We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr
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4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate 2015
Text © Andrew Marr 2015
Cover image © ‘Willow Bough’ wallpaper design, 1887, Morris, William (1834–96)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images
Andrew Marr asserts his moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008130893
Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780008130916
Version: 2016-07-18
Contents
5 Beyond the Nymphs and Swains: Renaissance Realities
6 Nothing Left But Laughter? Britain’s Mullahs Confront the Problem of Pleasure
7 The Restoration of What? Satire, Science and Cynicism, as Political Britain is Born
8 The Age of Reason. And Slavery, and Filth, and So On
12 Plush, Mush and a Handful of Titans
13 The Poets of More Than One War
14 How Modern Were the Modernists?
15 Lefties and Righties: Outrage and Laughter in Britain Between the Wars
16 Revolt Against the Metropolis: Britain in the 1940s and 50s
19 Celts, Britons and Their Friends: Modern British Poetry Furth of England
20 Here Comes Everybody: The British and Poetry Now
For Emily, a poetry reader
I would also like to thank Gwyneth Williams, Controller of Radio 4, who believed in this project; and James Cook, who led the ‘takeover’ of the channel for National Poetry Day, 8 October 2015
Beyond the village, there’s some marshy ground. There, on a warm evening, a horny, lonely man is making rhythmic noises and shuffling his feet. Inside his head there’s a kind of music, and what he’s doing is trying to fit words to it, words that express his feelings for a woman – too good for him – living in the village.
A few centuries later there’s another man, who feels he has let down God and is facing eternal hellfire. Yet he’s a kindly man, of gentle disposition, and somehow feels that God can’t be as pitiless as the Church elders suggest. So, with a goose quill and a sheaf of rough paper, he is dipping into ink and writing down a kind of private, rather bouncy, prayer. He too is humming.
Then there is the woman in a foul dungeon, throbbing with pain from her torture, dictating to a shabby priest her defiant poem against the authorities.
There will be many more women – rich, in chambers coloured with stained glass, protected against the cold by animal skins; and poor, living in twentieth-century London, struggling with wailing children and an absent man. And many, many more men, too – Irish mystics, Scottish farmers, West Country priests, a Warwickshire actor – all doing the same thing, setting the words to rhythm, tightening them together like the ropes on a fast-moving yacht, trying to build a compact, thrumming little engine of meaning out of the sprawling