As Britain entered the 20th century,
English poetry seemed stuck in a rut.
Poets wrote about nature, or celebrated
the glories of empire, in language that was formal and ornate.
But as old certainties crumbled, new generations seized their chance
to rewrite the world and build a new kind of poetry from the ruins.
They found words for the complexity, the upheaval
and the doubt of the modern age.
And there was another revolution...
In the 20th century,
television brought poets into millions of living rooms.
As the BBC cameras rolled, poets took the chance to explain
themselves to a mass audience for the first time.
In this first programme,
we'll meet the giants who set out to write for the new century.
April is the cruellest month
Breeding lilacs out of the dead land
Mixing memory and desire...
From TS Eliot, who dragged poetry into the modern age...
When he left, respectable...
..to WH Auden, witness to the chaos of the 1930s...
The little children died in the streets.
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs...
..to Dylan Thomas, whose lyrical voice held audiences spellbound.
The night above the dingle starry...
There were eccentrics, too.
In my poems, the dead often speak and the ghosts come back.
National treasures...
..and political rebels.
We must get rid of England, somehow or other. Completely.
Between them, they rewrote the rules of poetry for a new age.
This is how they did it, in their own words.
London at the turn of the 20th century.
While other European cities were in the grip of artistic
revolutions, British culture remained reassuringly traditional.
In 1908, a radical young American arrived in London on a mission
to, in his words, make poetry new.
Ezra Pound was born in Idaho in 1885.
As a student, he had resolved to
"know more about poetry than any man living."
In London, he planned to start a poetic revolution.
The poetry of the 1890s, in England in particular, was dominated
by a rather mournful, nostalgic, kind of pastiche poetry, really.
A poetry that sort of imitated earlier Victorians,
imitated the Romantics, and had a sort of decadent feel about it.
Pound absolutely loathed this.
He thought British poetry was flabby, it was dull,
it was repetitive and he kind of put it on a diet.
Everything had to be spare, every word had to count.
Sent it to the gym, gave it a face-lift.
And, you know, he was a great pioneer of modernism.
In 1913, he wrote a modernist manifesto stating that poets
should aim for precision with words,
clear imagery and break free from familiar, traditional rhyme.
His poems were pared down and precise,
sometimes only a line or two long.
But Pound wasn't starting from scratch,
he was harking back to ancient sources.
It was Chinese text that perfectly captured
the precision of language and image that inspired his radicalism.
Ezra Pound rarely appeared on camera, but in 1959 he was filmed
for the BBC in Italy, demonstrating the qualities of Chinese writing.
You have the primitive sun,
then when they want to make it pretty, they square it up...
and that's the sun.
Then for the dawn, you've got the sun over the horizon.
What was exciting for Pound about Chinese poetry,
and the Chinese pictograms themselves, was that it seems as
if the image is just there in just a few beautiful strokes of a brush.
That's all compressed into one space.
That is like a reply
to the great frothing of what they saw as
the decadent writers of the 1890s.
Pound's life's work was an epic called The Cantos, a collection of
poems that ranged through history
and ancient cultures to the modern day.
The Cantos remain among the most complex
and challenging poems of the century.
The Cantos were a sprawling,
epic attempt to incorporate nothing less than virtually everything
that had ever been written in any poetic tradition in the world.
It was unbelievably ambitious and it was also, as a consequence,
it was fragmentary, it was elliptical, it was collage.
It was bits and pieces of a great many traditions,
in a great many languages and even a great many alphabets.
Pound read a controversial section of The Cantos for the BBC.
In the poem,
he attacks capitalist society for immoral money-lending or usury,
which Pound calls "usura", an evil for which he blames Jewish bankers.
With usura hath no man a house of good stone
Each block cut smooth and well-fitting
That design might cover their face,
With usura hath no a man painted paradise on his church wall...
Pound's ideas about global capitalism were bound up with
anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in which he believed that
it was Jewish people who were controlling capital and that it was
Jewish greed, the stereotype of the Jewish usurer,
who was the puppeteer.
With usura the line grows thick
With usura is no clear demarcation
And no man can find site for his dwelling
Stonecutter is kept from his stone
Weaver is kept from his loom
With usura wool comes not to market.
CROWD CHEERS
In his 30s, Pound's politics grew increasingly extreme.
He believed fascism was the answer to what
he saw as failing Western democracy.
There's a strange idea that if you're modernist,
you're somehow or other progressive politically,
and that you're somehow part of a general liberal outlook.
This isn't the case.
Plenty of the modernists were quite keen on fascism
and you can see a relationship,
if you like, between the language that Pound uses about poetry,
wanting it to be spare and hard and dry,
and he wants the images to be powerful and working in themselves,
and the way in which he and others worshipped Mussolini.
After the Second World War, Pound was imprisoned for his fascist
views, deemed anti-American.
On his release, he returned to Italy.
I can remember that it was pretty controversial that the BBC went
and found him, and dug him out and interviewed him.
Society had cast him out, the poetry world had cast him out,
and he was this slightly prophet-like
figure, raging in the wilderness.
Pound's main importance and his accepted reputation
is as sort of the midwife of modernism, really.
And so he's a kind of high priest of early 20th century literature,
but his own poetry is,
I think, studied rather than read.
Ezra Pound had set out to reshape poetry for the 20th century.
But he had an important ally,
a protege who would, in time, come to eclipse him.
In 1914, TS Eliot, another American,
was drawn to London
and into Pound's modernist literary circle.
It's an interesting fact that in the English tradition,
modernist poetry emerges with two American poets working together,
Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, both of whom had left America
and come to Britain and were working together to create something
that would be innovative and fresh in poetry.
For Pound and Eliot, the idea of escaping America was something that
they had to do in order to write in the way that they wanted to.
Partly because the idea of exile, I think,
appealed to both of them enormously.
I don't think they really felt attached to the
mass culture of America.
In fact, both of them felt rather ambivalent towards it.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis in 1888.
He studied philosophy at Harvard, Paris and then Oxford,
where his towering intellect set him apart from his peers.
In London, Eliot spent his days working on foreign accounts for
Lloyds Bank in the city, and then at publishing house Faber and Faber.
There, he cultivated a studiedly unpoetic image.
I think there has always been an idea that poets must be anarchic
and dress in a flamboyant fashion,
as, for instance, Ezra Pound did.
Along comes TS Eliot. He wears a suit,
he has an umbrella and a bowler hat. He is a city gent.
And this is a huge breakthrough,
you know, poets can look like anybody else.
And yet, they are also writing the great poetry of the 20th century.
Together, Pound and Eliot formed the most important partnership
of 20th-century poetry, editing and promoting each other's work.
Eliot's poetry reflected the turmoil
and fragmentary state of the modern world.
He appeared tantalisingly rarely on television,
but he was filmed recording his poem, Four Quartets, for the BBC.
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
POWERFUL EXPLOSIONS
The First World War gave Eliot the impetus to write his most
celebrated and revolutionary work, The Waste Land.
Drawing on Pound's collage method of composition,
the poem would come to define the emptiness
and disillusionment of the post-war world.
The Waste Land was modernist poetry's masterpiece.
The Burial Of The Dead
April is the cruellest month
Breeding lilacs out of the dead land
Mixing memory and desire
Stirring dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm
Covering Earth in forgetful snow
Feeding a little life with dried tubers.
The Waste Land is probably our most famous
artistic response to the First World War.
It's very clearly a reaction to the
sense of moral and spiritual and artistic breakdown.
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains
Stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal.
It is a poem that's radically de-centred.
There's no perspective that unites it all.
It is a poem about incoherence.
It is a poem about looking for origins,
for meanings, for trying
to find a way to start over and finding that unbelievably painful.
It's modernist in that the fragments of memory, bits of books,
bits of culture, bits of overheard conversations.
He puts them all in one poem
and somehow manages to write
and create the 20th century.
It was written quite early in the century,
but it absolutely looks forward.
Alongside references to ancient myth and popular culture,
the poem captures glimpses of contemporary life.
Sometimes they're just conversations, you know,
he talks about a woman talking about her husband, going,
"When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said - I didn't mince my words,
"I said to her myself, 'Hurry up, please, it's time.'"
So you've got this bar, you can hear the barman, you can
hear the ladies talking about a soldier, about the war.
Now Albert's coming back, Make yourself a bit smart.
He'll want to know what you've done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, And get a nice set,
He said, I swear I can't bear to look at you.
He's got this ability to make us hear what he heard,
so he's making your ears get pricked up
so that you are hearing more heightenedly and, actually,
that is what poetry is, is us hearing ourselves better.
It throws light on things.
All art does that, it just sandblasts reality with light.
High modernist poetry, particularly, is represented by The Waste Land,
which is by far the most influential single poem of the 20th century,
I think. It sort of cleared everything away, I mean,
it liberated the next generation of poets from the past.
It was as if after The Waste Land,
all sorts of new things could become possible.
The desolation of the First World War had led Eliot to
write his masterpiece.
But out of the horrors of the front lines
would come a new, more direct kind of poetry.
Faced with the unrelenting trauma of trench warfare, a group of
soldier poets created some of the most moving poetry of the century.
First World War poetry is just an outstanding
movement in British verse.
I think it's to do with this idea of,
you know, trained literary minds on the front line.
You know, you got these highly articulate,
highly intelligent people who could work wonders with words,
and suddenly they were there holding rifles
and witnessing colossal, seemingly endless waste of human life.
That's what got reported back to us in verse.
The poetry of Wilfred Owen
and Siegfried Sassoon broke new ground with its raw
and shocking description of the horrors they witnessed.
"All a poet can do today is warn", said Wilfred Owen, and,
if you like, Owen and Sassoon are protest poets.
They are telling people what it's like at the front
and that nobody should have to put up with these conditions.
SHELLING AND SHOUTING
Fighting alongside Sassoon in France was Robert Graves,
captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and budding poet.
The war had a profound effect on Graves' poetry,
and in 1916 his first
volume of verse was published.
That same year, his name appeared in print again,
this time in a national newspaper, listed among the dead.
Many years later, Graves reflected on his own death for the BBC.
I was 22 hours dead.
It was on my 21st birthday and that's where I started again,
you see, I'm now only 53 instead of 74.
You were reported dead?
They closed my bank account, they wrote to my parents
and said how heroic I was, they did everything.
They stole all my kit and I appealed for it but I never got it back.
As the war ended,
Graves wrote a poem recalling the jubilation of Armistice Day.
Armistice Day, 1918.
What's all this hubbub and yelling, Commotion and scamper of feet
With ear-splitting clatter of kettles and cans
Wild laughter down Mafeking Street?
O, those are the kids whom we fought for
You might think they'd been scoffing our rum
With flags that they waved When we marched off to war
In the rapture of bugle and drum.
But his anger at the futility of the war meant that celebrations
were of little comfort.
When the days of rejoicing are over
And the flags are stowed safely away
They will dream of another wild "War To End Wars"
And another wild Armistice Day
But the boys who were killed in the trenches
Who fought with no rage and no rant
We left them stretched out on their pallets of mud
Low down with the worm and the ant.
1920S SWING MUSIC
In the 1920s, a weary post-war Britain was keen to put
the misery of the trenches behind it.
But perhaps it wasn't quite ready for a poet
who was about to make a dramatic entrance.
The eccentric, aristocratic Edith Sitwell.
On the 12th June, 1923,
Sitwell performed her poem, Facade,
in London's Aeolian Hall.
Sit and sleep
Periwigged as William and Mary...
She read her poems from behind a painted curtain.
This version was designed by artist John Piper.
..the reynard-coloured sun and I sigh
Oh, the nursery-maid Meg
With a leg like a peg
Chased the feathered dreams like hens,
And when they laid an egg...
Music by composer William Walton accompanied her words.
..the serene King James would steer.
Her experimental blend of words and music took poetic convention
and gave it a good shake.
..picked it up as spoil to boil for nursery tea, said the mourners.
The poems are rich in quickfire wordplay, free association
and modernist jazz rhythms.
And whistling down the feathered rain Old Noah goes again.
Facade was quite an extraordinary undertaking.
It had this great kind of wheezing, arrhythmic poetry,
and then the performance element, with Sitwell behind a screen
and declaiming these words through a megaphone,
so her voice ringing around the performance space.
It was, I think, quite alienating for members of the audience.
Puzzled theatre-goers thought they were
the victims of an elaborate hoax and, overnight,
Sitwell became the most talked about poet in England.
But Sitwell was serious about revitalising
poetry for the modern age, as she explained later on BBC radio.
'At that time, a change in the direction,
'imagery and rhythms in poetry was taking place,
'owing to the rhythmical flaccidity the verbal deadness, the dead
'and expected patterns of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.
'It was therefore necessary to find rhythmical expression
'for the heightened speed of our time.'
Sitwell was a poetic innovator,
but it was her strikingly eccentric looks that drew the most attention.
At six foot tall and draped in Tudor gowns
and jewels, she cut quite a dash.
Everything about Sitwell was a performance - the clothes...
and she knew she looked weird,
and so her decision was to look even weirder and to make
no allowances, people had to know
that she has to be a poet - look at her!
In 1959, she was interviewed by John Freeman for the celebrated
BBC series, Face to Face.
Dame Edith, the world outside your own circle of friends
tends to think of you as remote, eccentric,
forbidding and rather dangerous.
Now, perhaps that's a false impression, and I want you
to tell me, face to face, what sort of person you really are.
Now, first, your appearance, why did you devise your personal
style of clothes that you wear so often?
Well, because I can't wear fashionable clothes.
You see, I'm a throwback to remote ancestors of mine and I really
would look so extraordinary if I wore coats and skirts.
I would be followed for miles
and people would doubt the existence of the Almighty,
if they saw me looking like that.
There was the dressing-up aspect,
but there was also the idea that she is, as we think of her,
a series of modernist lines and angles,
she somehow transcends the flesh,
which she didn't really have much of,
and becomes lines and bones
and costume jewellery and turbans and rings.
She is a confection, a construction.
She's like something that's been built,
rather than something that was lived.
You asked me just now, you said that people's idea of me
was that I was eccentric and savage?
Forbidding and dangerous.
Well, I don't think I'm forbidding, excepting when I absolutely refuse
to be taught my job by people who know nothing about it.
I have devoted my whole life to writing poetry,
which is to me a form of religion.
And I'm not going to be taught by people who know nothing about it.
I think it's very impertinent.
I mean, I don't teach plumbers how to plumb.
Despite dressing like a historical relic,
with her poetry, Sitwell was ahead of her time.
There is a genealogical relationship between Sitwell and rap,
because her poetry was popular in recorded form,
you bought a Sitwell LP.
Her work should always be listened to -
don't read it if you don't have to. Hear her perform it,
because the music of it is in there in her voice.
The 1930s took Britain into an age of political tension,
economic crisis and high unemployment.
In Europe, political leaders were squaring up
for another devastating war.
From this uncertainty, a young writer emerged, convinced that
poetry should have an engaged, political voice.
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, the son of a doctor.
He won a scholarship to Oxford University, where he held sway
over a group of idealistic young writers with strong left-wing views.
They believed their duty as poets was to inspire political change.
In his 20s, Auden travelled to Berlin,
to bear witness and report back.
There, he discovered and wrote about
a Europe on the brink of catastrophe.
If you read Auden's poetry of the '30s,
there is a kind of urgency to it.
He wrote about demagogues, dangerous leaders,
such as you were seeing in Hitler and Mussolini.
He is engaged and politicised and at the same time he's a very individual
voice, fantastically mature and precocious from the start.
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand.
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
Was greatly interested in armies and fleets.
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter
And when he cried, the little children died in the streets.
Hungry to experience conflict, in 1937, Auden volunteered
for the Republican forces fighting Fascism in the Spanish Civil War.
My first guest, WH Auden.
APPLAUSE
But in later life, Auden would come to reject his youthful belief
in the power of poetry to inspire change.
He was interviewed by Michael Parkinson in 1972.
You seemed to deny the thing that a lot of people suspect a poet hopes
he could be, which is a kind of social, political reformer.
No, that they can't be. At least, not in the West.
By all means, let a writer or poet,
if he feels like it, write what we now call an "engage" poem.
But he must not imagine that by doing so
he will change the course of history.
Nothing I wrote postponed the war for five seconds,
or prevented one Jew being gassed.
Yes. Now, of course one can do them, but one mustn't imagine that
one can change the course of history by doing it.
I mean, if one asks what the function of not just literature
but of all the arts is, first of all I'd say what Dr Johnson said.
The aim of writing is to enable readers a little better
to enjoy life, or a little better to endure it.
Auden's verse became less urgent and more reflective.
The BBC visited him at his summer home in Austria.
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river,
I heard a lover sing
Under the arch of a railway,
"Love has no ending.
"I'll love you till the ocean
"Is folded and hung up to dry
"And the seven stars go squawking
"Like geese about the sky."
The reason that he's so important
is to do with the incredible technical versatility
and freedom of his poetry.
It was often said that WH Auden had this peculiar gift of making
ordinary words sound terribly poetic
by putting them into echoing patterns of sounds.
It's as if the experiments of people like Pound and Eliot
have freed him to go back to the roots of what English poetry can do.
"Stand, stand at the window
"As the tears scald and start,
"You must love your crooked neighbour
"With your crooked heart."
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers, they were gone,
The clocks had ceased their chiming
And the deep river ran on.
On the whole, I think one's rather proud to serve a medium which,
in our time, when the public has learnt to consume
almost everything like cans of soup,
poetry is somehow or other remained something you either have
to read it or leave it alone.
It's rather nice, I think, that one has this medium.
At any rate, as few as one's readers may be,
at any rate, one knows they can read.
If Auden came to distance himself from politics,
one fellow poet never wavered in his political commitment.
Hugh MacDiarmid was born Christopher Grieve
in the Scottish Borders in 1892.
Fiercely patriotic, MacDiarmid was a member of both
the Communist Party and the Scottish National Party.
He also listed Anglophobia as one of his hobbies.
I am a Scotsman, as you can hear.
In the Declaration of Arbroath, way back in 1320,
perhaps the greatest democratic pledge of all time,
my people, the Scottish people, swore
that as long as a hundred of them remained alive,
they would never allow themselves to be dominated by the English.
APPLAUSE
My people have done little but betray that oath ever since.
Some poets get their engine out of a kind of rebellion against the world.
He was deliberately very provocative,
he thought that was part of his duty, to be provocative.
MacDiarmid felt that Scotland had lost itself,
and that its identity could be reclaimed through poetry.
But for him, the experience of being Scottish
could not be properly expressed in English.
He formulated an ambitious plan to create a new Scots language.
I myself was convinced that there was nothing that the Scottish mind
could conceive that couldn't be better expressed in Scots
than in English, or any other language.
There's a whole range of feelings, of combinations of ideas,
all related to the specific character of Scottish landscape
and to the history of the Scottish race
in relation to their landscape, which is embodied in the vocabulary of
Scots and which is very little used in the last couple of hundred years.
He passionately wanted to write Scots
and he wanted that not to be a backward-looking thing.
He wanted to fuse modernism and language that was often antique.
He didn't write dialect, he made a new, plastic language.
He was actually before his time,
he was before his time while using this old language
in this amazing way.
In 1978, MacDiarmid read his most famous work,
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle,
for the BBC.
O, Scotland is
THE barren fig.
Up, carles, up
And roond it jig.
Auld Moses took
A dry stick and
Instantly it
Floo'ered in his hand.
Pu' Scotland up,
And wha can say
It winna bud
And blossom tae.
A miracle's
Oor only chance,
Up, carles, up
And let us dance!
The poem is a long monologue in which a drunk man lying on
a hillside contemplates Scotland's position in the world,
and rages against its seeming passivity
in the face of English domination.
Inside this flimsy story of somebody lying drunk in a ditch,
all this stuff goes through his head,
and it's ancient, it's modern
and it's very angry and it's very anti British Empire.
It's one of the most brilliant and game-changing poems
that have ever existed.
MacDiarmid helped spark a renaissance in Scottish literature.
But in later life, he felt the battle was far from over.
It's very questionable,
whether the whole business that I started wasn't too late.
I was hopeful when England lost its Empire.
It might not be, but England's fighting back, of course,
and still thinks it is a world influence
and a world mission and so on.
Let's get rid of England, somehow or another. Completely.
JOAN BAKEWELL: You're still hopeful?
Hmm? You're still hopeful?
I'm still hopeful, yes.
In the suburbs of North London,
another poet was planning her own quiet rebellion.
Stevie Smith lived with her spinster aunt and worked as a secretary.
But behind the curtains of her suburban home,
she created poetry that defied all expectation.
Stevie Smith is a rebel, complete.
She's going to write poetry
and she's going to mock the way we write poetry.
She was actually taking the kind of assumptions
we make about poetry and what's important and how poetry works,
and she was just refusing to even try.
Her poetry was both jaunty and unsettling,
apparently naive, yet preoccupied with death.
She is seen here in rare BBC footage from 1965.
In my poems,
the dead often speak and the ghosts come back.
Here is a poor man who got drowned.
His friends thought he was waving to them from the sea,
but really, he was drowning.
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
"I was much further out than you thought
"And not waving, but drowning."
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him, his heart gave way,
They said.
"Oh, no, no, no, it was too cold always",
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
"I was much too far out all my life
"And not waving, but drowning."
Beyond the apparent simplicity of her poetry
lay a carefully crafted and innovative style.
The poetry that was written by gentlemen,
for gentlemen to read in the years when everybody learnt Latin
and Greek at school is over, it's gone.
You want rhyme - bugger you, you're not getting a rhyme.
You want a story - I can't even be bothered telling you a story.
She's going to write in chip-chop rhythm, she's going to use
extraordinary, limited vocabulary, high level of repetition.
And it works in a minimalist way.
People in rather odd circumstances are what
most of my poems are about, mixed up with arguments,
religious difficulties, ghosts, deaths,
fairy stories and a general feeling of guilt for not writing more.
Stevie Smith cultivated a certain view of herself as
the hare-eyed spinster of Palmer's Green,
producing these, in a way, wilfully eccentric poems,
oddly naive little works with these rather childlike drawings
appended to them, and yet, I think,
despite that sort of atmosphere of cultivated eccentricity,
there is something very hard within her and something very dark too,
that sort of destructive element there is inside her work,
it's so raw and so powerful.
The general feeling about love in the poems is nervous.
Like this poor little child who has been turned
to stone in his mother's lap. She clutches him and cries,
"I'll have your heart, if not by gift, my knife shall carve it out.
"I'll have your heart, your life."
It's precisely the darkness that reminds you that actually,
what you're mistaking for whimsy is this minimalism.
It's asking you to back off and take another look.
The onward march of the suburbs in the interwar years provided
inspiration for a poet with an altogether more benign vision.
Miss J Hunter Dunn, Miss J Hunter Dunn,
Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament - you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! Weakness of joy
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.
John Betjeman was born in 1906, the son of a luxury goods tradesman.
As a child, Betjeman was painfully aware
of his family's low status in Britain's class system,
a preoccupation that would later come to define his poetry.
Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,
Above us the intimate roof of the car,
And here on my right is the girl of my choice,
With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.
And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twenty to one
And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.
Betjeman's verse saw a return to elements of poetry
discarded by the modernists -
regular rhyme, familiar rhythm and a wry sense of humour.
A passionate lover of buildings,
he championed Victorian architecture at a time when historic towns
and cities were being threatened by modern ideas of progress.
He became a poet of a passing England,
an England that was being subsumed
under the concrete of new developments.
And there is something in the work like that too,
it's attached to rhyme and rhythm
in an attractively conventional, consoling, comforting way.
So just as he defended the Victorian architrave,
he's there, defending certain kinds of end stopped rhyme
when other people are rejecting it or seeing that
as the equivalent having too many knick-knacks over your fireplace.
He slightly strikes you as a fuddy-duddy,
but actually, he embraced TV, modern media,
newspaper, radio,
he wanted to run with that,
and I think he understood how
poetry could work with the general reader and the general public.
Well, if you mention the word "poet" to most people,
they'll reach for the sleeping tablets.
Well, there's one poet who manages to bridge that hitherto unbridgeable
gap between the public and his art, he is Sir John Betjeman.
APPLAUSE
Betjeman found a natural home in front of the camera
and was a regular guest on prime time chat shows.
What is the function of a poet, Sir John?
I think primarily, it's to say things simply, shortly,
rhythmically, memorably.
And it's luck, it's inspiration,
there is such a thing as inspiration.
And when you tell me that thing, if it's true,
that my poetry is read by people who don't ordinarily
read poetry, that's all I could want to happen.
Betjeman could speak to a couple of million people through
one transmission, and I take my hat off to anybody who can take poetry
out to the general public, cos the general public don't always want it.
And he forged a link and a bond with them.
Some of that was through his personality,
but a lot of it was through his work.
I am a young executive,
No cuffs than mine are cleaner.
I own an oblong briefcase
And I use the firm's Cortina.
In every roadside hostelry from here to Burgess Hill
Les maitres d'hotel all know me well and let me sign the bill.
You ask me what it is I do.
Well, actually, you know,
I'm partly a liaison man and partly PRO.
Essentially, I integrate the current export drive
And basically, I'm viable from ten o'clock till five.
Those poems, they're not facile. They're not just party tricks.
He's got a good eye for social conventions
and a tongue for undermining things when he chooses.
I do some mild developing.
The sort of place I need
Is a quiet country market town that's rather run to seed.
A luncheon and a drink or two, a little savoir faire,
I nobble half the council, the banks, the clerk, the Mayor.
And if some preservationist attempts to interfere
A 'dangerous structure' notice from the Borough Engineer
Will settle any buildings that are standing in our way -
The modern style, sir, with respect, has really come to stay.
That's beautiful.
APPLAUSE
Far from the television studios of the capital,
another, more solitary poet was waging his own war
against the decline of a precious culture.
RS Thomas was a Welsh Anglican priest and a staunch nationalist.
Written in his parish in the remote hills of North Wales,
his poems are deeply rooted in rural life.
But far from romanticizing the countryside,
Thomas's work evoked the harshness of the Welsh landscape and
the struggles of isolated farming communities in the mid 20th century.
Too far for you to see
The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot
Gnawing the skin from the small bones,
The sheep are grazing at Bwlch-y-Fedwen,
Arranged romantically in the usual manner
On a bleak background of bald stone.
Too far for you to see
The moss and the mould on the cold chimneys,
The nettles growing through the cracked doors,
The houses stand empty at Nant-yr-Eira,
There are holes in the roofs that are thatched with sunlight
And the fields are reverting to the bare moor.
Though he shunned the media, Thomas agreed to make two films
with the BBC about his life and work in the Welsh hills.
I came out of a kind of bourgeois environment.
And, er, this muck and blood and hardness
and the rain and the spittle and phlegm of farm life
was, of course, a shock to begin with, and one felt
that this was something not quite part of the order of things,
but as one experienced it and saw how definitely part of their lives
this was, sympathy grew in oneself,
and compassion and admiration.
I did find that the strongly charactered hardness of these,
er, border people really did make an impression on me,
as far as poetic material was concerned.
CHURCH BELL TOLLS
For Thomas, language and imagery connected his work
as priest and as poet.
Poetry is religion, religion is poetry.
The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet.
The New Testament is metaphor. The Resurrection is metaphor.
When I preach poetry, I am preaching Christianity.
And when one discusses Christianity,
one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects.
The core, the core of both are imagination, as far as I'm concerned.
He couldn't bear literalism, he loved the fact that poetry
and religion provided for each other very ready explanations.
He could link in his imagination the idea of the story
of the Resurrection with the word metaphor,
that is how he wrote his sermons, how he thought about God,
how he wrote his poems,
and I believe it all to be one whole way of being.
HE SPEAKS WELSH
Despite his isolated existence,
Thomas was passionately committed to contemporary causes.
He was well-known for his campaigning -
for nuclear disarmament and for wider use of the Welsh language.
'As the arson campaign enters its 14th week, police in Wales
'have warned that all homes owned by English people are now at risk.'
Most controversially,
when a militant Welsh nationalist group burnt down English-owned
holiday homes in the 1970s, Thomas was moved to defend them.
Where can I go, then, from the smell
Of decay, from the putrefying of a dead nation?
I have walked the shore
For an hour and seen the English
Scavenging among the remains
Of our culture, covering the sand
Like the tide and, with the roughness
Of the tide, elbowing our language
Into the grave that we have dug for it.
Born only a year after the reclusive RS Thomas was another
Welsh poet, but one who lived and died squarely in the limelight.
Dylan Thomas, the son of an English teacher,
was born in Swansea in 1914.
He developed an early love for words and their sounds.
He was a prodigal poet, writing much of his most famous work
while still living with his parents.
His first collection was published in 1934, and soon after,
he began broadcasting for the BBC.
In 1949, he recorded a poem written to mark his 30th birthday.
Here is a poem called Poem in October.
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.
I can remember the sound of Dylan Thomas's voice
coming out of the radio, it was very deep and fruity, and also
this accent that you could almost feel like you could
touch it and get into it, so when he said things like "all shining",
and if you had an old radio, it would rattle a bit as well.
In a way, the BBC made him,
they gave him his voice and he gave his voice to the radio.
Thomas's writing was precocious and original, full of an exuberance
for words, at odds with the sparse poetry of his contemporaries.
Dylan Thomas is a poet who isn't trying
to join the classical tradition,
he just breaks it by bursting out,
I suppose he's a pure talent, he's a kind of volcano of talent.
He was the first star, a public star,
as in on the BBC, he became a sort of rock star, but he was a poet.
And that's unusual.
With Dylan Thomas, you get a return to the old idea of the poet
as a bard, an orator.
I mean, he was a great performer of his own work,
great reader of his own work.
It's extravagant.
It's word breeding another word, image breeding image.
We have lushness and rhetoric.
For him, poems had to be read aloud, he loved the sound of words
and that was really crucial to the way he wrote.
In London, as his career took off,
Thomas's legendary hard-drinking reputation began to take root.
Remarkably, no footage or filmed interviews with Thomas exist.
But his widow, Caitlin Thomas, gave an interview to the BBC
in 1977 about life with the poet.
From the very start, he had just the one idea -
the poems and the booze.
In that order, was it, then?
Yes. The poems, they were more important,
but I think he used the booze to kind of wipe out the poems,
not to think about them when he wasn't writing them.
How did he write poetry,
and was it easy for him, or difficult?
No, no, no, it was terribly difficult for him.
He used to go into his little shed and scrape and scratch and mutter
and mumble and intone and change
and he was frightfully slow, you know.
In one whole long afternoon from about 2:00 to 7:00,
he might have done just one line,
or taken out one word, or put in one word.
Much of Thomas's poetry paints a nostalgic picture
of his childhood in Wales.
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons, I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
It is a nostalgia for his childhood, but not one that he was
trying to repeat in his life, it's a nostalgia seeped in technicolour,
his memory, and it's as if there's a sort of saturation in his memory.
Thomas's image as the fast-living enfant terrible of poetry
became fixed in the public imagination.
It was a role he would adopt until his death in 1953.
For his widow, his demise had seemed inevitable.
He was always convinced that he was going to die
before middle age, wasn't he?
Yes, he was, he had a ridiculous,
romantic idea, you know, of the poet starving in the garret,
and all that helped the image he was trying to build up
of the tubercular, consumptive, dying, pale poet,
and he wanted to be long and sickly and green and all that.
But in fact, of course, he was square and small and not like
the conventional idea of a poet at all.
Thomas undoubtedly cultivated the image of the Poet, capital P,
which had almost been killed off.
So it was the poet as the drinker - and my God, Thomas was a drinker -
the poet as womanizer.
There was something in the end rather infantile
and innocent about Dylan Thomas,
and suddenly this worldly success came to him,
and he couldn't cope with it and of course, it killed him.
Was he the same man in his own private life
as he projected publicly?
No, he was rather off-stage in the house.
He liked his warm slippers, you know,
and his dish of titbits and pickled onions and sardines,
anything with a lot of vinegar, and cockles, all put on a plate which
he'd stuff into his mouth when he was listening to the cricket scores.
So, you know, I keep... He was just Mr Everyman
until he put on the act of being the poet, or until he wrote his poetry.
Oh, as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Next time - the aftermath of war breeds a new kind of poetry,
keen to reflect the voice of the ordinary man and woman.
A new kind of poet from outside the world of the educated white male.
And a new kind of audience,
many turned on to poetry for the first time.