Alan Bennett - Six Poets

Rating: 5/5

Review: 
A joy

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and will continue to enjoy it for many years, I think.  I remember the original Channel 4 series in 1990 with great affection, and I am delighted that this book (effectively a transcript) is available again.

This is classic Bennett – witty, extremely knowledgeable and insightful and always direct, clear and readable.  This is billed as an "anthology" , but is really Bennet's reflections on and analysis of the work and a little of the life of these six poets, illustrated with selections from their verse.  It's a wonderfully illuminating and enjoyable read.

To give an idea of Bennett's style here, he begins his essay on Auden with "Much of Auden, even most of Auden…I do not understand."  I know I'm in good hands when I read things like that – and he goes on to quote Isherwood's explanation of the obscurity of some of Auden's writing: that Auden used to save up favourite lines and then group them together "entirely regardless of grammar or sense."  But as well as this quite genuine expression of intellectual humility, in the same essay he quotes Kierkegaard, this time to illustrate two aspect of Auden's life: "There are two ways: one is to suffer; the other is to become a professor of the fact that another suffers."  He also reports that Auden and his partner lived in some squalor and after a rather stomach-churning anecdote remarks, "One wonders where did one wash one's hands after washing one's hands."   

This mixture of clarity, honesty, insight, intellectual brilliance and real wit pervades the entire book and makes it a huge pleasure.  He also selects the poems very well, from the very well-known like Housman's "Into my heart an air that kills" to the (to me) obscure, surprising and wonderful discoveries like Hardy's At The Draper's.  He uses them to illustrate his points very well and to give a very good picture of the breadth and development of each poet's work. 

Bennett celebrates both the direct and the obscure and writes illuminatingly on both.  His love of poetry as a form and of its capabilities shines through, summed up in this remark on Betjeman and Larkin: "Both…wrote straightforward poetry that didn't need much exposition.  But it's also the case that poetry, though we don't learn it by heart nowadays, and though there is no poetic equivalent of the Booker Prize, it still has magic and seems magical."  Well, quite – and if you have any interest at all in poetry or if you just like to read great critical writing, don't hesitate.  This is a joy from start to finish and very warmly recommended.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)