Zigzagging through poetry

The recently published Lives of the Poets by Michael Schmidt is 939 pages long (including index) and weighs 3 lbs 8 ozs. The most staggering statistic, however, is that it took Schmidt just one year to write. Presumably he could have written more quickly had he given up one or other of his day jobs: poetry professor and director of a new creative-writing MA at Manchester's Metropolitan University; and boss of one of Britain's foremost poetry imprints, Carcanet Press - 60 titles published last year, every one edited by Schmidt. However, the real hubris of his tour de force, he says without a hint of irony, is not its size (it was only supposed to be half the length) but its scope - "the idea that anybody has the right, or knowledge, to take a subject from the beginning right up to the present day is unheard of."

Samuel Johnson attempted the same feat for his own century; a writer called Thomas Warton ("he's wonderful; I quote him a lot") died before he got to the end of the 15th century. Schmidt begins in 1450 and ends in 1998. Lives of the Poets is not primarily intended as a reference book ("Don't trust it: not being a scholar there are certain factual approximations in there"), but a history of English-language poetry told through the lives of its creators. It is a book to be devoured and kept by the bed. Both in person and on paper this literary pinball wizard flashes effortlessly back and forth across centuries, making unexpected and serendipitous connections at every turn, insight and anecdote symbiotically entwined. ("There are no straight lines," he writes, "only zig-zags.") High scores in the arcade, however, (five stars in the Daily Mail) mean little in academe where specialisation is all, he explains. "But someone who writes perhaps about Alexander Pope would find it almost impossible to write about John Gower. Somebody who writes about Chaucer would find it virtually impossible to write about Kipling. Though there is so much in common between Kipling and Chaucer. There is so much in common between Chaucer and Larkin really."

Michael Schmidt exudes enthusiasm at coronary levels, as unfeigned as his American accent. Born in Mexico of American parents, his first language was Spanish. Love of poetry - English-language poetry - started early. ("Maybe it was the excitement of metred, patterned language in my second language that got me going.") By the age of eight he was writing sonnets to red-letter days on the Mexican calendar. He gave up writing poetry 10 years ago - "or rather . . ." he hesitates, "it gave me up". "I think there are certain times in your life that you can write and certain things you can write about and I always felt I wrote best when things were breaking up. I wrote my best collection just as my marriage was coming apart. But then I divorced.

Some people need instability and I think a threatened stability was the ideal situation for me. And I always thought it was going to rectify itself and when it didn't I just stopped writing." Although his marriage may have failed, his love affair with publishing other people's poetry is still going strong. He set up Carcanet in his last year as an undergraduate at Oxford. Then, "being foreign, I was going to be thrown out of England but a man called C. B. Cox, editor of the Critical quarterly and professor of English at Manchester went to the Gulbenkian foundation and they funded a fellowship for me to move to Manchester with the press." That was in the late 1960s and he has been there ever since, publishing new poets, re-discoveries and literary novels. Two years ago, however, Carcanet's offices in Manchester's Corn Exchange were destroyed by an IRA bomb.

Hundreds of manuscripts were lost - all the records and, most importantly for Schmidt, a proportion of the library: Carcanet no longer has a complete run of its 1000-plus published books. The Corn Exchange is still boarded up, and the Carcanet offices are now across the river in Salford. In many ways Salford, the home of Coronation Street, would seem a more appropriate base, given Schmidt's contention that poetry is always subversive. The book begins with an account of a radio discussion he chaired in 1988 with four poets writing in English, none of whom actually was English: Derek Walcott (Trinidad), Joseph Brodsky (Russian), Les Murray (Australian) and Seamus Heaney. All have survived the force-feeding of an alien language culture: all then turned it around and made it the language of the people. Their experience holds up a mirror to the genesis of English poetry itself. "Latin was the language of religion and French was the language of power. English was just the language you spoke at home, the unprivileged language, the unlicensed language, the unauthorised language.

And that was the language that had to emerge for poetry to be written." It's a dynamic, he believes, that continues today. "There's great excitement in Arabic poetry and Polish poetry between the very rigid, formal tradition and the demotic, which comes in and leavens and changes it in various ways. That was the great strength of poets like Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert - that they mixed the very formal, strictly rhymed, metred forms with a colloquial diction which was completely out of keeping with tradition. And that's what Wordsworth does in the 18th century. It's basically the same kind of energies coming into Polish poetry into the 20th century." Changes in poetry, he says, are always a form of resistance. "Poetry itself becomes rigid, and then it resists itself, it creates forms of resistance within itself so it radicalises itself."

Michael Schmidt's seven-century view of English poetry is panoramic rather than comprehensive. His focus is not always the one you expect. Among contemporary Irish poets, for example, the emphasis is on Eavan Boland and Thomas Kinsella, rather than Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.

"It's an odd take on Ireland. It's actually quite an odd take on all English poetry, because if you approach it historically, which I have tried to do, certain poets that tend to be overlooked today are actually far better than you think, and other poets that maybe we are valuing too highly aren't really as original as they seem. One example is Craig Raine who struck with his Martian poetry, but this is something that had been done in the 1930s and early 1940s much, much better by Norman MaCraig, a wonderful Scottish poet.

"Because we forget our history we tend to value reinvention as much as we do invention. That is why when you look at things in the continuum you see that, say, Thomas Kinsella is amazingly original, whereas Heaney, wonderful as he is, is basically an extension of the romantic tradition and basically hasn't done that much with it."

The more knowledgeable readers are, Schmidt says, the more they will discriminate and demand more of their poets. Readership, he says, is such an important element. "I think once you have read the poetry of the past, it puts the smallness of the poets of the present such as Alan Brownjohn or Peter Porter, say, in perspective. Yes they're fine, but they're not good enough. The poets who are good enough are Larkin, or Sisson or Geoffrey Hill. "You suddenly see that there is, even within the contemporary scene, a very real hierarchy. And it's qualitative. These poets are taking bigger risks, these poets are investing more of themselves, these poets are saying what they mean in ways which extend expression.

"The past is what will inform our reading of the present, even if poets themselves are not looking into the past, we as readers gain energy as readers from the past in our present reading."