best-sellers (since it is impossible to survey taste as a whole)
(F Thompson (check sales figures via a biography) the dog in Waste Land may actually be the Hound of Heaven? poems have similar designs?) no data
Kipling no figures available
William Watson and Stephen Phillips were big sellers around 1900. Watson's moment of popularity seems to have ended in the 1890s, although he received a knighthood for an expert piece of verse flattery of Lloyd George during the Great War. A copy of Phillips' verse play Paolo and Francesca , a big hit around 1908, says "twenty-fifth thousand", while crediting another verse play, Herod, as "twenty-first thousand", and Poems as "twelfth thousand". The rate of literary change was such that they became fossils decades before they died. Watson's death is variously given as 1925, 1935, and 1936-the uncertainty is indicative of what an impact his death made. Some way into the project, I discovered (what would have been obvious to a 19th C specialist) that both poets are much indebted to Henry Irving, and especially to his production of Faust. The parade of European history in that play was magnetically attractive, and both poets liked a perspective above the earth, from which all possible phenomena of the world are seen passing by in the form of tableaux. This total accessibility of images acted like a drug on poets; for us it seems like a museum or the cinema (or in fact one of great Exhibtions of the era). It may be one of the archetypes haunting 20th C poetry.
Both stand on a low level of artistic achievement, although two of Watson's early poems have something to be said for them, in their bizarrely historicist and over-ornate way. He vanished form sight in the 1920s, one of the many victims of modernity; something which his book-length Iranian cosmic religious dramatic poem, Ahura-Mazda (?), did not strive for.
Newbolt's Admirals All sold, according to the editor of his Selected Poems, 21,000 copies in 1897; it was a pamphlet, so this does not represent a fortune in money. I also have the impression that Alfred Noyes, a similarly stout nautical writer, sold many books; but I don't have the details on this or on Newbolt's later volumes. His most famous poem is in dialect, but this appears to have been a single spark. The tone of both poets is one of patriotic gallantry, which involves-given the personnel on His Majesty's men-of-war-lower-class characters, and also physical realism in narrative form. Newbolt has been described as a Kipling of higher ethical tone and without the vulgarity. Both extolled martial self-sacrifice in a period which was visibly building up to a world war; this must have eased the creation of their reputations by the Tory press, and pointed Newbolt's knighthood at him, but does not prove that their motives were base. After a war in which everyone was fed enough patriotic blither to last them for a lifetime, and which was won rather unglamorously by seapower slowly reducing the German civilian population to mass starvation, they seemed like dinosaurs. Newbolt's decline may have been due to his fantasies being realised too carnally; he was a sensitive man. Their poetry was suitable for children, as well as being the kind of thing that masters liked to see their pupils reading, and the reaction against it was also a way of stressing the adult nature of adult reading.
Newbolt was actually knighted for his war service in the propaganda effort. His identification with both imperialism and the world war would have been enough to make him unfashionable after the war. The suspicion remains that his personal fantasies crossed over and became part of the national mythology, even if this made him superfluous; his ability to produce images for the mass media is modern, even thogh sinister.
The Georgian Books were best-sellers for their time. (poss don't qualify) book 1 sold 15,000 copies? check in Ross
1912-21?
Munro's stress on reading aloud (he seems to have invented the poetry reading, in its modern sense), and (unrealised) wish to make a living by going round villages reciting poetry to the villagers, defined a notion of authenticity revived in the 1960s-as the sixties recycled everything.
A book on Alfred Housman cites 21,000 copies of Last Poems sold in the first few months after publication, and remarks that A Shropshire Lad was at that time selling over 3000 copies a year-twenty-six years after publication. Even if we screw this figure down to the 15 years of Housman's great popularity (1910-25 according to George Orwell), we end up with 45,000 copies sold; a remarkable total.
It is hard to think sociologically while reading them, because they are so absorbing and entrancing as poems. Unlike the poetry previously discussed, they survive as classics. One has to cite its perfection as poetry as the reason for its popularity.
David Perkins' invaluable History of Modern Poetry cites 292,000 copies of Rupert Brooke's Poems (1913) sold by 1926. This is usually set aside as not belonging to the history of poetry, but this does not allow us to decide for ourselves what the proper bounds of the history of poetry are. An insignificant volume, its success perhaps has something to do with a unique double in achieving approval from the intellectual elite and giving the ordinary middle-class reader something they could feel passionate and safe about. Brooke's insider status in the literary world meant that a strong biographical myth could very rapidly be formed and disseminated: the reviewers had all met him, and other eminences were prepared to endorse him. Brooke was the Princess Di of his day. This "public intimacy" flashes us forward to the public intimacy which the media share with the home life of stars today, and shows also the family aspect of the English literary world, a peculiar possessive warmth which discourages any self-will in form or content. It is hard to imagine Brooke's poetry being translated; how would one explain to an audience in France, let's say, why the poetry was popular? It may well be that his poems, read with no name at the top, would seem empty, and so are dependent on the biographical myth; but that is an empty observation, since everyone who reads them does read them with the biographical myth in mind.
The peculiar sentimentality of the middle-aged about the young, if the latter are full of promise, not aggressive and cynical, and (if possible) personally attractive, influenced Brooke's career in life and accounts for his apotheosis in death. It is invoked by every young poet, who is then puzzled and indignant at the corps of editors, reviewers, etc., not being sentimental about them and not finding them attractive. These crushes are not unusual, but they are exclusive: there is only room for one favourite, and everyone else is ignored.
The gap between B's intellectual interests (he was already a fellow of a Cambridge college) and the subjects of his poetry is peculiarly wide. The one exception is the poem about life after death, which reflects his membership of the Society for Psychical Research, and ideas dear to the intelligentsia of the day.
His career was where the media and poetry interact. Academics may dislike this, but after all poetry can't become part of literary history unless someone reads it. Some of his lines are instantly memorable, and one may doubt that a poet could become a hit unless some of the lines were so memorable, and willing to become part of the word of mouth. Just as the shop starts yards down the street (where its display first hits the stroller), the sale of a book of poems starts before the buyer sees the book.
His story resembles a poem by Newbolt and Noyes: another version of proletarian hero (and even of dialect). The complex of patriotic narrative dissolves the separation between the reader and the poet, who apparently belongs to them by virtue of the shared war. Feelings about boundaries are played so that boundaries within society dissolve in a war effort, while external boundaries are suffused with rage, and intruders get chased off. A thick line of Victorian paintings chose the collective mythology and became invisible, over time, because the artist's personality had been excluded. The patriotic-military cycle allowed a kind of impersonality, dissolution of personal interests.
The stage set of a Socialist poem, with lower-class heroes, physical effort, comradeship, collective interest, etc., is present in these poems, but in the form of patriotism in uniform. Anyone reared on this kind of war story gains a tremendous sense of community and destiny. It tended to make personal poetry seem insignificant; ships, cannon, marching columns, even seas or teritories, became trophies propping up the narrative. The cycle of imperialist wars goes back at least to the 7 Years' War, but the patriotic narrative as such goes back to Henry VI at the very least, and that was drawing on ready-shaped and tilted material in the chronicles.
Bevis Hillier records in his classic biography of Young Betjeman that a book of poems by John Oxenham sold 286,000 copies because it was very popular during the First World War. I can give no further details of Oxenham, a vanished figure.
Robert Bridges published The Testament of Beauty in 1929, when he was 81 and Poet Laureate. It sold 80,000 copies according to his biographer (check) It is not true that intellectuality puts people off, since Testament sold so much.
The work deals with the nature of Man in 4 books. It is not about beauty, nor am I clear why it is called a Testament. It is philosophy which is not critical philosophy. There is no sense of exchange; ideas are conceived pictorially.
The biology is pre-sociobiology and pre-biochemistry. He has no notion of hormones, although these were discovered around 1900. So the subject is "human nature" but his means of finding it out are primitive; and he does not suspect them. He deals with the least understood area of biology, touchy ground even today; but talks with the greatest self-assurance. The sociologically given authority (he was the King's Poet Laureate, and his works were published by Oxford University press) stands in for intellectual accuracy.
A benign old buffer, he writes with a placid tedium which is very relaxing. Starting from living scenes with their rapid change and material constraints, he poeticises by rising to a vantage point where the constraints disappear and the rapid change, itself a response to the constraints, is resolved into a static pattern of eternal truths. From this vantage point of deep security and remoteness, Bridges writes a book-length poem of absolute generality: the original living scenes have completely vanished. Change has been frozen out of the picture; the class order is rooted in genetics. At the time, literariness could be identified with lofty detachment, and Bridges triumphed because he was more lofty than all his rivals. His diction uses turns which have not been spoken since the 16th C: this timelessness is an echo of the Authorised Version, perhaps also of other 17th C divines, so that the withdrawal from time is associated with authority and unassailable wisdom-with orthodoxy, in fact. Why should someone in the lofty place be bothered about the shallow time in which languages change? The text is made distinctive by Bridges' spelling reforms, not adopted by anyone else except him (so far as I know-the discovery of a volume by a follower of Bridges would be quite a find). These may have appeared to an incurious readership as strange, avant garde, and profound.
The distinctive, and even seductive, style of Testament, has these features:
vagueness
temporal blur
move from search for individual advantage to view of whole group
move away from concrete situations to supratemporal generalisations
elimination of uncertainty
move away from viewpoint of a social group to species-wide ethical generalisation
removal from Beauty of expressivity and emotion, tied to personal desires, and replacement by idealism, the godhead, the supra-personal
archaism of diction and of manner
absence of personal style; fusion with the diction of many poets of the past, the nameless of styles
removal of people in favour of depersonalised Ideas or Impulses
In its argument, it shows:
avoidance of number, in biology, to be replaced by the pictorial; the elimination of variables and of observational series
rhythm without emphases or irregularities
social ills are not problems and cannot be solved, but are photo-opportunities for the poet to appear noble and compassionate
no wish to disturb established sets of ideas
These diverse elements combine into a highly integrated, consistent, purposive plan: a recipe which any poet who wishes to be a best-seller should study. Pictures succeed each other to give us a sense of overflight, of magical visibility; a camera which nothing resists. The poetic line offers us a constant ripple of diverse sensations, a spectrum of musical colorations, where nothing is obtrusive or stressful. It is like film music, to be blunt; like a Stan Kenton album. The fluency offers perfect insulation. So much of this is true of the mature Auden.
Testament is partly a pamphlet against the lower orders; a genial survey which takes all the new ideas threatening the middle class, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and dismissing them. It is a poem about healing which identifies ideas with conflict and wounds.
Bridges' lack of narrative is something he has in common with other 20th C poetry.
Error: this should not happen
John Masefield's 1928 Collected Poems have sold 200,000 copies (as claimed on the dust jacket of the Carcanet Selected Poems; these sales would have taken place over a long period. His biographer gives a much lower figure, which however refers to the book's sales during the 1920s.) Masefield was still alive, and Laureate, in 1967, which means he was just alive when I first read his work. Reynard the Fox was just the kind of thing that got read to prep school boys in those remote times; we had to read a book of Narrative Poems, which was obviously the kind of thing to appeal to boys of that age. His foreword to Reynard describes it as an allegory about the destruction of a social order: the fox is, oddly, pre-war England. It was Masefield's own powers as a writer which were shaken up beyond recovery in the war. He was reaching perhaps one hundred times as many readers as the 1920s poets who adapted to the crackup, as he did not, and wrote from within it. He wrote daily for seven decades, and among a bewildering variety of books we can notice his religious verse dramas of the late 20s, and his plays of around 1910-20, some attempts at peasant poetic drama, but one set in Japan. It was The Everlasting Mercy, more than anything else, which made his Collected Poems sell so well.
Reynard employs a rapid and pictorial way of sketching social types, in a gathering, meant to add up to a view of society, which is not a million miles away from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. It speaks to us because it relativizes the self, and implies a larger and more stable context; on reflection, the method resembles that of Auden, during the 1930s, and is unsatisfactory for the same reasons. Auden's editing method is exciting and mysterious, but he still aims for the typical, the vignette, the broad view. The general truth, that the advance of privatisation has made such a social poetry impossible, has to be qualified by Auden's Thirties poetry, among many other exceptions. To be accurate, Masefield's account, in The Everlasting Mercy, of a single soul, the poacher Saul Kane, is artistically far superior; the Protestant focus down to a single soul brings with it immense problems, but here allows precision, intensity, dramatic changes, and sharpness of focus, to impressive effect. The story of a single soul; isn't that the formula of lyric poetry? Reynard already shows a need to write about everybody, and a consequent loss of grip and conviction. There is a whole swathe of English poetry producing "vignettes of social reality", and I suspect none of it is any good. Sociology just isn't that easy.
Masefield, and that whole group of proletarian and realist poets, such as Wilfred Gibson, stole a march on the twentieth century by writing about non-middle class subjects, but were left high and dry by the advance of the century. It would be difficult to compete with Masefield for hard work, patriotism, interest in oral delivery, social realism, or benignity; he won the wrong games, apparently.
Victoria Sackville-West's The Land, 1926, an imitation of Virgil's Georgics set in the southern English countryside, sold 100,000 copies up to 1971, according to her biographer. The majority of sales must have taken place in the first ten years, and we can compare this with the one thousand copies sold, by 1940, of Auden's Poems (1930), a critical success which came out soon after it.
It is pleasant to record that there is a piece of S-W's poetry which I like-it is in one of the late Georgian Books. The Land was popular because of a compulsive fantasy, which irresistibly led people to buy it, which hovers over the pages of the book and yet is frustrated by it. The fantasy, no doubt, has nothing to do with the author-she merely had to find sounds that would evoke it. It seems that successful poets evoke a shared, gratifying, durable fantasy and then do reinforce it and give it wings. It is strange that Sackville-West's own fantasy was quite different from the one her readers were seeing; she had been wounded by being unable to inherit the ancient family estates, since she was the wrong sex, and was compulsively buying up land. She did indeed come from a ducal family and did live in a stately home and was obsessed by her own land and genealogy. We can compare The Land with Brideshead Revisited and ask whether the majority of the mid-century reading public were simply impelled by snobbery.
I am not setting out to ridicule people's snobbery. It may be the legitimate form of cultural pleasure in a class society; a direct exchange within the grasp of the stupid, which must be one of the criteria of significant art. Imaginary riches are better than real poverty. All the same, The Land is bad poetry. The theme of our book, however, is how the landed aristocracy were replaced, as the social fantasy animating poetry, by a middle class ideal of being intelligent and ahead of the game. This binds us to the task of explaining why the further project, undertaken by so many people over such a long period, of breaking up this ideal of intelligence and culture to replace it with an ideal of equality and brotherhood, has not been successful. We can take social structure as a productive source of fantasies and as itself a form of partially shared fantasy.
Her biographer, Victoria Glendinning, records a meeting in 1946 where experts (or dilettanti, to use a kinder word) were discussing the choice of poets for a public reading. No-one even thought to suggest Sackville-West, there present, and this mortified her so much that she never wrote a line again. The incident shows how those most committed to poetry-a small, highly educated, urban minority- have a hot line to literary influence which readers in the provinces do not have, although they have spending power. The imbalance whereby Sackville-West respected the opinion of the gatekeepers, rather than her own and that of the mass public, is striking. Part of being a gatekeeper, of course, is that you spend your days reading bad poetry, to be fair in judgement; the big fantasy of the gatekeeper is to be allowed to read only good poetry, and live a life of intoxicating aesthetic experiences, rather than stolid depressed fairness.
Sackville-West's second book-length poem was The Garden, and her shift away from poetry towards gardening allowed her great cultural influence in the post-war scene; conceiving a cultural strategy whereby a new mass consumer market would imitate aristocratic taste. Rather than burn the aristocrats, people visited their gardens and bought seeds.
Her way of life, involving a lack of intellectual culture (she was thinly educated), rural residence, much time spent with animals, avoidance of work, dislike of anything modern, and a daily attempt to find amusement (anything which did not involve the intellect), has an intuitive appeal to millions of English readers which the life of a poet-intellectual utterly lacks. The Land is a reminder that the broad public would prefer to read books by people who don't think or talk about writing.
The popularity of these books in the 1920s and 1930s lets us qualify the tenet about the 20s being a radical break from the past. More truthfully, they saw the rise of a new sensibility among a minority, and a state of disaffection with authority which for the most part evaporated during the years of peace, and as the hate-figures of the War vanished from the scene. We may compare the readership of Testament with that of, say, The Waste Land, to qualify the shifts of taste of the 1920s; by 1930, they were still the literacy of a tiny urban minority, which is not to deny their spread to a mass reading audience over the next thirty years. The alliance between Cambridge textual purism, smart urban "secular" art lovers, and revolutionaries in the political and economic field, was difficult, but seized key positions and reached, decades later, a very large number of people; without, however, becoming the culture of a whole society.
I have been quite unable to find out why three such popular books were published in successive years from 1926. History does not seem to yield order at this level.
Note how many of these best-selling poets studied at either Oxford or Cambridge universities. The doctrine that Oxbridge writes self-regarding poetry which is necessarily unpopular needs to be revised to a B version, that Oxbridge produces self-regarding poetry which is often extremely popular, especially when it delivers populism (Housman, Betjeman) as well as cachet. In the 1950s, the Fantasy Press series of pamphlets had actually as part of their sales literature that all the poets were associated with either Oxford or Cambridge universities: at the time this was seen as a guarantee of the highness and preciousness of the poems.
John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells (1960)
The success of this churchy autobiography in verse, said to have sold 100,000 copies, shows the might of the Anglican taste, not displaced until the 1960s. (Displaced is too strong a word for it.). Biographies of poets are generally much more popular than the poems they wrote; a basic rule of English taste. The association of Betjeman with the Oxford of Evelyn Waugh's novels may have been crucial to his success, because everyone had read Waugh, and JB didn't have to do basic scene-setting by 1960, when he wrote about the 1920s in Summoned. The familiarity of the social scene allows us to imagine and stage the events of the poem. I am afraid that much poetry relies on prose for its success; political poetry generally relies on you having read the newspapers, or seen the TV news coverage, first. This method is so obviously effective that remarks about poetry leading the way are beside the point. The 1920s were a comfortably nostalgic theme by 1960, where rebellion was remarkably undisturbing; the typical buyer of this book was, in the folklore, middle-aged, and of course this is a much under-addressed market of people who spend a lot of time reading. (One may suppose that no-one over thirty was buying the Hughes/Gunn selected, and so that no-one bought both books.) This is a very non-egoistic autobiography, and Betjeman reminds us of Masefield in his benignity and interest in other people. This is not a bad formula for a poet to follow.
It is not clear to me whether B.'s prose made his poetry popular, or vice versa. Personally, I cannot enjoy his poetry, but I find his architectural prose compelling and even enthralling.
The Penguin book The Liverpool Sound, with Brian Patten, Adrian Henri, and Roger McGough, is reported to have sold several thousand copies. confirm sales figures.
for example in that book about the Mersey Poets.
His biographer cites three printings of the 1976 book by Philip Larkin, High Windows, which add up to 19,500 copies. This implies the survival of Anglican taste.
I don't think we find, in these books, indications of a constant taste, or of broad and regular shifts. The extreme specificness of Betjeman is at the opposite pole from the lofty vagueness of Bridges. People like long continuous poems, generous experiences, not fragments and bittiness. They actually want to think they've bought the experience in question, not remaining fragments that allude to it; they want a sight worth the journey, and not something brief and strained. Before putting the money down, they want to have a very clear idea of what the experience is which they are paying for; all the works concerned have a strong marketability in the sense that a word of mouth account of what they are is rapidly recognizable and graspable. This would not apply to, for example, to Auden or Eliot.
The failure of the tradition leaves each hopeful young poet with the dual attractions of writing like an Elizabethan and taking on pop culture-both disastrous. One of the conventional responses to this is to pronounce that thorough modernism is the correct solution, and that each poet's failure can be attributed to their failure to perceive this; a theory which ignores the clear wishes of the reading public (they don't buy modernism) and the (largely undocumented) problems of so many poets who did try to be modernists.
The notion of the up to date is misleading; any period looked at shows several different styles, each hoping to be elected; the process is competitive, styles are floated like shares, and this uncertainty is only hidden by the co-operation of anthologists and critics allied to the winning group in silencing and leaving out poems of other and rival styles. The prevalence of a style, once elected, removes the element of doubt from the critic's actions, as all he has to do is pronounce in favour of that style and his own claims to be up to date are validated.
These books probably don't reveal the underlying structure of the market, because they don't seem to have had follow-ups. They don't seem to have created a durable taste, which would bring poets and readers together afterwards; they all seem to have been flukes. The exceptions are interesting: Hughes and Gunn were perceived as parts of the same thing by the reading public in the 1960s, although no-one thinks that now. There is an overlap between Housman and the Georgians, as we can readily, and perhaps rightly, see his impoverished rural characters going on to appear in poems by Masefield and Gibson. Sackville-West was technically a Georgian since she appeared in Edward Marsh's anthologies. A great deal of homogeneity in taste has been reached at the universities, but this is at least partly for organisational reasons, and the abiding gap between university taste (since its beginning in the 1920s) and the taste of the general middle-class reading public does not demonstrate the constancy or unity of the latter.