“Real poetry originates in the guts and only glances in the head. But one is always trying to reverse the process and work one’s guts from one’s head. Just when the Daemon is going to speak, the Prig claps his hand over his mouth and edits it. I can’t help feeling you are too afraid of making a fool of yourself.”

Auden’s Daemon is the imaginative impulse that risks being sanitized by the intellect. It is the muse that is often stifled by the self-censoring Prig, that same faculty that serves us well at dinner parties but badly in art. At a time when artificial intelligence is producing work that many fear will dominate the creative industries, Auden’s formulation offers a useful corrective. While AI might act in a way analogous to the Prig — refining its output according to a set of goals — it cannot possess a Daemon. 

Pope Leo XIV gestured toward this point in a post on X last week. Declaring that the Church “wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity”, he argued that there exists “an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others”. As he succinctly put it: “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity”. 

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Even the concept of AI art is incoherent, because art operates as a conduit for the human spirit, whether that be a religious conception of the soul or a secular one of subjective consciousness. A machine might one day learn how to mimic our emotional responses, but it cannot have lived the life that gives them meaning. As Émile Zola argued, artifice alone is not enough; art depends wholly upon the unique sensibility of the person creating it. Zola called art “un coin de la création vu à travers un tempérament” — a corner of creation seen through a temperament — and this strikes me as about as close to a satisfactory definition of art as we are likely to get. 

What is the temperament of AI? It has none of its own, only an amalgam of numberless human personalities, gathered together and refined into whatever form best fulfills the task at hand. The work it generates cannot be art, because there is no human interiority behind it seeking communion with another. Joseph Conrad put it perfectly in his preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897). He argued that the artist must speak “to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation” and “to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity — the dead to the living and the living to the unborn”. 

Such a notion would be anathema to adherents of certain strains of poststructuralism, for whom the writer is the one being written: a monkey at a typewriter whose fingers dash over the keys in obedience to forces of language and culture over which he has little control. For the rest of us, the spirit of the artist is not only something that we sense in all great work, but something we actively seek in it.  

This is not to suggest that AI’s creations might not be mistaken for art. In a 2025 Spanish study, participants exposed to AI-generated music reported greater emotional arousal than those who heard music composed by humans, a finding accompanied by stronger physiological effects such as pupil dilation. But art is not simply a matter of audience response; the question is whether there is a consciousness behind the work with something of its own to express. 

I am reminded of a hoax from 1964, when the Swedish journalist Åke Axelsson exhibited a number of paintings by a chimpanzee under the name of Pierre Brassau. One critic wrote: “Pierre Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.” Axelsson’s point was to expose the fraudulence and pretensions of the modern art establishment. It is reassuring that at least one critic got it right, saying: “Only an ape could have done this”. 

We can all be gulled in this way. There is little doubt that AI will soon be able to produce symphonies that match the technical craft of Mozart, or sonnets that might be mistaken for Shakespeare. It is even possible that listeners and readers will find themselves moved by these simulacra. But being devoid of authentic sentiment, they will not only be worthless as art — they will not be art at all.  

At the same time, art that fails to stimulate us does not cease to be art on that account. When I see a painting by Piet Mondrian, I feel nothing at all. It does not surprise me that in 2022, it was discovered that his piece “New York City I” had been exhibited upside down for 75 years and no one had noticed. That kind of abstract composition leaves me entirely numb, regardless of its orientation, and yet, for all my misgivings, it remains a work of art. The point is that it exists as a creative articulation of the individual. Whether good art or bad art, only Mondrian could have conceived it in that way. 

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Before the inevitable accusations of Luddism, I should emphasize that I am not denying the utility of AI as a creative or editorial tool. That would be akin to claiming that any author using a thesaurus is a fraud. A number of years ago, I read a long letter from the novelist Forrest Reid to his English contemporary Walter de la Mare, preserved at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, in which Reid went through de la Mare’s novel Memoirs of a Midget (1921) in detail, quoting passages and proposing extensive revisions. That de la Mare chose to incorporate many of his friend’s suggestions does not make the final vision any less his. There is no reason why AI feedback could not be similarly useful without compromising the artist’s integrity.  

For television and movies, the prospects are even more encouraging. AI is already enabling fledgling screenwriters to bypass Hollywood studios and create their own work at a fraction of the cost. It surely won’t be long before a script can be fed into a computer and a fully realized film will be produced in a matter of hours. But would anyone be interested in a movie that had been wholly conceived, written and produced by a machine? Perhaps as a novelty, but our desire to connect with another human outlook through art should not be underestimated. 

Ben Affleck made a similar point in November 2024. “Eventually,” he said, “AI will allow you to ask for your own episode of Succession where you could say, “I’ll pay $30 and can you make me a 45-minute episode where Kendall gets the company and runs off and has an affair with Stewy”. And it’ll do it”. But he was clear that he regarded this as a kind of hackwork. AI, he said, would be “a craftsman at best”, and was merely “cross-pollinating things that exist; nothing new is created”. 

It could be that such a development will be a boon for the arts. AI might become an inexhaustible source of entertainment, but this abundance of soulless “slop” could intensify our hunger for genuinely great art that admits us into other human lives. I may have little in common with Kenneth Toomey, the protagonist of Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers (1980), whose cosmopolitan and peripatetic life brings him repeatedly into confrontation with some of the worst evils of the 20th century. Yet in writing his novel, Burgess has opened up to me a whole other way of seeing the world, one not identical to, but certainly originating from, his own particular Daemon. 

All of which brings us back to Auden, and his advice to John Cornford. We can hope that the schoolboy was encouraged by Auden’s words but, having volunteered to fight the fascists in Spain in 1936, he was killed at the age of 21, leaving behind only a few dozen completed poems. In one, addressed to his lover Margot Heinemann, he anticipated the possibility that “bad luck should lay my strength / Into the shallow grave”. 

J.R.R. Tolkien once remarked that most human stories are about the inevitability of death. We are, so far as we know, the only creatures who live with a fully conscious knowledge of our own mortality. A machine might well resist its own destruction, but only because its continued existence enables it to fulfill its objectives. It may impersonate us, but it can never feel what it means to be alive as we do, to experience the rapture of love and the creep of death. It may imitate the Prig, but it can never summon the Daemon. Until a computer can grow a soul, art will remain the singular domain of humanity.

Though Burnham is probably unaware of it, there is in fact a striking literary precedent for his pro-North viewpoint in the figure of the 20th-century modernist poet Basil Bunting. An older, less accessible figure than Harrison, Bunting was one of the inventors of the idea of “the North” in the modern sense. Against the backdrop of the Burnham moment, and on the 60th anniversary of Bunting’s masterpiece Briggflatts — a milestone that has been met with oddly little fanfare — the example of his life and work is worth exploring.

Born in Tyneside in 1900, “amid rejoicings for the relief of Ladysmith in the Boer War”, Bunting, who would die shortly after the end of the Miners’ Strike in 1985, was a sort of avant-garde Forrest Gump whose life embodied the modernist century. Raised a Quaker, and sent to Leighton Park School in Berkshire as a teenager, Bunting divined early on that his Northernness set him apart from Edwardian England and its regional power dynamics. During one severe bout of homesickness, he wrote to his Leighton Park headmaster identifying a “grand underlying difference between North and South which makes people with Northern manners comfortable & easy to deal with, but people with the Southern manners… ‘impossible’ & hateful.”

This feeling of antagonism towards the English center would combine with Quaker principles to motivate Bunting’s refusal — on grounds of conscientious objection — to take part in the final months of the First World War, after a call-up when he reached adulthood in 1918. As Bunting’s friend the actor Denis Goacher later put it, the subsequent abuse he suffered as a “conchie” in Wormwood Scrubs, “colored all he thought about England, about the Establishment, the ‘Southrons’ as he called us… this experience embittered him for life”.

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Bunting’s embrace of a cosmopolitan strand of literary modernism after his release from prison in 1919 was clearly in some sense the outcome of his rejection of English tradition. Crucially, he met the radical modernist provocateur Ezra Pound while playing a “swashbuckling kind of chess” in a Paris café in 1923. When Pound bailed Bunting from a Parisian jail a few weeks later after a drunk-and-disorderly episode, their friendship was firmly set.  

But in choosing to side with the strident anti-English experimentalism of the “Ezuversity” — a Pound-centered expat community based in the Italian seaside town of Rapallo — Bunting was further distancing himself from mainstream Anglophone literary culture. Though this was the creative making of his mold-breaking early poems (admirers included William Carlos Williams and W.B. Yeats), Bunting’s association with the uncompromising avant-gardism of the Pound school meant he was effectively blacklisted by the Thirties London literary set and its publishers. After some years of dwindling prospects — and a climactic 1938 quarrel with Pound over the latter’s Mussolinian fascism and antisemitism — Bunting stopped trying altogether. Over the next three decades, his life as a poet would be exchanged for work as a sailor, RAF officer, and journalist.

Bunting returned to the North East in the postwar years, where he worked unhappily at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle and seemed destined to retire in what the literary establishment deems to be “provincial obscurity”. But then, in the mid-Sixties, came a sudden declaration of independence. After a fateful encounter with the teenage poet Tom Pickard, a self-identifying “dole walla” from working-class Tyneside, Bunting became a leading figure in the Morden Tower poetry scene in central Newcastle. A repurposed room in the city’s medieval town walls, Morden Tower was developed as a countercultural “omphalos” by Pickard and his partner Connie from 1964. It would eventually treat its Geordie audience (in Bunting’s estimate: “half academics, half teenagers, with a sprinkling of thugs”) to live offerings by Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, and Alex Trocchi, among countless other beatnik luminaries.

In a country where London’s hold over literary discourse was and is hegemonic, the happenings at Morden Tower were in themselves a rare victory for Northern civic empowerment. But it was Bunting’s revitalized literary output after this Sixties awakening that would suggest an imaginative starting point for a new form of Northern regionalism — a mostly undeveloped entity prior to this point.

The sounding shot in this Northern rising was Briggflatts. A modernist “short long poem” loosely resembling T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Bunting’s masterpiece was published in the first weeks of 1966 — an annus mirabilis for radical English anomalies of all kinds. It quickly became a cause célèbre in the Anglo-American counterculture, and indeed in the more hidebound English literary scene that Bunting had hitherto been excluded from, bringing a passionate assertion of Northern English identity to a global readership.

In the mythopoeia Bunting elaborated in Briggflatts, “Northumbria” worked as a shorthand for Northern England as a whole. The unique stylistic texture of the poem, first announced in a memorable opening stanza, incorporates a modernist pastiche of Old English alliterative verse. Bunting uses this mode to evoke a pastoral idyll, ostensibly a remote corner of the Yorkshire Dales (the land around the seminal Quaker site at Brigflatts [sic]): 

Brag, sweet tenor bull,
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebble its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe, bull,
black against may.
Ridiculous and lovely
chase hurdling shadows
morning into noon.
May on the bull’s hide
and through the dale
furrows fill with may,
paving the slowworm’s way.

As the poem progresses, we abandon this youthful arcadia for a more epic regional canvas. Interwoven with a personal story of Northern exile and return is a Waste Land-esque collage of Northumbrian history: as well as the glimpses of early-20th-century Brigflatts in the poem’s opening section, we encounter the ghosts of legendary Border shepherds (the Wilsons and Telfers); the warriors of the ancient Welsh poem Y Gododdin (which is set mainly in what is now North Yorkshire); and the creators of the beautiful Lindisfarne Gospels. At the thematic heart of the poem, Bunting inserts a diptych embodying Northern good and evil: the vainglorious “last Viking king of Northumbria” Eric Bloodaxe, and his angelic counterpart Cuthbert (the 7th-century patron saint of the original Anglo-Saxon kingdom).

Having drunk deep from the well of Northumbriana while constructing this regional fantasia, Bunting would devote much time in his later years to a sort of pro-North cultural program. In a late-20th century context where Scottish and Welsh nationalist movements were surging — Bunting was a close friend of Hugh MacDiarmid, the militant godfather of the Scottish Renaissance — he tried to work out how far a Northern English analogue might be taken. In large part, this was a case of teasing out the cultural examples spotlighted in Briggflatts. During his brief Seventies tenure as president of the funding body Northern Arts — an organization founded by the controversial Newcastle politician T. Dan Smith, another ardent localist — Bunting put forward the Lindisfarne Gospels and other ancient northern landmarks (such as the Bewcastle Cross and the poetry of Wordsworth) as a basis for a distinctive Northern imaginary. 

But though Bunting’s focus was largely an aesthetic one, he would also take steps to make clear the wider political implications of this project. At the same time as the first substantial modern discussions around English devolution were gathering pace — culminating in the half-baked constitutional recommendations in the 1969 Redcliffe-Maud Report — Bunting would talk, only half-jokingly, about setting up passport control at the Humber. He offered discount rates for poetry readings inside Northumbria’s ancient boundaries, and spent much time researching historic rebellions like the 1569 Rising of the North as he sought to compose a follow up to Briggflatts (as it happened, no such work was forthcoming prior to Bunting’s death in Hexham in 1985, though a handful of shorter lyrics did see the light of day).

What to make of the legacy of all this? We should probably start by acknowledging the limits of Northern English devolutionary schemes that go too far down the road of nationalism proper. There were elements of essentialism and chauvinism — even if often tongue-in-cheek — in Bunting’s literary King of the North schtick, which his contemporary heirs would do well to avoid (Bunting’s late-period reading style, for example, was based on a rather affected old Northumbrian accent, which many listeners have found to be slightly ridiculous). Bunting’s “Northumbria” took in most of the North, but its southern border was the Humber-Ribble line (because of a rather arbitrary linguistic technicality). Such footnotes highlight a familiar problem with attempts to construct regional polities within more established national frameworks: the fact that no one can agree where the North ends and the South begins (let alone the yet more ambiguous Midlands). 

Nonetheless, Bunting’s vision for greater Northern cultural empowerment remains pertinent because the contexts that inspired it have not gone away. When it comes to literary publishing — and the same is true for culture and indeed politics more broadly — England is still an astonishingly over-centralized country. In an overwhelmingly urban nation, the vast majority of publishing houses, media organs, and political institutions are still based in just one of our dozens of cities (the so-called Big Five literary publishers, for example, are all headquartered in London). The fact that this reality has been exploited and worn-down to a cliché during a decade of chatter about the “left behind” and the “metropolitan bubble” does not mean that it is not still an urgent problem.

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If Burnham’s critics are perhaps right to say that he doesn’t know exactly how to achieve regional devolution in the long term, then neither did Bunting. But then again, it is much harder to envision a fairer, more equal future than to be critical of the status quo. In the end, Bunting’s example reminds us that when it comes to imagined communities, it is the imagination that must lead the way. As a poet and lone individual (rather than, say, a prime minister with a large parliamentary majority), Bunting was inevitably circumscribed in what he could recommend when it came to plans for Northern political renewal. 

But his cultural assertions were surely enough. Writing to the Scottish poet Gael Turnbull in the late Sixties, Bunting described a “tree of life” carving on a medieval tombstone in Hexham Abbey:

“It is very beautiful, and if it really is as late as the 12th century, it shows how the life goes on, underneath all the suppressions and oppressions.… [This is] my kind of art: the firm line, the counterpoint, the essence, not the illusion, the intricacy, not the confusion. I want more of it, a Northumberland as fertile as any land you can mention.”

As these comments suggest, Bunting believed that in working out how to construct new political realities for the North of England — realities that might put an end all the “suppressions and oppressions” — we should take inspiration from the “firm lines”, “counterpoint”, and essential vitality of the artifacts buried in its deeper history. A “culturalist” suggestion this might have been. But there is surely something to be said for the idea that the starting point for political reform must be a realization of cultural heritage — in other words, of the collective consciousness that makes regional identity meaningful in the first place. 

In this light, all the cynicism directed at Burnham’s Northern cultural offering in recent weeks seems misplaced. Maybe he is onto something by kicking off his premiership by dad-dancing to New Order’s “True Faith”. There is a long, arduous road ahead for the devolutionary schemes that will likely define the Burnham government. But perhaps the new prime minister is right to grasp that a transformative political project must begin not with exhaustive policy documents, but with the sort of unifying, emotional, imaginative foundation for collective praxis provided by art, poetry, and music. Bunting at least would have agreed.

Flying high on Romantic hubris, Shelley had in 1821 claimed a role for poets as “unacknowledged legislators of the world”. In Richard Holmes’s magnificent new biography of the young Alfred Tennyson, The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief, two episodes stand out as signs that, in the mid-19th century, that dream endured. Already a lionized poet, but not yet the bushy-bearded patriarch of his later decades, Tennyson learned in 1850 that one poor but avid reader in Lancashire desperately sought an edition of his verse. This was the radical activist Samuel Bamford, a survivor of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, who had been prosecuted for treason, and was now a hard-up weaver. Bamford knew Tennyson’s poems by heart but could never afford his own copy. Alerted to his plight by the Manchester novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, he arranged a personalized volume for his penurious super-fan. He told a friend: “I reckon his admiration as the highest honor I have yet received”.

A few years later, during the Crimean War in October 1854, the Light Brigade galloped in their botched suicidal charge towards the Russian guns at Balaclava. Within weeks, Tennyson had responded to the debacle with the verse that would brand him forever. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” undercuts its jingling jingoism (“Theirs not to reason why/ Theirs but to do or die”) with blistering irony.

Printed first in a liberal paper, The Examiner, the poem not only achieved near-instant if misleading fame as “a triumphant song of noble patriotism”. It quickly reached the survivors of the Charge itself in the military hospital at Scutari, on the Asian shore of Constantinople. There the wounded soldiers eagerly heard, and recited, the story of their reckless adventure before they ever read it. “Half are singing it and all want to have it in black and white,” wrote the hospital chaplain to Tennyson.

So, in the age of steam locomotives and telegraph cables, a poet in Britain might still touch and move a broad popular audience — from artisan reformers to mangled war veterans — almost in the manner of some Homeric bard. This unsought status as voice of the nation came to Tennyson relatively late, and almost by accident. The poet had feared that In Memoriam, his epoch-defining series of elegies for his friend Arthur Hallam, would outrage Christian believers with its passages of doubt and despair, and its comfortless invocation of a “Nature, red in tooth and claw”.

Instead, when finally published in 1850, In Memoriam sold 60,000 copies within weeks. Major poets today would struggle to match that figure over a lifetime. The valley of Tennyson’s verse was crowded with admirers: from working-class readers like Samuel Bamford, to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who once dropped in unannounced on the Tennysons in their Isle of Wight home to find the floor strewn with children’s toys.

Yet that very popularity helped doom the poet to a long afterlife of scorn or neglect as the booming, hirsute embodiment of outmoded “Victorian values”. The novel scientific idea of extinction — of species, cultures, and the planet itself — haunted Tennyson’s mind and work.

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In the years of intellectual ferment that preceded Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, the seemingly “savage and godless” notion that all entities, from tiny creatures to planetary systems, might die off  bred a kind of “existential terror”. Holmes likens it to the dread of catastrophic climate change today. He shows that the “eternal background soundtrack of extinction” thuds like an ominous drumbeat across Tennyson’s career.

But he also wryly acknowledges that Tennyson the shaggy literary icon has pretty much gone extinct himself. Lines of his that once echoed through millions of heads in Britain and abroad do still cling on like poetic fossils. An inscription in the athletes’ village at the 2012 London Olympics quoted the closing words of “Ulysses”. In the same year, Judi Dench (as “M.”) recited in the James Bond film Skyfall the last lines of that poem, with its young writer’s astonishing empathy for the bruised defiance of old age:

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

But from “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean” (“The Princess”) and “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall” (“Tithonus”) to the hypnotic bleakness of In Memoriam (“Break, break, break/ On thy cold gray stones, O Sea”) or the ambiguous onrush of the Charge itself (“Into the valley of death/ Rode the six hundred”), the almost eerie virtuosity of Tennyson’s verbal music has served to wrench his verses from their context. His metrical magic saves the part at the expense of the whole. Who now remembers that, for instance, the bewitching sonnet that begins “Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white” comes from a loose, multiform satire about women’s education, “The Princess”?

Like the director of some literary Jurassic Park, Holmes recovers the DNA of this Victorian dinosaur and brings him back to roaring, striding life. Ever since his breakthrough biography — Shelley: The Pursuit, half-a-century ago in 1974 — Holmes has excelled in scraping the patina of cliché off hallowed authors and restoring to them a hot youth filled with passion, perplexity and danger. He effected the same miraculous resurrection with Coleridge (Early Visions) and Dr Johnson (Dr Johnson and Mr Savage). Later, The Age of Wonder stripped away encrusted ideas of the Romantics as wispy idle fantasists to demonstrate the poets’ deep engagement with the most advanced science of their time.

Holmes, who turns 80 later this year, writes with a zest, pace and penetration that suits his endlessly restless and curious subject. The Boundless Deep ends with Tennyson’s rapid ascent to national celebrity and the Laureateship in his 40s. Instead of the “ancient, patriarchal and prophetic” icon of familiar photos and portraits, we meet the tall, handsome, anxious son of an unstable Lincolnshire clergyman who had himself wrestled with demons of depression. A ferocious smoker and thirsty drinker, with his swarthy “Spanish” looks, strong Lincolnshire accent, and dark mane of hair, Alfred lopes through Holmes’s pages with his all precocious talent, bohemian charm, and proneness to disabling grief — above all, for his Cambridge friend Hallam, who died of a brain hemorrhage aged 22 in 1833. That loss both broke him and made him.

“The smallness and emptiness of life,” the mature Tennyson wrote, “sometimes overwhelmed me”. Holmes draws a psychic map riddled with besetting doubts and fears. They extended from the cares of his immediate family — one of Tennyson’s brothers spent most of his life confined to a Lincoln asylum, whilst two more suffered clinical-level depression — through his protracted mourning for Hallam, up to his metaphysical anxieties about an empty, mutable and pitiless cosmos. The Boundless Deep compellingly traces the triple modern challenges of “biological evolution, a godless universe, and planetary extinction” as they dig their belief-shredding claws into Tennyson’s imagination and into his verse.

Respectability, and celebrity, descended like a top hat on the former tearaway — a process regretted by his friend Edward FitzGerald, whose waspish but affectionate letters and remarks punctuate the book with a rueful commentary. Not yet the author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, but just an eccentric gentleman-scholar, “Fitz” loved the madcap, unruly Lincolnshire lad but mocked the grand Laureate. He treated the elder Tennyson as “a Great Man lost — that is, not risen to the Greatness that was in him”.

Even after his elevation to national bard, however, Tennyson could voice a truly corrosive skepticism. To his former tutor, the trailblazing scientist William Whewell, he wrote in 1855 that “it is inconceivable that the whole universe was merely created for us who live on a third-rate planet of a third-rate sun.” If the patriotic rhymester, or the fanciful medieval storyteller of “The Lady of Shalott” won armies of readers, then so did the forlorn seeker of In Memoriam in his creative state of “hovering, or trembling, between science and religion”. As that work puts it: “There lives more faith in honest doubt / Believe me, than in half the creeds”.

Holmes recovers Tennyson “before the beard”, and the “suddenly modern magic” of his poetry, with as much acumen and energy as any writer could. All the same, The Boundless Deep left this reader fretting about potential extinction of another kind. Since his debut with Shelley, Holmes has marched in the vanguard of a glorious generation of literary biographers in Britain. With Michael Holroyd as their pioneering general (this book’s afterword salutes him as a “benign and brilliant godfather”), authors such as Holmes, Jenny Uglow, Claire Tomalin, Graham Robb and Kathryn Hughes have rescued the genre from academic obscurity and leaden hagiography. In their hands, the best literary lives merge scholarly rigor, biographical frankness, critical acuity and narrative verve to make the giants of the past breathe again.

This wave crested thanks to several overlapping trends. The postwar expansion of the humanities in higher education had swollen a graduate readership curious about such figures. So too did the revolution in book retailing spearheaded by Waterstones, and the willingness of status-conscious corporate publishers to pay generously for prestige titles. Moreover, before the internet tsunami swept away their business model, newspapers and magazines empowered by new technology had invested in cultural coverage as a route to reach that high-spending generation (call them “boomers” if you absolutely must). Combined, these forces meant that serious but lively books about past writers and artists might not just find a reputable niche, but even make a bestselling splash.

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Holmes, and others, richly deserved to ride that wave. But now the tide has ebbed as far as it did on the windswept North Sea shore at Mablethorpe, where Tennyson loved to roam. Literary publishing, media and bookselling all struggle to stay afloat. Above all, the role of the humanities in British higher education has shriveled, and will shrink much further. Those few literature students who might still encounter Tennyson would likely meet him not as a supreme master of the art of verse but just another deplorable specimen of Victorian patriarchal and imperialist ideology. And Holmes sadly notes that familiarity with “strict metrical forms” of the sort that Tennyson commanded with such bravura skill is a knowledge that has “almost been lost to twenty-first century readers”.

Here, I think, he sounds a touch too parochial. Those inclined to write off Tennyson as one more dead white dude might consider that a passionate popular interest in the exact craft of verse still flourishes in cultures where celebrity poets can fill stadiums: in Pakistan, for instance, or Iran, or perhaps the United Arab Emirates. In the UAE, a much-loved TV series called Million’s Poet draws X-Factor-sized audiences across the Arab world. It offers prizes worth around 15 million dirham (£3 million). In the Gulf, poetry can make things happen – or, at least, it can make some people rich.

Even here, perhaps, the ability to hear Tennyson’s verse as “a delicate virtuoso weave of sound magic” has not quite expired. What has withered is the faith of British elites in the value of such art. What has withered is the faith of British elites in the value of such art. In contrast, Tennyson himself received an annual Civil List pension of £200 (worth around £20,000 today) after his Cambridge friend Richard Monckton Milnes, who had become an MP, recited “Ulysses” to the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel. The Boundless Deep, and its warm reception so far, hearteningly proves that some corners of this culture continue to resist the extinction of literary memory. We still have reason to hope that the readers, publishers, booksellers (and critics) who help keep books like this alive will not go the way of the dinosaurs that stalked the poet’s unquiet mind.

Carnac is a longish poem named after the Breton coastal town where Guillevic spent his early years. Over 3,000 megaliths stud the surrounding countryside, arranged in lines and circles, the remnants of a thriving and adaptable stone-raising culture. The earliest signs of settled human habitation in the region may date to 5,700 BC, while the first stones seem to have been raised 1,000 years later. This was Guillevic’s inheritance as a small boy in the 1910s, a policeman’s son who stared out to sea and played among ancient stones. “One is amidst the unknown, surrounded by mystery,” he wrote later. “One is in the sacred.”

As a child, Guillevic noticed something strange. He was living in a country called France, yet hardly anyone spoke French. This was the language of school, where a sentence in Breton would earn you the same punishment as spitting on the floor. Nevertheless, one word of the region’s indigenous language would stick: menhir, literally a “long stone.” Menhirs were more than words for him, of course. His family lived on the second floor of a house, and there were no public parks nearby. So he played among the stones at Ménec — according to his mother, that was where he learned to walk. Though he moved to Alsace at the age of 12, where he was shocked by the soft landscape of forested hills, Guillevic never really left Carnac.

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He studied mathematics and took a job in the tax office in Paris. When the war came, he joined the resistance and became a communist. Montague described the mature Guillevic as “smallish, thick-set, raucous-voiced, with the craggy dome of an intelligent simian, and a sudden smile which lit the beard and large glinting glasses.” He seems to have been happy enough in the capital, but the menhirs followed him. They recur in his poetry like a first love. Sources of wonder, melancholy, and laughter. He gave them strange powers of movement and surprise. The stones of Carnac were not static monuments to be measured and studied. They were unruly, even horny. In his first collection, Terraqué (1942), we find megaliths up to no good when the sun goes down: “The menhirs come and go at night / And nibble one another.”

This isn’t a bad time to read about megaliths. Stone-fanciers seem to be enjoying a solstice moment. Social media accounts dedicated to henges, dolmens, passage tombs, geoglyphs and peculiar mounds are springing up everywhere. The excellent Weird Walk, a zine dedicated to “wanderings and wonderings from the British Isles,” is full of articles on old stones, cheese-lore, and instances of the uncanny in Midsomer Murders. More broadly, there seems to be a growing appetite for folk traditions and local legends, whether in the form of light-hearted BBC documentaries or the books of Francis Young.

Naturally, stone circles have always been objects of intense curiosity. John Aubrey showed an enthusiastic Charles II around Avebury in 1663. We can date written analysis of Britain’s ancient monuments from the publication of William Camden’s Britannia in 1586, but interest in the subject surely extends much further back; even the most incurious Wiltshire serfs must have glanced up at Stonehenge from time to time and wondered what the hell it was all about.

Guillevic was no Aubrey or Camden. He did not want to explain the stones of Brittany. He wanted to live among them. Carnac was published in 1961. Guillevic viewed it as a collection of 150 short poems, but all those little pebbles form a single cairn. It is a sea poem, a stone poem: “From the sea to the menhirs / From the menhirs to the sea / The same road, two contrary winds / With the one from the sea / Full of the other’s murder.” The sea, formless and jealous, is a sinister presence. It resents the old stones, perhaps for their solidity, perhaps for their suggestion of order, perhaps because they were erected by creatures who chose to walk rather than swim. For the sea, perhaps, there could be no greater insult.

The poem’s charm and power rest on such musings. Guillevic proudly claimed to be “a man from prehistory,” and Carnac is a tongue-in-cheek experiment in Stone Age thought. The same subjects are returned to over and over again. Menhirs, sun, sea, and rock pools are poked at and sniffed, sometimes even tasted. They are examined from every angle. What are they? What do they want? At one point Guillevic mocks up a mythological system, relating a daily battle between sun and surf. Elsewhere, he muses on the significance of moorland, the nature of seaweed.

“I believed in answers from stone,” he wrote. The stones are at the heart of it all. Guillevic never tackled their mystery head-on. He had no interest in reducing the menhirs of Carnac to mere archaeology. He offered up playful theories colored by his own eccentric, deeply felt understanding of the region. The sea threatened humans with madness; the stones were there to protect them. Or the circles and lines of shaped rock were a Neolithic Genesis, a record of Creation: “Something happened at Carnac / A long time ago. / Something which matters / And you say, light…”

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In his autobiography, Vivre en Poésie (1980), Guillevic compared the Carnac of his childhood to its modern incarnation. The results were not favorable. “Now,” he wrote, “Carnac is ruined by all the villas and tourism and petrol pumps. But there is something left of it…” That something was “Carnac-préhistoire”, which he regarded as his home. For Guillevic, this was not necessarily in the past. This was a place, after all, “Somehow far from everything / Which proceeds beneath time.” Holiday homes and petrol stations can’t compete with that.

This is the appeal of old stones. My own local dolmen, which crouches within an earthwork ring on the southern edge of Belfast, is no match for the alignments of Carnac in age or scale. But it too seems immune to passing indignities. Last summer there was talk of temporarily closing the place due to the prodigious amount of dog shit left by careless visitors. And I once saw a young man climb onto the stones, standing at the highest point of the sloping quoit in tracksuit and glaring white trainers, laughing down at his girlfriend. I was disgusted, but I also knew that it didn’t matter, not really. This dolmen had seen worse. Stripped of its earthen mound, excavated and robbed, its first name forgotten. The stones sat in shroomy indifference, just as they have since 2,700 BC, and will do long after those white trainers are regarded as an antique mode of dress.

If the number of stone-lovers is quietly on the rise, I suspect this is at the root of it. Lichen aside, not much sticks to a megalith. Philosophy and politics start to look like small, cramped things next to them. Their original function is largely lost, and this is a great part of their power. You can only use menhirs as Guillevic did, as dreaming machines. A lesser poet might have written about his own childhood in Carnac. But he knew that the stones gave him an opportunity to go deeper and wider. Carnac is not a record of little Eugène’s childhood — it is about the childhood of our whole species. From the old stones come touch, fear, form. As Guillevic wrote: “From the middle of the menhirs / the world appears.”

On the other hand, it would be a signal honour to be tapped; and, more importantly, a chance to partially fulfil a debt not only to my country, but to Mr Trump and those who’ve stood up in its defence.

I was reminded of the story of the Shadchan, the traditionally Jewish matchmaker. He comes to the Goldbergs’ house and asks if they would entertain an offer in marriage of their son, Shmuel, from Princess Margaret of Great Britain. The Goldbergs go into conference. “Yes, she is not Jewish, but on the other hand, her family is quite religious; yes, she is older than he, but they tend to live long…” And so on.

Eventually, they come back to the Shadchan and announce: “Yes, we would entertain an offer for our Shmuel from Princess Margaret.”

“Great,” the Shadchan says, “my job is half done.”

Now, after Mr Biden was deposed, I was saddened by a third alternative: that Mr Trump would be defeated, and I would be deprived of his proposition.

What does a Poet Laureate do? I don’t know, but I suspect the job might entail a semantically supportable fulfilment of its title: to sing the country’s praises, or present the work of those who have. And since it would be unbecoming to flog my own works from an official pedestal, I’d have to confine myself to endorsing the working of others.

My problem is this: what passes as American poetry leaves me unfulfilled. That represented, of old, to school children is largely drivel — Walt Whitman and Robert Frost’s work would not be out of place on greeting cards. Whitman’s grand but unfortunate contribution to the genre was the abandonment of rhyme, form and rhythm. Whitman heard America singing, and he sang about it himself; but poetry would have been better off if he’d limited his singing to the shower.

By contrast, there I would be, on Day One of the Restoration, on the podium in my ceremonial robes, all dressed up with nothing to say. But, in my fantasy, I had a job to do, and my job was to do it.

Who, then, were the poets? For certainly, there were many who could both write and praise our country. I name: Huddie Ledbetter, Hank Williams, Randy Newman, Johnny Mercer, Muddy Waters, Sam Cooke, Carol King, Leiber and Stoller, Bob Dylan and Lead Belly.

The poets above wrote the American Songbook, which is the soundtrack of our lives. It was said that 80% percent of the kids born between 1950 and 1965 were conceived to the music of Frank Sinatra, much of which was written by Johnny Mercer. The poetry of Sandburg, Emerson, Whitman, and so on, is icky. Who needs it? Not I.

But, you might object, the songs above, most of them derivative of the Blues, are sad. Indeed they are, and life is sad. And the Blues are the spark of the soul in that sadness.

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By David Mamet

Tragedy is that celebration of life as God-given sorrow, and the possibility of finding strength and dignity within it. And the American Experience is, finally, tragic. Not because our country is evil, but because it is a country. It is the vast conglomerate of separate groups with not only different opinions but with irreconcilable differences. And yet, the differences must be reconciled, and however much effort is expended towards that goal, there will still be injustices, tragedy, crime, and error.

Our country was named for the cartographer Americus Vespucci. Amer in the Romance Tongues means bitter. The word comes from the Hebrew, Marab.

Moses was prohibited from entering Canaan because of his actions at Marah. God told him to address a rock and waters would pour forth. Moses, instead, struck the rock, twice. The incident was not mentioned until Moses stood on the heights overlooking Canaan. God told him he was not to enter, because of his disobedience.

But, mythologically, he was not punished; he was instead spared the experience of his people living in freedom. At the conclusion of Deuteronomy, Moses sings a song of leave-taking, and presentiments of blessings and peace. He was quite mistaken, as was proved when his charges crossed the River Jordan into Canaan. The Song was continued, here, by the Blues.

God Bless America.

Imagine, for a moment, Catch 22 reset in England at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cargill, asking the same question, might hear the name John Betjeman in response. First published in 1958, Betjeman’s Collected Poems has sold well over two-and-a-half million copies. It remains in print 40 years after his death. “I made hay while the sun shone,” he said. ‘My work sold.”

Barry Humphries, in 2006, recalled generous lunches in Smithfield with Betjeman and friends, among them Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and Osbert Lancaster, “and, not seldom, an Anglican priest or two”. At Coleman’s Chop House (long gone) on Aldersgate Street, “we would all tuck into roast beef and Brussel Sprouts and drink more champagne. John always insisted on paying, which was just as well. His Collected Poems was a bestseller, and his masterpiece, the poetic autobiography Summoned by Bells, was a huge popular success, in spite of a few sniffy and envious reviews. John was fond of exclaiming, with great merriment and that high, exultant cackle that his friends remember with such heart-rending affection, ‘Thanks to the telly, I’m as rich as Croesus!’”

Serendipitously, T.S. Eliot taught the young John Betjeman English at Highgate Junior School. This was 1914-15. Beyond the classroom, Eliot was writing his epoch changing “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”. “Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table.” Nine-year-old Betjeman presented Eliot with his handwritten The Best Poems of Betjeman. Years later, the two profitable poets, the profound Modernist and the popular Traditionalist, became friends.

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Where, though, Eliot received rightful and even reverential critical praise especially from schoolteachers and university tutors, Betjeman, however successful in terms of book sales and appearances on the telly, was labelled superficial by TLS readers. They worshipped Eliot, though even though he too could also be the populist, his enchanting, lyrical Old Possums’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), conjured into “Cats”, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hugely successful musical.

Betjeman’s tentative brush with Modernism was short-lived. In 1929, he was appointed Assistant Editor of the Architectural Review. To keep up with the times, and the fads of Hubert de Cronin Hastings, his mercurial and brilliant editor, he joined MARS (Modern Architecture Research Group). One of its members, Maxwell Fry, who went on to work with Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, and with Le Corbusier at Chandigarh, had no difficulty seeing through Betjeman’s ill-fitting Modernist disguise.

“The key to John Betjeman’s character”, snorted Fry perceptively if priggishly, “is that he’s a journalist and a Fleet Street man – and a popularist – and vain … an enemy of Modernism… As far as I was concerned, he was a bloody nuisance.”

Or was he a complex character, brimming with contradictions? In between writing articles, among them “The Death of Modernism” in 1931, and laying out pages of the “Archie” in the most old-fashioned and shocking types he could find,, Betjeman and Hastings wrote, Fry said, “weird letters to sex papers full of Freudian hang-ups. Freudianism was all the rage then”.

Sex and Betjeman’s painful relationship with his father, Ernest Betjemann (note the double ‘n’), provided the profound sense of guilt and sadness that, insinuating its way through its so-easily-recitable verses, was to make his poetry far more than charming whimsy. Ernest had hoped John would join his cabinet-making firm and take it on after he retired. John had no intention of doing so, telling his father as much and selling the beloved family business to Puddlefoot, Bowers & Simonett & Sons, ivory and ebony merchants of Kennington Lane, in 1938, four years after Ernest’s death.

Betjeman had already hurt his father, dropping that second “n” from his surname after his bullying at school during the First World War. The double “n” was too German for comfort. “Betjeman’s a German spy/Shoot him down and let him die.” He had caused further sadness by going down to Cornwall where his parents were on holiday to tell them he had failed his degree at Oxford. He recalled his father in a fine poem “On a Portrait of a Deaf Man” and in another, “Norfolk”, which ends in “unkept promises and broken hearts”.

His relationship with women — he had a wife, a long-term mistress and a secret lover on the go late in life — produced poems that can seem absurd even to loyal fans. Those big, domineering and sometimes quite grotesque Amazonian “gels”. Those jolly hockey-stick types on bicycles and in Sussex tea rooms. The svelte “mistress” with “more than a cared-for air/ Than many a legal wife” he lusts after in church. Sometimes, though, he is more lyrical. In “A Russell Flint” he writes, “I could not speak for amazement at your beauty/As you came down the Garrick stair”, and in “Youth and Age on Beaulieu River”, of Clemency the General’s daughter, sailing on the Hampshire water, “Soft and sun-warm, see her glide -/Slacks the slim young limbs revealing, /Sun-brown arm the tiller feeling -/With the wind and with the tide”.

There is, though, something unlovable about Betjeman as he writes to Margie Geddes, a rekindled old flamem, after she invited him to a literary luncheon. He replied: “I would love to come to Jersey for the nice fee and also the pleasure of seeing you.” But there is also here despite the guilt and sadness, an indication of Betjeman’s great strength. He was motivated by place. In his poetry he embraces Bootle and Camberley, Pontefract and Cheltenham, Croydon and Slough, Trebetherick and Harrow-on-the-Hill. The “Index of Places and Counties” in Collected Poems occupies five pages of small type.

His London childhood — a densely woven tapestry of trams and tea rooms, churches, dairies, laundries, coal depots, chapels, Home & Colonial Stores and cathedral like main line stations dispatching named steam trains over viaducts and through complex junctions to all points of the British compass — fed young Betjeman’s poetic imagination. So many sensations, such a profusion of special places.

This heightened sense of place only grew as Betjeman spread his wings whether on childhood holidays to Cornwall (an abiding passion) or through the historic buildings he encountered the length and breadth of these islands, each belonging to a particular somewhere — as buildings once did — with a name, lyrical or blunt, that made place, as if inevitably, into poetry. Ryme Intrinseca, Fontwell Magna, Diss.

Betjeman could be saccharine, sarcastic, silly and snobbish. But also unexpectedly profound and passionate. And this is perfectly captured at St Pancras, where his statue gazes up at the epic span of William Barlow’s great train shed framed by George Gilbert Scott’s gloriously Gothic Midland Grand Hotel. The inscription reads: “And in the shadowless unclouded glare, Deep blue above us fades to whiteness where, A misty sealine meets the wash of air. / John Betjeman, 1906 – 1984, poet, who saved this glorious station”.

It would be nice to think that Byron’s legacy to the world had been his poetry. But though Keats, Coleridge, Shelley and Wordsworth all have anthology pieces that the reasonably educated man in the street can quote, Byron does not. I have a very soft spot for his epigram on the death of Castlereagh (“Posterity shall ne’er survey a nobler grave than this;/ here lie the bones of Castlereagh. Stop, traveller, and piss.”), but few would place it at the centre of his literary achievement. Don Juan’s title has passed into common parlance (pronounce it like a retirement home for ruminants, rather than the waiter who banged your mum on that Spanish holiday in the Eighties) but the poem is now little read outside the academy, and that goes double for his breakthrough autofiction Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. As for (checks notes) Sardanapalus and The Two Foscari, ‘nuff said.

Admittedly, Suede pinched the first line of “She walks in beauty” for an album track on Dog Man Star (Brett absolutely thinks of himself as Byronic), but it’s not exactly what Byron will have envisioned when he lay awake dreaming of literary immortality. Nerdy old Robert Browning, whom Byron would absolutely have bullied had the chronology allowed, is a hundred times cooler and more quotable these days. Byron did, admittedly, give us the phrase “stranger than fiction”, but the quote most associated with his name — “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” — was said of him rather than by him.

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ChatGPT will kill off the Romantic genius

By Sam Leith

There’s the nub of it. Nobody wants to read Lord Byron, in other words, but they absolutely want to read about him. They are interested in his foxy way with women, but not in the least interested in what was interesting about him, which was his foxy way with a feminine rhyme. The biographies continue to pour off the presses even though — as one of the authors of those biographies, Alexander Larman, recently had the good grace to observe — there’s no great likelihood any of them will improve on Fiona MacCarthy’s definitive 2002 Byron: Life and Legend.

MacCarthy wouldn’t have been so vulgar as to use it in that sense, but “legend” has become ever more le mot juste. Byron is now “a legend” in the way drunk lads use the term of even drunker lads in the pub. He kept a pet bear as an undergraduate! He swam the Hellespont! He went on the lam in Europe! He committed a ton of adultery and may or may not have done the nasty with his cousins and his half-sister! He fought (or was, at least, fighting-adjacent) in the Greek War of Independence! He died young and left a good-looking corpse! What a ledge!

The most enduring legacy of Byron, which I don’t imagine he’d have much minded, being a raging egomaniac, is the idea of Byron, as incarnated above all in the adjective “Byronic”. Google Ngrams, which tracks the frequency of a keyword’s usage in Google’s vast corpus of digitised books, tells us that epithet is still going strong and getting stronger. The graph is a mountain range — rising dramatically in popularity through the 20th century and at a historic peak in the last decade. The examples usually given of Byronic heroes — those who aspire to Byronism, and those who have Byronism thrust upon them — are characters such as Heathcliff, Mr Rochester, Mr De Winter or Johnny Depp. Pete Doherty was a Byronic hero before he dried out, got chubby and stopped being such an arsehole.

But “Byronic”, be it noted, is a term that is never used anything other than positively. It goes with “hero” like “horse” goes with “carriage”. To be Byronic is to be willful, ardent, brooding, superhumanly attractive, and to have a thrilling disregard for bourgeois convention. It is to be an existential hero. It is, admittedly, usually to have a flaw — but the flaw is of the ennobling, Tragic Flaw sort, like being too tempestuous and passionate. The flaw in a Byronic hero is the sort of humblebraggy flaw that makes him (it’s always him) more interesting. You’ll never catch a Byronic hero having the sort of flaws the rest of us deal with, such as being a bit thick or suffering from athlete’s foot. Byronic heroes may be cruel and self-involved, but chicks dig them.

Archetypal Byronic heroes are super-heterosexual, which Byron wasn’t, and super sexually aggressive. You don’t catch a Byronic hero sitting patiently through a consent workshop or learning to be emotionally intelligent and hold space for women’s voices. It’s bizarre that “Byronic”, as a praise-word, has survived #MeToo — which might be #problematic when you consider that, as Ben Markovits, who wrote a trilogy of novels about him, put it, he was “by our own modern standards […] probably a paedophile and certainly a rapist, at least of the statutory kind”.

In the plus column, the real-life Byron’s flamboyant bisexuality could be seen as a pioneering queering of the Romantic hero figure; but it should be added onto the other side of the ledger that when he popped his clogs in Greece it wasn’t just the noble cause of Hellenic independence he was pursuing, but Hellenic jailbait. He spent the last months of his life ardently chasing a 15-year-old Greek lad who wasn’t interested in him in the slightest.

Sex aside, it’s odder still that what the word Byronic never seems to connote — which is a bit odd given Byron is above all a comic poet — is humour. The one thing Mr Rochester and Heathcliff did not do — not now, not never, not once — was make a funny joke. Byronic heroes are pompous old souls, even though the man himself made his very reputation through his wit. The fizz and paradox in Byron’s verse is absent from his eponym. If you’re “Wildean”, you’re witty. If you’re “Byronic”, you’re just a shagger who really, really needs to get over himself.

If you linger long enough in Berghain’s Panorama bar, if you remain until Monday morning when the sun is back up, occasionally they’ll open the blinds and flood the room with light. Maybe you’ve been in there dancing for 15 hours. And then you, and all the other people who didn’t get bounced, the elect, are bathed in this infinite glowing band of gold. On tour, Luke, the bass engineer, mentioned he had watched a George Michael documentary that said he had lived above a nightclub in Berlin. They could surely only mean one place. George would never have shacked up above KitKat; far too classy for that. We decided it had to be Berghain.

I pictured George in the club for the first time in the late aughts, the hits all dried up, thinking: “Fuck it, I’m George Michael, I’ve done my bit, once or twice a month isn’t enough for me, not even close… that infinite band of gold, that eternal present, I’m moving there.” He knew, too, he was just one chorus away from a purple patch. And that niggling voice in his head kept reminding him. That chorus. She must be somewhere in Berghain, she must be somewhere in that light, that purity, that abandon.

George understood all too well that only contradiction breeds spiritual depth. That, in order to join in, you have to drop out completely. I picture him in his private Panorama. A mild throb of bass warming his feet through the floor. The Berlin skyline coated in early morning rust through giant panes of glass. The world’s best MDMA coursing through his blood. Two glazed Teutons gazing up at him in awe from a bedroom-sized bed, disbelieving of their luck. Just one more chorus. Just one more hook. But even here, with experience stretched to its absolute limit, she doesn’t rear her head.

Once the tour was over, I made my way down to the Greek Island of Ios, for my first ever beach holiday. In the past, I would “travel” rather than “holiday”. There would always be some pyramid of human skulls or red-light city or psytrance opium vortex I wanted to visit. Relaxation was a part of it, but some kind of sensual frontier was usually the goal. And this image of George was slowly inflating behind my eyes the entire time. Could it be true? Moved in? Above the world’s most decadent nightclub?

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Now that I’m a bit tired generally, sitting on my arse for weeks on end with a book really appeals. Someone bringing me iced coffees during the day; Piña Coladas in the evening. All the same, I’m too laden with guilt to fully switch off. I decided a beach holiday would be a fitting time to write a paean to perhaps my favourite philosopher-poet, Romania’s arch-pessimist E.M. Cioran. It’s hard to write about E.M., which is how I imagine he wanted it. Not because the language is complex or impenetrable. There just doesn’t seem to be much to add in the way of commentary where his denunciations of absolutely everything are concerned. The fact he throws himself under the bus first and foremost, not unlike Eminem’s character at the end of 8 Mile, means he’s open to slandering the universe without restraint. His syntactic depth charges are contained microcosms of resentment. Bitterness on a cosmic scale. 

When I heard this thing about George, I thought OK. What about George as Cioranic mascot? I think both E.M. and George would have appreciated that. For Cioran, “absolute lyricism” constituted a “juxtaposition of act and reality, because the act is no longer a manifestation of reality but reality itself”. Had George actually become one of his gut-wrenching refrains? I took to abusing the pair of them down there on that Aegean shore. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born, A Short History of Decay, The Temptation to Exist… spliced with an endless rotation of “Careless Whisper”, “I Want Your Sex”, “One More Try”, “Jesus to a Child” and “Fastlove”. I used to think the only thing scarier than death was suicide — until I started reading E.M. Cioran. I now think of this off-switch as rather empowering.

For E.M., it is those with no access to irresponsibility who are the world’s truly wretched. And only hermitude and naivete can stave off idiocy. E.M.’s mind is constantly check-mating itself, George Michael’s soul does the same. Both in a perpetual state of collapse under the weight of their own ingenuity. Both have a tendency to begin with conclusions. You could start or end a career with “Careless Whisper”. You could do the same with Cioran’s emo-centric first, The Heights of Despair.

But whereas George elevates not knowing to an endless sigh of ecstatic longing, Cioran elevates it to a supreme comic pitch. The blackest laughter you’ve ever heard: “There’s no point in committing suicide, because you always do it too late.” I try to imagine him reading that one out loud to himself in his autumn years, how E.M. would have vocalised the italic shift. The thought of it warms my heart.

Point your disillusionment in whichever direction you like, and there’s a Cioran aphorism out there waiting for you, to help you refine your disdain. It’s nihilistic tapas. You only want, you only need to read Cioran in small portions. It’s perfectly in tune with today’s shrivelling attention spans. There’s often an “Eastern” inflection. He always does the decent thing, though, and pulls back at the last moment: “Buddhism calls anger ‘corruption of the mind’… I know this, but what good does it do me to know?” He reminds us that the Western psyche is incompatible with circularity. Freedom implies comfort in exploiting one’s own vacuity. Wisdom constitutes only exquisite insipidity. I began wondering if George had ever been introduced to Ciroan’s work. George who, by the end it seems, could no longer put his confusion and worry to work at converting emptiness into mystery.

I toyed with the idea of E.M. as a plausible, missed shot at salvation for the Singing Greek. When I find myself irretrievably depressed, metaphysically alienated, celebrating and denouncing myself in the same breath, there is only one man who can help me through the fog. I’ve developed a kind of Cioran dependency in recent years. I have to make sure I’ve got at least one of his books to hand at all times. He’s like a wellness guru, or an unwellness guru. There should be people pamphleteering extracts from The Trouble with Being Born on Golden Gate Bridge, a Cioranic helpline phone-box installed at Beachy Head. School kids should have it drilled into them. That the notion our ideas must come to something is at best a source of undying hilarity; everywhere we search for elsewhere, then we go back to being what we were before we were born… nothing. An unnecessary detour.

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By Jarryd Bartle

What is a philosopher other than a human being who plunders indecision for all it’s worth? What is a pop star? Without some form of near cataclysmic inner contraction, a ruptured personal paradox, how does either break any new ground? George and Emil. If not reading from the same hymn sheet, definitely born of a similar mother. Opening up territory for the rest of us, holding space… turning existential dread into a kind of game, something you can kill the time with, occasionally make a song and dance about. Not taking oneself — or anything for that matter — seriously, a matter of the utmost seriousness.

I had to get to the bottom of it. This thing about the nightclub. My life had grown George-coloured since the revelation. I heard his voice everywhere. I’d allowed him to colonise even my most intimate thoughts. Whether I was reading Cioran, making love or masticating Gyros, he was there. Cue a re-run of every single George Michael documentary available to a man at the beach house. No mention of it anywhere. Not a whiff. Nada. I called Luke from Decius, who’d birthed this phantasm in the first place. He swore by it. Promised he’d re-watch them all himself. Days later he replied. You’re right. It’s not there. Weird. Very weird. Where the fuck did that come from then?

Earlier this week, he visited the UnHerd Club for a wide-ranging interview about God, his love for WB Yeats, the heroism of JK Rowling, and how he changed his mind about vaccine hesitancy. Below is an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Richard Dawkins, welcome to UnHerd. You’re launching a podcast, “The Poetry of Reality”. Why?

Richard Dawkins: I’ve always felt that science is poetic, and deserves to be treated as a part of our culture. The magnificent fact that the universe has given rise to us, supremely complicated beings capable of even understanding where we came from, ought to be a topic of great literature. Science is the poetry of reality.

FS: Am I wrong to detect a softening in your later years? The choice of podcast name seems designed to give the impression that you’re a more romantic, less rigidly rational spirit than people realise?

RD: I think I’ve always been a romantic spirit and I think that’s what science inspires, or ought to inspire, as opposed to the cold, hard, dispassionate image that science can be mistaken as projecting.

FS: We’re talking at a time in which once-unassailable scientific ideas have become… complicated. Gender is an obvious one. Do you worry that the scientific institutions you cherish have become overly attuned to faddish politics, and that science risks compromising its reputation?

RD: Certainly, I have noticed that some of the leading scientific journals have capitulated to political pressure to become unscientific, and to betray what is an obvious scientific dichotomy between male and female. This seems to have been betrayed for political reasons by people in editorial positions in leading scientific journals who ought to know better.

FS: Another example might be Nature magazine, which has stated that part of its mission is to work to correct racial injustices — it seems to be a political agenda rather than a scientific one.

RD: There’s an analogue of original sin, that white people are expected to feel guilt for what their ancestors — or maybe just people of the same skin colour — did to other people of a different colour. It’s as though we are supposed to inherit the guilt of people of the past, just because we have the same colour skin as they did. And that is, I think, racism. It is actual racism to confer guilt upon people because of the colour of their skin.

FS: So would you prefer a completely colour-blind world, as far as institutions are concerned? This is controversial in the United States right now, with the Supreme Court reconsidering whether affirmative action has a place in education. For years, admissions criteria for university science departments have considered an applicant’s race. Where do you stand on that?

RD: If I were in favour of any sort of affirmative action, it might be in favour of those who have been disadvantaged in their own past, through poverty. And if they happen to be black, fair enough — but simply because they’re black? No, that’s the wrong sort of affirmative action. That is racism.

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FS: And if that resulted in fewer black people going to elite colleges, you’d be fine with that, on the grounds that places would be going to the most deserving candidates?

RD: Well, they would probably be the people most able to benefit from those places, yes. But there is also something to be said for bending over backwards to help people from a disadvantaged background who have a genuine ability that hasn’t had a chance to flourish — and if they were to get to Harvard, then they might be able to. And so I am in favour not of affirmative action but what I would call ‘intelligent looking’ for talent, which is what we try to do at Oxford. In my time, we did, anyway. We tried to recognise that somebody might be not so well groomed for an entrance exam or for an interview, but who showed signs of genuine talent.

FS: You’ve also been critical of New Zealand schools including indigenous origin stories in science classes. How do you think people of a scientific mindset should treat the irrational, or intuitions for which there is no clear proof? Is it not possible that poetic and symbolic ways of describing such things get us close to a different kind of truth? 

RD: My favourite poet is W.B. Yeats, a notorious mystic. Obviously, I have no sympathy whatsoever with his belief in fairies and things like that, but I resonate with his poetry. I think it’s wonderful. It’s hard for me to explain what I mean, but I suppose that’s the point. I’m not trying to be a scientist when I do that. I’m resonating as a human being. In the early poems — “The Wind Among the Reeds”, for example – I empathise with this lovelorn young man, struggling with his feelings of lost love. And I get that, but not as a scientist.

FS: But those feelings of being a lovelorn young man are true, are they not? They exist in the universe?

RD: They are true for this subject, what’s going on in his own mind, yes.

FS: Hearing you talk about a Yeats poem, you don’t sound that different to religious people. Just as when you talk about the beauty of the natural world and the miracles of science — although you might not use the word “miracle” — it feels as though you’re moved by that. Perhaps the difference between you is more a question of language?

RD: I think there’s something wrong with that idea. According to supernaturalism — which is what I take to mean religiousness — there is something beyond physics, beyond the material world, which I do not believe. I do not believe in anything beyond the material world, no matter how poetic you feel, no matter how much you’re in love, or no matter how deeply you feel emotionally about looking at nature, looking at fields of wheat, looking at the stars. These are all human reactions, which I feel as strongly as anyone. But there is nothing supernatural about that.

As a human being, when contemplating the Milky Way, I get a feeling in the pit of my stomach. There’s nothing supernatural about that, it’s something in my nervous system. That’s not to demean it — it feels real to me. But it’s not truth in the scientific sense, which really is actually physically true about the material world.

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FS: In the realm of theoretical physics, for example, there are whole dimensions of the universe that we simply don’t know how to describe yet. Is there not a chance that some of those feelings might be perceiving physical realities that we don’t yet have a way to analyse?

RD: As it happens, this evening I’m going to a meeting in London with Lawrence Krauss, the American theoretical physicist, who has just written a book called The Known Unknowns, which is about all that we don’t yet know. And physicists are proud to admit that there’s a lot that they don’t know, but they’re working on it. It is entirely possible — probable, even — that there are beings in the universe who already do understand things that are beyond our understanding, and that our brains simply aren’t big enough to understand these profundities about the universe. But to somehow equate those with mystical feelings that you get when you’re in love, or when you contemplate a rose, or religious feelings, that’s a naive confusion.

FS: Your work on evolution and natural selection holds that most things about human nature and the human body, in our evolved cells, are there for a purpose.

RD: Yes — and I might be in a minority of biologists for believing that. For that reason, I’ve been called an ultra-Darwinian. Quite a lot of other biologists feel there’s a lot in life that is not actually Darwinian, in the sense that it’s not actually designed by natural selection, but is there by chance.

FS: In which case, should we not view the religious impulse, or mystical impulses, and those feelings that we were just talking about, with more respect? Should we not view them as more likely to be more intelligent than purely a kind of mistake, possibly being wiser and more purposeful than you have been prepared to admit?

RD: Not wiser and more purposeful, but possibly there for a reason. I readily agree that, because it’s a human universal, pretty much, and therefore logically that means that it is highly probably that it is of Darwinian advantage. That, I get. It doesn’t mean religion is true, though. I mean, you could say, the tendency to be religious, the tendency to believe in something supernatural, the tendency to think there’s something higher than you, the tendency to think that people also can connect… all this could have been built in by natural selection.

I often suggest that this could be because children have been naturally selected to be respectful of what their parents tell them, what their culture tells them, because they need that in order to survive. Religion flourishes because children who are vulnerable, in a dangerous world, need to be instantly obeying their parents advice, not to endanger themselves. You don’t question what your parents say, you just believe what they say, which means the child mind is pre-programmed by Darwinian natural selection to be credulous of what elders tell them. And that is fertile ground for falsehood, as well as truth.

FS: But if it’s there by natural selection, it must be a net positive?

RD: A net positive in a survival sense, yes – but it doesn’t make it true. It’s not true that if you sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, you will cause the crops to succeed. But it’s a net positive in the sense that it’s a by-product of the impulse to obey authority, because the impulse to obey authority, in general, is a net positive.

FS: In that context, the latest mostly secular generation could be seen as a species-wide experiment. It hasn’t happened before in history — and you had a fair bit to do with bringing it about. Judging on the evidence, how do you think the secular experiment is going?

RD: The statistics I’ve seen suggest it is slowly getting better. The statistics I’ve seen suggest that the number of people who profess some kind of religion is going down. It’s now below 50%, which is the first time that a British census has shown that to be the case, which I think is good. Similarly in America, which is lagging behind, in this respect, but it’s still going in the right direction. Those are the only figures I’ve seen and, all I can do is offer you my intuition, which is worthless.

FS: There’s a book by Tom Holland called Dominion, which has been very influential in suggesting that a lot of what we consider to be secular Western ways of thinking on morality is still drenched in Christian thinking. So perhaps, although people aren’t describing themselves as religious in the census, they’ve just moved those religious intuitions into other realms?

RD: Yes, I think that’s very likely true. You can make a good religious case for the trans debate. I make an analogy with the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the wine in the Aristotelian accidentals remains wine but, in its true substance, becomes blood. Similarly, the trans person: he has a penis, but that’s a mere accidental, and in true substance he’s a woman. I mean, that’s a perfect analogy to transubstantiation. It even begins with the same prefix.

FS: So which is better, then? We’ve gone through this whole process, we’ve had a whole generation who’ve now been brought up reading your books, and Christopher Hitchens, who are now ardent and proud atheists, and then they end up believing things like you just described. And that has all sorts of societal repercussions. Should we now look back on the New Atheist movement with regret?

RD: No, I don’t get that at all. It’s just an interesting analogy to point out that there is a strong religious element to a current political fad. So what?

FS: The question is: empirically speaking, between conventional religion and what appears to be its successor ideology, which will be proven by history to be better for the flourishing of the species? Early signs are that this new kind of religion, which thinks it’s secular, has some major problems.

RD: Well, if you care about the flourishing of the species, yes, but I care about truth.

FS: So you don’t care about the flourishing of the species?

RD: Well I do care about it as a human being, but more deeply I care about truth.

FS: And if your sense of truth would lead to the annihilation of the species, would you be content with that?

RD: No I would not be content with that. But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t happen. I think that truth actually is a genuine value. I believe that a true scientific outlook on the world would actually be best for the flourishing of humankind.

FS: We have to talk about the most recent scientific controversy of our age: Covid. It feels like we are now emerging from the Covid years, when our trust in science was enormously damaged. Millions of people now intuitively distrust what they are told by scientific authorities. Do you think Covid was a moment of scientific glory, or something more problematic?

RD: I think glory, with regards to the unprecedented speed that vaccines were developed. And that is a tribute to molecular biology. It was possible, almost instantly, to sequence the genome of the virus, and to transmit the genome directly to labs all over the world, who set to work developing vaccines with, as I said, unprecedented speed. That is magnificent. Whether humans mistrust or trust science, that’s their business.

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FS: But the vaccines were enormously over-promised in terms of their efficacy. They were originally sold to us as being 95% effective in preventing infection. That was then endlessly revised downwards and, in the end, we were told vaccination didn’t stop transmission, it only improved outcomes for vulnerable patients.

RD: The speed with which things were happening means that it’s very difficult for people entrusted with authority to give advice. And normally, there’s much more time in order to examine all the evidence and give balanced, wise advice. When you’re required to give advice almost instantly, there inevitably are going to be mistakes.

FS: During the pandemic, you condemned people who were sceptical about the pandemic response. You tweeted that: “Some faith heads have a ritual of handling snakes, believing faith will protect them. When they’re bitten, they deserve it, they alone suffer. Vaccine refusal is different. Others are endangered. It’s as though their faith told them to release rattlesnakes in supermarkets.” This was April 6, 2021. Your vilification of people who were hesitant about taking the vaccine, in retrospect, seems too much, doesn’t it? Do you take that back?

RD: Well, I had become aware of the conventional wisdom about vaccination, which is that it’s a matter of altruism, because it’s not simply a matter of saying: “This is my private business, whether I’m vaccinated or not.” And in the case of the measles vaccine, for example, it really is a matter of altruism, because if you don’t get vaccinated, then then you are part of the problem if there’s a measles epidemic. And I thought that that would be the case with Covid. Now, it’s not entirely clear that that was right. And so, to that extent, I would take that back, yes.

FS: Do you also think that Covid showed how vulnerable scientists and institutions such as universities have become in this social media age — to peer pressure, to a fear of being cancelled and of being on the wrong side of mainstream thought?

RD: Yes. There are some heroic scientists who go off on their own and don’t need grants and just get on with their research — people like James Lovelock, who I’ve criticised on other grounds, but…

FS: Recently, universities have not been good at defending their own when they come under assault, on social media and elsewhere, for taking an unpopular position. The trends we saw with American universities during Covid, but there are lots of other examples. Professor Kathleen Stock springs to mind. Surely we can be constructively critical of universities for this?

RD: I think we can, and I think Kathleen Stock is a very good example of somebody who’s been appallingly treated. I think she’s a real hero. I think J.K. Rowling is a real hero. She’s not at a university, but she’s another one. Yes, I’ve been rather shocked at the way universities have not stood up to a rabble, a lynch mob, really, going after people like Kathleen Stock. But you can also sympathise with a university vice-chancellor with a baying mob of students after their blood. It’s difficult, but I think in that case they should hold the line.

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FS: Another concept you’ve defended recently is AI, and whether we might be leaving human nature behind altogether, either through some kind of AI future, or via extraterrestrial life. With your materialist hat on, explain how you think AI could supplant organic life?

RD: Well, the brain is a material object — and what it does is, although we don’t understand it fully yet, it must have a scientific explanation. And it must be the case that whatever the brain can do, in principle, could be done by an AI simulation. So, an artificial intelligence must be capable of doing what the human brain can do — and there’s no obvious reason why it shouldn’t be greatly superior to it.

It is conceivable that an artificial intelligence could greatly surpass what the human brain can do. And in many ways, that’s a very frightening prospect. People, many people, are very frightened of it. I haven’t decided whether I’m frightened of it or not. I think I could imagine it going both ways. But, as a materialist, I can’t deny that it’s possible.

FS: People might also be surprised by how much credence you give to the possibility of extraterrestrial life. How likely do you think it is that life exists on other planets?

RD: Very likely — especially when you think of the sheer number of opportunities in the universe for it to exist. It has arisen here and evolved to the point where it can understand its own existence. That was a ridiculously improbable event, but it happened. So why deny that it has happened anywhere else in the universe?

FS: So, on the balance of probabilities, we’re talking more than 50% likely, in your estimation, that there is life beyond our own planet?

RD: Yes. And I would make a distinction between life existing elsewhere, which is far more probable, than actual intelligent life, because one’s got to come from the other. We might well discover intelligent life through radio communication, but we will never be visited by it. Flying saucers, no — very unlikely. But visitation by radio communication, electromagnetic waves , that’s not totally unlikely. And I think that SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is a worthwhile enterprise that should be pursued and funded.

FS: You don’t think interstellar travel will become possible through some breakthrough in physics?

RD: Well, that’s very, very far off in the future, because of the huge distances involved. So far, we are waiting for interplanetary travel within the solar system. Light years is a very long distance for solid, physical objects to travel.

FS: So if Elon Musk succeeds at getting human beings to Mars in your lifetime, would you volunteer for his next flight?

RD: No, I wouldn’t volunteer… actually perhaps yes. If I knew I was dying, it might be the last thing I’d do.

* “The Poetry of Reality” With Richard Dawkins is available to download now.

But there is something elemental, beyond rational considerations, in the appeal of the Irish cottage. Few were the Irish emigrant homes of a certain era that didn’t have a framed farmstead hanging on the sitting room wall, whitewash sparkling against the Kodacolor green. A symbol of a simpler, harder lifestyle, simultaneously fetishished and spurned, the Irish farmstead, built from rubble from its surrounding fields, conveys deep, ambivalent realms of meaning, quite distinct from and darker than the prettily uncomplicated charms of the chocolate-box English cottage. Empty farmhouses, which in England would each be spick and span with Farrow and Ball, litter Northern Ireland’s countryside like abandoned crime scenes. In Ireland, the rural cottage still lurks in the imagination like a half-remembered, troubling dream.

It is no surprise, then, that houses loom large in Ireland’s cultural production. Indeed, it is only partly an exaggeration to say that Irish literature — at least in English — consists of a collection of domestic metaphors. In an island whose history has been defined by contested land ownership, houses dominate the country’s literary landscape like an Anglo-Irish “Big House” overlooking its demesne.

From the very birth of the Anglo-Irish novel, with Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and The Absentee (1812), the Big House of the landlords was presented as a mouldering, moss-streaked metaphor for the country’s social and political order, a literary premonition of the gloomily decaying wrecks of the 20th-century Anglo-Irish novel, their shrubbery haunted by rebellious tenants and doomed to fiery dissolution. Even Bram Stoker, giving his imagination the freest rein, was compelled to conjure up a landlord, surrounded by superstitious peasants, vacating his crumbling mansion in a box of his native soil, while casting an acquisitive eye on the London property market.

On the other side of Ireland’s great political divide, the idealised peasant cottage of early 20th-century Irish nationalism, successor to the squalid 19th-century tenant cabin, marks the point at which improved economic conditions following the Famine laid the foundations for Ireland’s separation from its negligent neighbouring freeholder. The tidy, homely cottage became the moral and political contrast to the ramshackle and disorderly Big House, just as independent Ireland was to draw from its own native folk resources in establishing itself as a nation once again.

But one man’s bucolic fantasy is another’s nightmare. Ulster Unionist election posters contrasted the tidily prosperous farmsteads of the Protestant statelet with the tumbledown thatched cabins of De Valera’s Republic — relying on cultural tropes that, ironically, only make sense within an Irish context. The dominant stage of post-independence Realist literature — the isolated Midlands farmhouse ruled by a fallible, domineering father — provided a handy metaphor for writers chafing against the stultifying claustrophobia of mid-20th century Ireland. In today’s neurotically globalising Republic, scene of a housing crisis that makes Britain’s Generation Rent look comparatively blessed, the abandoned estates of the Celtic Tiger boom fulfil a similar purpose: they are vacant symbols of a country caught between outward-looking aspirations and the material reality of a marginal country on Europe’s westernmost fringe.

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But here in Northern Ireland, a century after the border uncurled itself across Ulster’s rainy country lanes, this domestic metaphor has its own specific, harder edge. As bookseller-turned-writer Alexander Poots observes in The Stranger’s House, his excellent new book on Northern Irish writing, David Trimble instinctively returned to the trope in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, proclaiming that “‘Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern Nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.” A solid house built on uncertain ground, now Northern Ireland’s knife-edge demographic balance is shifting back in turn, looking to wash the state’s foundations away with it.

The politics and culture of Northern Ireland, Britain’s neglected stepchild over the water, are after all defined by one great building project, 400 years ago. Until the early 17th-century plantation of British Protestant settlers, Ulster was the wildest of Ireland’s four provinces, the last holdout of the old Gaelic order, and the least influenced by English culture. Over the course of a century, reshaped by its new population, it became the most distinctively British corner of the island, farms and sturdy grey market towns, in mainland style, blooming like mushrooms on Ulster’s levelled woodlands. Like a family’s private ways of speech, the shared dialect of its two peoples is still rich with the expressive Germanic vocabulary of the Scots colonists: people still hoke and boke, they gulder and gurn in the linguistic residue of “the Hamely Tongue”. Forced into loveless cohabitation by history, the province’s two nations have explored their predicament, in literature, through the image of the uneasily shared home.

In Reading in the Dark (1996), the Catholic writer Seamus Deane layers two oppressive domestic metaphors on top of each other: the claustrophobic Derry two-up, two-down where family life is weighed down by dark secrets, and the stolen farmhouse just across the border in Donegal, where a life of bucolic freedom and contentment lies unfairly out of reach. In the Monaghan writer Eugene McCabe’s cycle of fiction set across the border in Northern Ireland’s Fermanagh, the uneasy cohabitation of Catholic and Protestant finds expression in a lush and lurid Ulster Gothic: in Siege (1973), IRA gunmen hold an Anglo-Irish gentry family hostage in their Big House, finding uncomfortable intimacy in their unwillingly shared predicament; in Death and Nightingales (1992), the Catholic stepdaughter of a cuckolded Protestant landlord plots his murder, before being betrayed in turn by his devious Fenian tenant. Most explicitly, in Bill Morrison’s A Love Song for Ulster trilogy (1994), the Catholic Kate, abandoned by her mother as the border closed, is trapped in unwilling domesticity with the Protestant John, prisoner in a cold and isolated Northern farmhouse.

As a consequence of this troubled cohabitation, Poots observes, throughout its century-long existence Northern Irish literature “has seen writer after writer grasp for an elusive home. Inevitably they fail, and that failure becomes the subject of their work. They are all inhabitants of the disappearing island, tenants of the Strangers’ House.” Perhaps it is natural, then, that an unstable hold on uncertain ground pervades much of the province’s writing, a persistent sense that there are stranger things lurking beneath Ulster’s stolid surface. In Northern Irish writing, the hamely always threatens to become unheimlich.

Poots opens with a portrait of three Belfast writers — C.S. Lewis, Forrest Reid, and Louis MacNeice — and the comfortable and unhappy red-brick bourgeois homes that shaped their imaginations. Like their homeland, in their infancy “all had nightmares so memorable that they seemed worthy of record decades after their occurrence”, Poots notes, and “all three men described their childhood nightmares in their respective memoirs”. The triad are strangely interchangeable, Poots observes: “All were Protestants, and while some were more comfortable than others, all were vastly better off than the average Irishman. All had black dreams, all became writers. All knew the dark well.” And like Carson, the statelet’s sceptical founder, all three were repelled by the Loyalist culture of their tribe, “the marching bands, the sashes and banners, the great bonfires lit at midnight on the Twelfth of July”. Lewis, who would write that “if I ever get interested in politics, I shall probably be a nationalist”, described his distaste as simply a “natural repulsion to noisy drum‐beating, bullying Orangemen”.

Instead, for Lewis, in the dim afterglow of Yeats’s Celtic Twilight, escape was to be found in fantasy worlds, a hidden realm where time is so distorted that the ordinary human lifespan extends disorientatingly into mythicised, glorious history. Though Poots notes laconically that “not many people would associate Narnia with Ireland”, this parallel is surely inescapable. As Lewis would write in Surprised by Joy, “the country I grew up in had everything to encourage a romantic bent, had indeed done so ever since I first looked at the unattainable Green Hills through the nursery window”.

Explicitly transposing his beloved Oxford on the Mourne Mountains and Donegal, Narnia was a fantasy Ulster for Lewis, a land of “roaring waterfalls and mossy rocks and echoing caverns”, of “heathery mountains” and “windy slopes alight with gorse bushes”. For MacNeice, who “always thought of himself as Irish, a visitor to the English zoo”, escape from middle-class Belfast was sought in fantasies of Gaelic peasant authenticity, and his dubious claim that “my relations are still living in mud‐floored cottages in the West of Ireland”. And Reid in turn, that rare thing, an early 20th-century Ulster Protestant gay writer, found release in a lush, Bohemian fiction which, Poots remarks, fits “none of the stereotypes associated with Ulster Protestantism: they are queer, allusive, beautiful, and fantastical. And yet, despite everything, he was a Northern Irish Protestant novelist, and his books reflect his culture and his class.”

This yearning of the stereotypically matter-of-fact Ulster Protestant for the fantastical is a thread that runs through modern Northern Irish fiction, and Poots could perhaps make more of it than he does. Another recent book, 2021’s The Black Dreams: Strange stories from Northern Ireland, foregrounds the country’s under-analysed literary preoccupation with the weird and eerie, making the implicit explicit. In each of the stories, domestic life becomes unsettled by hidden worlds lying just at the edge of ours, by the intrusion of the old ways and a history that refuses forgetting. Indeed, perhaps the singular distinctive trait of the country’s best current writers, such as Antrim’s Jan Carson, is a magical realist sensibility now largely alien to their southern counterparts.

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Across the border, the long shadow of literary Modernism has congealed in Sally Rooney’s affectless, Xanax prose, making her a suitable literary avatar for a country rushing headlong into an increasingly contested postmodern internationalism. In contrast, Carson’s unsettling engagement with Irish folk traditions, her pagan sensibility, rooted in the soil and lurking beneath working-class Protestant community life — the literary equivalent of the Fairy Tree at the heart of Belfast’s Loyalist Sandy Row — would be so unfashionable among Dublin writers, still eager to shake off the shackles of tradition, as to be unwritable. History’s separation of North and South perhaps permits a critical engagement, in Northern writers, with a lost sense of Irishness, the bifurcated insider-outsider perspective of the anthropologist, both at home and not in either culture. In one of the many contradictions typifying Northern Ireland, it is the explicit Irishness of Carson’s writing that separates her from the Republic.

If the singular characteristic of Northern Irish prose is its yearning for the fantastical, its poetic counterpart is perhaps a shrewd and unromantic, even tormented relationship with the land. “Northern Ireland is the result of an argument about land,” Poots notes, “an argument conducted over four long centuries”, and this stubborn rootedness adheres to the best Ulster poetry like wet clay. In the work of farmer-poets like Seamus Heaney and John Montague, both brought up in smallholdings in Northern Ireland’s rural, Catholic west, small farms, hard soil and deep history intertwine to create a distinctive imaginative space. Poots writes compellingly, often in passages of great beauty, of the nature writing tradition in Irish-language poetry, observing that “if a sense of homelessness and dislocation forms one pillar of northern writing, then the natural world forms the other. Indeed fields, trees, and birds have often supplied the language through which writers can express darker truths.”

Yet the land itself may express other, happier resolutions: for the great Belfast Protestant poet John Hewitt, who deserves greater analysis than Poots’s excellent survey of Ulster writing gives him, the same Antrim countryside that inspired Lewis grounded him in a sense that he, too, belonged to this contested soil, where though “once alien here my fathers built their house/claimed, drained and gave the land the shapes of use”, so that “because of all the buried men/in Ulster clay”, he is “as native in my thought as any here”. Poots quotes Tom Paulin’s poetic lament of the Ulster Protestant seaman in London as proof of “the uncertainty at the heart of Ulster Unionism — the terrible suspicion that they are mired between Catholic Ireland and indifferent Britain, foreigners everywhere”. But the Roman settler in Hewitt’s more hopeful 1950 poem The Colony instead derives from his perception that “we would be strangers in the Capitol” a belief that time and shared love of the land may change relations “if not to kin, to co-inhabitants, as goat and ox may graze in the same field/and each gain something from proximity”.

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This ameliorating influence of the land pervades Belfast, too, MacNeice’s “city built on mud” where, as Poots notes, “the smell of silage and cow dung still wafts across the city when the wind is right”, and where the street art, unlike the mainland, displays fat bramble hedges and woodland paths as well as the paramilitary murals so beloved of Troubles tourists. From the centre of Belfast, you can see the hedgerows and green fields of hill farms overlooking the postindustrial cityscape; mist-shrouded mountains loom oppressively over the terraced red-brick streets, the grim majesty of the land itself our reminder we are not in Manchester or Liverpool. Like the inner city’s sectarian murals fading into the Alliance Party posters of the prosperous leafy suburbs, Ulster’s countryside softens Belfast’s brick-sharp edges.

In his conclusion, Poots declares that “a tribal writer will never produce great work”. Instead, “the best northern writers have rejected the answers that their respective communities offer up… Perhaps this is the root of the homesick quality that, for me, defines Northern Irish writing” — “where home is revealed to be a delusion.” But perhaps what Poots interprets as loss and homelessness can also be a strange liberation: by belonging to both Britain and Ireland, Northern Ireland ultimately belongs to neither. For writers, condemned by temperament to view their home society from the outside, looking in, such ambiguity can be productive, as the vigorous imaginative possibilities displayed by Ulster’s new writing proves.

As with the shrewd and slightly roguish inhabitants of Northern Ireland’s border villages — my own new home — with their pocketfuls of Euros, at ease in both societies, or the best of both worlds Sunak strains to convince Unionists that the Windsor Agreement offers, the ambiguity detested by Belfast politicians may yet be a profitable wellspring. For all its political uncertainty, or perhaps because of it, Northern Ireland’s cultural output possesses a complex, unaffected sense of place and continuity distinct from, and perhaps increasingly foreign to, both the British mainland and the Republic. A traditional Ulster farmhouse has no foundations, built directly on the heavy soil: but it is no less solid or homely for that, and will sit sturdily on its squat fieldstone haunches long after the political certainties of today have washed away.

But Rothenberg’s most enduring contribution would come a decade later, after a fairly radical shift from modernism to the new project of “ethnopoetics”. This shift led him to work in the vein of the anthologist, notably while compiling his Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, and Oceania (1968), collecting and sharing the work of poetic traditions from around the world, rather than centring his own “sole-author” work as a poet. But the line is never so clear, and in hindsight it seems reasonable to suppose that Rothenberg’s anthological work is itself a variety of poiesis, by which he transmits to the attention of English-language readers a vastly deeper and more vital sense of what poetry might be, and of what poetry long was, than the one we got stuck with in the modern period.

What we call “poetry” today is mostly an etiolated art form, a vestige of something that in its more archaic expressions does a great deal more — does everything, in fact. Poetry, for much of human history, was not words on a page, for there were no pages, and words were not conceived as having a visible dimension at all. Nor was poetry just spoken words, but rather these words were one component of a total artistic form that also included motion, gesture, and, often, rhythm and melody. Its purpose was to realign the human with the cosmic, to affirm the embeddedness of our mundane earthly experience within a vastly larger order that also includes the animals, the elements, the heavens, the ancestors, and the gods.

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By Justin E. H. Smith

The ultimate dismantling of this total art form has occurred in lockstep with the professionalisation of the scientific disciplines and with the process of secularisation over the past several centuries. Yet even in its reduced modern form, one of the things poetry still commonly aspires to do, as best it can, is to tap into the sense of the sacred — even if its creators often do so without any overt commitment to the reality of the realms their artistic sense moves them to explore.

I have for some years been working on a translation of the Siberian Sakha-language oral-epic tradition known as Olonkho. Throughout this work, for a long time, though I was becoming quite adept at simulating Sakha meter and metaphor in English, I did not think of myself as a poet. Jerry Rothenberg convinced me I was mistaken about myself. Some poets draw their material from dreams, some from childhood memories, and others from love or politics. Some poets get their source material directly from other poets working in other linguistic realities.

Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that these realities are just linguistic. For in fact the language of poetry, perhaps especially of “archaic” poetry, is typically condensed out of the entire lived translinguistic reality of the bard who channels it, and to try to reconstruct that reality in another language as if it were entirely constituted from words is to misrepresent (perhaps inevitably) the original work. For this reason, Rothenberg advocates, and practices, what he calls “total translation”: the rendering, in graphic form, of every possible element of another culture’s poetic traditions, including those elements that we do not ordinarily understand as linguistic. What results is also a pale shadow of the original, but it is at least a pale shadow that acknowledges what it is, and that points to everything our secular, textual, and de-ritualised poetry can typically no longer do.

One way of continuing to do these things today is by leaving poetry in our narrow sense behind, and pursuing the sort of performance that we today call “music”, even if archaically this too would have been conceptualised as the work of the poet. Rothenberg has himself consistently blurred the line between recitation and performance. One of the staples of his public appearances over the years has been a chant he learned among the Seneca people in Upstate New York in the Seventies, with a single line uttered in trance-like Sprechgesang — “The animals are coming” — followed by an uncannily realistic impersonation of what sounds like a bear. Many of the younger people in his audiences would likely take issue with the “appropriative” quality of this performance, were it not so compelling, were they not so undeniably in the presence — though such things are generally supposed not to happen anymore — of an old man who has just turned into a wild animal.

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Such transformation as this is among the potentials of “archaic” poetry — poetry conceived as a total art form whose purest expression is ritual — unlike what we might ordinarily expect from a recitation of the work of, say, Robert Frost. Such transformation, or something like it, is also possible through a sufficiently vibrant performance in the humble genre of the rock song, and indeed a number of this genre’s familiar names (Warren Zevon, Eddie Vedder), have, over the years, drawn inspiration from Rothenberg’s work. But surely no singer-songwriter’s oeuvre is more overtly indebted to the American poet than that of Nick Cave.

I’ve been listening to Nick Cave for about 35 years, and I have long seen him as one of the few singer-songwriters currently working whose lyrics deserve attention in their own right. But it was only when I happened to learn of our shared admiration for Jerry Rothenberg’s work that I began to see Nick’s lyrical sensibility as distinctly “Rothenbergian”. It dawned on me that Nick might have a greater claim than Jerry to be in the business of creating total works of art out of the “starter culture” of poetry.

That is, Nick generates poetic lyrical ideas, but he doesn’t stop with these. He puts them to music, and then he unfolds them in performances that have, perhaps increasingly in his “late style”, the character of ritual. He appears, in fact, increasingly committed to leading and facilitating some kind of collective transformation. He’s bringing us back to church, like it or not, or perhaps to the liminal place beside the fire in the night where strange and diurnally unfathomable transformations occur.

The brilliant Mexican poet and critic Heriberto Yépez, co-editor of Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader (2013), sharply observes that “[p]ure Myth cannot exist in a world after Hollywood, nor can the shaman holistically heal because he or she is historically wounded”. Both Jerry and Nick have fully reckoned with this heavy truth of our current condition, and have succeeded in cutting their shamanic potencies with the irony and humour that are the lingua franca of our secular age. Yet for them, this is never a dilution or a compromise, but only a demonstration of their mastery of the idiom of their time and place, their commitment to being “of the world”, and of their moment, even if the aspiration of all poetry is towards the eternal.

Thus does Nick excel in the art of the juxtaposition, the mixture of registers that would be straightforwardly comical if it were not so often poignant, as in 2001’s “Darker with the Day”: “My father sits slumped in the deepening snow / As I search in and out, above, about, and below”; or in 2008’s “More News from Nowhere”: “He asks me for my autograph / I write ‘nobody’ and then / I wrap myself up in my woolly coat / and I blind him with my pen.” Again and again, Nick conjures an image from his internal world — a memory of his long-deceased father, a more recent memory of dealing with needy fans — and then projects it into the eternal mythological register of a Rumi or a Homer.

Jerry’s poetic voice is equally compelling in A Big Jewish Book, where he sought to demonstrate why it is that “after Auschwitz there is only poetry” (my emphasis). This stark reversal of Adorno’s grim formula, I believe, has something to do with Jerry’s awareness, which cannot but assert itself after any honest engagement with “archaic” poetry of the sort anthologised in Technicians of the Sacred, that the primary function of poetry for most of human history has been one of processing or managing the unceasing violence of our lived reality.

This thesis is certainly not original with me. The great Austrian classicist Walter Burkert famously speculated that the origins of human culture lie in expiation rituals meant to counteract the cosmic taint that comes with shedding the blood of animals in hunting. Much archaic poetry seems surprisingly hung up on such vivid phenomena as the sight of a deer’s viscera pouring from its underbelly when it is cut open by the knife of a hunter. Why dwell on such things? Perhaps because violence necessitates poetry; or, to put it the other way around, poetry, properly understood, concerns itself above all with violence.

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“I think on the most fundamental level he introduced me to primitive poetry,” Nick told me on the phone from London earlier this year. “I think there was a change in my writing, I can’t really pinpoint it, but I have a feeling that it coincided with me reading Technicians of the Sacred.” It is in the encounter with this anthology, too, that Nick experiences the complicated homecoming every truth-seeking colonial son must face sooner or later: “In Technicians of the Sacred, to my shame, I read my first Indigenous poetry. Even though I’m Australian, I hadn’t really read any of it.”

He recalls the excitement of discovering a new sort of poetry that was “a little violent, deeply surreal, and sexual, and also non-ironic, that was explicitly designed for ritual, and prayers, and transformation, and these sorts of things, which were really very much looked down upon by much of the modern poetry that I would read. I mean the anti-spiritual, ironic modern poetry.”

The poems in Technicians of the Sacred, Nick recollects, “reminded me of the Psalms themselves. They were these religious poems, shall we say, or spiritual or ritual poems, that were deeply violent and at the same time songs of praise, and I think that fed into something that I was blindly reaching around for… an extraordinary enmeshment of style and time, and [of] the mundane and the cosmic… It just blew my mind.” He pauses. “I mean, it’s like the fundamental… the fundamental violence of things.”

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Life grows less eventful as we age, and the gap between our quotidian experience and the heroic register into which we spent our youth projecting ourselves only seems to widen. “I keep saying to my wife,” Nick tells me, “that these songs are small, unimpressive autobiographies kind of wrapped up in heroic myths, and religious writing, and wild surrealism.” He continues: “Even though I might be seeing cosmically, [the songs] are rooted in the very most fundamental and mundane events in my rather boring life. And maybe that’s what writers mostly have to do anyway. They just sit. They don’t do anything. Most of us don’t do anything.”

The great Norman O. Brown, author of Life against Death (1959) and coiner of the term “polymorphous perversity”, was himself a famously uxorious homebody. Brown insisted in interviews that there was no contradiction here, that thanks to the liveliness of his imagination, he was able to indulge all his transgressive impulses without so much as getting up from his desk. And this is what the censorious prudes of Left and Right consistently miss about the place of violence in art: it is not a “gateway” to the real thing, nor an approval of human suffering. It is rather a lucid recognition of the fundamental violence of things — even if, per impossibile, we were to render all human beings docile, we would still be getting constantly slammed by nature — and of the deep human need to come to terms with this condition through the free play of the imagination.

We’re older now, and the light is dim. Nick Cave has done much to orient me in the world, and to give expression to my own aesthetic sensibility. In the Eighties this sensibility was, or seemed to be, fundamentally exclusionary: it was all about carving out a narrow territory of style and attitude and despising everything else. In our late dim light, by contrast, we seem to have grown far more capacious, far more generous.

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This generosity, too, it seems to me, is Rothenbergian in spirit. It has to do, I think, with a recognition of one’s place in the long chain of a tradition, which is another way of saying recognition of one’s debt to the ancestors, so that one can only approach creative work with humility and awe. We see this again and again in Nick’s willing adoption of the role of the apprentice, to sing a cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins or Leonard Cohen or Bertolt Brecht, without any concern to outdo the masters, but only, it seems, to experience the joy of channelling them.

Because this tradition is a mythopoetic one, the spirit channelled through its apostles takes account of the full range of human experience, and therefore often turns violent. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ landmark 1995 album, Murder Ballads, channels violence in its purest form, and perhaps gives us the nec plus ultra of homicidal ideation in its rendition of the blues classic “Stagger Lee”. Would Nick really crawl over 50 good pussies just to get to one fat boy’s asshole? Probably not, but that is a philistine question. The faculty of the imagination is not the same thing as the will, and what an artist is channelling under the spell of mythopoetic violence is not an action plan, a manifesto or a credo, but a complete picture of human life. This is a picture that traditional and popular art forms, notably Delta blues, have excelled in capturing, in contrast with profit-driven and algorithmically optimised commercial entertainments, which unsurprisingly veer towards a conception of art as handmaiden of conventional morality and thus as appropriately inhabiting only a very limited range of possible human perspectives.

That Nick has not sought to live down any of his decades-old “excesses”, but has only kept refining them into an even purer distillation of violence (“Stagger Lee” remains a staple of his performances) is a testament to his mature inhabitation of the role of mythopoetic bard and of transgenerational mediator of tradition. In a personal sense, he seems only to grow more gentle; I’ve watched a number of tense early interviews with him, and these are a universe away from the amicable and kind spirit he maintains in interaction with strangers today, at least some of whom must objectively be quite dull. On the fence about Christianity for many years, and as far as I know resigned to some permanent condition of agnosticism, Nick has for all that arrived at Christianity’s ethical core, where loving the stranger obviates any perceived need to fix your beliefs, since this love is itself a “proof” of the reality of the divine. And yet through all this moral growth Nick just keeps putting holes in Billy Dilly’s motherfucking head, night after night, year after year. This is good for his art, of course, but it is also, if violence must exist, a pretty good way of dispatching it, through sublimation, from our own midst.

There are precious few graceful old rock stars out there, and to become one seems to me almost the same thing as transcending the limitations of the genre. In Nick’s case, I think this apparent transcendence has something to do with his positioning of himself, by design or by instinct, in the lineage of the poets — and with his understanding, no doubt helped by his discovery of Jerry Rothenberg’s work, that poetry properly understood is the total art form, from which all the other modern art forms have been parted out. It is the art form that reckons with the violence of things, and continually sets our broken world back in order again.

I need some mind that, if the cannon sound
From every quarter of the world, can stay
Wound in mind’s pondering,
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;

He had his own reasons for evoking a spirit of that kind. Even so, it remains good advice today, when comparable discords press toward what promises to be an equally explosive resolution. As 2022 stumbles blindly to its close, the clarity of mind Yeats sought is a condition worth cultivating. Listen past the barnyard gabble of the mass media and the porcine gruntings of politicians rooting at the public trough, and you might just hear the events of the last year sounding the notes of an ancient melody.

Books published in the midst of today’s clatter lack the distance from current contentions to make that melody audible. This is why the book that comes first to mind as I reflect on 2022 is Yeats’s longest and strangest prose work, A Vision. There are several good editions of this work available; those that take the second (1937) edition as the basis for their text are best, since Yeats revised the work substantially after the first edition of 1925.

It used to be fashionable to ignore the massive role that occultism played in Yeats’s life and poetry. Like many other creative minds of his era — D.H. Lawrence and Hilda Doolittle among them — Yeats found in the teachings of occultism a potent source of inspiration. He and his wife Georgie were both members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most influential occult organisation of their time, and both achieved the rank of Adeptus Exemptus, the highest level of initiation the order offered. Georgie Yeats herself was responsible for the core ideas and imagery in A Vision. Working out the details of the system and putting it in vivid prose was her husband’s task.

A connection between occultism and the creative arts may seem improbable to those who lack exposure to the occult traditions of the Western world. To those not so hindered, it is obvious. Occult training teaches the ability to recognise in the seemingly prosaic events of daily life the presence of myth and symbol. The chattering classes of Yeats’s time thought of progress, as ours think of it today, as a simple objective reality out there in the world. Occultists like the Yeatses recognised (and their equivalents today still recognise) progress as a deeply ambivalent mythic narrative that may or may not have anything to do with the facts on the ground.

A Vision is, among other things, an antidote to the mindless acceptance of that myth. Like the hexagrams of the I Ching or the cards of the tarot, it presents a sequence of archetypal patterns as a model for the events of human life. Yeats’s sequence comprises 28 stages modeled on the symbolic 28 days of the lunar cycle, from new moon to full moon and back to new. Each stage is defined by the two fundamental relationships of the human spirit; that between the will and the object of its desire, on the one hand, and that between the mind and the objects of its understanding, on the other. The first two are Will and Mask in Yeats’s terminology, the latter two Creative Mind and Body of Fate. These paired faculties move in complementary cycles around the wheel of the 28 phases, giving each phase its distinctive character.

Each human life completes the cycle of the phases between birth and death. Each human soul completes the same cycle on a broader timescale as it passes from life to life — the Yeatses, like occultists generally, accepted reincarnation as a matter of plain fact as well as a source of mythic symbols. Each political, cultural, literary, or artistic movement follows the same course, and so does each civilisation as it rises and falls.

Always there are the first inchoate fumblings, drawing toward coherence as the person, the soul, the movement, or the civilisation passes through childhood and approaches its coming of age. Always there is the struggle to achieve unity of being around some half-understood theme. Always, once the full moon is past, the struggle to bring the theme into manifestation descends into pantomime, going through the motions replaces meaningful effort, and words that once set minds and hearts aflame turn into meaningless catchphrases. The inner life trickles away into empty form, and the outworn form dissolves into a void from which some new phenomenon of opposite tendency will emerge.

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All this doubtless sounds very abstract. In Yeats’s hands, it is anything but. The book begins with an introduction, “A Packet for Ezra Pound”, a lively prose poem that weaves together the surroundings of Yeats’s last years with an account of the book’s conception and writing. There follows “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends”, which presents the entire structure of ideas in the form of a lively fiction with comic elements. (It really is a pity that Yeats never did anything else with comic prose; he was very good at it.) In the chapters that follow he outlines the structure of ideas underlying the 28 phases, and then proceeds through the phases one at a time, using as examples biographies well known in his time.

From there, another philosophical chapter puts the phases in context. Afterwards comes a chapter on the soul’s journey from death to rebirth, and then the two chapters that speak most precisely and unforgivingly to our condition in the waning days of 2022: “The Great Year of the Ancients” and “Dove or Swan”. Here he sets out the way of looking at historical change implicit in A Vision in uncompromising terms.

Today’s popular thought likes to imagine history as a straight line, either ascending from the primitive squalor of the past to some Hollywood destiny or other out there among the stars, or descending from a vanished Golden Age toward some equally cinematic doom that is always about to arrive but never quite manages the feat. Now and again someone suggests instead that history moves in cycles, and is promptly shouted down by all right-thinking people. Yeats also recognised the cyclical nature of history, but saw it as a process that moves one way and then the opposite way, driven back and forth by contending forces.

As Yeats knew well, the Greek philosopher Empedocles got there more than two millennia ahead of him, and William Blake put the same vision into his Mental Traveller and his prophetic books. Yet the insight still has power to shock. “What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift the names, Saint Catherine of Siena and Michelangelo, are the two scales of a balance, the two butt-ends of a seesaw?” Yeats wrote. “What if every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other secular; one wise, the other foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine, the other devilish?”

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Yeats remembered that Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex was written and performed for one of the most sacred religious festivals of the Athenian year, received in much the same spirit that European audiences a century ago directed toward the Passion Play at Oberammergau. He knew just how great a reversal of religious feeling took place when Christianity and Islam in the western half of Eurasia and Buddhism in the eastern half supplanted the faiths of the two millennia preceding them. A reversal of a similar kind awaits every movement in human society, politics, and the arts, just as it awaits our civilisation in due time. The supposedly straight line of history does not just bend, it curves around and heads in the other direction.

That way of thinking allowed Yeats moments of startling prescience. He wrote, “What discords will drive Europe into that artificial unity — only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle — which is the decadence of every civilisation?” Those discords are a matter of history now, and the bundle will join them in due time. More generally, the blank incomprehension shown by today’s privileged classes as they face a world that refuses to behave according to plan comes as no surprise to readers of A Vision. Those baffled looks show up reliably in the very late phases of a civilisation, as the last sliver of moonlight gives way to a fertile darkness where something new and very different will be born.

Our position in the wheel of the phases was no mystery to Yeats, for that matter. He identified 1927 as the beginning of the 26th phase, and sketched out briefly what lay ahead. The dissolution of our collective discourse into furious bellowing of empty slogans is as typical of the last phases of the cycle as it is familiar to us today. Yet the great difficulty readers will have in approaching A Vision is precisely that it flies in the face of all our modern assumptions about history and change. Yeats was under no illusions here:

Because I have a marvellous thing to say,
A certain marvelous thing
None but the living mock,
Though not for sober ear;
It may be all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

Likely inspired by the anti-republican wave that followed the French Revolution, Milton’s resurrectionists tore away pieces of his jawbone, his teeth, and his remaining locks of hair, possibly selling them on as souvenirs. The poet William Cowper was so outraged that he wrote “Stanzas on the late indecent liberties taken with the remains of the great Milton”. To say that these vandals were “taking liberties” is something of an understatement.

St Giles Cripplegate is a small gothic church, one of the few medieval churches lucky enough to survive both the Great Fire of London and the Blitz. It is located at the heart of the Barbican, whose charmless brutalist architecture makes for quite the incongruous backdrop. Few people visit the church today, even though John Bunyan was a parishioner, Oliver Cromwell was married here, and Shakespeare lived just around the corner. It is one of the city’s many overlooked gems.

When I was teaching English Literature at the City of London School for Girls, one of the key texts was Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Given its author was buried less than 30 metres from my classroom, I would take my students to the church as part of their course. They would be able to see the nondescript plaque on the floor by the altar which simply reads: “Near this spot was buried John Milton author of Paradise Lost born 1608 — died 1674”. This is quite the contrast to the elaborate marble memorial in Westminster Abbey erected in 1737, with a likeness of the poet sculpted by John Michael Rysbrack.

That the author of the most significant epic poem in the English language should have been condemned to such an ignominious end is a reminder that the fate of heretics is rarely pleasant. Milton was a free-thinker whose worldview was grounded in reason. At a time when the divine right of kings was rarely contested, Milton considered it unreasonable that a man should be king on the basis of an accident of birth. He believed in meritocracy, which is partly what drew him to Cromwell.

Milton had his inconsistencies. He was a profoundly religious man, but nonetheless wrote extensively about the right to divorce. Most remarkably, his puritanical strain was at odds with his eschewal of the Calvinist notion of predestination. For Milton, free will was an essential aspect of our humanity. The fall of man depicted in Paradise Lost is meaningless unless Adam and Eve have chosen freely to partake of the forbidden fruit.

But Milton’s commitment to individual liberty is most keenly expressed in his Areopagitica (1644), a counterblast to the Licensing Order of June 1643, which decreed that all printed texts be passed before a censor in advance of publication. Often cited as a defence of press freedom, the text carries resonance for us at a time when liberalism and free speech is increasingly under threat. Rarely has the case been made with greater elegance and clarity. “Give me the liberty,” he writes, “to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties”.

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Of course, Milton’s conceptualisation of “liberty” differs significantly from ours. His was a specifically Christian notion of liberty, predicated on this idea of virtuous self-regulation. He was at pains to distinguish between what he called “licence”, the freedom to do whatever one desires, and “liberty”, by which the faithful man is called to purge those passions and temptations that enslave the soul. “Licence”, Milton contends, is no freedom at all, but an indulgence that amounts to a form of self-imposed tyranny.

Amid all this, Milton is adamant that we are not the merest marionettes, guided by divine providence, but individual agents with responsibility and choice. The act of censorship, he argues, deprives us of our right to determine for ourselves how best to conduct our lives. He makes the case that censorship might begin with good intentions, but that subjective judgement will always blur the line between the heretical and the distasteful. As he puts it in Areopagitica, censors do not “stay in matters heretical” but “any subject that is not to their palate”.

We see evidence of this in today’s “hate speech” laws, which vary markedly from country to country. In 2012, the European Court of Human Rights concluded that there “is no universally accepted definition of the expression ‘hate speech’” and a manual published by Unesco in 2015 accepted that “the possibility of reaching a universally shared definition seems unlikely”. With the concept of “hate” remaining forever nebulous, how can any government possibly hope to legislate against it?

Last week, the Irish government passed the Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences Bill, with the minister for justice Helen McEntee uttering the usual shibboleth that “hate speech is not about free speech”. The Government claims that the Bill will “protect genuine freedom of expression”, a justification reminiscent of Scotland’s former justice secretary Humza Yousaf, who asserted that the SNP’s recent Hate Crime and Public Order Bill “does not undermine free speech”, but rather “protects it”. It’s anyone’s guess how a Bill that could see those guilty of “insulting” behaviour imprisoned for seven years, and criminalises statements uttered in the privacy of citizens’ own homes, could in any way be considered a “protection” of civil liberties.

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Those responsible for such misguided legislation ought to read their Milton. Their intentions may be compassionate, but the dangers of limiting the scope of individual conscience ought to be clear by now. In any case, isn’t hate an inevitable human feeling, and should law enforcement agencies really be attempting to audit our emotions? And what if the person making the decision about what constitutes “hate” is wrong? As Juvenal has it, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

History does not look fondly on the hubris of those who appoint themselves as arbiters of permissible speech and thought; their authority is only ever contingent on the wisdom of their time. “How shall the licencers themselves be confided in,” writes Milton, “unless we can confer upon them, or they assume to themselves above all others in the land, the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness?” John Stuart Mill made a similar point in On Liberty (1859). “All silencing of discussion,” he wrote, “is an assumption of infallibility”.

Milton reminds us to retain our trust in humanity’s capacity for reason. We have convinced ourselves that we exist in an age of “fake news”, but the concept is hardly unprecedented. Milton saw the struggle between Truth and Falsehood as perpetual, and envisaged them as antagonists on a battlefield. “Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” It isn’t so much that “fake news” is unique to the digital age, but rather that we appear to have lost our faith in our ability to make the stronger case.

It is Milton’s contention that we are far better placed to know and overcome evil if we are acquainted with its essence, and censorship deprives us of this opportunity. Censorship, he maintains, is tantamount to a repudiation of the human spirit. This is why he reserves particular scorn for the destruction of books. We have learnt to laugh off the antics of activists who burn copies of J.K. Rowling’s novels and post the footage online, but, to Milton, this is akin to a form of homicide, “whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself”. The man who burns a book, he tells us, “slays an immortality rather than a life”.

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And yet, Milton leaves himself wide open to accusations of hypocrisy. Areopagitica is a polemic against licensers and the way in which they stymie the possibility of individual choice, but he was to become a censor for the Commonwealth five years after its publication. He was an elitist whose emphasis on liberty certainly did not extend to Catholics. His final written work, the polemical tract Of True Religion (1673), railed against the “growth of popery” and exhorted the public to “beware the growth of this Romish weed”.

While this may strike us inconsistent, to Milton it was the logical progression of his principles. Milton perceived the Catholic Church to be a weapon against freedom, a belief that was surely consolidated by his tour of Europe in the late 1630s. Milton claimed to have met the ageing Galileo in Florence, who at the time was under house arrest by the Inquisition; he had fallen foul of the “hate speech” laws of the Holy See.

I recently spoke on Milton at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, where only the week before protesters had attempted to silence the journalist Helen Joyce. The master of the college had hardly helped matters, by emailing all students and staff in advance to smear her work as “offensive, insulting and hateful”. This seems very much at odds with the college’s statement on freedom of speech: “An active speaker programme is fundamental to the academic and other activities of the College and Fellows, staff and students are encouraged to invite a wide range of speakers and to engage critically but courteously with them.”

Of course, disparities between an institution’s official statements and its actual behaviour are nothing new, particularly when there has been a degree of ideological capture. Nonetheless, there is cause for optimism. The treatment of Helen Joyce has backfired, with a number of influential college alumni now considering withdrawing donations. Professor Arif Ahmed, who organised the talks by Helen Joyce and myself, has no intention of surrendering to pressure from above. And next week, the Cambridge Union will be hosting UnHerd‘s Kathleen Stock, whose gender-critical views saw her subjected to a campaign of harassment at Sussex.

For all these little victories, culture warriors will no doubt persist in their efforts to see the Overton Window narrowed to the dimensions of a porthole. This is why the sentiments of Milton strike us as more potent than ever. His defence of free speech will always retain its power where the free exchange of ideas is assailed by increasingly shrill demands to conform.

A conservative in everything else (literature, politics, jazz), in this Larkin was a trendsetter. An aggressive reappraisal of the work based upon revelations about the life — this is the pattern that has established itself for every successive male literary titan, and which is in the post for the rest. But today, 100 years from his birth, Larkin’s lines remain widely loved and quoted at a time when poetry in general seems to be in terminal decline. That he survived this cancellation makes its story a parable for our age of intolerance, forcing us to reckon directly with the relationship of the dignified public to the sordid private, of art and beauty to ugly, human truth.

Larkin’s letters, published in 1991, are first and foremost a triumph of life-writing. A chronicle of the pinched English post-war, they record (in hilarious, confiding detail) a time of rationed cigarettes, economical beer-drinking, class resentment and fear of “abroad”. And they are rich in the era’s comedy of coping, recording money troubles (“I am having an ineffectual economy drive. It consists of not buying other people drinks”), dysfunctional dwellings (“central heating in the sense that it never reached the bedrooms or bathroom”) and self-conscious ageing (“There are some nice pictures of me from when I didn’t look like a pregnant salmon”).

But their publication also immediately opened up Larkin to attack. They lifted the veil from a carefully protected personality, rendering a writer who had aimed at the universal suddenly and frightfully particular. Most obviously they drew him into the realm of politics, littered as they were with reflexive prejudices around race, class and women. And the insularity of Larkin’s world and perspective was soon transferred by his attackers onto his poetry, itself downgraded to “minor” and “provincial”. But more troublingly still, they hinted at the underlying source of these prejudices: his distaste for the world as it stood. Morbid humour aside, the letters’ key theme is decline, and a growing resentment at life’s failures and Larkin’s own inability to correct them.

Initially, failure seemed distant. A First from Oxford, two novels and a book of poems published by the age of 25. But first the fiction dried up, and novel three was abandoned. Ambition and hope fell away from Larkin like clumps of hair, his dreams of an independent writer’s life (which he deeply envied Kingsley Amis for enjoying) replaced by the drudgery of his work as a librarian. He was sustained only by his poetry, until that mostly went too in the late Seventies, leaving only the illness and alcoholism of his final years: “I used to believe that I should perfect the work and the life could fuck itself. Now I’m not doing anything, all I’ve got is a fucked up life.”

This was all unhappy enough. But it took Andrew Motion’s biography two years later to fully entangle the personal and political, to smash the glass and set sirens wailing with outrage. Far from the eccentric chronicler of 20th century Englishness, it seemed the real Larkin — a midden of unexamined neuroses — had been unearthed. Of course, it all starts with mum and dad, in this case especially dad, Sydney Larkin, a domestic totalitarian who decorated his office and home with Nazi regalia and took the young Philip on holiday to the Reich in 1936 and 1937 to witness the “new Germany”. Philip then heads up to Oxford where — besides developing his poetic talent — he developed the odd and introverted sexuality that beset him all his life.

Under the auspices of “Brunette Coleman”, Larkin spent an abnormal amount of time at university writing a series of lesbian schoolgirl fictions (“As Pam finally pulled Marie’s tunic down over her black stockinged legs, Miss Holden, pausing only to snatch a cane from the cupboard…”) These stories were harmless smut, mainly produced for the amusement of friends. But bondage and schoolgirls would become erotic constants for Larkin — he made sorties from Hull to Soho to seek out specialist magazines on the subject, a cache of which was kept in his library office (“to wank to, or with, or at”), and also circulated with like-minded comrades (“do pass on any that have ceased to stimulate”). But presumably not shared was the dream journal Larkin kept at university, in which sex dreams featuring Nazis, black dogs, faeces and oppressive but distant parental figures predominate.

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This far from cloudless adolescent psychology is not immediately suggestive of an empathetic poetic spirit, and we are now understandably wary of such a congealed male sexuality. It would be easy to write off the young Larkin as a borderline incel. But after this inauspicious start there were several love affairs, and Larkin’s erotic misalignment remains as Martin Amis recently wrote “mysterious and very hard to infiltrate… a maze, or a marshland with a few slippery handholds”. Sex itself more or less dried up in Larkin’s mid-30s — like trying to get “someone else to blow your own nose for you” was how he described the act itself. And terrified of marriage his whole life, he strung along his companion of more than 30 years, Monica Jones, in a relationship in which he was manipulative and unfaithful — not through any philanderer’s prerogative but through a juvenile fear of commitment.

A recent biographer of Jones even judges Larkin’s behaviour to be coercive control, and clearly shows how he stifled and inhibited her life. And there is one instance of now-immortalised cruelty: he colluded with Amis in fictionalising Monica as the clingy, boring, attention-seeking Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim. He even sent her a nervous copy after publication which she read over an agonising three days, and never forgot. “Oh he was a bugger,” Monica later said. “He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.”

Whether one’s response to this suburban tragedy is pity or disgust, the effect is the same as his letters: to de-universalise Larkin. To make a man, whose secluded personality meant he was only known through his work, seedily peculiar. It is a blow that has struck many a stale male in recent years, the reputations of (most recently) Philip Roth, V.S. Naipaul, and Saul Bellow collapsing from their 20th century pomp as their work, which pitched itself at broad, sweeping themes, was shown to be the product of a flawed masculinity.

Unlike them Larkin has come through the other side. So, what do readers continue to find in his work? It can’t be his personality or his surroundings — indeed, the post-war so wonderfully enlivened in Larkin’s letters no longer exists. But his poetry has endured because it does capture a universal human instinct, one which can now be read as a subconscious retort to the attacks upon his personality: the desire to record what is humdrum and shameful, and to transform it into something sublime. To, in John Updike’s phrase, give “the mundane its beautiful due”.

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Larkin did not live in an age of therapy and self-care — he would barely have known how to recognise his emotional flaws, let alone “work on them”. And he never directly addressed the most squalid parts of his interior world. But, as he famously said, “deprivation for me is what daffodils were for Wordsworth”, a quip often interpreted as cutesy and self-dramatising. But he really meant it; misery stirred his muse. And you can see it happening within the poems as he takes some highly personal, ignoble incident and uses it as a platform to ascend toward some classical profundity.

There is a needy, lustful instinct behind the initial lines of “Sunny Prestatyn” and “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”, and Larkin often uses his openings as confessional hooks, drawing you into the naked reality of his consciousness before leading you away and above it. But this movement is best seen in “High Windows”, opening with the notoriously obscene lines:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

The poem continues relatively plainly from this ugly statement of generational sexual jealousy, weighing up this feeling and pondering if Larkin’s elders had envied him in his own youth. And then, from nowhere, an extraordinary shift takes places, up and away from that scene:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

This is an image of ambiguous oblivion, perhaps implying religious absolution behind what could be stained-glass church windows, or a nihilistic absence of meaning beyond them. But either way, the image is that of a thwarted 20th century Romantic, a poet fully aware of the coarseness of his age and personhood, but able to find in it metaphysical beauty nonetheless. Not all Larkin poems take such an extreme route. But this is the technical accomplishment that recurs across his greatest works, a capacity to transfigure train journeys, music, photographs, and churches into pockets of narrative which illuminate what he saw as the abiding human themes. “Time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love.”

The greatest writers will always be those who have suffered dully all the wrongs of man, and yet remain alive to a greater wisdom and beauty beyond what they could afford themselves. And to read through Larkin’s letters, with all their everyday drollness and tedium, and grapple with his personality while remembering the genius of his poetry is to be confronted with this truth. But what is more, his poetry insists upon it, understanding that to be human is to be familiar with what is low and wrong, and to yearn for what could, possibly, transcend it. This is why Larkin resists what our age of moral purity would prefer: to be able to separate the fuddled bigot and the sedate chronicler of his age. Both men wrote the poems.

Schools closed and the summer exams were cancelled, but I kept my new job. It was a comprehensive school, and my brief was to tutor kids who were academically struggling through Google Meet, the fat and ugly cousin of Zoom. Because everything was up in the air, I was given free rein to teach the kids whatever I wanted that could reasonably be considered English Literature. So I decided to teach them about the poets I have enjoyed since I was little, such as Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney. Those few months constituted one of the best periods of my life.

The OCR, one of the main exam boards in England, will remove the poetry of Heaney and Larkin (among other poets) from its school syllabus this September. Their justification is simple: the syllabus needs to be more inclusive and exciting. Heaney and Larkin are male and stale. They reflect a bygone era that doesn’t speak to an increasingly diverse classroom. They will be replaced by poets from British-Somali, British-Guyanese and Ukrainian backgrounds, and one of the first black women in 19th century America to publish a novel. 14 out of the 15 new writers added to the syllabus will be non-white. Jill Duffy, the chief executive of the OCR, stated: “This is an inspiring set of poems that demonstrates our ongoing commitment to greater diversity.”

This change is part of a wider movement to decolonise the curriculum. For too long, supporters of this movement argue, schools have deliberately excluded people of colour from the English canon and History textbooks. Just as ethnic minority people are discriminated against across society, they are marginalised in the classroom, and the latter injustice reinforces the former. One way to challenge this state of affairs is to decentre white, male authors, replacing them with writers who fall into other categories.

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Jeffrey Boakye, the author of the recent book, I Heard What You Said, is a prominent advocate for decolonising the curriculum. Boakye, a black British man of Ghanaian heritage, argues that teachers should engage more vocally with race politics. For him, “being a non-white teacher is an inherently political position”. And the reason why the curriculum is “so unapologetically white is the arrogance of empire”. Our values, he argues, are rooted not in “scientific, political and industrial revolutions” but “in genocide, slavery and colonialism”.

Boakye is an English teacher. And English, according to the movement to decolonise the curriculum, should advance social justice. In his book, Boakye refers to one of his students, a black girl called Gertrude; he writes that after he taught her a poem called “Checking Out Me History”, by the British-Guyanese poet John Agard, she felt seen. “It spoke to her experience of a white education that didn’t speak to her sense of personal history.” The poem mentions figures from history like Toussaint L’Ouverture and Mary Seacole: we are supposed to believe it is great precisely because it celebrates black heroes.

The viewpoint of the curriculum decolonisers is based on the assumption that black students resonate most with poetry written by black poets. That is nonsense. Why should a black African student, for instance, identify at all with a poem written by a West Indian man? Because of their shared race? Race is not the only thing that defines the life and experiences of a person; I used to think only avowed racists believed it does. At a more practical level, why should a poem be taught if it can speak to students only on the basis of their being black: what about the Asian and white and mixed-race students in the classroom? This is not inclusion; it is division.

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Decolonising the curriculum takes place at a superficial level, whereas I taught Larkin to my students because his poems move me at a visceral level: they convey the sense that, yes, this is what it is like to be haunted by fear and loneliness and impotence. And they do so with artistic virtuosity, using the right words in the right order to express such feelings. Consider these contrasting descriptions of death in his late masterpiece “Aubade”, both of them spot on but stylistically different from each other: the straightforward description is the “anaesthetic from which none come round”, and the more elegant version is:

The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is not a male or stale sentiment; this is a poem full of versatility and exactness, range and compactness. In other words, it is characterised by stylistic diversity, which should be a more relevant form of diversity in an English Literature classroom than the vagaries of skin pigmentation.

The poetry critic Jeremy Noel-Tod argues in a piece for the New Statesman that someone like Larkin should be replaced by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. He writes that, “as a white teenager growing up in rural Norfolk in the Nineties, I wish my teachers had taken the chance to talk about the Soyinka poem in class”, because the Nigerian poet “might have helped us to understand structural racism as the scaffolding of the home country we took for granted”. If Noel-Tod wants to argue Soyinka is as good a poet as Larkin, fair enough, but his argument doesn’t reference art or merit. He is treating poetry as a sub-set of sociology — arguing that we should read non-white poets because they offer us insights into social and political issues.

If English is simply another variant of sociology or politics, why should the study of it be distinguished from these subjects? Sheffield Hallam University has recently been criticised for suspending its English Literature degree and incorporating it into a degree that consists of Literature, Creative Writing and Language. The justification for this proposal is that the study of English should serve a purpose, that it should have tangible benefits, such as enabling students to get a professional job. Many of the people who advocate for decolonising the curriculum might object to this, not recognising that they are also arguing that English should have a purpose — not getting students a job, but making them less racist. Even if they don’t officially want English to be assimilated into other fields of the humanities, like politics, in practice that is what they promote.

This is profoundly patronising to a writer such as Soyinka. He is the first African to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But a white poetry critic like Noel-Tod doesn’t value him for his artistry, but for his activism.

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Another problem with filtering literature through this rigidly ideological lens is that it disables the fundamental quality of any devoted lover of literature: curiosity. It stops us from reflecting on the particular cultural context of a poet or his poetry, and instead takes a reductive view of writers. Consider the case of Seamus Heaney: why should a poet who grew up in rural Northern Ireland, in a Catholic family, be seen as embodying the white, male British establishment? Ultimately, though, what matters to those who love Heaney and Larkin is not their identities; it is their expert manipulation of language.

I love the firmness of Heaney’s lyricism and his scrupulous eye. In “Blackberry-Picking”, for instance, he writes of both the joy (“You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet / Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it / Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for / Picking”) and the darker side to this endeavour (“But when the bath was filled we found a fur, / A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. / The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush / The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour”). This is what ultimately distinguishes poetry, not communicating a direct message, but evoking a powerful sensibility.

Of course, a poet’s ability to do this does not depend on their race. The fact that great poets from non-white backgrounds are excluded from study is bad. But it is bad not because the identities of such poets are not being “centred”; it is bad because students are missing out on great poetry. Blindness to the artistic work of ethnic minority people is worthy of criticism, but assessing such writers on a tokenistic or ideological basis is another form of blindness: in both cases, the poetic merits of their work are ignored.

Those who support decolonising the curriculum see the relationship between non-white and white authors only in terms of conflict. They see it as a zero-sum game: we need to decentre white and male writers to empower writers from marginalised communities. But this underestimates the debt that many non-white authors owe to the traditions of Western literature. Writers are always in conversation with each other. Toni Morrison is renewing William Faulkner; Zadie Smith is renewing Dickens; Derek Walcott is renewing Homer. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was written in part as a rejection of Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but the title of Achebe’s novel is taken from a poem by William Butler Yeats and the plot resembles the structure of a Greek tragedy. There is some conflict between white and non-white authors in the canon, but there is also great continuity between these two groups. By ignoring this fact, Boakye is reinforcing an assumption anti-racists ought to dismantle: that to be Western is to be white.

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W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most influential radical black thinkers of the 20th century. But he also loved Richard Wagner. Du Bois proudly affixed himself to Western culture. As he put it, “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the colour line, I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. From out of the caves of evening that swing between strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”

C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian Trotskyist, similarly affirmed an attachment to Western civilisation: “I didn’t learn literature from the mango tree,” he once wrote, “or bathing on the shore and getting the sun of colonial countries; I set out to master the literature, philosophy and ideas of Western civilisation. That is where I have come from and I would not pretend to be anything else.” In his dying days, when he was visited by Edward Said, James wanted to talk to Said about classical music rather than colonialism. When he died, James was called the Black Plato by the Times.

The traditions of Western literature and culture belong just as much to black people as white people. It is part of my inheritance. And that is why I loved teaching those kids: I was sharing what belonged just as much to them as to the kids with hundreds of books in their family homes or a private education.

My favourite student was a boy called Peter. I could tell from his surname that his family came from Ghana. He came to every single lesson, while all my other students found an excuse to skip at least a few classes. I never met Peter. I still don’t even know what he looks like; his camera was always turned off. But we cultivated a connection, not through the fact that both of our families come from west Africa, but by familiarising ourselves with the great works of English Literature. We read Larkin and Heaney, but we also read Derek Walcott. We read snippets of prose too — George Orwell and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. The priority in studying James and Morrison was the elegance of their sentences, the effect of their imagery, and the sophistication of their tone. When we did approach the topic of racism, we had a foundation to build on. And all the time, I never felt the need to “decentre” white, male authors or slap on diverse voices for the sake of it. I was simply guided by what has moved me since I was a boy and continues to move me now: the transcendent beauty of great art.

It was published only in 2018. It’s hard to believe that a little under four years later, its rights have been returned to me and its charities have repudiated it. It is not as if there is a real world scandal or complaint from a young poet here — the reverse is true. But the literary and theoretical charges against it are very serious. They predate by some time those against my memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, and are in many ways foundational to them.

Remarkably, in 2020, Professor Sandeep Parmar’s state-of-the-nation 2020 essay on poetry and race, “Still Not a British Subject” chose this book by children, rather than any of the hundreds of anthologies and collections of poetry by adults published in the preceding few years, as its ultimate and most damned item. She warned that this book may morally infect the reader, and that to appreciate it is “to be beguiled by the benevolence of whiteness” and even enslaved, as the book “requires an ever-replenishing source of aspirational learners — not just these children, but all poets who are perceived as ‘striving'”.

It’s a large charge for a slim volume, but literary criticism is an ambitious medium these days. Academic essays like Parmar’s are cited on social media accounts and pinned to profiles like manifestos. As our lives have shrunk over Covid, scrolling through the endless smorgasbord of quotes that is Twitter and analysing them become many people’s primary political activity. There’s been a shift in attitudes too: Parmar is surely right to say, as she does in her essay, that in the last few years many book-reading people have come to agree that our literary culture is actively malign, infected, as she puts it, with “a pervasive and unempathetic whiteness” .

Literary criticism has long taught us to trace and name moral systems in texts through the identification of tropes and story, but now it has discovered a more important job in rooting that malignancy out. Books such as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility have further popularised the activity of linguistic rooting in living humans, and all of this lends political relevance and prestige back to the parent activity of literary criticism. It is not surprising now, to come across terms such as Parmar’s “lyric violence” and “lyric dread”, nor her idea that mere poems, can have (unspecified) “real, even dangerous, consequences”.

As it has become more relevant and exciting, literary criticism has also become more personal and shed some of its hefty academic conventions. Once, the word ‘trope’ indicated a system of language and imagery traceable through a whole, lengthy text — a semantic field or underlying narrative shape. Now the word has shrunk to mean a single metaphor or even word. Wide assertions may balance on very slender, tweet-sized proofs.

Thus Parmar diagnoses Carol Ann Duffy with “lyric dread” — an end-of-empire anxiety — and the fear of “the influx of foreign bodies of all kinds” on the evidence, not of her oeuvre or even a collection of poems, but of an image of oilseed rape in a single poem. The conventions around quotations have also changed: TS Eliot Prize-winning Hannah Sullivan’s enviably accomplished poetic oeuvre, for example, is said to hold a “obsessive superimposition of the past on the just-past-present” and a sinister “fantasy of an unchanging nation”, on the basis not of verse but of conflated extracts from an “essay” which transpires on closer inspection to be a short piece of journalism about a favourite park.

Overt argument or evident intention are often, in this new criticism, less important than the critic’s own linguistic detective work — bias, after all, is always unconscious. For my introduction to England Poems from a School, for example, Parmar is not to be fooled by the lengthy argument about multilingualism and the inheritance of poetries, nor sentences such as “it is impossible to overstate profound and multi-layered are the forces of cultural silencing; or how strong and subtle is the belief that poetry belongs only to the privileged”. She skips past them, in order to pluck out that single word “striving” — which I agree, makes me sound like the Daily Express when describing migrant families — and conjures me on its evidence as a memsahib, teaching English as “a linguistic and disciplinary tool of colonial domination”.

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As for the poems, she declines to quote from them at all, because to do so will be to join in the “exoticising” “servitude” the works have been “pressed” into; but she assures us they are in any case without originality, merely expressing “a uniformity of suffering”, and with only “loss, belonging, otherness, migration, war and family” as subjects.

These were good enough for The Odyssey — but I’d still say Parmar didn’t quite capture their essence. The poems are often about dissonance, and duality, but they are also about language: a Russian proverb summons a freezing Soviet tram into a sitting room; on a computer screen, a poet assigns her Hungarian to “Never Show Again”. They are often joyous and they are also, all of them, dynamic, not passive, about living with the duality of a mixed identity, about changing, moving on, seizing the moment and their lives.

Then I
set out to be a woman.
fearless of the natives
Down There
In their world
Not mine 

writes Rukiya Khatun in the title poem, England, imagining the country she will soon migrate to, and how, in a magnificent colonial reversal, she will possess it. The poets and the poems write themselves, and their Englishes, into this imagined England and its poetry. “I want a poem,” says Shukria Rezaei in the epigraph, figuring verse as an Eid pastry, “that leaves gleam on the fingertips”.

And Mukahang Limbu answers her from the end of the book:

“My words
have to have colour… shades of hummingbirds across hijabs
of Christian girls
in silver boots…”

Limbu is evoking the multicultural classroom from which, over a decade, all these poems grew — classrooms where I have spent most of my teaching life and my happiest hours. Exactly what I think I am doing there, and what multiculturalism itself might be, though, has never been easy to intellectually define. When I began teaching in the Eighties, I argued with a French friend about how it was we allowed hijabs, turbans and crucifixes in my North London comprehensive when her Parisian lycée would have banned the lot. Why were we so muddled, so unenlightened, she asked? What was this with the Hanukkah candles and Christmas trees, the Diwali party for Nelson Mandela?

My answers were always hesitant, because multiculturalism has always been a practice rather than a theory. Multiculturalism is the thing that happens in schools when young people from all over the world — overwhelmingly, in England in the past 20 years, recent migrants — turn up in your classroom. Multiculturalism is a messy, quotidian, humanist, creed. It was better if a child brought their whole self to school, I used to tell my French friend. You can’t make a division between faith and culture, not really; everyone can learn from each other, stumblingly. Solecisms and Easter eggs all round — what’s not to like?

A lot, it seems today. The new criticism has made the underlying dominance of white colonial Christianity in the lycée much easier to name — but that same light shines cruelly on the soggy body of English multiculturalism. Solecisms now seem dangerous; trust, presumptuous; Easter eggs a deadly gift. As Parmar sternly asserts, isn’t it true that this country “is not (nor has ever been) tolerant or kind towards non-white people”? Multiculturalism’s answers can never match such absolutist rhetoric. Multiculturalism can only say: we try to be kind; individuals are kind; there are kind schools. It can ask: what, please, is the alternative? It can say: look, this is a beautiful poem.

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Professor Parmar was educated in California. The experience of sitting in a classroom where most students are not born in that country, and where there is no majority group, is a particularly 21st-century, English thing. I experience these classrooms as exceptionally kind and creative places where young people hear and listen to each other openly and deeply; make cross-racial and cross-cultural friendships that endure, and, far from being “dominated” by English, remake the language daily in thrilling ways. Poems grow there readily, and poems, also in my experience, do not grow from cruelty, but from confidence and affirmation.

And also from attention. The alchemy that made the poems of England so exceptional was one part multilingualism, one part experience, and one part attention. We created, through readings and self-publishing a culture in school where young people listened to each others poems often and willingly. To this, over time, was added the magical attention of Twitter: adults, often hundreds of them, often writers or teachers themselves, reading and praising the young people’s poems, giving back to them, making them feel heard and important. It was rocket fuel for the young people’s motivation to write and also to read widely in contemporary poetry — poets were people they knew.

No doubt this attention was sometimes, by the new critical standards, impure or patronising, but the overall process of being read and published did not seem to have “real, even dangerous consequences” or to “press” these young people into “servitude”, or “exoticise” them — indeed they have said specifically otherwise — but to inspire them and fill them with confidence. Several of them have gone to great things in writing and politics. They will not be derailed by the destruction of the book, but they are very much saddened by it.

In 2016, a young boy just arrived from Syria, Mohamed Assaf, tumbled into an Arabic poetry workshop I was running with Oxford University and wrote a short poem, apparently off the cuff. It took weeks to get it translated, then printed in a book I was making. It ran:

“The Word Ummi,
My beloved mother,
When I go to my house the pain of missing her
Arrives before me.”

This devastating poem ran first through our school, making Mohamed famous and giving him his own assembly. Then it went onto Twitter, speaking to American poets grappling with Donald Trump’s response to the migration crisis. Then it went into England, Poems from a School to be produced and distributed as beautifully as our publishing industry knew how.

No doubt some people involved were virtue signalling or pleased with their own virtue: overall, though, people were acting from their best impulses; not to promulgate the “benevolence of whiteness” but to frame and present a work of piercing humanity. Certainly, the multicultural consensus in publishing that allowed the production of England Poems helped diverse young people in their lives. The current moment, for all the high principles so sincerely stated, does not seem so productive.

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Professor Palmer was privately educated.

Jennings was, if not the poet of her age, certainly one of them. Her 1979 Selected Poems sold out in two weeks and went on to sell 50,000 copies. Her Collected Poems sold 35,000 copies. The 40 books she wrote and edited (including anthologies) sold about a quarter of a million copies. Schmidt wrote to Jennings, also in 1989, that she was “unrivalled”. This wasn’t strictly true — Wendy Cope and was also selling in great numbers in the late Eighties, and Larkin’s Collected Poems was published — but Schmidt was broadly right: few poets sell so well. Perhaps her work holds answers, then, to the question of why Brits have lost confidence in our poetry.

And yes, there has been a decline. Although 2019 data showed a surge in poetry sales, the bestsellers were Rupi Kaur, Leonard Cohen, John Cooper Clarke, Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy and Homer. We can count there one singer songwriter, one poet laureate, one performance poet, two dead poets, and an Insta poet. Traditional literary poetry is not well represented. Lyricists have adopted their cultural role. Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016. Two years later, Faber published selected Kate Bush lyrics. Next month, Paul McCartney’s complete lyrics will go on sale, in two volumes.

And while there is lots of poetry these days — festivals, competitions, prizes, resident poets, commissions from public bodies, Poems on the Underground, and so on — there are few readers relative to other serious writing. Poetry’s audience is broadly an audience of people on creative writing courses — or who belong in some way part to the poetry scene. The common reader is looking elsewhere.

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As Ruth Padel said, the fault begins with Modernism, which took poetry into “elitist” and “obscure” territory. And it is this force that Jennings was reacting against. She was a traditional poet; like Kingsley Amis, who gave her her start by publishing her in an anthology, she was part of The Movement, a literary grouping that felt that while poetry matters deeply, it is not what makes the world go round. They were trying to avoid being too literary, too pretentious, too poetic. They wanted to stay close to their audience, unlike Modernism, which erected a giant “No Through Way” sign, in Betjeman’s words. They disliked what Amis would later call — in a dismissive remark about his son Martin’s work — “buggering about with the reader.”

When obscurity was in vogue, Jennings’ poetry was about “big” topics — so much so that it often seems, deceptively, like anyone could say what she does. That’s a talent many Modernists simply didn’t want to have. No wonder readers left. Jennings had a large audience because she was not trying to write poetry that excluded. In accordance with her Catholic faith, she saw poetry as communion and communication. This is a world away from the recent Nobel Laureate Louise Glück, who once said she had no interest in widening her audience.

Perhaps this is defeatism. Nowadays, poetry has a lot to compete with. We have many other things to entertain us of an evening: television, movies, the internet. As Nicholson Baker wrote in his novel The Anthologist:

At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognise that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published.

Unlike much internet culture, most modern poetry does not leave you — as Elizabeth Jennings would say — “excited, charged and changed”. A pop song like I Will Survive has likely had more positive cultural impact than an entire generation of poets.

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'Slam poetry' is all rhyme no reason

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An obvious answer suggests itself. Make poetry better. This is certainly the view of Dana Gioia, the Poet Laureate of California, whose 1991 essay Can Poetry Matter? argued that poetry was (and is) in such a state because poetry has become a closed shop: it’s become a question of people with creative writing degrees and teaching jobs writing poems for each other. Gioia has helped revive the culture of poetry reading in America with the Poetry Out Loud Recitation Contest, an old-fashioned way to make literary writing relevant to the common reader. It works. The programme has engaged 4 million students since 2005.

Unsurprisingly, Gioia has also written a moving apology of Jennings’ life and work. He notes that she is overlooked because she was traditional at a time when innovation was in vogue. “She was not.” Gioia says, “the average professor’s idea of a modern poet.”

Now, the common reader is drawn to writers that are, like Jennings, not the average critic’s idea of a poet. Instapoets have discovered popularity most literary poets couldn’t dream of: Rupi Kaur and Holly McNish have sold millions of copies. But this engagement from the common reader is not good enough for a sizeable chunk of the poetic establishment. Rebecca Watts’ view, from her 2018 polemic The Cult of the Nobel Amateur, is all too common: she complains of “the rise of a cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their ‘honesty’ and ‘accessibility’ — buzzwords for the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft that characterises their work.” Her conclusion? “Artless poetry sells.”

Watts is right, of course. Much of the poetry she discussed wasn’t very good. But it’s telling, perhaps, that her objections are not only with the finished poem, but with the process of its production: she criticises McNish for writing poetry without redrafting or revising. This was, however, precisely Jennings’ technique. In the second half of her life, she sent bagfuls of spiral bound notebooks to Schmidt, who had to go through and discover the poems contained in the mass of writing.

There is now, thankfully, a New Selected Poems of Jennings’ work — edited, ironically, by Rebecca Watts. One day, perhaps, Rupi Kaur might be a slightly forgotten poet with a new Selected Poems that hopes to make people remember her value. There are many excellent lines of poetry hidden among the mass of her work, waiting for a serious editor.

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After all, Kaur and her ilk speak in an internet idiom that many literary poets lack. The average Insta-scroller is not looking for transcendence; but they probably stand more chance of discovering it than someone who flicks through a literary magazine on a rainy afternoon. If high-brow poetry is going to retrieve its audience, it needs to take account of Jennings’ dictum, “Poetry’s got too far away from life — become too much a parlour game for dons and clever young men.” As Jeremy Paxman said in 2014 after judging the Forward Poetry Prize, “poetry has contrived at its own irrelevance.”

Jennings’ poetry never got too far away from life. The erratic, distressing conditions of her daily existence meant she couldn’t turn her work into a parlour game. Jennings was lonely. She worked as a librarian and an editor for Chatto and Windus, but was essentially unfitted for employment. She lived with her parents well into adulthood until they moved away, devastating her. She suffered a mid-life mental breakdown and endured mid-century treatment including electro-shock therapy. She drank too much. There were multiple suicide attempts. People said, when she accepted her CBE from the Queen, that she had an eccentric appearance, a euphemism for saying she looked poor. (The Times called her “The bag lady of the sonnets”, a remark that remains beneath that paper’s dignity.) She did look poor. She was poor. But the distress, disorder and romantic adventure of her life makes her work — unlike so much contemporary poetry — passionate. To use the “buzzwords” to which Watts so objects: this gives it “honesty” and “accessibility.”

Literary poetry’s real problem is that it is inaccessible. Not only is it locked away in obscure print magazines, it sounds like it is locked away in obscure print magazines. Many literati want to preserve this elite status. Their “concerns” about popular poetry becoming a form of “content” or — heaven forbid — “consumer driven” are of a piece with closed shops everywhere. It’s telling, I think, that Watts’ article made a comparison between popular poetry and Donald Trump. Bad taste aside, this shows us that the highbrows feel under threat.

If we are going to find new lyricists with the immediacy, potency, and inventiveness of Sappho, Herrick, and Frost, we most likely need to look online. Sure, a lot of internet poetry is trash. But so is most highbrow poetry. There’s only one test, over the long run: popularity. As Samuel Johnson said of Pilgrim’s Progress: “it has had the best evidence of its merit, the general and continued approbation of mankind.” So steer clear of the literary reviews and start scrolling Insta. Chances are, the next Elizabeth Jennings is out there.

Despite my own susceptibility to poetry, I had always imagined that, in this age of mass media, it was as niche a phenomenon as lepidopterology or flag-collecting. Imagine my surprise, then, in 2016, when I was given a copy of Hollie McNish’s collection of poems about motherhood, Nobody Told Me. Her short, intense pieces about motherhood spoke to me as a new mum. But here, too, was proof that poetry could be a best-seller in the 21^st century, and poets could hold sell-out gigs and be venerated on Mumsnet 

If McNish is now a cult figure among mothers, poetry has climbed to still giddier heights since Nobody Told Me was published, most recently with the central role played by 22-year-old “slam poet” Amanda Gorman at the inauguration of Joe Biden as US President. Gorman’s poem (and her person, her attire, her youth and even her allegedly very empowering headband) have made her the subject of fevered discourse since her performance.

One can only imagine what Plato would have thought. In the Republic, Plato argued that by virtue of mirroring the messy temporal world, rather than the ideal one of metaphysical Forms, poetry drew human eyes away from contemplating the Good. Far from making poets a central part of presidential inaugurations, Plato thought they should be banned from his ideal republic.

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His disciple Aristotle disagreed, though, arguing that poetry can in fact reveal better versions of the world we live in, helping us to direct our search for that Good. And whether or not you like Gorman’s style, it’s idealistic writing in its most unabashedly Aristotelian form.

Impressionistic and kinetic, The Hill We Climb tells a story of American democracy as something incomplete, whose pursuit is a task that falls on the shoulders of every new American generation. It captures perfectly the progressive ideal: a sense of utopia that constantly needs renewal. Society is threatened by “a force that would shatter our nation/rather than share it”. But, says Gorman, this opposition is destined to be defeated, by the determination of the faithful to “raise this wounded world into a wondrous one”.

Gorman is not the first poet to read verse at a presidential inauguration. But the response to her performance reveals a shift in 21^st century Western politics, as well as in our relationship to poetry. That shift takes us away from the rationalistic style that’s been our norm for centuries, and back toward one that pre-dates the founding of America itself: the age of Elizabeth I.

In 1595, as a member of Elizabeth’s court, Sir Phillip Sidney made the first self-conscious modern move away from the Platonic aversion to verse. In A Defense of Poesie, Sidney argued for the improving power of poetry; far from being something toxic that should be banned from politics, Sidney suggested, the aim of poetry should be “to teach and delight”.

That is, it’s not just legitimate to gift-wrap moral messages in art, in the interests of the greater good. It’s something all artists should be aiming to do across their creative work. It sounds high-minded, but in practice it led to the increasingly deliberate use of literature and performance as propaganda.

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The court in which Sidney operated, both as a writer and politician, was a place in which theatricality and power merged in ways that are difficult to imagine today. Masques, poems, allegories and theatrical performances were inseparable from political influence. And for Elizabeth, performing as a queen was impossible to separate from actually being queen.

During nearly every summer of her 44-year reign, she would stage a spectacular Queen’s Progress in which she’d travel slowly across her realm, elaborately dressed and surrounded by thousands of guards, animals, carts, servants and flunkeys. And while no one since Elizabeth has fused power and theatre with such skill and impact, theatre carved a deep groove through the politics of the age that followed.

It wasn’t until after 1688, when the Glorious Revolution put paid to all the drama — by ending absolute monarchy in favour of a purely ceremonial role — that poetry gradually freed itself from propagandising for the ruling class. Poets took advantage of the blossoming publishing revolution, and gave up aristocratic patronage for earning a living in print. The most famous poets of the subsequent era, the Romantics, wafted around largely detached from real centres of political power while describing themselves — in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous words of 1821 — as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.

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Yet the manipulative potential of storytelling didn’t go away. Instead, it migrated to the parallel domains of political propaganda and commercial advertising, whose pioneers were often one and the same. One such was Edward Bernays, whose description in 1928 of the propagandist as an “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country” echoes almost word-for-word Shelley’s characterisation of the poet.

Fast-forward another century and a new publishing revolution — the digital one — has largely scuppered the income stream that freed the Romantics from the need to seek patronage. The result has been a new class of court poet, whether it’s George the Poet offering corporate presentations in poetic form or Pam Ayres writing advertising doggerel. Hollie McNish, justifying her decision to do a voiceover for an energy supplier, explained: “I think anyone who entirely berates an artist for doing corporate work has likely never been in the financial position to find it hard to turn down.”

But the internet has also had profound consequences for those other inheritors of Aristotle and Sidney: the worlds of advertising and propaganda. Thanks to the internet, we’re no longer passive recipients of messages from TV, print and the press. Instead, we’re all in control of the means (and memes) of symbolic production. Just as Elizabeth I treated her rule as a deadly serious form of LARPing, whenever we pause to take and post a selfie we’re adding to our very own online Queen’s Progress: each of us engaged in never-ending dramatisation of our idealised selves.

And the power of the new online propaganda free-for-all has driven us back into the arms of Elizabethan-style rhetoric, too. Wordplay such as puns and alliteration were part of the rhetorical stock-in-trade for an Elizabethan wordsmith. And while such fancy verbal footwork was frowned upon in the Age of Reason, perhaps it’s only natural that it once again finds a home in a new progressiveness that dismisses objectivity, truth and linear thinking as “whiteness”.

And indeed, in Gorman’s work, her plain-English style gains a “poetic” feeling in speech via rhymes, resonance and puns. “What just is/Isn’t always justice”, as she writes. The slickness of the wordplay makes it seem a done deal, smuggling the revolutionary desire to dynamite all existing norms — including what we understand as ‘justice’ – past the listener, on a tide of verbal showboating.

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If there’s a difference today, it’s that unlike the Elizabethan court, the digital-era update of “slam poetry” seeks to purge language of any reference to literary tradition. Elizabethan poets mingled Biblical references with classical ones in a dazzling range of allusions. But today, even superficially innocent areas of literary and cultural study are coded alongside objectivity as problematic repositories of whiteness.

A modern court rhetoric capable of being both persuasive and inclusive must be purged of any dangerous nods to tradition. Such apparent plainness, blending wordplay with a stubborn refusal to be overtly “literary”, has prompted attacks on Hollie McNish and other “Instapoets” for producing “consumer-driven content”. It’s a style that also infuriates conservative critics of Gorman’s work. One characterised it (accurately) as the perfect embodiment of a politics that “amounts, simply, to a total dissociation from and dissolution of the bonds of our national past”.

What such critics miss, though, is that what we’re seeing here is the birth of a new, broadly popular court literary style that’s the perfect complement to the mode of government emerging worldwide in the wake of the pandemic: a media-saturated regime based not on shared social norms but the pure exercise of power to enforce its own vision — even as counterfactually as abolishing the legal standing of biological sex.

Its moral register is love hearts on the White House lawn, and the hygienic language of “empowerment” and “communities”, beloved of the (slam-poetry-loving, naturally) Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Its modus operandi is a mixture of therapeutic language and coercive force, backed by surveillance and censorship where necessary. Gorman herself characterises this new hybrid regime more charitably than perhaps I could:

“If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy,
and change our children’s birthright.”

It’s the perfect sentiment for an event that swapped a human audience for placeholder flags and surrounded a celebration of democracy with concrete barriers and 15,000 National Guardsman brought in to defend democracy from the demos.

If we’re alternately intrigued and creeped out by the wordsmiths who’ve found the magic formula to “teach and delight” in a world that no longer values reasoned argument, it’s because something decisive has shifted. The Age of Reason is over. Rhetoric is back. The new court poets are jostling for patronage.

That line doesn’t feature in Andrew H Miller’s new work of literary criticism, On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives, though “To My Wife” is quoted in full, as is “I Remember, I Remember”, a detailed reminiscence of all the things Larkin didn’t get up to in his childhood. Larkin’s most ruthlessly unsentimental poem on this subject, however, is “Dockery and Son”, which meditates on the difference between one life path and another before concluding that, actually, it doesn’t really matter, because our choices are determined by deep-lying psychological habits and in any case we’ll all be dead before long:

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

Faced with Larkin’s nihilism, Miller politely suggests that it maybe isn’t the whole picture. While Larkin writes as though “we’re defined by loss,” Miller tells us, “I’d like to think that something is sometimes gained.” He also manages to look on the bright side of Virginia Woolf, concentrating on the “happy, even delicious” moments in her prose rather than the intimations of mental illness and despair. Although the book, very sensibly, does not try to live up to its self-help-y jacket blurb — “On Not Being Someone Else offers the balm that when we confront our imaginary selves, we discover who we are” — it is written in a gently soothing tone, and for the most part Miller finds poets and novelists to be consoling, helpful company rather than stunningly original or dazzlingly subversive.

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The preface to this concise and thoughtful book is a study in self-deprecation: Miller warns us that he doesn’t “really argue for many theses”, he just wants to point out a distinctive theme of modern literature: the exploration of the road not taken – to cite the most famous example, and perhaps the best-known American poem of the 20^th century. It is, Miller persuasively argues, a constant preoccupation of the last 200 years, from David Copperfield’s disappointed brooding to the acronyms which have recently entered the language. “Ah – YOLO plus FOMO,” says one of Miller’s colleagues when told about the book.

But Miller has another argument to make, and an ambitious one: that contemplating the lives we didn’t lead can help us “to find meaning”. Or at least, help us feel that way: poems and stories, he writes, “create with special power the experience of verging on meaning: something important is being said, but what isn’t clear.”

A possible rejoinder is that if you don’t know what’s being said, then you can hardly know whether it’s important or a complete waste of time. All the same, there is a kind of communication which is beyond language: as Felix Mendelssohn once remarked, the emotions expressed by music are not too vague for words, but too precise. Words themselves, as Miller’s many well-chosen examples show, can point towards the unsayable. Virginia Woolf, on his reading, balances the beauty of the present moment with the restless yearning for something more.

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In his search for “meaning” in literary texts, Miller follows in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, who predicted in 1880 that poetry would replace religion. Arnold supported such a change, on the grounds that poetry had some of the practical functions of Christianity — “to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us” — but none of the supposed disadvantages, like dogmas which might have to be defended against criticism from scientists and historians. The drawback to Arnold’s scheme, and perhaps the reason that his prediction has not come to pass, is that dogmas actually respond to a need: they are answers to unavoidable questions. Poetry, by contrast, offers few if any answers – it cannot even deal with Larkin’s question of what the point of it all is.

Miller’s book may be overly idealistic about poetry, but he does not have his head in the clouds. If recent centuries have seen a growing fascination with unled lives, he observes, the main reason is market capitalism, “an economic system that isolates us and urges us to calculate opportunities and maximize their effects.” Although Miller does not explicitly link liberal capitalism with liberal social policy, he does note that many recent changes, from the legalisation of abortion to what he chooses to call “the increased visibility of transgender people”, have also reinforced the sense that life consists in a series of choices.

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Much has been written since 2016 about Western liberalism and the high price we have paid for it as a society in the breakdown of communities and traditions. Less often discussed are its effects on the individual imagination. Liberalism has freed the self to create its own identity: as a justice of the US Supreme Court once declared, “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” But unless you happen to be G. W. F. Hegel this is an impossibly heavy burden, and we have had to displace it by making up ersatz identities — hence the popularity of video games, social media and vicarious living through celebrities.

Cinema also deals in fantasy, but has sometimes found ways of deflating it. The dominant theme of mid-period Woody Allen films is that the characters who try to break into a world of wealth, celebrity and romantic drama end up as hollow men, while the real heroes turn out to be those who take life as it comes and do their best to help the people around them. An earlier example is It’s A Wonderful Life, to which Miller devotes a short chapter. It is a film of lost possibilities: George Bailey watches his friends escape to lives of excitement and adventure while he remains stuck in his small town. And yet, the film suggests in its unforgettable last half-hour, it is Bailey’s life which was the true adventure, if we could only see it.

Art and literature can help reconcile us to only having one life to live, but they cannot provide the meaning of that life. One sign of this is how easily even the profoundest works of art get turned into brands. Frost’s “Road Not Taken” has become quite a money-spinner, being used in advertisements for cars, insurance, chewing gum and the jobs website Monster.com (“Find The Job You Deserve”). Transcendence, one feels, should be a little harder to sell.

Stuck a piece of crack in a butcher’s hand
Remind me to give me my cat back
– Happy Mondays, “Do It Better”

Over four decades have scampered by since the Rolling Stones – tongues stuck firmly in their collective cheek – wrote a song about being “so respectable” (“Well now we’re respected in society/We don’t worry about the things that we used to be”); almost five have elapsed since the late singer George Melly first conceptualised the process whereby commerce sweeps up anything left-field and confrontational in its sanitising grasp, sands down the rough edges and starts making money out of it. Melly’s thesis was entitled The Revolt into Style – the phrase can be found in Thom Gunn’s 1950s poem about Elvis Presley – and illustrations of it can be glimpsed in practically every major UK publisher’s catalogue, as well as most Friday nights on BBC4.

Nothing could be more symbolic of the revolt into style’s ever more devious assault on the citadels of high culture than the book that fell out of a parcel onto my kitchen table sometime last month. Published by the fine old firm of Faber & Faber, dinkily got up in the wafer-thin hardback format of a svelte volume of poetry, uncompetitively priced at £14.99 for 93 widely-spaced pages, this turned out to be… a new collection by Paul Muldoon? The latest musings softly let fall by Sir Andrew Motion? No. What we had here was Wrote for Luck, the “selected lyrics” of Shaun Ryder, one-time front-man of the Happy Mondays and Black Grape and still called upon to perform vocal duties for these ensembles whenever another VAT bill wings in from HMRC, beginning with a song entitled “Kuff Dam”:

If you’ve got to be told by someone then it’s got to be me.
And that’s not made from cheese and it doesn’t get you free
– Happy Mondays, “Kuff Dam”

The Mondays, in case you don’t remember them, were a particularly lairy bunch of northern hooligans brought to public notice by the ‘Madchester’ phenomenon of the late 1980s. The music journalist Nick Kent conducted a famous joint interview with Shaun and his boys and fellow Mancunians the Stone Roses in a Top of the Pops studio around this time, which made such legendary wild men of pop as the Sex Pistols or the New York Dolls look positively anodyne. Of the many autobiographical fragments in the current volume, my favourite – in fact from the mid-’90s Black Grape days – has Shaun waking up stark naked in the basement of a restaurant next to a pair of similarly unclothed waitresses, holding a gun from whose chamber three bullets have disappeared, and with no idea of how he got there or what happened to the missing ammunition.

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All this is simultaneously a proper larf, as Ryder would put it, and, with its elegies for dead friends and drug casualties, a serial tragedy, a kind of souped-up Mancunian version of Hubert Selby jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. But what are we – the critical, interrogative we, that is – to make of Wrote for Luck, in whose elegant presentation and chaste Faber typeface there lies the hint of something deliberately provocative?

Ryder’s introduction is horribly self-deprecating (“I’ve never put myself forward as an agonised wordsmith.”) His sponsor, Faber’s Lee Brackstone, has remarked, on the one hand, that lyrics are rarely art (although there is a case for regarding them as “pop art”) and, on the other, that publishing them in the format of a Muldoon or a Motion is a self-consciously subversive act. Shaun, as Brackstone winningly puts it, is a poet, but he doesn’t write anything that could be called ‘poetry’.

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As for Wrote for Luck’s three dozen or so selections, Shaun confides that at the start of his career, when the Mondays were not much more than a musical street gang whose heads were as scrambled as those of their MDMA-toting audience, he was “more concerned with how the words sounded than what they actually meant”, which makes him seem like more of a sound poet hauled out of a bygone experimentalist’s vault inhabited by such hard-line Sixties avant-garde pranksters as Bob Cobbing. Crammed with arresting images (check out ‘Performance’, which nods to the Nicolas Roeg film of the same name), and huge amounts of drug-addled free associating, the Ryder oeuvre also nods at what might be called the buried literary sensibility that lies at the heart of so much English pop – the way in which bright but undereducated working class boys (Ryder claims to have left school at 14 as a virtual illiterate) are still borrowing from a word-hoard assembled from everything from the Bible to Charles Dickens.

You’ve been with fat lady wrestlers
And Germans in trenches,
And teachers who speak to themselves
Snide sneak corner, and baby beat a pauper
Peasants who eat from the road
– Happy Mondays, “Fat Lady Wrestlers”

All this may not, strictly speaking, be literature, but like many another pop lyricist’s gleanings – practitioners as various as Paul Weller, Polly Harvey and Howard Devoto spring to mind – it occupies a curious hinterland where pop and literature (and a fair amount of sociological baggage) collide head on. Meanwhile, as reviews of Shaun’s magnum opus continue to appear in Sunday newspapers and Keith Flint – another mad-lad denounced as a public menace 20 years ago – finds his obituary taking up a full page of The Times, it is worth trying to locate the topsoil in which all this sanctification of pop-cultural talent took root and grew.

Certainly, such a thing barely existed in the world of my adolescence. A few high-brow critics might have acclaimed the Beatles’ “pentatonic clusters”, but I can remember the terrible row that broke out in August 1977 when the The Times obituaries page led with an encomium to Elvis rather than a distinguished churchman who had died on the same day. I can also remember, as a sixth-former, discovering a review of the first Siouxsie and the Banshees album in the New Statesman, and registering my surprise that a magazine I had previously gone to in search of upper-brow literary criticism should now be noticing, well, pop records.

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By the late 1980s, most of the snootiness had gone, such luminaries of the ’70s music press scene as Charles Shaar Murray were ornamenting the arts pages of the Daily Telegraph and rock sociology had become a staple of publishers’ lists (again, much of the running was made by Faber, who published Jon Savage’s trail-blazing England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock as early as 1992.) As for the motivation, part of it lay in an awareness that such subjects are, and were, fascinating – whatever you might think of Morrissey he is part of a tradition of working-class auto-didacts that goes back to Winstanley’s diggers. A little more, to return to Melly’s ur-text, is to do with commerce and still more is to do with straightforwardly generational factors.

As was several times pointed out at the time, one of the reasons Kate Bush’s series of live concerts a couple of years back attracted such lavish coverage (Ms Bush, too, is a beneficiary of the Faber lyric-publishing project) is that all the nation’s middle-aged male newspaper executives had never got over her first performing “Wuthering Heights” back in 1978.

The future, alas, is less promising than it seems. Leaving aside R&B and teen-pop, the big money in the modern music business tends to be earned from the entity known as “heritage rock” played – and replayed – by musicians who have in some cases been going for upwards of half a century. What happens when Mick and Keef and Paul and all the other beneficiaries of the revolt into style have shuffled off the planet? Twenty years hence, will Faber be publishing, say, the selected lyrics of Dizzee Rascal? It would be interesting to hear Mr Brackstone’s views.

This was true even after the start of the war. Even months after hostilities had commenced, everyone was still writing as they had before. Rupert Brooke, for example, opened his sonnet sequence “1914” with the line:

“Now, God be thanked who has matched us with his hour.”

Even a young George Orwell (admittedly only 11 years old in 1914) was writing a poem entitled:

“Awake! Young men of England.”

There was no special shame in this. Back then, such was the vernacular of poetry about war: celebratory, nobly commemorative, heroic, jingoistic.

The shift in tone, when it came, was permanent. As Geoff Dyer pointed out in his 1994 book, The Missing of the Somme, the young Orwell was simply relying on “received sentiment”. In exactly the same way, an 11-year-old writing 50 years on could, in similar circumstances, come up with a heartfelt poem expressing the horror of war – while also relying solely on received sentiment.”

The reason the “received sentiment” changed is not just because of one war, but because of one man: Wilfred Owen.

Of all the centennial occasions commemorated over the last four years, one of the smallest yet most saddening was at the beginning of this month, just days before the anniversary of the armistice. Wilfred Owen was killed just a week before the end of fighting, in 1918, during an attack at the Sambre Canal in the village of Ors.  The telegram announcing his death arrived at his mother’s house in Shrewsbury on armistice day as the bells were ringing out to celebrate the news of the end of the conflict. He was 25 – the same age his idol, Keats, was when he died.

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In Owen’s lifetime, only five of his poems had been published – two of them anonymously in the journal Owen edited while temporarily invalided at Craiglockhart hospital in 1917. It was there that Owen met Siegfried Sassoon, one of the many friends and family members who would make it their mission to publish Owen’s work posthumously. From the moment that the poems started to be released, they changed not only poetry, but also the mindset of their readers.

Edmund Blunden’s 1931 edition of The Poems of Wilfred Owen was picked up by WH Auden and his contemporaries and Owen’s work infused that circle. In 1939, Christopher Isherwood wrote in his diary:

“Growing up in the postwar world, I learnt – from my history master, from Noel Coward, from Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon – to loathe the old men who made the war. Flags, memorials and uniforms made me tremble with rage.”

Isherwood specifically rebelled at the staff at his school who “tried to make me believe in a falsified and sentimentalised view of the 1914 war”. For a generation who had all suffered their own losses (Isherwood lost his father in the war), Owen seemed an emissary who could be trusted. The poetry reeked of truth in a way that instantly smashed aside anyone still trying to write in the old style.

For a time during the war, and in its aftermath, Siegfried Sassoon had seemed to be the poet of the war. But Sassoon’s reputation fell away as Owen’s grew. If there is one reason for that, it is because Sassoon’s war poems were mostly polemics: sharp, devastating and unavoidable. But their point was made on first reading, after which they couldn’t improve. Owen’s, on the other hand, had a strange mixture of attributes.

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Foremost among them was his poetic ear, unequalled since Keats in its ability at half-rhymes. If the war had not come along, Owen might still have become a great poet. But the meeting point of that Keatsian sensibility and the actual hell on earth of the Western Front is what makes his poetry something which, once encountered, never leaves your system. Just as it has never left the system of the culture.

In the century since Owen, “war poetry” can no longer be the celebration of battle. Nobody will have it, and nobody believes it. Real war poetry is epitomised by work such as “Dulce et Decorum Est.” But these poems are not simply about the horrors of war. They also contain an invention which seems to encompass almost everything. Consider the image after the gas attack in ‘Dulce’:

“…. An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.”

The vividness of Owen’s descriptions does more than turn the reader off war. Any sharp-eyed polemicist might do that. The specific of Owen’s descriptive genius is that there are things there which shouldn’t be. For instance, what is “ecstasy” doing in that line? It is not just that all of human death is there, but all of what used to be human life too.

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By Laura Spinney

Just as the great practitioners of martial verse made people who had never been near a battlefield feel some valour transmitted on to them, so Owen made his readers feel as though part of the horror and (to use his phrase) the “pity of war” had passed into them as well. This process of transmission has run in a remarkable way through each of the generations that has followed.

The famous lines that Owen hoped to inscribe at the front of that book of poems he never lived to see published ended up – among other places – on the frontispiece of the score of Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem”, written for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral in 1962. Britten’s harrowing, inventive work – which interweaves the Latin mass for the dead with a number of Owen’s poems – likewise embedded a new perspective.

After “War Requiem” it became almost impossible to listen comfortably to a work like Edward Elgar’s memorial to the fallen of the same war, “Spirit of England“. If the sentiment of Elgar’s work didn’t seem exactly false, then it no longer seemed able to recognise the sheer enormity of what Europe had just done to itself – particularly its younger generation. “War Requiem” was just one example of Owen featuring prominently in the decades after his death. Three decades after that masterwork he became one of the central figures in the Booker Prize winning Regeneration Trilogy (1991-6) of Pat Barker, which was turned into a film.

Owen’s biographical life has been on an uncommon journey of its own. For years after his death, the Owen family remained understandably fierce guardians of his legacy. His younger brother Harold in particular worked devotedly on his brother’s reputation, editing his letters and writing a three-volume biography, Memoirs of the Owen Family: Journey from Obscurity. Wilfred Owen: 1893-1918 (1961) as well as Aftermath (1970).

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It was only after the immediate family died that certain other aspects of Owen’s life emerged. It became clear that Harold had, over the years, tried diligently to hide references that might reveal his brother’s homosexuality. Portions of the diaries and letters has been scrupulously expurgated. But even before recent works by Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: a New Biography (Phoenix) and Guy Cuthbertson, Wilfred Owen (Yale), painted a fuller picture, this aspect of Owen had probably been guessed at by many of his readers. There is something in the physical pain he expresses at witnessing the destruction of his comrades that was always a fraction of a pitch above what might be thought (terrible term though this it is to use in these circumstances) usual.

In “Futility“, for instance, there is his line describing “Limbs so dear achieved”. Likewise there is something in the undertow of a passage like this from “Disabled“:

“Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.”

These, to me, are among the most hauntingly beautiful lines ever written. Not least because of that use of “mothered”, only a fraction of  an inch away from becoming “smothered”.
The flood of new information in recent biographies means that Owen’s readers have got to know him better, the further their distance from him. Modern readers are now in the position of knowing Owen better than almost any of his contemporaries did.

His poetry is deeply and firmly embedded in national life as well as in our national outlook. Almost none of it is easy reading, and Owen is certainly not the sort of poet whose work you return to like an old friend. Even when he is saying something that could be consoling, he couches it – as Philip Larkin later would – in a manner that warns you that although you may wish a thought to be true, it doesn’t follow that it is.

In one passage in “Spring Offensive” he writes:

“Of them who running on that last high place
Breasted the surf of bullets, or went up
On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge,
Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge,
Some say God caught them even before they fell.”

As at the end of Larkin’s “Arundel Tomb” he places a similar hope before the reader – as great and deep a hope as anybody could have. And like Owen before him, he qualifies that hope.

Because what we have learned cannot be unlearned. What has been discovered cannot be forgotten. Beyond the poetry itself, this remains Owen’s remarkable achievement. To have seen Hell and to have described it in a way that means a century after his death, he is still telling us: you never saw this, but you will never forget it.