Poets at the BBC Artsnight

Since its inception,

the BBC has captured the greatest names in poetry.

The BBC's archive features some of the most popular

literary figures of the modern era.

Here is a poor man who got drowned.

His friends thought he was waving to them from the sea

but really he was drowning.

This programme will look at how bards turned into broadcasters...

Poetry is religion, religion is poetry.

The core of both are imagination, as far as I'm concerned.

..as poets braved the cameras

to be beamed into the nation's living rooms,

a tradition that still continues today.

The First World War saw industrial slaughter across Europe.

Out of the horrors of the front lines would come

a new, more direct kind of writing.

Robert Graves was a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers

and a budding poet.

The war had a profound effect on his poetry

and in 1916, Graves' first volume of verse was published.

That same year, his name appeared in print again,

this time in a national newspaper,

listed among the dead.

Many years later, Graves reflected on his own death for the BBC.

I was 22 hours dead. It was on my 21st birthday

and that's where I started again, so I'm now only 53 instead of 74.

You were reported dead.

They... They closed my bank account.

They wrote to my parents and said how heroic I was.

They did everything. They stole all my kit and I appealed for it,

but I never got it back.

As the war ended, Graves wrote a poem recalling

the jubilation of Armistice Day.

Armistice Day, 1918.

What's all this hubbub and yelling,

Commotion and scamper of feet

With ear-splitting clatter of kettles and cans,

Wild laughter down Mafeking Street?

O, those are the kids whom we fought for

You might think they'd been scoffing our rum

With flags that they waved when we marched off to war

In the rapture of bugle and drum.

But his anger at the futility of the war meant that celebrations

were of little comfort.

When the days of rejoicing are over,

When the flags are stowed safely away,

They will dream of another wild "War to End Wars"

And another wild Armistice Day.

But the boys who were killed in the trenches,

Who fought with no rage and no rant,

We left them stretched out on their pallets of mud

Low down with the worm and the ant.

SWING MUSIC

In the 1920s, a weary post-war Britain was keen to put the misery

of the trenches behind it.

But perhaps it wasn't quite ready

for a poet who was about to make a dramatic entrance.

The eccentric, aristocratic Edith Sitwell.

At that time a change in the direction, imagery and rhythms

in poetry was taking place,

owing to the rhythmical flaccidity,

the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns

of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.

It was therefore necessary to find

rhythmical expression for the heightened speed of our time.

Sitwell was a poetic innovator

but it was her strikingly eccentric looks that drew the most attention.

At six foot tall and draped in Tudor gowns and jewels,

she cut quite a dash.

Everything about Sitwell was a performance.

The clothes, the face - and she knew she looked weird,

and so her decision was

to look even weirder, and to make no allowances for people.

People had to know that, "Look, she has to be a poet, look at her."

In 1959 she was interviewed

by John Freeman for the celebrated BBC series Face To Face.

Dame Edith, the world outside your own circle of friends

tends to think of you as being remote, eccentric,

forbidding and rather dangerous.

Now, perhaps that's a false impression and I want you to tell me

face-to-face what sort of person you really are.

Now, first, your appearance, which everybody knows - why did you

devise the very personal style of clothes that you wear so often?

Well, because I can't wear fashionable clothes.

You see, I'm a throwback to remote ancestors of mine

and I really would look so extraordinary if I wore coats and skirts.

I would be followed for miles

and people would doubt the existence of the Almighty

if they saw me looking like that.

There was the dressing-up aspect but there was also the idea

that she is, as we think of her,

a kind of a series of modernist lines and angles.

She somehow transcends the flesh,

which she didn't really have much of, and becomes lines and bones

and costume jewellery and turbans and rings.

She is a confection, a construction,

she's like something that's been built

rather than something that was lived.

You ask me, just now you said that people's idea of me

was that I was eccentric and... and savage?

No, forbidding, I said, and dangerous.

Well, I don't think I'm forbidding, excepting when I absolutely refuse

to be taught my job by people who know nothing about it.

I have devoted my whole life to writing poetry,

which is to be a form of religion, and I'm not going to be taught

by people who don't know anything about it.

I think it's very impertinent.

I mean, I don't teach plumbers how to plumb.

Ever the innovator, Sitwell worked with composer William Walton

to create lively musical settings for her poems.

ORCHESTRA PLAYS JAUNTILY

# So do not take a bath in Jordan, Gordon

# On the holy Sabbath, on the peaceful day

# Or you'll never go to heaven, Gordon Macpherson,

# And speaking purely as a private person

# That is the place, that is the place

# That is the place for me! #

There is a genealogical relationship between Sitwell and rap,

because her poetry was popular in recorded form.

You bought a Sitwell LP. Her work should always be listened to.

Don't read it if you don't have to.

Hear her perform it, because the music of it is there in her voice.

# "As they watch me dance the polka"

# Said Mr Wagg like a bear

# "In my top hat and my whiskers that

# "Tra la la trap the Fair."

# Tra la la la la la Tra la la la la la

# Tra la la la la la la la la

# La la. #

The 1930s took Britain into an age of political tension,

economic crisis and high unemployment.

In Europe, political leaders were squaring up

for another devastating war.

From this uncertainty, a young writer emerged

convinced that poetry should have an engaged political voice.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, the son of a doctor.

He won a scholarship to Oxford University, where he held sway

over a group of idealistic young writers with strong left-wing views.

They believed their duty as poets was to inspire political change.

In his 20s, Auden travelled to Berlin

to bear witness and report back.

There, he discovered and wrote about a Europe on the brink of catastrophe.

If you read Auden's poetry of the '30s,

there's a kind of urgency to it.

He wrote about demagogues,

dangerous leaders such as he was seeing in Hitler and Mussolini.

You know, he's engaged and politicised.

At the same time he's a very individual voice.

Fantastically mature and precocious from the start.

The six-line poem Epitaph on a Tyrant shows Auden's gift

for devastating political verse.

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand.

He knew human folly like the back of his hand

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets.

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter

And when he cried, the little children died in the streets.

Hungry to experience conflict, in 1937, Auden volunteered

for the Republican forces fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War.

My first guest, WH Auden.

APPLAUSE

But in later life, Auden would come to reject his youthful belief

in the power of poetry to inspire change.

He was interviewed by Michael Parkinson in 1972.

You seem to deny the thing that a lot of people might suspect a poet

hopes he could be, which is some kind of social political reformer.

No, that they can't be. I mean...

At least, not in the West.

By all means, I...

Let a writer, a poet, if he feels like it,

write what we now call an engagee poem,

but he must not imagine that by doing so

he will change the course of history.

Nothing I wrote postponed the war for five seconds

or prevented one Jew being gassed.

-Yes.

-No. I mean, of course one can do them

as long as one doesn't imagine

that one will change the course of history by doing it.

I mean, I think if you ask what the function of not only literature,

of writing, but also of all the arts is,

I would say, first, I'd say what Dr Johnson said -

"The aim of writing is to enable readers

"a little better to enjoy life or a little better to endure it."

When the BBC visited Auden in Austria,

the poem they recorded had nothing to do with politics.

Instead, it was an ode to melancholic love.

As I walked out one evening

Walking down Bristol Street

The crowds upon the pavement

Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing

Under an arch of a railway

"Love has no ending.

"I'll love you till the ocean is folded and hung up to dry

"And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky."

The reason that he's so important is to do with the incredible

technical versatility and freedom of his poetry.

It was often said that WH Auden had this peculiar gift

of making ordinary words sound terribly poetic

by putting them into echoing patterns of sounds.

"Stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start

"You must love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart."

It was late, late in the evening

The lovers they were gone

The clocks had ceased their chiming

And the deep river ran on.

On the whole, I think one's rather proud to serve a medium

which in our time, when the public

has learned to consume almost everything like cans of soup,

poetry has somehow or other remained something that you either have to read it or leave it alone.

It's rather nice, I think, that one has this medium,

that at any rate, as few as one's readers may be,

at any rate one knows they can read.

If Auden came to distance himself from politics,

one fellow poet never wavered in his political commitment.

Hugh MacDiarmid was born Christopher Grieve

in the Scottish Borders in 1892.

Fiercely patriotic, MacDiarmid was a member of both the Communist Party

and the Scottish National Party.

He also listed Anglophobia as one of his hobbies.

I'm a Scotsman, as you can hear.

APPLAUSE

In the Declaration of Arbroath, away back in 1320,

perhaps the greatest democratic pledge of all time,

my people, the Scottish people,

swore that as long as 100 of them remained alive,

they would never allow themselves to be dominated by the English.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

My people have done little but betray that oath ever since.

APPLAUSE

Some poets get their engine out of a kind of rebellion against the world.

He was deliberately very provocative.

He thought that was part of his duty, to be provocative.

MacDiarmid felt that Scotland had lost itself

and that its identity could be reclaimed through poetry,

but for him, the experience of being Scottish could not be

properly expressed in English.

He formulated an ambitious plan to create a new Scots language.

I myself was convinced that there was nothing that the Scottish mind

could conceive that couldn't be better expressed in Scots

than in English or any other language.

There's a whole range of feelings, of combinations of ideas,

all related to the specific character of Scottish landscapings

and to the history of Scottish race and relation to the landscape,

which was embodied in the vocabulary of Scots,

and which is very little used the last couple of hundred years.

He passionately wanted to write Scots

and he wanted that not to be a backward-looking thing.

He wanted to fuse modernism and language that often was antique.

He didn't write dialect.

He made a new, plastic language.

He was actually before his time.

He was before his time while using this old language

in this amazing way.

In 1978, MacDiarmid read his most famous work,

A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, for the BBC.

O Scotland is the barren fig

Up, carles, up, and round it jig!

Old Moses took a dry stick and instantly it floo'ered in his hand.

Pu' Scotland up, and wha can say

It winna bad and blossom tae.

A miracle's oor only chance.

Up, carles, up

And let us dance!

The poem is a long monologue

in which a drunk man lying on a hillside contemplates

Scotland's position in the world and rages against its seeming passivity

in the face of English domination.

Inside this flimsy story of somebody lying drunk in a ditch,

all this stuff goes through his head, and it's ancient, it's modern

and it's very angry, and it's very anti-British-Empire.

It's one of the most brilliant and game-changing poems

that have ever existed.

MacDiarmid helped spark a renaissance in Scottish literature,

but in later life he felt the battle was far from over.

It's very questionable whether the whole business that I started

wasn't too late.

I was hopeful, when England lost its empire, that it might not be,

but England's fighting back, of course,

and still thinks it has a world influence and a world mission, so...

Let's get rid of England somehow or other, completely.

-You're still hopeful?

-Hmm?

-You're still hopeful?

-I'm still hopeful, yes.

In the suburbs of north London,

another poet was planning her own quiet rebellion.

Stevie Smith is a rebel, complete.

She's going to write poetry

and she's going to mock the way we write poetry.

She was actually taking the kind of assumptions we make about poetry

and what's important and how poetry works,

and she was just refusing to even try.

Her verse seemed jaunty...

..yet it was hugely preoccupied with death.

As you can hear in her most renowned poem.

In my poems the dead often speak and the ghosts come back.

Here is a poor man who got drowned.

His friends thought he was waving to them from the sea,

but really he was drowning.

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning

"I was much further out than you thought

"And not waving but drowning."

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he's dead

It must have been too cold for him, his heart gave way, they said.

"Oh, no, no, no, it was too cold always"

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

"I was much too far out all my life

"And not waving but drowning."

Beyond the apparent simplicity of her poetry

lay a carefully crafted and innovative style.

The poetry that was written by gentlemen for gentlemen to read

in the years when everybody learnt Latin and Greek at school

is over, it's gone.

You want rhyme? Bugger you. You're not getting a rhyme.

You want a story? I can't even be bothered telling you a story.

She's going to write

in chip-chop rhythm,

she's going to use extraordinary, limited vocabulary,

high level of repetition

and it works in a minimalist way.

People in rather odd circumstances are what most of my poems are about,

mixed up with

arguments, religious difficulties,

ghosts, death, fairy stories...

and a general feeling of guilt for not writing more.

Humdrum suburbia was also to inspire another great writer,

John Betjeman, who delighted the nation

with poems that celebrated ordinary life.

Miss J Hunter Dunn, Miss J Hunter Dunn,

Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,

What strenuous singles we played after tea,

We in the tournament - you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,

The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,

With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,

I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.

John Betjeman was born in 1906,

the son of a luxury-goods tradesman.

As a child, Betjeman was painfully aware of his family's low status

in Britain's class system,

a preoccupation that would later come to define his poetry.

Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,

Above us the intimate roof of the car,

And here on my right is the girl of my choice,

With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.

And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,

And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.

We sat in the car park till twenty to one

And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

Betjeman's verse saw a return to old-fashioned elements of poetry -

regular rhyme, familiar rhythm

and a wry sense of humour.

A passionate lover of buildings, he championed Victorian architecture

at a time when historic towns and cities

were being threatened by modern ideas of progress.

He became a poet of a passing England,

an England that was being subsumed

under the concrete of new developments.

And there's something in the work like that, too.

It's attached to rhyme and rhythm

in an attractively conventional, consoling, comforting kind of way.

So just as he defended the Victorian architrave,

he's there defending certain kinds of end-stopped rhyme,

when other people are rejecting it

or seeing that as like the equivalent of having

too many knick-knacks over your fireplace.

He slightly strikes you as a fuddy-duddy,

but actually, he embraced TV, modern media, newspaper, radio.

You know, he wanted to run with that,

and I think he understood how poetry could work,

you know, with a general reader and the general public.

Well, if you mention the word "poet" to most people,

they reach for the sleeping tablets. Well, there's one poet who manages

to bridge that hitherto unbridgeable gap between the public and his art.

Here's Sir John Betjeman.

APPLAUSE

Betjeman found a natural home in front of the camera

and was a regular guest on prime-time chat shows.

What is the function of a poet, Sir John?

I think primarily it's to say things simply,

shortly,

rhythmically,

memorably.

And it's luck, it's inspiration.

-There is such a thing as inspiration.

-Yes.

And when you tell me that thing, if it's true,

that my poetry is read by

lots of people who don't ordinarily read poetry,

that's all I could want to happen.

'Betjeman could speak to a couple of million people

'through one transmission. And I take my hat off to anybody'

who can take poetry out to the general public,

because the general public don't always want it.

And he forged a link and a bond with them,

and some of that was through his personality,

but a lot of it was through his work.

Betjeman could even be highly satirical.

He attacked the administrators

who were casually laying waste to British heritage

in his poem Executive.

I am a young executive.

No cuffs than mine are cleaner;

I own an oblong briefcase and I use the firm's Cortina.

In every roadside hostelry from here to Burgess Hill

The maitres d'hotel all know me well, and let me sign the bill.

You ask me what it is I do. Well, actually, you know,

I'm partly a liaison man, and partly PRO.

Essentially, I integrate the current export drive

And basically I'm viable from ten o'clock till five.

'Those poems, they're not facile, they're not just party tricks.'

He's got a good eye for social conventions

and...a tongue for undermining things when he chooses.

I do some mild developing. The sort of place I need

Is a quiet country market town that's rather run to seed

A luncheon and a drink or two, a little savoir faire -

I nobble half the council, the banks, the clerk, the Mayor.

And if some Preservationist attempts to interfere

A "dangerous structure" notice from the Borough Engineer

Will settle any buildings that are standing in our way -

The modern style, sir, with respect, has really come to stay.

That's beautiful.

APPLAUSE

In the post-war Britain of the 1950s,

Betjeman's knack for capturing the everyday

foreshadowed a group of new voices in poetry

known as "the Movement".

The early poetry of those writers

was full of observation and anecdote,

and often observation and anecdote

drawn from the daily lives of the poets,

which mean the daily lives of the readers too.

The Movement was made up of mostly male white-collar workers,

including librarian Philip Larkin

and university lecturer Kingsley Amis.

When you have movements and generations and little collectives

there's always one person that stands out, really,

and it's around them everything revolves.

And in the case of those '50s poets, it's Larkin.

Philip Larkin was affectionately known as "the hermit of Hull".

Though he won critical acclaim in his thirties,

he shunned the limelight

for a quiet career as a university librarian

for over three decades.

But in 1964, he allowed himself to be filmed

for the BBC's flagship arts programme, Monitor.

Work and I get on fairly well, I think.

There are just these occasions when one would like to prove it

by not working for a bit.

When I bind up library committee minutes at the end of five years,

it makes a great, fat volume,

but it's not the same as a volume of poetry.

Larkin was always described to me at school

as "the voice of the man next door".

He didn't sound like the man who lived next door to me,

but I understand where that comment comes from.

There's a sense of him describing the daily, the ordinary,

er, the domestic.

It was a language that came out of the bus stop and the newspaper.

Transformed through his poetic powers.

This gift for ordinary and even vulgar language

was captured in poems like A Study Of Reading Habits.

When getting my nose in a book Cured most things short of school,

It was worth ruining my eyes To know I could still keep cool,

And deal out the old right hook To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs, Evil was just my lark:

Me and my coat and fangs Had ripping times in the dark.

The women I clubbed with sex! I broke them up like meringues.

Don't read much now: the dude Who lets the girl down before

The hero arrives, the chap Who's yellow and keeps the store

Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:

Books are a load of crap.

The striking thing about Larkin's poetry is, in a way,

its eloquent ordinariness.

You can analyse as much as you want his poetry

in terms of sort of the nerves it touches

and the experiences of sort of welfare state Britain,

life in the post-war world that it illuminates, and that's all true,

but in the end, it's his gift for memorable phrases and lines.

He had the tendency to send himself up, rather.

So when he appears on camera he is,

in a way, playing a kind of a part.

I read that, er...

you know, I'm a miserable sort of fellow

writing a sort of welfare state sub-poetry,

er - doing it well, perhaps, but it isn't really what poetry is

and it isn't really the sort of poetry we want.

But I wonder whether it ever occurs to the writer of criticism like that

that, really, one agrees with them,

that what one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is

and the kind of environment one's had and has now.

Er, one doesn't really choose the poetry one writes -

one writes the kind of poetry one has to write, or can write.

Living on the margins suited Larkin.

His writing captured a remote awkwardness

with the world around him.

He's always very keen to make us understand

that sense of separation,

partly because we all feel it.

It's particularly powerful, I think, in Church Going,

where you get that self-irony of him taking off his bicycle clips

because he feels there's something about it,

you just shouldn't be in a church with bicycle clips on.

It's somehow disrespectful.

Hatless, I take off My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.

From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -

Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.

Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few Hectoring large-scale verses,

and pronounce "Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant.

The echoes snigger briefly.

Back at the door I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,

Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

If Larkin thrived on solitude, his close friend Kingsley Amis

embraced the celebrity of being a writer.

He frequently appeared on television.

On the BBC, Amis voiced his disappointment

with the conservatism of '50s Britain.

I personally then was suffering from a good deal of depression

for quite a long time over the results of the 1951 election,

which seemed to me to say that the modest bit of social revolution

that the British might have been going in for

between 1945 and 1951

had now come to an end and the public had turned their back on that

and, er, were trying to reverse the process.

Which I found depressing.

Although Amis was better known as a novelist,

most famously with Lucky Jim,

he actually began his career as a poet.

I think Kingsley Amis would see himself as a light-verse poet.

He edited an anthology of light verse,

he enjoyed making people laugh.

Lucky Jim, how I envy him!

Author, poet, fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, jazz critic.

You ask what his name is - I say Kingsley Amis.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

The first poem is on an ever-interesting topic,

though you might not think so to start with.

There's a poem of his called The Bookshop, which sort of...

looks at the differences between what men read and what women read.

But interestingly it's a poem that turns everything on its head

at the end and admits that actually, men have got a softer side too.

Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart

Or squash it flat?

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;

Girls aren't like that.

We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff

Can get by without it.

Women don't seem to think that's good enough;

They write about it.

And the awful way their poems lay them open

Just doesn't strike them.

Women are really much nicer than men:

No wonder we like them.

Deciding this, we can forget those times

We sat up half the night

Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,

And couldn't write.

APPLAUSE

Poets of Amis's generation were all about emotional restraint.

Across the pond, a new type of verse was emerging

that was visceral and cathartic.

The Bostonian Anne Sexton was breathtakingly honest,

and her verse was informed by her battles with mental illness.

I did get very manic once,

and they told me I was psychotic in the hospital.

And I thought that was a riot, cos I was still me.

You know, I thought psychotic was someplace else, but I was still me.

Sexton more than anybody else

wrote about previously taboo subjects in her poetry.

She wrote about menstruation, she wrote about masturbation,

she wrote about incest, she wrote about adultery,

and she wrote about them in ways

that suggested that she was not imagining them -

that these were things she had intimate personal experience.

Menstruation at Forty.

I was thinking of a son.

The womb is not a clock nor a bell tolling,

but in the eleventh month of its life

I feel the November

of the body as well as of the calendar.

In two days it will be my birthday

and as always the earth is done with its harvest.

This time I hunt for death...

She was forcing in subject matter that was definitionally ugly.

It was in the womb all along.

I was thinking of a son...

You! The never acquired,

the never seeded or unfastened, you of the genitals I feared,

the stalk and the puppy's breath.

It was at the suggestion of Sexton's therapist

that she began writing poetry.

She was what we would now call bipolar -

at the time called manic depressive -

and it was suggested to her

that poetry might help her in a therapeutic way.

Um, many people have tried to write poetry in therapy.

Anne Sexon wrote very great poetry.

My psychiatrist suggested that I watch Channel 2.

"You have an educational television there, why don't you look at it?"

So I did, and IA Richards was explaining the form of the sonnet,

and I thought, "Oh, so that's a sonnet!"

So I sat down and tried to write one. It was a pretty bad thing.

And that just turned me on, and then I, you know, turned on.

Eventually, it became impossible to separate Sexton

from her intensely autobiographical work.

She has a role she sees for herself

and she insists on playing it.

And I just got sick of it - the endless posturing

and just thinking, "I don't want to go on any more about female stuff,

"I don't want to be wombing and entrailing all over the place,"

all that stuff. And I just wanted her to...go for a walk.

I myself will die without baptism, a third daughter they didn't bother.

My death will come on my name day.

What's wrong with the name day?

It's only an angel of the sun.

Woman,

weaving a web over your own,

a thin and tangled poison.

Scorpio,

bad spider -

die!

But there were still poets who turned their focus not inwards,

but outwards, towards the beauty of the natural world.

Seamus Heaney grew up on a cattle farm in rural Northern Ireland,

an experience that fed directly into his verse.

There are two ways to look at Seamus Heaney's early poetry,

and indeed English writers did look at them in these two ways.

One, to think it's wonderful, about nature,

and two, to think it's rural, earthy,

it's all about root vegetables and crops and so on.

Both, actually, reactions are rather condescending

to what Heaney was actually doing.

Heaney's so-called nature poetry is actually dealing with

a lot of other things to do with identity, his own,

to do with family and tribe and home,

and belonging.

It's not just about describing blackberries or potatoes.

Heaney linked poetic creating to farming life

in one of his most famous poems.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I'll dig with it.

In Heaney's verse, the natural world provided a way of understanding

profound human experience.

In Personal Helicon, nature was a way of explaining the transition

from childhood to adulthood.

As a child, they couldn't keep me from wells

And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.

I loved the dark drop,

the trapped sky, the smells

Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.

I savoured the rich crash when a bucket

Plummeted down at the end of a rope.

So deep you saw no reflection in it.

The magic of poetry is that the individual can take an experience,

paint it in words,

and other people can see themselves in it.

He's not... He's not about anything,

there's no polemic in his poetry.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,

To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme

To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Heaney grew up in a rural community and that was his world,

the world that he wrote about in his first two or three collections.

But then he was living in Belfast at the time of the Troubles.

Suddenly, the urgency of that matter

was something he felt he had to address as a poet,

to be a public voice, to be a political voice,

to show solidarity with his own people.

Interviewed on the BBC in 1973,

at the height of the Northern Irish conflict,

Heaney was forced to consider how he would play a public role.

In your early years, your first poetry,

wrote what I'd call modern landscape poetry, basically, of the land.

And now that landscape that you're all too familiar with

is torn by often arbitrary but certainly tormenting violence.

Surely this must have some effect on the poetry you're writing now?

My...view and way with poetry

has never been to use it

as a vehicle for making statements about situations.

The poems have more, er, they have more come up like

bodies out of the bog of my own imagination.

Er, I want to wait, in a sense,

until the violence comes out of the pores of my mind, naturally.

I think it does, in a way.

While Heaney drew inspiration from Irish landscape and history,

the hills of Wales found their own bard with RS Thomas.

Thomas was a Welsh Anglican priest and a staunch nationalist.

His poems were deeply rooted in

the atmosphere of some of the remoter parts of North Wales.

His poem The Welsh Hill Country

evoked the harshness of the landscape

and the struggles of isolated farming communities

in the mid 20th century.

Too far for you to see

The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot

Gnawing the skin from the small bones,

The sheep are grazing at Bwlch-y-Fedwen,

Arranged romantically in the usual manner

On a bleak background of bald stone.

Too far for you to see

The moss and the mould on the cold chimneys,

The nettles growing through the cracked doors,

The houses stand empty at Nant-yr-Eira,

There are holes in the roofs that are thatched with sunlight,

And the fields are reverting to the bare moor.

Though he shunned the media,

Thomas agreed to make two films with the BBC

about his life and work in the Welsh hills.

Well, I came out of a kind of bourgeois environment

and, er, this muck and blood and, er, hardness,

the rain and the spittle and phlegm of farm life

was of course a shock to begin with,

and one felt that this was something not, er...

not quite part of the order of things, but...

..as one experienced it and saw

how definitely part of their lives this was,

sympathy grew in oneself,

and compassion, and admiration.

And I did find that

the strongly charactered hardness of these border people

really did make an impression on me

as far as poetic material was concerned.

BELL TOLLS

For Thomas, language and imagery

connected his work as priest and as poet.

Poetry is religion, religion is poetry.

The message of the New Testament is poetry.

Christ was a poet.

The New Testament as metaphor, the Resurrection as metaphor,

and...when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity.

And when one discusses Christianity, one is discussing poetry

in its imaginative aspects -

the core of both are imagination as far as I'm concerned.

He couldn't bear literalism.

He loved the fact that poetry and

religion provided for each other

very ready explanations.

He could link in his imagination

the idea of the story of the Resurrection

with the word "metaphor".

It's how he wrote his sermons, how he thought about God,

how he wrote his poems,

and I believe it all to be one whole way of being.

Nes bod ni wedi ymffurfio...

Despite his isolated existence,

Thomas was passionately committed to contemporary causes.

He was well known for his campaigning -

for nuclear disarmament

and for wider use of the Welsh language.

-NEWSREADER:

-As the arson campaign enters its 14th week,

police in Wales have warned that all homes owned by English people

are now at risk.

Most controversially, when a militant Welsh nationalist group

burnt down English-owned holiday homes in the 1970s,

Thomas was moved to defend them.

TRANSLATION:

One supremely bleak poem

summed up Thomas's despair about the fate of Welsh culture.

I have walked the shore

For an hour and seen the English

Scavenging among the remains Of our culture,

covering the sand

Like the tide and, with the roughness

Of the tide, elbowing our language

Into the grave that we have dug for it.

In the '60s, defiantly urban voices began to break through.

The Liverpool Poets were

geography graduate turned pop star Roger McGough,

music journalist Brian Patten

and artist Adrian Henri.

Together, they would bring poetry into the heart of '60s pop culture.

The BBC filmed the group in 1966.

They captured McGough performing a witty poem

that was infused with the language of modern consumerism.

Monika, the tea things are taking over,

the cups are as big as bubble cars, they throttle round the room,

the tin-openers skate on the greasy plates

by the light of the silvery moon.

The biscuits are having a party, they're necking in our bread bin,

that's jazz you hear in the salt cellars

but they don't let non-members in.

The egg spoons had our eggs for breakfast,

the sauce bottle's asleep in our bed,

I overheard the knives and forks,

it won't be long, they said

it won't be long, they said...

In 1967, the hugely influential Mersey Sound was published

and became Britain's bestselling poetry anthology of the time.

I remember finding Roger McGough's

Let Me Die A Youngman's Death -

not a clean and inbetween the sheets holywater death.

I remember reading it in the Sunday Times one Sunday

and thinking, "Wow, I want to do that."

McGough became a familiar face on television

performing cheeky and affectionate poems like Summer With The Monarch.

The Queen came up to Liverpool To dine at our Town Hall

In the evening wrote to her husband "Dear Philip, I'm having a ball

"I think I'll hang about I mean everything's happening here

"I'm beginning to dig the poetry scene

"And the ale is bloody gear."

So while she was having a castle built

Down in Castle Street

She had a look round Liverpool 8

Found a pad there, small but neat

She moved in a few belongings

Corgis, crown, a throne...

LAUGHTER

And blueblood in the neighbourhood Really raised the tone.

It seemed very near

and seemed very approachable

and yet when you look at it now, in some respects,

of course it was very formal poetry.

There they are in little four-line verses, rhyming perfectly.

So it was... It was magical.

McGough could tell a whole life story in a handful of words.

Out of work, divorced, usually pissed

He aimed low in life

and missed.

LAUGHTER

But McGough's popular approach met a critical backlash.

If you write about ordinary stuff,

and if you write about things

that other poets have written about in quite high-falutin' ways

and you write about it in very ordinary ways,

people will treat you with disdain.

There was still a lot of hostility

towards the Liverpool Poets.

Poets found it unbearable. They do,

if somebody comes along who's popular.

I once read a review that was outrageous.

I mean, it was just as if somehow or other he had profaned poetry.

He hasn't, he hasn't at all. He's done the opposite.

He's kept it alive.

What do you think the role of the poet is? Or your poetry?

Um, I don't quite know, really.

I think... I do things I think are...

There are two reasons - reasons for writing,

I'm not sure why one writes poetry, it's very personal.

But then when you actually stand and read it to people,

then I think it possibly can be entertaining.

The choice of poems should be entertaining.

Do you see yourself as an entertainer?

Not in the sense of, er,

like a showbusiness sort of thing, not really.

I think it's all sorts of things.

You know, it can be serious, it can be entertaining, it can be funny.

I think entertaining tends to mean funny, I think, that's the problem.

In people's minds.

LAUGHTER

Poetry had become a familiar part of popular entertainment

and was reaching a wider audience than ever before.

But in the mid 1970s, at a time of deep social unrest in Britain,

more urgent marginalised voices started to be heard.

Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote about the disaffection of British black youth.

He was the only voice that was speaking to us,

putting our situation under a microscope,

and not only just reporting and observing

but kind of offering direction and ideas.

You look at the body of his work

and he sums up the '70s into the early '80s,

what it was like to be black in Britain, like nobody else.

Kwesi Johnson used poetry to tackle the riots of the early '80s.

Madness, madness

Madness tight on the heads of the rebels

The bitterness erup's like a heart blas'

Broke glass, rituals of blood an' a-burnin'...

Kwesi Johnson wrote in a Jamaican dialect

and performed his poems over reggae beats.

Broke glass, cold blades as sharp as the eyes of hate

And the stabbin', it's

War amongs' the rebels...

One of the fibs about British poetry

is that it's always been written in Standard English.

The point is, many poets, both in Britain and America,

have written in what you might call non-standard, or in dialect.

So when Linton was writing in patois,

people said, "Oh, well, I don't understand it."

I think they were making a statement

that they didn't want to understand it.

Kwesi Johnson's unique style of performance

attracted the curiosity of even the most traditional BBC programmes.

You do use a Creole patois, don't you, which is very difficult

for a white person to understand. I found listening to some of them

that I would have liked to

understand them more than I did and that in a way

you weren't actually reaching me as a white person.

Well, perhaps it forces you, if you're really that interested,

you know, to try and penetrate the language

and check it out and try and understand it.

But would you not also like the white people to understand

a little bit of what the black people are going through?

Sure, um... and I think they, um, some people do

get some insights into our experiences from my poetry.

We looked to our language and the way we delivered our language

as part of our rebelliousness.

You know, our parents, you know, when they came over in the mid '50s,

the way that they thought they'd succeed is by assimilating,

which...you know, really meant trying to play the white man.

I mean, you know, Jamaican language, it's got a bass, man.

It's got a certain power to it.

..So smooth So tight and ripe and smash!

You like also to perform your poems, don't you,

rather than to actually have people read them?

Absolutely, because it's oral poetry.

The emphasis is on the spoken word as opposed to the written word.

And of course the spoken word has a greater immediacy

and impact than the written word does.

Published in the run-up to the Brixton riots of the early '80s,

Dread Beat An' Blood became Kwesi Johnson's politically charged anthem

to his generation's struggle with police brutality and injustice.

Dread Beat An' Blood is a really powerful piece of work

that's definitely informed by the times,

and I don't think there's any better encapsulation

of what the Black British experience was at that time.

I mean, it certainly changed my life.

The BBC arts documentary strand Omnibus

followed Kwesi Johnson's campaign for George Lindo,

a Black British man who had been wrongfully imprisoned for robbery.

The slogans that the demonstrators were chanting

had a kind of a calypso tempo.

# Jailhouse ain't George house

# Jailhouse ain't George house... #

And, um, that simple chant gave me the inspiration to write this poem.

Dem frame up George Lindo up in Bradford town

but de Bradford blaks dem a rally round

Maggi Tatcha on di go wid a racist show

but a she haffi go

Kaw, rite now,

African, Asian, West Indian,

an' Black British

stan firm inna Inglan

Inna disya time yah.

Throughout its history, the BBC has always used radio and television

to broadcast poetry.

But in the 21st century, it is showcasing poetic genius online.

The iPlayer series Women Who Spit

drew on the most exciting new female poets.

And the last word goes to Vanessa Kisuule

with her plea for women to claim their place in the world.

Take up space.

Wear pink skirts or black Doc Martens.

Know that souls

can dance unchecked beneath the fortress of a hijab

as well as baggy T-shirts and ripped jeans

Shave your legs, or don't

Smile from ear to ear, or don't

Liberation has no dress code, etiquette or secret dialect

Give yourself the space to be fickle

to bumble with your faith to fail

to fluff up your lines and make things up

Your shabby slip-stitch mistakes make you miraculous

A goddess of spit and sweat stumbling in a pit of phoenix ashes.

Take up space.

Believe the compliments you are given

Give yourself the benefit of the doubt

Don't doubt the benefits

of being the brightest shade of you on the spectrum

You

You with the shoulders prone to shrugs

and the throat full of half-formed whispers

You are indispensable.