Christopher Middleton and the Bare Bone of Creation
2005; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 51; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoAmour fou? What's this, then? Early 1960s in London and some of us have been drowning in the drumming ploughland for a couple of years, so eager for a pure English poetry uncorrupted by the tediously experimenting Europeans and--Lord, save us from them--obstreperous Americans that we don't even remark that the hawk in the rain fell right out of the windhover's nest, that while Europe advances England is bent on going backwards; there are some among us who can't stand the muttering retreats of the metropolis, don't want to know about the old bitch gone in the teeth, and recycle themselves to the countryside, tweed jacket unbuttoned to the bracing English wind, grey worsted trousers neatly held at the ankles by cycle-clips, and pedal away from village to village, stopping at one church and then another, remaining, like good country folk, bored and uninformed, a condition nationally applauded as admirable. So what's this Amour fou, then? There's that respectable old man, Robert Graves, real Englishman he is, bless him, giving us More Poems in '61 and New Poems in '62, regular as a school-boy Annual with its predictable contents, everyone adores him, even the New Statesman and The Observer print dozens of his poems, it's enough to make you want to sing Rule, Britannia all weekend long, and here's this Middleton bloke with his Amour bleedin' fou, what in Alfred Lord Tennyson's name is this foreign stuff, then? Those Sunday mornings in London one opened The Observer while the brain was still cobwebbed with dreams and the kettle was boiling for one's first cup of coffee. A glance at the cricket scores showing England losing to Australia once again restored one to living reality, a couple of sips of Mocha Java cleared the brain, and one turned ritualistically to the book pages to read A. Alvarez's magisterial pronouncements on the state of poetry in the English language, which somehow seemed mostly American, and to see whose poem he had chosen to print in italics at the bottom of the page. And casting one's brightening glance there on that Sunday morning in the early years of that famous swinging decade one saw that curious title, Amour fou, and did a double take, and then reading the poem felt that something was missing, as if a cyclist had forgotten to take the pump with him and coming out of another church had no means to fill his deflated tyres with air. And then read the poem again and began to suspect that it was the other way round, nothing was missing but something was there one had not seen in poems before, not immediately sure exactly what, but two or three readings left the brain murmuring to itself, for it kept hearing the music that the poem continued to secrete in some buried region of one's consciousness. Early 1960s. T. S. Eliot still lived in Chelsea, though his residence in Carlyle Mansions might as well have been on Mt. Olympus; ten minutes walk from there, up on Sydney Street, met on Friday nights the young poets fancifully called The Group; just round the corner, in a pub on Fulham Road, one might find Patrick Kavanagh, an almost empty pint in hand, rehearsing his dance with Kitty Stobling; and pubs in Soho still remembered Dylan Thomas. Across the river, in a pub in Dulwich, Howard Sergeant held his monthly poetry readings and on some occasions the long room upstairs was so full there were people crowded at the door with some more behind them on the stairs. There was a serious audience for poetry in that London which seemed to have awakened from its postwar sleep in spite of the seductive sentimentality of Betjeman's bells summoning the nation back to bed. Provincial insularity was out. The British Commonwealth was superseded by the European Common Market. At the popular level, the Beatles and the new mod culture, with Mary Quant and Carnaby Street as two of its symbols, coinciding with the advent of the jet engine, changed the nation's manners, customs, speech and geography--the English Channel became irrelevant and America came closer: it was the beginning of the end of the high and low two-culture theory, and though we did not notice it at the time, the popular revolt against high culture had been launched and democracy's great dumbing-down crisis had commenced with capitalism seizing the opportunity to profit from the easily gratified majority. …
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