We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr

      

Copyright

      4th Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.4thEstate.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate 2015

      Text © Andrew Marr 2015

      Cover image © ‘Willow Bough’ wallpaper design, 1887, Morris, William (1834–96)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

      Andrew Marr asserts his moral right to

      be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is

      available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      Source ISBN: 9780008130893

      Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780008130916

      Version: 2016-07-18

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Introduction

       1 The Earliest English Poetry

       2 Knights in Green Satin

       3 Fanatics and Courtiers

       4 England’s Miracle

       5 Beyond the Nymphs and Swains: Renaissance Realities

       6 Nothing Left But Laughter? Britain’s Mullahs Confront the Problem of Pleasure

       7 The Restoration of What? Satire, Science and Cynicism, as Political Britain is Born

       8 The Age of Reason. And Slavery, and Filth, and So On

       9 The Revolution

       10 Romantic Agonies

       11 The British Age

       12 Plush, Mush and a Handful of Titans

       13 The Poets of More Than One War

       14 How Modern Were the Modernists?

       15 Lefties and Righties: Outrage and Laughter in Britain Between the Wars

       16 Revolt Against the Metropolis: Britain in the 1940s and 50s

       17 The Age of Larkin

       18 Fresh Freshness

       19 Celts, Britons and Their Friends: Modern British Poetry Furth of England

       20 Here Comes Everybody: The British and Poetry Now

       Acknowledgements

       Index of Poets

       Also by Andrew Marr

       About the Publisher

Dedication

      For Emily, a poetry reader

      I would also like to thank Gwyneth Williams, Controller of Radio 4, who believed in this project; and James Cook, who led the ‘takeover’ of the channel for National Poetry Day, 8 October 2015

Introduction

      Beyond the village, there’s some marshy ground. There, on a warm evening, a horny, lonely man is making rhythmic noises and shuffling his feet. Inside his head there’s a kind of music, and what he’s doing is trying to fit words to it, words that express his feelings for a woman – too good for him – living in the village.

      A few centuries later there’s another man, who feels he has let down God and is facing eternal hellfire. Yet he’s a kindly man, of gentle disposition, and somehow feels that God can’t be as pitiless as the Church elders suggest. So, with a goose quill and a sheaf of rough paper, he is dipping into ink and writing down a kind of private, rather bouncy, prayer. He too is humming.

      Then there is the woman in a foul dungeon, throbbing with pain from her torture, dictating to a shabby priest her defiant poem against the authorities.

      There will be many more women – rich, in chambers coloured with stained glass, protected against the cold by animal skins; and poor, living in twentieth-century London, struggling with wailing children and an absent man. And many, many more men, too – Irish mystics, Scottish farmers, West Country priests, a Warwickshire actor – all doing the same thing, setting the words to rhythm, tightening them together like the ropes on a fast-moving yacht, trying to build a compact, thrumming little engine of meaning out of the sprawling