THE FABER BOOK OF POLITICAL VERSE
Tom Paulin
London: Faber
1986
What is political verse? What are, or should be, its themes and inspiration? Peace, war, government, authority, democracy, international relations? The nature of man in society? Any of these, and many more if the poet can command sufficient poetic sensibility. International relations may sound like an intractable topic, but consider what Milton did in his sonnet, On the late Massacre in Piedmont (1655) dealing with the persecution of the Protestant Waldenses by the Roman Catholic Duke of Savoy.
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered
saints whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine
mountains cold….
Forget not, in thy book record
their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their
ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese
that rolled
Mother with infant down the
rocks.
Has any poet commented as well on the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, which rent European opinion, or on Vietnam?
These thoughts and questions are prompted by a stimulating though idiosyncratic new anthology of political verse (rightly not described as political poetry), The Faber Book of Political Verse, edited by the poet and translator, Tom Paulin. Described by one distinguished critic as “miscellany of rhyme with little reason,” the collection demands critical reading by its very eccentricity, because it is far from being the authoritative canon Paulin would like it to be considered.
Paulin fails to define political verse and draws very shaky parameters. The lowest poetic point reached in his collection is the doggerel on Gunpowder Plot Day, November 5, 1605 when Guy Fawkes tries to blow up the Houses of parliament in London.
Please to remember
The Fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and Plot:
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
The anthology's highest poetic point is probably the magnificently terrible passage form Dante's Inferno on the agonies of the traitor Ugolino and his consignment to the hell for traitors, not untopical in the twentieth century. Translated admirably by Seamus Heaney, the passage is too long to quote and is only tangentially political. Between these two extremes the anthologist wanders very uncertainly, like an explorer in a far country noting hills and valleys but quite incapable of constructing a
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