An interesting job I’m occasionally asked to do is advise on the list of writers being considered for inclusion in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. This involves reading what obituaries can be found, and weighing up whether someone fulfils the criteria of being a “significant, influential or notorious figure” in the history of Britain.
A subcategory I’ve noticed on these lists might be called “Minor Aristocrats Who Wrote Doggerel”. These are people whose deaths have come to the attention of The Times and the Daily Telegraph due to their titles, but whose taste for expressing themselves in rhyme sees them remembered as a “poet”. From a literary point of view, their claim to inclusion in the DNB is negligible, and I leave it to others to decide whether their inherited wealth and privilege tips the scales, as it did in life.
There is a twentieth-century poet, though, who has something like the opposite problem. Almost every introduction I’ve read to the life and work of Lilian Bowes Lyon (1895-1949) has felt obliged to mention, usually in the first sentence, that she was a cousin of the Queen Mother — that is, the mother of Queen Elizabeth II. As an averagely disloyal British citizen, I’m more likely to avoid reading matter connected with the Royal Family than seek it out. But the more I read of Bowes Lyon’s poetry, the more I feel the association has overshadowed her verse, which is subtle, original and seriously informed by a wide sympathy with hardship and suffering.
I was first impressed by her 1936 poem “The Glittering North” — found in one of my favourite anthologies, Neil Astley’s The Land of Three Rivers: The Poetry of North-East England (Bloodaxe). It evokes the wild moorland of her native Northumberland, as brief sunny peace breaks up bad weather, and leaves the poet
… pondering every stone-bred stream
That braids the glittering North, a ghost in debt.
That guilty sense of being “a ghost in debt” — to other people, other ghosts — will return in some of her most haunting poems. But for now: what a bird’s-eye image! And what fine sound-patterning, foreshadowing “ghost in debt” with “stone-bred” (sto- / -ost; -ed / -ebt; stone / -st in), which then modulates into “stream […] braids”.
Like so many mid-century female British poets, however, Lilian Bowes Lyon was dogged by the faint praise of male critics. Her Collected Poems (1948), published a year before she died, came with an introduction by Cecil Day Lewis, who would soon become Professor of Poetry at Oxford (and later, Poet Laureate). No doubt the essay was intended as a generous gesture of support. But it has that stiff-Upper-Sixth quality of the Thirties generation, who seem to have been brought up to believe that the main job of the literary critic was to straighten other men’s ties.
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