Contemporary parliamentarians, in my experience, are not specially attuned to contemporary verse. There are significant exceptions. The former culture secretary, Chris Smith, presides over the Wordsworth Trust at Dove Cottage, a venue for poets, and is an expert on the Romantics. Kenneth Baker, a former Home Secretary, has compiled fine anthologies for Faber. When in the 1970s and 1980s I worked in Parliament, many members had enjoyed, or suffered, a classical education. Enoch Powell was a full Professor of Greek at the age of 25. Quintin Hailsham, Lord Chancellor when I joined the Cabinet, knew reams of Greek and Latin poetry by heart. Denis Healey, still happily with us, was famous for his cultural hinterland. Of these three, Powell wrote and published a few poems. They are quite death-directed (he reminds me of Ludovic in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour war trilogy) and a bit creepy; certainly less well composed than his speeches. On the Labour side today, Gerald Kaufman, Denis McShane and Mark Fisher are very well read men and Chris Mullin is a remarkable writer. The Tories have their best writer and parliamentary performer in William Hague, who I suspect will return to writing full time after serving, as he hopes, as Foreign Secretary. A bow should be taken by former Chancellor Ken Clarke. Clarke’s encyclopaedic knowledge of improvisational jazz, the great tenor saxophonists in particular, probably includes their influence on modern American poets, Frank O’Hara, for example. The Tories are also fielding a remarkable writer, Rory Stewart, in what should be the safe seat of Penrith. But poetry? Even allowing for having lost touch since leaving politics in 1985, I scan the green and red benches in vain.
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If you publish a book while serving as a Minister, it needs to be cleared by the Cabinet Office, effectively by the Prime Minister. OUP accepted my first book of poems before I joined Edward Heath’s administration but it was scheduled to appear after I had kissed hands ― whips in the House of Lords become temporary members of the Royal Household. So I sent the MS to the Cabinet Secretary, also head of the Home Civil Service. The then Secretary replied that he could not, at one reading, discover in it anything deleterious to the national interest. Yes, Minister had not yet been conceived, but what could be more like Sir Humphrey than that little qualifying phrase?
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Facing the Cabinet Secretary recalls a splendid (and true) story about Clement Attlee. John Strachey, a senior member of Attlee’s Cabinet, sought formal permission to publish a non-political poem in The Sunday Times. To his amazement, this was refused. He stormed along to Number Ten to ask the Prime Minister what on earth was going on. “Rotten poem. Doesn’t rhyme and doesn’t scan,” answered Clem.
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Attlee himself had no difficulty rhyming or scanning. His great autobiographical poem is well known but so often misquoted that I give it here in full.
Few thought he was even a starter.
There were many who thought themselves smarter.
But he ended PM, CH and OM,
an Earl and a Knight of the Garter.
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Perhaps the most impressive poet of his generation, James Fenton had a spell as a parliamentary sketch-writer for The New Statesman. Like Alan Watkins before him and Frank Johnson later, in The Daily Telegraph, Fenton was very funny. Considered syntax opposed ad-libbed interventions or carefully crafted vacuity. Long hours on the lobby benches also allow you to become a keen student of human behaviour.
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Like the New York and London Reviews of Books today, The New Statesman used to be essential reading. Even if you yourself were not on the left politically, most cultural commentary was left-oriented. Under Max Hastings and Charles Moore respectively, The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator started in the 1980s to generate serious cultural debate in a light-hearted and enjoyable manner. No more. The Telegraph is now an unwieldy version of The Daily Mail. Come back, Conrad Black, all is forgiven. Rupert Murdoch is Guy Fawkes to the arterati. But his TLS is The Guardian’s only rival where consideration of contemporary verse is concerned. And Sky Arts is like the BBC’s Third Programme when I was growing up in the 1950s. You get chunks of raw artistic material unmediated by talking heads. Popular music, from Bob Dylan and The Beatles to Rap, is fired by poetry – reason enough for politicians to keep an eye on it. Highly regarded contemporary poets like Simon Armitage or Hugo Williams think of themselves as entertainers as well as writers. Good. Poets like celebrating action, heroism. The Premier League soccer teams should be encouraged to employ competitive bards. We don’t cost much. I like to imagine a bidding war between Chelsea and Manchester United for a virtuoso like John Fuller.
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Left wing, right wing: templates of an earlier period of political discourse. Voters have seen to that. They steadily refuse to be either or insist, inconveniently, on being both. Social democratic administrations running mixed economies in an era of globalised markets are subject to severe policy limits. If you are on the right, you might get away with arguing for public expenditure to be reduced to about 38% of GDP; if on the left, for it to be raised from about 44% to 48% of GDP. The tanker of state steams through narrow channels. As we have witnessed recently with the financial markets, whose profits fuelled the present government’s spending binge, accident or excess can lead to fiscal as well as environmental pollution. Tony Harrison or Clive James could write poems worth reading on the fall of Lehman Brothers and its aftermath; Christopher Logue imports contemporary ironies into his great imitation of The Iliad.
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We can, however, veer left or right nostalgically. Great poets of the right: Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Larkin, Hughes. Of the left: only McDiarmid (if you can manage him) from these islands. Otherwise Brecht, Neruda. Whether as readers or writers most of us occupy an ambiguous, and fluctuating, centre. It is admirably served: Pasternak, Montale, Auden, Bishop, Lowell, Heaney, Mahon. Geoffrey Hill, who to me is the greatest living English poet, as distinct from ‘poet writing in English’, is left in his Milton-influenced, Roundhead vision; right in his concern for society to cultivate the soil of historical memory. John Ashbery is a great poet of the self in New York, that anthology of selves.
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An inconvenient truth. The best poem of the Second World War was written by a Fascist lucky to escape execution as a traitor: Ezra Pound.
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Correction. You might, of course, consider Eliot’s Four Quartets and David Jones’s The Anathemata war poems. But they are a lot more oblique about war, a lot more distant from war, than The Pisan Cantos.
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Even if, like me, you are a Tory, Larkin is, on a political level, too much to take. An onanistic bigot. Asked who was the greatest French poet, Gide replied, “Victor Hugo, malheureusement”. Likewise Larkin for us and for the last sixty years. He is the incomparable genius of the narrowing, diminished, provincial England (not Britain) which I grew up in and would frequently escape from: back home to Ireland or, for work, to America. Poems like Church Going, The Whitsun Weddings, Dockery and Son, MCMXIV, An Arundel Tomb, The Building, Show Saturday and The Explosion are public poems, social poems with the uncertainty and sweep of great novels. They are thrown well out of bounds of their author’s identity. In that sense, they are classical, not romantic poems. They illustrate the efficiency, in mechanical terms, of poetry and achieve in a few stanzas what in fiction would require hundreds of pages. After just a few readings, you will remember whole tracts of them by heart. The left has Harold Pinter, Larkin’s only rival in the matter of post-war England. Pinter’s plays are written in verse. The famous pauses are equivalent to line-endings or caesuras. If you compare him with another great playwright, Tom Stoppard, you will see the difference, or rather hear it. Stoppard has a fine ear also, but for discourse: for prose.
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A key text of modern conservativism has a beautiful title: “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind”. Michael Oakeshott’s essay bowled me over as an undergraduate when it was published in 1959. Oakeshott distinguishes conversation from enquiry and the accumulation of knowledge. “Of course there is argument and inquiry and information”, he writes, “but whenever these are profitable they are to be recognised as passages in this conversation and perhaps they are not the most captivating of the passages….To listen to the voice of poetry is to enjoy, not a victory, but a momentary relief, a brief enchantment. Having a ready ear for the voice of poetry is to be disposed to choose delight rather than pleasure or virtue or knowledge, a disposition which will reflect itself in practical life…”. The last phrase is the key, the manifesto point.
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Odd poetic moments during a political career. Representing Mrs. Thatcher at a Westminster Abbey celebration of Gerard Manley Hopkins, I muttered, under my breath, “Márgarét áre you gríeving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?”
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Voters, in a democracy, need to make choices which pertain to practical life. But candidates with an ear for delight should be preferred. Now that, thanks to Tony Blair’s abolition of the hereditary peerage, I myself am enfranchised, I shall make my way into the booth with two texts in mind: Sir Toby’s “Dost thou think, that because thou art virtuous,/There shall be no more cakes and ale?” and Robert Lowell’s “…only by suffering the rat-race in the arena/can the heart learn to beat.”