370 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
These and other sorts of divagations tend to interrupt what is
most substantive in this book: the close readings. When Snediker
approaches the poetry without recourse to an external theoreti-
cal apparatus, the results are generally rewarding; his acuity
proves especially useful for revisiting poetic moments hitherto
relegated to explorations of coldness, despair, or mere
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cynicism. Attentiveness to a diverse array of feelings is certainly
a desirable critical faculty, and Snediker’s call for a queer
paradigm that can accommodate this diversity is well adduced
and welcome.
Cornell University LILY CUI
doi:10.1093/escrit/cgp019
AUTHENTICITY, NOT ORIGINALITY
New Collected Poems. By Sylvia Townsend Warner; edited with
an introduction by Claire Harman. Carcanet Press, Fyfield
Books, 2008; £18.95.
‘I propose to be a posthumous poet!’ Sylvia Townsend Warner
wrote to Michael Schmidt in 1978, delighted and astonished
that Carcanet were interested in publishing her poems in ‘my
extreme old age’. ‘A posthumous poet!’ – Warner’s proposal
is comically alive to the vagaries of reputation, at once rueful
and pleased, a modest and an immodest proposal to be, as
Keats put it, ‘among the English Poets’. She died later that
year, as she had calmly foreseen. One of the very last things
she wrote, the preface for Virago’s 1978 reprint of
Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927), ends with a memory of posting
the manuscript of the novel to the publishers back in 1926.
She described feeling ‘a sense that my world was now nicely
and neatly over’, gracefully oblique reminiscent words with a
different aptness fifty years on. She didn’t live to see the
revival of her reputation as a poet which followed the publi-
cation in 1982 of her Collected Poems, edited by Claire
Harman, whose pioneering efforts for Warner would later
bear fruit in a Selected Poems (1985), a fine biography (1989),
and a selection from the diaries (1994). And now, more than a
BOOK REVIEWS 371
quarter of a century on from 1982, Harman has edited a New
Collected Poems. With over a hundred poems not previously col-
lected, it gives an impressively expanded sense of Warner’s
unusual and distinguished poetic career, remarkable for its
duration and fluctuations.
She published her first book of poems, The Espalier, in 1925,
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the same year as Hardy’s penultimate collection, while the last
collection she oversaw, Azrael, appeared in 1978 in the heyday
of punk rock. She later recalled 1922 as the year she realised
she could write poetry. At this point she was not in her first
youth (she was born in 1893), and her earlier cultural efforts
had been as a composer (there is a tantalising story that she
was to study with Schoenberg before wartime made that imposs-
ible). But she had been writing poems for some years, and
Harman dates the writing of Warner’s earliest published poem
from 1914. Her first two collections, published in 1925 and
1928, were widely admired, including by Yeats and Housman,
and came to feature in anthologies. In 1928, although at the
height of her fame as a novelist, she noted in her diary that
she wanted to read and write only poetry, and remarked won-
deringly on her own fertility: ‘My fingers drop myrrh. I really
am writing a poem a day’. Her next volume, Opus 7 (the title
teasingly suggesting the composer she hadn’t become) was a
departure, a 1400-line narrative poem set in contemporary
rural England, with an alcoholic heroine, in couplets that var-
iously call to mind Dryden, Crabbe, Keats and Shelley, and in
so doing reflect critically on the pastoral traditions of English
poetry. Until this point, Warner might be thought to have had
something like a ‘career’ as a poet alongside her celebrity as a
novelist. The first two volumes were the basis of a reputation,
and although Opus 7 met with less acclaim, as its defiantly unfa-
shionable mode had made likely, it was part of a distinguished
and growing body of work in prose and verse.
The main setback to her poetic reputation came with
another experimental project, Whether a Dove or Seagull, a
jointly-authored collection comprising fifty-four poems by
Warner, and fifty-five by her lover Valentine Ackland. The
poems were unattributed in the 1933 American edition,
though a list of attributions was supplied at the end of the
372 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
British imprint the following year. A blithe but as it turned out
ill-judged Note to the Reader announced the joint authorship:
‘The book, therefore, is both an experiment in the presentation
of poetry and a protest against the frame of mind, too
common, which judges the poem by the poet, rather than the
poet by the poem’. It aimed to combine ‘the element of
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contrast’ and ‘the freshness of anonymity’, but the little
preface succeeded only in directing attention to exactly the
issue of authorship which it meant to sideline. The book
suffered moreover from its unevenness of achievement,
Ackland’s talents being much lesser than Warner’s, and from a
lack of purposeful sequence compounded by the disorienting
absence of titles for individual poems. Warner continued to
write poetry after 1934, and sometimes to give it periodical pub-
lication, but there was to be no book between 1934 and 1958.
And when they did come, her last two books were on a distinctly
modest scale. Boxwood (1958), a series of sixteen engravings by
Warner’s friend Reynolds Stone, was ‘illustrated in verse by
Sylvia Townsend Warner’ in short poems prompted by the
pictures. King Duffus (1968) was a pamphlet privately
printed, although, as Harman points out in her valuable notes,
both of these collections draw on poems more than a decade
old (as did Azrael, published posthumously in 1978, which
included ‘Graveyard in Norfolk’ from 1934).
We do not know exactly why she abstained from publication
for so long. The poor reception of Whether a Dove or Seagull
may have been a factor, but conjugal tact was probably the
main consideration. From then on Warner would write the
fiction, leaving the field of verse to Ackland, who had an
intense and troubled poetic vocation. Poetry’s loss was prose’s
gain. Between 1926 and 1977 Warner’s prolific and abundant
creative gifts brought forth seven novels and eleven volumes
of stories. And we can now see more clearly than ever that
the poetry didn’t stop. At 391 closely-printed pages the
New Collected Poems is a bulky volume, and even here there
are some substantial omissions, most notably thirty of the fifty-
four poems she contributed to Whether a Dove or Seagull. It is
an unusual writing life in terms of the place held by poetry. It has
some resemblance to that of Hardy, with whom Warner – partly
BOOK REVIEWS 373
because she too lived most of her life in Dorset – is most often
compared. Among more recent writers, comparisons could be
made with Beckett, Pinter and Muriel Spark: all of these
started as poets, never gave up writing poetry as they became
more famous in other genres, and published collections of
poetry in their final years.
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In 1958 Warner told Vaughan Williams that she had given up
composition because ‘I found I was doing nothing of my own’
(‘Authenticity, I said, not originality’). Her work in music con-
tinued throughout the 1920s, however, in her role as one of
the editors of the ten-volume Tudor Church Music, and her
musical background strongly informs the care for rhythm and
phrasing in her poetry. Hearing some of Benjamin Britten’s
Hardy settings in 1954, for instance, she noted that she had
been most impressed by ‘The Travelling Boy, with its reiterated
figure in the accompaniment, a bouncing futile phrase with the
frustration of To Lincolnshire to Lancashire to buy a pocket
handkercher’. Warner’s word ‘phrase’ here brings together the
musical figure and the verbal catch. It suggests her intensely
musical perception of the quantities of words and the connec-
tions between linguistic and musical measure. The poem in
question must be Hardy’s ‘Midnight on the Great Western’, in
which the fourth line of each stanza does indeed stand out
because of its internal rhyme, with a bitter pathos in the
jauntiness – something to which Britten’s ‘bouncing futile
phrase’ creatively responds. Warner’s early poems continue the
ballad tradition in which Hardy was such a central figure and
they also demonstrate some of Hardy’s virtuoso craftsmanship
with metrical variations; her themes and settings are often
Hardyesque as well. But, as Donald Davie pointed out in
Under Briggflatts, Warner’s is a twentieth century sensibility
which has learned not just from Hardy but also from Edward
Thomas and such later Georgians as Blunden and Graves; and
her verses introduce complicating and distinctly modern disso-
nant notes. ‘The Sailor’, a poem included by Yeats in his
Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), is both in the tradition
and a variation on it.
374 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
For she so young is, and tender,
I would not have her know
What it is that I go to
When to sea I must go,
Lest she should lie awake and tremble
When the great storm-winds blow.
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It takes a confident writer to interrupt the alternating end-rhymes
of ‘know, go, blow’ with that prosaic third line ‘What it is that I go
to’, where ‘go to’ anticipates and muffles the rhyme, especially as
the sense suggests an emphasis on ‘go to’. The deliberated effect
avoids facility and predictability. Likewise with some of the
other modulations in the stanza, the first line for instance
stopping itself in its tracks to register what’s even more crucial
than her youth, her being ‘tender’, a registering which may be
either compassionate or sensual; and the last line moving its
metrics weightily away from a fluent trimeter (the splicing
together of ‘storm-winds’ makes it impossible to articulate the
line as three iambic feet). Another early poem which was to be
anthologised (by Louis Untermeyer, who championed her work
in America) is ‘Nelly Trim’, which tells the traditional story of a
girl who gives herself freely to a passing traveler. Is she a minister-
ing angel or no better than she ought to be?
Strangely assembled
In the quiet room,
Alone alight
Amidst leagues of gloom,
So brave a bride,
So sad a groom;
And strange love-traffic
Between these two;
Nor mean, nor shamefaced –
As though they’d do
Something more solemn
Than they knew:
BOOK REVIEWS 375
Like a number of Warner’s poems of the 1920s, ‘Nelly Trim’
suggests the hinterland of war by quietly evoking a landscape
of damage and recovery. It is risky for a writer twice to call a
scene ‘strange’, but her lines make the strangeness real and
vivid: by the rapidly enigmatic suggestiveness of ‘brave’ bride
and ‘sad’ groom, the anti-conventional implication that this is
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a marriage whatever it may seem, the solemn slowing of the
metric in ‘Than they knew’ (three syllables instead of the
expected four), above all perhaps in the Beckettian line ‘Alone
alight’, compacting and focusing the romantic scene and then
widening its perspective as the alliterative sequence continues
across into the next line: ‘Alone alight / Amidst’.
Warner said that her second collection, Time Importuned,
was more ‘vinegary’, a quality she liked (‘Vinegar’ is the name
of Laura’s feline familiar in Lolly Willowes). A characteristic
poem, ‘A Pattern of Time’, hints that erotic regret makes a
bridge across the generations.
Still in the shining garden
Where once in time long gone
I walked alone, a maiden,
A maiden walks alone.
The speaker, it seems, is both an ordinary woman no longer
young, and a timeless presence in the garden, with an aura of
the meetings of mortal and magic frequent in Warner’s 1920s
writing. Time’s continuities and time’s changes are focused
into the styptic meeting across the line-ending of ‘a maiden, /
A maiden’. Warner’s perspective on the elusive truths of desire
here prefigures early Auden.
Red, red are the roses;
But yet there is something more,
And through the garden she wanders
As though she would implore
Blossom or leaf to reveal it . . .
The vigorous and coolly brilliant Opus 7 (1931), Warner’s
third volume of poetry, is a diffuse and exuberant narrative
376 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
poem of about 1400 lines, a venture into extended poetic narra-
tive which she never repeated. Its central figure, Rebecca
Random, is a village drunkard-cum-gardener who nobly
supports her habit by a combination of business acumen and
inspired green fingers. The poem returns to the pastoral of
Lolly Willowes – and Rebecca is a kind of witch, like Laura
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in that book – but also looks ahead to Warner’s socio-political
commitments of the 1930s and 40s. The village that Laura
found was locked away at the end of a valley, a retreat and a
cul-de-sac, mainly feudal in structure and queerly hospitable to
the reclusive and the deviant. Rebecca’s village is more
gossipy, money-minded, subject to modernity; it has a Wool-
worth’s as well as the wireless, and it relies on the developing
tourist trade. The poem is strewn with echoes and allusions –
to Marvell, Cowley, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats,
among others – and is partly a sceptical meditation on how
English poetry has dealt with country life. Warner’s anger
about cultural decline, social meanness and a disastrous world
war is expressed through the figure and denunciatory words of
‘a crippled Anzac’ soldier, whose symbolic importance for the
story is expressed through his role in reviving Rebecca’s life
(he is the first to buy flowers from her). Through Rebecca’s
dauntless alcoholism the poem gives a feminine and audaciously
grungy twist to British poetry’s paeans to drink – for instance in
these sardonically compassionate lines worthy of Byron:
All this for gin. Yes, as you say, all this
for ransom, ease, illusion, the sole kiss
lorn age can trust to, the last kindness done
bewintered flesh that has outgrown the sun.
O faithful bottle! –
The New Collected Poems includes an exceptionally rich
gathering of poems from the 1930s and 1940s, the years of
Warner’s most vigorous political engagements. The same com-
plexity she brings to her reassessment of the pastoral literary tra-
dition she brings also to her thinking about the radical politics of
the 1930s and about the second of the world wars she lived
through as an adult. Warner was a convinced anti-fascist, but
BOOK REVIEWS 377
sceptical about the British establishment and aspects of the war
effort. The previously uncollected poems include some fiercely
Brechtian descriptions of wartime casualties, and such disen-
chanted epigrams as this:
The prophet in his country
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Abused the local gentry:
When distant gentry heard
The prophet was honoured.
Not only is the prophet without honour in his own country, but
the honour he wins abroad may not be to his credit. When
gentries disagree, my enemy’s enemy may be my friend. Local
rivalries outdo class solidarity. Warner contrives eloquently dis-
sonant off-rhymes to express such sour worldly astringencies as
this. (Harman’s biography describes Warner as a vigorous
heckler in political meetings, and taking pleasure in how loud
and nasty her own voice could sound.) This is far from her
only political register, but it gives some indication of the reach
and versatility of her achievement as a poet.
She joined the Communist Party in 1935 and remained a
member long after the war, but the later poems engage less
directly with public affairs. For instance, from Boxwood, this
fine example of the risky genre of cat poems:
The fire, the cushion, and the toy,
The curtained room
And my sweet milk to come –
All mine by right feline –
Is this not joy?
The wind, the dangerous dark, the sway
Of bough to ride,
The midnight world so wide –
All mine by right feline –
Is that not joy?
It is characteristic of Warner’s prosody to have at least one line
without an end-rhyme; sometimes, as Harman’s introduction
378 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
illustrates, she would delete a rhyme in the process of revision.
Here the fourth line of each verse doesn’t rhyme except intern-
ally: ‘All mine by right feline’. To make it rhyme properly,
though, we would have to denature the word ‘feline’ and pro-
nounce it as ‘feline’. Human language, she suggests, isn’t quite
in tune with animal rights. Moreover, although ‘toy’ and ‘joy’
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are a full rhyme (for ‘this’ domestic world), ‘sway’ and ‘joy’
chime more remotely (for ‘that’ midnight one). ‘Sway’,
without an endstop, ambiguously evokes both a dangerous
motion and an exciting mastery. It is only a small poem, but
through such deft touches and intimations Warner stays true
to one of her central convictions – that to give due regard to
another creature you have to let it go where it mysteriously
will as well as inviting it in. The woodcut which the poem illus-
trates shows a cat on its cushion, the cat of the first stanza; but
there is no frame to this little picture (unlike the rest of the
engravings) so the cushion might be thought to look like a
flying carpet. Perhaps a notion of this kind, as well as long
experience with cats, prompted Warner’s second, quietly dissi-
dent verse.
In Under Briggflatts (1989) Donald Davie paid tribute to ‘the
more than 70 uncollected or unpublished poems’ in the 1982
Collected Poems – ‘an astonishing harvest’, as he called it.
The 2008 volume is astonishing again. Admirers of Warner
are greatly in Claire Harman’s debt for these New Collected
Poems, and also to Carcanet Press not just for their enterprise
in publishing the book but for pricing such a substantial
volume at a manageable £18.95. It includes about 110 pre-
viously uncollected poems. The majority of these date from
the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and, of the remainder, four come
from the period before 1931, twenty-four from Whether a
Dove or Seagull, and sixteen from the last decade of Warner’s
life. The endnotes and dating of poems remain concise, but
Harman has expanded them since 1982, adding some fascinat-
ing material and enhancing the book’s indispensability as a
resource for comparing Warner’s poetry with her prose of the
same moment. She has omitted the 1959 lecture on ‘Women
as Writers’, which arguably had too much prominence as an
appendix to the 1982 volume. Some variant readings are given
BOOK REVIEWS 379
(though a few which were noted in 1982 – such as line 3 of
‘Lady Macbeth’s Daughter’ – have disappeared), and
Harman’s ‘Introduction’ touches on the great interest of
Warner’s manuscript revisions. ‘No word from the 82-year-old
Sylvia Townsend Warner was unconsidered’, as Davie admir-
ingly noted, including the words she revised. There is one
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further small but not insignificant point of house style: the
New Collected Poems gives titles to every poem, which unfortu-
nately occludes a distinction between those poems to which
Warner herself gave titles and those many to which she didn’t,
including the entirety of King Duffus and all but five of those
she wrote for Whether a Dove or Seagull.
Even with all its new material, the edition is a ‘Collected’ and
some way from a ‘Complete’. It does not for instance reprint a
number of fugitive song lyrics from Warner’s early years,
among them the three song-texts included in The Oxford
Song Book (1916), edited by her then lover, Percy Buck,
which may have been her first appearance in print. Various
light verses survive, some of them reprinted in the journals of
the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, but they are omitted
here. On a larger scale, there are a number of poems by both
Warner and Ackland in the selection from the two women’s cor-
respondence which Warner compiled, with connecting narrative,
after Ackland’s death in 1969. Susanna Pinney published a selec-
tion from these letters in 1998 under the title I’ll Stand By You. It
includes (by my count) fourteen poems by Warner, some of
them only four or five lines long. Harman has taken five of
these fourteen for the New Collected Poems: but I’ll Stand By
You represents only about a third of the correspondence
compiled by Warner, and no doubt the remainder harbours
other poems. So there may be further discoveries ahead for a
future enlarged edition.
The most important omission comes from the ill-fated
Whether a Dove or Seagull, from which Harman reprints only
twenty-four of Warner’s fifty-four poems. This was clearly a
tricky case. The book has been reprinted in its entirety as part
of Frances Bingham’s valuable selection of Ackland’s poetry,
Journey from Winter, also published by Carcanet in 2008.
Harman writes that ‘the Warner and Ackland literary estate
380 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
has given permission for a selection of Warner’s contribution to
appear here’, so she was evidently constrained in what she could
include. There are obvious reasons for the non-duplication, and
yet it has produced the unhappy anomaly whereby a large
number of Warner’s poems are now only to be read in a
volume of Ackland’s selected poetry. The problems of joint
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authorship continue to bedevil Whether a Dove or Seagull, all
the more regrettably since a critical reading of the volume is
long overdue.
Copyright issues may also have played a part in the omission
of the illustrations to Boxwood, an understandable loss, but an
important one given that the poems were produced in dialogue
with specific images, like Thom Gunn’s poetic illustrations to
his brother’s photos in Positives (which, perhaps for that
reason, Gunn omitted from his own Collected Poems).
Harman has reprinted the first three volumes in their original
form, but thereafter her arrangement gives priority, in many but
not all cases, to manuscript chronology. There is a strong ration-
ale for this decision, in that Warner’s notebooks sometimes
gathered groups of poems, giving unusual authority to the
sequences thus provisionally brought together. Two such
sequences from 1949 and 1950, years of crisis in Warner’s
relationship with Ackland, are among the revelations of this
volume. But still it is a decision with a major downside, in
that readers of this book never get to see Boxwood, King
Duffus, or Azrael in their integrity, in the final form and
sequence which Warner approved. Harman’s notes do,
however, give enough detail for readers to reconstruct the
sequence of poems in the original publications.
It is a shame to finish by caviling, but the text of the New
Collected Poems could be improved. The very first poem, for
instance, concludes without a full stop – a small error but a dis-
concerting one, especially given that many poets of the 1920s
did dispense with ordinary punctuation. The English preface
to Whether a Dove or Seagull is quoted as saying that
‘The authors believe that by issuing their work under one
cover . . . ’, but the correct phrase is ‘their independent work’ –
an important English declaration of independence. The first
line of the poem from Boxwood cited above is given as ‘The
BOOK REVIEWS 381
fire; the cushion, and the toy’ both in 1982 and here, but both
editions of Boxwood (1958 and 1960) read ‘The fire, the
cushion, and the toy’, and the alteration in rhythm makes all
the difference to the poem (the semicolon cat is much
sleepier). Harman has seen manuscripts and typescripts, so it
is not impossible that she is giving us variant readings; but if
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so she hasn’t noted or justified the decision. Such changes in
punctuation, for any poet but especially one trained in music,
crucially affect tempo. Similarly with questions of stanzaic
form and even of indentation, and here too the New Collected
Poems is sometimes fallible. The first published versions of
‘Ballad Story’, for instance, in Azrael (1978) and Twelve
Poems (1980), have six stanzas, of 8,8,4,8,8 and 2 lines respect-
ively, with the last shortened stanza kept expressively apart. Such
variations matter to Warner, as conversely in the title poem
‘Azrael’, where three quatrains are followed by an octave as
the consciousness of mortality gathers. But ‘Ballad Story’ in
the New Collected Poems has only five stanzas, with the last
one extended to ten lines. (In the 1982 Collected Poems a
page-break clouds the issue). Harman notes that the typescript
is dated 1966, but not whether the variant from previous print-
ings derives from this. In the end, of course, no edition is free
from slips and errors, and these caveats are partly made in
order to suggest the future value of a variorum or scholarly pres-
entation of Warner’s work. The poems are good enough to
deserve it. Meanwhile, these New Collected Poems, one of the
most important books of poems to be published in 2008, give
us a huge amount to enjoy and admire.
University College London PETER SWAAB
doi:10.1093/escrit/cgp021
