I’m on holiday in Cornwall this week, so I packed two anthologies of Cornish poetry. One is The Wheel: An Anthology of Modern Poetry in Cornish 1850—1980 (Frances Boutle) and the other is Modern Poetries 1: Cornish Modern Poetries (Broken Sleep Books).
But I can only say I’m looking forward to them, as this is a pre-recorded post. Instead, here is a piece from the archives about three poems of Cornwall that I came across while researching The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry (2013 — see last week’s post for the full story of this book…)
“Birmingham,” said the English poet Roy Fisher, “is what I think with”. The modern poet’s preoccupation with place struck me repeatedly as I worked on revising the biographical summaries that make up The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. First published in 1994, and edited by the poet and critic Ian Hamilton, the second edition — now called The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry — surveys poets writing in English around the world from 1910 to the present day.
The critic T.E. Hulme argued in 1908 that the aim of the modern poet is “to fix an impression”. In his own case, he said, “the first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse, was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada”.
A century later, English verse has been used to fix impressions of every continent. Where Anglophone poets stand on the earth, as they write in a global language, is a defining question. “To come to what you have to say,” observes Dionne Brand, a Trinidadian-born poet living in Canada, “you have to / sweep this stretch of land up around your feet.” Yet poets also inhabit the same places separately: the different kinds of writing that make up the world of modern poetry can sometimes appear to be foreign countries to each other.
Bringing them into closer proximity was one aim of the new Companion. Different kinds of poetry offer different ways of seeing and hearing the world. One of the pleasures, I hope, of browsing such a volume is to move between poets not normally found together in other accounts. Take, for example, three poems by three post-war British poets evoking the same place: Cornwall.
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