gutter with petrol and stubbed fags.
the rusty smell of the sea and misogynists' guilt...
('A Mug of Black Coffee')

But is ultimately a master of the sharply nailed aphorism:

A deadly man with loveless breath.
Time eating the stomach. Can't afford fags.
('Disintegration')

We live with uncertainty,
our giros and our dreams.
('New Cross')

Today a sweetheart's sigh is more dangerous
than massed armies.
('Desperate Sex')

A bored mouse storming heaven in a book,
the look took all my caring.
('The Ivy')

For there is within the soul of labour the tenderness
of the violet beneath the shaking lonely chestnut.
('For Emma, Aged 10')

Lines such as these will ensure his hard-won literary posterity. Suffice to say, in Kessel, who though plunged into a materially disprivileged adult life through the devastation that is chronic paranoid schizophrenia, originally hailed from a middle-class background - though one of cultural clashes: his maternal grandfather was a Jewish immigrant, his paternal grandfather, a British Blackshirt - and initially qualified as a GP. But due to his illness, entropy set in to his life's structure, and for the past thirty-odd years, Kessel has survived through deadening daily jabs of medication, for some years now living in a psychiatric halfway house in Whitechapel, and in spite of all odds, produced a superb oeuvre of poetry, which is in many ways the raw DNA of dissenting literature, a social and political urban poetry of a psychiatric 'survivor'; but one brilliantly intermingled with a bookish heritage of historical dialectical Marxism and autodidactic scholasticism in the poetries particularly of those ideologically and actively engaged in and between both World Wars, specifically Christopher Caudwell, John Cornford, Edgell Rickword, Alun Lewis, Keith Douglas, Sidney Keyes and Drummond Allison - and further, through the lineage of British socialist writers such as Robert Tressell, right back to Gerrard Winstanley. Even those iconic names from popular culture Kessel chooses to incorporate in his own form of socialistic outsider mythology are ones commonly saluted by other left-wing poets: Tony Hancock and John Lennon, to name two. There is a key psychogeography to the map of Kessel's poetry, which cites most if not all of these names at various points as links in a chain of dissenting literary heredity, and one or two poems specifically dedicated to some of them. It is also interesting that many socialist poets as Kessel also have a tendency to fixate on certain fictional characters in British literature as ideological folkloric motifs, in Kessel's (and, incidentally, my own) case, Conrad's Lord Jim and Hardy's class-thwarted autodidact Jude Fawley (the Obscure) whom he alludes to in his poem 'In Memory of Jude'.

It is telling that there is such a deep connection with historicism and heritage in most of the work of modern British socialist poetry, the impulsive tracing of a lineage of like minds, as if to further buttress what are essentially timeless ideological dialectics; and here is its key strength, its ability to build on a past tradition that in some essential ingredients is as unchanging and fundamental as the Jewish religion or the Catholic faith (though I emphasize here that the Recusant is not named to cite the 16th and 17th century priest-hole Catholics, but simply alludes to the more general definition of one who practices a spiritual/intellectual/political/literary pursuit irrespective of the fashions of their times - though a certain indirect subtextual allusion to the uncapitalised term 'catholic' is a welcome association, since contemporary Recusancy in poetry is all about a varied and all-inclusive spread of styles and approaches).

Howard Mingham, whom Kessel privately regards as one of the major working-class lyrical voices of the late 20th century, but who is almost entirely unknown, partly due to his marginalised life in Hackney - also a schizophrenic - and his premature death, produced only 25 poems (as far as his peers are aware), but to my mind they constitute totemic oeuvre whose size is proportionately far more than simply the sum of its parts. Again, I would point the reader to a new e-book I have published, with David Kessel's and Ken Worpole's co-operation, of Mingham's Collected two dozen and one poems, Waters of the Night, which includes an extensive Introduction on Mingham's work (Caparison e-books at www.therecusant.org.uk). For the purposes of this monograph however, I quote below some excerpts from Mingham's startling dialectical lyrics; as is evident, his oeuvre is bristling with some exceptionally original tropes and images:

In these unused canals a flood,
derelictions that rattle on the light
and call to the body of your unemployed blood.
('Broken Water')

Black coffee, the cactus of our mornings
greens the deserts -
or stewed tea, straining the hunger
from boredom's belly;

lunchtime,
when the muscles return to the shoulder
and bread and chair equate.
('A Cup of Burnt Brazil')

Let my son do daring things
and see beyond his reaches.
Let him not
be the thing which sits in cities.
Let him blaze like an angry Jesus
('Ode')

To return to the anthology Where There's Smoke, the title of which couldn't be more apt,: this is one of a number of anthologies produced by the Hackney Writers' Workshop, dated 1983, which for those who remember, was very much the sealing election year for Thatcherism's epic political dominance for the generation to come, and one which saw the then left-wing Labour party drop to their lowest ever ratings - though far more nobly than Tumbledown Brown's moribund New Labour, since Michael Foot's Labour actually pursued unadulterated socialist policies, which ensured of course their oblivion for the rest of the decade (I'd recommend George Orwell's monograph On the English for a polemic on the almost genetic conservatism and perennial aversion to radical change of a nationality). As its title elliptically suggests, there is much fire in this excellent anthology - which should be required reading for all contemporary poetry scholars - not simply in the work of Kessel and Worpole, but also in other fugitive radical voices as Colin Samson (who pens a brilliant Introduction), Maggie Hewitt, Sue Shrapnel and Lotte and Siggy Moos. Some of the standout voices for me include Siggy Moos, who wrote much about causes of mass unemployment, and his wife Lottee Moos, whose 'Tea For One' has a Monroesque eloquence about diction and cadence:

Into the house of the unattached lady
The afternoon enters on oily slicks
Through the foliage outside and the potplants' long slings
On to the biscuit and assorted tea-things
....

The pickers of tea, sick kids on their backs,
The girl in the laundry with itching red wrists,
The miller who sifts choking flour from grist:
All hitched, all pitched, into sweaty long shifts

Her 'They Who Walk Barefoot' has a beautifully verbal vibrancy and pugilistic political energy about it, with tropes like 'They who walk barefoot through London's bespattered streets' and 'In crooked ways, playing bo-peep with its shadow,/ Scuttles down history's crooked lanes' and '...the profits, old bovver-boys thirsting for justice'. Indeed, this anthology has an exceptional showcase of little known political women poets; another being the superb Sue Shrapnel - 'Beach' is just one example of a number of poems that demonstrate a truly powerful and eloquent social-political poetic timbre:

On the perfect terrain
stripped of breakables, narrowness, property,
...

the encroaching wave, the wave as dissolving mattress -
the round, resilient, brown, vigorous children play,
outlast us; need the touches
of hand and towel, the offer of food
and arbitration.
...

...without our fat, spread veins or wastedness,
they live; building under the porpoise curves
stubbornness, purposes and reserves
as tangled as the nylon lines...

...the waves crack in the new dark,
they dance on the washed shifting margin.

Shrapnel's sublime 'In Passing' the second and final verse of which I quote in full:

Out of the pub: 'precipitating',
he says, as the rain thickens. The sleeping baby,
and the blanketed child, are carried home; and home
comes the coasting last-minute braker, metallic and flash:
while in the brand-new van, the thin woman
and the thoughtful man, worry it out. Useless,
this list of incidents, except
for love and kinship.

This beguiling social lyric taps in so brilliantly to the socialist mindset, almost suggesting in the last trope that individuals are the sums of a collective, prioritised consciousness which in turn illumines the inconsequentialities of the individual's domestic life as a vital part in the tapestry of human community. That without community, a sense of one another and our responsibilities to one another, we negate ourselves as individuals too; and this is an optimistic, Wildean interpretation of socialism, hinting at the greater individual self-fulfilment and purpose that comes only through a communion with others; obscure but implicitly uplifting, Shrapnel's utopian inclination can't be measured by the armchair pragmatism of conservative-minded logic, nor can it, as with the incomprehensible concept of Heaven's spiritual perfection and bliss, be imagined within the parameters of the human consciousness. But it is something sensed or projected in occasional sentiment and epiphany of feeling in many of us from time to time, especially in peaceful moments, or during bereavements, but which could only ever be fully understood empirically, through actual experience and participation. There is definitely a relation between the sometimes impossibly idealistic aspirations of romantic socialism, and conceptions of a boundless, painless, unchanging, egalitarian afterlife - but one could reasonably argue that both socialism and Christianity aspire to basically the same thing: a unification of consciousness and thereby a deliverance from the prison of the skull-sealed mind, the ecstasies and agonies of the ego in its temporal glass dome (Hell being, in effect, the extreme isolation of mental illness).

Rebbeca O'Rourke is another equally startling voice, most demonstrably in her discursive and subtle poem 'Actually Existing Socialism', which juxtaposes the obscure life of a late friend with the theoretical communism of EP Thompson's iconic work from which the poem title is derived, beginning: 'It falls from between the pages/ Of 'Beyond Actually Existing Socialism'/ A small, black and white photograph'. The photograph is of the poet's deceased friend Ethel, described with Eliotonian eloquence: 'Ethel wears two cardigans/ her thickening legs stout and slippered'. O'Rourke compellingly keeps echoing the title of Thompson's eponymous text in relation to the context of Ethel's unvisited life 'bounded by Lancashire's mills and pits', 'well before actually existing socialism', hitting on the sort of serendipitous aphorism that only a truly emotionally engaged poem can do:

Her life, a strong argument
she never made.

This poem is dialectic of the heart as much as the head, which makes it all the more powerful, and authentic:

The argument challenges
the slow haze of back street life,
challenges that flat Lancashire landscape
pitted with colliers and mills.

Where There's Smoke is indeed particularly memorable for its revelation of fugitive female political poets, and their contrast with the equally talented male voices cements their achievement all the more in a non-adversarial, gender-balanced, non-segregated context (in contrast to the 1973 feminist manifesto-anthology, The World Split Open), which emphatically demonstrates that women voices can more than match males on the polemical poetry front.

Poet Colin Samson, in his Introduction to Where There's Smoke, incisively comments:

In one sense it could be said that our group ... was established to advance the idea that working people have and have had something valuable to communicate in writing. This goes against the historical grain of literature and the arts which have been perceived to be the exclusive preserve of a middle and upper class elite.

This may seem like rhetorical Marxian simplification to some, but the fundamental inheritance of British literature, poetry in this case, has been and still is, especially in its established representations, a presumption of ancestry based more on educational and hereditarily received superiorities and nepotisms, rather than on pure merit. And one only has to look today at the predominance of the middle-classes among the ranks of the highest profile practitioners, mostly from academic backgrounds, still many hailing from the ancient universities, and contrast this verse elite with the vast underclass of equally able and naturally talented poets, whose valuable and very relevant writing is - and has been almost unfailingly - completely under-represented, even unpublished, in the mainstream. Even when an outsider voice is permitted in by the randomly Damascus-struck editor of an otherwise near-impregnable - without the right connections - higher imprint, they are invariably led out for a graze in an often tokenistic, patronising manner, as much as publicity stunt of sham-altruism for the title as a genuine concession to the poet's equal merit to the more manufactured, chaperoned-in voices. Where There's Smoke, then, is a lasting testament to the exceptional strength and vitality of marginalised working-class poetry of recent times.

Pluto Press's 1980 anthology Bricklight - Poems from the Labour Movement of East London, edited by the accomplished Smokestack poet Chris Searle, provided a more historical, broad-sweeping collection of writings from both the posthumously known and the contemporaneously unknown. Both famous and fugitive socialist voices are published alongside one another in an egalitarian spirit: names such as Blake, Shelley, Thomas Hood, William Morris, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Christopher Caudwell, and famous political activists, such as Sylvia Pankhurst and Clement Attlee (a poet Prime Minister! What a far cry from the pinstriped salesmen premiers of today), are punctuated by an army of lesser known, even obscure, voices, such as Richard Free, Arthur Lynch, Joseph Leftwich, Chris Searle, Peter Blackman, Martha Watt, Patrician Lynch, Leonora Thomas - exactly where are most of the latter names to be found in the often-cited representative literary archives of the nation? There are also, tellingly, many anonymous voices in this brilliant and thorough anthology, one tantalisingly called 'The Tramp Poet', who provides a poem titled 'The Battle of Cable Street'. As in many such fugitive anthologies, there is a mixed standard of poetry, but Bricklight gifts us more than its fair share of startling discoveries. 'A Cry in the Darkness', a 1902 poem by Richard Free, is a brilliant polemical verse in the Shelleyan ballad tradition, with more than an echo of John Davidson's 'Thirty Bob a Week' in its use of a working-class patois - in this instance apparently Glaswegian Scots - to lend it a streetwise verisimilitude:

You gents with your blood o' the bluest -
After all, 'ow's it diff'rent from mine?
Your 'earts, it is said, are the truest,
Though crusty, maybe, like old wine;
Are you proud of your truest an' bluest?
Try a venture o' faith, quite the newest -
Cast your pearls afore swine.

The fust-born, you are Gawd's creechers
In station, nobility, pride;
And I guess you're our natural teachers,
Though the world and 'is wife may deride;
Be true to yourselves as Gawd's creechers,
An' we'll shunt all the poets an' preachers,
An' the slummers beside.

Sassiety's leaders they call you!
You may be, but then you're not mine,
Nor my mate's, whose remarks would appal you
Ef you ventured too fur on thet line:
Lor' bless you! the names she would call you!
But don't let the thought o' that gall you:
Cast your pearls after swine!
...

Did He [Gawd] give an eternal vacation
To you, lazy nobodies, there,
Sittin' squat on a nabbed reputation
With your Times and your padded arm-chair?
Did He grant you an endless vacaction
Wen He made the lords o'creation?

This is a long but well-sustained ballad, its mimicry infectious, its energy insatiable, its dialectic inescapable - a fugitive classic.

Charles Poulson's previously unpublished 'Stepney of the 1920's' is a superbly descriptive prose-poem, a social document in itself - here are some excerpts:

The planner, the inspector, the enforcer of legal standards,
The man from the Council, the businessman's nightmares,
Were yet but the hope in the mind of a radical.
...

The church is there yet, with its fine-carved stonework
But round its green graveyard, like a besieging army
Stands smoky black Stepney in all its grimness.
...

The women who scrubbed and polished themselves into the grave
...

Praising the Lord with the brush and the mop and the scourer;
The young bucks at the corner planning the revolution,
Or pitching and tossing for pennies. The tired men
After a long day's work, in the ill-lit library
Conning a difficult book, seeking a way
To a world more sane and just ...

The last trope reminds me of a disarming monologue in Dennis Potter's unsung 1965/6 masterpieces Stand Up Nigel Barton/Vote! Vote! Vote! for Nigel Barton, when the eponymous character lachrymosely recalls how his collier father's hands could turn from the hard labour at a coal-face to making sublime sketches of human faces, a talent which he neither rated nor even recognised, such was the 'keep-in-your-place' mindset of the times; a beautiful and profoundly moving motif of the sheer waste of human talents in a classist society. To which, William Robert Halls contributes the excellently barbed 'When the Worker Begins to Think', which as its title suggests, a rousing challenge to the 'angels in marble' (Disraeli's epithet for working-class Tories) everywhere to see their labour as the exploitation it really is, rather than buy in to the twisted work ethic they'd been indoctrinated to accept, even celebrate, with masochistic pride (as with Tressell's Tory-voting Ragged Trousered Philanthropists):

When the worker begins to think,
And use of his organ of sight;
He will rid the 'Human Flowers'
Of the capitalistic blight.

Halls also has a true gift for the polemical punch, especially regarding working-class consciousness and capitalism's absolute damnation of talent without means:

But hark! The engine's dragging,
The steam is dropping back;
Pick up the rake and shovel
Or else you'll get the sack.

For you are only a worker,
And not a poet, you see;
So you must not start a-thinking,
Or; it's goodbye to profits and 'master me'.

J.A. Elliott's 'Match-makers' Complaint', about the Matchgirls Strike of 188, subverts the Lord's Prayer to put its satirical point across: ''Give us this day our daily bread'/ You pray who are already fed'. 'Strike for Better Wages' was one of the anonymously authored Union songs, to the tune of 'Tramp, Tramp, Tramp the Boys are Marching', and reads almost like a parallel working-class Kipling, and again, with a hint of Davidson's infectious sprung-rhymed balladry:

Starvation 'tis they bids to a man with seven kids,
When he brings home only fifty pence a day.
For what can you get to eat on seven and six a week
When it often takes it all the rent to pay.

'Fugitive Vision' by William Dorrell, a shop steward of the Tobacco Workers' Union, is a brilliant autobiographical fantasia infused with an industrial glossary of factory terms, and interpolated by a beguiling naturalistic monologue from a Pan-like tempter of obscure purpose (perhaps to lure strikers from solidarity into 'scabbing'?):

The roar of mad machinery that cuts and cuts
The moist tobacco leaves crammed in its wooden guts:
The super-heated gas-pans with their nauseous stink.
And fumes that irritate one's eyelids that they blink:
The blowers whir-ring whir-ring, till the heat is killed...
...

One morning as I stood with blackened greasy hand
Upon the rigger-bar, about to pull the band,
The sun, that had been streaming on me through a chink...
Was suddenly obscured, and my machine looked dull
And dirty in the half light, as an unwashed trull:
And glancing up toward the high built window there,
I saw two brown and startled eyeballs widely stare
Between the bars: I saw the shaggy legs, the tan
Of health on lithe brown limbs: I saw the goat-foot of Pan.

Pan then beckons the tobacco worker to follow him back to pre-industrial nature away from 'the resin-tang of pine:/ The smell of burning loam and straggling honeybine/ The reek of beech-nuts rotting in the twilight of the wood'; the Fawn explains he is the embodiment of all natural sublimities such as 'The curve of the fluted rushes and their slender pointed tips/ The invisible mouth that brushes the wanderer's dusty lips:/ The silver bloom on the peaches ...', and so on. On returning from under this spell, the tobacco worker seems lastingly touched by its magic, possibly a metaphor for the socialist utopian aspiration:

But in my heart was happiness - I felt that song
Was throbbing in my throat, trembling upon my tongue:
And all that day I went about my hated toil,
With smiling lips, forgetful of the dirty and moil:
And conscious only of that song's inviting words,
Alluring as the scurry of ascending birds.

Tony Gilbert's 'Good to Fight' is a rousing poem on working-class resistance to the Thirties Blackshirts:

Demanding a shilling's winter relief,
Shouting, 'We want work!'
Cable Street, Bermondsey and Spain
Were battles we could not shirk.

Nat Cohen, Sam Masters, Phil Richards - they went
When Madrid fought and called for aid.
First our Tom Mann Centuria
Then The International Brigade.

Poems such as these highlight one of the outstanding achievements of Chris Searle's selection: the representation of what the working-class poets were saying at such times as the Thirties, when the received canon of British poetry only records what the upper-middle-class Oxbridge elite of the likes of Auden, Day Lewis, Cornford, Caudwell et al. were - however valuably- publishing. And this anthology demonstrates - and enshrines - so importantly the sheer depth and range of working-class poetry of the twentieth century; take Jim Woolveridge's 'They were hard times but...' for another authentic voice:

Tell me about the old days,
When living was so cheap,
When cigarettes were ten for fourpence
And oranges were tuppance a pound.

I can tell you about the dole, son,
Where they gave me fifty shillings,
I couldn't afford to smoke son,
And oranges were only for Christmas.

Or, Stephen Hicks in 'Some People':

Some people eat and some do not
It depends on how much cash they've got.
...

Things that we need through the day
Are so fantastically dear
It's alright for them down Pall Mall way
But we don't get too much here.

Bricklight is also a menagerie of exceptional poems by highly politicised women, such as Milly Harris's anti-Blackshirt 'October 1936', and Sally Fool's 'Man's Hell':

On Earth, is this Hell?
The working class
Know too well,
To be ruled by a clock...

Leslie Mildiner's 'Sometimes You Can Hear the Birds Sing' is beautifully descriptive, tripping poem:

Above the noise of the frustrated, mirror-faced workers,
drills, screaming lost children;
above the noise of planes, meths-drinkers, provocatively
dressed schoolgirls; ...
old men arguing in back-street pubs,
lonely cold women dying in damp, gaslight rooms,
prostitutes giving
pleasure and comfort to secret-keeping fathers...

Or possibly this is a polemic on the worker swallowing their lot for promise of a fictive hereafter? It's isn't entirely clear, but it is a sublime poetic statement by Dorrell, reminiscent both of Blake's 'The Chimney Sweep', and the novel no doubt inspired partly by the latter poem, Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies. Bricklight is a treasure-trove of illuminating and highly accomplished British socialist poetry, with too many extraordinary poems to quote from here, but other standouts are 'May 4th., 1926' by Bill Foot, 'Red Gold' by E.R. Mansell-Moulin, the redundant cranes of 'Dockland' by Bernie Steer, 'Ode to Wapping' by Danny Connelly, 'The Battle of Cable Street' by The Tramp (Anon.), 'Haruna Maru' by Arthur Clegg (who was, incidentally, David Kessel's first publisher, The Ivy, 1994), 'High Rise Blues' by H. Joseph, and precocious piece of polemic, 'Destruction by Margaret Thatcher', by a fourteen year old, Paul Parris (presumably no relation to Matthew!).

And in the case of Labour activists and politicians, Bricklight also brings some startling re-discoveries, as in the compassionate and lyrical 'In Limehouse' by young MP Clement Attlee, long before he rose to become Britain's most socially transformative and genuinely left-wing Labour Prime Minister (last of a Liberal-Labour line of socially transformative administrations from Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith, inspired in the creation of a Welfare State by William Beveridge's seminal 1942 report on poverty and unemployment); how different a time it must have been when a newly elected MP penned a poem about his new constituency and its social problems, which, though unsurprisingly mediocre in the main, does proffer the nice figurative line 'I see the weary mothers sweat their souls away'. But it's Sylvia Pankhurst who is the real revelation of the activist voices, whose compassionately vitriolic social-document poems not only convince as empirical insights, but in their grasp of form and painterly descriptiveness, as full-blooded poems, albeit archaically sculptured ones in terms of diction and syntax - here's an excerpt from her 'Mary':

They named thee prostitute and sent thee here,
poor ancient Mary, wan and parchment-faced
with mumbling chin approaching to the nose,
a-drooping pinched o'er toothless gums indrawn.

Searle's Introduction is also worthy of mention and comment, since it is an erudite, historically rooted charting of the lineage of song and poetry by those mobilised by organised socialism in the halcyon days of the still left-wing Labour Movement. Searle begins his essay with an extensive quote from 1932-5 Labour leader George Lansbury, himself emphasizing the link between poetry and politics in British socialism:

These words of music and poetry tell us of the trials of the past, when in those hopeful days our fathers unfurled the flag of revolt and human progress. When we sing The Red Flag, we shall think of the revolutionist of whom it is said, 'his blood-red banner streams afar, who follows in his train?' because our red flag stands for the same oneness of human life embodied in the words 'he has made of one blood all nations of the Earth'. For teaching the revolutionary doctrine, he was crucified. ... When we sing The International, we proclaim our faith in human brotherhood ... 'On we march then, we the workers, and the rumour that ye hear/ Is the blended soul of battle and deliverance drawing near'...

Searle's emphasis in this excellent exposition of early British Labour Movement literature is, crucially, on the inextricable role song and poetry, the twin banners of music and language, played in British socialism's developing spirit and campaigning mobilisation. In providing an anthology of political poetry, he focuses in the Introduction on the less commonly noted ancestry of poetical politics, as in the case of the bookish Lansbury, the early Labour journals and broadsheets' literary textures and infusions such as J.A. Elliott's topical 'The Link, a Match Maker's Song', the Left anthems 'The International' and 'The Red Flag', Arthur Lynch's 'The Tinsel Ark' (intriguingly inspired by a phrase in a Keats poem) in such seminal titles as Lansbury's Labour Weekly, The Clarion, The Herald and The Women's Dreadnaught, tracing this ancestry back to the Chartists' use of rabble-rousing poems and songs, Morris's Chants for Socialists, and even further, to the beguilingly figurative prose of the dialectical broadsides of John Lilburne and Gerrad Winstanely.

Searle's re-emphasis on the vital importance of language and literature, particularly poetry, to the communication of the socialist cause, and his mourning in 1980 of the dearth of Labour groups left who still wound down their meetings by singing 'The Red Flag', is an essential dialectic in a materialist age where for too long now the Far Left in Britain have grown besotted by pseudo-Marxian dismissal of 'the arts' as a bourgeois distraction from the fundamental issues of class-struggle; this is indeed a philistinism sadly prevalent not only some in Far Left circles today - a dose of which I have experienced at first hand with a singular indifference among especially Trotskyite socialists to the contribution of poetry in advancing the cause - but also to a great extent in the Labour Party itself, especially of course in the historically divorced, modernising post-New cabal. But the importance of poetry, art in general, to the socialist cause, cannot be underestimated (once more open-minded leftist titles such as the New Statesman and Tribune spare the odd space in their pages for politically germane poems, but not so for some time now, leaving the Morning Star to carry the banner practically by itself). Searle's Introduction is in many ways a specifically British-focused descendant of Alan Bold's to the Penguin Book of Socialist Verse exactly a decade before.

Both Where There's Smoke and Bricklight are essential anthological archives for all poets of the Left today, again, to demonstrate just how rich the lineage of socialist poetry has been English literature, not only throughout the last century, but also crucially since 1945, when debatably the realisation of a more egalitarian society via the triumph of the Welfare State and NHS, which continued through a broadly left-of-centre consensus up to 1979, had turned mainstream poets' attentions away from social issues and back into their own minds again (though why more radically charged political poetry has not again been on the ascendant from the 1980s up until today, in light of the gradual dismantling of the post 1945 New Jerusalem planning programme, is almost impossible to fathom, except perhaps for a germ of unstoppable complacency spreading to epidemic proportions throughout the big imprints and powerhouses of established British poetics).

It's poets such as Worpole, Kessel, Mingham, Moos, Shrapnel, Samson, Mitchell, Tebb, Croft that have been the true oppositional poets of our times, the ignored voices against Thatcherism, the materially working and underclass verse-commentators, living and writing in obscurity, but whose output will I am convinced earn its much-deserved posterity in future literary discourse and even anthologizing.

Reclaiming the Means of Publication: Towards a New Arts and Crafts Movement?

In Brighton, where I've lived and written since 1998 (though I recently relocated to sleepier Hove), there is, if one selectively sifts through the pretentious detritus of poetaster-style stand-up poetry and spoken word, and the loftier Sussex University literati and associated mainstream cabals and imprints, a more disparate community of new emerging talent drawn from the city's vast underclass. This artistic underclass, rarely if ever to be cited in glossy (official or Fringe) Festival brochures, is however beginning to find representation through organisations/charities, such as Creative Future. CF is essentially a socialist arts initiative, which provides a mentoring scheme for gifted amateur poets from socially marginalised backgrounds (mostly survivors of homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness, or combinations of these), publishing their work alongside marginalised visual artists in beautifully produced annual anthologies, and selecting two or three a year for individual pamphlet publication. I'm honoured to be one of Creative Future's mentors, and to also assist in the editing and design of their pamphlets.

A further serendipity has been that I have been able to dovetail my own workshop residency at Mill View psychiatric hospital in Hove with Creative Future, and am presently mentoring through their scheme three very talented poets from the local mental health community. Last year, as a culmination of three years' tutoring patients on an acute ward and then collating a huge body of their poetry and prose, I was able to design, select, edit and publish an anthology of service-users' writing and artwork via a Sussex Partnership NHS Arts Award, and the resulting reversible double-book (also incorporating poetry written by outpatients at Aldrington Day Hospital, my first workshop-base), The Hats We Wear/Blank Versing the Past, was launched at the central Jubilee Library to heartening publicity. This book has also marked the second community-based anthology under the Waterloo Press imprint, following on from Bridget Whelan's very well publicised Salt & Vinegar (writing by members of the Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project).

It's not only in such unusually co-operative projects that Waterloo Press present a more radicalised alternative to the more mainstream publishing of other Brighton-and-Hove-linked poetry presses: putting an editorial preference on diversity of style and subject, with a particular leaning to Left-inflected voices, modernists and mixed-genre autodidactic poets, Waterloo is unequivocally the poetry powerhouse of Brighton and Hove today, as well as the longest running (since 1998), albeit one which doesn't disproportionately merge itself into the city's rather hyperactive, even hyperbolic, live performance culture. The resonance and sheer catholicity of its range of voices however is not to be underestimated; and it's standing in terms of poetic quality is a particularly establishment-challenging achievement, since Waterloo is one of the very few contemporary poetry presses that does not base its judgment in commissioning authors on how many top journals their work has appeared in previously, which is the proverbial first on the checklist of most poetry publishers today. In selecting its poets, the Waterloo editorial policy is one purely based on the merit of the work submitted to the press, irrespective of how impressive or scant one's Acknowledgments are; an inclusive protocol which keeps the door open to new and fresh voices as it does also to the occasional rogue 'name'. Waterloo is one of only a small number of contemporary poetry presses that prise ambition of subject and theme every bit as much as ambition of style - a distinctly non-partisan stylistic approach, neither mainstream nor entirely the other direction, that opens the door therefore to a wider and more varied range of voices. Smokestack, Sixties Press, Flambard and several other medium-sized imprints promote very much the same establishment-sceptic, catholic approach.

The media, particularly - and ironically - the more progressive outlets such as The Guardian, Independent and New Statesman, will commonly fall into the proverbial trap of interpreting radicalism of poetic style as ipso facto indicative of what constitutes politically radical poetry, and lead themselves down random blind alleys where they cite the output of such avant-garde - though rampantly commercial, if that's not a contradiction - imprints as Salt and Cape as examples; or journals such as The Wolf and Nth Position, both of whom claim to champion the non-conformist in modern poetry and to be anti-clique, and counter-mainstream, but both of whom betray many zeitgeist-latching traits and contributor lists that say otherwise. The latter two titles, one a print poetry journal, the other a polemical poetry webzine, are basically representative of the just slightly more questioning end of a broad mainstream in contemporary poetics; their detectable ambition being not so much to uproot the aesthetic complacencies of the present day poetry scene, but more to simply transplant its high profile apparatchiks with an only marginally altered 'alternative mainstream', themselves as the new doyens. As with the progressive imprint Salt, and its aesthetic cousin Cape, there is a similarly conservative undertone to an ostensible radicalising of poetic form - unhelpfully however, towards what is basically poetic prose or prosetry, as opposed to the more prose poetry, or prosaic poetry, of much of the mainstream: their dialectical mettles or implicit manifestoes, feel meretricious, vague, even a little pretentious, and at times, too flexible to convince as authentic alternative British poetics. The preoccupation of these outlets with stylistic innovation over that of topic, or social engagement, at least, beyond anything knowingly ironic or flippant, is for the more dissenting schools of poets practising largely in obscurity today, not a rallying-cry but more another hollow echo from simply another academic cabal who seek to transplant the currently dominant mainstream academies - a sort of tedious Oxford-Cambridge poetry boat race.

The dissenters want poetry to return to the people, to become relevant again to the turbulent issues of our time, to address the moral and social anarchies of free fall capitalism - but, crucially, without any dumbing down of standards, as some would argue the originally radical Bloodaxe have latterly come to epitomise. So in the absence of any unified putsch in the direction of a true and refreshed style-subordinated social poetic from either wing of the poetry academies, the dissenters are forced to pursue their individual voices, a plurality of unfashionably political, dialectical and didactic poets who form of a large section of what I shorthand as Recusants: poets not interested in trends and passing fashions, but purely in the development and pursuit of the distinctive individual voice, and in the social and political re-engagement of the poet's role in society. [Some might cite this aspiration as a contradiction, but it isn't at all: if poets today cannot define their own individual poetic identities, then how can they hope to authentically contribute to the plurality of issues in the society they are a part of? This might not be an obvious principle, but it is a perennial one of the Wildean-Caudwellian form of socialist literary dialectic that has informed the British radical poetry tradition for over a century now: the path to true individualism, that is realisation of the authentic self, often augmented through creative practice, is only truly accessible through an egalitarian communion of all people, a transcendence of class and wealth disparities, an equitable sharing of material and cultural means in order to achieve authentic freedom of self-expression for everyone. Capitalism only offers promotion to a self-interested minority, but at the continual expense of the freedoms and prosperity of the majority. True socialism alone offers a route to true freedom for the individual, to realise their full personality and talents. But it must be pursued unconditionally, and in a humanitarian and sharing spirit; no one-upmanship will do, no coteries or exclusive clubs, no distortions of self-esteem through a sense of superiority to others - in the kind of society Oscar Wilde (in his dialectic The Soul of Man Under Socialism) and Christopher Caudwell envisaged, is one in which we celebrate our infinite human difference through full expression of our individual personalities, as opposed to celebrating our material disparities and expressing ourselves through snobbery and prejudice, as we do under capitalism. The latter is a false freedom, a false individualism, based entirely on wealth and property; the former, as yet unrealised, would be a true and meritocratic articulation of an infinitely diverse species. And this dialectic applies equally and just as urgently to the representativeness of the literature of society].

But sadly still, such innovative and inclusive presses and outlets are few and far between, and their continuance in the main ever relies on the patronage of the Arts Council, which frankly has a rather capricious track record in the main, and in a time of severe recession, may prove even more prickly in times to come. These more radical poetry outlets are, arguably by their very nature, in a minority today, and none can be said to be representative of the established mainstream arena, but largely still marginal to its narrowing remit. One could argue that the last twenty or so years of British poetry have indeed marked a steep decline in social and political engagement in mainstream terms, to a degree arguably not witnessed since the Georgian period (roughly 1910-14), which was truncated abruptly by the First World War, and thereafter, the rise of Modernism. But even still, one could look even further back in time, to perhaps the mid-Victorian era, even further, to 18th century Augustan verse, for a parallel to today's markedly apolitical, conformist and prosaic excesses. Since Georgianism, frequently disparaged in Modernist-inclined circles, but rather venerated in the more formalist shades of today's mainstream, was actually quite a mixed bag of talents, and some poets often tagged with that vague label were in their actual output anything but the willow-clopping prefects of the likes of Rupert Brooke or Edward Thomas: Harold Monro, for instance, was a voice apart from the rest, a lugubrious, rather morose poet with an acid political bite, while the Super-Tramp himself, WH Davies, documented in verse his first-hand experiences of vagrancy and poverty.

In today's British poetry mainstream, who do we have who more than tokenistically addresses the grittier issues of the day - apart from the hypothetical polemic on Iraq (re, Carol Ann Duffy's Laureate work, and Salt's 2003 100 Poets Against the War), and other universal single issues such as the Banking Crisis and MPs' expenses - also, Chris McCabe's eponymous collection based around the Hutton Enquiry (Salt) - I can think of many practising and publishing poets who do tackle the less salubrious subjects such as poverty, homelessness, mental illness, social exclusion, drug addiction, domestic violence etc. but none of these voices could be categorised as mainstream, either in their style or in their published representation. In the mainstream, it is truly difficult to try and weed out any high profile poets today who write outside the box of received post-modern wisdom, who are openly ideological or politically coloured, unless one can include a certain New Labour/Blairite lukewarm 'progressive centrism' of attitude that seems to pervade the academic, middle-class, Oxbridge sets.

But the contemporary poetic obsession with understatement, authorial neutrality, Guardian-style centrist cynicism, vague trans-partisan epiphany, and sardonic irony, makes in the main for a blanched, colourless, coffee-bar poetic, stripped of all dialectic and tension, and so ultimately culturally sidestepping. Indeed, one wonders if, had Blair not recklessly dragged this country into Iraq, would there ever have been any rapidly assembled mainstream-tinted political anthology as Todd Swift's single-issue enterprise for Salt? One can't help thinking that without such macrocosmic vicissitudes as the invasion of Iraq, or the Banking Crisis, British poets would have been quite content to scribble away in their unalloyed collegial solipsism on Damascus-moments in the kitchen or on nature walks, their tortuously bohemian sex lives, and insipid episodes of epicurean speculation. It's deeply ironic of course, since it's all a bit upside-down in the mainstream: a preoccupation with the microcosmic on the domestic level is counterbalanced oppositely with an occasional nod to the macrocosmic global issues - these latter subjects being of course cool enough to handle due to their detachedness from day-to-day British reality and the more contentious issues of domestic politics and social inequalities that stare us in the face all the time, and one does suspect that the main reason why the mainstream largely avoids social commentary closer to home is because few if any of them are willing to compromise their career paths. The only theme most of the mainstream seems to come together on is 'water'. So we're highly unlikely to ever see anthologies appearing along the lines of 100 Poets Against Capitalism or Poetry V Poverty - the nearest we got to this was Rupert Loydell's ironically punning Make Poetry History, a sort of Dadaist cryptic reference manual. Again, even on the more Modernist, experimental end of the contemporary poetry spectrum, we get rather obfuscation and equal but opposite preoccupation with style to the blander mainstream, verbal collages that simply obscure the bigger picture.

Perhaps the drift away from social and political dialectic in British poetry was largely as a result of the growing cultural hold that pop lyricism has had on the imagination of the public since the likes of Lennon and Dylan began to explore the 'bigger' themes in their songs, that had hitherto been the remit almost entirely of poetry; and, indeed, subsequent attempts by the trendier of literary commentators to merge the two genres by canonising the likes of Dylan and Leonard Cohen as 'poets', has arguably been unhelpful rather than revitalising regarding the case for the continued relevance of poetry in popular society. It is certainly true that Dylan, relative to the standard songwriter, demonstrated an unusual ability at the figurative in some of his lyrics, but all too often he veered into the trap of spontaneity so common to songwriters, producing much pseudo-poetry that in the main falls rather flat when isolated on the page, with only the words to carry it. Lennon excelled at Carrollesque obscurism with classic word-plays such as 'I Am the Walrus' and 'Glass Onion', and went on of course to become the de facto pop protester of the early Seventies; Ray Davies of The Kinks offered a rather quirky, nostalgist voice, while Steve Marriot and the Small Faces took the music hall vaudeville route with songs like 'Renee'. To my mind, some of the most authentically poetic songwriters and lyricists - and arguably the last of a now long-gone breed - emerged mainly in the late Seventies, and via the more alternative, underground music scenes of the otherwise lyrically risible Eighties, in the latter sense, largely as a dialectical reaction to the stultifying materialism of that decade. Kate Bush, probably more than any other lyricist before or since, came the nearest to a true poetic sensibility in her lyrics; Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding of XTC were very much a more dialectical Lennon/McCartney of their era, but were plunged into obscurity after stopping live touring; Matt Johnson of the cult band The The, blazed brilliantly though obscurely throughout the Thatcher era with some exceptionally literate anti-capitalist poetic-songs such as 'The Sinking Feeling' and 'Heartland'. But for me personally, it was Paul Weller of The Jam who most demonstrably and descriptively manipulated the pop-lyric medium to assert a new working-class poetic polemic (he also wrote poems which were published under his own imprint, Riot Stories, and was inspired particularly by Shelley, whose 'Mask of Anarchy' was quoted on the back of The Jam's 1980 Sound Affects LP), presenting a serious challenge to the political poets of the period, in such class-blasting songs as 'Eton Rifles' ('what chance have you got against a tie and crest?') and 'A Town Called Malice', and exceptionally descriptive vignettes on urban degeneration as 'Down in the Tubestation At Midnight', demonstrating a level of poetic social engagement on a very concrete level that made the empty sloganeering of the Clash seem relatively crass. Take this brilliantly evocative lyric from Weller's 'Saturday's Kids' - it's difficult to cite any mainstream poetry of this time (1979) writing something as socially descriptive and polemical:

Saturday's boys live life with insults,
Drink lots of beer and wait for half time results...

Saturday's girls work in Tesco's and Woolworths,
Wear cheap perfume 'cause it's all they can afford,
Go to discos they drink Babycham
Talk to Jan - in bingo accents.

Saturday's kids play one arm bandits,
They never win but that's not the point is it,
Dip in silver paper when their pints go flat...

Their mums and dads smoke capstan non-filters,
Wallpaper lives 'cause they all die of cancer...

Save up their money for a holiday,
To Selsey Bill or Bracklesham Bay...

Saturday's kids live in council houses,
Wear v-necked shirts and baggy trousers,
Drive Cortinas with fur-trimmed dashboards,
Stains on the seats - in the back of course!

Contemporary pop stars certainly don't write lyrics like that anymore; or, arguably, many contemporary poets either. (It's almost as if most of us simply pretend poverty and social deprivation doesn't exist anymore, while we step over street beggars and avoid 'Chavs' like the plague).

So, it is possible to trace the decline in social and political engagement of British, particularly English, poetry to the interpolation of popular lyricism into the traditional heartlands of poetry between the mid-to-late Sixties up to its last, though more zeitgeisty gasp of the mid-Nineties Britpop peak. But beyond the Nineties, into the Noughties, and now, the next decade, where is the excuse in light of a de-intellectualised, streamlined artificial pop sensibility currently holding sway? Since over the past three decades, publication and promotion of more radical, political, ideological, and socially engaged poetry has fallen to the far-scattered small presses in the main. I say, in the main, since in its early years (chiefly the mid to late 1980s), Neil Astley's counter-establishment Bloodaxe - now a household name - was geared towards a shaking up of the perceived elitism of the then-British poetry scene, and certainly publications such as Tony Harrison's V, a blazing poetic statement against Thatcher's pogrom on the mining industry, was a bold and significant step in a more radical poetic direction. Unfortunately however, over the past decade or so, Bloodaxe has in its own way come to typify a corner of the new mainstream, one disturbingly more and more prose-inflected, increasingly populist and commercial, and in its own inverted sense, rather exclusive and dogmatic in its editorial conception of what constitutes 'contemporary poetry'. With few exceptions, Bloodaxe has debatably now become part of the contemporary problem in poetry: an implicit misconception that in order for poetry to be popular again, it has to be dumbed down to the lowest common cultural denominators - sex, football, celebrity, comedy - and should rarely if ever be didactic. But what most potential poetry readers and buyers want to receive from the medium today is writing which is both well-crafted and relevant, and not simply one or the other. In any case, 'relevance' is highly subjective, but by this term I would argue more socially engaged poetry - and didactic sometimes, why not? - or are the likes of Shelley and Auden to be consigned finally to the dustbin of poetic history? Perhaps many contemporary practitioners are scared of didacticism because they themselves have nothing in particular to say? That is a clear possibility given the dearth of interesting topics tackled in much mainstream poetry. But to echo the old Fabian aspiration for society, it's my own belief that poetry should be neither inaccessible nor vapidly populist, but somewhere balanced between the two, where craftsmanship is never compromised, where the big important subjects are addressed, the grittier social realities included, which is both speculative and occasionally didactic, ideological even, and ultimately aiming to draw in the public and lift it up with itself to a better, more transformative societal mindset.



Bold and Beyond: Smokestackians, Recusants and Redbricks

As touched on earlier, a lineage of poets writing in the left-wing radical tradition has filtered through almost in spite of itself into print through mostly Northern imprints unafraid to publish partisan ideological work: Flambard, Five Leaves, Smokestack, to name just three, though broadly most are part of the Independent Northern Publishers group. Middlesbrough-based poet Andy Croft (who founded Smokestack to publish 'poets who are unconventional, unfashionable, radical or left-field and who are working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority'), in many ways follows in the footsteps of Tony Harrison - and the indefatigable socialist poet and People's Laureate, Adrian Mitchell - but less raucously or given to shock-tactics to win his audience, and who writes from an historically informed Communist standpoint. Croft is one of a whole generation of radical left-wing poets who interestingly in the main channel their polemic through a high formalism not entirely dissimilar to Audenesque schemes, though of more pronounced working-class dialectical tone than Auden's Oxford Blue socialism; a certain mnemonic inclination is utilised to often startling effect through this allegiance to iambic verse form, rhyme and metrical blank verse, which is much more than simply a retro-stylistic, it is a reaffirmation, through a certain timelessness of poetic form, of the equally and symbiotically timeless nature of the political aspirations these poets seek to champion, often by illustrating starkly how far modern society is still from achieving them. As Alan Bold wrote in his Introduction to the Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (1970):

It is necessary for the socialist poet to have more impressive technical equipment than his apolitical contemporaries because his task is that much more important.

This technique employs satirical irony only in so far as it reinforces the ideological argument, but never simply as an end in itself, as it is arguably in the majority of more polemical poetry and prosetry being produced by more avant-garde exponents of the younger generation of poets today (with some exceptions). Many of this breed of unfashionably unreconstructed socialist poets are represented by the Smokestack list, and there is a cross-pollination of some of the more prolific voices with kindred presses such as Flambard and Five Leaves, as well as like-minded journals such as The Penniless Press (where one can find a veritable archive of work by such didactic left stalwarts as Alexis Lykiard, John Lucas, Mike Wilson, Fred Voss, David Betteridge et al. With the further democratisation of poetry representation summoned in with the internet revolution - a serendipity of development from an unlikely medium, and one which many instinctively luddite left-wing poets initially shunned but have now opened up to more - there is a plethora of radicalised outlets for socially and politically engaged poetry, specifically Red Ink, Eleutheria - Scottish Poetry Review, Osprey, the Glasgow Review, Poetry Leeds, the Recusant (excuse the plug), soap-box poetry dialectic sites like Angel Exhaust, The Bow-Wow Shop and Nth Position and Culture Wars, some rather contradictorily anti-coterie and pro-inclusivity titles who puzzlingly states that they 'do not accept unsolicited submission', which smacks of the very exclusivity they lambast in other mainstream outlets and somewhat undermines their polemical posture to an almost laughable degree; and of course there are many small left-wing journals that are increasingly embracing an e-life in addition to print-life, such as, again, the polemically exceptional The Penniless Press.

All these more politically charged, polemical poetry outlets have found in the internet an unprecedented control of their own means of publication to potentially massive readerships far larger than the average poetry print journals and presses can hope to reach; and so too, inevitably, the e-book has followed suit in the form of the downloadable pdf, set out as a pre-print book, a medium which can prove wearisome on the retina if read entirely on screen, but that can be solved by printing out (while, admittedly, the intimately tangible experience of handling a properly bound book is less easily placated). Naturally, this fresh new innovation in poetry publishing is continually bashed by the jealously guarding print presses and journals, who occasionally lapse into reactionary spin, with themed-issue dialectical scare tactics under banners such as Is the Internet Undermining Poetry Standards? and other frankly rather pathetic quandaries, not to say in the main hypocritical, when one examines the plethora of sheer mediocrity that has been published in volume form over the past twenty-odd years. Again, a certain parallel with the knee-jerk Tory scare-stories of nationally bankrupting Hung Parliaments among the equally threatened tribalistic political class, can be clearly drawn.

Meantime, on the more free verse-inclined fringes of working-class poetry, increasingly admired voices such as Peter Street (a true modern day autodidact poet who taught himself to read and write poetry, against almost insurmountable odds) from Wigan, Tom Kelly and Keith Armstrong, both from Newcastle, et al - they are very much in the industrial regional dialectical tradition of poets such as Joe Corrie (1894-1968). While Kelly and Armstrong write mainly of the erosion of working-class identity in the post-industrial North and its betrayal by New Labour, Street takes a more naif, almost itinerant, observational approach reminiscent in some tonal senses of John Clare, or WH Davies, and has written on as singularly diverse subjects as abattoir banter, grave-digging, horticulture and war atrocities in Bosnia (where he travelled as a BBC-sponsored poet-correspondent). What all these poets have essentially in common is their radicalised challenge to poetry, often misperceived - due to frequent misrepresentation - as an elitist, upper-middle-class medium, by bringing into their own work a strong and much-needed infusion not simply of concrete topics related to working-class life and heritage, but also aspects of their regional working-class patinas and vernacular, idioms and slangs, which has come to infuse the form with a verbal grit drawn from more manual backgrounds and hands-on engagement with life and labour (almost a parallel to the uniquely untutored output of the Pitman Painters), that presents a true challenge now to the current mainstream establishment; or would, if they admitted to taking notice. In the meantime, while we wait for a thorough assimilation of working-class poetry into mainstream middle-class poetics, the likes of Smokestack keep the flag waving, not only of working-class writing, but also that of fellow-travellers, lapsed middle-class, shabby genteel voices who have known social hardships at first hand, and of course, those who empathise with such sentiments.

Alan Bold also interestingly warned against the experimental excesses of post-Eliot Modernism as in many ways as much a bourgeois distraction from the bigger social and political themes of the times - which require more sincerity and mnemonic directness to be most authentically addressed - as the domestic and prosaic of the post-Movement schools:

With political poetry we go to the heart of the matter and can dispense both with neo-Georgian domesticity of 'traditional' poets, and the graffiti of 'experimental' poets.

While he makes concessions of course for non-partisan political commentary in poetry, as in the case of Ginsberg's 'Howl', and the Beatniks, Bold makes a particular attack on the linguistic artifice of the Modernists:

...modernism is based on an untenable ontological dogma (man's isolation) and expresses the values of modern capitalism (nihilism) often unconsciously. By refusing to take cognizance of socialism, the modernist condemns himself to sterile and regressive technical experimentation, and accumulates naturalistic details without regard to a hierarchy of values.

In the tradition of this dialectic, the midstream schools of political poetry practised since 1970 and accelerated by the vicissitude of Thatcherism and the ideological abandonment of Blairism, have in the main instinctively embraced metrical verse, blank and often rhyming, to carry more mnemonically the increasingly urgent, even essential, ideological arguments and dialectics; a superficially retro-formalism that harks back to the likes of the Rhymers' Club, then the Thirties' poets, as a counter-poetic echo against the more formless, prosaic neo-Georgianism that has complimented the new materialism of the last three decades, even developed from it, and which therefore has resulted in the amorphous emptiness that is applauded by its own practitioners as the 'contemporary' method. But it has over the past three decades, only served to further alienate a public who feel cheated by the medium in its general - though not entire - resistance to engaging with their own lives, and those caught up in the social and political upheavals of both this nation and others; as with modern politics, the dialogue between politician and electorate, between poet and readership, has broken down, and did so ever since our culture cut out the middle man of debate and entered into a tribal duopoly of viewpoints, as we see with Labour and the Tories today (who have inevitably further deconstructed into a centre-right pseudo-consensus), while in poetry, the readership is caught up in the middle of an ongoing tribalism between the neo-Georgian mainstream and the experimental Modernists, both of which, debatably, are as out of touch with the common readership as each other: both wings of contemporary English poetry, as Bold argued as far back as 1970, have deconstructed themselves down to a sort of nihilism, which is reflected as much in the authorial vagueness and domesticity of the mainstream as it is in the cold cerebralism of the experimenters. Somewhere in the middle of these two oppositional forces, is the a wide variety of poetic styles, some closer to one wing than the other, but which is engaged every bit as much with 'the subject' as it with scoring stylistic points, where in many cases style takes a second place after the memorable, accessible but well-crafted conveyance of social and political concerns; a case of communicating something bigger than oneself, to the common public, which neither bores with quotidian domesticity nor obfuscates with linguistic opacity or self-indulgent irony, but delivers lastingly.

So it is not that English poetry hasn't been political for the past three decades, it has; but unfortunately for its prospective wider readership, the stylistic tussle between two opposing factions who place more importance on their methods than on substance, has alienated its public, and resulted now in a mainstream establishment still doggedly besotted by the obsessive reductionism of subject and style to an almost rootless, historically orphaned prosaic verse, coupled with an ever-visible experimental but equally reductionist (and deconstructionist) opposition that is infatuated with its own irony and flippant cynicism. Both are poetries of egoism, self-worship, as informed unconsciously by the cultural materialism of Thatcherism, and then fermented to maturation by both the neo-liberal and so-called progressive anti-ideological convergences during the New Labour years; it is then hugely ironic that most of the exponents of both sides of the contemporary poetry coin would consciously regard themselves as left-of-centre, even left-wing, voices. But without the nuts and bolts of poetic craft and tone needed to convey such sentiments, both sides fail to deliver authentic, even recognisable social dialectic or commentary.

The experimental Modernist line, descending from the technically ingenious though politically nihilistic, apocalyptic Nietzscheanism of Eliot, Pound, David Jones et al, also inherits in its genes the more politically engaged Scottish Marxist-socialist aesthetic of the likes of the recently disinterred Joseph MacLeod (and also from over the border, Hugh MacDiarmid), and this is becoming more and more prominent in certain circles of contemporary Modernism, by way of one example, in the work of Norman Jope, who is unusual in incorporating in his modernistic poetry a strong sense of form and cadence which connects his oeuvre more wholesomely to that of Eliot - both poets owe more to the Modernist tradition - stretching back to the more discursive, imagistic work of John Davidson - than to the more artificial post-historical experimentalism of today. But in the main, today's modernists need to be very weary of an accidental attrition of their predominantly left sentiment through a miscomprehension that radicalism of aesthetic style somehow translates into radical political and social engagement. History tells us something quite different, and as Bold warned, language, especially something as concentrated as poetic language, has a habit of distracting the poet from the nub of what he/she is trying to communicate; so the further irony is that in such bourgeois stylism, even those modernists who may seek to be subverting the apparatus of capitalism, might in effect simply be reinforcing it. Both the mainstream and the experimentalists are post-political factions, but in these post-recession radicalised times we are presently experiencing, by being so complacently Olympian in their respective ways, they risk increasing irrelevance, and this is something that arguably the new Laureate, Carol Ann-Duffy, is showing signs of detecting herself, by beginning to address the urgent issues of the day in her capacity as State Poet - and one can only hope there will be a trickle-down effect in time.

I'm afraid that on the level of social and political engagement in contemporary poetry, it feels very difficult, indeed, something of an effort, to find much that either fires or inspires among the current mainstream 'names'; the scourge of 'cappuccino poetics' getting more and more nausea-inducing by the decade, light and frothy as much of it is, topped with a sprinkling of post-political irony. George Szirtes, for instance, occasionally tackles some interesting topical issues and with an unusual immigrant slant (being Hungarian), but to my mind, probably more inclusively and personably on his rather perambulating blog site than in much of his actual poetry, which has its moments on the page, its flashes of insight and aphorism, the odd beguiling trope here and there, but which ultimately to the ear tends towards poetic prose, or prose, and for me lacks sufficient cadence and musicality to truly convince as full-blooded poetry. The same could also be said of numerous other well-established poets today, though admittedly compared to the naked prose of interminably self-reflective voices such as Hugo Williams, Szirtes certainly comes out better. But frankly, to my mind, this is a case of the best of a mediocre crop.

What is it, indeed, that I and many other poets find so completely un-compelling and uninspiring about so much currently lauded and prize-buffered poetry? How is it that what was mostly historically a literary form that roused the reader from their mundane apathies, pushed the emotional as well as intellectual buttons, excited, inspired and empowered the public in its sheer beauty of phrasing and composition and ability to stare out the darkest and most challenging of subjects and human issues so compellingly, has for so long now been steadily diluted into a form of plainly written, almost wilfully un-engaging, quotidian, half-hearted, prosaic anecdotes and meditations, which are neither clearly poetry nor prose, but somewhere dissatisfyingly in the middle, forever sprawling arbitrarily on the page as if in constant search of an identity? It's almost as if while the rest of us get on with the nitty-gritty of day to day mental, material and psychical struggle, poets languish in some sort of quaint parallel universe where everything can be endlessly deconstructed and reduced and pared down in a detached, slightly fey, indifferent kind of way; and then they wonder why they no longer touch the public consciousness as they once did.

The contemporary pedagogic poet, Don Paterson, is a skilled poet in his way, but what and who does his poetry represent? I have no idea personally; it doesn't affect or speak to me in the least; and in spite of his merits as a poet, I find myself straining to fathom why he is lauded as highly as he is, as opposed to say, most other mainstream poets today. His poetry might be rock solid, confident in its tone and use of form, intelligent, sometimes incisive, but ultimately it is hard to like it, or to relate to much of it, in a similar sense to his constant rival Sean O'Brien - for me, both poets are too self-concerned, curt and hubristic to ever sway my own reading habits. In Paterson's case, these rather unattractive egoistic traits in his poetry are also seemingly reflected in his public persona, which has more than a hint of the chiaroscuro of the old Thatcherite mindset in its stark demarcation between 'professional poets' and 'the others', which to me smacks of a literary equivalent to Thatcher's famous trope that 'anyone still travelling on a bus by 25 is a failure': no doubt Paterson would use such gauche and draconian relativism to belittle anyone still without a Faber/Picador contract under 35 as a failure.

Paterson - and O'Brien also - I have no doubt, would perceive themselves, as do most poets almost by dint of their intrinsically un-lucrative chosen career, as fundamentally left-of-centre in their views, but in my experience, one should walk the walk as well as talk the talk, and many poets I know who profess to being 'radicals' or 'socialists' rarely if ever translate such ideals into their actual behaviour towards others, particularly each other, in fact, in some cases, practise the complete opposite almost instinctively, partly due to the disproportionate intensity of competition in a disenfranchised literary medium, where print outlets are diminishing by the year - the original London Magazine (under Sebastian Barker) and the late U.A. Farnthorpe's publishers Peterloo, being two of the casualties of swingeing Arts cuts in recent times - and inclusion is often doggedly fought over in a literary survival of the fittest, thereby reducing any altruistic claims among many practitioners to believing in a brotherhood of man, or of poets, to mere badges of abstracted fancy (or, socialism so far as in it profits oneself and one's fiscally starved art-form).

Paterson's rather gloating (inverted) elitism, even outright aesthetic snobbery, is however matched by many poets still 'on the make' as it were, still desperately clawing their way up the poetry rungs to greater recognition, but this is of course a hubristic insecurity; nevertheless, it is a destructive, divisive and self-defeating attitude to adopt, fed inevitably by the less-than-admirable examples of those poets perched jealously at the top of the ladder. Again, this culture of Social Darwinian one-upmanship often at the expense of poetic integrity or any sense of solidarity reminds us of Alan Bold's depressingly prescient prognosis based on the poetry of his own generation:

...poets have been, in this country, cut off from industrial conflict. Though financially allied to the working class, they have had middle-class pretentions.

It's poetry Thatcherism in motion, basically, and the mainstream scene has been infected this way for some time now, many of its aspiring 'names of tomorrow' so caught up in the rat's maze of promotional opportunities that they are arguably losing the focus of what they are supposed to be doing: writing poetry. But slim, half-developed oeuvres cannot keep poets going very long, and eventually the tinsel of the live stage and festival podium will have to take a back seat for the inevitable return to the desk and the page if any longevity, or posterity, for their voices is coveted by them every bit as much as the temporal limelight of passing fashion, which whole scores of aspiring poets respond to almost automatically in a dialectically arid tropism. This onus is indeed even more heavy for those poets writing today who seek to do poetic justice to the bigger social and political themes of their time, over and above that of spoken word agitprop or single-issue subscription-radicalism, and we're again reminded of Alan Bold's resonant advice that socialist poets need to master the craft of poetry more extensively and convincingly than apolitical voices.

Radicalism in itself of course is a term that can apply to both the far Left and the far Right - Thatcherism, for instance, was radical conservatism, radical capitalism. But since one might argue human status quos have since time immemorial - bar the odd oasis of progressiveness - been almost intrinsically conservative, the term 'radicalism' has tended to be more commonly associated historically with the Left, without which modern British society would be even more unequal and class-ridden than it is today. But the highly vexed and frustrating question left to us is: Why has British poetry apparently turned its back on any authentic social or political engagement, almost pathologically, for over three decades? It would be easy to simply blame this trend away from any sense of moral didacticism in British poetry towards a far more complacent, uninvolving, prosaic, even quotidian formula that it has become in the mainstream of today, as being entirely a result of the anti-intellectual, anti-ideological materialist regressions of Thatcherism - though undoubtedly this cultural vicissitude has played a major part in the increasing stultification of contemporary British poetics - and the Third Way centrist philistine populism of the New Labour era; for even as far back as 1970, to someone of my generation (I was born four years later), a date heralding the decade that now sounds to my ears as a veritable beacon of social, political and cultural possibility (in spite of the collective elephant-memory of economic upheavals throughout it), a period, imperfect of course but brimming with still vital transformative energies and ideas prior to the moral and intellectual Fall that avalanched in post-1979, there was already a sense of despair at the emerging apolitical complacency of then-contemporary British verse, as poet and critic Alan Bold suggested in his riveting Introduction to The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse:

What I do believe is that the contemporary poetry that gets the most attention, in Britain at least, is technically inadequate, thematically limited, and socially soporific. At its best it is pleasant, at is worst pathetic. It may be that it is able to hog the spotlight because our leading critical sensibilities have so much irony in their souls they recoil from a direct and explicit admission of concern for other people. It may be that in order to consolidate the rather trivial work they have championed they refuse to discuss art that would jeopardize this.

Shamefully, now, in the early 21st century, such sentiments still speak volumes.

I could go on quoting from this breathtakingly incisive and unconventional interpretation of political, specifically socialist, poetry, and the dearth of it in the poetry of 1970 - here he lambasts a perceived Narcissism in poetry - foreshadowing the egoism of many high profile mainstream voices today - which insists on an impervious sense of 'self' as an only truth, a posture of isolated talent untouched by other, particularly past or historical influences, both artistically and politically; an aesthetic arrogance that is commonplace among many mainstream journals and presses who funnily enough publish and promote such voices, the kind who simply state, again in a chiaroscuro-optic Olympianism, that they publish 'the best poetry being written now' by 'the best poets', utterly unwilling, probably incapable, of articulating exactly what constitutes this, and omnisciently implying that they alone hold an inviolable critical acumen, unsullied by any subjectivity; but which, ironically, in our very derivative gallimaufry of mainstream poetics today, is as specious now as it was in Bold's day:

The function of politics in poetry is to show the reader how events external to his inviolability as an individual continually impinge on his behaviour.

Or do Paterson, O'Brien, Fiona Sampson et al exist in some sort of metaphysical vacuum?

Bold sums up both the importance of poetry, as any art form, to engage with its social environment or else be irrelevant, as well as defending didacticism as a poetic imperative, more traditional verse form as mnemonic maturity, and criticises equally the apathetic establishment periodical poetry of his time and the nihilistic pretensions of modernist experimentalism, as both in their way mere stylistic props to the capitalist system (and no doubt in this more than echoing many of the arguments of Christopher Caudwell - see Illusion and Reality). This is a majestic dialectic, and one to my mind only really flawed in a single regard, which is Bold's slightly presumptuous prediction that the emerging performance poetry scene would inevitably open up poetry on social and political levels; while undoubtedly there was at least the germ of such impetus during the Poetry Revival of the 1960s, that movement was also dogged - as was much work by the Beats - by an integral tendency towards callow sloganeering agitprop (or bong-thumping if you like), and a rather puerile inclination towards stand-up comedy, and debatably put too much emphasis on performance as opposed to poetry and the essential craftsmanship that makes it lasting; and tragically, in the main, apart from some more politically militant cabals on the scene, has largely only led to a further unhelpful blurring of boundaries between poetry and what is now termed 'spoken word', even 'rap', mediums that, far from popularising poetry, have actually tended rather to detract from it entirely and instead promote its own live hybrid form of word-juggling cabaret, most of which has as much to do with actual poetry as pop lyrics.

Masquerading as a new socially inclusive poetics, spoken word has largely only asserted its own mongrel genre, and so advanced the cause of social and political poetry no further; any poetry presses who have tried to incorporate voices from the performance scene into their lists of titles have frankly only proven that such spontaneous verbalism and hackneyed rhyming cannot stand up to scrutiny on the published page, and thereby have contributed to a slow dumbing-down of the medium of poetry. This is a view that most page poets today would privately agree with, but publically few would admit to it - far from being a snobbery, it is simply a recognition of a lack of demarcation between very different genres among those who have in the main laboured long and hard to try and master a literary form, rather than assume to take to a stage and spout improvised or single-drafted doggerel somehow qualifies them as poets. It doesn't of course. What they are, is performers, which is an entirely different thing altogether. Nevertheless, the instant-celebrity bug that we endure today has unfortunately long-bitten many developing poets, and mostly before they have finished developing, to the detriment of their maturation into authentic voices. To end, I'll give Alan Bold the final word:

Milton, Blake, Shelley: great English poets whose efforts to speak to people rather than other poets have been frustrated by futile critics claiming to be the custodians to culture. Trust the poet, not the exegesis...

... it is wrong and an act of artistic cowardice to imagine that the currently fashionable or approved constitutes the work of permanent importance.

Alan Morrison



Sources:

The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse, Edited with Introduction by Alan Bold (1970)
Georgian Poetry, ed./intro. James Reeves (Penguin, 1962)
Poetry of the Thirties, Intro./ed. Robin Skelton (Penguin, 1964)
Poetry of the Forties, Intro./ed. Robin Skelton (Penguin, 1968)
The Victorians, Arthur Pollard (Sphere, 1969)
British Poetry Since 1945 - Intr./ed Edward Lucie-Smith (Penguin, 1970)
Where There's Smoke - Intr. Colin Samson, co-operative eds./Centreprise (Hackney Writers' Workshop, 1983)
Bricklight - Poems from the Labour Movement in East London, ed./intr. Chris Searle (Pluto Press, 1980)
Poets of the '90's, "The Tragic Generation" - Derek Stanford (The Unicorn Press, 1965)

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