Lives of the Poets by Michael Schmidt Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20 in UK
One thing readers need to know about Michael Schmidt is his address: Manchester. Since Manchester is neither Newcastle nor London, it stands at an oblique angle to one of those poetry cliches irremovably lodged in the minds of British journalists, the North-South divide.
In reality, there is much more of an entente cordiale between the compass points than the cliche suggests. The London poetry establishment is full of gritty Northerners made good (Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, Robin Robertson), and hoary old Northern radicals like Tony Harrison have long since been housetrained by Channel 4. As the editorial director of Carcanet Press and PN Review for a quarter of a century, Michael Schmidt represents a more unusual challenge than any of these to the hegemony of London and Oxbridge.
Born in Mexico of German extraction and educated in Harvard and Oxford, Schmidt is a true maverick, and only a maverick could have thought of writing a book as ambitious as Lives of the Poets, his 950-page Johnsonian summa poeticae for our times. Lives of the Poets begins with Heaney, Brodsky, Walcott and Murray in Dublin in 1988, before backtracking all the way to John Gower. It is a rare spectacle to see a contemporary poetry editor get excited about Hoccleve, Lydgate and Charles of Orleans, and the early chapters are highly instructive on the history of the language and the development of printing. Not that Schmidt is indiscriminately respectful of his ancients: the woolly old Anglo-Saxons are out, of interest only for having inspired Ezra Pound to a few unforgettable translations.
Another poetry cliche today is that political poetry must mean left-wing poetry. Untrue: the two avatars of Carcanet Press from its inception were Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson, both fiery pre-Thatcherite Tories. Schmidt's book too is undeniably conservative in its bearings. He is churchy in a very Anglican way (an early issue of PN Review attracted much attention with an attack on the Church of England for its neglect of the Authorised Version and the Book of Common Prayer), sympathetic to writers as diverse in their creeds as Milton and Les Murray, but impatient with the batty myth-making of Blake and Yeats. Schmidt is conservative not just because he still thinks the past matters, but also in the way he considers the great Modernists to lie at the heart of 20th-century poetry in English. It is almost a test of integrity for a critic today to see through Eliot's and Pound's disastrous politics but still find a place for them that does full justice to their achievement. Schmidt could never be accused of failing that test.
When it comes to dealing with a monster of the Stalinist left like Hugh MacDiarmid he is no less forthright but, again, fair. Though identifiably on the cultural Right, Schmidt has been consistently much more open to poetry from the Left than the Left (Sean O'Brien, for instance) has been towards Geoffrey Hill or Donald Davie. Schmidt himself does not talk of Left and Right, declaring a dislike for the very concept of political verse with its palpable designs on us. Much more to his liking is poetry that elicits "communion" rather than "solidarity". Another thing he doesn't have much time for is postmodernism, the shrink-to-fit uniform of most of the younger contributors to Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford's recent Penguin anthology. In Schmidt's book the ability to wield a rhyming couplet in your ironised tales of suburban England doesn't automatically earn you a comparison to Auden - not that he ranks Auden too highly anyway. His favourite contemporary poets include Allen Curnow, John Ashbery, Sujata Bhatt, Gwyneth Lewis, Patricia Beer and Michael Hofmann: eclectic indeed.
Lives of the Poets is not without surprises: Schmidt is more generous to Ted Hughes and Paul Muldoon than the tone of PN Review over the years might have led one to expect. And where the past is concerned, he's not in the business of taking the sign-posted route through the Eng. Lit. heritage park: his case for the 18th-century poet Charlotte Smith is a good reminder that literary history can be (and should be) just as passionate and urgent a business as writing about one's contemporaries.
Lives of the Poets is a marvellous testament to the urgency of Schmidt's passion for poetry. Oxford University Press found the task of running a poetry list too much to manage; Michael Schmidt does it and still finds time to write a book like this. It's quite an achievement.