Blake Morrison

Poetry written in dialect seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Tony Harrison has made extensive use of Northern idioms. Tom Paulin has been busy raiding Ulster (and, I suspect, Scottish) dictionaries. Craig Raine has produced a manifesto, ‘Babylonish Dialects’, on dialect’s behalf. And several of the books under review here – by Scots, Welshmen and British West Indians – cannot be read without the glossaries which they thoughtfully provide. Such a resurgence may have a socio-political motive: at a time when the Government is imposing ‘centrality’, dialect is a way of fighting local corners, a way for the regions to remind the capital that they are no longer speaking the same language. In other poets, dialect stems simply from a frustration with standard English, which – by keeping a civil tongue in its head – is felt not to get enough said. Whatever the motives, poetry in dialect appears to go against the modern grain: against Imagism, which was also imagisme, a café society for the exiled, a glut or polyglut of purified observations recognising no race or creed; against the Esperanto of Thirties poetry with its depiction of a world struggle between Communism and Fascism; against the Fifties Movement school, which was provincial but not regional, scornful of ‘Lallans mongers’ and ‘Welsh valley babblers’ alike. But the underlying assumptions that Modernism and Europeanism look (progressively) to the future, while dialect and nationalism are (retrogressively) infatuated with the past, don’t square up with 20th-century practice. Lawrence and Joyce held onto their roots even in exile, and there was always MacDiarmid, whose ‘Gairmscoile’ stands the Modernist argument on its head:’

The ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal ...

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’

I were just cleaning up streets our kid. Just cleaning up streets.

Peter Sutcliffe to his brother Carl: Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son by Gordon Burn

Ower...

‘Be careful not to spill it when it pops. He’d bloody crucify me if he caught us.’

We had taken months to get to this, our first kiss a meeting of stalagmite

and stalactite. The slow drip of courtship: her friend, June, interceding with letters,

the intimate struggle each Friday under the Plaza’s girder of light.

But here we were at last, drinking Pomagne in her...

They come each evening like virgins to a well: the girls queuing for the xerox-machine, braceleted and earmarked, shapely as pitchers in their stretch Levis or wraparound shirts, sylphs from the typing-pool bearing the forms of their masters, the chilly boardroom gods.

Johnson’s Imlac, urging that the poet neglect the ‘minuter discriminations’ of the tulip leaf in favour of ‘general properties’, has been unpopular for two hundred years, never more so than now, when it is believed that accumulated tiny detail – thinginess – vouches for a poem’ s authenticity. But Imlac also argues, apparently contradicting himself, that ‘to a poet nothing can be useless,’ that he ‘must know many languages and many sciences’ and through his command of botany, zoology, astronomy, politics, ethics and so on become a ‘legislator of mankind’. This is familiar enough for us to see that there is no contradiction: our own version is that the poet be learned but wear his learning lightly, that he know more than he lets on. We expect the poet to know in a general way that his physics are Einsteinian, so that (like Imlac crossing deserts and mountains for ‘images and resemblances’) he may draw if he wishes on a language of atoms, anti-matter and black holes – but not, like Empson in ‘Doctrinal Point’, to cite individual physicists such as Heviside and Eddington. We may ask for ‘scientific precision’ in poetry but we don’t want displays of scientific knowledge any more than Johnson did: these will earn the epithet ‘cerebral’. Poems of Science, an anthology of seven centuries of scientific verse (from Anon on the structure of the cosmos – ‘as appel the eorthe is round’ – to John Updike on cosmic gall), is therefore fighting a lost battle. The editors make out a brave case for the similarity of poet and scientist (‘the starting-point for both of their activities is the imagination’), dispute old distinctions between ‘fact’ and ‘feeling’, and think it important for poets to keep abreast of scientific advance. But then comes their selection. Donne is there, not for those compasses in ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, but to expound the new philosophy in ‘An Anatomy of the World’; Empson is there to haggle a doctrinal point rather than let it go. That’s science for you.–