Andrew Marr - We British - The Poetry of a People

Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction 1 The Earliest English Poetry 2 Knights in Green Satin 3 Fanatics and Courtiers 4 England’s Miracle 5 Beyond the Nymphs and Swains: Renaissance Realities 6 Nothing Left But Laughter? Britain’s Mullahs Confront the Problem of Pleasure 7 The Restoration of What? Satire, Science and Cynicism, as Political Britain is Born 8 The Age of Reason. And Slavery, and Filth, and So On 9 The Revolution 10 Romantic Agonies 11 The British Age 12 Plush, Mush and a Handful of Titans 13 The Poets of More Than One War 14 How Modern Were the Modernists? 15 Lefties and Righties: Outrage and Laughter in Britain Between the Wars 16 Revolt Against the Metropolis: Britain in the 1940s and 50s 17 The Age of Larkin 18 Fresh Freshness 19 Celts, Britons and Their Friends: Modern British Poetry Furth of England 20 Here Comes Everybody: The British and Poetry Now Acknowledgements Index of Poets Also by Andrew Marr About the Publisher

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate 2015

Text © Andrew Marr 2015

Cover image © ‘Willow Bough’ wallpaper design, 1887, Morris, William (1834–96)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

Andrew Marr asserts his moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008130893

Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780008130916

Version: 2016-07-18

Cover

Title Page Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction 1 The Earliest English Poetry 2 Knights in Green Satin 3 Fanatics and Courtiers 4 England’s Miracle 5 Beyond the Nymphs and Swains: Renaissance Realities 6 Nothing Left But Laughter? Britain’s Mullahs Confront the Problem of Pleasure 7 The Restoration of What? Satire, Science and Cynicism, as Political Britain is Born 8 The Age of Reason. And Slavery, and Filth, and So On 9 The Revolution 10 Romantic Agonies 11 The British Age 12 Plush, Mush and a Handful of Titans 13 The Poets of More Than One War 14 How Modern Were the Modernists? 15 Lefties and Righties: Outrage and Laughter in Britain Between the Wars 16 Revolt Against the Metropolis: Britain in the 1940s and 50s 17 The Age of Larkin 18 Fresh Freshness 19 Celts, Britons and Their Friends: Modern British Poetry Furth of England 20 Here Comes Everybody: The British and Poetry Now Acknowledgements Index of Poets Also by Andrew Marr About the Publisher

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1 The Earliest English Poetry

2 Knights in Green Satin

3 Fanatics and Courtiers

4 England’s Miracle

5 Beyond the Nymphs and Swains: Renaissance Realities

6 Nothing Left But Laughter? Britain’s Mullahs Confront the Problem of Pleasure

7 The Restoration of What? Satire, Science and Cynicism, as Political Britain is Born

8 The Age of Reason. And Slavery, and Filth, and So On

9 The Revolution

10 Romantic Agonies

11 The British Age

12 Plush, Mush and a Handful of Titans

13 The Poets of More Than One War

14 How Modern Were the Modernists?

15 Lefties and Righties: Outrage and Laughter in Britain Between the Wars

16 Revolt Against the Metropolis: Britain in the 1940s and 50s

17 The Age of Larkin

18 Fresh Freshness

19 Celts, Britons and Their Friends: Modern British Poetry Furth of England

20 Here Comes Everybody: The British and Poetry Now

Acknowledgements

Index of Poets

Also by Andrew Marr

About the Publisher

For Emily, a poetry reader

I would also like to thank Gwyneth Williams, Controller of Radio 4, who believed in this project; and James Cook, who led the ‘takeover’ of the channel for National Poetry Day, 8 October 2015

Beyond the village, there’s some marshy ground. There, on a warm evening, a horny, lonely man is making rhythmic noises and shuffling his feet. Inside his head there’s a kind of music, and what he’s doing is trying to fit words to it, words that express his feelings for a woman – too good for him – living in the village.

A few centuries later there’s another man, who feels he has let down God and is facing eternal hellfire. Yet he’s a kindly man, of gentle disposition, and somehow feels that God can’t be as pitiless as the Church elders suggest. So, with a goose quill and a sheaf of rough paper, he is dipping into ink and writing down a kind of private, rather bouncy, prayer. He too is humming.

Then there is the woman in a foul dungeon, throbbing with pain from her torture, dictating to a shabby priest her defiant poem against the authorities.

There will be many more women – rich, in chambers coloured with stained glass, protected against the cold by animal skins; and poor, living in twentieth-century London, struggling with wailing children and an absent man. And many, many more men, too – Irish mystics, Scottish farmers, West Country priests, a Warwickshire actor – all doing the same thing, setting the words to rhythm, tightening them together like the ropes on a fast-moving yacht, trying to build a compact, thrumming little engine of meaning out of the sprawling magic of the English language.

Palaeo-archaeologists, who study early man, tell us that the rhythm and the music came first. Dances, perhaps led by tribal shamans, would be used to bind the people together and to express defiance of the surrounding dark and danger. To keep the beat, it was natural to hum, sing or shout. And at some point it seemed a good idea to add words. The earliest Greek tragedies, with their choruses, music and masks, give us some notion of where poetry came from.

The first poets that we know were read and discussed on the archipelago of islands we call British would have been the Latin poets of the Roman Empire. It’s most unlikely that the Bronze Age tribes – technically competent people, farmers and metalworkers, miners and traders – didn’t have their own poetry. But we know nothing about it. The Romano-British, however, would have had their Virgil and their Martial, and indeed their Greeks as well; there would have been poetry recitals in the villas of Sussex, and dirty, clever ditties murmured along Hadrian’s Wall.