A very minor poet
Marghanita Laski
I was an English Poet: A biography of Sir William Watson Jean Moorcroft Wilson (Cecil Woolf £12.50) William Watson, who was born in 1858, was knighted in 1917 and died in 1936 according to the title-page of I was an English Poet but in 1935 according to his funereal inscription, wrote the short poem that begins 'April, April,/Laugh thy girlish laughter'. This has been principally valuable in enabling near-contemporary an- thologists not entirely to ignore the substan- tial reputation that Watson once had; though Helen Gardner in her Oxford Book of English Verse of 1972 and Philip Larkin in his Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse of 1973 both left Watson out, and no one thought the worse of them for it. In 1964, in his Oxford Book of Nineteenth- Century Verse, John Hayward had, however, and rather more adventurously, inserted what is arguably Watson's best poem, the longish 'Wordsworth's Grave' of 1887.
But even Watson's best poem is not a good poem, and it is clear now that Grant Allen was wrong when, in 1891, after the publication of the second edition of Word- sworth's Grave and Other Poems, he wrote in the Fortnightly Review: 'One glimpse revealed the gold. I looked up in surprise, and exclaimed at once, "This is not minor poetry!" ' Such misjudgments were fre- quently (though, as time went on, less often) to be made of this North-Country shopkeeper's son. 'When William Watson crossed our path, we saw him and named a star,' wrote the Liverpool journalist James Ashcroft Noble in 1875. He had helped young Watson as he had helped many unknown young writers — Edward Thomas, Gordon Bottomley, and Richard le Gallienne, of whom this book gives a drolly interesting photograph. Watson cannot now be considered a star, and Jean Moorcroft Wilson does not claim that he can. She fairly compares Kipling's poem on the Sudan campaign of 1884 ('So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan;/You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man') with Watson's sonnet which opens, 'They wrong'd not us, nor sought 'gainst us to wage/The bitter battle —'; and the contrast brings out many of Watson's constant fail- ings, and notably the pomposity and the mock archaisms — hardly a poem without, say, an 'ope' or an 'aye', a 'methinks' or a 'twas' or a 'twill'. It has been said quite often that the trouble with modern poetry is not that no one is writing like Milton or Wordsworth or Tennyson, but that too many people are still trying to. Watson was one of them. He is a classic example of the kind of talent which appeals to the less well- judging of his own time because easily ac- cessible, but of no lasting value because of lack of originality. He also, as I hear hire, lacks a good ear, being one of those writers whose scanning is technically accurate rather than musical and/or effective. Take, for instance, these lines written after he had discovered Shakespeare (he would, wouldn't he?): 'Sir, during this your ever blessed reign,/1 have unearthed in all ten several plots/Against your Majesty's most sacred life'; and compare it, for resonance, with one not particularly 'poetic' line-and- a-half from Shakespeare, plucked at ran- dom from memory; 'Cromwell, 1 did not. think to shed a tear/In all my miseries — The oddest puzzle presented by this book is why Jean Wilson — about whom the blurb tells us nothing — chose this subject for what is apparently her first work. It 1,5 not as if Watson was, apart from Ills poetry, a likeable or even an interesting man. He was ashamed of his origins, furious at his only limited literary success which of course he put down to malice (he was himself extremely malicious and wrote some really nasty verses when he believed himself affronted); and he was a poor judge of newer, better work. He often drank and drugged and had mental breakdowns, but he was, withal, a lecherous fellow and suprisingly successful with duchesses, though with the kinds of general attitudes to women that at last seem intolerable. He expected the Laureateship, and perhaps not unreasonably in a period that awarded it to Alfred Austin instead. The knighthood came after a poem extolling Lloyd George as a Merlin redivivus. But taking all in al!, his life was no more interesting than ills verse, and such as both were, Jean Wilson has not made a bad job of assessing thern• Most people will, however, find the books major interest in other literary figures who flit through it, such as Hall Caine, young In Liverpool with Watson; John Lane, 01 'Petticoat' Lane, as they called him; the scandal of Beardsley and the Yellow Book ('a magazine started by John Lane'); the hated Georgian poets; and, especially touching, Bernard Shaw who, when an aP.
peal was launched in 1931 for a not veryneedy Watson, 'gave a pound publicly an a hundred pounds privately'.
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