Sebastian Faulks reviews “A Little History of Poetry” by John Carey (Yale £14.99 pp 302) (from Sunday Times Culture supplement, 15 March 2020)

Last summer I tried to proselytise two people who said they couldn't see the point of poetry. l read them extracts from Tennyson’s Ulysses, Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach and Charles Causley’s Eden Rock, finishing with Donal Og, a Gaelic ballad that goes like an arrow to the synapses where the currents of heart and tear duct meet. They sat there stony-faced. It was like watching two people for whom both Bach’s St Matthew Passion and the Beatles’ Penny Lane are just noise. Poetry functions in a part of the brain we may be losing — an area connected to our past, where remembered speech rhythms helped to develop consciousness in preliterate societies. It is therefore possible that an inability to appreciate poetry is not a failing of taste or education, but an evolutionary phenomenon, like a lack of wisdom teeth. Another problem for poetry is the way it is, or at least used to be, taught. We children of the Sixties, the derided baby-boomers, were given collections called Poetry for Pleasure or similar, which began with Alfred Noyes, “Come down to Kew in lilac time”, followed by the most bathetic second line in all literature: “(it isn’t far from London!)” It was hard to know which made you want to vomit more, the bracket or the exclamation mark. It has been claimed that today’s undergraduates are not expected to read whole books, let alone long poems that deal with experiences alien to their own. John Carey’s hectic, reader-friendly introduction to poetry gloriously ignores these problems.  lt is redolent of a time when grammar school sixth formers studied Milton in class and the Romantics on reading camps in the summer holidays. Its assumptions are unencumbered by critical theory or identity politics. It believes that the work of poetry is to open up to its readers an emotional variety and grandeur far beyond the limits imposed by the trifling boundaries of their own selves; that poetry’s aim is not to confine or confirm, but to transcend. Typical of Carey’s approach are superb short essays on Donne and Yeats, which show how individual and gifted they were, how very much of their respective times, yet how it was, paradoxically, the fierce pursuit of their idiosyncrasies that allowed them to strike universal chords. Even if you think you know everything about the household names, Professor Carey has read them more recently. I found myself searching for an unfamiliar Shakespeare sonnet and intend to follow his advice on Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale: “Treat yourself, and read it again.” As readers of this newspaper (Sunday Times) will know, Carey combines high scholarship with a disdain for elitism. In his memoir The Unexpected Professor he recounted his dislike of the venerated Don Quixote — “boring and hateful”. In this new book, Dante is too interested in torture and sadism for his, or our, good; Petrarch is turgid;  Wordsworth’s best poems ' cannot bear comparison to those of Coleridge. Disagreeing with the author is part of the process: it may be that Kubla Khan is the greatest poem in English, but if it is greater than Tintern Abbey, it is, I would suggest, by a margin that even VAR would struggle to establish. If there is a hint of donnish table talk here, there is also considerable research, particularly into the work of female poets who have not had their due. Charlotte Mew and Christina Rossetti are upwardly revalued; Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop are preferred to the lofty and obscurantist Robert Lowell. Some 18th-century female poets are recognised for almost the first time outside academe. The pace is furious. Hymns, ballads, sagas, poems in Chinese, Japanese, German (big shout for Rilke) and Italian are flattened like ducks in a shooting gallery; a hundred years of history is often summarised in two sentences. Sometimes the price exacted by the publisher's word limit is too high; Thom Gunn surely needed more than one short paragraph. However, the critical edge remains unblunted and the quotations well chosen, making you long for more. This book should send its readers running to their local independent bookshop, or at least to YouTube to hear Tennyson speak his verse, recorded onto a wax cylinder. Try reading aloud John Clare’s I Am! or Henry Vaughan’s They Are All Gone into the World of Light without choking. You can? Perhaps your genome has lost its vestigial link to a poetic past. There may be another reason, however. I’m not sure poetry lovers were born ready to feel the mournful logic of Philip Larkin or the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins resonate deep within. Some of the taste was acquired by reading and by diligence; “sheer plod”, after all, “makes plough down sillion shine”. And does TS Eliot's phrase “the vacant interstellar spaces” in East Coker resonate with a fraction more power because it is harmonising in your unconscious with Milton’s line from Samson Agonistes describing the hero’s blindness as being like the moon “hid in her vacant interlunar cave”? And so this fizzing, exhilarating book is given weight by a melancholy subtext: the fear that its readership may not be there. From where l sit, the most compelling evidence for the existence of the poetic hunger on whose existence this book is predicated is its melancholy, long withdrawing roar. I hope l’m wrong. As a lifelong Oxford professor as well as a much-read newspaper critic, John Carey must know his audience. And if there are enough enthusiasts to make this book the bestseller it deserves to be, then we need not go gentle into that good night, but can all breathe easy into our face masks as we self-isolate to the soundtrack of a George Herbert podcast.

Short excerpt:

THE FIRST POEM

Nearly 4,000 years ago in western Asia, the Epic of Gilgamesh was etched into clay tablets with bits of reed. It's the oldest known surviving literary work, and one that we think of as poetry, although we know nothing of its author(s) or how it was originally perceived. It pioneered what would become two of poetry’s perennial subjects, love and death, and uses mythological motifs that later, through Homer, became an essential part of western poetry's imaginative universe.