The ancestry of radical and subversive thought and of literature containing a new world is in the sects of radical Protestantism, revealed in a blaze of light by the dropping of censorship during the 1640s and 1650s and the consequent torrent of antinomian and Utopian pamphlets. The Leveller and Ranter tracts are still profoundly exciting. This uproar should not deafen us to the probable existence of similar beliefs back in the depths of the Middle Ages, if exhibited only in trials for heresy and the refutations by orthodox writers of lost heretical texts. These are discussed in, for example, The Pursuit of the Millennium, by Norman Cohn. The 17th century wave was the subject of The World Turned Upside Down, by Christopher Hill (see also the bibliographies in both books). This long trailing history can be read either as "the anti-hierarchical, radical, collectivist, transformatory tradition has always been there", or as "the failure of Utopian projects for the transformation of human nature has been going on for as long as the horse plough".
2. Christian Socialism
This movement of the 1840s, led by F.D. Maurice and animating Charles Kingsley, and working through its journal Politics for the People, was essentially a response to Chartism. It can be claimed that it had nothing in common with modern Socialism except the name; certainly it pointed away from government and legislation and towards self-sufficient egalitarian communes along the lines of Robert Owen's New Lanark. Nonetheless the continuity is there, in my view. Modern Socialism has been sustained not least by middle-class Christians. The CS argument that the vote was not enough, that equality could not be reached by political means alone, can also be interpreted as an anticipation of revolutionary politics, where the rules of existing politics are set aside. A convenient source is The Christian Socialists by E.R. Norman.
They didn't want the welfare state, but they did after all want everyone to be fed, clothed, and housed. The Christian art which expressed compassion for the poor, for example through moralising prints, was highly developed and was the predecessor of a whole strain of Left poetry. Socialist art has had, not so much to start from scratch in a flat field, as to clear away or modify the enormous town dump of sentimental representations of poverty and brotherhood going back to the very origins of Christian art. Where it has succeeded in sweeping away sentiment and morality, it has defeated its own object.
The classic Labour-Socialist criticisms of this long-lived movement are that it left control of the State and of property to the existing malevolent powerholders, and that only a national organisation, sufficiently centralised to act coherently, sufficiently large to win strikes and elections, could alter society. The CSs were no doubt eclectic and ineffective. The rational singlemindedness and tenacity of the State-Party machine enabled it to carry out its chosen tasks while simultaneously disabling it from solving, or even perceiving, other problems. The welfare legislation is all very well, but since it will all be repealed if public feeling runs against it, it is public feeling which is of primary importance.
Politics for the People describes communities which were free from unemployment because they were owned by their members. If we bear in mind these self-sufficient, protective, intimate, producers' communes, as modules of an ideal society, we can perhaps recuperate the mediaevalism of William Morris' poetry as a revival of a social order without centralised power or corporations.
The situation of the academic Left today, an educated middle-class group kept out of real power, ideologically influential but living in a verbal-symbolic domain which ever threatens to become drained of meaning because it represents intentions which cannot be carried out, embodying standards which are radical and transformatory but also walk on thin air, is analogous to that of the Christian Socialist clergy. The secular Left strand which has espoused a doctrine of effectiveness does not for that reason lack unexpressed residues of intent. It may be consoling to envisage the current situation as dating, not from 1979 or 1974, but from the 1640s and the collapse of radical hopes as the Revolution was consolidated on a businesslike basis.
It was perhaps the struggle for the franchise which focussed the attention of Socialists on the State and on Parliament. The era which followed, of a dual movement of Unions and nationwide Socialist electoral parties, can perhaps be seen today as a phase bracketed by two eras in which the stress was on small groups, the family, and personal goodness. The great Socialist parties of Europe seem today to be at the end of their legislative programmes: a huge slice has been enacted and realised, another slice has been ditched as Utopian; although the need to restrain the corporations is today greater than ever before, the managerial politicians at the top of nominally Socialist parties seem to agree with the directors and bankers. In the East, the story is even more sombre. The mass working-class movements could only reach certain objectives, but they were at least purposive devices; the admirable complexity of personal politics seems to make progress imperceptible and immeasurable, universal but reversible; where strikes and legislation are impotent, one cannot believe that verbal and pictorial campaigns will achieve permanent results. The quality of progress may be inherent to the big seductive external world of rationality, facts, bureaucracy, machinery, contracts, and large fixed-capital concerns; while outside that realm reigns arbitrariness and the cyclical time of biology.
3.Weaver poets
Umpleby reports, in the Introduction to The White Rose Garland (an anthology of Yorkshire dialect verse, edited by Halliday and Umpleby), that "the rise of dialect poetry (the voice of the people) in the middle of the 19th century was the direct outcome of that negation of nature which we call the Industrial Revolution. It was an indictment of the ills and miseries that followed in the wake of expanding trade and a machinery-dominated economy.". This fills me with dismay, since it indicates that the history of Left verse should be traced back at least to the Chartists; and that the record of success is even sparser than I had thought. The date of mid-century means more precisely, I suspect, the 1840s and the surge of Chartism; to which Christian Socialism was, as we have seen, a response. Umpleby remarks that "most of this verse had reference to the textile industry", the weavers produced political poetry and the Yorkshire colliers wrote only on other themes. The level of this poetry is incredibly low. However, it does indicate that the working class of the nineteenth century had a poetry produced within its own numbers, and reflecting, partly, its own interests and beliefs. It was confined to quite small areas: the working class of the most heavily industrialized districts was developing political awareness. The growth of a narrowly working-class market, separate from the general book and newspaper market, was possibly related to the settlement pattern of single-class communities; allowing a depth of self-awareness and alienation which the uplifting effect of middle-class people, as clergy, employers of servants, and so on, prevented in more traditional districts. In about 1840 the working classes (of relevant parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, presumably also Cornwall, Dundee, and some other Scottish towns) were the most progressive element in society, willing to develop new ideas and institutions: this situation fluctuated, and its fluctuations have composed a great deal of the cultural history of the past 150 years. Evidently, the result of much of the progress of the working class was to turn individuals or families into the new middle class. Part of this process was shame at the culture of the class being left behind, and shame at being ashamed; most acute in changes of language, e.g. losing Welsh. Cultural conflict in Britain is always also conflict between regions; it seems certain that the new industrial civilisation - new on the face of the earth - which grew up in certain regions of England and Scotland, then from about 1840 in South Wales, did not develop a new poetry as an adequate expression of its cultural needs. The consequences of this were still important in the 1960s. I am not going to quote the weavers' poetry because it has just been left behind; I don't think anyone lives in a standpoint from where they can enter it and enjoy it.
The vision of judgement
Lawrence and Wishart (a concern with a close interest in communist writing) published a book of Political Verse and Song (edited by Mary Ashraf, 1975, and printed in the German Democratic Republic), which is not only from an exclusively Left viewpoint (of course) but also includes a lot of 19th-century material. It would be eccentric to claim that it gives us the history of British Left poetry, since all the selections march in time, and the choice since the foundation of the British Communist Party (1920) is bizarre and even hallucinogenic, since it eschews anyone who wasn't a communist. Whether Ashraf ever read poetry for pleasure remains uncertain. She skips a huge mass of poetry which is certainly political. Sight of the spine of Thomas Wright's Political Songs (two sets, in three volumes altogether) from the 13th to 15th centuries may make a politico's heart beat, but these works, entirely (I think) second-rate as poetry, deal with disputes immanent to the world as conceptualised and lived in by people of those times, and the possibilities for change and issues which they see at stake are quite alien to us. The poems descend I suppose from early mediaeval narrative and heroic poetry, and don't get very far away from describing fights: usually between the English and despicable foreigners, for variation between King John and his barons (the 'Song of Lewes'). The resemblance between the two sides is what strikes us about such battles. A society does contain within itself, and in the consciousness and writings of its members, radical and unrealised and wished-for possibilities, but in the long perspective these bear a very strong resemblance to the society as it actually was. Piers Plowman is a radical and anti-authoritarian poem in its way, but the models of social behaviour which it holds up are profoundly alien to us, tenuously related to our political ideas, and similar in detail to what the social system of late-fourteenth century England actually was. After a long craze for interpreting religious reform as concealed social protest, it is time to interpret it as religious reform. The penalty for dismissing the alienness of the past is that by failing to realise the alienness of the future you misunderstand the nature of historical change altogether and empty political action of its purpose. The prejudice in favour of song echoes George Thomson's preoccupations.
Although a tenet of socialism is the weight of unpurged crime and ill-gotten gains from the past, overhanging the social order and threatening its claims to justice and stability, in poetry the concern is more the overhang of bad poetry from the past. No doubt these were decent and ardent people, but the feeling that if you take up socialist poetry you will end up writing like them is enough to make most people surrender. Going to poetry knowing exactly what you want it to say to you is an ineffective strategy and is a bit too much like a suspicious shopkeeper wanting to know what he is buying. The potential of poetry is in proportion to its level of uncertainty. One of the reasons why I have no written magazine strategy is that I know I want to publish socialist realist poetry, and I can't fi nd any; it's better for me to shed my positive expectations and move into a realm where my categories are disconcerted and thrown into question. The tenor of Left poetry since 1960 has been to question the procedures of perception, such as deduction, suggestibility, stored knowledge, interpretive norms, categorisation, including the procedures used in writing and reading poetry. These poems are not suitable for singing at demonstrations. It's quite unreasonable to demand that every poet re-enact the surpassed phases of socialist poetry and spend years writing tub-thumping fo-fum-storm-the-Bastille ditties before starting on something more developed; surely we're allowed to take the nineteenth century as read and learn from its example. Unless someone alters the aesthetic principles used by Ebenezer Elliott, the Bard of the Anti-Corn Law League, they are not going to write poetry better than Elliott's. If we have a situation in the UK where a large left-wing movement fi nds relatively little sustenance and inspiration from left-wing poetry; where collective provisions like the welfare state enjoy broad support from the entire population; where it's virtually unknown for a poet to be Right of centre, but all poets seem to have dif fi culty writing outspokenly Left and public poems; there is no need to defend the cognitively critical version of Left poetry, the burden of proof is on top of anyone who wants poetry to be like Ebenezer Jones:
We'll all go building workhouses, - million, million men.
What'll we do with the workhouses? million, million men.
Shall we all lie down and madden, each in his lonely den?
What! we whose sires made Cressy! we, men of Nelson's mould!
We, of the Russells' country - God's Englishmen the bold!
Will we, at earth's lord's bidding, build ourselves dishonour'd graves?
Will we who've made this England, endure to be its slaves?
(Ashraf, p. 200)
One curious feature of the 19th century poetry printed by Ashraf is its version of the sublime; a distinct psychological state, dissolving the borders of the body image, allowing a disembodied eye to rove over global or allegorical landscapes. I don't think it has much to do with politics, although it springs from reading. The alienated self is placed outside the history of the Behemoth society which alienates it: 'I spoke an astral language,/ I sung a supernal song,/ In a region beyond ether,/ With a beatific throng' (James Slimmon), standing on an eschatological coign of vantage from where the origin of society, the origin of institutions, the origin of human nature, the far parts of the earth, the most ancient kingdoms mentioned in the Bible, etc., are all visible as if in the spectacle shots of a Cecil B. De Mille movie.
But science gathers, with gigantic arms,
In one embrace, the South's diffusive charms;
Nor these alone, she rears the bright domain,
Throughout the world expands her hallowing reign -
Then, bold aspiring as immortal thought
Launched in the boundless, mounts the aeronaut,
While o'er the earth they drive the cloudy team,
Electric messenger, and car of steam;
And guide and govern on innocuous course,
The explosive mineral's propelling force;
Or, mocking distance, send, on rays of light,
Love's homeborn smiles to cheer the wanderer's sight
(Ernest Jones, from The Revolt of Hindostan)
Jones follows these feasible strides of progress with:
With Babel's curse war, wrong, and slavery came -
Their end was shadowed in the cloven flame
No parchment deed shall qualify the soil:
God gave to man his title in his toil:
Here we have the myth of Babel hard followed on by a prophecy of the abolition of private property. This is almost psychedelic; the sensory overload being supplied by the wealth, even excess, of data about the past being supplied in visual and verbal form by the mighty printing presses of the nineteenth century. It is poetry written by people with their eyes bulging. Every view is seen in this greedy, atemporal, perspective, where only the essential is visible: 'Then the howl of the world arouses him; he rises, - / Through heaven and hells, eternities and times,/ Wildly he stares; - seeking the power that bids/ This terrible reign.' (Ebenezer Jones) It is reasonable, I suppose, if you are attacking private property, to go back to a time when it did not exist; demanding feats of anthropological imagination on the part of the reader, but before that of the writer, which might make your eyes bulge all over again. Jones can't easily duck the fact that he is imitating the Bible, with its knowledge of Empires and of Ultimates, because he is still using it as a source for much of his 'knowledge'; he competes with it in literary terms by discerning a pattern as clear and sonorous as Divine History:
Wait, blind-whirl'd Ixion of the flashing wheel
Life and Death!
This thing is certain, that like ore good grows all
Ill beneath
Other than worshippers of dreams and scriptures
Live by faith.
I don't think it's sure at all. The idea that history doesn't have a pattern, that even human nature is flexible and as it were a-biological when it comes to social life, was unacceptable at the time.
This is the confluence of two streams of 19th century historical activity, the printing and picturing of the total world remains of the past, ransacking archives, temples, and tombs; and the radical, critical, movement of thought. Rationalism, Greek tragic poetry, and the kerugmatic history of the Bible, are poured into one ensemble as if they were three characters in the same opera. This line of poetry reached a decadent peak with the (non-radical) Stephen Phillips (A Vision of Judgement) and William Watson; a last, putrid, rush of spectacle and eschatology before the sobriety and peasant realism of the Georgians. I doubt that either the history of Assyria or the Greek myths have anything to say about contemporary politics. Although I think this is all very bad poetry, I think the impulses which made it so bad are interesting. What burst it was the attempt to contain all of historical knowledge, something still possible in around 1720; the solution of 1910 vomited out everything, giving up History; we are still faced with the resulting problems. In the thirties capitalism was discredited, but the Labour Party was discredited too, after its collapse in 1931: an era of intense leftism for a small minority, and a collapse of union membership, strikes, and Left voting in the broad majority. Socialist poetry of extraordinary realistic depth and imaginative achievement was written by Idris Davies, Glyn Jones, Hugh MacDiarmid, Joseph Macleod, and Sorley MacLean. The search for effective Left poetry in England is far more fraught. The key names seem to be Edgell Rickword and Charles Madge.