this is an incomplete study which talks about the work of David Jones, CH Sisson, Kathleen Raine, and Peter Abbs.
I got interested in the rleigious background to poetry after doing some research to help reviewing a book by Geoffrey Hill. I find the project fascinating, but I have really given up - because I don't have the appropriate knowledge of contemporary movements within Christianity, and because the influence of religion fell sharply in the 1960s, and has not recovered. I'm not sure how much people want detailed explanations of shifts in poetic style 40 years ago.
What the hole is made of: religion
The lost centre of British culture is the Christian faith, a complex of self-exposing delusions which has declined rapidly in this century, reaching all the same a state in which it is noticeably more popular than poetry, also waning from its Victorian dominance. The readership for poetry was Christian by majority until a recent date which cannot be pinpointed, but was perhaps after the mid-point of the Sixties. The cadres of the Anglican clergy - upper-middle-class, bookish, educated, well-meaning, anti-capitalist, idealistic but without the common touch - bear a fatal resemblance to the typical English poet, who fills the anthologies, and who my contemporaries would like not to be. The social history of the Anglican Church (in such a book as E.R. Norman's The social and political attitudes of the Anglican Church check title) is essential to understanding the history of English poetry. One might well suspect that a healthy experimental movement would have been founded on a healthy classical-conservative school of poetry, and ask why, given how weak in terms of sales and recognition English (and Scottish and Welsh) modernist poetry has always been, nonetheless Christian poetry in this century has failed miserably, so that a stunted Periphery was fed by a comatose Centre. This chapter overstates the case somewhat, because I have left out the best Christian poets, such as David Jones, Saunders Lewis, and George Mackay Brown, to be treated elsewhere.
The modernist literary taste emerged out of violent Edwardian struggles with a moralizing, official-ecclesiastical, system of social control, reaching open outbreaks on subjects like the licensing of plays at the Court Theatre, the Post-Impressionist exhibitions, the public sculpture of Jacob Epstein, and the more daring novels of DH Lawrence. The "new taste" was propelled forward by an internal dynamic which always threatened, when energies flagged or when too few "people of advanced tastes" were in a place, to be evinced, marginalized, and re-absorbed by the clergy, headmasters, JPs, and the morality leagues. (Note that the writings of the original Modernists were frequently determined attacks on the city, on the loss of spiritual values, on adultery, on jazz music and the machine; these are easy to find in the novels of Aldous Huxley, in the poems of Eliot and Aldington, for example.) This was a struggle of secular duration; the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960, and the struggle for free verse in the 1960s and even 1970s (a struggle which has yet found a historian), were exchanges of fire in the same battle. Despite those cannonades, it has become conventional to say "modernism never happened in Britain": quantitatively, it may well be that modern poetry has reached a limited market in this country. As for the potential market, it is said that Masefield's Collected Poems sold 80,000 copies in the 1920s. Research might indicate that the success of Modernism was geographically restricted: it was excluded, or penetrated very feebly, in those areas where religion remained strong, and where specialist bookshops did not exist. Provincial culture always has a large presence of Christianity.
Modern art is a product of big cities, and more precisely of societies where social bonds, codes, and hierarchies are breaking down. This might sound attractive to someone stooped down beneath those bonds and hierarchies, but to the Churches this situation means alcohol, drugs (today), pornography, and adultery. Since modern art in no case believes in (fictional) characters being punished for bad behaviour, it's inevitable that modern artists should be punished by the competent authorities. Poets who believe in a strong community spirit, or perhaps live where one exists, write a poetry without self-expression - without style. Stylistic criticism is open to misinterpretation by those who believe that this undermines morality, and is a kind of freedom and detachment which means immorality. If I say that modernism means adultery, this encapsulates such a position; this is a complete falsification of what modern poets, or conscious poets, or non-traditional poets, stand for, but it does explain the posture of defense in which so many conservative critics have crouched for so long. Once poetic style is taken as the soul, as the expression of the poet's entire character and everything they believe in, then this reductionism is inevitable; someone who uses their imagination is a liar, someone who experiments and has a very free technique is a future adulterer. When someone's style is crass, Victorian, and stultifying, the intended message is the opposite.
I could wish that modern art portrayed freedom and life in the City as attractive things. If you read The waste land, or Antic Hay, with this in mind, you will see that what they are saying is that life in the City is Hell, people there are unable to love, they engage in adultery and become miserable because they aren't really loved, they take drugs out of despair, etc.
We may laugh at communism or Christianity for being marginal and having been long ago disproved by events, but modern poetry itself is no less marginal in a mass society. Poets tend to have little to do with business; the poetry audience will always turn out to have a large share of Christians, Marxists, and, today, adherents of New Age beliefs.
It's unfortunate that the new profession of academic literary critic has been so ridden with moralising and sub-religious intent, perplexing its relationship to the strand of modern literature which questions the accuracy and insight of the old moral taboos, and encouraging it to ignore aesthetic values altogether. This programme of social control broke down in the second half of the Sixties. However, a large part of the poetry-reading public is, or has been, Christian, and has the right to construct a pantheon of purely Christian poets, even if this means excluding modernism altogether.
Someone - the phrase has lost its source - remarked that modern (Protestant) theology had a God-shaped hole at the centre; I suppose this phrase emanated from a follower of Karl Barth and the Theology of the Word. Modern religious poets usually turn out to be part of the hole rather than part of God.
Religion supplies the poet with a boxful of tokens, ready to be assembled into complex symbolic statements. These tokens are inflexible, and they have been used by hundreds of thousands of artists before; they contain drastic inaccuracies and simplifications, which the audience are rather alert to. They form a belief system which may disable the artist altogether by making him insensible to what the audience is perceiving.
The failure of religious poetry often has to do with the relationship between God as author and the poem as creation of the poet. There's no doubt about God's authorial ambitions: it's nearly true to say that all we know of God is the texts, the texts stand for God; they are the adequate medium for his thoughts and intents, and the organization of his mind must bear a resemblance to the organization of the Scriptural writings. He may have been a dab hand at embroidery or the saxophone, but He left us no messages in these forms, the Testaments are words and words only. The temptation of the believing writer is the sensation that God is a speaking subject, who must also understand His words as he speaks them, consequently that who speaks the words of God is like God.
The abjectness of the writer trying to take over the words of God reproduces the psychic structure of sovereignty, the alliance of weakness with power. The meekness and submissiveness in earthly things of poets such as Christina Rossetti goes along with a reach after supreme power, if in vicarious form. The survival of mediate forms of truth, neither eschatological nor part of abjectness and mundane illusion, parallels the rise of the middle class, neither endowed with arbitrary power nor bowed down by servile status, owning rights which are exactly defined, inclining men to empirical investigation and exact observation. In culture, upwardly mobile peasants strove to acquire fragments of downwardly mobile aristocratic and courtly housekeeping: clothes, table manners, tableware, but perhaps most of all words. This sensation of power was vouchsafed to modern poets by plugging into Freudianism, Marxism, and other varieties of salvation knowledge. The yearning after Stalin and God proleptically confirms the attack on individual credibility; as poets needed the staff of irrational authority to be psychologically complete. Today the use of literary theory is accepted by some as a token for sophistication and freedom from deceit, although not by the reading public.
We can hardly avoid mentioning two by-forms of inspired utterance. The Ephesia Grammata, Ephesian words, are utterances in a language understood by the gods, and pleasing to them, which the priest does not understand; some examples have been preserved, which bear a generic resemblance to the glossolalia of the Chlysty, once studied by Jakobson. The other genre, this time incomprehensible to the utterer but pleasing to the reader, is of non-canonical revelations, a library of huge extent even if it is strictly frowned on by the Church. If God is silent, having completed the message, lesser and unquiet spirits still have their literary urge. As for our twentieth-century poets, the gap between revelation and mere mortality is the gap into which, finally, all their work disappears; the distance between a centre and a periphery. If they recycle parts of Scripture, their words are unbearably faded and deprived of authority; but if they claim direct revelation, their arrogance is beyond measure and their sanity is in question. The truth falls "like lightning from above", as Barth said, linking the upper world and the world of mixed darkness only blindingly and for unseizably short moments; the diastasis engulfs and destroys all merely human utterance about spiritual matters.
I suppose the contest between theory and art can be found already here. The Christian poet constructs a poem, which appears beautiful to them, which expresses their soul, the way they want other people to behave, and which they identify as a facet of the Truth. And yet the majority of the educated public regards their beliefs as rubbish, and their poem as the result of the weary procreation of forms, linked by sterile productivity to other poems of the past two thousand years, but non-referential, or summoning a meaning which is only the memory of other texts. Some vivid experience, of those of which the self is apparently composed, lies behind the poem, somehow strayed and falsified by the mediations it passes through; but the poem itself is only a mediation. Should we allow the philosophers to destroy Christian poetry, but not atheist poetry? or should we allow them to destroy occult and witch-cult poetry, but not Christian poetry? or should we allow them to disaggregate European poetry, the words of the oppressor, but not the poetry of Third World countries, ex-colonies? It does not lie in the power of any consistory to forbid these things.
Compromises attempt to leave religion as a relict area or parkland of licit psychosis, where the structure of the cosmos is directly connected to our psychic structure. In academic circles, it looks as if poetry also plays this role, an inexplicable private activity, so unlike the perfectly natural activity of writing essays. The limits of reason should be demonstrated by watching it fail, not by forbidding it to enter sacred precincts. Or wouldn't this mean that I don't have the right to dislike poetry by a Christian, and that my boredom, the taste of rottenness on my tongue, my feelings of being lied to by someone not terribly intelligent, are disqualified as unordained?
The occult sources of socialism are in Christian marginals like Langland, Winstanley, Blake, and Robert Owen, and the decline of Christian values seems to be following the same curve, although on an earlier timescale, as the fortunes of socialism. Indeed, it looks increasingly as if socialism was an encompassing moral-scientific-aesthetic structure of a type similar to Christianity, and as likely to be disarticulated and dissolved, piece by piece, by the advance of scepticism. As one reflects on little aberrations like the Vietnamese Communist Party, having caused a famine and a bloody revolt by imposing forced collectivization of land in the North in 1958, going on to cause a famine in 1985 by imposing land collectivization in the South (even Stalin didn't collectivize twice), it begins to look as if collective ownership could only work as a consequence of a perfectly harmonious society, not be the direct cause of it. In a United Kingdom where the three largest parties are definitely against an extension of public ownership, socialism seems like no help in everyday life, or even in one's lifetime. Perhaps happiness is possible outside socialism.
Christianity seems in the contemporary world to be little more than a pious wish that other people would be good. However, socialism, minus a belief in the imminent collapse of the social system, in its own scientific basis, or in the demonic nature of commerce, also amounts to little more than an exhortation to be good and selfless. The decision to dialogue with your fellow-countrymen, not to coerce them by armed force and twisted rhetoric, is the practical sign of goodness and selflessness. To be a socialist poet able to convince other people, you need to demonstrate wisdom, in the way you describe human events; but you also need to be a good person. The readers are certainly looking for these patterns as they read modern poetry, and I am not far from thinking that they feel success when they have found them; dodging through the sheets of words in order to know the individual writing them. This may sound old-fashioned, but I am not convinced that readers want unorthodoxy or formal daring without those virtues. It seems unlikely that a radical writer can persuade the reader without exhibiting those qualities.
Christianity is a radical rejection of society as it is, its poetry is based on a vision of a quite different social order, against which the existing one is measured, and to which we are led by a "shining path" of transformation and redemption. This other world is not purely verbal, rather it is an imaginary place which can be depicted by words or pictures or even music, but it is the ground of verbal compositions. The consistency and resistance of the poem depend on the adjacency of this imaginary world, the capacity of something unreal to distract our attention from a thousand other unreal worlds, competing with it. There is, after all, an imaginary capitalist world in which no-one is poor or unemployed. Reality is a matrix that could be pulled in a thousand different ways. The imaginary is not so much empty air, as a flooding plenitude of excess signification, which the poet reduces to unity by brilliant feats of control and unreceptiveness. The adjacency of a reformed, transformed, in forms only, social system depends uneasily on the suggestive powers of the poet, powers which in other mouths maintain the power order as we know it; fetching us the idea that the social system we live in is the creation of suggestivity, seduction, brilliant deceit. The convergent power which reduces the imaginary to a single crystalline form is uneasily close to paranoia.
Kathleen Raine (1908-)
Raine is a better poet than her style implies, which so much suggests an inorganic Platonist capable of turning out poems of mindless purity. A tendency to hero-worship has been a fatal handicap, as she incorporates fragments of system from selected spiritual authorities in her works rather than thinking for herself. References in poems to the power of folk-song, remembered from her Scottish childhood, are tantalizing, because the lack of the concreteness and (to put it bluntly) sexual realism of folksong in her work is ruinous. When Scottish activists claim that Standard English is incapable of producing good poetry, it is poetry like Raine's (and Edwin Muir's) that springs to mind. The confusion between commending folksong, and reaching out to obtain the terseness and passion of poets like MacDiarmid and Sorley Maclean, is typical.
One suspects her of enormous latent powers - like a terrifying kind of saint, or a potent villainess in a horror movie - which well-bred inhibitions, and a fatal belief in poetry as song, have driven out of her books. She doesn't let go because she is afraid of the power - hysterical, inhuman, asocial, maenad power - which would be released if she did. I enjoyed some of these poems - but she is more like Little Red Riding Hood than the priestess of Astarte. Her poems are sexless and devoid of rhythmic grace.
There is no second voice, no stylistic tension in this poetry dominated by its own technique, in which the mode of production is so evident that psychological necessity is no longer credible. Cut out the bad lines and the over-regular metre, and she'd be tantalizingly close to Quasimodo; "Word known to the dead", couldn't that be the title of a Quasimodo poem? ('Parola/ agli morti conosciuta').
Her activity as a propagandist and critic of modernity has been considerably less enlightened. Interviewed at the age of 84, she was still smarting at conversations of 60 years before, and replaying them without being able to persuade the reader that she had understood the other person or was giving a fair account of their position. Her religiosity is astonishingly self-serving, it seems to be little more than a way of invalidating people who are more intelligent than her and who pointed out at various stages of her life that she wasn't intelligent enough.
Raine, a sometime editor of Psychic Review, has been a popular poet for several decades without ever attracting much critical attention or, I suspect, being the object of discussion; she does not appeal to the intellect. Unsurprising that she should conjure up a world of spirits and essences to repair the slights of the real one. God becomes a revengeful power incorporated by self-humiliation. Mysticism appears as the ultimate quibble in a losing argument, the volatilization of common ground by denial of the senses and affirmation of second sight. The laws of an invisible world justify the sulking which disrupts the procedure of the court which writes her off as not being a great poet.
In some remarkable autobiographical interviews, Raine has recalled how, as an undergraduate, she was laughed at by everyone for her stupidity, and how everyone around her was more intellectually sophisticated; impressed by this, she nonetheless found her way to spiritual verse in a stanzaic form derived from the nineteenth century (or do I mean the sixth century?). The statements are remarkable for their frankness in admitting that she was wrong about everything, and for their arrogance in assuming that she was right about everything that mattered, and everyone else was wrong. Again and again she hammers home the message about thinking being bad for you; a kind of mispronunciation of 'I am bad at thinking'. In order to read the situation correctly, wouldn't she have needed to be intelligent? but if she'd been intelligent, would she have been on the side of Kathleen Raine?
Her ideas about poetry seem dominated by vagueness and fantasy. She entitled a book of essays on poetry Defending Ancient Springs, as if she were gallantly standing up against the forces of Evil, rather like Lucy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But, in the absence of evidence or reasoning that would support her claims to sanctity, one has to assume that the defensive trench she dug was simply an obstacle to traffic. If Raine is saying 'I was defending poetry against the attacks of Bad Men', this is not pure self-description, it is above all a statement about the Bad Men, which could be confirmed if we could find someone who said, 'Yes, I was a Bad Man; I attacked and defiled Poetry; noble Raine bears witness to the Truth.' Since no-one is saying this, one has to question whether Raine's autobiography is ethical or true. Close examination of claims may seem 'cynical' and 'materialistic', but where someone makes such appalling accusations against other people, one has to examine the evidence. She is unique in the scurrility of her claims about other people, in this scenario of purity and defilement, and in her image of English poetry as two opposing camps. Her overwhelming intuitions mysteriously contain the same sequence of pictures as a self-serving fantasy. Could it be that thought competes with fantasy?
Her poetry is better than the murky ideological aura around it. Unfortunately, there is a lingering suspicion that the simplicity of what is on the page, its failure to develop over decades, is related to her pouring of energy into ideology, to the neglect of poetry. So, Raine was right to attack the habit of theorizing and arguing.
David Jones (1895-74)
What I say about Jones will be limited, since there is by now a torrent of books about him; further because of the complexity of his work, because chasing the fifty important influences or sources he lists in the Foreword to the Anathemata is more than the bounds of my book can sustain; and because he is probably the poet of my life, the one whose work has exercised me most. Given that he was the greatest British poet for a generation, after Eliot's creative decline in the 1930s. Our interest now is in how he takes up and summates certain themes in Welsh literature.
Jones' technique points to international connections, and to modernism; however, close consideration of his work also points towards the preoccupations of Welsh literature, which we find transmuted there. The first theme is religion; Jones' work is predominantly religious in nature, although we can attribute its artistic success to his careful rejection of the conventions of religious literature, whose forms he detaches and reincorporates in a context which makes them merely objects in exhibition, and not the form of the literary work itself, which subsumes them and is more inclusive and unseizable. The second theme is family; Jones has astutely noticed, as who could avoid doing?, that this is a source of numbing tedium, and he has solved this problem, partly by sublimating the idea to become a history of ancestors, skipping over living relatives and their probably tedious eccentricities, and partly by tackling the problem on a greater scale and with more energy than anyone else, so that the 'Redriff' section of The Anathemata is simply a monologue in the mouth of his grandfather, Ebenezer, a 'master block and mast maker' on the Thames at Redriff:
Not for a gratis load of the sound teak in
Breaker's Yard
and that we could well do with
Not for a dozen cords of Norweyan, red nor yaller, paid for, carried and stacked.
Not for a choice of the best float of Oregon in the mast-pond.
Not for as many fathoms of best Indies lignum vitae
as 'ld stock us till we re-sheave the blocks for master-
bargees plying the Styx.
Not for a pickin' of all the bonded stuffs passed over the quays in a full working week between the Bridge and Battlebridge Stairs
and there's a tidy jorum
to pile a mint in sterling - to rig out Ann my wife like Suky Tawdry.
Jones shares with Eliot the distinction of influencing nobody because his style is too powerful to be assimilated. If Welsh poetry had been able to take this extraordinary richesse on, things would be very different today. A third theme is physical work, and here again we can see that this is central to the way Jones operates, and makes him like every other Welsh writer, and yet his way of handling it makes him quite unlike any other Welsh writer; Jones is ultratechnological, and preoccupied with the details of manual crafts; he accepts the wager that showing someone immersed in difficult manual work is a way of plunging us vividly, sensuously, into the past, and he brings it off. A letter he wrote to the archaeologist and translator (from Babylonian) N.K. Sandars says "the trouble with my kind of work (…) is that I have to know exactly what are the details apropos of such and such, before I can use the word I want, or, in the case of drawing, the visual equivalent to a word or a sentence in writing. (…) I had an awful job over the ship in the Esyllt picture on this account. Not because I wanted 'accuracy' for its own sake, still less 'realism', but because how can one begin to juggle with the form and content of chaps messing about with cordage, canvas, tackle, etc. unless one had a fairly clear notion of how, in fact, these things worked?" Many of the works listed as sources in the Anathemata must have been useful in this way, describing for example how ships were built and rigged. He refers, again, in the Preface to The Anathemata, to "the various modes and traditions of doing this and that, from bowling a hoop to engraving on copper; from 'Kiss in the ring' to serving at Mass; from forming fours (or threes) to Rolle of Hampole's Form of Perfect Living; from Rugby Union Rules to the rules that governed court etiquette in the Welsh mediaeval codes; from the mixing of water-colours to the mixing of pig-food; from mending the fire to mending the fire-step; from the making of blackbird-pie to the making of a king..." He is necessarily close to Iorwerth Peate and the Folk Museum idea, and yet so far away from thousands of poems which describe someone working in the fields or in the kitchen and catch nothing at all, making us feel vaguely guilty at being so uninspired. The fourth theme is topography; this is something Jones is less seduced by, and yet careful description of sites is common in his work, however mythological, and indeed a kind of oxymoron, stressing the real and banal features of a romantic and mythical scene, is his method of avoiding mere Pre-Raphaelitism.
The meet was within the pomoerium
of the City
that sacred unseen defence
the augurs plot
clockwise, the sure-binding wall
without which the mortared walls of
squared, dressed stone
crenellate and turreted
were contrived in vain.
('The Kensington Mass')
He is striving to avoid being trapped in a single field, or two adjacent fields, and constantly brings us back to the idea of Wales as a whole. 'Angle-Land', another section of the Anathemata, describes the sea voyage from the German coast to Kent, as the Saxons must have carried it out in their ciullae (this part isn't very Welsh!), and is guided by the relevant sea charts; which is certainly topographical. (There is a similar voyage, from Gaul to Wales, in Lewis' Buchedd Garmon.) Finally, there is the idea of community; this animates the whole of Jones' work; he tries to depict a community from outside, where its edges are visible, rather than from inside, where the community is invisible because it is merely omnipresent. I take it that Jones's ideas of community are Roman Catholic, and that his work belongs to a tradition of thought, not of poetry only, in which the idea of an organic community is central, and literary methods are profoundly adapted to showing the whole, with the individual reduced to part of a pattern; it is unfortunately true that the Welsh poets of my knowledge have no such tradition. (There is of course a whole other Roman Catholic literary tradition which deals with individual psychology, deriving from the confessional and the priest's duty of spiritual guidance; the notion of individual is essential to Catholicism, and there is an army of works which set out from this tradition; but such moral analysis is not important to Jones' poetry.)
To catch past societies in language which is theirs-and-his, Jones draws on a particular kind of linguistic analysis, called the wordfield school; he quotes words from their original language, on the assumption that the words are grouped in fields which embody distinctions which were important for the society in question: that is, the visible structure of the language coincided with a deep structure of social conceptions. (The practice also has something to do with the Latin of the Catholic Mass.) The theory of wordfields dates from 1930 on, and is associated with Leo Weisgerber and Jost Trier, but the idea seems to be much older, stemming directly from the need to observe contrasts and demarcations in making dictionaries or simply commenting on texts. Jones found in lexical structures a way of presenting social structure which corresponds to his method of accurate description of techniques in presenting the made environment and the world of work. Both come together in philology, where to explain the Homeric word akinakes (short sword), for example, Autenrieth gives a picture of the object, as found in excavations, and lists words for related but different weapons, exhibiting a word-field.
Later poets have wanted to give a portrait of a society through its discourse, but this has not proved easy for them. However convincing modern theories of language seem to their adherents, they have the effect of boiling off the material they are supposed to explain, leaving nothing behind to make a poem out of. It is, of course, possible to argue that nineteenth-century style philology explains virtually everything in a satisfactory manner, and leaves only a few exceptional cases for adaptations of its method to explain; the adaptations being so tenuous, refined, and counter-intuitive that they can't be put over in poetry at all. Be that as it may, Jones' discourse-about-discourse is grandly effective. The reduction of a social system to a pattern that we can see from outside, which can be as it were drawn out and rolled up, implies a reduction of our own social system and individual being, ejected and squeezed out along a perspective which implies their disappearance. Jones can do this with equanimity because his supra-historical values allow for a constant change of institutions, perhaps as laid out by the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson (The Making of Europe, etc.) He is not paralysed by the usual Welsh dread that either we do as our grandfathers did, or there is nothing, dissolution.
The obvious comparisons, in the Welsh context, are T. Gwynn Jones' Arthurian poems, certain of Saunders' Lewis' plays and poems, Wyn Griffiths' verse-drama on Blodeuwedd, and John Cowper Powys' Welsh historical novels Porius (especially), Owen Glendower, and The Brazen Head. Where Jones excels these is in discarding the realist aesthetic, desperately ragged as that might seem when dealing with myth, and devising a solution which relies on simultaneous presentation of many strata of time. The underlying reality of this would have to be a museum or a library, where a tumble of different eras are juxtaposed. That is to say, Jones foregrounds the unreality of his subject matter by putting the modern (well, 1930s or 1940s) observer in every frame; the characters may be in costume, but the camera also shows us the camera-man, in 20th century garb. We might even describe Jones' work as hyper-selfconscious, in this respect; an important channel marker, because in Jones the artistic illusion is as deep and overwhelming as it can possibly be, and we might want to remember that selfconsciousness does not have to mean loss of faith in your artistic powers and purpose. We could say that the other writers mentioned base the literary work on the idea of forgetting: we discard at the threshold, as if a pair of shoes, the knowledge that the work, written in 20th century Welsh or English, is not really ancient, and we are caught in the 5th century, or whenever, as if in a prison. In Jones' work there is no forgetting; it is poetry about the contemplation of the past, not some costume drama where the actors are wearing genuine replica Dark Ages underwear.
Daniel Owen, in his novel Hunangofiant Rhys Lewis, shows the narrator's mother rebuking his brother, some time around 1840: "When I was a lass, there wasn't much heard about newspapers except for the man in the manor house, and a few uncircumcised Saxons, the family of ribaldry and hunting dogs. There was no-one who held their souls of any account who thought of reading anything but the Bible, Bunyan's Pilgrim, Charles’ (Welsh) Dictionary, and Gurnal's book." She goes on to say, "You saddened me a bit, Bob, in speaking so inconsiderately of the old preachers. You have been, I see, like many people in this age, speaking lowly about the servants of the Lord. They were 'plain and unlettered' men, it's true; but don't call them ignorant in my hearing, the best for you." Jones recalls his father reading Pilgrim's Progress to him in childhood; and respect for the servants of the Lord, albeit not Welsh Methodists, is the subject of the whole Anathemata. Jones had absorbed a thick streak of Welshness from his father and from Owen M. Edwards.
In praise of subordination: C.H. Sisson (1914-)
'The Cornelius boys call me a sleazy old Fascist, but they say this to everyone.' (Michael Moorcock, The Laughter of Carthage)
His 1974 collected poems starts out with 'Martigues', which is in fact about the clerico-Fascist Charles Maurras, Sisson's favourite thinker, condemned in 1944 to perpetual imprisonment for his collaboration with Hitler ('intelligence with the enemy') during the German Occupation of France. A wonderful example of intelligence and patriotism. I don't exclude the possibility of a fascist being a good poet; one must leave every possibility open; we are used to enjoying the work of poets because of its pathology, because of its running sores and naked misery; nonetheless it is unlikely that anyone who is not a clerico-Fascist could enjoy Sisson's work. More limiting is the fact that the poem 'Martigues' gives no clue as to its subject: this is not surprising, since the literary public would have been very angry with Sisson if he'd explained what he admired; but the poem is incomprehensible except to the initiated. The liberal-democratic tradition is founded on demonstration, whether in court, Parliament, or a poem; Maurras rejected all of this, in favour of irrational, anointed authority; the text of Sisson's poems excludes everything essential, they are dominated by an area of repression which is not permitted to become verbal, they rely on arbitrary, as if inspired, declarations or comminations.
The basis of Sisson's reputation is that his tone resembles Eliot:
My eyes open, with eyelids pulled apart
I stand here before time
Have mercy goddesses, standing in the long avenues.
Death is in your keeping.
The bright eye, let me never be parted from it
I hear the drum now
I hear the whistle, there are pipes in this shrubbery
And the owl is near.
(from 'In Arles'). That air of bitterness, despair, religious guilt,and over-education impresses people even when it doesn't add up to an aesthetic experience. A stock of mediaeval songs, or Classical poems, was available to supply the imagery. Bitterness served to exclude possibilities, the air of certainty preventing discussion even where it didn't carry conviction. Sisson published his first book at the age of 47, in 1961; the advent of the Sixties, when so many people regarded happiness and sexual liberation as the source of poetic authority, boded no good for Sisson, who wanted authority and was proposing unhappiness and sexual alienation as the basis for it. Thus flouted and deprived of his career the second time round, he over-reacted, his public utterances became parodies, dominated by his cultural enemies. His misanthropy:
In every clearing a mad hermit
Draws his stinking rags about him and smoke rises
From thatches lately hurt by rape or pillage.
seems personal, but also fits into a broader Action française polemic about the unfitness of ordinary people to vote, attacking the franchise as an obstacle to legitimate authority. His distaste for sex, in so many poems, is part of a distaste for the masses, the proles (offspring), who are certainly the product of sex and who threaten to swamp the order of Church and nobility. The concern with animal desires ('Like questing hounds/ The lechers run through London/ From all the alley-ways/ Into all the thoroughfares') questions the faculty of reason and so the right of the masses to exercise it by voting.
Maurras was a classicizer, refusing even to read modern literature, and we should look to the poetry of Maurras and such as Jean Moréas for sources of Sisson's technique, and the cult of the Mediterranean; Maurras was, unlike other French Christian poets of the time, indifferent to the Middle Ages: Sisson has used primarily mediaeval mysticism, the belief in the elusive and the unsayable, rather than the splendours of the Offices. (Maurras' position was literally that he was an atheist who believed that the moral authority of the Catholic Church and a Crown with arbitrary powers was necessary to hold society together.) His bleak anthropology is inherent in the Christian notions of contempt for the world, but is not mediaeval in expression, it is rather comparable to Swift, and perhaps Hobbes and Rochester, for its ideas and form. He got some early exposure in the late Fifties magazine X, through which he became a friend of George Barker; we can think of a connection between his Sixties poetry and Barker's, scabrous, monotonous monologues on sex and religion with a grumbling, curmudgeonly air.
Insofar as the redeeming features of his poetry are love, tolerance, and forgiveness of one's enemies, his work is an excellent argument for Christianity: he gives out these goods in desperately small doses. Rage and disgust came naturally to him; moments of relief are less vivid, more like exhaustion and dissociation:
No mind has spoken yet
Nor will
You catch-cheat, catch-care face
You foot
I foot
Wandering upon the ground
You badger-track, you walk
Split eye
Half looking up, half down
What shall I do?
Do nothing more but sleep
Geschwind
([quickly], from 'Dialogue of the Soul and God'). Sisson had strong ideas about how people should behave - religiously, sexually, aesthetically - and reacted like a frantic guard dog every time someone broke his rules; each reaction generated a little heat, and the net heat boiled his brains. He has a strongly imagined world composed largely of boundaries, and of the rage that follows when they are crossed. The point of the disquisitions on the baseness of human motives is, I take it, to discredit people who fall in love, who are affectionate, and who have feelings: Sisson, obsessed with the persons of young women, and without sensibility, is offering his rants as a proof that no-one else falls in love either. There is considerable potential for comedy in this spectacle, which Sisson has unfortunately missed by regarding himself as a thinker. The theory that no-one has real feelings cannot be proved, because it is wrong; so much for Sisson's scope as a thinker. His preaching is also a subliminal attack on people who write pleasing and kindly meant poetry, in competition with his rancid, chiding, bile-queasy stuff.
Sisson took early retirement from the Civil Service, and indications are that old age and release from daily pressure have soothed his compulsive rage and hatred, and made him a better Christian. The Collected Poems of 1984 has been followed by God Bless Karl Marx, Antidotes, and What and Who.
General
Perhaps it is time to ponder some of the relationships between these poets of private mythology. We have a floating and rather puzzling relationship to Anglicanism which, like so many aspects of Anglicanism, I have been unable to fix. A possible line of argument would be that Anglicanism, preoccupied with missionary work, gentleness, cheerfulness, broadness of dogmatic positions, de-mythologizing the Word, and getting rid of the historic link to the State and the gentry, flowed out into everyday life and the laity so much that it stopped being an organized religion and became instead a hippy belief in finding the transcendent in everyday life, with the missionary element becoming a curiosity about the Third World and the other elements gently mutating too. This thesis is perhaps too vague to be demonstrated or refuted. A more nuanced variant would point to the middle class becoming, as State employment become more lucrative and common and the State became involved with the modernization process, involved with a vision of transformation and rationalisation of life in a highly co-ordinated way. Marxism was the most unbalanced and self-worshipping form of this, which in reality involved much broader sectors of middle-class opinion; for a certain time, the problems of society appeared soluble by State action, so that the transcendental hopes or visions could be realized by legislation and administration; power was largely benevolent, and the acquisition of knowledge and method were idealistic. The realization of the inadequacy of governmental action, or instead of the complexity of human behaviour, upset this vision, perhaps during the late 1960s and early 1970s; at this point the educated conscience gave up on the projects of modernization and State control and so withdrew into a position on social unhappiness, i.e. that it was lamentable but insoluble except in a piecemeal way, which coincided with nineteenth century Anglicanism. The revolutionary hopes of a certain period, say 1968-75, defined the ground of contemporary poetry, only to vanish, much like the belief in God. Socialist intellectuals—a term which embraces most of the poets we are discussing, and most of the milieu in which their poetry is produced—no longer expect socialism to arrive in the short term, and so have shfited their attention by default to a much nearer horizon, where it is important to have a personal morality, to love other people, and to cheer other people up when tribulations get them down. This state of salvation delayed cannot help resembling the Anglican frame of mind. The game of competition, so that angry people denounced other people for not immediately overthrowing the government, made them guilty of all kinds of crimes, demanded obedience from them, and gave their words a diminished reality, was very important at one stage, but is now relatively unimportant. details of what good behaviour consists of, short of salvation, are significant because they alone decide who is a good person, but are not grippingly interesting, because they are only details. Angry people normally behave appallingly badly, but are fired with self-righteousness and believe they possess supernal authority, which incidentally absolves them of any need to behave well, or to judge other people fairly. Like Anglicans, the Left may become involved in scholarship, a displacement activity: details of what marxist theses were uttered in Russia are uninteresting once you know that Lenin and Stalin committed genocide and so have nothing to say about secular transcendence of salvation. Another detailed and exhausting project is studying sociology, medicine, housing, and so on, so that State policy can be made as effective as possible, reducing the magnitude of the pain; this is not a displacement activity, because of its practical worth. However, the problems of understanding what society and the psyche are only intermittently seem soluble; and the State service is peculiarly frustrating when the political overlords are, as they have been since 1979, against State intervention, against any innovation that does not save money, and are soaring on a great wave of malevolence towards the poor and ill. The helm of modernization has been taken over by the world capitalist market; the notion of progress has lost lustre when this was, apparently, the condition towards which progress was being made.
John Booty, discussing the qualifications of a standard Anglican divine, listed among the works such a man might have written: “theological treatises, polemical or apologetical tracts, catechetical works intended for the instruction of communicants, books and essays designed to help the faithful in making moral-ethical decisions,sermons, liturgical forms, prayers and meditations of personal devotions.” What strikes us is the prevalence, among the public works aimed for ceremonials celebrated before the assembly of the faithful, of private works; the identification of a possibility of truth and authenticity in solitude anticipates the modern state of culture. Indeed, the existence of the book for private reading (as opposed to a service book or hymnbook) presupposes just such a privatization and internalisation. Lancelot Andrewes’ Preces privatae date from the early seventeenth century. The focus on the domestic and everyday is a great feature of our period, and can be associated with Georges Lefebvre’s (Marxist-Situationist) The structures of everyday life and with the shift of capitalist emphasis, dated to the later fifties, towards the household as the centre of consumption decisions; but cannot, puzzlingly enough, be separated from the Anglican development of a lay spirituality conducted domestically or even in solitude.
The poem is the classic flight from political defeat: I can’t offer the overthrow of capitalism, but in the meantime here’s a poem, and it’s better than nothing. It also resembles a prex privata, a solitary devotion. The dissolution of the Established Church in 1649, accompanied by a new order set up by the so-called Independent party, led to the withdrawal into private life of many clergy whose personal beliefs could not be adjusted to this administration; they used their enforced leisure partly in order to write. The musicians excluded from the churches often took part, we know, in private ensembles (concerts) performing in private houses. One such group of divines was the (so-called) Cambridge Platonists; a misleading name, since they were pious Anglicans, not philosophers, and originated the movement called Latitudinarian. Apart from writing texts which could not be printed at that time, they cultivated a plain language: ‘clear, plain, and short... they... applied themselves to the matter, in which they opened the nature and reason of things so fully, and with that simplicity, that the hearers felt an instruction of another sort than had commonly been observed before”, according to the contemporary, Bishop Burnet. According to Stephen Neill, this plainness effected a revolution in English preaching. The integrity of such men, excluded from being printed and from preaching in churches, probably created a cultural model which allowed small press poets, three hundred years later, to write works which almost nobody was going to read, without feeling simply superfluous and unpopular. Such poetry has many sympathizers even among people who don’t want to read it. Domestic is probably the word for its radius of dissemination.
The Dissenters, naturally, were always involved in private and domestic devotion, since the law was against them; they began as the defeated Independent party, so that the 1650s can be seen as a key moment in the development of private, decentralised culture in Britain, and as the principal factor of culture there. But the Dissenters were not very productive culturally, because of a severe plainness, which itself is not unrelated to a modern British inhibition about any ambitions to poetic style. The word myth, in a British context, could usefully be considered as the opposite of domestic.
Protestants constitutionally prefer to be the losing party, holding meetings in private houses and persecuted by the State.
For Man and Islands (Tern Press, 1978); Songs of a New Taliesin (Gryphon Press, 1981); Icons of Time (Gryphon Press, 1991); Personae and other Selected Poems (Skoob Books, 1995, 174 pp., œ8.99) by Peter Abbs
Peter Abbs (b.1942) is conservative but talented:
Tonight, as we lie in bed, a battered moon drifts
Through the sky - it seeks a glistening eye,
It seeks a low-tide pool, a mountain lake,
In which to dip its wounded face,
Its scarred distended cheeks, its frozen mouth.
Who will return its former life? its lost being?
Its ancestral bearings? Who will lend the slack night
The great curved mirrors of his mind
To house this nomad face? We turn away.
('Estranged')
Morning's come
after night's spiked wind
bleeding wound and
sleep, dumb stone, in the turmoil.
Throw open the room's window! Rain
splintered glass
dazzles my matted eyes and
cool air eddies
in - then Trinity's holy bells!
('Resurrection')
But his old-fashioned technique is based on perceptual blocks. In the title poem 'Of Man and Islands' he writes
For the time's intolerant images
Storm my mind.
I find not waves but faces
Marching to the Age:
Faces numb with the cold wash of phrases,
Faces frozen with slogans,
Eyes swollen to flashing discs,
Minds hardened by helmets.
This is his view of the demonstrations of the seventies. Was there anyone on those mass political manifestations more intolerant than Peter Abbs? He is against democracy; against popular sovereignty; against large gatherings of people; against debate and reform. No wonder the texture of his poems is so smooth and definitively sealed. This pessimism is that of a Catholic conservative faced with the permissive society. In that poem, he uses Dark Age apocalypse imagery to foresee Western Culture being wiped out, but surviving in the monasteries along the Atlantic and North Sea: 'I think of/ Skellig Michael. Iona. Lindisfarne. (...) And I pray that their black-cracked rocks/ be ready to hold the storm-borne/ Seeds again, to shield whatever/ Fragile spores of hope'. The threat is of people acting spontaneously; the scenario is of de-urbanisation, removal of people. The death symbolism is due to his inner death, but also serves to make the landscape simple enough for Abbs' heroic gaze to see into the deep past, for his apodictic wisdom to meet all cases. Seeds, spores: it's remarkable that Abbs hands over reproduction to all-male communities. The whole script is Spenglerian, and indeed he quotes Spengler. Islands appeal because they are out of contact, and so preserve the 'right ideas' handed down in codified form from an imaginary era of privileged, divinely vouchsafed, insight into human nature. Sexuality is reduced to words (those 'fragile spores') and preserved on isolated rocks. Its nature ceases to be change and mixture and becomes rigour; English poetry is so afraid of showing behaviour, everything is crushed into black, neurotic, timeless slabs of knowledge, like the rocks. Surely Abbs' view is patriarchal; the threat to culture is invented to justify male strength defending it, and the need for arbitrary cultural rules is made up so that his knowledge becomes moral and necessary. He ignores poetic technique because the authenticating gesture for him is to imitate patriarchal figures like R.S. Thomas.
The paternal power - of the Roman priesthood or of the daft sage of Carmarthenshire - was tight-lipped and undemonstrative. Its utterances ended thought. If he isn't into this, why has he picked up all the stylistic attributes of an older generation? what is the motive? So the trajectory is determined from the first by the quality of the initial intellectual influences. The determination would not be so if the poet had developed, alongside artistic fluency, the intellectual scope to transcend starting conditions and innovate, and to work out the problems inherent in the new style and make it work.
Note that there was an intellectual vanguard in the 1960s; if we leave out science, technology, and business methods, as simply being too important for poets to understand, there were in the unimportant humanities things like Structuralism, semiotics, feminism, new variants of Marxism, the rise of sociology, the spread of anthropological ideas, the expansion of history to take on much vaster realms of experience and evidence. What do we find of this in Abbs? Nothing at all. There are no embedded versions of decolonisation, of the new history displacing kings and queens. His vision of demos is his reception of the New Left. I don't want to delimit the realm of human intelligence, after all the area of sixties thought probably closest to me is computer technology, it can't be compulsory to write about any field of ideas. All the same Abbs' no-saying does give us a hint of the lack of logic-information flow in his poems. I expect you could take Spengler and Christopher Dawson, cadavers as they seem to me, and make a brilliant poetic complex out of them; but A. has solidified these ideas, made them unconscious and intractable. They don't make the surface more animated, if anything they drain it of activity. The pressure of Left political activism in the seventies drove him to articulate his position, in Of Man and Islands, in an effective way; this was followed by the pamphlet Songs of a New Taliesin:
It is bitter cold. Each blade of grass
Bent down by frost. Tremulous pools in the churned
Slang's ruts are frozen still. New on this New
Year's Day the sun stares and winks from the crest
Of the hill. Bright as percussion, as
Burnished brass, in a hundred frames, the glass
Throws back its light, returns a darker burning,
A greater conflagration. On every roof
The plum-fleshed slates begin to weep.
('Welsh Nativities');
a beautiful poem, spoilt by doom-laden moanings at the end. Things seem to have gone seriously wrong in the era of right-wing domination, which elicited from him a sequence of sonnets, Icons of Time. We need a new vocabulary to distinguish aged-objects from novel-objects within the poem. Abbs' exit into skellig-geology rather clearly shows a transition from refusal of change to denial of other people's wishes. The rocks threaten whatever they reject with crushing or drowning; they are authenticity and selfsameness; they are simply the patriarchal power.
Two traits complicate the picture. The first is his admiration for D.H. Lawrence, which intermittently animates his work a great deal; he has published David Holbrook, an anti-pornography campaigner who is also a lawrentian because he was a pupil of Leavis. The second is a curious half-belief in flux. Lawrence made the transient, irrational, present moment sacred; Abbs believes that he believes this: A poet should be out/ In this, his mind coinciding/ With all that flows and// Undergoes metamorphosis , but he scrunches every moment down into hard, massive, petrified lumps of moralised knowledge. He has unresolved radical conflicts which sap the work from within.