It's Only Words

English poetry has many faces, from the richness of Keats's 'Ode to Autumn', to the spare, direct, even bad language of Larkin. In 'This Be the Verse', 'they fuck you up, your mum and dad', so be careful and take Larkin's advice, 'get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself'. This may not be to everybody's taste but maybe he has a point. Larkin is probably best known for his attitude to sex, which apparently began in '63, 'between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP'.

The wit of Larkin in the collection 'High Windows' finds many successors, not least in Wendy Cope who 'used to think all poets were Byronic' until she met some and then decided 'they're mostly as wicked as a ginless tonic and wild as pension plans'.(Triolet)

T.S. Eliot, or 'Toilets' as he is better known, intellectualizes in a much more philosophical way, in for example 'Four Quartets' and 'The Waste Land'. For him everything is contradiction and paradox, and in 'The Waste Land' society has become a barren state of no communication and futility.

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were a formidable husband and wife team. Plath's 'Balloons' is enigmatic and haunting, 'since Christmas they have been with us, guileless and clear, oval soul-animals'. And Ted Hughes reaches something of an apotheosis in 'Crow'. 'To hatch a crow, a black rainbow, bent in emptiness, over emptiness, but flying'. The collection 'Lupercal' is similarly astounding. These are poets who transcend the ordinary and the everyday and touch the soul of genius.

Helen Dunmore, who is probably better known for her prize-winning novels, can also write original poetry most notably in 'Out of the Blue', a very striking volume of poetry. She is well worth taking a look at.

Andrew Motion, one time poet laureate, often has to write royal ditties for various occasions. His four stanza poem on Charles' and Camilla's wedding is proficient and some of the images are effective. 'The heart which slips and sidles like a stream, Weighed down by winter wreckage near its source, But given time and come the clearing rain,
Breaks loose to revel in its proper course'. The 'winter wreckage' is presumably an allusion to the car crash in which Diana died, which maybe needs for all of us the 'clearing rain' to heal and mend the hurt.

Betjeman was quintessentially English and his poetry of metroland and the garden suburbs of England leaves us with the comfortable and pampered feeling of what its like for the middle classes. Dylan Thomas reveals the beauty of Wales in so many poems but still seems essentially English for after all his poem 'Fern Hill' could be set in Hampshire, Devon or Cornwall. His particular original genius seems to sometimes transcend nationality, though something like 'Under Milk Wood' is so very Welsh.

This is only a short essay, so many poets can not be mentioned, but I don't feel one can write about English poetry without mentioning Kipling's 'If'. To me this poem says it all about our human condition and teaches us so much. 'If you can fill the unforgiving minute, with sixty seconds worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that is in it, and which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!'

Christina Rossetti is a fine poet and I have chosen to end with her poem 'Birthday' simply because it has a richness and luxury of language which is there for the poorest of men to enjoy.
'Raise me a dias of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life is come,
My love is come to me'.