Up Parnassus with rod and gun
P. N. Furbank
LIVES OF THE POETS by Michael Schmidt Weidenfeld, £22, pp. 939 Michael Schmidt, the poet, publisher and editor of PN Review, has produced what is in a sense an old-fashioned kind of book: a 900-odd-page critical history of English poetry, from John Gower (c. 1325- 1408) to Seamus Heaney, all very chrono- logical and untheoretical, as such books used to be in the days of George Saintsbury and Oliver Elton. Or, rather, of 'English- language poetry', I should have said, for Schmidt attaches a good deal of impor- tance to this verbal distinction. 'A time has come', he writes, `to speak unapologetically for a common language and to speak a common language'. He is an enthusiast, a phrase-maker and an acute critic, with strong but undogmatic views, and I think his book ought to be, and will be, warmly welcomed. Oddly, he provides no source- references: Hazlitt and Matthew Arnold will be quoted, saying apt things about poets, but we are left asking ourselves, where did they say them? On the other hand, there is a good and up-to-date bibli- ography and the book is efficiently indexed.
A word about the title, which is bor- rowed from Samuel Johnson. When, some years ago, William H. Prichard wrote a Lives of the Modern Poets, he abandoned Johnson's clear separation of biography, character-portrait and critique as being outmoded. Schmidt stays closer to Johnson in this respect, though, in rather effective style, he is likely to begin with a critical apergu about a given poet, proceed to sketch his or her life, and then return more systematically to critical appraisal. (He does not make an independent work of art out of the biography, like Johnson; but then, what the booksellers originally com- missioned from Johnson was, precisely, `Lives%) With its many virtues, Schmidt's book is not too easy to review. I agree with a thou- sand things in it and disagree with another thousand. It may be more interesting to discuss the disagreements. I will choose three, which have a sort of similarity in their pattern, having to do with false oppo- sitions. Let us begin with Wordsworth. Schmidt, like so many who write about Wordsworth, represents him as a renegade, whose genius as a poet was an expression of his radicalism and decayed as the radi- calism decayed.
He abandons a new faith to embrace the old . . . He settles into a winter of 'long and piteous complacency' beside an eccesiastical Tory hearth.
This, I am sure, is to misunderstand Wordsworth. His achievement, I would contend, sprang from something a good deal more complex — a tension between his youthful radicalism and a nascent con- servatism, when these two contradictory impulses were both intensely alive in his mind. It is what he is evoking or hinting at in those lines from The Prelude in which he pictures unreformed England as a ruinous and neglected inheritance, which one visits,
And is half pleased with things that are amiss, 'Twill be such joy to see them disappear.
Then, Schmidt holds that Robert Burns `emancipated himself from Augustan language and decorum as decisively as Blake did' and that his English poems have merit, but pale beside the Scots writ- ing'. Not so, I would argue. Burns's great originality lay, rather, in holding Augustan politeness and vernacular homeliness in tension within the bounds of the same poem, playing them off one against the other in all sorts of cunning and subversive ways.
My last example shall be Philip Larkin. Schmidt seems to want to restrict his real achievement to poetry and says about his novels Jill and A Girl in Winter — admitted- ly a little ambiguously — that 'only his more serious fans value them'. I must be a very serious fan, for I regard that extra- ordinary novel A Girl in Winter as one of the supreme achievements of 20th-century English fiction.
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