Note: This is part 1 of two lectures on the same theme; the recordings for part 2, and for the lecture that followed immediately after are missing, and so will have to be omitted from this series for as long as Hill’s own hand-written manuscripts are not available to the public.

Twelve months ago to the day, I came here to deliver my inaugural lecture, and once again I mount this podium, somewhat as mad Heracles in Women of Trachis, agonised and enraged mounts to the summit of his funeral pyre. He is in agony because he wears the irremovable blood-dyed shirt of the centaur Nessus, a false and deadly gift, the burden of which is intolerable, but which he cannot be rid of save by self-immolation by fire. Eliot’s ‘Lines for an Old Man’ come to mind:

‘When I lay bare the tooth of wit
The hissing over the arched tongue
Is more affectionate than hate,
More bitter than the love of youth,
And inaccessible by the young.’

As do the lines from the second section of Little Gidding (1942):

‘From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’

The mode here may be Dantean (Purgatorio 26) it may be allusively Yeatsian, (The Tower, 1928; The Winding Stair, 1933), but the matter is also Heraclean, if it matters. Poets invent even their confessions. The 17th century Samuel Butler, author of Hudibras, wrote in his commonplace book:

‘…Plato, who first banished poets [from his] Republic, forgot that very commonwealth was poetical’

Samuel Butler, The Genuine Remains in Verse and Prose of Mr Samuel Butler, J R Tonson (1759), p. 126

And of course Eliot was all of 54 when he published Little Gidding; at the date of the publication of the The Tower, Yeats was 63; when he published The Winding Stair he was 68. I am seven months short of 80, and I take it that my Clown’s Rule is to exasperate, and not only in small meannesses.

Why do I commence this lecture with a half-comic travesty of the poet's craft? Partly because I am almost past caring; partly because I still care too much. I here recollect a sentence from the poet-critic Peter Whigham and the critic Dennis Goacher, appended to Ezra Pound’s translation of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, first published in the Hudson Review, 1954:

‘It is plain that unbelief is accompanied by inanition and low-vitality’.

At the date of the first British publication of Pound’s translation I was 24, and you are entitled to say that I am still marooned there, the angst of my youth compounded by the exacerbations of old-age. And that contrary to my general outlook and insistence, today’s British cultural climate is notable for its vigour and promise. The flourishing poetry lists of Faber, Bloodaxe and Carcanet, the plethora of literary prizes, the prominence given to literary awards by the BBC news and cultural affairs programs. Nothing at all like the inanition and low-vitality of sixty years ago.

On the 5th of September last, the Poet Laureate1 gave an interview to The Guardian in which she observed that ‘The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It’s able to connect young people in a deep way to language… it’s language as play’.2 With the last four words I am in entire agreement. The basic fact to be understood about this strange art is that it is entirely an art of invention and the major justification for rhyme is that it stimulates one to invent even more wildly. Anyone who has ever taken creative delight in limerick and clerihew knows this to be the case. Our pleasure in the lunatic-pedantic genius of William McGonagall is a case in point. For him the exigencies of rhyme urge him to re-invent the stunningly obvious, so that the stunningly obvious has never appeared with quite this intensity of solemn, imbecile hubris. I think that one might learn something, if only a little, from this as one can certainly learn things of value from the ways in which films are cut, and the way great comedians, such as Ken Dodd, pace their jokes.

My assent to Professor Duffy’s argument falters beyond this point. She proposes that the poem is a form of texting, ‘it's the original text, it's the perfecting of a feeling in language, it's a way of saying more with less just as texting is.’ I would not agree that texting is a saying of more with less and that it in this respect works as a poem. As the laureate says, poetry is ‘condensed’; text is not condensed it is truncated. What is more, it is normally an affectation of brevity. To express ‘to’ as ‘2’ and ‘you’ as ‘U’, intensifies nothing. Texting is like the old ticker tape; highly dramatic and intense if it is reporting ‘Wall Street crash’ or ‘the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour’, not through any inherent virtu of the machine. Is the breaking news that runs at the foot of the screen on the BBC news channel condensed and consequently poetic? I fail to see how anyone could rationally claim that it is. Again, texting is linear only; poetry is lines in depth, designed to be seen in relation or deliberate dis-relation to lines above and below. The Guardian interviewer, Joanna Moorhead, quotes a poem by Professor Duffy, written in memory of her old english teacher:

"You sat on your desk / swinging your legs, reading a poem by Yeats / to the bored girls, except my heart stumbled and blushed / as it fell in love with the words...

I believe the eloquence of this might be enhanced if the third line might be allowed to retain its position beneath the second. But what I really wish to say is, compare and contrast the rhetoric of this poem with the rhetoric of Yeats's ‘Among School Children’ (The Tower, 1928):

‘… it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.’

Clearly, by this point, Yeats has withdrawn his interest, or the major element of his interest, from the children and the kind old nun in the white hood with whom he began his rhymed meditation. The laureate’s concern does not, so to speak, wonder. Is her poem therefore superior to Yeats’ for this reason - that her imaginative focus does not withdraw into the matter of her own creativity, as his does? Well I don’t think so and I don’t think that she would ever make the claim that it is ethically or imaginatively superior for being democratic, rather than Platonic-aristocratic as his poem is.

‘What sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant either in time or place, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years, and with no greater difficulty than the various collocation of little characters upon a paper.’

Galileo Galilei, in J Arthos, Milton and the Italian Cities, Barnes & Noble (1968),p.93

The writer here is Galileo, and he is in the words of John Arthos, in his book Milton and the Italian Cities (1968), ‘marvelling at the nature of language’. Carol Ann Duffy’s poem relates that her heart fell in love with the words as her teacher read a poem by Yeats. She and I are closely akin here. I began marvelling at the nature of language when I was given a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury as a Sunday school prize, round about the age of 9 or 10. Looked at from another angle however, it seems equally arguable that our inspiration and love took different forms. Basing my own view entirely on The Guardian interview (we have not met, and we have not talked things over), I would consider it fair as I have already suggested to describe her as an ethical and cultural democrat, who would naturally rejoice at the flourishing poetry lists of Faber, Bloodaxe and Carcanet, at the continuing surge of interest in creative writing courses, at the plethora of literary prizes.

When Galileo writes as he does, marvelling as John Arthos says, at the nature of language, he is doing so very much in the spirit of the 17th century Tuscan academies, whose aristocratic and intellectually elite members welcomed John Milton to their company during his Italian visit of 1638-9. By the time of his arrival in Italy, Milton had already written ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, ‘At a Solemn Musick’, ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, ‘The Ludlow Masque’ (or, Comus) and ‘Lycidas’, all of them poems marvelling, as Galileo witnesses in his Dialogue on the Great World Systems, at the nature of language, and all of them structures worthy of our undiminished admiration. Judging entirely by what she says in her Guardian interview, I would guess that the laureate and I come from not dissimilar backgrounds, and that we might both be described, in the cant of the day, as children of the underprivileged. Both my parents left school, almost a hundred years ago, at the age of thirteen, with no academic qualifications whatsoever. I would find it difficult to explain why one such child develops as its adult creative philosophy, a generous all-embracing egalitarian literary-missionary zeal - The Guardian refers to her tirelessly touring the country visiting schools - while the other, insofar as it has notoriety, is latterly known as a notorious literary elitist. Except that obviously in the latter case, elitist must mean something other than celebrity-orientated.

When I was in one of the junior forms in Bromsgrove County High School in Worcestershire, it may have been shortly before the end of the second world war, or shortly after it, our English teacher, Anne Ledhill, gave us a poem by Auden to comment on. It was the title poem of his book Look Stranger, published some nine years earlier in 1936:

Here at a small field's ending pause
Where the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,
And the shingle scrambles after the suck-
-ing surf,
And a gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.

The first thing I would say now about the stanza is that it displays an almost excessive mannerism of technic, as in the second line, which combines alliteration (falls, foam) with heavy internal rhyme and assonance (chalk, walls, falls), and how the remainder of the the stanza relishes full and half rhyme (pluck, suck). In 1944-5 I believe, the concept of technical mannerism would have been quite outside my field of reference. I do recall noticing that the word ‘sucking’ is broken across the line ending. I cannot recall precisely what I said, but it was to the effect that so placed, the stanza minutely enacted what it described, line 6 in effect sucking down part of line 5 into itself. It was the simultaneous awakening in me of critical acumen and sensuality, though I was not wholly aware of the sensuality until later. I believe I knew from that moment what critical acumen might entail. Anne told me years later that it was my twelve or thirteen year old response to this small felicity that led her to think that there might be a future for me as a professional student of literature.

Dear Anne, she was quite wrong, of course, I had no future as a professional student of literature. My future was to appear before the crème of a transient intelligentsia, as a sinister old harlequin, bellowing for a pittance some gibberish about the shirt of Nessus. I would wish to add however, that when earlier in this lecture I quoted three lines of Eliot’s Little Gidding, I did so not from a standard collected edition, but from a Second Impression of the First pamphlet issue of the poem, printed on atrocious wartime paper, in 1943. As I am sure you know, the four poems comprising Four Quartets, were originally issued in separate wrappers, and pre-dated their appearance in hardcover book format. Four Quartets first appeared in hardback volume form in the UK in 1944 (and yes I know there is a bibliographical glitch with reference to Burnt Norton). The nub of the matter is that my four pamphlet editions of four quartets were gifts from her. If I am an elitist, it is my tribute to her and others of similar background, such as my parents.

Anne Ledhill was born on a public housing estate, in an industrial town in what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire, I don’t have an exact date, my guess would be in or around 1918. She went to Bedford College, University of London, where she obtained first-class honours, but was unable to take up the proffered research opportunity because of straitened family circumstances. You may readily comprehend the bitter contempt with which I respond to political careerists of whatever party, who currently attempt to assuage the wrath of a cheated and embittered nation, with assurances that they and they alone will ensure that the doors of higher education are henceforth to be opened to receive children from underprivileged backgrounds.

Those who have come in expectation of my opinions of the July and August riots will already be somewhat restless4. The first thing to be said in the ongoing rhetoric of my argument, is that the riots were in their horrible way, thoroughly conventional, even traditional. They were reminiscent of the major 18th century disturbances - the 1710 Sacheverell riots in London; the 1736 Porteous Riots in Edinburgh; the 1780 Gordon Riots, again in London; the 1791 Priestley Riots in Birmingham. Sacheverell was a Church of England rabble rouser, a monarchist and a tory, who incited the mobs to attack religious dissenters and Church of England latitudinarians. The Porteous Riots in Edinburgh, which in certain details, particularly a police shooting, perhaps most closely anticipate the Tottenham outbreak, are imaginatively recreated in Sir Walter Scott’s finest novel, The Heart of Midlothian (1818). The Gordon Riots (for which see Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens) were anti-Catholic in origin; they lasted for eight days, caused the deaths of more than three hundred people, and it is said, resulted in more damage to property in London than would result from the popular uprising in Paris at the time of the French Revolution.

But I have been in fact, from the opening sentences of this address, speaking to the topic of ‘Poetry, Policing and Public Order’. When the laureate speaks to The Guardian columnist of the tremendous potential for a vital, new poetry, to be drawn from the practice of texting, she is policing her patch. And when I beg her with all due respect to her high office to consider that she may be wrong, I am policing mine. What Professor Duffy desires to do I believe, and if so it is a most laudable ambition, is to humanise the linguistic-semantic detritus of our particular phase of oligarchical consumerism. And for the common good she is willing to have quoted by The Guardian interviewer, several lines from a poem by herself that could easily be mistaken for a first effort by one of the young people she wishes to encourage. I have here in mind, you will recall, lines in memory of her English teacher, lines printed by The Guardian as lines of prose intersected by diagonal slashes:

"You sat on your desk / swinging your legs, reading a poem by Yeats / to the bored girls, except my heart stumbled and blushed / as it fell in love with the words ...

I respond to this excerpt in two ways, each radically incompatible with the other. My first response is: this is democratic English pared to its barest being, and I would not myself have the moral courage to write so. My simultaneous, incompatible response is: this is not democratic english, but cast-off bits of oligarchical commodity english, such as is employed by writers for Mills & Boon5, and celebrity critics appearing on A Good Read and The Andrew Marr Show. Now if we turn immediately to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem for Armistice Day, ‘The Christmas Truce’, printed in the Saturday Guardian Review 2011, we have something radically different

But it was Christmas Eve; believe; belief thrilled the night air,
where glittering rime on unburied sons
treasured their stiff hair.

So that although ‘thrilled’ and ‘glittering’ are words that come with a standard poetry kit, ‘treasured’ is beautifully chosen and placed, and I cannot readily imagine any texted message in which it might conceivably be found to anticipate or emulate the resonance it has in Carol Ann Duffy’s stanza. Something instantaneous occurs when a word is used effectively, I would dare to say magically. For an instant the poem seems to hover over itself as if aware of itself, as a well-struck thing resonating.

In the course of my inaugural lecture, exactly twelve months ago I stated that during my tenure of this office I would give no reading to the university of my own poems, to do so would seem an exploitation of my academic appointment. I abide by that self-imposed rule. It has occurred to me however that from time to time it may be essential to the development of a critical argument to cite a phrase or two that I have myself written, and such an occasion presents itself now. In 1983 I published a poem of 400 lines with the title The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy. It contains the line:

To dispense, with justice; or, to dispense with justice

In late 2000 or early 2001 I received a letter from Lord Windelsham, at that time Principal of Brasenose, requesting my consent to his use of that line as part of an epigraph to the final volume of his four-volume series, Responses to Crime, and further to his use of the words dispensing justice as his book’s title. I was happy to accede to his request and in due course received a signed complementary copy which I greatly value. The title page in fact carries a double epigraph, the second citation is from my book, but it is preceded by a quotation from the foreword to Criminal Justice System Business Plan 2000-1, the joint authorship of which is given as The Attorney General, Home Secretary and Lord Chancellor, that is the three separate government Ministers of Justice. There quotation reads:

To dispense justice fairly and efficiently and to promote confidence in the rule of law

Windelsham’s acknowledgement page begins:

The subtitle of this volume, dispensing justice, derives from the two frontispiece quotations. In giving permission to reprint the brief but telling extract from one of his poems, Hill remarked that such a use confirmed his belief that poetry is an art of public significance. The contrast is apt between his precise use of words and punctuation, and the overarching aims of the ministerial mission-statement.

Well if I may be allowed an impertinent paraphrase, Windelsham is saying that by precise use of punctuation Hill is indicating that law, like poetry, necessitates due attention to the minute particulars, that the humanity is in the detail, and that in contrast the Ministerial wording is a kind of trade-flotation. In seeing how the two sentences - mine and that of the Ministerial pronouncement - are oxymoronically related, David Windelsham shows himself to have a mind instinctively attuned to the proprieties of poetry, an art which is culturally, or post-culturally, shackled with the worst kind of sentimental improprieties.

John has a strong poetic streak in him (he wrote poetry and read historical romances)

I noticed this only the other day in the obituary section of a college magazine - not the magazine of my own college, Keble, I had better say. The late person deserving this tribute had been greatly distinguished in his own field but I would irritably deny that poetry is to be considered as anyone’s hobby. If you have a hobby you are a hobbyist and ride a hobby horse and, albeit cranky, are entirely harmless. Now you may tell me that A E Housman, internationally renowned as a Latin scholar, seems to have regarded the writing of A Shropshire Lad (1896) as the indulgence of a hobby. And I would agree with you that there were occasions where he affected so to regard it. Now I am myself the hobbyist of a theory that we and our fellow Europeans are citizens not of democracies, but of finance-oligarchies with democratic and aristocratic trimmings. In a month that has witnessed two elected European governments dissolved by fiat of an international finance ratings agency this does not strike me as a crazy suggestion6.

Last week my local free rag in Cambridge announced the city’s Winter Word Fest:

‘November is a terrible month for entertaining yourself at home unless you are a fan of watching jungle-based celebrities swallowing Gnu’s gonads or aging stars attempting ill advised high kicks in spangling ball room outfits. Thank heavens then for Word Fest, the opportunity to escape from the banality of weekend telly, and get your fix of intelligent and lively debate

What is so exemplary about this passage - it would not surprise me to learn that its author is a recent first-class honours graduate in English - turns on the assumptions in the use of the word banal, the assumption that if weekend telly is banal then November Word Fest is not. That a phrase such as ‘get you fix of’ makes manifest the high order of intelligent response intrinsically superior to the chavish delights of weekend telly. I would also like to add that the big festivals, the annual event at Hay-on-Wye, the Oxford Literary festival are not superior events to the November Word fest, they are essentially book fairs, though without the chance excitement of finding anything good. And in the latter case, the way in which this university has or appears to have given its high intellectual repute as guarantee of worth to what is in brute fact a publishers jamboree, is in my view deplorable.

In one of my previous lectures I said something to the effect that in writing poetry it was essential not to be one’s self, not to be sincere but to be inventive. I said that knowing how the cult of sincerity plays into the hands of the spivs and charlatans of our anarchical plutocracy. And I said it knowing that so to protest turns me into a parody of myself, a kind of senile Saint-Just of the Republic of Letters. Gratitude, decency, intelligence, faith, love itself, protest itself, have all been gutted and recycled in the festival driven madness of commodity, and in this murderous wallow it is of no consequence that John ‘wrote poetry and read historical romances’. Why couldn’t he have built elaborate model railways and read Areopagitica, or Fors Clavigera?

I recently read a newspaper piece on Rory McGrath who is in the process of writing his memoirs. He says ‘the thing about writing comedy, which is what I have written mostly in my life, is that it's a very artificial and mechanical process, it's all about timing. Writing a book about your life is far easier because you are just writing what happened’. What is noteworthy here is that McGrath could be understood as apologising for the art of comedy; if so, he is, I think, seriously mistaken, and it might be far better for his autobiography if he were to apply the rules of comedic writing to it. In order to do anything of worth in literature you must create, not what is newsworthy or praiseworthy in the terms of the festival pundits, but something that is self-contained and in which the stresses are right - it is all about timing, as McGrath says, almost in spite of himself. And as previously suggested I am policing my patch when I insist that any poetry written today worthy of being read for any other reason than antiquarian curiosity in fifty or a hundred years time will have been written with a kind of savage technical restraint, somewhat akin to Swift’s Latin Epitaph and Yeats’ translation of it7. Mechanically, and with a near-perfect sense of timing, it will not pat John on the head for writing wimpish poems in his dotage and reading historical romances, but will honour him for the outstanding work he achieved in his own field, and in John’s case it was indeed outstanding.

The poetry, I regret to say, is not ‘in the pity’8. The pity is triumphantly vindicated in the poetry or it is not. To read Wilfred Owen as though for a distillation of appealing sentiment which is also considered relevant is not to do justice to that fine though uneven poet. You cannot read Rimbaud for sentiment and relevance, you cannot read Isaac Rosenberg for sentiment and relevance, you cannot read Pound’s Pisan Cantos for sentiment and relevance, you cannot read Laura Riding or Marianne Moore for sentiment and relevance. Or, rather, you could, but it would serve no honest purpose. Sylvia Plath, by the way, can be read for sentiment and relevance, and scores of thousands of impressionable people have read her in just this way, and for those fatuously wrong reasons. But the best of her, as in ‘The Bee Poems’, is resistant to anarchical sentimental pillage, and will resist oligarchical aesthetic devaluation, as the best of Robert Lowell, chiefly but not exclusively the early Lowell, resists and has resisted debasement. But let us not misunderstand one another, oligarchy requires instantaneous debased and debauched response. Joseph Goebbels fully mastered all its tricks. I would suggest that anyone who studies the relationship or dis-relation between language structures and political structures, particularly oligarchy’s relationship with anarchy, might wish to consider instances of German underground or openly resistant ethical writings, both Jewish and Christian in the period 1933-1945. The two books by Victor Klemperer9, Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison, the posthumously published letters of James von Moltke. In different ways they are all discussing or meditating on veracity, its essential relation to the relaying of information, as well as to the highest orders of creation. Bonhoeffer wrote:

‘Timeless and placeless ethical discourse lacks the concrete warrant which all authentic discourse requires’

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, Touchstone (1995), p. 266

I would say that the truly major events in literary-critical scholarship during the past couple of decades have been the appearance of such works as David Norbrook’s Writing the English Republic (1999), or the analyses of Collin Borough of the writers of the Henrician period, or Brian Cumming’s Grammar and Grace (2002), on the interrelationship of Reformation theology and the verse and prose structures of the 16th and early 17th centuries. To take not quite at random a few phrases from Norbrook’s chapter on Marvell ‘Horatian Ode on Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’:

‘The regicide may have destroyed some forms of beauty but it has opened the way to the sublime’ (p. 267)

or

‘Cromwell’s ‘wiser Art’ is in the first instance the political skill that is needed to turn such plans into reality, but it also directly confronts the arts of the Caroline court’ (p.268)

Both from D Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics (1627-1660), Cambridge University Press (1999)

Norbrook is showing us how to evaluate a novel type of heroic style, the republican sublime, and adding that an awareness of Marvell’s stylistics in the ‘Horatian Ode’ itself is aided by our awareness of this. Marvell is neither vehemently for the republican sublime, nor zealously against it, but is overall somewhat cool, and the coolness explains the ambiguous pitch of the ‘Ode’, which many have commented on without putting their finger so precisely on the point.

Such objective precision, as we get in Norbrook’s study and Marvell’s ‘Ode’, is nowhere apparent in literary criticism, to give it an archaic label, that now appears in the form of reviews of contemporary poetry and prose in the papers that were once called broadsheets, but are now tabloids. In the Guardian G2, on November 7th, there appeared a review by Sam Leith, of an exhibition of Sylvia Plath’s drawings10. I quote:

I spent my teens marinated in Plath's poetry (there's a school of thought, not a very honourable one, that this is evidence that I was a slightly morbid teenage girl trapped in the body of a slightly morbid teenage boy).

The entire weight of the passage is directed at the interestingness of Mr Leith, not at the significance or otherwise of Plath’s drawings. ‘Marinated’ is exactly of its time and place, as ‘wooly bleaters’ or ‘feathered tribe’ are exactly revelatory of minor 18th century pastoral verse. We can turn to a lengthier passage:

Plath read Freud and Jung, and used them consciously in her poems. You could say she used the unconscious consciously. Symbols recurred and were reworked: all those white moons and black yew trees (fathers/husbands); white feet and black shoes; the black-and-white sea (always furious); the sinister flowers; the awful medical apparatus of bandages and scalpels, the bald doctors; the engulfing reds of blood and flame.

The telltale phrase here is ‘all those’, so characteristic in its anti-contextuality. What is Leith’s purpose in this random list of symbols, does he mean to reveal how deep Plath is, or how knowing she is, or how boring she is? Because taken in this pattern-book way the ‘sinister flowers’ resemble in this way the feathered tribes of 18th century literary mediocrity. Leith is at once opinionated and without decisiveness or judgment, and in this is entirely representative of the oligarchic commodity style, in which the creative faculty is sensed as being phrenetic yet passive, exactly as consumer anarchy at the post-Christmas sales is at once frenetic and passive. ‘Engulfing reds of blood or flame’ - engulfing what? Or whom? Is Plath victim or perpetrator of such horrid, destructive activity? Is this how the world is to Plath or how Plath is to the world? It matters, one wants to know - the state of poetry wants to know, I want to know. I want to know how Mr Leith would present a three thousand word appreciation of the paintings of Jackson Pollock, would it be on the level of the ‘engulfing reds of blood and flame’ or would it be minimally concerned with application, because this word - ‘application’ - blending the ethical and the technical, would seem to me a key term in approach we might make to Pollock’s painting.

In the mythical conversation I am here conducting with the poet laureate on the question of poetry and democracy, I would wish to know her mind on the question of Walt Whitman’s distinction between ‘grand common stock’ on the one hand and ‘mean flat average on the other’ on the other. It is my strong conviction that anyone propounding or advocating an aesthetic and ethical continuity between texting and poetry would need to have at least a considered opinion on this matter. My own considered opinion, I scarcely need to stress this surely, is that texting is the very embodiment of the ‘mean flat average’ and that democratic poetry, such as the laureate writes, and wishes to encourage school children to write, must be the expression of the ‘grand common stock’. True poetry, I hope to get away with this utterly vacuous phrase, is not a series of textings about the world, the world that we have authored and desire to go on self-authorising, it is a kind of intensely crafted and parallel world, but not an alternative or better world, since it is not here to offer us escape. As a parallel world it must possess its own gravity, which can be interpreted two ways - either as gravitas, an accomplishment of the old rhetoric, or as pondus, weight, a form of the gravitational pull, specific gravity to be found in the semiologies of english, as recorded in the OED and in the inherited canon of poetic kinds - Shakespearean sonnet, Miltonic sonnet, Pindaric and Horatian ode, heroic couplet and blank verse, and so on and so on. The possession of gravitas does not rule out the possibility of obscenity. Indeed, I would here offer my opinion that in collision with anarchical plutocracy, as I believe us to be, obscenity in verse of the highest moral calibre is essential, because the twin domain of civic-cum-private debauch, whether in the Florence of Dante’s Comedia or in the London-Rome axis of 21st century Euro-finance has so much about it that requires a genius for the obscene to match.

The theory and practice of poetry, I am convinced, and this conviction is fundamental to my fifteen lectures, is a part of the ‘civil constitution’. I take that phrase from Francis Oakley’s book Politics and Eternity (1999), who takes his title from a sentence in Michael Oakeshott’s introduction to his edition of Hobbes’ Leviathan, an edition first published in 1946, where Oakeshott says:

‘To establish the connection in principle and in detail, directly or mediately, between politics and eternity, is a project that has never been without its followers’

T Hobbes, M Oakeshott (ed.), Leviathan; or, The matter, forme and power of a commonwealth, ecclesiasticall and civil, Blackwell (1946), p. x

Again, a note of coolness, but not as trenchant as Marvell’s towards Cromwell and the republican sublime. More like studied equanimity over the port. By the time I read my way through the first half of the famous introduction to the Leviathan, I intuited that Oakeshott would have to be enrolled in a checklist of those who indeed think in such terms, that is, between politics and eternity. So why this combination room reserve in the phrasing? Because I would set my own sense of the thing thereabouts. I think that when one writes in any significant way one is in some sense between politics and eternity, and I would not try to hedge my bets on this statement with any kind of grammatical nuance. I would say that to establish the connection in principle and in detail, directly or mediately, between disparate phenomena, seems to me a necessary continuation of any vision regarding the function of metaphor, from Aristotle, to Eliot, Yeats and Pound.

Now Oakeshott’s Leviathan piece, together with his essay ‘The Voice of Poetry and the Conversation of Mankind’, has greatly influenced a considerable number of liberal-conservative academic moralists of about my age, and perhaps a shade younger. As I desire to continue the theme of ‘Poetry, Policing and Public Order’ in the two remaining lectures scheduled for this academic year, I shall take Oakeshott’s two essays under review, with respect, but by no means with acclaim. He’s a damn sight too civilised for my liking, and I do not think that in the present anarchy being studiedly civilised is the best riposte that you can make to the oligarchical strut. Jonathan Swift, in ‘The Conduct of the Allies’, published exactly three hundred years ago in 1711, declared that it is the ‘folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee house for the voice of the kingdom’. And reading the review pages of cultural tabloids you can see that very little has changed in the succeeding three centuries. And I believe that Swift might have thought less well of Oakeshott, than Oakeshott would have considered merited by his own impeccable reasonableness of discourse in the face of the world’s provocations. And If I had to choose between them, I would hope not to have to as I do admire Oakeshott, I would feel that I had to choose Swift, even at his most cantankerous and obscene.