Commonplace 157 George & The Genius of The Crowd. PART ONE
Poetry was George's first love; he considered it his métier. He thought only a select few could ever really appreciate it. There used to be a school of thought that said real writers should be poets first and authors second as being a poet of good standing was well above being a writer of similar acclaim. But it's a hard act to pull off - very few good writers are also good poets. One thinks of the Divine Oscar Wilde succeeding and George Orwell failing. However, the latter made up for it with his journalism.
The working class, George said, were incapable of appreciating poetry, despite the evidence right under his nose that the working people enjoyed all manner of verse and poetry in an oral tradition that went back to before Beowulf click, continued through the folk song tradition of the early medieval to the popular works of the 18th century to the tunes of the music hall. Poetry, as with the visual Arts, is awash with over-educated people telling you it is for a select few, and that it contains arcane truths unfathomable to the ordinary person. If it does, then it has failed.
Art, if it does nothing else, attempts to raise the human animal above the mundane if only for the few seconds of sentience experienced in the face of the Artwork. Music, poetry and the visual Arts have an immediate and unconscious effect on the audience - reason and rationalisation follow an initial hit of sensation, or sometimes, emotion - even if the feeling evoked is repugnance. Sometimes, it is to be remembered, repugnance is what the Artist wants us to feel. (One thinks of the Austrian Hermann Nitsch's 'Aktionen' events, though I am probably projecting here as I find his work repugnant!)
Poetry, in George's day, was considered a higher form of expression, but one that operated within fairly strict confines. We are speaking of Pre-Modernism days, which Algernon Swinburne in England, and the likes of France's Baudelaire and the USA's Walt Whitman were doing their best to dismantle. Consider this by Baudelaire:
If rape and poison, dagger and fire,
Have still not embroidered their pleasant designs
On the banal canvas of our pitiable destinies,
It's because our souls, alas, are not bold enough!
It was written in 1857, the year George was born. Consider this, written by George in 1876:
As when an autumn breeze in hurrying flight
Catching a ripe seed from a garden rose
Over a meadow wafts it, and then throws
'Mid the rank herbage, where 'tis hid from sight,
Till the kind spring uprears it, the delight
And beauty of the wild spot where it grows;
This is from George's 'Perdita', as found in the ultra slim volume 'Six Sonnets on Shakespearean Heroines'. George can only perform within the confines of the sonnet form, and would have rationalised that the exercise was one that was harder than any other form of composition. But he lacked real imagination and descriptive powers, unless he was using these to give a flavour of some real event. Some of George's best writing is to be found in his non-fiction; some of his worst, in his poetry. Words like herbage, leafage and uprears abound with unselfconscious abandon throughout George's canon - even in his day these would be taken as archaic and pedantic terms.
Despite living in what Baudelaire proved were interesting times for poetry, George never came on as a trailblazer. In spite of a brief flirtation with bohemian tropes of mild debauchery and petty crime, he was essentially a deeply conservative mind with a devotion to tradition, and there is precious little evidence of any poetry in his soul. Tradition was what George wanted to excel at - to be recognised as being a soulmate to his own select club of revered poets - Tennyson, Dante, Goethe, Heine, Keats, Shakespeare were his idols. But being a wordsmith of prodigious talent is not enough; you have to deliver something unique, fresh and innovative. When he won prizes at Owens, it was for the sort of cliched doggerel he found easy to toss off: homages to the point of being pastiche.
Swinburne, all bells and whistles, was almost the opposite of George. Algie S liked to boast he just took up a pen and it all poured out, and the length of some of his works supports this. There are two psychological conditions that help poetry form: logorrhoea, often an element of hypomania or bipolar disorder, where excessive wordiness dominates click. And flight of ideas where thoughts ricochet and bounce round in reaction seemingly without design or structure. Swinburne is supposed to have been somewhat psychotic, with bouts of mania and depression - can we assume he was bipolar? The Beat Poets used amphetamines to access torrents of words and flights of ideas, and the Dadaists cut up chunks of text and rearranged them to make a different syntax. George liked to refer back to the Greeks for a structure and for themes, and to any historic precedent - his distrust of the modern is well-documented. It limited, more than supported, his voice.
Despite winning a prize for his poem 'Ravenna' when he was at Owens College, George never really evolved his own style, being wedded so firmly as he was to the Greeks and to his own heroes of verse. Why? To a great extent, George was an autodidact who had to continually prove he was just as learned as the next cove who was a university graduate and in possession of a degree certificate proving educational worth. The accepted trajectory and therefore, the established route to knowledge (such as Oxford or Cambridge) was in George's mind, cut off from him because of his criminal past, more than his lack of finances, and so it became all the more important for him to have some visible sign of learnedness - which he took to be a sign of a superior nature. This stark difference between himself and those successful writers he looked down on who were university graduates would have been an humiliation hard for him to endure. George had to constantly reinforce his own ego and prove he was cultured, sophisticated, well-read, intellectually capable and middle class. (Those with real middle class credentials never break a sweat about which class they belong to.) Besides, culture has always welcomed the talented amateur or untutored 'natural' - the Outsider. One example is the way the group of intellectuals made up of Thomas Wainewright (see Commonplace 95), Charles Lamb and the artist Fuseli and their appreciation of and socialisation with the labouring class poet, John Clare, he of the much-loved poem, written when he was in Northampton Asylum, which we know as 'I am' click.
George would probably see Clare's social class not as being one of a member of the Demos crowd but as one of those rare beings born into the wrong social grouping, have innate 'aristocratic' genes. William Hazlitt (1778-1830) click, friend of John Keats, who entered into many contentious and sometimes semi-friendly public debates with Thomas Wainewright's alter ego Janus Weathercock, wrote this, in March, 1818:
What is the People?
And who are you that ask the question? One of the people. And yet you would be something! For what is the People? Millions of men, like you, with hearts beating in their bosoms, with thoughts stirring in their minds, with the blood circulating in their veins, with wants and appetites, and passions and anxious cares, and busy purposes and affections for others and a respect for themselves, and a desire for happiness, and a right to freedom, and a will to be free.
Being born in Wakefield, George is one of that select group of Yorkshire Poets made up of many but represented by: Andrew Marvell, Emily Bronte, Ted Hughes, and Simon Armitage. George's father, Thomas, was also a poet, and published a small collection - read all about it here click. Of them all, Marvell is the genius. This:
Gosh! How could any red-blooded wench resist?
Poetry was George's first love; he considered it his métier. He thought only a select few could ever really appreciate it. There used to be a school of thought that said real writers should be poets first and authors second as being a poet of good standing was well above being a writer of similar acclaim. But it's a hard act to pull off - very few good writers are also good poets. One thinks of the Divine Oscar Wilde succeeding and George Orwell failing. However, the latter made up for it with his journalism.
 |
| from the video Sleeper by Mark Wallinger 2004 |
Art, if it does nothing else, attempts to raise the human animal above the mundane if only for the few seconds of sentience experienced in the face of the Artwork. Music, poetry and the visual Arts have an immediate and unconscious effect on the audience - reason and rationalisation follow an initial hit of sensation, or sometimes, emotion - even if the feeling evoked is repugnance. Sometimes, it is to be remembered, repugnance is what the Artist wants us to feel. (One thinks of the Austrian Hermann Nitsch's 'Aktionen' events, though I am probably projecting here as I find his work repugnant!)
Poetry, in George's day, was considered a higher form of expression, but one that operated within fairly strict confines. We are speaking of Pre-Modernism days, which Algernon Swinburne in England, and the likes of France's Baudelaire and the USA's Walt Whitman were doing their best to dismantle. Consider this by Baudelaire:
If rape and poison, dagger and fire,
Have still not embroidered their pleasant designs
On the banal canvas of our pitiable destinies,
It's because our souls, alas, are not bold enough!
It was written in 1857, the year George was born. Consider this, written by George in 1876:
As when an autumn breeze in hurrying flight
Catching a ripe seed from a garden rose
Over a meadow wafts it, and then throws
'Mid the rank herbage, where 'tis hid from sight,
Till the kind spring uprears it, the delight
And beauty of the wild spot where it grows;
This is from George's 'Perdita', as found in the ultra slim volume 'Six Sonnets on Shakespearean Heroines'. George can only perform within the confines of the sonnet form, and would have rationalised that the exercise was one that was harder than any other form of composition. But he lacked real imagination and descriptive powers, unless he was using these to give a flavour of some real event. Some of George's best writing is to be found in his non-fiction; some of his worst, in his poetry. Words like herbage, leafage and uprears abound with unselfconscious abandon throughout George's canon - even in his day these would be taken as archaic and pedantic terms.
 |
| Ghost House by Rachel Whiteread 1993 |
 |
| Detail from The Annunciation by Fra Angelico c1426 OMG - 1426!!! |
 |
| from Half a Man by Mike Kelley c 1991 |
Despite winning a prize for his poem 'Ravenna' when he was at Owens College, George never really evolved his own style, being wedded so firmly as he was to the Greeks and to his own heroes of verse. Why? To a great extent, George was an autodidact who had to continually prove he was just as learned as the next cove who was a university graduate and in possession of a degree certificate proving educational worth. The accepted trajectory and therefore, the established route to knowledge (such as Oxford or Cambridge) was in George's mind, cut off from him because of his criminal past, more than his lack of finances, and so it became all the more important for him to have some visible sign of learnedness - which he took to be a sign of a superior nature. This stark difference between himself and those successful writers he looked down on who were university graduates would have been an humiliation hard for him to endure. George had to constantly reinforce his own ego and prove he was cultured, sophisticated, well-read, intellectually capable and middle class. (Those with real middle class credentials never break a sweat about which class they belong to.) Besides, culture has always welcomed the talented amateur or untutored 'natural' - the Outsider. One example is the way the group of intellectuals made up of Thomas Wainewright (see Commonplace 95), Charles Lamb and the artist Fuseli and their appreciation of and socialisation with the labouring class poet, John Clare, he of the much-loved poem, written when he was in Northampton Asylum, which we know as 'I am' click.
 |
| The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Edouard Fournier 1889 |
What is the People?
And who are you that ask the question? One of the people. And yet you would be something! For what is the People? Millions of men, like you, with hearts beating in their bosoms, with thoughts stirring in their minds, with the blood circulating in their veins, with wants and appetites, and passions and anxious cares, and busy purposes and affections for others and a respect for themselves, and a desire for happiness, and a right to freedom, and a will to be free.
Being born in Wakefield, George is one of that select group of Yorkshire Poets made up of many but represented by: Andrew Marvell, Emily Bronte, Ted Hughes, and Simon Armitage. George's father, Thomas, was also a poet, and published a small collection - read all about it here click. Of them all, Marvell is the genius. This:
To His Coy Mistress
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
A hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
A hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Gosh! How could any red-blooded wench resist?
JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO EXPLORE A POET GEORGE WOULD UNDERSTAND: CHARLES BUKOWSKI.
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