Stanzas in the Stacks - Part Two

 

Let's have a look at some more of the poetry books which were recently brought up into the light from the stacks down below for a display - verses on view, if you will. The size of the poetry collection at Exeter Library may be accounted for in changes to the structure of the post-war library system. With overall control of public libraries almost universally handed over to county and city councils, a new inter-library loans system was set up. This involved particular libraries building up stock in a particular area of specialisation, which would then be available for users to access nationally. Poetry was an area of subject specialisation chosen for Exeter, so we are blessed with a particularly rich selection.  

William Blake is perfect for such a display, given the glorious combination of words and images which characterised his work. His illuminated books, the personal creations of someone who had been apprenticed as a printer and engraver, are some of the masterpieces of both British art, literature and the bookmaker's craft. He was a singular figure in so many ways, one of which was that he was from a working background, the very opposite of the head in the clouds aristocratic fop which remained the stereotype of the English poet for some time to come. In this, he shared some affinity with his fellow working Londoner and engraver William Hogarth, who we will look at in a future post since we have a very, very, very large volume of his prints. In other ways they are polar opposites, of course. The earthy Hogarth would have roundly mocked Blake's visionary mythologisation of 'Albion' and would have been deeply suspicious of his revolutionary sympathies. Nevertheless, there IS a connection there. Hogarth and Blake both married the visual with narrative verse and both, ultimately, had an innate sympathy with ordinary people and a visceral dislike of abuses of power and privilege which partly arose from their backgrounds. Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell includes passages referring to 'a printing house in hell' and 'printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite which was hid'. The techniques of his trade, often highly dangerous and potentially toxic, are thus inscribed into the body of his work; labour bringing forth vision.

                                   

A couple of Blake's exquisite small prints for Virgil's Pastorals adorn the cover of Seven Romantic Poets, a collection of poems by Blake, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats - the equivalent of one of those old LP compilations of classics (only on Ronco!) This exemplary selection was put together by one TP Tosswill, who was apparently a schoolmaster at the private school of Rugby (private schools in England being confusingly known as 'public schools', of course - a rather strange misnomer). Kathleen Raine was a Blake scholar who was also a fine poet in her own right. She shared with Blake and perhaps partly inherited from him a worldview steeped in the spiritual, drawing on traditions from east and west, ancient and modern. Defending Ancient Springs is a book of her essays on Blake, WB Yeats and Coleridge as well as lesser known names like surrealist poet David Gascoyne, Orkney-born Scottish poet Edwin Muir and Welsh poet Vernon Watkins. The cover art is by Cecil Collins, very much a spiritual descendant of Blake, as were others of the neo-Romantic movement with which he was associated. Collins was born in Plymouth and became a part of the Dartington experiment between the wars. This was an attempt to create a thriving rural culture and economy centred around the Dartington Estate, which Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst had bought in 1925. Progressive methods of farming, forestry, gardening, education, crafts and, crucially, arts were established, with modernist buildings blending with restored medieval architecture to create an Edenic vision of an alternate way of living; one which blended the spiritual with the practical. Blake's famous quote from his Auguries of Innocence - 'to see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wildflower' - was carved into one of the garden walls. Collins and his wife Elisabeth, also an artist, moved to Totnes and then to Dartington, where he taught art and also exhibited. And there they stayed until 1943. The beautiful surrounds of the South Hams, with its gently rounded hills gathered around the slowly coiling Dart, definitely exerted a strong influence upon his art, both at the time and in subsequent years. 

John Clare, like Blake, was a poet of humble origins, born into a farm labouring family and hence sometimes reductively referred to as the 'peasant poet'. His poetic explorations of the Northamptonshire territory he knew so well, its fauna, flora and seasonal transformations, along with his observations of the disruption to life wreaked by enclosure, make him one of the great nature writers and a dissenting voice protesting the pre-industrial seizure of the rural commons. He has been increasingly in modern culture; Damon Albarn's latest album The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows draws its title from a Clare poem, Yorkshire singer Jim Ghedi set his anti-enclosure lyric Lamentations of Round Oak Waters to impassioned music, and writers such as Iain Sinclair (in Edge of the Orison), Alan Moore (in Voice of the Fire) and Adam Foulds (in The Quickening Maze) have shown their fascination. Sinclair and Moore both appeared in Andrew Kotting's 2015 film By Our Selves, which traced the path of Clare's 'Journey out of Essex'; Clare was silently depicted by Toby Jones, inheriting the role from his father Freddie Jones (who also appears in the film) who had depicted Clare in a BBC Omnibus programme from the 70s. 

                                             

                                             

                                             

                               

Clare spent many of his later years in asylums, having become subject to delusional mental states. The 'journey out of Essex', related in a fragmented and hallucinatory journal, was in fact an 80 mile walk he made from the asylum at High Beech in Epping Forest where he spent several years to his old home village of Northborough, somewhat to the north of Peterborough. His depression and descent into delusion was partly induced by the waning of his initial renown. The 'peasant poet' was a fancy briefly entertained by London society before it moved onto other distractions, and Clare had to return to farm labouring to feed his family. In some ways, he was an early victim of a form of ephemeral celebrity culture. And yet his work endures and continues to grow in stature. Soon after his arrival in Northborough, he was taken into Northampton Asylum, where he resided for the rest of his years. He continued to write, and composed his most famous poem, a despairing lament called I Am. We have a copy of this produced in an edition of 100 and illustrated by the artist Rigby Graham (one of two Clare poems which he illustrated and which we have in the stacks). Graham's neo-Romantic style, with echoes of Graham Sutherland and John Minton, suits the haunted quality of this poem. Our copy of a 1964 edition of The Shepherd's Calendar collection is accompanied by some beautiful woodcuts produced by artist David Gentleman which evoke the rural scenes Clare conjures. 

The Celtic lands have always treasured their poets and the bardic tradition they uphold. In Kings, Lords and Commons, Frank O’Connor collected some of his translations into English of Irish poetry from the 17th to 19th centuries. O’Connor was best known as a short story writer, with many of those stories being published within the prestigious pages of the New Yorker; but he was a multi-faceted man of letters who also wrote poetry, memoirs, biographies, plays and essays. He was also involved in theatre management, teaching and political activism. All of his activities demonstrated an abiding love of the Irish culture in which he was steeped.

Robert Gurney’s collection Bardic Heritage applies his literary and linguistic skills in freely translating verse from the rich Welsh poetic tradition into English. RS Thomas furthered that tradition into the twentieth century, and in his rejection of many of its technological comforts sometimes seemed to be harking back to an earlier age. He was an Anglican priest in a small rural community and his poetry vividly evokes the stark beauty of the Welsh landscape of his parish, which he got to know as intimately as Clare did the land within his bounds. Thomas was also a strong supporter of Welsh nationalism and the preservation of its culture, including the language, which he taught himself as an adult. His work is haunted by an austere beauty and self-questioning spirituality. 

Edinburgh-born poet Norman MacCaig's post-war work is warmly human and kindly observant in tone. A pacifist during the second world war, he didn't share the nationalist ideological fervency of O'Connor or Thomas, but there was nevertheless a distinctively Scottish undercurrent to his lyrical writing. The critic Angus Calder, in his 1996 Independent obituary of MacCaig, noted how he 'talked about the Celtic feeling for form which he derived from Gaelic forebears'. 

Liverpool is a city with a hugely distinctive character and cultural identity. In the 1960s, the Liverpool poetry scene was an intrinsic part of this, and made strong connections with the music scene. The Mersey Sound Penguin paperback (here publisded in the Penguin Modern Poets series) was in the pockets of many a student and switched on hippie after its publication in 1967; they might have a copy of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band under their arm at the same time. Of the three Mersey Sound poets (Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten), McGough and Henri were both in musical outfits. Henri was a part of The Liverpool Scene, which mixed poetry, rock and jazz (and were favoured by John Peel, who produced their first LP). McGough was part of The Scaffold, along with one Mike McGear, whose big brother was Paul McCartney (he adopted the cheeky stage name to avoid intimations of cashing in on the mega-fame of his bro). In 1968, McGough and McGear recorded an album together which was partly produced by George Martin and which featured contributions from big brother Paul, Jimi Hendrix, John Mayall, Spencer Davis, Graham Nash, Dave Mason of Traffic, Paul Samwell Smith of the Yardbirds and Viv Prince of the Pretty Things. Talk about an all-star line-up!

A later Roger McGough collection from 1978, Summer With Monika (a reference to one of Ingmar Bergman's best-known films) charts the turbulent course of a love affair. It has illustrations by Peter Blake, the pop artist probably still best known for his co-creation (with the less-frequently credited Jann Haworth) of the Sgt Pepper cover. 

The radicalism of the late sixties and early seventies can be seen in a couple of hand printed pamphlets of poetry tucked away like subversive samizdats amongst more conventional volumes in the stack. There's a copy of Shelley's radical call to (non) arms, The Mask of Anarchy, written in the wake of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre and advocating non-violent resistance. This ragged copy, so wonderfully redolent of its time, was put out by  Kropotkin's Lighthouse Publications, named after the Russian anarchist (much favoured by author Michael Moorcock). Copies were presumably available in the Freedom Press bookshop depicted, and to which directions are provided (turn right out of Aldgate station and into the alley by the Wimpy Bar). Of a similar stripe is the revolutionary socialist poem Revolution Down the Mines by Keith Armstrong, published in 1974. This was the year of the miner's strike which led to the three day week and effectively brought down the Heath government, so it very much reflects the temperature of the times. The introductory rhetoric from the League of Socialist Artists is aggressively uncompromising: "the emerging revolutionary-socialist movement in art, literature and music must strive to develop and perfect the positive socialist-realist alternative to the poison of culture-reaction: an art actively affirming the life-experience of the working-class in struggle at every level and in every sphere, right up to the final and highest level of struggle, that for the revolutionary destruction of the state monopoly capitalist system of exploitation and oppression itself". Well, we're still waiting on that one. Red Shelley is a study of Shelley's radicalism by Paul Foot, a left-wing journalist renowned for his probing investigations into political corruption published in Private Eye and elsewhere. He's one of a number of socialists to be buried in the shadow of Marx's giant head in Highgate Cemetery. His tombstone bears lines from Shelley's Mask of Anarchy: 'Rise like lions in slumber/In unvanquishable number/Shake your chains to earth like dew/Which in sleep had fallen on you/Ye are many - they are few'.