Books & Poetry

As a uniquely communicative critic, teacher, broadcaster and poet, Tom Paulin has made his most flamboyant marks as a champion of oral, regional and vernacular traditions. So his emphasis in this interpretative anthology on the time (dis)honoured (mis)understandings of English versification as a slavish echo of ancient Roman measures is paradoxical. Where he seeks to analyse, criticise or enrich our appreciation of poems composed with classical metrics in mind, such as those by Dryden, Tennyson and Auden, the approach makes a sort of sense. But his examinations of others whose authors were unconcerned with the rules of Latin scansion as often resemble a pedantic musicologist expounding the art of song to trees full of lyrebirds.

Fortunately, Paulin is a better poet-critic than his erudition knows. For example, he castigates the metrical disparities in the opening lines of D H Lawrence’s ‘Bare Fig-Trees’ until, in the fourth line, ‘Lawrence makes it all suddenly run right, interjecting an afterthought between dashes (“I say untarnished, but I mean opaque – ”)’. Paulin praises this as ‘a perfect iambic pentameter, which confesses to a mistake in the previous line’. I suspect DHL neither knew nor cared that he had penned iambics – but Paulin is spot-on when he compares Lawrence’s ‘aesthetic of spontaneity’ with ‘an artist in his studio having another stab at something he’s just painted’. The more so because as well as being a supreme artist in prose and free verse, Lawrence was an equally pure and unbridled poet in graphic line and paint.

Paulin’s exegesis of Craig Raine’s ‘Flying to Belfast’ notches up verbal relationships with poems by Hardy, Yeats, de la Mare, Eliot, MacNeice, Heaney, Wallace Stevens, et al: ‘Larkin is also present in the description of the fields.’ For Oxford Eng Lit tutors like Raine and Paulin, Larkin and the orthodox canon will always be potentially lurking. For many other poetry writers and readers, not necessarily. Paulin is on surer, more universal ground when trailing the ways Shakespeare vied with Marlowe, or how Bunyan’s ‘To be a pilgrim’ draws on Greenwood Tree songs and their native ideas of liberty and free speech.

This book will send anyone who cares about English wordsounds back and on to reconsiderations of the texts explored. Dr Johnson’s hypothesised ‘common reader, uncorrupted by literary prejudice’ may frequently disagree with or dislike Paulin’s extrapolations, but the dedicated ear, eye, heart and intellect at play make these essays an exhilarating read even when they feel perverse or over-academic.