England made me

I can picture my Welsh ancestors turning in their stony graves at the sight of that headline! But I think my English ancestors would like it. More precisely, in any case, is this: English made me. And because English's poetry is so intimately tied up with what English is, I can even say that English poetry made me.

Here's Bryan Appleyard, celebrating English poetry in The Liberal:

"If Hamlet can be seen as one big poem, then so, in a sense, can all of English poetry. It is a conversation with itself. Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ – indeed, perhaps the whole of his work – is another way of articulating the spirit of Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘The World is Too Much With Us’. Robert Browning’s dramatic meditations are refined and internalised by Ezra Pound; the Gothic arches of ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ becoming the broken psychic concrete of the Cantos. John Clare’s open-eyed, innocent, wondering, exact gaze is also that of Ashbery.* And – slightly quirky one this – Clare’s line “I am the self consumer of my woes” could, to my ears and mind, prefigure Bob Dylan.

Eliot understood this better than anybody. ‘The Waste Land’ opens with a line – 'April is the cruellest month' – that sardonically inverts the mood of the first line of ‘The Canterbury Tales’ ('Whan that Aprille with his shoores soote'), as if to remark that all poetry is one, and that in the end is the beginning. Less explicitly, Auden had only to set pen to paper for the whole history of English poetry to come flooding onto the page in his infinity of rhythms and nuances. His great but neglected short poem ‘Like a Vocation’ expresses this eerie feeling of looking around to see where the voices are coming from:

But somewhere always, nowhere particularly unusual,
Almost anywhere in the landscape of water and houses,

The voices are, of course, those which Peter Ackroyd has called English Music."

There is a Zeitgeist at work, here - the current national self-examination, which seems to be cropping up everywhere. People are asking, "what is Englishness?" Often it's a quotidian, multicultural Englishness, and sometimes it's a divisive not-Scots-or-Irish-or-Welsh Englishness. But the Englishness that includes Blake, and Robin Hood, and Wat Tyler, and John Clare (see above), and the greengrocer who got in trouble for insisting on selling his carrots by the pound, is my favourite one. It's the Englishness of a thousand years of English poetry.

Appleyard again:

"Hamlet is a weird drama made magnificent by a torrent of peerless poetry, and I have always thought of it as a long poem whose cosmic structure seems to pivot on the words 'We defy augury'. Shakespeare is the greatest playwright on earth, but he is heaven’s poet. And the list of his poet-compatriots – Chaucer, Browning, Dryden, Wordsworth, Clare, Donne, Auden, Tennyson, Keats, Pope, Herbert, etc. etc. – closes the case. We are a nation defined by and consisting of poets. To deny this is to deny England."

* I love this remark.