---

The Practical Limits of Daylight: In Memory of J. H. Prynne (1936–2026)

.

For reasons inexplicable to me, I have had the first line of W. H. Auden’s elegy for W. B. Yeats rattling around my head lately: ‘He disappeared in the dead of winter’. As unremarkable as the lines of poetry that tend to lodge in my subconscious, playing on a loop in idle moments, Auden’s opening gambit nevertheless makes something happen to my perception of Yeats. It seals him in a particular moment, preserves him in a seasonal or climatic aspic, a certain wintry mise-en-scène through which the poetry itself gets filtered in retrospect. Last Wednesday, the 22 April, I was on Primrose Hill, in the noon sunshine of a tentative spring day, when I heard the news that J. H. Prynne, the father of late modernist poetry in Britain, had died earlier that morning.

In that moment, the paragraph that stood out in the circular email I had received from Ian Heames, a longtime confidante of Prynne’s and de facto executor of his late works, details the atmosphere of the poet’s final days in palliative care at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge: ‘Poems were read, songs sung, and the weather outside the window was almost always bright and sunny’. Thus, for me at least, was Jeremy Prynne immortalised, like Auden’s Yeats, in a coincidence of weather conditions. Far from his reputed obscurity, I began to see him as something I, and I would imagine most readers, had never seen him as before: a theorist of light, a sun poet.

That afternoon, my two volumes of Prynne’s Poems – great tomes encapsulating almost a life’s work – fell open in new ways. It’s rarely worthwhile to pluck lines of poetry from their original contexts as exemplars of something, but on that afternoon, as in so many other ways, Prynne’s work figured as something of an exception. I started to see references to light and sunlight everywhere: ‘vain sunlight royal almost / trusted when most in doubt’, ‘down from dawn-light refined, pressed in firm shape’, ‘we held out brightly […] the lights of common day’, ‘see the light of the sun, do not enquire / how much light the sun has, or how high it / rises’, ‘festal blinking / at sun surges for a half-hour’, ‘The common world, how far we / go, the practical limits of daylight’. Of these dappled fragments, one shimmered especially brightly: ‘expression held in for in half / praise flooded over, no sun so shone more’. The circuitous imbrication here of sunshine and expression, light and language, is an abiding one in Prynne’s work. This triggered another reminiscence – a phrase from his 1969 book The White Stones, almost a kind of distillation of his kaleidoscopic poetics as I was now able to see it: ‘luminous / take-off shows through in language’.

If the luminosity of language is a cliché to which all poets in one way or another subscribe, it is something by which Prynne was utterly possessed. A 1964 letter to his American counterpart and correspondent, Charles Olson, sheds further light on his poetic apperception:

The purest shaft of memory is via Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary back to Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch: that’s the geographic of the language and perhaps therefore the grammar of which all else is syntax.

The vertiginous archaeology of etymology, the history of words and phrases, becomes, in Prynne’s formulation, a shaft of vertical light, bisecting the horizontal plane of a since charted ‘geographic of language’, a sprawling vista of allusive possibility: ‘the grammar of which all else is syntax’. Jeremy Noel-Tod reprises a similar geographical metaphor, suggesting that, for Prynne, ‘human language [is] the most finely contoured map of the world available’. Light and land are his linguistic elements: we are not so much fumbling amid a realm of things in his work as we are confidently deployed in a map of pure language.

This is what it’s like to lower yourself into the luminous landscapes of Prynne’s poetry, preparing for take-off. The brief, if there is one, is to marvel at the almost architectural power of language arranged just so. One need not be quite so intrepid, in other words, as his detractors might suggest; the work’s notoriety as ‘difficult’ poetry bespeaks a more nuanced condition than simply ‘unreadable’ or ‘rebarbative’ navel-gazing. Granted, the very first line of the very first text in the very first book of his collected Poems puts the point a little finely, reading almost as a mission statement: ‘The whole thing it is, the difficult’. Indeed, you could say, to reprise the ghostly spectre of Yeats, that there is a certain fascination of what’s difficult in Prynne. But, as Aubrey Beardsley counters, and as Ezra Pound echoes in Canto LXXX, ‘beauty is difficult’; there is an important category distinction between a charge of wilful obscurantism and exploiting difficulty as an aesthetic principle. And Prynne’s poems radiate with a strange, terrible beauty all of their own: ‘And for ever the day ruffs out / at the neck, taken with brightnesse, / too brilliant to the touch’.

Any navigation, then, of those two aforementioned planes – the x and y axes of language, the vertical and the horizontal, the diachronic and the synchronic, the focused and the dispersed – presents a rather apt correlative to the available modes for reading Prynne’s work. Richard Kerridge characterises it well: the vertical approach comprises ‘a potentially infinite activity’ where every gnomic reference and hermetic thread is followed up, to the point where ‘dissolution threatens’ a single fluent reading – ‘the poem has to take up a disruptive amount of the reader’s life if it is to be read at all’. Against this, there is the horizontal approach: to ‘read quickly and uninterruptedly’, appreciate it as ‘beautiful but enigmatic surface’, a bit like reading Finnegans Wake without a glossary. ‘Sometimes the lyricism carries me forward’, Kerridge writes, ‘when my mind is protesting feebly, “stop, wait, I need to look something up here”’. It is the nexus of both of these impulses – to chase down every allusion, and to chase every word to the end of its line – which activates the obscure alchemy of Prynne’s poetry.

A hallmark of the work is its cadence, instantly recognisable and virtually inimitable. Abrupt collisions of different linguistic registers create its unique din – the nonsensical, aphoristic, and even the prophetic are combined:

Pity me! These petals, crimson and pink,
are cheque stubs, spilling chalk in a mist
of soft azure. At the last we want
unit costs plus VAT, patient grading:
Made to order, made to care, poised
at the nub of avid sugar soap.

Reading these lines vertically, we recognise – after the requisite research – an interleaving of radically disparate lexical samples: the argot of economics undifferentiated from colourful blossoms lifted straight out of ancient Chinese lyrics by Li Xun and Sun Kuang-hsien. Reading horizontally, on the other hand, we’re delivered snappily to a place of reassuring pathos, albeit one unmoored from worldly phenomena as we know it – ‘the nub of avid sugar soap’ becoming some kind of terminus for the ‘we’, caught between value added tax and the majesty of nature. We’ve gotten somewhere, to something: it matters less where, or to what.

Ventriloquising a certain perception of the poet he ultimately doesn’t share, David Wheatley has called Prynne ‘the ultimate poet of anti-pathos’, a practitioner who delights in endlessly deferring the romantic, worldly pay-off we’ve come to expect of the lyric. What this caricature omits is the extent to which Prynne is a poet, strictly speaking, unmoved by worldly things in his work; such trifling details stifle the business at hand. As the above section from his 1983 book-length sequence, The Oval Window, puts it earlier, ‘It is not / so hard to know as it is to do’, a direct quote from another of his ancient Chinese forebears, Li Chi, in Wen Fu:

When I compose my own works, I am more keenly aware of the ordeal. Constantly present is the feeling of regret that the meaning apprehended does not represent the objects observed; and, furthermore, words fail to convey the meaning. The fact is, it is not so hard to know as it is to do.

What his ancient predecessor regrets, Prynne savours. What if poetic accomplishment tended not towards verisimilitude, connecting the objects of the work with their referents in the world, but instead towards an approximation of the lyric pattern – pathos, catharsis, revelation – rendered in pure language, voided of straightforward worldly reference? Are we no less engaged by the latter? Pluck just about any handful of lines from Prynne’s 2011 masterpiece Kazoo Dreamboats, and the answer is an emphatic one, slabbed in total syntax:

                                                      I saw it upmost, to know partly is by now
not to unknow else with borrowed light induced by origin perpetual,
by passion flat lying and tumid for advantage, for all or nothing

Once again, we are seemingly nowhere, with ‘nothing’: but isn’t it a linguistic tour worth taking? Just what does Auden mean when he says poetry makes nothing happen anyway?

*

Auden’s tribute to Yeats evades a charge of hagiography by defamiliarising the Irish terrain to which his subject was once devoted: as Terence Brown, a biographer of Yeats, once asked of Auden’s poem: ‘why ranches?’. In a similar vein, Jeremy Halvard Prynne’s private and public lives are as inscrutable as the work itself appears at first glance, ‘beautiful but enigmatic’ in their own right. When I imagine Prynne the person – someone I never met nor spoke to – I don’t see a poet peering over half-moon spectacles declaiming his work or holding court, hands grasping either side of a lectern. What I see – as indeed I have seen on YouTube – is a quintessential Englishman in an immaculately tailored suit, waving a traditional folding fan under the fluorescent studio lights of a Chinese reality TV show (or was it a game show? The original video evades my internet searches, existing now only as a fittingly plausible fever dream). If I have to imagine him as a public poet, I see him as a nineteenth-century figure, addressing an audience with a can of Diet Coke anachronistically perched by his left hand, an interloper in modernity, yet hyper-modern: certainly not a beatnik, yet one among beatniks. He was at once the Cambridge don par excellence, carrying the torch of old school practical criticism for new generations of literature scholars, and the avant-garde outlaw, printing samizdat material on the mimeograph in his rooms at Gonville and Caius College. Unlike his American interlocutors Olson, Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn at Black Mountain College, that bastion of experimental art and phallocentric ‘Projective Verse’, Prynne led the modest charge of British late modernism – the fabled ‘British Poetry Revival’ – from a base of operations in one of the most ancient and traditional institutions in the West. There, a coterie coalesced around him in the 1960s: ‘The Cambridge school generally insinuates a body of experimental writing “ultimately centred on Prynne’s Cambridge”’, writes Alex Latter.

Here lurks a further contradiction. How do we square Prynne the solitary reaper of his own singular poetic praxis, with Prynne the unofficial figurehead of a collaborative, collective cultural movement? To do so is to historicise the work itself, an oeuvre which may appear immutable in its distinctive cadence and indelible voice, yet moves fluently with the times. It is to chart the frequency of operative terms, like a corpus linguist, as they cluster in particular conjunctures across his career.

From 1966–8, he was one of the core contributors to – and, through happenstance, printer of – The English Intelligencer, a circular of poetry and aesthetic commentary and, albeit briefly, the very beating heart of the so-called Cambridge School. The Intelligencer was the arena in which many of his earliest published poems first appeared. His contributions in verse and prose in this period of creative cross-fertilisation and dialogue with other poets are marked by their insistence on ‘we’, on ‘trust’, on the word ‘community’: at once a ‘community of wish’, as in ‘Moon Poem’, and a ‘community of risk’, as in ‘A Letter’, both published in the first series of the Intelligencer. It is unsurprising to note the frequency of such collectivist sentiments in this period of concentrated collaboration, not least in a decade so marked by collective struggle and the possibility of societal change through solidarity. It is equally unsurprising, by the same historical barometer, to find a subtle but definite shift in linguistic talismans in Prynne’s vocabulary by the 1980s – Thatcher’s long decade of virulent individualism. ‘What can’t be helped / is the vantage, private and inert’, he announces towards the beginning of The Oval Window in 1983, a poetic sequence in which even the solitary ‘I’ aptly struggles to find sturdy instantiation.

Prynne doesn’t go in for what Veronica Forrest-Thomson, his former PhD student and a poet and theorist in her own right, would call ‘naturalisation’: that trick of lyric poetry which makes the words speak directly to referents in the empirical world. The point here, however, is that his work does nevertheless obliquely capture the spirit of its times, accrued in each instance as the sound bites and buzzwords of the day and refracted back to the reader as garbled admonitions and patchwork prophecies. As if by osmosis, for instance, the ‘faults of destruction’ in To Pollen seem to impact against the ‘common grief’ of Abu Ghraib; in Refuse Collection, the wastes of American imperialism are not put on a plate for the reader but are instead glimpsed only fleetingly

                                          in the curving
mirror of enlarged depravity daily and abhorrent a
comfort of disgust adjusted to market slippage

In Triodes in 1999, the uncertain peace promised by peace treaties in Palestine and the North of Ireland breeds a confusion of geography, where sites of conflict overlap: ‘With blood on their hands is a terror attack / on the Jewish state, Antrim west bank’. The poet need not gently orient the reader in order to insert themselves into the history through which they have lived; as Prynne shows us, there is method, even beauty, in disorientation.

*

It is by now almost a cliché to bemoan the cartoon vision of J. H. Prynne as the arcane, self-serious poet-academic. Frankly, it’s boring, and what’s more it diverts attention away from how funny and mischievous his work really is. More specifically, it obscures our view of him as a trickster in the classical sense, or more incisively as a ‘prankster’, as Noel-Tod has called him. There is arguably no greater illustration of this than, perhaps unexpectedly, in a feat of revision: the annotated version of The Oval Window, published by Bloodaxe in 2018, some thirty-five years after the book first appeared. Prynne provided the editors of this new edition, N. H. Reeve and Kerridge, with a tranche of source material and notes pertaining to the original – ‘the poem’s archive’, as they call it – in the service, if you like, of speeding up or altogether short-circuiting the ‘potentially infinite activity’ of reading his work vertically, with an eye out for every reference and unattributed quotation in the textual fabric. Immediately, this seems out of character for a poet who, as his former teacher Donald Davie argues in Under Briggflatts, has always adhered to the Duke of Wellington’s motto: ‘Never apologise, never explain’. And, appropriately, to read the annotated Oval Window is to stare Prynne the prankster square in the face: the more explanation we are afforded – this is from a Times article of the 22 August 1981, that’s a Shakespeare quote, this is a snippet of a Thatcher speech, that’s from a computer programming manual – the more lost we become; the more infinite the potentially infinite activity of reading starts to look. Worse still, it denies the sickos the opportunity of doing the sleuthing for themselves.

T. S. Eliot famously disowned his own annotations for the American edition of The Waste Land, retroactively deeming them entirely unfit to ‘elucidate the difficulties of the poem […] to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble’. A voracious reader, Prynne will have been well aware of Eliot’s words when he took the decision, some sixty years into his writing career, to do what he had never done before: elucidate the difficulties of his work. ‘Never apologise, sometimes explain’ seems a qualification unbefitting the enigmatic anti-laureate of modern English poetry, and even more so the perennial prankster that Prynne really was. And at any rate, if we consult Walter Skeat’s etymological dictionary – Prynne’s ‘purest shaft of memory’, his guiding light – we find that ‘explain’, in fact, derives from the Latin root ‘explanare: to flatten, to spread out’. As if cautioning against too much excavation, too much vertical reading, we are implored – via Skeat, via Prynne – to stick to the horizontal, to allow the work to spread out before us, to keep reading across the line, to maintain speed. Here, then, is the inevitable clarion call to Prynne sceptics: read, read quickly, submit to the strange music, resist the cop in your head, be persuaded to rejoice, let the healing fountain start. ‘Life’, he tells us in The White Stones, ‘is a gay bargain’: once more, then, across the beautiful but enigmatic surface – ‘dash outwards through the smoke’.

.

.

Will Fleming is a poet and writer from Ireland, based in London. His work has previously appeared in Ludd Gang, The Stinging Fly, Gorse, The TLS and elsewhere.

---

To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.