'Utterly Unsuitable for Appearing on Television'

At Kaboom Books I found a first American edition of Kingsley Amis’ A Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957–1967 (1968) and couldn’t resist. Fortuitously, I was rereading his short novel Ending Up (1974) and reminding myself that in his best work, Amis is a master. Few writers are so intelligently funny, and he often writes poems like a novelist. He gives us characters and turns them loose in stories. His interests are moral, his words plain, occasionally still Auden-esque. In “Science Fiction,” he finds in that genre a moral core and primal appeal: “the impulse to meet face to face / Our vice and folly shaped into a thing, / And so at last ourselves.” The poem reveals the origin of an older Amis title: New Maps of Hell (1960). My favorite poem in the collection may be “A.E.H.” – that is, A.E. Housman: 

“Flame the westward skies adorning

Leaves no like on holt or hill;

Sounds of battle joined at morning

Wane and wander and are still.

 

“Past the standards rent and muddied,

Past the careless heaps of slain,

Stalks a redcoat who, unbloodied,

Weeps with fury, not from pain.

 

“Wounded lads, when to renew them

Death and surgeons cross the shade,

Still their cries, hug darkness to them;

All at last in sleep are laid.

 

“All save one, who nightlong curses

Wounds imagined more than seen,

Who in level tones rehearses

What the fact of wounds must mean.”

 

Elsewhere, Amis describes Housman as his favorite poet. He writes in his review of A.E. Housman: Collected Poems and Selected Prose (ed. Christopher Ricks, Penguin Press, 1988):

 

“No poet could have turned his back more comprehensively on the modern world or (what has come to be part of the same thing) written in a way less cut out for study in modern universities, where the standing of poets seems nowadays to be determined. From such places he looks a disagreeable figure, elitist, embittered, pessimistic and utterly unsuitable for appearing on television.”