Poetic explosions blow away the mothballs

James Fenton is nothing if not frank

James Fenton is nothing if not frank. "We despise the deformed, uncandid, class-consciousness of our domestic criticism," he wrote in his last poetry collection, Out of Danger. Remarks on the US ("Madame Vendler's chamber of horrors") and France ("either shut up or say something worth saying") in the same collection showed he wasn't too impressed with the state of criticism anywhere else either. His election to the Oxford professorship of poetry in 1995 raised the possibility of pyrotechnics in the cloisters, such as had not been seen since Robert Graves's supremely dotty gracing of the role in the 1950s. If not quite pyrotechnical, the first lecture of The Strength of Poetry does at least begin with a bang. `A Lesson from Michelangelo', describes the young Giambologna bringing a model to the old Florentine artist for his opinion. In silent fury, Michelangelo knocks it to bits. Don't expect much from your artistic elders and contemporaries, runs the moral, which Fenton drives home with tales of Wordsworth's snide, mean-spirited treatment of Coleridge and Keats. A little disillusionment may not be such a bad thing though: the essay ends with Giambologna inspired to new and greater things by his friend's consoling verdict on Michelangelo: "He's a complete tosser."

The combative imagery continues in, `Goodbye to All That?', a lecture on the poetry of empire, with a striking couplet formerly ascribed to Marvell:

`His shatter'd head the fearless duke distains And gave the last first proof that he had brains'

The head belongs to the Earl of Cork's son, and has been blown off by a Dutch cannonball. The sheer gutsy shamelessness of 17th-century imperial verse like Dryden's, `Annus Mirabilis', both fascinates and appalls Fenton. Turning to modern examples, he judges Frost's, `The Gift Outright' (recited at John F. Kennedy's inauguration) "egregious rubbish", and can scarcely believe the smug conceit of Eliot's, `To the Indians Who Died in Africa'. As for that other empire-smitten patriot, Philip Larkin, Fenton makes the novel suggestion that, far from being too imperialist, he wasn't imperialist enough; that in fact, he may have been turned down for work at Bletchley as a security risk because of his strongly pro-German father. The harrumphing old codger of, `Going, Going', came later, its strangely confused tone a product of Larkin's failure to work out what lay beneath this youthful disengagement. How poets change over the years is also the subject of, `Becoming Marianne Moore', which bemoans the late Moore's ruinous revisions of her early work. Fenton suggests that the Moore canon be available in both versions, as has happened with that other arch-reviser and poetic lodestar of Fenton's, W. H. Auden.

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Auden reappears as the subject of the final three lectures, which deal with his reading of Shakespeare's sonnets, `Blake Auden' versus `James Auden', and finally Auden on rejection and humiliation as he experienced them in England, after his perceived desertion of the country during the war. The second of these sees Fenton go into Michelangeloesque demolition mode, when confronted by Orwell's attack on Auden as a hybrid of "the gangster and the pansy". While completely disagreeing with Orwell's attack, Auden's long retreat from his early, activist manner did date from around the same time.

The words "activist" and "Oxford professor of poetry" may sit together more than a little incongruously, but as the lively and engaging essays of The Strength of Poetry show, Fenton isn't ready for academic mothballing just yet. Which being so, leaves only one question: isn't a new book of poems long overdue?

David Wheatley's poetry collection Misery Hill was recently published by Gallery Press