The Great Political Poems

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Hello, my name is David Runcelman and this is Past, Present, Future. Today, after the great political novels and the great political dramas, we're going to be talking about something related but very different. I'm speaking to the writers and academics Seamus Perry and Mark Ford. They are the hosts of the LRB's Brilliant Close Readings podcast about what makes a great political poem.

Maybe we could start with just trying to define how you defined the scope of this series. So I've been doing a series on great political fictions and people often say, well, why does that one count? Why did that one get in? And it's quite loosely defined. When you were coming up with the poems for this one,

Where did you draw the line? What gets in or or what maybe didn't get in because it wasn't political enough?'Cause some of them clearly are very political. They are about political events and they have strong political themes, but some of them it's a little looser. Did you struggle to know where to draw the line? So one initial prompt to this was an anthology that Mark and I were both familiar with, edited by Tom Paulin some years ago, called the Faber Book of Political Verse.

And it was a very interesting and kind of stimulating, provocative sort of anthology because Pauline very deliberately included. within the book poems that w would not normally be categorized as political, I suppose, in most university or school syllabuses, for example. And one of the test case poems was Thomas Gray's Elegy in a country churchyard, written in the middle part of the eighteenth century, which doesn't have uh any mention of any eighteenth century politics in it at all.

And Grey, you know, if called upon, could have had a line on Walpole, for example, but he doesn't have anything about that in the elegant. And the reason it gets into Paulin's anthology, I guess, is because there's a very celebrated reading of a couple of stanzas in it by William Empson in the nineteen thirties, and these are stanzas in which Grey looks upon the obscure rural dead that lie um all around him, whose lives have come to nothing.

And Grey says, Well, you know, that's just natural, that that's what it's like. Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air. And Emerson's point is that although that isn't ostensibly a political sentiment, actually in some senses implicitly it is,'cause it's saying there's nothing that a changed system of new political structures or something could do.

to prevent this human wastage. It's just hardwired into the way that the moral universe works and you can't do anything about it. Whereas if you are

a progressive socialist of some kind, let's say, you might think you could do something about the waste of obscure human lives. And so that's the kind of rather difficult case that Paulin enjoyed, including, and I think that was That was one of the spurs we had, wasn't it, Mark, to to the series, thinking about as you say, um Davis, some poems that are absolutely straightforwardly political, like a poem about the Spanish Civil War, but these other slightly more complicated cases.

Well, and it has become the vogue in academia to see everything as political. So the the new historicism and the kind of waves that have spread from that. incline all interpretations and readings to kind of ground every text in its kind of political context. And so that's so much the vogue that y you can treat even the most kind of fleeting love lyric as in some ways expressive of all sorts of political urgencies or contingencies.

But in the series we wanted to appeal to our listeners in relation to poems that that respond to a particular obvious crisis. I suppose many of the great political poems that we've been considering, such as Yeats's Easter nineteen sixteen, or Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy, which is about Peter Lou, uh or indeed Orden's poem about the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

are really responding in the moment to a crisis and poetry was much more the way of responding to the crisis in certain periods than in other periods.

But at the same time there can be a conflict between poems which are explicitly political and presenting a political view, and others which are brilliantly political but seem to express no particular political view. We kicked off with Andrew Marvell's Horation Ode, which is about Cromwell's triumph in the Civil War and his invasion of Ireland, and it is impossible to work out what Marvell thinks of anything uh in this poem.

So we're also interested in the sophistication of political analysis as it's embodied through poetry. And poetry, in some ways, you can be more ambivalent, more ambiguous. more nuanced, more subtle, more evasive in a poem, I think, than you can in prose.

And for that reason is there a point so one end there's a question about where you draw the line, is a love poem political? Is everything political? And then at the other end, you're these are the great political poems. But it feels like When a poem is too political it's not going to be a great poem and that ambivalence, that ambiguity, is not going to survive ideology. So it feels to me a little bit like an ideological poem is going to struggle to

qualify as one of the great political poems because it will be too strident. But then, for instance, the Orden, I don't know if you would describe it as ideological. But certainly I mean, what's so interesting about it, it's clearly a great poem. It's utterly memorable. The lines in it are utterly memorable. It is about

a political event, the Spanish Civil War, and yet, as you say in the podcast, he disowned it. He was embarrassed by it because it was too much. And part of the reason it was too much is in some ways it was too certain about What was going on? And with hindsight he regretted that. So is there a point at which these things political poetry are odd? If by politics we mean ideological conviction?

I think to take up the Orton point first, one of the things he reproached himself for particularly in that poem, and this might be a point of more general application, was that he felt that his rhetorical commitment had led him to a a kind of political commitment which wasn't really his own. That the poem, as it were, had a greater kind of ideological

certainty or or greater kind of ideological, you know, univocality or whatever than he actually did himself. So it was a kind of a rather astringent self censoring, I suppose you could say, that he felt he'd betrayed himself by being so rhetorically effective in the politics that he's putting forward. It's a difficult case, the Spain poem, because I agree with you, it's an extraordinary poem, it's an amazing poem. And some of the things that Orden said about it in later life.

that expressed his dissatisfaction with it just seem in a way not true. So those great last lines about history to the defeated may say, Alas, but cannot help or pardon, those seem to me extraordinary. powerful, honest, true lines. But Warden came to think that they were just equating historical success with moral goodness. That seems a very odd way to read those lines to me.

Exactly. It's very weird for a poet to think that his own lines have such an unequivocal meaning when to almost any reader they wouldn't have that. The only way you could possibly read them in that way is if you took the capital H of history and thought it was some kind of numinous Hegelian process or something which is intended and teleological. But if you take history in the normal sense of just the stuff that happens to happen

then I think that what he's saying in those lines is absolutely true. I mean you can say alas to the people who lost, but you of course you can't do anything to help or pardon them'cause you can't go backwards in time. But I don't know, what do you think about Orden's actions towards his poem, Mark? Well, people did read the poem and g and enlist and go over to Spain. So it was part of the kind of fervor o of nineteen thirty six that peop or uh thirty seven, that people were so

wedded the the idea that the Spanish Civil War had to be joined, and Ordin's status at that moment was one of a kind of seer or prophet like figure whose pronouncements did actually have an effect on people. And I think what he's worrying about in some ways is the legacy him of W. B. Yates, who famously said about a play called Kathleen Lehoulehan, did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?

and that Yeats' notion that his poetry could make people participate in violence was one which Auden took very, very seriously, and he was anxious not to fall into that trap. So to some extent his later recantation was part of his distrust or dismissal of Yates' vision of himself as a kind of political profit figure or someone who could become an activist.

And Auden, as part of or involved in left-wing circles in the thirties, suddenly realized that for him as a poet this was fatal. Because going back to what I was saying about Marvell, one of the things that poetry is able to dramatize. when it is discussing political issues, is the freedom of the poet to escape from mind systems, belief systems, ideologies of those who need to get things done in politics. But a poet has a kind of freedom and can resist

ideological pressure and that Auden felt that he was succumbing in this poem to ideological pressure. And you may think of it as a historian as a complete myth that poets

sort of nurture that they have some kind of escape route through poetry from the political pressures of their time. But th that was something which ordinary came to distrust his own prospero like magic that he could make people do things, and he much more wanted to associate himself with a free spirit, such as Ariel from the Tempest, and the Tempest

was very important to him as a kind of paradigm of the dictator figure who makes people do things in Prospero and a figure like Ariel, who is a kind of free spirit at the end of the play. And he wanted to preserve that sense of the poet. as not having political responsibilities of the kind that a political leader has.

I wanted to ask you about how these poems are used or read today because one thing about the Orden poem is it is quite dated. I mean it is literally dated, but One of the ways it's dated is that it's written at a time when he thinks nineteen thirty seven, Spain, is the hinge of history. I mean he he says there's yesterday, there's today and tomorrow, and today is Spain, and our tomorrows depend a bit on what's going to happen in Spain.

And with hindsight we know that's not true. Spain was a sideshow and the hinge of history was coming in nineteen thirty nine, and the the great irony or tragic irony of this is that

The war that was coming was the one that would decide the future, except in Spain, because fascism would be defeated everywhere except in Spain. I mean if you'd said to Warden and at the end of what will actually be the hinge of history where the really great issues and the greatest war for better or for worse in history, will resolve these issues, will still leave Franco in power.

you would think, well, nineteen thirty seven, that was wrong. But of course there is that other Auden poem which is dated September the first, isn't it, nineteen thirty nine? Which gets cited a lot these days, much more than the nineteen thirty seven poem, it seems to a lot of people, some of the lines in it, you know, they crop up in sort of political commentary and so on. And then the other Auden poem that seems to me the one that

resonates for a lot of people today. It's too short for I think you to have had in this series, but Epitaph on Atari and Because it you know, it feels I mean, just lines like He knew human folly like the back of his hand, when he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter. It's quite Trump. I mean uh you know, when I read that now it just it's not quite right, but it's not far off.

Is the nineteen thirty seven one dated? Were you tempted to do the nineteen thirty nine one? An epitaph on a tyrant. That seems to be the one that maybe because you can always mock tyrants. That's that's something timeless about that. But that seems to be the one that really resonates today.

Well, September the first, nineteen thirty nine has had a much more extensive afterlife. It was quoted a lot after the Twin Towers and it was seen as as the kind of archetypal crisis poem for some moment of overwhelming kind of cataclysm that somehow everything was under attack, that this was the crisis poem that did feature on the internet quite a lot in two thousand and one.

Whereas Spain is much more about choice. In some ways, he foregrounds the notion that each individual has to make up their mind whether or not they go to Spain. Whereas September the first, nineteen thirty nine Towards the end it involves this creation almost of a coterie of the like minded who these points of light

who in their right-mindedness resist or in some ways commiserate with each other over these vast forces which are beyond the control of the poet. So I think the distance in to some extent is one of helplessness. that Spain does present the the poet as a political activist in some ways that Auden came to distrust.

And later on, September the first, nineteen thirty nine, there's a sense in which there's a kind of helplessness which the poet dramatizes, uh, and that is probably closer to how we feel in relation to the tides of history than that sense that, you know, today. Uh you can make a difference by signing up and going to Spain. So we are going to cover uh Louis McNey's Autumn Journal in our next.

poem, which in some ways is a very full book length poem, set in nineteen thirty eight, written sort of to the moment, and that captures much more the sense of Nazism as a kind of creeping force. and the ways in which one experiences it on a day to day basis. And McNeese, you know, can see them building or Primrose Hill, he can see them building kind of, you know, trenches and kind of cannon places and there's

searchlights and so on. Both Orden and McNeese have a kind of journalistic aspect to the ways in which they approach poetry, that they were which is one of the radical and interesting things about thirties poetry is how open it was. to responding to political developments. And sept certainly September the first, nineteen thirty nine. It is also this low dishonest decade. I mean, Alden again scrapped September the first, nineteen thirty nine. Um we must love one another.

or die is its famous conclusion, and then L B J, Elyndon Baines Johnson, used that in one of his political ads in the nineteen sixties, with uh children pulling petals off a flower, saying we must love one another or die. And Ordin was outraged by that. And that was exactly what he didn't want his poetry to be used for, to make political propaganda.

So I brought up the Tempest in my last kind of answer, but a Caliban and Ariel are the kind of figures with whom he ends up identifying rather than Prospero. Actually he played Caliban as a kid at Gresham's.

when he was at school and very much identified with him as well as this kind of the kind of monster figure, the the outcast figure, the figure who is derided by the mainstream society, and that was one of his images of the poet as somehow an outcast figure who rejects the dominant ideologies. But how you do reject the dominant ideologies is sort of what Auden then plays out in in the rest of his career.

Seamus, do you think, like Mark said, it was in vogue after nine eleven, but there's a current almost obsession with trying to work out whether Trump is a fascist or not. I've got to write a piece for the Guardian next month, answering the question, is Trump really a fascist or not? And I've been reading about it and I everyone has a view on this. But one of the consequences of this is that some of the poetry of the age of fascism is being brought back. Is it too much of a stretch?

Do you think, when people try and now so not so much the Spanish Civil War, but more like a short verse like Epitaph on a Tyrant, try and apply it to now? I think the thirties poets have a also in their plays, of course, because many of them uh try to dramatize these ideas as well, have a great interest in ideas of autocracy and despotism.

and the sense that underwrites lots of political verse of that period that there is something kind of intrinsically weak about democratic structures, that they don't have any kind of Tenacity or staying power. and that may speak to something in the contemporary world. I don't know. Certainly there's a strong sense in people of Ordin's generation that the kinds of political hope that the the preceding English uh literary generation put in concepts like liberalism, that was just dead in the water.

rather homespun, amateurish works of political science is called Forward from Liberalism and it's just considered self evident that liberalism's not gonna do it for you. So where do you go? A considerable resistance, especially on the part of Auden, for going straight into the hands of Kommunismus.

And certainly no enthusiasm for lapsing back into a kind of, you know, residual English conservatism. So you're kind of lost in a sort of ideological no man's land in a way, and I think that's what Spain captures.

Rather brilliantly, really, the Evocation of what yesterday was like is one thing, and we've got a kind of a glimpse of what tomorrow is going to be like, and then in the middle there's this kind of rather odd space where political agency or political action or the motivations for political action are actually left pretty obscure.

And in all sorts of ways the most impressive things about the Spain poem aren't really the language of politics at all. When he talks about yesterday, he talks about things like the divination of water and the invention of cartwheels and plots.

And when he looks to tomorrow, you know, the rediscovery of romantic love and the photographing of ravens, I mean none of these are actually the w there's one political term that gets into the poem where he talks about liberty's masterful shadow. But that's the only flash of his verbal imagination being switched on by any recognizable political concept really in the poem. And uh I agree very much with Mark, I think what the first of September nineteen thirty nine represents

is in a way giving up even that d you know, tiny toehold in in a world of political discourse and moving on to something else. And when you get

Love I mean love appe appears in almost every poem that Orden ever wrote. He couldn't write a poem without using the word love. But it begins to assume in those later poems, uh things like the first of September nineteen thirty nine, a tremendous kind of force and you're not surprised to discover in retrospect that it's only eighteen months down the line and he's re entered the Anglican

Church again. So there's there is another ideological position that's available, which isn't defined by secularism and politics, but by the church. And that's where he goes. I came across an interesting comment in one of T. S. Elliot's letters. He'd just been to see one of Orden and Isherwood's plays, I think it was the cent of F six, and he says in the in the letter Hitler is not such a simpleton as they suggest.

there was a sense i of the thirties poets to someone like Elliot as being somewhat naive in their visions and that th their resistances to kind of creeping fascism taking a the form of a kind of schoolboy mask or kind of, you know, a review, rather than really responding with due kind of, you know, alarm or with alarm which which was sufficiently grave to the crisis uh posed by Hitler.

So undoubtedly Orden then flees to America or finds himself in America and um a kind of great phase of political poetry is over. And I think in some ways English poetry has struggled since

the thirties to be as kind of confident in its politics as um the thirties poets were so felt so much today the struggle that this wasn't something you could dodge or kind of e evade. But the later poets uh perhaps less willing to in the post war era, you get the new apocalyptics like Dylan Thomas and so on, they're less willing to address directly political events. And when one does, such as Philip Larkin, y you were asking what else kind of bad political poems?

And I was thinking of his nineteen sixty nine poem Homage to a Government, which is a poem about Wilson bringing the troops back home from Aden. And Larkin laments this, is the kind of decline of empire. We brought them home for money. And I don't think it is a good political poem. I think it's very limited in its understanding of the post imperial era and it's sort of

pressing buttons in relation to money and bringing the troops home in a fairly kind of unsophisticated way. So that seems to me an example of a a great poet. writing a not very good political poem because the issue as has somehow overmastered his sense of sophistication or nuance. I don't know, d what do you think of homage to a government shameless?

Well, I wouldn't put it in my top ten Larkin poems. No, it's true. And there's some odd, funny little kind of satirical squibs, aren't there, about the L S E and things like that that he also writes. But I mean I think they're kind of I don't know, it's that odd kind of Larkin voice, isn't it, that you get in the letters that he exchanges with Kings the Amos and it's Larkin assuming a kind of telegraph.

voice, which indeed is partly genuinely his voice, but is also partly a kind of, you know, a c a construction and I think that's partly what's limiting, isn't it, to the homage to a government. It's a single voice poem, isn't it? And the great thing about a really great la Arkin poem is it normally has different voices in it of one kind, or different idioms or different registers of one kind or another.

Yes, I wanted to mention, I mean, in in terms of elegy in the country churchyard and how you can approach poems which don't seem political, but then suddenly assume all sorts of political charge at grasp. The last poem in The Less Deceived is a poem about basically two old racehorses, ex race horses galloping around in a field on their own. And this then became in readings of it a symbolic expression of post imperial tristesse, to use um a comment of Blake Morrison's, I think.

that these two knackered horses somehow represent the post imperial moment with much greater kind of a sophistication and interest and imaginative range than a poem such as Homage to a Government, which directly addresses the fact that Britain has lost or is is rapidly losing its kind of status in the postwar era. But they're both about England gone, aren't they? That's what joins them. As he says in the poem Going Going

you know, and that'll be England gone. That's I mean that's the moment that these poems are about in their different ways. As you say, one in a rather beautiful pastoral way and one in this rather kind of tubthumping way. And is there a point at which I've read those letters too, and some of it's not just

telegraph stuff, some of it is just outright racism and he's playing up to Kingsley Amos and vice versa, and to others Robert Conquest and others. But you know, it's certainly damaged his reputation, I think. But also, is there a sense in which some poems like Homage to Government are more obviously contaminated in a way once you understand the crude political

beliefs that lie behind it in a way that I don't know, the wits and weddings or something probably isn't going to be contaminated by that. You know, he's an incredibly humane, sympathetic poet.

But here's a poem like Homage to Government, which but in political terms it's quite crude. And then you discover that behind it something even cruder lies. And that one gets dragged sort of posthumously,'cause a lot of this came out after his death, it kind of gets gr dragged into the collapse of his reputation into a pretty nasty politics, whereas some of the other poems

surely survive that. And so there is a line somewhere, and some of the poems are on the right side of that line, and homage to governments on the wrong side. Yes, it's an interesting question though, isn't it, about

I mean to try and imagine the possibility of a really good poem written about some really nasty politics. I mean that must be a kind of a like a a thought experiment, mustn't it, that it's worth pausing on. Certainly Auden in his elegy for Yates At least before he goes back and cuts out. the stanzas that I'm just about to refer to you, in a similar kind of gesture to cutting out Spain from his work altogether.

Uh in that poem Orden does seem to suggest that if you use language properly, if you use language in a kind of reverential and worshipful way in your poems, then time will pardon you. Time, he says, pardon Kipling and his views, so a whole set of kind of imperialist doctrines that Auden passionately did not believe in.

And yet he loved Kipling, and pardon Paul Claudell, who was the arch conservative French writer of the first part of the twentieth century and uh Ordin says time pardons him for writing well. So that I mean it's an interesting one, isn't it? Is it possible to imagine a poem that articulates a politics that you really find a bit off putting, and yet does it with such extraordinary verbal brilliance or imaginative gift that the poem is good, even though the politics of the poem are not good.

Where does Kipling fit in this? Are you doing Kipling in this series? I'm guessing not. No. Kipling is an absolutely fabulous poet. I think I I mean I've been re rereading him recently and he's one of the most wonderful poets in terms of his eloquence. And his in a way his vision of of the Empire is is fairly he believed in it. I don't think you feel contaminated by it. I think in terms of what Seamus was saying, the locus classicus is Ezra Pounds Pis and Cantos.

which were awarded the Bollingen Prize in nineteen forty nine and which were written in the, you know, the the prison camp at Pisa and he was about to go he was on trial for being a traitor for his broadcast

Octo Mussolini, but the poem itself is the cantos themselves are full of the most kind of loathsome anti Semitism and attacks. And he he is th the great test case for w how you value a a poet whose technical inventiveness has done all sorts of things for poetry and for other poets, but whose views as kind of embodied in

a number of his uh you know, of the cantos are utterly repellent. So and it was given the the prize. I I forget who was on the um the committee. Ordin was Ordin on the committee, I think he was, wasn't he? I think Orton was, yeah. He certainly defended the decision. And when his publisher proposed to a pound from the poetry list on which Ordin was also a part, Orden threatened to take himself elsewhere if they did that.

And that's a good example, isn't it, of how the poet likes to think of poetry can somehow have a sphere in which it's uncontaminated by the political or the political can somehow not affect one's understanding or or assessment or Yes, and Yates for Auden was also a good example of that,'cause obviously Yates' political views, especially as the thirties go on, get more and more you know, what should we say, cranky. And he writes.

You know, in late poems like The Statues, which is an extraordinary, amazing poem, but it's a weird poem about how Ireland has to kinda remodel itself on the geometric norms of classical Greece and get outside of the filthy modern tide, which we've been

thrown upon. And there's a really strong kind of eugenics kind of feel to that poem. And yet that late Yeats voice, for some time at least, Orden really admired, while disagreeing with almost everything that that late Yeats voice was saying. So there is a kind of odd kind of division between um as it were what's said and the way that it's said, in some cases at least.

Can I ask you about a couple of the other poems that you've discussed already in the series? So one is The Yeats that you mentioned, Easter, nineteen sixteen, because that's also a poem with a date. But I would say it's less you know, in lots of ways it's less dated. I suspect it's more widely read than Spain nineteen thirty seven. I don't know if that's partly because it's about

political failure in a way. So it's it doesn't have that sense that that Auden does, which is he hasn't seen the ways in which this is going to fail yet. But also it's so weirdly personal. He's writing about people that he knew. You know, it's not that the personal is the political, the political is the personal in that poem. I think you say in the podcast, you know, this is Dublin. They all knew each other, they were all bumping into each other.

in the streets and then a bunch of them go and get themselves shot, leaving the poet to think, What was that? And um so there's something you know, it's an amazing poem. These are all amazing poems, but there's something I hate to use this word, but almost relatable about it, which is that feeling of y you're in the middle of a dramatic political event and and some people have gone one way and some people have gone another.

I don't know, but it certainly to me feels a lot in its way a lot less dated. I don't know if that's the wrong word to use, but I'm thinking of the two that have dates in the title. Well yes, I mean I think also th it's it's a slightly different case in the extent to which the Irish Revolution was about language, much more than than the Spanish Civil War that

the fatal things which the British did were to create martyrs out of the sixteen men who were killed. And Yeats's own participation in that creation of a m a mythology is much more in some ways a politically effective And although he hedges his bets a terrible beauty is born, um, creates a a sort of sense of his own sidelining by this particular event, which took him by surprise. He does commemorate them. I write it out in a verse.

so that the extent to which the poem itself is participating in the event in in s for for many people it has become the event. I mean Easter nineteen sixteen is and when you read a historical account of Easter nineteen sixteen you realise what a complete botch the whole thing was, how no one rose up, and it really does become uh does work on the level of symbolism.

And I think we mentioned in the podcast how Lenin kind of observed what was happening there and he thought, yeah, that they're onto something here, that it doesn't actually matter what happens, it matters how it is framed and the mythology which can derive from it. And Yates in his own way, wanted to be a part of it, but he didn't want to he obviously was against violence.

And i I said it's the great failure, but of course it's the failure that becomes a success, unlike Spain, where it y it's being built up as this enormous thing, but with hindsight it wasn't that. This is the thing that, partly thanks to Yates, does build up to be the thing that it wanted to be in its dreams. Yes, that's true. Though again the terms into which Yates puts those events of Easter nineteen sixteen are curiously unpolitical, aren't they, in any kind of normally recognizable

way. And he himself is surprised, isn't he, um, Mark, do you remember the letter that we we discussed at one point about he he seems genuinely surprised that he's so moved by a public event? 'Cause he's not interested in public things. I mean he's interested in the in the the deep internal worlds of imagination and vision and you know, possibly

Celtic legends, if y something like that, but really not interested in in public events. And I think also quite striking that Morgon, who was absolutely political through and through, didn't like it. She didn't think it rose for the occasion. She obviously well, I say obviously, I'm the way I interpret her remarks to Yates, no I don't like your poem. It isn't worthy of you, and above all it isn't worthy of its subject. uh is that he's somehow failed to write a sufficiently political poem.

for her. And in i in a way if you read it absolutely straight and and don't look at the footnotes or to identify who the participants are and so on, the thrust of the poem is that what's so great about what's happened is a new kind of beauty. has been launched in the world. So it's actually a poem in a funny kind of way about aesthetics or about a new a new kind of aesthetic experience and not really about

A political defeat or indeed a a political failure. Especially when you get to the end. For all that is done and said, we know their dream enough to know they dreamed and are dead. This isn't the language of militant republicanism, is it, I don't think? But he was also moved by a public event, which was a private event. It would be odd in a way not to be moved by people you know being dragged out and shot. It's sort of you know, if he hadn't known any of these people, if it hadn't been his world

He he might have been unmoved by it. It would be it would take a heart of stone in a way. This is the public event which is also absolutely touching him personally. Yes, that's right. But there is that still that same kind of odd kind of transformational magic that the poem works on what as as Mark says was actually a a bit of a kerfuffle in the you know, botched uprising, and yet is turned into something with this kind of extraordinary, I don't know, terrible beauty. It's like Lear or

something, isn't it? It's that kind of level of poetic achievement. Mark and I were both supervised by John Bailey years ago and and he keeps cropping into our conversations in rather an irritating way. But anyway, he once said of Auden that what Auden learnt from Yates was how to, as it were, get into a situation and then make it stylish.

you take a a a situation which appears you know, an international episode of of potentially momentous uh historical significance, like Spain or like the Easter uprising in Dublin. Uh but you devote all your poetic energies into turning it into something stylish, into something that is personal, highly kind of personal poetic.

individual. I mean in a way kind of easing it away from the world of public discourse and public engagement into something which is much more self created and self delighting in odd sorts of ways. I don't know what you think about that much. Well, I agree. I think in terms of Yeats's career, his engagement with politics made him into a better poet. That that he's one of the his greatest poetry was written after say nineteen fourteen onwards and that for why is politics can ruin some poets.

that it mediates as a poet, that no one wants more of the wanderings at Vuchin, but they do want more, even of his proto fascist poems, because the rhetoric is so kind of startling and original and powerful and the versification is so astonishing.

and the commitment and energy is is so high. So that I think he he is a good example of a poet whose politicization I mean Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry was how Auden put it in the in his elegy, and I think that the extent to which you c cannot disever Yeats' achievement from the Irish struggle for independence is is um

or or you can, but his most interesting ways of reading him. There's a great essay on him by Edward Saeed, reading him as a post-colonial poet, you know, that frankly this is the kind of poet he was, somebody whose imagination is engaged with and excited by the whole process. of forging the conscience of his race to use Joyce's phrase from the end of Portrait of an Artist as a young man.

The most recent episode in your series is about Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen, which I'm guessing is probably the poem that's best known. by people who are listening'cause it's still ubiquitous, I think, in schools. And it's also interesting because it's not like those other two that we've just been talking about. It's not Spain nineteen thirty seven, it's not Easter nineteen sixteen. It's not about a political event.

It's about the First World War, which is a political event, but it's not trying to pin down a public event. When you discuss it you talk quite a lot about its political effects, as it were, its afterlife in the twenties, you know the Owen's poetry was immensely powerful and influential. Orden might have persuaded one or two people to sign up to Spain, but my God, Owen's poetry persuaded a lot more people than that that Warden. Oh boy.

wrong and it had profound political consequences in nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties, Britain. But In your episode there was a bit of the poem that you didn't talk about that I wanted to ask you about. So after I listened to you, I then went and reread it and then I thought, Well, there is a bit in here that is straightforwardly political. and you haven't discussed it. So I might have misread it. You're gonna have to put me right on this. You can give me a supervision here.

poet. And it seems to me there's one bit of this that is profoundly prophetic. So this poem is about his Doppelganger, so it's about the German Wilfred Owen. And he's killed him. So Wilfred Owen has killed the German Wilfred Owen because he's killed the poet of the war, who would have been the German poet of the war. So there is no German poet of the war to be Wilfred Owen. And the German Wilfred Owen talks about how the world will go in the absence of him because he's no longer there.

And the lines that you didn't discuss, so maybe I've misread them, but they feel extraordinarily prophetic to me. The German Wilfred Owen says, Because I'm not around to write my poetry, to sort of wash the chariot wheels of their blood Now men will go content with what we spoiled, or discontent, boil bloody and be spilled. They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress, none will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

And you could say the tragic prophetic irony of this poem is that that's quite a good description of nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties Germany. So the British Wilfred Owen lives long enough for to have his political affairs. But he's killed his German equivalent, as a result of which the world of politics is going to go a particular way.

Is that too literal a reading of it? Because you didn't talk about those lines, but it seems to me there is a little bit in this poem where it does speak about the public world of Politics and the Future and it's eerie reading it.

Yes, I've just written a piece on Owen for the L L B so and uh I don't discuss those lines, but I discuss Strange Meeting and the extent to which it does create a a vision of loss of all direction, that all the kind of all the ways of understanding the world, interpreting the world, making sense of the world are kind of tossed into this cauldron and they all kind of fall apart.

in various ways. And that sense of disintegration is proliptic of a poem like The Wasteland, in which all sorts of kind of, you know, things are conjugated in relation to kind of failure and despair. I think the extent to which Owen was a committed European, that he spent all this time in Bordeaux and he learnt fluent French

And he was, as much as Eliot, committed to a vision of Europe. So in those lines that you mentioned, and I think you're absolutely right, apologies to our listeners for not discussing them in our podcast, you can see that the whole vision of a trek. this idea of the kind of pioneering spirit you associated with the board.

and so on and the Boer War, but this from progress that Owen was committed to the idea of progress in some ways, and that poets would play their part in this trek towards progress. but that the slaughter of them was apocalyptic because they could no longer play their role

in the formation of a kind of meaningful sort of body politic in terms of m the myths which hold nations together. And it it is interesting'cause Owen was quite a patriotic uh poet, as well as being as taken as the sort of great kind of

outspoken denunciator of war. In some ways he was also extremely patriotic and committed to the war effort. And he could have got out of going back. I mean Scott Moncrief tries to get him out of it And it's not decided really until quite late in the autumn, late summer of nineteen eighteen that he's going to go back.

But certainly I think Strange Meeting, which i is a a very in some ways influential poem still today, because as you say, every school kid in the country reads it. And another way it's interesting is it's a kind of homoerotic poem as well. It it's a poem about Two men grappling together in the dark.

uh one kills the other. But there are ways in which for Owen the First World War was not only appalling cataclysm, but it was also ways in which uh men bonded together in the most intense and exhilarating of ways.

And conflict itself becomes almost a kind of l erotic struggle in strange meeting. That couldn't tie into kind of Freudian notions of the death drive, I suppose, or or concepts of the ways in which war itself is responding to some kind of uh deep atavistic tribal drive in us as much as is as it is to the kind of crisis in contemporary politics.

I should say the series that I've been doing on great political fictions and dramas begins with Coriolanus and actually what this reminded me of was Coriolanus and Orphidius. There's a bit in Coriolanus where they're grappling exactly this way and it's ver you know, deeply homoerotic and similar. So I I heard that echo. But Seamus, I don't know enough to know whether there were German anti war poets equivalent to

Owen and Sassoon. But one of the weird things about Strange Meeting is it makes a big claim for poetry. I mean it seems to me it makes an extraordinary claim for poetry, which is because you've killed the poet. the world is gonna go this way rather than that way. And the odd thing is that there is some truth in that. You know the poets of the First World War were extraordinarily influential

Germany got the great anti war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, but almost too late. By the time that came out, it was in time for the Nazis to burn it. But this stuff is coming out in nineteen eighteen a and beyond. I don't know if it prophetic is too big a word for this, but I really found it eerie just thinking about those lines and the thought that you know, the the poets weren't there. They were there in this country, but they weren't there.

I mean Germany lost the war, so it's gonna be a different kind of anti-war poetry. And you know politics is politics and history is history and maybe poetry doesn't make any difference. But this poem makes that weirdly huge claim for poetry. It's you're gonna get a different world if you kill the poet. No, absolutely. And although young Orden was a a great admirer of Owen, and thought that Owen was better than a poet like Seedfried Sassoon, because he seemed less

very polemical in his his anti militarism. I think Orden in a way got Owen wrong because I think Owen was absolutely committed to the idea of the social political utility of poetry. in a way that Auden, as we've been discussing, kind of moves away from pretty quickly. You can see all that in the little preface that Owen writes.

to the volume of poems that obviously he never sees into print, where he talks about the poet having a job to warn and the kind of visionary mode in which a poem like Strange Meeting is written is clearly drawing upon the visionary, the more kind of Danteesque poems of someone like Shelley, who we've looked at, and Shelley was absolutely of the view that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, that the the writing that was actually going to determine

The way in which human history unfolded was in some sense poetic writing. Now he draws poetry quite broadly, he's not just talking about lyrics. But nevertheless, that same impulse, that same ambition is there, and I think that's where where Owen's getting it from. Um he's a late romantic with a capital R in that sense.

is very keen to point out that what poets like are things like thunderstorms and conflagrations and colourful things like that. And he tells his audience that the attributes of a poet are a very undesirable thing in a statesman. You don't want those things.

And and this discussion makes me kind of aware of the extent to which, say, the battle between Trump and Biden is fought out through language. In a way, they are both poets. They're fighting each other, they're battling each other, and it's the domination of language, which is what poets write. which in some ways is how politics kind of articulates itself or communicates itself. So, I mean, Trump has published his poems, as you f probably know.

They were presented as poems, weren't they? Some of his sayings. But the ways in which some particular kind of phrases can connect with the public imagination is something that politicians and poets share. There's that cliched line, You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. And I was thinking about, you know, tell Kirstama and Rishi Sunak that you campaign in poetry. I didn't feel like we just had six weeks of poetry.

To be replaced by prose. But Trump is so interesting. I don't know if poetry is the word for it, but one of his distinguishing characteristics as a politician is he doesn't govern. You know, he doesn't actually see any difference between the rhetoric inside and outside government. It's kind of all the same. His first time in office was notable for how little governance went on, it was just the rhetoric continuing. And he is that very unusual politician. He is all language.

I mean there isn't anything else there. He is all language and all projection. And that line from Auden that I quoted, it does seem to mean I mean, I'm not sure when he laughed respectable senators burst with laughter,'cause I'm not sure they're respectable anymore, but He knew human folly like the back of his hand seems to me a very good line for Trump. He's not a simpleton. He is a profound student of human weakness. You know, one of his poetic

devices is to give people nicknames and he's brilliant at it. He's struggling to find one for Kamala Harris. I think he's still feeling his way, but you know, he destroys his rivals in that way. He is a very unusual politician. I don't know if poet is the word for him, but Whatever he does when he campaigns, he it just carries on.

Well that does go back to this old tradition of flighting F L Y T I N G, which Scottish poets would do, and they would sort of insult each other, and that was the way in which you expressed your poethood, certainly in the mass media world. Social media world or the disastrous debate that they had. That's sort of what's supposed to happen, and only Biden didn't show up. The last episode in the fiction series that I've done is Hamilton, which is interesting because you know it's the hip hop.

founding fathers, but Lynn Manuel Miranda says part of what drew him to it is your hip hop has this way of communicating, which is insult. You know, it's just so he does cabinet meetings as Jefferson and Hamilton just trying to take each other down like they were you know, in some kind of hip hop beef. I h you know, I use these terms, it sounds ridiculous, people like me saying hip hop beef. I don't even know if that's the right term. But

It works because politics is very like that actually, but it's also extraordinarily lyrical. I think Hamilton is I think the lyrics in Hamilton are genius because they are so intricate, but it is that thing of the intricacy of the insult, which actually, yeah, Trump is brilliant at.

It's utterly fantastic, Hamilton. I've seen it several times and I've teach it as well. I think it's one of the greatest reconfigurations of a sort of political system there has ever been. The idea that kids see a black Washington is itself kind of exhilarating. But also that the bit when Jefferson and Hamilton are fighting it out and you know, we we all know who does the planting where it's the one sort of gesture to kind of slavery or one of the gestures to slavery.

in it, but it's i inexplicit in the ways in which it and I think that the poetry that Miranda comes up with stands up both on the page and in performance.

So can I ask a quickly a final couple of questions? I think you're halfway through your series. What's coming up? Oh, we were gonna do Autumn Journal by Louis McNeese and also Going Back to the French Revolution, books nine and ten of the prelude by Wordsworth, which are a a really astonishing register of a again a political cat kind of cataclysm.

And there's it's interesting'cause there were two ver there's the eighteen oh five and the eighteen fifty and Wordsworth ends up are kind of conservative. But Nevertheless, they are, in terms of a poetic representation of a historical crisis, they're as astonishingly full and vivid. He was there. Uh he was there and and suffering uh in his attic room, his chambre de Bonne. waiting for, you know, and every day a new execution was happening. And so he he was in the tiger's den.

Finally, so I've just finished this political fiction series. I just wanted to ask you because I'm really curious, and we've got some of our regular contributors coming on to talk about their favourite. political fiction. So Laire Ippy's doing The Wild Duck, it's not particularly political. Helen Lewis to Kill a Mockingbird, and then Robert Saunders, who's been our guide to historic elections, is doing Felix Holt. So I did Middlemarch.

But you know and I'm now reading Felix Holton, I'd always been put off it, but actually it's great. You know, it's quite hard work, but it's great. What do you think are the great or or is the great political novel? Or is that too sweeping a question? Well I didn't choose I I noticed you haven't got any Dickens there. Um Dickens seems to me the greatest kind of political novelist.

there's ever been. The one I sort of decided to choose for when you asked, you know, what's your favourite was Nicholas Nickleby, which is a kind of early one in in which sort of GK Chesterton talks about how there's more of the French Revolution in Nicholas Nickleby than there is in A Tale of Two Cities. that it's got these anarchic liberational energies released in it and it's also utterly hilarious.

But it's also got really solid social political action that there were these Yorkshire schools where parents would send unwanted children. No vacations was always advertised. And it's basically to get rid of of illegitimate children. Dickens goes up there, he writes this episode with Wackford Squeers, he he denounces these schools, makes the fun of them, within fifteen years they're closed down.

So in terms of of a novelist who's has a political effect on particular issues as well as articulating a kind of humane and generous and moving attitude to all who are in suffering or outcasts like Smike and Nicholas Nickleby. I just think that Dickens gets much more sophisticated in in his ill political analysis in Bleak House or Little Dorrit. But in these early ones there's a kind of clarity about it and an energy which is is is unself conscious and which I I find particularly powerful.

I think I'm gonna nominate Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. Conrad is a fascinating novelist, partly because he is so interested in politics in a kind of conceptual way. And one of the things that's underlying under Western eyes is pretty deep and serious reading in nihilist literature of of the period.

and revolutionary writing by Bakunin and people like that. I mean, so he really is coming at it with a set of and he's, you know, fascinated in this book about what liberalism means, what liberty means, what does freedom mean, all these sorts of things. So he really is coming at it in in as I say that kind of conceptual way, but finds a most brilliant dramatic kind of scenario within which to explore those things. So it's set in Russia and in Geneva, and it's all about a student called Razumov.

who gets caught up quite unwillingly in revolutionary violence and assassination that that's been done. and he either finds himself complicit with the revolutionaries, or complicit with the autocratic Russian state, which Conrad

is very, very clear, is appalling. It's not like they're revolutionaries against a decent regime. Both the regime and the revolutionaries are appalling. And one of the interesting, fascinating things about the book is the way that Conrad develops this sort of parallel between the psychology of revolutionary violence on the one hand and the psychology of autocracy as a governmental system on the other hand, and that what look as though they are

uh embattled opponents are actually part of the same system. And poor old Razanov, the student who's caught in the middle I won't give away the plot away, but anyway, it's not a very happy outcome for him in the end. And it's Conrad making an extraordinarily powerful point about the relationship between certain kinds of political liberty and certain kinds of moral identity. And if you lose one, Conrad's implicit point is then you then you lose the other and a moral life becomes impossible.

It's very powerful. It's a brilliant reimagining of Dostoevsky and other kind of fraught sort of existentialist novels like that, but very much in the terms of political thinking and political ideas. If you'd like to hear more from Seamus and Mark and I don't normally say this, but it really is a brilliant series. I've been listening to it avidly. You can hear about the great political poems on the LRB's Close Readings podcast simply by searching for close readings.

If you subscribe, you also get access to many previous series by Seamus and Mark talking about poems, but also LRB series about literature from ancient Greece to the present day. We are now going to be talking to a couple of our regular contributors about their favourite political fictions. But just a reminder, if you subscribe to PPF Plus, you can now get a bonus episode, which is me talking to Robert Saunders about George Elliott's Felix Holt.

You just need to go to ppfideas.com or follow the link in the show description. Next time, I'm going to be talking to Leia Ippey about a play that she has known since she was eight years old. And she explains to us just what it has meant in her life. It's by Ibsen, it's called The Wild Duck, and it's an amazing story. This has been Past Present Future brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books.