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The Scent That Captures That "1930s Moment"!
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XXXVIII
The only poetry exposed en masse today –apart from Pam
Ayres’ verbal palmistry and Shillingbury whimsy in Greeting
Cards –Roses are red/ Violets are blue and other nerveless
Violet verses– is that sponsored by corporations through
Advertising campaigns (or that which turns advertising
Copy into poetry, post-modern, naturally, commoditising
Austerity into apolitical conceptual art as text-speak),
Pop-ups on ipads and laptops, engorged with glamorising
Glossolalia, designer doggerel, pottage of rugged individualism,
Temptation-spiel… Christopher Caudwell dryly noted all of this,
At length, way back in 1937, in his Illusion and Reality:
His essential thesis being all ‘modern’ verse was inescapably
‘Capitalist poetry’ –or at the very least ‘bourgeois’, and had
Been ever since the Elizabethan Age, or… skip a page… More
Noticeably since the counterfeit Commonwealth concluding
The victorious Parliamentarian campaign, that outfoxing
Civil War –nowadays often called, quixotically, the ‘English
Revolution’, as if we’d ever go through with such a thing!–
And Cromwell’s regicide, which, far from heralding a New
Jerusalem for the Meek and Poor, and an end to the twin-
Tyrannies of property and poverty, did no such things,
Simply consolidated the Puritan Pumpking as ‘Lord Protector’
Ipso facto Monarch in all but name and particular trimming
Of laced collars (and figurehead of a Dynasty of crop-haired,
Crowned princes, but for the failure of his ineffectual son,
Richard, old ‘Tumbledown Dick’, to lift up the turnip-sceptre
Of Norfolk kingship), and summoned in Mercantilism,
Empire-building, sails harnessing the trade winds; and, by
The Enlightenment, the amplification to Capitalism,
The Calvinistic ‘Profit Motive’, Thrift and material
Abstinence through saving and accumulating coined symbols
Of moral worth, the mint of antinomianism, transacting
Material virtue for ‘spiritual’ interest, insurance schemes
For the soul sired in thorny hair-shirts of pocket-stitched
Puritans who put much stock by Capital, a Christian-karmic
Stockpile which should somehow serve as a passport to Salvation;
A mysticality of artifice (almost echoing those ancient
Pharaohs’ metaphysical protocol of entombing themselves
In pyramids surrounded by their worldly goods and riches,
As if somehow these things would translate with their spirits
Into an afterlife for furnishing –gold baubles, trinkets to turn
Into ghost-objects, celestial equivalents, discarnate accoutrements
Taking shapes in shadow-form from their earthly templates)...
And then the Industrial Revolution rooted itself into
The soil of the common psyche, so a new sprawling patchwork
Of clay-brick hedges sprang up and spiralled centrifugally
Into a Rationalist labyrinth swallowing up all once hoped
To be held in common –contrapuntal to all of this, clearances
And enclosures of those evicted by the land-grabs, resettled
Into tenements and slum districts of slate and stone carbuncles
Clustered round remorseless growths of poison-spewing blowholes,
Chimney-spouts, smokestack collosi sprouting up implacably,
Steeples of waste gathering round grinding mills, and foghorns
Blowing like landlocked lighthouses, factories spuming out
Putrifying gasses like washed-up whale carcasses; pitheads
Stacking high, spinning like upturned prams discarded in ditches…
XXXIX
Caudwell believed mostly all ‘modern’ poetry (his ‘modern’
Period pitching from the Seventeenth Century to the time in
Which he was writing, the third decade of the Twentieth),
Was capitalist agitprop, mostly without knowing it, and often
In spite of consciously attempting to oppose such a system,
Yet employing tropes and metaphors useful for propaganda
Purposes of materialists; providing rhythmic ammunition
For industrialists; all blunderbuss and thunder for Napoleonic
Pyrrhic victory and Balaclava blunder (for every flag-unfurling
Trafalgar or saber-rattling Waterloo, there was a Tolpuddle
Transportation, and a banner-tattered Peterloo!)… Such
Was Christopher Caudwell’s rudimentary polemical claim,
Dashed off in a matter of months before setting forth to help
Defend a pelted Republic, where patters of automatic rain
Cut up his volunteering into death’s conscription, in Spain,
As his final dialectic was spliced into strips of paper grain…
Meanwhile, Wystan Hugh Auden, by thirty, in 1937,
Already a poet sire of his neurotic generation, survived
His brief spell of ambulancing on behalf of the Spanish
Republic, and turning his poetry to propaganda purposes
Of encouraging wider European opposition to the Francoists,
And he would live to write, at great length, and over many
Vistas and varied landscapes, from Spain’s sun-punished
Pastures to Iceland’s gabbro crags to Manhattan’s Giant’s
Causeway of skyscrapers, his pen would campaign across
The crumpled map of poetry and metaphorical politics…