Professor of Poetry Lecture 1: ‘How ill white hairs become a fool and jester’

Delivered 30 November 2010

Shortly after the announcement of my election to this chair, my wife was dining at an educational establishment more than twenty five miles from here. A fellow diner, thinking to make a civil introduction, called across the anarchic din of high-table to one who sat opposite, a distinguished guest from overseas. “Her husband is Oxford’s new Professor of Poetry!” But the distinguished visitor, perhaps momentarily unnerved by the cacophony through which British academics make festive smalltalk, misheard. “Professor of Perjury!” he exclaimed, “… what will he say to his students?” My wife vouches for the truth of this occurrence, but of course it is also much too good to be true. It has the stuff of fable - a timeless relevance, like Old King Cole, like Canute’s rebuking the tide, but how few read that lesson as the king intended.

Some in the audience will be saying, though not necessarily sotto voce, “But poetry is perjury”.

What we are after is not so much poetry’s use of perjury as a theme; there is perjury in Dante, in Shakespeare’s histories, particularly in Richard II and Richard III. We are not so much after those thematic applications, as the confession by a poet, preferably in English, that the very exercise of the craft is itself perjured. Shakespeare’s sonnets provide a wide range of implication:

Sonnet 152:

For I have sworn thee fair; more perjured eye,
To swear against the truth so foul a lie.

Sonnet 138:

Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

Sonnet 121:

For why should others’ false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?

Sonnet 129:

… lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,

Sonnet 115:

Those lines that I before have writ do lie,

One might hazard that Shakespeare's sonnets in their entirety exist as if on the rack, or constitute a kind of rack, so that the most fervent statements of love’s fealty are put to the question. I am quibbling of course. The frame of a sonnet is not at all like the frame of a rack. And blurted confession, if it is to endure as poetry, must not in actuality be blurted as though by an average on-the-spot interviewee. All the phrases that I have so far quoted from Shakespeare’s sonnets are supremely self-possessed in their eloquence, and can see the rhyme-word coming:

For I have sworn thee fair; more perjured eye,
To swear against the truth so foul a lie.

Do poets approach language as the neutral instrument for confessional themes, on occasion themes of perjury? Or do they, in the very act of writing, manifestly reveal language itself, particularly language twisted into poetic shapes, as a substance of imagination radically perjured? Two poems, separated by some three and half centuries, constitute evidence underpinning the second question. The first instance again is from Shakespeare’s sonnets (111):

And almost thence my nature is subdu'd
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
Pity me then and wish I were renew'd;
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eisel 'gainst my strong infection;

Katherine Duncan-Jones, in her admirable Arden edition of the sonnets, glosses that last section: ‘as the dyer’s hand is stained by dye, so is the speaker's nature by his public occupation. Insofar as Shakespeare’s occupation was writing rather than acting, his own hand could also be imagined as darkened with ink.’ This is unarguably correct as far as it goes, but it could be taken further. ‘My strong infection’ derives from Latin ‘inficere’, to dye, tinge, colour, stain - sense 1b - to impregnate or imbue with some qualifying substance or active principle as poison or salt, to taint. Shakespeare declares his nature, his dyer’s hand, to be somewhat more than superficially stained with ink from his quill. The dyer’s hand is a deeply infected hand by the simple necessity of doing its work. There is something implicated in the nature that writes, which is participant even to an exaggerated degree, with what one can only call original sin. This is a deeply pessimistic view, many would say anachronistic. But it is a view which was by no means unique to the author of these magnificent sonnets. The fact that W H Auden, having rediscovered his christianity, took the phrase ‘the dyer’s hand’ as the title of a major volume of critical essays, speaks to this point.

It is in these writings especially that one sees how technic and ethos can be minutely correlated. What technic and ethos have to work with is in Shakespeare’s case a formal moral dichotomy, such as one finds expressed in Philip Sidney’s An Apologie for Poetry (1595), a work grounded in its author’s Calvinism:

‘...since our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected wil keepeth us from reaching unto it.’

Certain of Shakespeare's sonnets, including all those from which I have quoted, strike us both as the demonstration of infected will, which uses the particular vehicle of erected wit, that is to say the sonnet structure; and it is also the indissoluble union of the one with the other. It is the marriage of true minds, in the sense that topos must be of one being with technic, thought is to be made manifest in structure. But the truth of those minds, in this particular techno-ethical nexus, is made consummate in the recognising of mutual contamination.

Professor Duncan-Jones has a memorable phrase about Shakespeare’s romances. She speaks of his writing speeches for ‘traumatised old men’. I am a traumatised old man, and my opinions on the matter of poetry in English, particularly contemporary poetry, are decidedly peculiar. I do not have any great desire to encourage the presence of contemporary writing in the University because I believe that contemporary poetry already receives far more encouragement than is good for it. As to ‘outreach’, if one of the as yet unknown great poets of the new millennium is already out there, working as an instructor or lab technician in South Parks Road or St Cross Road, she knows who she is and what she is and is able to judge her unique excellence without our help. And her absence from this and subsequent of my lectures is due not to diffidence, but to justifiable contempt.

This seems the proper place to add that, during the tenure of this office, I shall recuse myself from reading any of my own work within the University. I am painfully aware that this chair is widely regarded as a position of privilege and influence. And to be thought to use it as a means of promoting my own poetry before a captive audience would be to me abhorrent. What I cannot avoid giving you is a sense of my own poetics, together with evidence that I am setting these within their historical context. It seems to me allowable to display animus in what one says provided that the causes and the growth and the limitations of that spirit are conscientiously provided by the lecturer.

It is now some minutes since I referred to a poem described by me as much more of our own time, but that also takes as a given the entanglement of poetry and perjury. It is by the Bukovinian jew, Paul Celan (1920-70), a survivor, who wrote in German. Already you see the problem… I shall read the first stanza in the original, followed by two english translations:

WEGGEBEIZT vom
Strahlenwind deiner Sprache
das bunte Gerede des An-
erlebten — das hundert-
züngige Mein-
gedicht, das Genicht.

Michael Hamburger’s translation:

Etched away from
The ray-shot wind of your language
The garish talk of rubbed-
Off experience - the hundred-
Tongued pseudo-
Poem, the noem.

And Pierre Joris:

Eroded by
The beamwind of your speech
The gaudy chatter of the pseudo-
Experienced - the hundred-
Tongued perjury-
Poem, the noem.

Celan is characteristically forming neologisms from common ancient roots. He is playing, or perhaps interfering with the German noun Meineid which means perjury, and which by chance begins with mein (my). So Joris’ ‘my perjury poems’ has the edge on Hamburger’s ‘pseudo-poem’. Genicht differs by only one letter from Gedicht (poem), but contains the German negative nicht and both translators use an effective coinage - ‘noem’ - that differs by only one letter from ‘poem’ but is the total negation of it.

Shakespeare coins words, uses irregular syntax. The sonnets are not devoid of an excess of feeling we might wish to term hysteria. But the poem of Celan has been conceived semantically and syntactically as the ultimate machinery of hysteria. I do not intend that term to be understood pejoratively. One could use it dispassionately to describe elements in the work of some of the outstanding European and American poets of the twentieth century. In addition to Celan himself we could take account of Hart Crane and John Berryman (American), or Zbigniew Herbert and Alexander Wat (Polish). T S Eliot offers a unique case; the Prufrock volume and The Wasteland invent what has been later and in a different context termed an ‘expressive form for hysteria’. Consider:

On Margate sands
I can connect
Nothing with nothing

This means simultaneously I cannot connect anything with anything - literally, I am having a breakdown - and I can do the impossible, like squaring the circle. This is potentially as disruptive of reason, while superimposing a superior raise d’etre, as is Celan’s invention of ‘mein Gedicht, das Genicht’. The difference between the great early and middle period poems, and the post-war plays of Eliot is that in these plays he is merely the flaneur-voyeur of the hysteria of trivial people, whom he lets off the hook, with the possible exception of Celia Coplestone, by dissolving each crisis into the conventions of West End matinee theatre. In the case of Celia Coplestone, it is himself he lets off the hook.

R P Blackmur was one of the two finest American literary critics of the last century (the other was Lionel Trilling). Hugh Kenner and Harry Levin were better scholars than was Blackmur, but none could show better than he the actual dimension of the made thing. It is from Blackmur that I take the notion of hysteria as a working precept for assessing and evaluating the poetry of the last century and indeed the poetry of earlier periods (think of Crashaw, Smart, Cowper). The term ‘expressive form’ is also Blackmur’s. There is very little original in what I have to say, except that as a poet of the secular millennium I have a concern with original sin itself, which must place me among a marginalia of weirdos. I have to say at once that I differ from Blackmur as to the justice of his main conclusion to the essay from which I lift this keyword, hysteria. I take an observation from a Blackmur essay on D H Lawrence. He says:

‘Here again the broken burden of honesty is translated or lost in a condition of ritual, of formal declarative prayer and mystical identification which is indeed a natural end for emotions of which the sustaining medium is hysteria.

R P Blackmur, ‘D H Lawrence and Expressive Form’’ in Form and Value in Modern Poetry, Doubleday (New York: 1957), p. 266

Blackmur is not opposed to poetry that is quasi-liturgical or otherwise ritualistic; he thinks highly of ‘Ash Wednesday’. But he challenges that poetry in which the liturgical element acts as a subterfuge or a diversion from an anarchy of spirit that ought to have been expressed in its own destructive or catatonic terms. But he also believes expressive form to be the plague affecting the poetry of the last 150 years.

Now this essay was written in the early 1930s; he must therefore wish us to regard Lawrence as a late and not entirely effectual manifestation of Sturm und Drang. I maintain nonetheless that Blackmur together with Trilling represents the finest aspects of American literary criticism in the twentieth century. Why? Because even in his harshest judgments and misjudgments there is a form of love, a sense that to seek to penetrate the mystery of why and how works of literature succeed or fail is to do work of inestimable value. Here he is reviewing Robert Lowell’s first collection, the limited Cummington Press edition, Land of Unlikeness (1944). He says:

There is not a loving metre in this book. What is thought of as Boston in him fights with what is thought of as Catholic; and the fight produces not a tension but a gritting. It is not the violence, the rage, the denial of this world that grits, but the failure of these to find in verse the tension of necessity…’

R P Blackmur, ‘Notes on Seven Poets’ in Form and Value in Modern Poetry, Doubleday (New York: 1957), p. 335

How could any young poet - Lowell was then twenty-seven - not rejoice in the severity of such a judgment, issuing from such a quality of mind. The very rigour proclaims Lowell’s significance. His book merits the expenditure of this amount of inventiveness of phrase upon it. It is worthy of the severest scrutiny. The achievement of a major poem requires a form of cooperation between the impetus of creativity, and the reciprocity and receptiveness of an equal intelligence, Donald Carne-Ross’ ‘ontological reader’. The greatest tragedy of the last sixty years has been the extinction of the ontological reader at least in any public domain which would or could affect the moral-aesthetics of the nation. I am sure they exist in private, but they don’t find their way into the review sections of the Sunday Telegraph and the Sunday Times.

What I would call the high period of American literary criticism, lasted at a rough estimate from around 1925 to 1965, and there has been nothing since that even remotely approaches such reach and measure. The inspiration is almost certainly Eliot’s The Sacred Wood. In the preface to the second 1928 edition of that work Eliot wrote:

‘We can only say that a poem, in some sense, has its own life; that its parts form something quite different from a body of neatly ordered biographical data; that the feeling, or emotion, or vision resulting from the poem is something different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of the poet.’

Let us agree that Eliot’s weakest phrase is ‘feeling or emotion or vision resulting from the poem’ because we are reluctant to conceive the effectiveness of a poem as the mere after-taste of itself, as a fine vintage might yield its after-taste to a connoisseur of wines. There used to be a man in Who’s Who who under recreations put ‘fine wines and conversation with intelligent women’. What Eliot and we are looking for again, in one of his own phrases, is ‘significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal, and the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done’. This is finely said and must have been the mainspring of much of what subsequent American writer-critics such as Allan Tate, R P Blackmur and John Crowe Ransome, discovered in themselves to say.

Blackmur solves Eliot's problem with a magisterial formulation, but he could not have done this if Eliot had not shown what the problem was. Blackmur wrote in 1935, and I regard it as one of the great modernist formulations of what poetry is:

‘The art of poetry is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse by the animating presence of a fresh idiom; language so twisted and posed in a form that it not only expresses the matter in hand, but adds to the stock of available reality.’

R P Blackmur, ‘Three Notes’ in Form and Value in Modern Poetry, Doubleday (New York: 1957), p. 337

This is, so to speak, the formulation ultimately derivative from Eliot but capping his perception, that the post-Wasteland, post-Scared-Wood neophyte generation stood in need of. And truly it succeeds by the placing of two verbs - ‘twisted’ and ‘posed’ - ‘twisted’ which does what it describes, giving a new twist to the way the perspective is perceived, ‘posed’ to indicate that it is not ultimately a matter of distortion but of accurate placing. Earlier in the lecture using Sidney’s powerful distinction I tried to explain how I saw meaning as an inextricable part of the structure in a Shakespearean sonnet. Certain of Shakespeare’s sonnets, I wrote, strike us as both the demonstration of ‘infected will’ by ‘erected wit’, that is to say, in his case, the sonnet structure, but also the indissoluble union of the one with the other. If the poet succeeds, all the impersonality Eliot desiderates is there, objectified by the strenuosity of the maker’s inventiveness.

If I were to offer anything to the conventional young poet, apart from the proverbial revolver and a bottle of brandy, I would say don’t try to be sincere. Don’t try to express your inmost feelings. But do try to be inventive.

It’s high time that I return to those hypothetical members of the audience, and to their instinctive response that poetry is perjury. Is it though, in anything but a figurative sense? The OED supplies instances both of the legal definition and of various quasi-metaphorical applications. Strictly, perjury is the crime of wilfully uttering a false statement or testimony in reference to a matter material to the issue involved, while under an oath or affirmation to tell the truth, administered by a competent authority. It was extended by Thomas More in his anti-Lutheran polemics to include the breaking of a vow or solemn undertaking, in his case especially the vow to obey Papal authority. But both Catholics and Lutherans used it in this sense. For Lutherans it was the betrayal of conscience to Papal authority. In Romeo and Juliet, it became a bittersweet conceit:

And I will take thy word; yet if thou swear'st,
Thou mayst prove false. At lovers' perjuries
They say Jove laughs…

But in Richard III, before he is murdered, the Duke of Clarence describes his self-accusatory nightmare in which he is twice confronted by menacing spirits, twice convicting him of perjury. If treason can be regarded as a form of perjury, one piece of doggerel is to be recorded, which in the reign of Richard III brought its author to the terrible death imposed for high treason, that is to say, hanging, disembowelling and quartering. It is recorded in the major mid-sixteenth century compilation The Mirror for Magistrates (1559), in which it forms the twenty-third tragedy, how ‘Collingbourne was cruelly executed for making a foolish rhyme’. The rhyme was:

‘The cat, the rat, and Lovell our dogge
Ruleth all Englande under a Hogge

The ‘Hogge’ being Richard, the ‘cat’ Catesby, the ‘rat’ Ratcliffe, and the ‘Dogge’ Lovell, all being co-conspirators with Richard in his reign of terror. There is some significance in the short prose introduction, cast in the form of a dialogue around the question whether a mere poem which ‘is but feigning’ can be judged as sufficiently real to be indicted by law. ‘Oh but where as you say that a poet might feign where he list, indeed methink it should be so, and ought to be well taken, but it has not at all times been so allowed [...] for here followeth the story that one called Collingbourne was cruelly put to death for making of a rhyme’.

Why am I so drawn to split hairs in this way? It stems from the need I have long felt to establish the reality of the true poem. Needless to say my vision of the true poem corresponds more to Wyatt’s ‘they flee from me that sometime did me seek’ than to Collingbourne’s foolish rhyme. Wyatt’s case is pertinent; he was a diplomat-poet of the Court of Henry VIII, the reciprocally affectionate protege of Thomas Cromwell, dogged by slanders of the most lethal kind, whose poems do on occasion speak directly of treasonable matters. Such is his great lament for the deaths of his friends alleged to be Anne Boleyn’s lovers. He was not however indicted for the reality of his poems, but for knowing the wrong people at the wrong time, and for alleged misdemeanours in the course of his diplomatic missions. So how did I come to be where now I am? It is because some thirty five years ago I happened upon the work of the Oxford philosopher J L Austin who, together with A J Ayer, was the leading philosophical taste-maker of the 1950s. And in so doing I read this:

‘And I might mention that, quite differently again, we could be issuing any of these utterances, as we can issue an utterance of any kind whatsoever, in the course, for example, of acting a play or making a joke or writing a poem - in which case of course it would not be seriously meant and we shall not be able to say that we seriously performed the act concerned’

J L Austin, ‘Performative Utterances’ in How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962

I have come reluctantly to admit that, basically, Austin is probably right, and that the poem is not real in the way that a railway notice is real. What I objected to, excessively I now think, was the cunning with which Austin structured his contempt, how in the quoted passage ‘writing a poem’ follows not ‘acting a play’, which would be an appropriate sequence, but ‘making a joke’. But to bridle at this is to bridle at inessentials, and ushers us at once into the absurdities of reaction. Josep Mandelstam died in 1938 en route to a Gulag, because at a private party he recited a squib which he had written against Stalin, and someone at the party betrayed him. But that fact does not constitute the reality of Mandelstam’s poetry. Towards the end of his life Pasternak was sometimes asked by members of the audience to recite his translation of Shakespeare’s 66th sonnet. But this fact, powerful and poignant though it is, does not constitute the reality of that poem:

Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill.
Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

This sonnet has as its main body ten lines of parallel recitation. These constitute an elementary exercise in rhetorical figuration called by the technicians anaphora. The sequence that Shakespeare makes of this elementary rhetoric is in fact a form of recoil and recoup, an utterance of defeated disgust that is simultaneously a mode of resilient attack. A sense of ‘Ah not this! Not This! And yet more?...’ that is indivisible from ‘THUS I indict them, THUS I give utterance to a list of charges drawn up against a callous and meretricious social nexus’. How do you paraphrase that? You don’t, you HEAR it.

The burden of the lines is one of impotent disgust. The delivery that the lines make of themselves is forensic in its power of castigation. That the malign power of the world remains not to be dispersed or disposed of by a passion of consummate rhetoric, is confirmed by the bitter quasi-resignation, the world-weariness of its final couplet. The total effect of this sonnet cannot be paraphrased, it can only be delivered by the words and the metrical pulses that it itself employs. To quote Blackmur once more, though he does not have this poem in his sights but the words apply, ‘this is one of the great examples of tautology, where things become their own meaning, which is the condition of poetry, however great or narrow the selection of experience may be’.

Let me propose what I hope is an appropriate analogy of my own, that of a moment in Leibniz, in the Nouveaux Essais (1765), in which he confronts the Lockeans, where he says in translation ‘You oppose to me this axiom, received by the philosophers, that there is nothing in the soul which does not come from the senses. But the soul itself must be accepted, and its affections’. That leap of the critical imagination whereby Leibniz transcends a long tradition of neo-Aristotelian fatalism, I see as corresponding to the way in which structure, sense, and sensibility coalesce into meaning in Shakespeare’s 66th sonnet. It is as though that which was horizontal leaps, even as you pronounce it, into the vertical. Or as if non-dimensional thought became three-dimensional. The ‘leap’ as I now call it, can take place within one or two words, as in Celan’s ‘Mein Gedicht das Genicht’ or indeed with or in one word set into a contextual sequence that we might suppose unable to tolerate it. Take the sestet of Yeats’s sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’:

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Here the Leibnizian word, so to speak, is ‘indifferent’. We are quite unprepared for it because all of the preceding words relating to the Swan-God are words of commanding power. Yet we ought to have been prepared for it because this is a rape, essentially. There is a necessary post-coital male turning away. ‘Indifferent: def. without interest of feeling with regard to something, unconcerned, unmoved, careless, apathetic, insensible’. OED gives a fine example from Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley (1849): ‘When people are long indifferent to us we grow indifferent to their indifference’. But indifference, certainly from 1638 on, also means ‘not particularly good, inferior, rather bad’. So this all-powerful Jupiter is at the same time somewhat shoddy, as we know that he was. And the being that he begat upon Leda was Helen of Troy, and there is a variety of ways of regarding her, some though not all, unflattering. And was this momentous, indifferent, awful knowledge, knowledge of the squalid act - an act whereby a significant portion of divine wisdom was bestowed or betrayed upon the human race? There is a Leibnizian intellect of the word itself, and it is the poet’s gift and responsibility to release that intellect into the body of the poem so that its effect may permeate the whole. My awareness of this capacity comes not from a remote galaxy, but from the work of scholars, among whom professor Stallworthy is preeminent, which examines and collates poets’ draft sheets and rejects, and is able to show how the sudden leap of creative attainment from inadequate to consummate takes place.

To those who plan to attend this course of lectures expecting to hear immediately of the trials and triumphs of British poetry during the first ten years of this century I can only say, be patient, we shall get there anon, though I may have turned eighty before we do. ‘Relevance’ and ‘accessibility’ strike me as words of very slight value. I have written elsewhere that ‘accessibility’ is a perfectly good word if the matter under discussion concerns supermarket aisles, library stacks or public lavatories, but has no proper place in discussion of poetry and poetics. Poetry of the new millennium is as it is because of what English poetry has been during preceding centuries, and a degree of humility when faced with that fact would not come amiss from our latest celebrities. To put it vulgarly if Shakespeare’s 66th Sonnet was found more than adequate by Pasternak’s audience, caught in the vile terror and hypocrisies of soviet hegemony, it is an affront to justice to have it supposed less than adequate for those caught in the vile hypocrisies of our own savage and canting populism or Banker’s Olympus, as Henry Adams called it.

I propose merely as a debating point if that is what would be preferred, that English poetry, by which I mean poetry written in english, cannot be properly comprehended outside the context of politics, economics and theology in Britain and the former imperial dominions over the last 500 to 600 years. And elements of that context will be considered in the course of these fifteen lectures. Context is, I concede, rather too passive a term for what is proposed. I will be taking my bearings from the work of such scholar-critics as Brian Cummings, who writes, ‘Fulke Greville’s Calvinism is often taken for granted, then applied to his poems. In a circular process the poems are adduced as evidence of his doctrinal beliefs. In either event, the poetry is seen as a passive recipient of doctrine that has already been formulated.’ ‘However, poetry is an active participant in belief and doctrine,’ says Cummings, ‘Greville’s starkly intellectual verse makes minute adjustments of ideology from stanza to stanza and from line to line. Rather than theology happening elsewhere, before the poem is made, the poem shows theology in the making.’ The course that Professor Cummings takes, showing how the structure of the thing not only is inseparable from the thematic burden but also infiltrates semantically that burden, greatly helps to illuminate english poetry as it is, as a living and shifting entity, a creature very like Pope’s spider:

‘The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine!
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line:’

Fulke Greville, contemporary and friend of Sir Philip Sidney, whose life he wrote, was a major minor poet of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, greatly admired, as it happens, by the twentieth century British-American poet Thom Gunn, who edited a modernised selection for Faber some years ago. Looking through the text and index of the New Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010), I could not find a single occurrence of his name. But he’s in good company, also rejected from consideration is the major minor eighteenth century poet Charles Wesley, and Isaac Watts, erratic but splendid at his best, is mentioned only once in passing. Now without the hymnody of Watts and Wesley, and this is looking at the matter in the most basic utilitarian light, one is deprived of an essential part of the spiritual, linguistic and metrical foundation on which Blake built his Songs of Innocence and Experience. Looked at intrinsically, Wesley’s hymn Wrestling Jacob, like Watt’s ‘God is name my soul adores’ is as fine as Smart’s Song to David or Cowpers The Castaway:

God is a name my soul adores,
Th’ almighty Three, th’ eternal One;
Nature and grace, with all their pow’rs
Confess the infinite Unknown.

Thy voice produc’d the seas and spheres,
Bid the waves roar, and planets shine;
But nothing like thy self appears,
Thro’ all these spacious works of thine.

Still restless nature dies and grows;
From change to change the creatures run:
Thy being no succession knows,
And all thy vast designs are one.

How shall affrighted mortals dare
To sing thy glory or thy grace?
Beneath thy feet we lie so far,
And see but shadows of thy face.

Who can behold the blazing light;
Who can approach consuming flame?
None but thy wisdom knows thy might;
None but thy word can speak thy name.

That is how Blake would have hymned his creator had he been a Calvinist. And surely Blake must have sensed this by his creative finesse, his living along the line. Just consider that word ‘Dare’ - ‘how should affrighted mortals dare to sing thy glory or thy grace?’ in Watts as compared with ‘what mortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry’ in Blake. The posture or pitch of the lines by Watts and Blake seem essentially alike. It is a pitch we recognise as belonging peculiarly to eighteenth century hymnody. But Blake alters the quality of the verb ‘to dare’ so that what was used by Watts to focus on mortal servility becomes in Blake the sign of something outrageous - ‘how dare he?’ - in the Godhead itself.

The reiterated defence in such a case as the Cambridge History of Poetry is this - ‘with such a vast field to survey, English poetry from Beowulf to the present, omissions are inevitable but deeply regrettable’. I respond that out of a thousand and four pages of text, not counting bibliography and index, one hundred and twenty pages are dedicated to poetry from roughly the time of Larkin’s death to the present day, something in the order of a quarter century. This seems to me grossly excessive in the circumstances. When did it begin, this fantasy, that the literary scene of today is some kind of national treasure, when what it more resembles is landfill?

Pro-vice Chancellor it is customary for the new incumbent of the University chair to pay tribute to his distinguished predecessor in office, and this is a custom I am privileged and happy to follow and to perform. My predecessor in office, due to a small local difficulty, was Christopher Ricks, whose election to this chair was an inspired and inspiring choice. He established his critical pre-eminence at an early age and for half a century has worked as scholar and critic in such a way that his achievement will remain as a mark of excellence so long as public coherence remains, which may not be very long. He combines the resources gained from a formidable breadth of reading, a process begun in early youth, with a wonderful delicacy of ear and an exquisite, at times deadly, accuracy of phrase. His placing of his admiration for Eliot’s beautiful recognition of the two words ‘ah soldier’ in Charmian’s threnos for her dead mistress in Anthony and Cleopatra, is itself beautifully just. I think he is the only younger critic whom Empson genuinely admired. Speaking as a traumatised old man, I regret his decision to publish the book on Bob Dylan. Not that I think Dylan is execrable; some of the melodies stay long in the mind… But because as a verse writer, he is merely not good enough to merit even the protracted suspended animation of a great mind that in addition to the major works on Milton, Keats, Tennyson and Eliot, has also conceived and presented such formidable and formative essays as those on Gower, Donne, Wordsworth, Beddoes, and Lowell. When Ricks is at his best, and he is so more often than the rest of us, he can move the axis of the earth with his little finger. But Dylan is not an axis. He is a marvellously accomplished skimmer and has been since he first skimmed his effective stage name from the name of a famous Welsh poet.

What is needed from a contemporary critical mind that has both depth and reach, of a capacity that few have at any given time but which Ricks has demonstrated super abundantly is an analysis of how the skim of contemporary culture relates to - is inextricably part of - the gigantic scam of our times. The Bankers scam. The Blair-Brown scam. The Coalition scam. The Big Society scam. The education scam. The national happiness scam. ‘And gilded honour, shamefully misplaced’

Intrinsic value is perhaps only a figure of speech, but it is a meaningful figure of speech, and when one speaks today of a total destruction of intrinsic value, people generally know what you mean.

Thank you