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Scottish Sunday: International

Scottish Sunday: International: International

Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Verse

Edited by Peter Forbes (Viking)

This is a dangerous book, uneasy in its premises, unsettling in the support it lends to a worrisome consensus. It does not set out to be a survey of poetry in the 20th century, but rather of how poets have enshrined in verse the events, movements, hopes and fears, tastes and sensations of the last 100 years.

This is fine as far as it goes, which is only as far as self-evident. Poets have always written about great events as from private loves and fears, but that does not make them the most reliable recorders. Three thousand years of historiography suggests that history needs to be freed from metaphor. History does not scan, does not rhyme, and only has reasons in the plural.

War Poets and History

The second world war was barely under way when a call was sounded, in Horizon and elsewhere: "Where are the war poets?" It was not a rhetorical question. War artists could be retained for a tiny outlay; the minor keys of modern composers could be smoothed out to a sufficiently sanguine tonality for war use.

The written word was a more treacherous medium. And yet the absence of commanding poetic voices was keenly felt. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell suggested that our understanding of war was dangerously overdetermined by the literary legacy of Flanders - that the poets of the second world war, when they emerged, wrote in an inherited language. And this inherited language exerted a questionable grip on the ability to respond freshly to great events.

Some of Fussell's argument is compromised by the passage of time and the slow imaginative assimilation of later wars - Vietnam, most obviously - but also by the sheer one-eyedness of its premises. However, it remains true that our basic responses to world war, to the Soviet Terror, the Holocaust, the threat of nuclear destruction are profoundly conditioned by poetry.

The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Verse

Peter Forbes is editor of Poetry Review and thus perhaps in thrall - aesthetically if not chronologically - to the values of the 60s. It was the tendency of that low, dishonest decade (apologies to Auden, who in autumn 1939 hadn't seen nothing yet) to aestheticize politics and history rather than making history aesthetic. To be fair to Forbes he takes a pleasingly lateral and soundly non-narrative approach to what constitutes "history". A good proportion of the collection is about style and zeitgeist ("The Jazz Age" to the space age) rather than about concrete events.

In the same way, he hasn't been afraid of including the obvious: Owen, Auden's September 1, 1939, Brecht's still heartbreaking To Those Born Later ("Think of us / With forbearance"), large chunks of Louis MacNiece's Autumn Journal. And he has mixed English-language responses with a substantial proportion of translated verse. Here, though, there are oddities. What of the German response to the first world war? Erich Fried was an Austrian, born in 1921 and living largely in London; his poem about the French mutineers, bleating to show that they both were and refused to be lambs to the slaughter, doesn't count as first-hand testimony.

What of the official poetry of the Soviet regime? What of a more immediate and engaged reaction to JFK's assassination than Roy Fuller's "From a Foreign Land", which reads like a cautious statement of regret by some Liberal peer: "Sceptical of the cult, suspicious of the nation / Nevertheless we had to grant the amelioration / Of the one by the other; and certainly the alternative / Had seemed of depressing threat".

Why nothing from Josephine Miles, one of the best public poets of the century, who wrote with magnificent reserve and finely judged black comedy of the "pure pot" that took out America's most ambiguous President? Miles is certainly a finer poet than the Nobel Prize winning Wislawa Szymborska, and isn't there just a hint of sentimental snobbery in Forbes's seeming assumption that Eastern-Bloc-equals-authentic? It seems only reasonable, this week of all weeks, to point to the absence of anything that gets to grips with the language dimension of the new nationalisms, whether Serbo-Croat or Synthetic Scots. Nothing from that perverse arch-historicist Hugh MacDiarmid, when surely one of the Hymns to Lenin might have made the grade without hogging too much Lebensraum for literary Scotland. Robert Crawford's "The Numties" and Liz Lochead's Bagpipe Muzak, included for its obvious reference back to MacNiece, aren't quite a fair trade. And even if one accepts the notion of the "long 19th century", it seems odd to brush off the first decade and a half in eight or nine poems - of which two are chunks from another worthily selected Nobel laureate, Joseph Brodsky, whose History of the Twentieth Century is spiced with irony that is as black as Russian bread.

Prophetic Powers and Dark Anticipations

This section is headed "Omens", but has there been a single year in the last two millennia when poets have not written of dark storm clouds gathering, rumbles over the horizon, bleak anticipations of death and apocalypse? Like racing tipsters, poets need to be right more often than not, before they can claim real prophetic powers.

This early section does include Thomas Hardy's meditation on the Titanic, The Convergence of the Twain. This is just the greatest kind of poetic music - but dressed up as a warning of the vanity of human wishes, and as an echoing testimonial to God's dispositions for the world. (Almost 75 years later, Katherine Frost does something similar with the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle.)

Poetry and Historical Events

It is inevitably easier to pick, as a brief appendix does, exact matches of poet to event - James Fenton on Tiananmen, Jonathan Holden on the stock market crash of 1987, Adrian Mitchell on Di. Or you can map the poet to the idea - Gwyneth Lewis on the new optics of Hubble, Thom Gunn on Aids. But it becomes clear that the best historical poetry is often not about events or moods. When poets stand by the ticker machine, they generally do their worst and least representative work.

Russian artists are instinctively more didactic than Westerners, which is perhaps why Brodsky and others are over-represented here, though Forbes sees the merits of associative surrealism as well. Poems by Tristan Tzara and Guillaume Apollinaire sit well alongside more sober offerings.

The inclusion of Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell is a routine obeisance to pop music, but there is nothing by Wolf Biermann from East Germany, nothing by Woody Guthrie or Phil Ochs, and it's surely perverse to head the environment section "Mother Nature on the Run" without including Neil Young's After the Goldrush. Other troubling omissions include Victor Jara, Elvis Costello's Shipbuilding (the iconic Falklands lyric, even if not intended as such) and, God save the mark, Billy Bragg.

The Power of Poetry

History is a kind of barbarian: and for all its massacres and wild ambitions and destructive technologies, the 20th century is the age abandoned by history, by its hopes and its lessons. All we have left are books. All we have left is poetry.

Hotels: A Haven for Travelers

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The Brian Morton Show

The Brian Morton Show is set to debut on BBC Radio Scotland on Monday, May 10, at 6:15 pm and 11 pm. Tune in to this exciting program hosted by Brian Morton, where discussions, interviews, and captivating stories await.

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