I was sorry, this week, to hear of the death of Jonathan Raban. An admired writer of memoir and place — and a virtuoso of the sentence — he began as a poetry lover. From the Telegraph obituary, I learn that
At Hull University, where he read English, he founded a “Library Committee” specifically to meet Philip Larkin, who otherwise avoided the students.
Later, he lectured at the University of East Anglia, where I now keep a copy of his book The Society of the Poem (1971) on my shelf of criticism always worth dipping into.
As far as I know, it’s never been reprinted, despite being one of the best attempts to survey modern poetry for non-academic readers in the last fifty years. Perhaps it was too much of its moment — beginning as a series of talks on B.B.C. radio, and taking in a range of poets rarely now seen in the same company.
Yes, Larkin’s in there — Raban performs a formal dissection of “Mr. Bleaney”, observing that the first stanzas, with their dialogue between a landlady and lodger, are
a chronic case of compulsive enjambment, in which the language […] gets frequently treated as if it were so much faded ribbon, purchasable by the yard.
And this, in an important sense, is exactly what it is. The two voices in the poem are — in British terms — immediately recognizable as class spokesmen. […] Both characters are sprinkled by Larkin with a layer of fine grey dust.
Such worldly realism in poetry criticism is rare and welcome: The Society of the Poem, for Raban, is not a vague metaphor but a meaningful way of reading poems as performances of self in relation to community (he is less keen on the Beat poets, “with their Zen and their macrobiotic foods and their basic mistrust of rationalist categories”).
There also acute appreciations of Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Christopher Middleton, Tom Pickard, Sylvia Plath, Tadeusz Różewicz — an unusually wide horizon for an English critic of the time, though perhaps not so unusual for one who had recently passed through UEA’s new School of English and American Studies. It is nice to note that in the Acknowledgements to this man-heavy book (welcome to British poetry c. 1970!) Raban thanks his former UEA colleague Lorna Sage, “with whom I’ve argued out almost everything in this book, and without whom it would have been even more unscrupulous than it is”. The only thing I wish someone had suggested is an index.