Critical Survey

Since the word ‘melianthropy’ does not exist, I have invented it as my small tribute to John: it means the capacity for making people’s lives better and fuller. Ayear ago, having sent out innumerable letters of invitation to contribute to the present ‘special issue’ of Critical Survey in honour of John Lucas, his many friends responded with such speed and enthusiasm, and with such wonderful things to say about him-whowas- to-be-honoured, that I thought of scrapping the original idea of publishing essays, poems and reminiscences and simply printing the letters themselves instead. All solicited were ‘honoured’ or ‘flattered’ to be asked, but many added more: ‘a close friend and someone who has offered so much to so many of us, both in literature and in life’; ‘as well as being a fine poet and deep-searching author, John is one of the most generous-spirited men I’ve ever known, and it is not surprising that he has such a very wide circle of friends drawn from his many interests and his work’; ‘John is not only a very close friend but the most generous man I am ever likely to meet. I could never begin to repay his goodness to me’; ‘John deserves only the very best’; ‘John is among those whose friendship I most value and whose work I most highly regard. A very remarkable man – how does he do it? – and loyal and heartening friend’; yet another refers to ‘his and Pauline’s warm hospitality and infectious enthusiasms’. And so on and so forth – but all are clearly meant. For me, as guest-editor of this issue – itself an honour and a pleasure – the true index of the depth of affection and regard John inspires has been the fact that 98% of all the contributions were on my desk by the copy-date – an unheard-of thing!

Samuel Johnson considered that Thomas Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard ‘abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo’. Roger Lonsdale argues that it ‘produces fewer or more complicated echoes in the bosoms of modern readers than in those of earlier generations’, but it is not just the Doppler effect of the passing centuries that complicates responses. The Elegy has always been a conduit for diverse needs and aspirations. When General Wolfe famously declared on the eve of the Battle of Quebec that he would rather have written the Elegy than capture the city, he was enlisting its patriotic potential, or perhaps using it in the manner of Roman generals at their victory parades, to whisper in his ear, ‘remember, you are mortal’. For the nineteenth-century pioneers of the trade union movement the Elegy was a radical text which made their struggles poetic, and their banners often quoted the lines about the Village-Hampden who ‘with dauntless breast / The little tyrant of his fields withstood’.

The year 2000 marks the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of three important events in Tennyson’s life: the publication of In Memoriam, his marriage to Emily Sellwood, and his appointment as Poet Laureate. It was the annus mirabilis when finally, and despite the famed ‘black blood’ of the Tennysons, a measure of contentment and prosperity entered his life.

‘Under the Rose herewith … I meekly return to you, pruned and rewritten to order’, Christina Rossetti wrote to her brother on 13 March, 1865, responding to Gabriel’s editorial interventions as she prepared her second major volume, The Prince’s Progress, for publication. The poem had been hastily written to fill the gap left in the collection by Gabriel’s rejection of the powerful and ambivalent study of female aspiration and self-abnegation, ‘The Lowest Room’; and while Christina ‘meekly’ agreed to revise the piece with a certain understated irony, she still insisted on her right to write about what was, for both of them, an awkward subject for a woman: illegitimacy. ‘As regards the unpleasant-sided subject, I freely admit it: and if you think the performance coarse or what-not, pray eject it …’.

One remarkable career may have been launched at an institution in Reading (John Lucas’s, which this volume honours, at the University), but another reached an inglorious end at a different institution there: Oscar Wilde’s in Reading Gaol. Perhaps the arrival of John, a lover of the national sport, is anticipated in Wilde’s line: ‘A cricket cap was on his head’, but there the similarity probably ends.

Thomas Hardy’s striking Boer War poem, ‘The Souls of the Slain’, suggests a number of possible readings: formalist, historical and philosophical, readings which complement and contradict each other in their framings of this dissonant text. The poem may be identified formally as an elegy which functions by transgressing its own genre. At the outset the poet conjures up an ominous and elegiac seascape

These two familiar utterances differ both in the agreeable variousness of Whitman’s self-contradictions and the democratic hospitality he offered to one and all, whereas for Yeats, contradiction seems to have been suffered rather than welcomed, and against the more select range of contradictions he experienced, he waged a lifelong struggle. ‘Hammer your thoughts into a unity’, he would repeatedly tell himself, an aim sometimes realised only by suppressing one self-dividing trait in favour of its rival. I want to touch on some of these internal quarrellings, but it is first worth remarking upon that over-emphatic contrast between ‘rhetoric’ and ‘poetry’. What Yeats meant by rhetoric was writing aimed at persuading readers – or indeed listeners, the poet being no mean perfomer on public platforms – to adopt a particular course of action. Rhetorical writing was a product of the will, of that determined energy that in his early years Yeats thought essentially unpoetic. Victorian poets, brimming over with opinions, improvingly moral and socially progressive, had designed poems as vehicles for their effective propagation. Hence Yeats’ reservations about such as Tennyson and Browning, while a poet of his own time who fitted the same bill would surely have been Kipling. For the young Yeats, poetry could only emerge from the opposite state of mind, inward and contemplative, neither directed towards action, nor the vehicle of emphatic opinion of any kind, moral, social or political, above all, not energetic, and it takes no more than a glance at the poems of The Wind Among The Reeds (1899) to see how they illustrate that ideal.

According to his biographer R. P. Eckert, Edward Thomas was unaffected by the ‘social changes that seemed to have sprung up, almost overnight, when Edward VII ascended the throne’, preferring instead the work of Thomas Traherne (1637-74), ‘of a past generation, out of place in the company of modern social theory’. Writing in 1936-7, at the height of the Popular Front, Eckert assumed that ‘modern social theory’ was a front organisation for communism. Certainly, Thomas was never a ‘party politician’ – his phrase in the introduction to Richard Jefferies’ The Hills and the Vale (1909) to contrast with Jefferies’ ‘revolutionary’ commitment to the rural poor. He professed in The South Country the same year that ‘Politics … reforms and preservations … I cannot grasp; my mind refuses to deal with them’. But he also numbered himself in The Country (1913) among those ‘not indifferent to movements affecting multitudes’, who ‘may even have become entangled in one or another kind of social net’, and the circles in which he moved at Bedales school, where his wife Helen taught, were socialist, feminist and libertarian in a distinctively Georgian mode.

For Ivor Gurney nothing came easily. ‘The price of almost anything that one desires worthily’, he wrote from France in 1917, ‘is only Pain … long ago I decided that to accomplish what I wish was worth a great deal of pain and was ready to undergo it’. ‘We Who Praise Poets’ suggests that the poet may expect no praise from his contemporaries, and his worth is only to be measured against the ‘great trees’ of past poetry, ‘the able and the mighty dead’: in effect, those dead are envisaged as pronouncing the verdict on his achievement.

Wallace Stevens, in The Necessary Angel, gave it as his opinion that the purpose of poetry is to help people live their lives. Those of us who have made a study of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems would agree, I think, that they have helped a great many people live their lives. Yet, as David Kalstone remarked, Elizabeth Bishop has always been difficult to ‘place’. She found self-placement, both geographical and psychological, so difficult herself that we find two questions buried in most of her work: ‘Who I am?’ and ‘Where do I belong?’. I would like to suggest in this essay that Bishop did finally decide who she was and where she belonged. Like her own Prodigal, she made up her mind reluctantly, both before and after she went to live in Brazil, to go home to Nova Scotia. She could not live there, of course, since Nova Scotia was the landscape of the childhood that nourished her imagination; nor was that childhood an easy one to return to. But she knew she belonged in Great Village once she began to help herself to live her life by writing about it.

Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Ministry of Fear’, and Derek Walcott’s ‘Homecoming: Anse La Raye’, written within a few years of each other, bear some striking resemblances, which – together with their inevitable differences – illuminate the specific national situations from which their poetry emerges, and the differing ways each poet takes to negotiate or make the most of their particular histories. Heaney’s poem is the first in a sequence of six poems called ‘Singing School’, published in North in 1975; while Walcott’s poem first appeared in The Gulf and Other Poems in 1969 – both collections in which the pressures of local histories, and the demands of dramatic and immediate political events, are explicitly registered. In each case the poem is concerned with the difficulties caused, and the creative possibilities made available, by the distance between personal history and available poetic tradition – though this is a story told in a personal register, as autobiography, and told with varying degrees of ruefulness, sadness, and comedy. Both poems tell the story of the ‘growth of the poet’s mind’, and, indeed, Wordsworth is the explicit startingpoint for Heaney, whose poem systematically rewrites The Prelude, insofar as that can be done in a poem of such smaller compass. But Walcott also takes on one of the great poets and translates him into local terms – a project to be realised at much greater length some twenty years later with the writing of Omeros.

In this essay I intend to define and clarify the terms Romios/Romaic/ Romiossini, Greek/Greekness/Greece, and Hellenic/Hellas, which very often confuse readers of Greek literature in translation. I will consider the use of these words in the poetry of Yannis Ritsos and in some anthologies of Greek poetry in translation. In my examination of the different usages of these terms, I will inevitably turn to history and draw distinctions between the Greek Orthodox East and the Christian West, sometimes expressing strong opinions.

A is for Matthew ARNOLD, bringer of sweetness and light, upholder of the best that has been thought and said. (Notions much derided of late. All the more reason to defend them.) A poet-polemicist Oxford dandy turned Schools Inspector who didn’t just emit steam but suited action to word out in the big wide world. My favourite Victorian prophet, along with Mill, better company than Ruskin and bellicose Carlyle. Also for AL ALVAREZ, top gun of the sixties, who tried to shoot down English gentility. Good nose for a certain kind of poem, bad reasons for promoting it. Also for ACADEMIC. Pause. ‘Nuff said.

St Thomas Aquinas in MacNeice’s House, September 23rd, 1957

In an Australian Garden

Red Wine and Yellow Sun

For a Cornet Player, Retired

The Altar of the Motherland (trans.: Andreas Kalvos)

Looking at Pictures

Street Flowers

Fats

Oxford

The Puppy of Heaven

The Island Market

More Friggers for John: 22: Convict Tokens 1815-1840; 23: Trench Art 1914-1918

Only Connect

Self Improvement

Taking the Hexameter a Walk – a letter to John Lucas

From ‘The Riverside’

A Ballad for Apothecaries, Being a Poem to Honour the Memory of Nicholas Culpeper, Gent …

The Aisles

Sails

Aegina

Only

Mémoire Involontaire

Henry stood groaning in front of the pigeonholes, holding out a letter in one hand in passable imitation of Hamlet. ‘Good news from your agent?’ asked Dr Bee. ‘Agent, what agent?’ said Henry. ‘My agent is a secret agent. She doesn’t reveal her existence to me or mine to any publisher. No, there’s this letter saying Rollo said to get in touch with me and thanking me for arranging lunch and I can’t read the signature. Can’t remember arranging any lunch’.

A View from the Boundary

Reading Days

Nottingham 1964-71

John Lucas: The Nottingham Years

John Lucas

John Lucas at Loughborough

For ART! For TRUTH!! For BEAUTY!!! and For BEER!!!! Or: You can Tell a Man who Boozes, by the Company he Chooses …

Accolades and Fetters

John and Cricket

Down by the Riverside

A Bibliography of Books Written or Edited by John Lucas in Chronological Order