Six Poets (2 page)

Certain authors have fan clubs: Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Lewis Carroll and, more recently, Anthony Powell. Their work gets fenced off by enthusiasts, and the casual reader may feel the need of credentials to read them. Poets don't have fans in quite this way, though in the days of ‘the love that dare not speak its name' Housman was a telltale volume to have on the bookshelf, along with Forrest Reid, say, or Denton Welch. And Betjeman began as a somewhat eccentric taste, his admirers a bit of a club, before the poetry made a space for itself and was taken up by the nation.

One link between these six poets is that all of them (with the possible exception of Hardy) admired Hardy. Auden explains why:

My first Master was Thomas Hardy, and I think I was very lucky in my choice. He was a good poet, perhaps a great one, but not too good. Much as I loved him, even I could see his diction was often clumsy and forced and that a lot of his poems were plain bad. This gave me hope where a flawless poet might have made me despair.

Auden in his turn was admired by Larkin and MacNeice, though they were just two among the many poets he influenced. Auden was a good poet and perhaps a great one, though far from flawless, but he is less help to someone starting out than Hardy. Auden's tone of voice is distinctive and easy to imitate, and even when his poems are bad, they are couched in his peculiar imagery, and that is infectious, too. Half the job of learning to write is getting to know the sound of your own voice, and Auden is no help here at all, just spawning imitators.

Auden's intellect was formidable and showy, and quite off-putting. As an undergraduate at Oxford in 1956, I happened to hear his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry. I say ‘happened to hear' because I didn't honestly have much interest in his poetry, knowing only that this was a fabled figure and wanting to take a look. Had I any ambitions to write at that time, the lecture would have been enough to put me off. Auden listed all the interests and accomplishments that poets and critics should properly have – a dream of Eden, an ideal landscape, favourite books, even, God help us, a passion for Icelandic sagas. If writing means passing
this kind of kit inspection, I thought, one might as well forget it.

MacNeice would probably have been more encouraging. He's the odd man out among these six poets. Never well known enough to be other than a private face, MacNeice did not have to deal with the consequences of reputation, did not have to imitate himself, for instance, or sidestep his fame as his better-known colleagues had to learn to do. It might have happened, but because he died relatively young, he was denied his proper place. I didn't know his poetry and to discover it was one of the pleasures of putting together this anthology.

I would like to acknowledge the help of Channel 4, for which the original
Poetry in Motion
programmes were made. They were conceived and filmed by Tony Cash, whom I have known practically all my life, even briefly sharing a desk with him in the sixth form at Leeds Modern School in the 1950s. He has been a constant encouragement, as has my editor Dinah Wood.

1840–1928

Despite humble origins – his mother was a cook, his father a fiddle-playing stonemason – Thomas Hardy achieved such fame that he was awarded the Order of Merit and his ashes now lie in Westminster Abbey. Most of his life was spent in Dorset, the county of his birth. Aged sixteen he trained then practised as an architect. Success came in 1880 with the novel
The Trumpet-Major: A Tale
, published in instalments, as were
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge
and his last major work of fiction,
Jude the Obscure
, serialised in 1894–5. From 1898 until his death, he committed himself to poetry, finding inspiration in ancient and medieval history as well as the Napoleonic Wars: he even interviewed veterans of the Napoleonic campaigns and visited the battlefield of Waterloo. The last thirty years were largely spent at Max Gate, a house he himself designed near Dorchester. He lived there with his first wife, Emma Gifford, and, after she died in 1912, with his second wife, Florence Dugdale, a school-teacher and writer of children's stories. The pall bearers at his funeral included A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw. Spared cremation, his heart was buried in Emma's grave in the churchyard at Stinsford in Dorset, within walking distance of his birthplace.

March 1870–March 1913

I

O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free –
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.

II

The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away
In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say,
As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.

III

A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain,
And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain,
And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main.

IV

– Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky,
And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh,
And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?

V

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is – elsewhere – whom the ambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there nevermore.

Hardy was seventy-two when he wrote that poem, and he was remembering a visit to Cornwall some forty years earlier, when he met Emma Gifford, whom he later married. She had died a few months before he wrote ‘Beeny Cliff', which was part of a flood of verse released by her death. It wasn't so much grief as remorse: Hardy and his wife hadn't got on. She was vague, fey and, some people said, mad. It's a thankless role, being an artist's wife. Writers want a wife, but they also want a disciple, someone who can do the buttering-up as well as the washing-up. Emma Hardy wasn't really suited to either because she had literary ambitions of her own, so Hardy had to look elsewhere for appreciation.

He found it in various grand ladies, enamoured of literature and untrammelled by Emma's domestic duties. One of them was his secretary Florence Dugdale, who after a decent interval became the second Mrs Hardy. This wasn't a great success either, because Hardy spent most of this marriage, as can be seen in the poem, recalling the supposed delights of his first. So the first Mrs Hardy had the last laugh. It's the kind of story Hardy could have written – life, as so often, imitating art.

The second Mrs Hardy might have known what was coming from the manner of Hardy's proposal. He had taken her to the churchyard to show her the grave of Wife No. l, and, pointing to another vacant plot, he said, ‘That's for you.' By this, she took it that he was proposing. Before they're
anything else, if they're any good at all, most writers are absurd.

Graves, though, had a fascination for Hardy. This is a poem about a yew tree in a churchyard:

Portion of this yew

Is a man my grandsire knew,

Bosomed here at its foot:

This branch may be his wife,

A ruddy human life

Now turned to a green shoot.

These grasses must be made

Of her who often prayed,

Last century, for repose;

And the fair girl long ago

Whom I often tried to know

May be entering this rose.

So, they are not underground,

But as nerves and veins abound

In the growths of upper air,

And they feel the sun and rain,

And the energy again

That made them what they were!

Hardy was at home in churches. He knew the morning and evening services by heart, and though he had lost his faith as a young man, he continued to go to church and indeed designed one at Turnworth near his home at Max Gate in Dorset. He sometimes used to cycle there to read the lesson at morning service. It was a ride of twenty-odd miles, and as Hardy stood at the lectern, the congregation would see his bald head steaming gently.