Let us go then, and feign our love of verse
Come on, admit it, you can only half-remember a couple of sonnets. The truth is we don't give a stuff about poetry
It's been an unusually high-profile fortnight for English poetry. First, there was the appointment of a female poet laureate. Then came the multimedia slandering of an elderly black man who had only hoped, in the tradition of Benjamin Zephaniah, to be rejected as Oxford's Professor of Poetry fairly, at the voting stage, in favour of whichever white person left in the ballot could spell his or her own name. Then there was the election of the first female Oxford Professor of Poetry, followed by her resignation after being accused of involvement in the Derek Walcott scandal. All very exciting, very public stuff. But I think that in the commotion the core of the thing has been lost.
The ball has been dropped. The single eternal truth at the heart of English poetry has been forgotten.
Which is that nobody gives a toss about it.
Nobody cares. Nobody at all. Nooooooobody. Who is the outgoing Oxford poetry professor? Come on, come on... Wrong! Seamus Heaney was ages ago. It's Christopher Ricks, who, although he is a great critic, is not even a poet. And who was it before Heaney? Don't worry, I've no idea either! And, since Heaney took up the post in 1989, whoever the hell came before him was in the job while I was actually at Oxford, doing an English degree. That's how much of a toss we give.
The English love of poetry is a mirage, one of the great national cons. It's up there with Beefeaters, morris dancing and shortbread - just another thing that was never important except to a very small number of people, never relevant, never mattered, but is clung onto nowadays because otherwise what would they write on tea towels?
Perhaps you disagree. Perhaps you are, yourself, a poetry lover. Course you are, dear. What English girl isn't? OK then, what is your favourite poem? The one you know best, love most, can recite in full and have a vague idea what it's about.
It's one you did at school, isn't it? Probably for GCSE or O level.Unless it's Kipling's If, in which case you bought The Times only because the newsagent had run out of the Daily Mail, and you didn't go to school at all.
You see, we all want to believe we love poetry. We all have a stock of poems, half-learnt in school - a couple of Shakespeare sonnets, a line or two of Wordsworth, bits of Chaucer, the last line of Ozymandias and the first line of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - that we roll out at parties and use to persuade ourselves that we are part of the great tradition. But it's all a fraud.
We love poems that we were taught in school because they do not scare us. We were told what they are about long ago by people who were paid to tell us, back when our little memories could hold on to stuff like that. But who can be bothered with a new poem? Even a new poem by an old poet? All those words that may mean more than they appear to mean, all that obfuscation, no story to speak of, no jokes, only meandering sentences that quite soon have you staring out of the window and wondering what's on the telly...
We love the idea of our poetic history in part because we don't have much in the way of painters or composers compared with our European neighbours, and cleave to the idea that England gave poetry to the world. So we wear the old stuff as a badge (“oh, I loooove Keats”), but we don't even reread the poems we do like, and end up generally with nothing but the same dusty old one-liners growing foxed and mottled on our mental shelves.
On the day last week that The Times went big on the Ruth Padel story, for example, two of this paper's biggest-hitting critics, Richard Morrison and Andrew Billen, chose to adorn their columns (on unrelated subjects) with the same allusion to John Donne's line about no man being an island. A staggering coincidence? Or just evidence that that lone gag is all that has really survived of Donne's work, even in the memories of writers?
On the same day, this paper's leading article on Padelgate opened with Shelley's line about “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. And that's no coincidence either because, apart from the aforementioned bit of Ozymandias, it is about all that anyone nowadays can remember of Shelley.
If you want to know how little we care about poetry, then you might want to bear in mind that of the 150,000 Oxford graduates who were eligible to vote for the poetry professor, only 426 bothered. That's a turnout of less than 0.3 per cent. At its lowest ebb, the American electorate is 150 times more interested in choosing its president than that. And it's even worse when you bear in mind that that was 0.3 per cent of an electorate drawn from the 0.25 per cent of Britons most likely to give a damn.
Staggering, really, that it got in the papers at all. Except that what really got in the papers was a row between a woman and a West Indian man over the spectre of unwilling sex. Which is all that was unusual about what was, in the end, just another disagreement between poets.
But, of course, disagreement between poets has always interested us far more than poetry itself. The big questions in poetry have never been about lexicon, syntax or metre, but about personality: who was Shakespeare? Who stabbed Christopher Marlowe? Did Ted Hughes drive two wives to suicide, or did he just happen to like mad girls? Did Philip Larkin die a virgin? Did the ladies love Byron despite his club foot or because of it? How short was Pope? (I swear to God, more people - Oxford graduates included - will tell you Pope's height to the nearest inch than can give you three consecutive words from the Dunciad.)
Maybe it's just that modern poetry is rubbish. And maybe that's because, as The Times observed on Wednesday, poetry doesn't really pay. I notice that the position of Oxford poetry professor pays a pathetic £6,901. Padel would have done better to get a job flipping burgers at McDonald's.
Current thinking on MPs and teachers is that if only we could pay them a bit more, maybe we'd get better ones. Perhaps the same is true of poets. Perhaps the time has come to throw some real money at them. I'm writing this column from the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, as it happens, where poets come from all over Britain in the hope of making a few extra quid, but are utterly ignored while people queue round the block for Alistair McGowan and Ben Fogle.
And here's a funny thing: you'd have thought that people at the Hay festival, above all people, might just be interested in a reading by the Oxford Professor of Poetry. But they aren't. I know this because there was a reading by Ruth Padel here the other day. Right up to the morning of her resignation, tickets were readily available. Then she resigned, and the event sold out in minutes. Which goes to show that your average literary Briton will pay good money only to go and see a person performing who is absolutely and totally not the Oxford Professor of Poetry.
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