The English of all classes roll their eyes, they feel a pang of boredom, when certain earnest old subjects are brought up. There are very few people in our country, who can use the old words without feeling that they had rather not. I mean words such as ‘God’, ‘patriotism’, ‘poetry’. Orwell made this observation in 1943, in an essay about broadcasting poetry on the wireless. Perhaps other countries and languages now have the same problems; but back then, England was the type of country to which this sickness or state of advanced weakness was particularly fitting. The nation was at that time very important around the globe, but the people were very tired of their destiny, and they were on the eve of a giant imperial disaster, having spent nearly half a century in idleness at the leading edge of a world civilisation.
Poetry, God, and patriotism are perhaps the words and ideas which a comfortable and wealthy civilisation can simply do without. It is beyond dispute that they each suffered death in the Great War, in a demonstrable way, for English people. In a recent essay in The Spectator, Craig Raine has pointed out, that modernism, which is the movement of culture which speaks for civilisation and this tired lack of interest, was not born in the trenches and in the vast defeats of the old ideals on the Western Front, but that modernism and such decadences as ‘civilisation’ had already developed of itself, well before the outbreak of that war. The Great War simply confirmed, that modernism was right for the age.
What is modernism? It is the old culture, practiced by people who no longer know what to do with it. Painters paint, but badly. Writers make novels, but the novel has no plot, and does not observe grammar. Buildings are built, but they are ugly. Poets compose, with no intention of saying or doing anything. All tradition has been lost. Tradition and history are no longer what a man lives in, but something he vaguely remembers and looks upon as a foreign land. There has been talk also of ‘post-modernism’, which could be construed as something even worse than this: for in post-modernism, the traditional means are not even used anymore. Formless buildings of glass and steel instead of brick; unstructured meaningless books; art without design but merely from found objects; the orchestra is used, but only so as to make hideous noise, if any.
It is my contention, that only a high civilisation, with extreme levels of co-ordination across large numbers of delegated workers, highly monitored and controlled; a highly propagandised ‘population’ which is forced into a certain way of thinking and behaving, only in such people can modernism can come about. Control of population by a bureaucratic class, or by its own inner consent and self-policing, would be the cause of the desuetude of the natural forms of expression, the breaking of all the laws of nature. For, why believe in God, when the Welfare state is a safety net? Why cherish women, when people belong nowhere and just come and go? Poetry, I shall argue, serves a purpose linked to the nation and national survival, but in a global empire, or a global civilisation, there is just no need for it.
It would be possible to say, that the last poets of England were the generation of Tennyson, and since that time, there has been the dominance of the planetary control system, rather than of human being. The coming of a new age was expressed at the time in the highest form by Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, and the like. Since then, science fiction has been not only the most appropriate form of literature, but in a strange way I cannot yet formulate, it has been the actual ‘religion’ of our civilisation. The contemporary ideology or belief system, more or less self-conscious, has been both ‘science’ and also ‘fiction’. Most people, until very recently, believed that the human race would become a planetary unity. In fact, around 1990, it really did become such a global alliance. At that time, while humanity coalesced into a global nomadic race, expression was given to the outliers, the last bastions of uncilivised planetary life: these were the famous ‘axis of evil’, a list of seven countries which were badly performing members of the planetary civilised union. The future held in store for us, not merely the end of history and the end of politics, but even the end of humanity in its natural form; as a rule, everyone was expecting, sooner or later, the great extinction of the other animals; a government of the planetary weather; a system of order and law which crossed all borders, and provision everyone with welfare; the kinds of things which Elon Musk has created were merely next steps along the way toward the scientific future, which, because it was not yet here, could only as yet be understood as a fiction. The present and the future became understood under concepts which are appropriate to science fiction. It was also possible to construe this future as something malign, dystopian, something you might chose to oppose; but the principle remained in place.
It is my view, that the dismay about the war in Ukraine, and the anger about islam in England, are two very serious symptoms proving to anyone who cares to look, that the science fiction vision of existence does not actually account for reality. Anxiety about islam in England is justified, but the deepest anxiety is, that islam should not really exist anymore; it was never meant to happen. People often describe islam as a seventh century throwback, a historical fossil, a culture and politics for cavemen; the implication being, that Islamic people have not yet accepted the scientific fictional and super-natural way in which everyone ought to live now. That it exists is an insult to the science fictional worldview, the technological interpretation of life; this is how people like Christopher Hitchens and other famous atheists saw things.
At the same time in our era, the Ukraine war has startled and driven some of our contemporaries mad with rage and emotional anger, because this is a war which should not have been possible. One as futile and destructive as the trench warfare which was meant to have been put behind mankind. Civilisation cannot tolerate war; yet there is no doubt, in my mind at least, that the delusions and weakness of civilisation itself both started the war, by accident, and does not have the means to stop the war. Here are two mistakes made by England or the English, both as a result of a faulty grasp of reality and the laws which govern human life. The dystopian face of the future has also shown itself, under the guise of growing poverty in our Western countries: we shall be a planetary society, controlled, non-human, but we will be unemployed, surveilled, servile, and hungry. I take it for granted, that the fate of God, patriotism, and poetry, is finely attuned to the dominant ideology of our time. Technology and science fiction were meant to do away with God, country, and poetry.
Modernism arrived not by accident, at the moment when a universal and perhaps temporary civilisation arrived. It was at the same moment that the European project of constant expansion and adventure reached a zenith, that it also ran out of steam and stopped being serious: it became modern. At that point, it was possible to look back at a man like Rudyard Kipling and his poetry of an earlier, and very recent imperial period, as if Kipling were something from a very strange and distant period in the remote past. At that point, men who wrote in old forms were said not to be even doing ‘poetry’ any longer, but rather ‘verse’.
My focus for this essay, having shown the complicity of politics and ideology to determine how a poet writes, that is, as a modernist, is to look at what poetry must therefore be. As I hope I have shown, though briefly, it is a sad story of the decline of poetry, and God and patriotism, while the rise of civilisation continues almost, until recently, unabated.
Defining what poetry is, is notoriously difficult, and also dependent on the times in which the definition is considered and written. But, if we start at basics, then we can say this. There are three dominant types of poetry; and, it seems to us that poetry emerges at the same time that writing does, which means, that it might be as old as humanity, or organised humanity itself. I would like to balance this point with the one I made earlier, when I said that a sense of weariness comes over a man when he thinks of poetry today, and how he feels as if he is being asked to do an onerous and earnest task of listening or talking, when it would be better not to. Poetry, which is co-existent with organised culture, has, until now at any rate, become a pointless burden on our intellectual activity.
My other remarks about poetry and what it is, derive from my own activity as a writer. I can’t apologise for that. It might even by the case, that for the last one hundred or more years, there are no examples of what I mean when I say ‘poetry’, except in a faulty or modernist form. What I mean by ‘poetry’ might be peculiar to me alone, and to things and people two or three hundred years before me. If you are familiar with the way I write, then you will know the examples of what I think of, when I say ‘poetry’ written today. I find proof that I am right about what I say, in the entire history of poetry, since the Greeks. But my own work only has relevance when I think of what can be done today. I believe that current and future events will make poetry come back to life. So, let us see.
At the turn of the last century, around 1900, the pre-modernist English were writing their Edwardian and Georgian works, which nobody remembers with any pleasure. At the same time, there was Kipling. When in 1941, T.S. Eliot on his own initiative collected some of Kipling’s poetry, he referred to it and defined it as ‘verse’. He did so on the basis that Kipling, he said, had not set out to write ‘poetry’, but to write ‘ballads’. Modernist-era poetry is, he means, lacking in traditional form. That is demonstrably true: modernist and contemporary works do, typically, in their highest examples, eschew any form. Kipling’s poetry, which is still read and quoted widely, and which is highly regarded when surveys of public opinion are taken in England, was patriotic, vaguely Christian, easy to hear and to understand. He used a common or traditional verse form whenever he wrote; that is to say, he was pre-modernist. Eliot, who admired Kipling’s works, while not thinking of them as poetry, did recognise and even describe their value. But in part because they have a form, and because the form itself is half of what they are, and because Eliot thought that poetry was something slightly mystical, he could not allow Kipling’s poetry to be of any use as a model on which to base any future work.
I am not going to waste any time referring to Eliot’s very famous statements about literary history, and the contemporary poet. These are still considered to the state of the art theory of poetry and tradition, more than one hundred years later. What Eliot did not do, however, was actually write seriously in any of the older forms, even while he was obsessing over how his poetry could fit in among the older writers. When I say ‘the forms’ of poetry, I refer to the forms which Aristotle laid out, and which serve, broadly, as: epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry.
On dramatic poetry, in a similar vein to Eliot, Ted Hughes, when he collected his favourite passages from Shakespeare, claimed that Shakespeare wrote ‘verse’, rather than poetry. This is a controversial position. I consider Shakespeare to have been writing poetic drama, and while as recently as ten years ago, Geoffrey Hill was still referring to Shakespeare as a poet on the basis of his sonnets alone, I think of the entire body of Shakespeare’s collected works to be poetry. It is ‘dramatic poetry’, in the Aristotelian sense. It is granted, that in the civilisation which we have entered onto, we might not need dramatic poetry, or we can no longer create it. But, I do think that the time has come when the civilisation, which was the dead end of a culture, is itself now at an end. And that, therefore, form must return.
The other forms of poetry, namely, lyric and epic, also died out. I refer to the observational and honest words of Orwell again, when he pointed out, that it seems as if lyric and rhetorical poetry is no longer written in England or in English, and that they had not been written for a few decades prior to the 1940s. Poetry which could be called ‘lyrical’, where a writer sets out to put together a song, had died when Modernism arrived. And poetry in the form of a speech, as the persuasive elaboration of an idea, went the same way. This does bring us to ask, so what replaced lyric and rhetoric? In the Cantos of Pound, in the Four Quartets, or in any number of famous works from the century, what we find is a form of highly personalised, meditative note-taking; a severely intellectualised and intensely personal view on something, large or small. Such is what poetry became in the twentieth century.
We are familiar with how it comes about that a tradition arises; how groups encourage each other, how a taste and a style develops. Since the early essays of the modernists such as Pound and Eliot and Auden, and the critics who followed such as Empson, Leavis, and Richards, a certain style came to pass, of poetry as clever impersonal monologue. Usually in free verse. This new way of doing poetry simultaneously denied any personal emotion, and any personal biographical emphasis, while at the same time being extremely autobiographical and seeking above all things to provide pure emotional stimulation. I think of Seamus Heany, for instance, as a late example of the Modernist school. It is impossible to find any interest in Heany at all, unless we understand the Troubles and Irish nationalism as a revolutionary force against English patriotism, and against God, and dare we say it, probably against poetry itself. Against all these, he presents his own self, his own careful observations, his private world, a private language of spuds, and plops and other sounds which fascinated this anti-British writer and Nobel Laureate. It is true that Heany had inclinations back to the works of the tradition, and translated, for instance Beowulf; he hearkened back to the Iliad in his private way: but these merely private works, made for peculiarly anti-national reasons, seem only to widen the gulf between us and our past.
The greatest of all the traditional English masters of form and distance from the work, was John Milton, and it was critical work on Milton which defined and utterly cut the English tradition from its own past; the killing of Milton’s reputation meant the triumphal emergence of modernism and the total disappearance of formal poetry – alongside the betrayal of the older England, and of course, an eradication of the understanding of God in our language and thoughts and poetry. All the great twentieth century critics of literature devoted serious attention to Milton, and usually it was so as to diminish his work and reduce his influence. Milton was no doubt a strange man, and did write strange works, as Harold Bloom would say; but I leave that to the side. Until Eliot, Milton was considered to be the central character in our history. He wrote lyric, epic, philosophical, and dramatic verse, and it was believed until recently, that nobody excelled him. Enough said.
For balance, I now lay out how I see poetry, or my own poetry. I must also show how the future of poetry depends on the type of future for our country which we can expect. Poetry, for all the insistent embarrassment which that word brings to mind, has a specified group of forms, which it is the poet’s job to put into practice. Each form of poetry fulfils a purpose of its own – whether as a drama, a lyric, an epic, or in other forms, such as the philosophical poem. As it was with Kipling and the ballad, fulfilling the form is half of the point of the poem itself.
And using the form for form’s sake has the same necessity as other cultural forms of behaviour. As an instance of a formal behaviour with wide cultural significance and national meaning, I refer the reader to the folk dance, something like the Horo of Bulgaria, practiced by people of a nation. These things still take place, and whether the people dance it the more that they are distant from their country, or whether they do so the more when the country is falling apart, only advances my argument. Such a dance serves many purposes, including the purpose of being a fertility or mating dance; as a means of the members of the group showing individual skill; as something which links the old and young in one activity; as something which pays homage to the dead ancestors. Simultaneously, watching or doing it, it provokes pleasure. The same can be said for ballads, as recited to a group. It is known, that the drama of Athens was similar in some respects to the gathering for a dance; it collected the people together, and the gathering was integral to it. Perhaps the most important aspect of any poetry, is that it gathers the nation, the group. It does so not as a committee meeting, or some other kind of get-together, but the fine points don’t interest me here. It’s enough to say that poetry is more like a song or a dance, than a meeting of people going out to vote, or going to work, for instance.
I do not need to point out, that poetry has rarely been written to be read out loud in recently centuries in England, and that the modernist poetry for the page alone, the broken narrative monologue, is least of all suited to that. However, there remains a special virtue in the recordings of Eliot reading his work, and Pound’s voice. In their way, their books and their lives did fulfil the vocation of the poetry and poet – in a modernist world. But that’s by the by.
Now, England since the Civil War, has by and large been a place of peace and growing civilisation. Armies were professional, and wars tended to be far away. So, while the Athenians were constantly under threat, and each man was a hoplite, if he could afford the armour, that was not so much the case in since Dryden’s time. England’s culture has always been prone to ‘over civilisation’. So much can be said of England; but it is not possible to say the same about the other parts of Europe or the world. In normal times, the poet performs the semi-barbarous job of giving words to communal gatherings. In England, the principle of the class structure also applies, so the class which can read becomes the one to which poetry is addressed, and the poetry is therefore read rather than read out loud. However, the possibility of reading it out, is what ensures that it remains musical.
Needless to say, there are only certain times in history when there coincided, a country both in need of coming together, and, a country with sufficient intellect and power, to produce a poet or a tradition of poetry which lasted beyond their own time. In England’s history, the Court, or a particular city – London – with a publishing industry, was sufficient to bring the people together. This is a result of England being an island and to the coherent nature of our country and our people as a result. But in a normal society the example of Homer and Sophocles, and later of Horace or Virgil, is an important one: the poets used formally constructed verse to ensure the survival and coherence of the people.
I personally have an almost neurotic horror of unstructured, unsanctioned things, or things being done without any tradition or point. Innovation within a form is one thing: the changes to the form belongs within the tradition. But when something is done without any precedent or point, which is what contemporary poetry must be, if it is postmodern, and if it inspires fear and dread in any cultivated person, then it is ruinous. Mine is a largely political reaction against anarchy and rebellion. Whereas poetry indicates a cultured organisation, for the sake of the nation; on the other hand, post-modernism indicates the likelihood of disorganised disaster, the rabble, the rout, total oblivion of the group. It is postmodernism that we are familiar with in our time – and I fear that time is running out before the disaster. On the other hand, it calls for reform.
Poetry should reflect the natural law. See Shakespeare and Spencer, and those poets and that society which followed, with the Reformation; the emotions of epic poetry and dramatic poetry, as evincned by our literary history, gravitate toward the family. But whether they had families or not, the moderns rejected family and its loyalty and emotional burden. That loyalty is the emotion which is expressed, if there is any emotion, in Homer and Virgil. Love of country, admiration for our people, is the chief emotion of Kipling, and of the Greeks and Romans. By contrast, the modern, postmodern, or contemporary poet, usually has several countries, and squats in this one or that, with an international sort of mobile occupation, such as teaching at a university. These are the true barbarians, who have no loyalty or locality, who are on the periphery of the society.
In the folk dance, see how the women are dressed attractively, and everything is done to subtly bring the men and women together – for the purpose of encouraging reproduction. The poetry is the same, in the lyric, where it is conventional for woman to be praised for her own sake. This has the principle objective of ensuring tribal or national survival. The praise of virtue, and the poetry which is about virtue, has the same purpose: to ensure the society and the culture stays together and therefore survives. I could just as easily refer to the development of the Gothic church and cathedral architecture of England and Europe. To the untrained eye, one cathedral is the same as the next – because they share a form, and a set of choices has dominated all the cathedral building across the land; the same pathways were chosen in each instance, the same form. The reasons for this conformity are clear: builders meant to ensure dominance of a class, the survival of the people, in obedience to emulation and rivalry between towns in the same nation, and in technical expediency. The adherence to a form has produced enduring or eternal wonder, sublime works, with the overall intention of answering the question of the meaning of life, the purpose of being alive and surviving.
Now, sticking to the form is essential in the pursuit of this purpose. In that past century, there has been no form and no tradition. But, I have intended in my own case, therefore, to revive a dead form. Or, maybe, I have intended to take up a still living root or branch and see if I can make anything of it. I cannot say.
I do not feel confident that when you set out to revive a dead tradition, that you will succeed or even produce helpful and pleasing results. The Welsh tradition of poetry went from the formation of the language when the Romans left and the Saxons arrived on the borders, around the sixth century, to the total collapse of the tradition, which coincided with the collapse of political independence, around the sixteenth. One thousand years of continuous tradition and development; which followed the cultural and political situation very closely; the same arc might have been followed by English and the English people in recent times, and the demise of the nation is only prefigured in the demise of the poetry; and we hope not.
I noted above, that the cultural and political power and self-confidence of the English fell apart around 1900, and along with it, the poetry became modernist. Some strong influence was then provided by naturalised incomers from the United States. And, now, the US itself is shaking, in our era. As for England, or Great Britain, the future errs on the side of taking the nation into a situation where its survival is not obviously sure. The country has many times this century pledged itself to oblivion inside a European market, and has said goodbye to the independence of its people. In more recent times, the European state is growing not so much in power, as in ambition and harmful commercially minded interference – without any serious intellectual organised opposition inside our country. More urgently still, the nation has diluted itself with immigration. It would have been an ideal time to have either fought back against oblivion, or to have reforged the nation, with a strong formal culture, a culture which demanded forms and tradition. But such a force has been lacking.
It is not what it appears, I hope, when I now add on, as if in an afterthought, the poetic form of the Psalm, and also the Prophetic book, in addition to the epic, lyric and dramatic. These forms derive from the Hebrew Bible rather than from the Greek. The philosophical poem, already mentioned, is also principally a religious poetry. These are the forms we must work with.
In conclusion, I hold it as a principle which should be followed more widely by others, that whoever is not using the old forms, has no interest in the nation; and who has no interest in the nation, cannot be a poet at all; and that anyone who has forgotten this should, partly in the name of national survival, study to find out the tradition of English. Tradition not as a coherent finished thing, which you modify with new works, as Eliot said; but tradition as something which you are part of, either as a lesser talent, a hinderance, an embarrassment, or as one working productively. There is no longer any excuse for modernist poetry.
When it comes to the ballad, and the traditional forms, and the conservative impulse of English verse, it might be that the last simple minded, straightforward exponent of both, was the early romantic, who turned Anglican Tory, Coleridge. And the hearkening back to Greece, was last seen with any true belief, in the Germany romantics, in Holderlin, for instance, and Goethe.
But the highest form of poetry brings about the aesthetic calm, and that vision which is the property of the saint, and the genius who produces the total work of art, where the product of the mind outperforms what the senses and the natural world can do. The human mind can attain to almost divine world-creating power, working with ideas, which are superior to the world in important respects. Such poetry presents a pure idea of the world for dispassionate observation. And this is the achievement only possible with the help of the idea of the transcendent and the metaphysical, which has a theological underpinning, set out in a form generated by a tradition. I hope to see the return of the words, poetry, patriotism, and God.