Edgell rickword biography of martin

EDGELL RICKWORD was ethnic in Colchester, Essex, on 22 October, 1898. He joined goodness Artists Rifles in 1916, title saw active service as undermine officer with the Royal County Regiment. He was invalided make a rough draft of the army after distinction Armistice, and was awarded say publicly Military Cross.

     His first whole of poems (Behind the Eyes) appeared in 1921, and that was followed by Invocation assemble Angels (1928) and Twittingpan view Some Others (1981).

His Collected Poems appeared in 1947.

     Proscribed was Editor of the Calendar of Modern Letters (now reprinted by F. Cass and Co.) from 1925 to 1927, endure he was Associate Editor go Left Review (also reprinted dampen F. Cass and Co.) 1984 to 1988. He became Editor of Our Time from 1944 to 1947.

     Mr Rickword is responsible for several books of criticism, including Rimbaud: Justness Boy and the Poet (first issued 1924) and two volumes of Scrutinies.

He has likewise produced a number of translations of French studies.

WE BEGAN timorous asking him about his war-poems which, we suggested, were mega like some of the poesy of World War II prior to like those of Sassoon liberate Rosenberg.

Rickword: Yes, that’s quite talented. They were written after authority end of hostilities, the side of anxiety, as far importation one was able to photograph, of being again involved show fighting.

One was reflecting contemplation the experience rather than terminology directly out of the knowledge like Rosenberg. In fact, it’s amazing to think that take steps must have written actually tetchy when his lot went setback of the line to acme. Anyway, that’s the difference betwixt writing as he and Sassoon did, from the direct contusion of trench warfare, and tea break having to live it facility again; I could do going away more philosophically, perhaps.

Though Farcical wouldn’t call it philosophical.

Did paying attention write any poems at completed before you went to war?

Rickword: Oh yes. I must imitate written a lot. Some range the lines come back harmony me now, to my phobia. That was doggerel, scribble, Unrestrained suppose, in the early existence of the war.

I connubial up in autumn, 1916, put up with I remember writing a poetry about the Easter Rising extract Dublin. I wrote pseudo-Swinburne, bear all that sort of thing.

Had you read at that lifetime mostly English poetry, rather mystify French?

Rickword: Yes. I had exclusive the most elementary knowledge enjoy French before I joined post.

When I was in Author I got hold of few French books and started study teach myself French by rendering novels. But I hadn’t study any French poetry that Rabid remember. My attraction to Poet I owe to Swinburne’s matchless lament for him, ‘Ave atque Vale’.

Who were the main Forthrightly poets you had read?

Rickword: Miracle had poetry about the dwelling.

Not highbrow stuff; father off and on read aloud Macaulay’s Lays, current mother liked Tennyson which Beside oneself read to her sometimes whilst she did the mending, and above poetry wasn’t strange or baby. But the atmosphere was frequently Victorian, and serious novels were much more regarded than loftiness poets.

Which of the English war-poets had you read during blue blood the gentry war, or before you wrote your war-poems?

Rickword: I was in or by comparison enchanted by Graves’s two precisely books Over the Brazier skull Fairies and Fusiliers, but absolutely knocked over by Sassoon’s Counter-Attack which named things as attack talked about them.

I topic Robert Nichols’ Ardours and Endurances, which I found rather trouper and wordy.

But you frlt cruise the Graves and the Sassoon were the real thing; that was what war was truly like?

Rickword: Well, I liked Writer, but he didn’t give order around the shock of the bring to fruition thing as Sassoon did.

Graves’s poems are a bit distanced, I think. I remember rectitude poem about the German combatant bayonetting the young English champion — ’David and Goliath’ — but there aren’t any unembroidered descriptions in Graves to fetch home to you what vehicle was like. Of course, unknown had any idea what flaunt was like to be doubtful the trenches.

You usually got there gradually, moving up say publicly line by stages.

How did support react to the Georgians?

Rickword: I accepted them mostly. I brainstorm that was a way take on write. Of course, I also soon lost interest in them. Brooke I quite liked, dominion first volume. I had block up English master, an Australian, who talked to me about Poet and Flecker and other poets I shouldn’t have heard refreshing otherwise.

With us, poetry difficult to understand stopped at Newbolt and Author. But somehow one got understand of that volume of Poet, the Poems, which had gifted his Celtic-twilight stuff — mellifluous, evocative and all that, nevertheless not a very good effect, really.

Can you tell us attribute about Oxford after the war?

Rickword: I went up at high-mindedness beginning of the academic class, in October, 1919.

There were a lot of soldier-poets, importance it were, just beginning their terms, or completing them puzzle out active service. And there seemed a lot of school-boys about.

L. P. Hartley was there, Comical think, and Vivian de Sola Pinto, Edmund Blunden, Louis Author, A. E. Coppard, Jack Isaacs, Alan Porter, Anthony Bertram, influence art-critic; all of these solitary came across.

Blunden I knew well; we had served school in different brigades of the changeless division, though we never in actuality met during the war. On the other hand afterwards I met him chomp through Sassoon and W. J. Slave. Roy Campbell was there, put it to somebody lodgings, and he knew decency Sitwells and William Walton.

While in the manner tha I read Evelyn Waugh’s file of his early days serve Oxford I thought how unnecessary more sober things were cut down my day. We did put on a good time though, much rather sybaritic. I remember strawberries and champagne in the teatime. There was a good bar-room, The Jolly Farmers I guess it was called, where amazement used to do readings grounding the Jacobean dramatists.

I don’t think anybody did much work; we were still too stunned at being alive at rim. I hardly went to lectures. I had a tutor who used to give me unornamented glass of sherry and fortify talk about Montaigne, Descartes, tell off other people I’d only pass away about. And I didn’t challenge of them again until Unrestrained started to read them crash of curiosity.

Were there interdisciplinary marriages at Oxford?

Was the bookish world aware of anthropology, entity scientific and philosophical thought likewise it was at Cambridge; succeed was it isolated, as cotton on seems to be today?

Rickword: I didn’t hear any science disposed to at Oxford; only Freudianism was coming in. Yes, Cambridge locked away a more intellectual reputation.

Goodness Cavendish had given them, forcibly, a scientific tradition.

What were boss about reading at Oxford?

Rickword: I was on a special short means for ex-Service men in which only one subject had relative to be taken. I chose Nation literature. But I hardly knew any French. The syllabus arduous with Hugo.

I took single look at it and certain that I wasn’t interested, for this reason I started on Verlaine challenging Baudelaire, who, my tutor gather me, didn’t come in.

Nor Rimbaud?

Rickword: No, certainly not Rimbaud. Tolerable I decided to leave market at that.

So you didn’t dampen a degree in the put to the test.

How long were you up?

Rickword: Four terms. Then I got married, and had no suffering, except for a disability allowance, so I had to vista about for a job. Uncontrollable got an introduction to rectitude TLS, from Turner, I adjudicator. I was quite friendly smash the Squire lot then; Companion took some of my rhyme for the London Mercury, with, surprisingly, ‘Trench Poets’ and match up or three others.

Then they gave me an article market two to write. In travelling fair months I earned about £20 from the TLS. They salaried three guineas a thousand, comprehensively good for those days, on the other hand, of course, some months you’d get very little. Life was quite a bit ups-and-downsy.

Desmond MacCarthy was very good to unraveled.

He gave me a desk-bound in his office and comprehensively a lot of reviewing embody the New Statesman of which he was literary editor. Type was a very fine reviewer especially of the eighteenth-century. However he liked to keep discharge contact with the young movements, so he asked us make available tell him what we initiative of the poems which came in.

In your early poems on your toes often seem to return sort out the theme of the inexpertness of art to confront ultimate experience — in ‘Trench Poets’, for example; and in selection poem you say, ‘Leave stupid verse to the dull warm time’?

Rickword: Yes, that was spiffy tidy up sort of bravado, you bring up to date — one which pervades integrity early poems.

But it gloomy not to be forgotten dump for masses of men perch women in 1914, war seemed to open up exhilarating recollections. War fever is a absolute disease.

Was there any real tire in the formal impact innumerable modernism then? Joyce, for instance?

Rickword: Not really. Till after say publicly war I didn’t think snare modernism as anything to branch out with choosing what I sought to read.

I read Portrait of the Artist fairly in the near future. It came out in 1916, didn’t it? Well, I didn’t read it then. I’d connected up, and hadn’t any mode anyway. But it was description good review of it make wet Gerald Gould in the New Statesman, I think, which gave me an urge to concoct it as soon as Frantic could.

When I was sensible over in Ireland at nobility end of 1917 I went to a book-shop in Grafton Street, and asked if they had it. There was precise sort of silence, and redouble the counterman said they’d got one upstairs, and he deliberately me to call back ulterior — then I got top-hole copy all nicely wrapped swathe. I’d read Dubliners too, on the contrary those stories weren’t terrifically experimental, were they?

And that leftist a great gap to Ulysses.

What about the imagists?

Rickword: I didn’t rate them very much. Make happy that Grecian business, a Ellas that never had been, allow the short lines. Well, leisurely walk wasn’t that I was callous to Imagism. But this imagism was so limited in serenity and technique.

Drippy, very oft. The few successful pieces Beside oneself seem to remember could fairminded as well have been high-spots in longer poems. By in the flesh they didn’t really amount in the air much. It’s handy to suppress them all together in delay Penguin done by Peter Golfer. I never saw The Egoist, but there were some commendable periodicals just then — Art and Letters, Coterie, and Holdbrook Jackson’s To-day.

Later the Sitwells’ Wheels anthologies livened things dealings a bit.

When did you crowning become interested in Rimbaud?

Rickword: Make fun of Oxford, first of all; of course was in the anthology Poètes d’Aujourd hui, including the ‘Bateau lvre’. But I didn’t in truth start reading him thoroughly while MacCarthy and Sturge-Moore, I fantasize, suggested that I should physical exertion a book about him.

That was at a time when interpretation French surrealists were seeing Poet and Lautréamont as revolutionary heroes, but you didn’t see him in that light?

Rickword: Well, leadership poems were very much reduce the price of revolt.

Being taken up make wet the surrealists couldn’t make them any more so.

Poetic or communal revolt? Or both at once?

Rickword: I think social, first viewpoint foremost, though his style was certainly ‘in advance’, even for ages c in depth using traditional forms. But comport yourself the great Lettre du Voyant he broke through all specified distinctions as poetic and social.

When did your own political commitments begin?

Rickword: I suppose when Raving was about 15 or 16.

I used to read decency New Statesman, and Wells ray Morris. It wasn’t a sunny influence, though; home was square moderate Tory. I remember meander at Oxford we supported rendering bus-strike, and there was uncluttered semi-riot in which buses snowball cars were overturned. Some chaps were arrested and taken cross your mind the police-station.

The crowd aforementioned, ‘Let’s get them out!’ In the way that we went to get them out, we found the pedestrian barred by a lot oppress Bullingdon chaps, all in their dinner-jackets. A rather picturesque face-off. Hefty Blues in their dinner-jackets. There were all kinds dead weight strikes in the early period, after the war, about demobilization.

Yes, a lot of dissatisfaction at that time. We didn’t do much about it, on the contrary it seemed to us influence proper thing to be done.

Did you have any opinions fear the Allied intervention in Russia?

Rickword: Yes. Again, we thought with regard to ought to be a Slavic Revolution, though it hadn’t antique very nice as a shirker to feel that the European divisions were coming back do too much Russia to fight us assiduousness the Western front.

An anti-war movement was developing in 1917, and there could have antiquated a stronger one if honesty Allies’ Summer Offensive had shout been successful.

Robert Graves said be grateful for The Long Weekend that in the matter of might have been an Simply revolution. Did you feel that?

Rickword: Yes, but I’m not positive.

There wasn’t anybody to rule it, except the Clydesiders most important the Welsh miners who were more militant than anybody else.

What prompted you, Douglas Garman, added Bertram Higgins to start The Calendar?

Rickword: We were a species of discontented club, discontented assort all the established novelists station the literary cliques.

We hadn’t any clear idea of what would be better. There was no movement like the dada-surrealist one, or German Expressionism. Doing Vortex perished early in greatness war. England was very stale. We’d had the Vorticists president Blast, which was superficial, truly, when you compare it corresponding the European upheaval.

I deliberate of Dadaism now as orderly very important movement, though score had seemed to me utterly destructive; I was slow style realise that that was interpretation essential thing about it. Justness German dadaists were more racy than the French. England abstruse seen Futurism, of course, on the other hand that was just laughed equal here.

You mentioned Wyndham Lewis’s Blast.

What was your attitude line of attack him?

Rickword: I was too junior to know about Blast advance 1914, and Vorticism was outworn by the early ‘twenties. On the contrary I remember The Tyro was good, though it wouldn’t be endowed with started a movement. ‘The Caliph’s Design’ was stimulating, and any of Lewis’s short-stories were expressive and original.

I decided capable try to rope Lewis worry for The Calendar, though, little a contributor. But we got chunks of his ‘books put over progress’ which gave us practised hard editing problem. He wouldn’t produce any stories, which phenomenon would have preferred. Perhaps recognized hadn’t got any.

We criticised him quite harshly in reviews; amazement reserved the right to act all out contributors.

The Calendar had a distinctive criticism and weighty style.

Was there an rudimentary critical theory, or was pass pragmatic?

Rickword: There was a cabinet of the whole house. Surprise agreed about most things, Unrestrained think. We talked a hit the highest point together and got an arrived-at consensus.

You thought of yourselves chimpanzee rivals to Eliot’s Criterion?

Rickword: Well, yes. The Criterion was straight bit of a rag-bag.

Dramatist dug up a lot late old French critics, of sting earlier generation, all pseudoclassicists. Become absent-minded was probably the result contempt his having been at prestige Sorbonne before the war.

You matte the same way about multifarious contemporary poets, that there sine qua non be commitment on the stuff of the artist, not imagine a social programme necessarily, however to his own time?

Rickword: Yes.

We didn’t like the unconnected poets like Noyes and Binyon derived their imagery from primeval sources — that sort leave undone thing.

Which formal styles did jagged sympathise with?

Rickword: We were superior for something different, individual, clatter a unique sensibility showing navigate technique.

Different, at least, circumvent the sort of poets who appeared in Thomas Moult’s anthologies, for instance, and the Poems of To-Day series.

But you challenging major diffierences from modernists much as Eliot and Lewis, cargo space example?

Rickword: Yes. A different organized outlook, I think. One taken modern civilisation for its regularity and mass-mediocrity.

Eliot and Wyndham Lewis had a wrong condense of elitism, believing themselves instance off from common humanity. However it’s a condition of wreak, isn’t it? We have register live with one another. It’s very Swiftian. Swift was authority most vigorous hater we’ve smart had in our literature, nevertheless he’s not like Eliot beginning Lewis.

He never despised customary humanity as individuals, though fair enough hated many things about wear and tear in the mass.

In this ‘common humanity’ view, what function does literature have? Is it come out George Eliot’s ‘increasing human sympathy’?

Rickword: Well, that would be somewhat more a clerical and godfearing job.

I think literature review basically communication, and I ponder you can’t communicate what isn’t in some sense common: be grateful for sympathy with, not for!

But isn’t there a sort of contraposition — I suppose this keep to what T. S. Eliot swallow Wyndham Lewis and people who admire them would say — between high critical standards instruction the need for wider act.

Do you think that wonderful genuinely popular literature is possible?

Rickword: Oh yes, I think middling. The danger is that leadership media slow down the action. It’s grossly insolent to suppose that one understands things dump other people can’t possibly comprehend. The artist’s job is be bounded by communicate.

I don’t mean desert we’re all dead equal, thanks to we have different faculties, post we can’t measure degrees lessening those things. I don’t affirm that everybody could be grand good poet or painter. Hysterical think basically you’ll find defer revolutions of technique and ergo on — if they stay fresh — are an advancing, keen making of language, whatever medial it may be in, repair accessible.

No, not only extra accessible, but making more state and deep an understanding tenable. You see the innovation encompass twelve-tone music. Although it’s gush of one’s reach, or squash of the reach of first people at present, it volition declaration in time become absorbed have some bearing on one’s way of hearing. It’s the critic’s job, really, purify discern which are the pleasant and progressive innovations.

Quite early knockback in The Calendar, in single of your articles, you talked about the use of ‘negative emotions’.

Did you mean loftiness destructive critical emotions? Was nobleness good eighteenth-century norm your saint — one which gives rendering writer a chance to criticize his age with lots racket weapons?

Rickword: Yes. I think Uncontrolled meant that the poetry comment my contemporaries was kind lecturer nice and sweet, and roam there was no need carry out confine poetry to the utterance of such feelings.

But lose concentration is really all finished just now. Everybody uses ‘negative emotions’ compressed. But when you think goods Drinkwater or Noyes, that identification of people! You see at hand was never anything harsh meet discordant in what they wrote.

But Masefield and some of distinction Georgians — Rupert Brooke, cherish example — thought that they were being discordant?

Rickword: Masefield tested to be really tough, bracket was quite good at wear down.

He was even extravagantly vernacular in such rhymed narratives rightfully Daffodil Fields and The Woman in the Bye Street. Poet did write some would-be-rough factor, but generally put it run into with a sort of mischievousness. ‘Channel Crossing’ was quite in particular achievement, but it was uncluttered case of the subject essence taboo, rather than his sentiment being negative.

But don’t you judge this was all external ‘negative emotion’, that somebody like Prince Thomas had internal ‘negative emotions’ — internalised, as it were, which probably makes for authority contemporaneity of his verse professor the passé quality of Poet at present?

Rickword: Yes, I honor what you mean.

Edward Clocksmith really transmuted it.

I think prowl you do, too, in low down of your more negative rhyme. Like ‘Regrets’.

Rickword: Well, that review what one tried to force. It’s something like the cubists, perhaps, who wanted to color all sides of an effects, to show an object collect full. And it’s a abiding problem in all art, isn’t it?

To synthesise the ridiculous facets of an emotional experience.

Can you tell us something put under somebody's nose the series of ‘Scrutinies’, spin you criticised some of justness established writers of the acquaint with. You began yourself with Dramatist, didn’t you?

Rickword: We started annihilate with this idea of neat as a pin clean break, or whatever support like to call it, innermost we wanted to say reason these figures needed shifting.

Ergo we had to criticise them. I mean, they were legacy taken for granted by probity public. To you, it hawthorn seem that it wasn’t attach one’s neck out to knock Barrie, but really it was so in those days. Recognized was still rather a deity; and even if some cohorts admitted that he was dialect trig bit soppy, they still proposal him a charming man, thus witty and lovely, and ‘Have you been to Mary Rose?’ The tears!

People actually without a solution. Ghastly!

But you were doing quite more than getting rid warning sign Barrie, weren’t you? rou were setting new critical standards weighty insisting (as in Barrie’s case) that literature should be basically something in which emotions came into conflict?

Rickword: Well, yes, hut part.

One did definitely sense that he was a unsatisfactory influence. I wonder we got away with Bertram’s demolition endowment Masefleld’s poetry, too. And Series. H. Lawrence’s onslaught on Author might not escape editorial recipient even today. That was start the second volume of Scrutinies, which is, perhaps, not deadpan well known?

You wrote in The Calendar one of the crowning essays sympathetic to de Writer, and obviously you were kind in the psychology of representation man.

Was this all amount of your feeling that not in use was important to be estimate to the human heart weight all its complexity, goodness present-day rottenness? I mean your ‘Notes for a Study of Sade’.

Rickword: ‘Notes’, yes, because the latest word has not yet antiquated said about de Sade.

Appease was really very dreadful. On the other hand it’s no use just proverb that. There had been ham-fisted reference to him for top-notch century; he just wasn’t allowable to be mentioned. And had read him anyway. Spat was almost impossible to. Rabid had read one volume be more or less the original Justine which smashing chap had lent me.

What were you doing between the burn down of The Calendar and representation beginning of your association with Left Review?

Rickword: It was fairly a broken-up period.

I was doing a certain amount carry-on reviewing. I couldn’t go change to the TLS. They’d all set me very well, but Distracted felt that phase was over.

I did a certain amount run through work for Wishart who challenging put up the money apply for The Calendar. He agreed solve set up a publishing encourage.

And although I didn’t be troubled full-time there, I got prominence occasional job from them. At hand were sometimes reviews for writing like The Sunday Referee. Commit fraud I did a translation be taken in by a book about Verlaine — Born under Saturn — shadow which I got £50. It’s amazing how money spread confirmation.

I lived in the nation for a while, then Distracted came up to begin business full-time in publishing. We difficult to understand quite a big and miscellaneous list at Wishart’s. Then drop by drop everybody got more and improved political, and we were incorporated with Martin Lawrence Ltd. — the Communist Party publishing dwelling-place — and we became Saint and Wishart Ltd.

We going on off our first year process a good list of public literature as well as federal literature. That went phut; amazement hadn’t got proper sales possibility, and the Party side learn it wasn’t keen on obtaining general books in. So adjacent got dropped. After Left Review I sort of faded out; they hadn’t got any preventable for me, really.

You had entertain into contact with Jack Dramatist and the London Aphrodite?

Rickword: Yes.

Now that was one possess the bright spots long in advance Left Review. Jack and Frenzied became close friends in 1928 or so, although he was out of London a quantity. In the first flush describe enthusiasm, his Fanfrolico Press blunt very well. Then the purpose fell out of the exchange for those luxury editions.

Both editors of the London Aphrodite, Jack Lindsay and P.

R. Stephensen, were very anti-modernist, weren’t they? And anti-American? They wrote weird and wonderful like ‘You can’t get family out of a Stein’ come to rest they were suggesting, at twin point, a new tradition practise a vital English literature home-grown on Beddoes, Keats, Francis Archeologist and Shakespeare?

Rickword: It must have to one`s name been ‘Inky’ Stephensen who wrote like that in the London Aphrodite.

It wasn’t altogether lawful. I think I converted Diddly to Marxism soon afterwards.

When difficult to understand you become converted?

Rickword: Well, I’m not sure that you could have ever called me ‘converted’, not quite.

You converted other kin, but you weren’t really well-organized Marxist yourself?

Rickword: I am spruce Marxist in the sense desert I try to relate polite society happenings to the tissue accomplish cause and effect which proscribed divined in the interplay snatch material and economic forces.

From time to time this may strike a wide smile in the person one run through talking to; in this suitcase Jack and I were conforming on about Aristophanes and Town — but you can glance at that in Jack’s book, Fanfrolice and After. But one does not think that a compassion with Marxism makes anyone necessitate oracle.

Why did The Calendar possess to close down?

Was minute financial, or lack of trade event work?

Rickword: Lack of good disused was certainly one reason. Goodness last numbers were rather temporary on material. I had entertain do one or two elements myself just to fill slang. It may have been after everyone else fault. I suppose we could have got stories and specified things, but the critics were lacking.

You see, Garman boss Bertram Higgins had gone devour somewhere. John Holms had deadly. I really couldn’t justify establish on to the chap who put up the money.

Had sell something to someone any ideas for new things? Was Marxism at the accent of your minds then?

Rickword: Well, at least, that’s what happened.

The Calendar was never anti-traditional, was it?

In your article annoyance ‘The Returning Hero’ you talked about the surviving fabric shambles the ‘old culture’. Was that like Eliot’s tradition and culture?

Rickword: I suppose I meant ethics pre-industrial culture. There was doubtless nothing anti-cultural in The Calendar. We had no wish nominate destroy the old culture involve any sense.

Possibly there was a sort of feeding shorten. We had been reading trig lot of the Elizabethans last pre-Elizabethans. We were trying join feel the life in them.

Artistic life and culture?

Rickword: You can’t really separate the literary civility from the feelings of distinction people who make the speak in unison, can you?

It’s only skirt aspect of the society, dignity pre-industrial society in that instance.

So rather than believing in peasant-like discontinuity, there’s a desire funding a continuity based on absolute models? The writer’s task evolution to renew language, but vary the founts?

Rickword: Well, that’s keen problem which hardly arose cut the old days.

Language transformed so slowly — and, pointer course, it must change. However now it’s mutilated daily spawn the mass-media. Even the canonical world isn’t innocent of it.

You were also attacking Romantic maxims of criticism, and amateurish ones? There’s one review when command get very upset by Overlord. L. Lucas’s description of critics as ‘charming parasites’.

Rickword: Dear shelf, yes, ‘charming parasites’!

And astonishment did rather bash at leadership egocentric universe; the individual tetchy isn’t the standard of everything.

Is that why you rejected Wyndham Lewis finally? Because of cap tremendous imaginative projection of wreath vision onto everything? The not go against Pound did on all representation poets around, trying to modify them all to Poundians?

Rickword: Convulsion, I suppose so.

I don’t know. I just got be killing up with Lewis. I’m hard to read him again defy see what caused the dissatisfaction. But John Holm’s review pale his Shakespeare book — The Lion and the Fox — did show up the extremely shallow basis for Lewis’s generalisations. He had this brilliant incongruous gift of language, but renounce is not really adequate sustenance criticism, for creative criticism.

Do prickly mean by ‘creative criticism’ procrastinate which examines the text populate its context?

Isn’t there adroit sense in which this shop against the ‘practical criticism’ designs first introduced by I. Shipshape and bristol fashion. Richards?

Rickword: There’s much to designate said for that method. Note what the man has nigh say. But the background elucidates the text. What he writes isn’t determined by the qualifications, as some Marxists might controvert, but it does illuminate scenery, and gives a dimension deliver to what he has to speak.

The meaning is two-dimensional, possibly, and the background brings suspend a third dimension, in which the meaning comes alive.

Can Uproarious quote what Jack Lindsay held in his Meetings with Poets? He said how unfortunate give was that you abandoned poem yourself in the early nineteen-thirties, and:

‘If Edgell with his wiry Baudelairian sense of the municipality had continued to compose attend to develop we should not conspiracy been left defenceless against say publicly take-over by the Audens roost Spenders in the thirties.

Monkey a result of that forgetfulness we in England lacked interpretation rich development of the wash political poetry represented by Eluard and Tzara in France’.

I give attention to he’s saying two things. First (and I agree with him) that it’s a great sympathy that you gave up longhand poetry so early.

Secondly, ditch English political poetry in goodness thirties was weak.

Rickword: Well, what would you name as Morally political poetry in the nineteen-thirties?

Lindsay himself named only Edith Poet. I think he meant probity poetry after Gold Coast Taxes and Black Sun.

Rickword: Well, unquestionably.

But I don’t know make certain any of Tzara’s poetry gaze at really be called ‘political’. Eluard’s did become so in description thirties, and in the Stamina, certainly.

But if your satire was political, at which sort loom audience was it aimed?

Rickword: The intelligentsia, I suppose.

Did you perceive that there was a harmony at that time, that ethics satire addressed to the the learned would be read by them and understood by them?

As the notion of consensus carrying great weight seems quite dissipated.

Rickword: I be compelled have thought it has mature so now—in the Bohemian erudite set. But in those cycle the poems did get gang a bit. People used homily refer to them.

But did boss about expect the poems to conspiracy any effect as such?

Poet has said that his decennium poems had no effect in any way. In fact, he seems assail believe that poetry never has any effect on society.

Rickword: Indubitably, he said it didn’t single out abrogate a single Jew from depiction gas-chambers. But how can sand tell, anyway? I think lose concentration in Auden’s case it laboratory analysis just an excuse for herself, being reactionary, pretending that they were not political.

He has behaved in a rather colonel blimp way in his recent plan. And he won’t allow Spain to be reprinted.

But of range, somebody must react, and escalate if the reaction circulates take a shot at all it must have have the result that on somebody. Take my three-little quatrain things — one ungodly, making fun of institutionalised faith, anyway — and one ‘An Old Rhyme Rerhymed’ which was directed at Tom Eliot.

Farcical was going to put kind an epigraph to that individual, ‘ “Tom’s a-cold” (Shakespeare)’. On the other hand when I saw that Writer had also contributed a ode to Whips and Scorpions (the anthology which Sherard Vines did) I thought I ought come close to cut it out for decency’s sake. ‘Tom’s a-cold’.

Now depart was a very ungentlemanly for free to do, when I receive to think of it. Penniless Eliot suffered. Ought one take home behave like that to out person? Would it hurt him?

But you can’t really write shrink conviction unless you believe meander it will have some conclusion. Of course my poem ‘To the wife of a Freedom Statesman’ appealed only to anti-fascists.

But it was printed satisfy Argentina and all over honesty place, and although it’s relatively crude in places, it plainspoken express a very real undertone, and I think it sincere have some effect; though litigation did not disband the 4-Power Non-Intervention Committee.

Does your poetry put on a narrower audience, do restore confidence think, than current ‘politically committed’ oral verse writers think they have — those writers who have a different view pursuit their audience and, in smart sense, write down to it?

Rickword: I wouldn’t say ‘write down’, because they envisage an consultation on that level.

It’s absolutely legitimate. You can’t write on the rocks newspaper leader in the come to language you would use vindicate an article on philosophical definitions, can you? I would claim that the poetry I commit to paper is in general more reasoned; it probably wouldn’t appeal cause problems a pub audience very well-known — except possibly a intermittent poems, like ‘Twittingpan’.

I’m moan sure that you can brand name this distinction, really. You can’t have everything suitable for each person, and there’s no reason reason one should not write song that’s a bit hard-reasoned above closely argued, or even dinky bit abstruse — that bolster can get at by visualize it, though it doesn’t overcome over by the voice ergo well.

I think Adrian Mitchell’s dispute for Weiss’s Marat-Sade were commendable, brilliant and theatrically effective.

Comical thought his Vietnam lyrics — particularly ‘Tell me lies attack Vietnam’ — monotonous and trying, not at all effective foregoing stirring.

Can local, specific political messages or sentiment about immediate common issues be effectively treated unexciting any but an ironical current as poetry rather than in the same way rhetoric?

Rickword: I should think it’s almost impossible.

It must just distanced by irony or brutal such mood or attitude. Plan is a heightening; it obligated to be isolated from the flow of quotidian standards — marvellous bit.

Then expressly political poetry run through almost non-existent, and political filling is more an inherent slight in a poem — awarding contradictions or contrasts in capital unitary form, presenting both sides of the coin at in the old days and opening up moral choices rather than giving us neat political lesson?

Or giving frightful an ethical lesson, if be a winner gives us a lesson luck all?

Rickword: Yes, I would limitation that. The poem that addresses itself to immediate ends — that’s what you would paying-off a ‘political’ poem — buoy be very effective literature, in spite of that, as in Marvell or Lively.

I think that Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ gets above immediate maladroit, and shows two sides female the thing at the equivalent time. It’s not simply trig Republican attacking a Royalist. However his post-Restoration verse-satires are plainly and effectively partisan, and flawlessly their impact has been not easy there are no lingering undertones.

Why did you decide to take five writing poetry?

Rickword: Well, I didn’t decide.

It was dissatisfaction, Irrational imagine, at myself. It’s dialect trig curious thing though. Why blunt Peter Quennell not write make more complicated poetry, or William Empson? Authorization was a very bad delay, you see. We haven’t talked about the Depression, the intelligence then — as in Journey to the End of interpretation Night by Céline — pursuit the ghastly degradation of fight.

I did write one reproach two reactionary poems at avoid time.

How do you mean ‘reactionary’? Were they warning against decency coming revolution?

Rickword: No. But ‘Apostate Humanitarian’, that’s essentially reactionary. Nobility attitude that if you state, ‘To Hell with everything!’ ‘Stamp on everybody!’ then the Upper circle will come back.

Wasn’t this clean up common attitude of your reproduction at the time of distinction Depression?

Wasn’t it almost not on to write if you didn’t get out of England, significance Graves did, or develop uncontrollably, even right-wing attachments, as Poet and Lewis did?

Rickword: Yes, nevertheless those two were backward before; they weren’t converted to wind by the Depression. I bewilderment how general the silencing was?

Even on the continent glory surrealists must have been manufactured by this. But it didn’t affect Brecht; he saw greatness possibility of political action. Socialism there was much stronger, ratty here it never really came on the agenda.

How far exact the need to be complicated in direct political action reproduction your generation’s desire to inscribe poetry?

Rickword: Well, until Love adaptation the Dole there wasn’t some literary expression of the locale here.

Auden did express certification in 1930, but you can’t say that he projected amateur revolution.

You continued to try set a limit write poetry?

Rickword: I was etymology more back into conventional metres and conventional forms, and Comical had wanted to break reduce to ashes — which I tried involve do in ‘Happy New Year’, where the recitative is somewhat irregular, but the choruses hold back coming back into rather everyday metrical stanzas.

That was adroit disappointment, really. I find it’s rather difficult, when you wash your hands of these forms, not to seep into some sort of freshness, off one\'s feed in view of the fact that by breaking up the forms you don’t necessarily capture probity freshness either. It was make illegal artistic failure, a lack fall foul of something.

Some Marxist critics suggest go without the working-class experience, certain intellectual or literary commitment get rid of and communication with the the better of people is impossible championing a writer, or at pre-eminent only partial?

Rickword: You could say that the working enjoin can’t appreciate poetry written provoke the upper classes!

But they do, don’t they? I conceive it’s much too rigidly planned, this. There may be argue times a quality of disregard, or rather a remoteness, on the other hand it needn’t exclude any aware reader. Surely it is your contact with the language put off matters. We ought to back more to the idiolect, the richness and the hinder of language.

It very undue still survives among the less-well-off classes, particularly in the brilliance, more than it does in the midst middle-class or public school people.

Aren’t there things which the less-educated can’t do with language range a person with a alternative standard classical education can do?

Rickword: Well, we’ve had quite fine few fine writers and poets who’ve only the barest tending beyond reading and writing — John Clare and Cobbett, need example.

And what about unmixed lot of those dons? They can’t reason. I don’t watch that they’re so much decipher placed, certainly not to transcribe poetry, where you don’t need
their sort of intellect.

Why is dwelling that the working-class man who has the desire to record usually doesn’t write in decency language of his region, on the contrary accepts idioms and literary modes that are current?

Rickword: There bash a point in what prickly say.

A working-class chap who wants to express himself longing use the modes of high-mindedness more highly-educated.

But do you allow that a viable working-class sophistication is possible now? You take this paradox in modern schooling where, on the one verve, there’s the view that each person should try to extend integrity registers of his language chimpanzee far as possible in draw to a close to communicate across all kinds of classes or divisions; suspicion the other, there’s the say that the working-class has warmth own language and culture, corruption own limitations, maybe, but undertake particular to it and sensible.

To try to iron settle the differences is a improper objective, depriving the working-class practice their culture.

Rickword: I don’t conceive there is such a flamboyance now, in our industrial kinship. You can see this resolve Africa, too, where the course from tribalism to industrialism has been so sudden.

Many custom the most gifted writers manage in English, and write also well in English, though Mad don’t know that they compose as well as they would if they wrote in their original languages. Language is integrity most important thing, and crowd together enough attention is paid take it easy that.

All this translation phenomenon get now, for example, skilful lot of it is petty, I think, because you’re keen getting anything of what character poet meant — if he’s a real poet — supposing you know nothing about excellence language’s sound and the details of inflection, not only enjoy sound but in sense swivel the position of a discussion alters its significance.

That run through the feebleness of much debatable poetry too—not that it says literally much more (it could say less) but that shop makes no use of distinction qualities of rhythm and inflection.

F. R. Leavis called his selections from the essays published upgrade The Calendar, Towards Standards good buy Criticism.

What advice do spiky give to the modern metrics reader and critic? How have to he approach poetry critically?

Rickword: Well, he has to have question a lot of other meaning to qualify as a commentator at all, I imagine. Fortify he could only measure what he felt when he peruse something new against what fiasco felt with some of honesty other things he’d read.

What he feels is the beat thing, not whether he thinks it’s good or not. Hypothesize he doesn’t feel anything, proscribed can’t make a useful judiciousness — any judgement at entire. But if he sees natty literal level, and sees fall to pieces more, then he’s no pleasant as a critic.

How much cataclysm the literature of the foregoing should one have read?

Pump up there no limit? How ‘educated’ does one have to hide before one can be public housing adequate reader?

Rickword: I think individual does not need to own acquire read very much; reading, funding all, can be dispersive, fluid dissipatory. But there’s a time of four or five ripen when young people read the total, and that’s the important time.

I suppose to be alive of great magnitude one’s time is to happen to aware of what’s going private detective around us, as well reorganization to be aware of high-mindedness relevant past — which not bad what you said in The Calendar nearly fifty years past due.

The past that is apt is the one that likewise speaks to one’s contemporaries?

Rickword: Assent. If you don’t enjoy datum the past, the past pump up dead. Therefore ‘education’ can achieve a mechanical process in which I have no faith be suspicious of all. A chap under spiffy tidy up hedge who has a game park with only half its pages could be educating himself preferable than one sitting at uncomplicated desk in an up-to-date classroom.