A Nation of Poets

My vision of England is large, vivid and uncorrupted by experience. I have never been there. For me, England is a land compounded of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Johnson, Keats, Dickens, Auden and a hundred other writers. I am its heir not only because English is my inheritance but because England’s writers, in particular her poets, remain unsurpassed. Chief among their accomplishments is the collective fabrication of “England,” which I intend as praise, not mockery. As an American, which makes me part of another collective work-in-progress, I am the grateful offspring of “England's green and pleasant land.” With thoughtful pride, Bryan Appleyard has written “Poetry and the English Imagination,” a movingly learned, non-academic hymn of praise for his nation’s poetic tradition. It appears in the Autumn 2007 issue of The Liberal, and it’s the best thing I’ve read online in weeks:

“Poetry has no serious contenders as the English national art. Ah, it is often said, but Shakespeare wrote plays. And so he did. But consider these plays. Hamlet is a weird drama made magnificent by a torrent of peerless poetry, and I have always thought of it as a long poem whose cosmic structure seems to pivot on the words `We defy augury.’ Shakespeare is the greatest playwright on earth, but he is heaven’s poet. And the list of his poet-compatriots – Chaucer, Browning, Dryden, Wordsworth, Clare, Donne, Auden, Tennyson, Keats, Pope, Herbert, etc. etc. – closes the case. We are a nation defined by and consisting of poets. To deny this is to deny England.”

Think of John of Gaunt’s death speech in the second act of Richard II, moving even to an American, in which lament for England’s decay -- “This other Eden, demi-paradise” -- is already being sounded:

“This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas’d out – I die pronouncing it –
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds;
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!”

Appleyard is no jingoist. Amusingly, honestly, he admits an “unfortunate fact: in the 20th Century, English poetry became American. After Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, England produced only one further uncontestably great poet – W.H. Auden. Ted Hughes seldom works for me and Philip Larkin is superbly second rank. But Eliot, though an aspirant Englishman, never stopped being American.” In his magnanimity, Appleyard goes on to overvalue John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, American nobodys, but neglects England’s own Geoffrey Hill, the supreme poet in the language since Yeats, Eliot and Auden. And don’t forget R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet/priest, and Basil Bunting. Appleyard continues:

“`Poetry’, wrote Auden, `makes nothing happen’ – but, he added, `It survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.’” Poetry is England’s way of happening.

“And yet few now know this. Poetry is barely taught and, when it is, the emphasis is always on the ‘accessible’. What on earth does this mean? That the poem should wallow only in the familiar? Children exposed to such supposed difficulty at an early age have no trouble with real poetry. My daughter understood Stevens’ ‘The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts’ better at ten than I did at 45.”

The Auden line, from his great elegy for Yeats, is often contested, though I take it literally when referring to political or social change. Bullets and occasionally even ballots may change things, but not poetry. The late American poet William Meredith takes Auden to task in “Talking Back (To W.H. Auden),” arguing that poetry’s power is circumscribed but undeniable:

“What it makes happen is small things,
Sometimes, to some, in an area
Already pretty well taken
Care of by the senses.”

Meredith means the power of metaphor to augment the senses. To Auden he says:

“The exact details of our plight
In your poems, order revealed
By the closest looking, are things
I’m changed by and had never seen,
Might never have seen, but for them.”

Try to imagine your emotional, sensory and intellectual lives without the gift of English poetry. This “thought experiment,” as Appleyard might call it, would leave us hobbled, crabbed, hard of hearing, nearly blind and dumb. There are lessons here for Americans. The nation is awash with certified college graduates who have never read Shakespeare, Milton and Keats, but who likewise know nothing of Whitman, Dickinson and Stevens. Appleyard is generous in celebrating jazz and movies as America’s gift to the world, as poetry is England’s. He laments England’s burgeoning illiteracy but, with the aid of an American poet, suggests a solution to our “shameful conquest” of ourselves:

“Nobody can understand England without some sense of her poetry. That means, of course, that very few now understand England. Perhaps that is the way it must be: `The roar of time plunging unchecked through the sluices / Of the days’ (Ashbery) must sweep all away. But, though the signs are not good, English poetry is buried too deep in English soil ever to be quite eradicated; and so, like Hamlet, we must defy augury and send the brats home to learn at least a sonnet a night.”