0:00:08 > 0:00:11As Britain entered the 20th century,
0:00:11 > 0:00:14English poetry seemed stuck in a rut.
0:00:14 > 0:00:17Poets wrote about nature, or celebrated
0:00:17 > 0:00:22the glories of empire, in language that was formal and ornate.
0:00:28 > 0:00:33But as old certainties crumbled, new generations seized their chance
0:00:33 > 0:00:38to rewrite the world and build a new kind of poetry from the ruins.
0:00:39 > 0:00:43They found words for the complexity, the upheaval
0:00:43 > 0:00:46and the doubt of the modern age.
0:00:51 > 0:00:54And there was another revolution...
0:00:54 > 0:00:55In the 20th century,
0:00:55 > 0:00:58television brought poets into millions of living rooms.
0:01:01 > 0:01:05As the BBC cameras rolled, poets took the chance to explain
0:01:05 > 0:01:08themselves to a mass audience for the first time.
0:01:15 > 0:01:16In this first programme,
0:01:16 > 0:01:22we'll meet the giants who set out to write for the new century.
0:01:22 > 0:01:23April is the cruellest month
0:01:25 > 0:01:27Breeding lilacs out of the dead land
0:01:28 > 0:01:32Mixing memory and desire...
0:01:32 > 0:01:36From TS Eliot, who dragged poetry into the modern age...
0:01:36 > 0:01:38When he left, respectable...
0:01:38 > 0:01:42..to WH Auden, witness to the chaos of the 1930s...
0:01:42 > 0:01:45The little children died in the streets.
0:01:47 > 0:01:51Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs...
0:01:51 > 0:01:56..to Dylan Thomas, whose lyrical voice held audiences spellbound.
0:01:56 > 0:02:00The night above the dingle starry...
0:02:01 > 0:02:04There were eccentrics, too.
0:02:04 > 0:02:07In my poems, the dead often speak and the ghosts come back.
0:02:08 > 0:02:10National treasures...
0:02:12 > 0:02:15..and political rebels.
0:02:15 > 0:02:18We must get rid of England, somehow or other. Completely.
0:02:19 > 0:02:24Between them, they rewrote the rules of poetry for a new age.
0:02:25 > 0:02:28This is how they did it, in their own words.
0:02:44 > 0:02:47London at the turn of the 20th century.
0:02:47 > 0:02:50While other European cities were in the grip of artistic
0:02:50 > 0:02:55revolutions, British culture remained reassuringly traditional.
0:02:58 > 0:03:02In 1908, a radical young American arrived in London on a mission
0:03:02 > 0:03:06to, in his words, make poetry new.
0:03:06 > 0:03:10Ezra Pound was born in Idaho in 1885.
0:03:10 > 0:03:12As a student, he had resolved to
0:03:12 > 0:03:15"know more about poetry than any man living."
0:03:17 > 0:03:20In London, he planned to start a poetic revolution.
0:03:22 > 0:03:27The poetry of the 1890s, in England in particular, was dominated
0:03:27 > 0:03:33by a rather mournful, nostalgic, kind of pastiche poetry, really.
0:03:33 > 0:03:36A poetry that sort of imitated earlier Victorians,
0:03:36 > 0:03:41imitated the Romantics, and had a sort of decadent feel about it.
0:03:41 > 0:03:43Pound absolutely loathed this.
0:03:43 > 0:03:47He thought British poetry was flabby, it was dull,
0:03:47 > 0:03:49it was repetitive and he kind of put it on a diet.
0:03:49 > 0:03:52Everything had to be spare, every word had to count.
0:03:52 > 0:03:55Sent it to the gym, gave it a face-lift.
0:03:57 > 0:04:00And, you know, he was a great pioneer of modernism.
0:04:03 > 0:04:08In 1913, he wrote a modernist manifesto stating that poets
0:04:08 > 0:04:10should aim for precision with words,
0:04:10 > 0:04:15clear imagery and break free from familiar, traditional rhyme.
0:04:16 > 0:04:19His poems were pared down and precise,
0:04:19 > 0:04:22sometimes only a line or two long.
0:04:23 > 0:04:26But Pound wasn't starting from scratch,
0:04:26 > 0:04:30he was harking back to ancient sources.
0:04:30 > 0:04:33It was Chinese text that perfectly captured
0:04:33 > 0:04:37the precision of language and image that inspired his radicalism.
0:04:37 > 0:04:42Ezra Pound rarely appeared on camera, but in 1959 he was filmed
0:04:42 > 0:04:46for the BBC in Italy, demonstrating the qualities of Chinese writing.
0:04:48 > 0:04:50You have the primitive sun,
0:04:50 > 0:04:54then when they want to make it pretty, they square it up...
0:04:54 > 0:04:56and that's the sun.
0:04:56 > 0:05:02Then for the dawn, you've got the sun over the horizon.
0:05:02 > 0:05:06What was exciting for Pound about Chinese poetry,
0:05:06 > 0:05:11and the Chinese pictograms themselves, was that it seems as
0:05:11 > 0:05:17if the image is just there in just a few beautiful strokes of a brush.
0:05:17 > 0:05:19That's all compressed into one space.
0:05:19 > 0:05:22That is like a reply
0:05:22 > 0:05:25to the great frothing of what they saw as
0:05:25 > 0:05:28the decadent writers of the 1890s.
0:05:30 > 0:05:35Pound's life's work was an epic called The Cantos, a collection of
0:05:35 > 0:05:38poems that ranged through history
0:05:38 > 0:05:40and ancient cultures to the modern day.
0:05:40 > 0:05:43The Cantos remain among the most complex
0:05:43 > 0:05:45and challenging poems of the century.
0:05:49 > 0:05:51The Cantos were a sprawling,
0:05:51 > 0:05:56epic attempt to incorporate nothing less than virtually everything
0:05:56 > 0:06:00that had ever been written in any poetic tradition in the world.
0:06:00 > 0:06:06It was unbelievably ambitious and it was also, as a consequence,
0:06:06 > 0:06:09it was fragmentary, it was elliptical, it was collage.
0:06:09 > 0:06:13It was bits and pieces of a great many traditions,
0:06:13 > 0:06:16in a great many languages and even a great many alphabets.
0:06:20 > 0:06:25Pound read a controversial section of The Cantos for the BBC.
0:06:25 > 0:06:26In the poem,
0:06:26 > 0:06:31he attacks capitalist society for immoral money-lending or usury,
0:06:31 > 0:06:36which Pound calls "usura", an evil for which he blames Jewish bankers.
0:06:38 > 0:06:43With usura hath no man a house of good stone
0:06:43 > 0:06:46Each block cut smooth and well-fitting
0:06:46 > 0:06:49That design might cover their face,
0:06:49 > 0:06:55With usura hath no a man painted paradise on his church wall...
0:06:56 > 0:07:02Pound's ideas about global capitalism were bound up with
0:07:02 > 0:07:05anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in which he believed that
0:07:05 > 0:07:09it was Jewish people who were controlling capital and that it was
0:07:09 > 0:07:13Jewish greed, the stereotype of the Jewish usurer,
0:07:13 > 0:07:14who was the puppeteer.
0:07:16 > 0:07:20With usura the line grows thick
0:07:20 > 0:07:23With usura is no clear demarcation
0:07:23 > 0:07:27And no man can find site for his dwelling
0:07:27 > 0:07:30Stonecutter is kept from his stone
0:07:30 > 0:07:33Weaver is kept from his loom
0:07:33 > 0:07:36With usura wool comes not to market.
0:07:40 > 0:07:43CROWD CHEERS
0:07:43 > 0:07:47In his 30s, Pound's politics grew increasingly extreme.
0:07:47 > 0:07:50He believed fascism was the answer to what
0:07:50 > 0:07:52he saw as failing Western democracy.
0:07:55 > 0:07:58There's a strange idea that if you're modernist,
0:07:58 > 0:08:00you're somehow or other progressive politically,
0:08:00 > 0:08:04and that you're somehow part of a general liberal outlook.
0:08:04 > 0:08:06This isn't the case.
0:08:06 > 0:08:08Plenty of the modernists were quite keen on fascism
0:08:08 > 0:08:11and you can see a relationship,
0:08:11 > 0:08:15if you like, between the language that Pound uses about poetry,
0:08:15 > 0:08:19wanting it to be spare and hard and dry,
0:08:19 > 0:08:24and he wants the images to be powerful and working in themselves,
0:08:24 > 0:08:28and the way in which he and others worshipped Mussolini.
0:08:32 > 0:08:36After the Second World War, Pound was imprisoned for his fascist
0:08:36 > 0:08:39views, deemed anti-American.
0:08:39 > 0:08:42On his release, he returned to Italy.
0:08:43 > 0:08:47I can remember that it was pretty controversial that the BBC went
0:08:47 > 0:08:51and found him, and dug him out and interviewed him.
0:08:51 > 0:08:55Society had cast him out, the poetry world had cast him out,
0:08:55 > 0:08:58and he was this slightly prophet-like
0:08:58 > 0:09:02figure, raging in the wilderness.
0:09:02 > 0:09:06Pound's main importance and his accepted reputation
0:09:06 > 0:09:09is as sort of the midwife of modernism, really.
0:09:09 > 0:09:13And so he's a kind of high priest of early 20th century literature,
0:09:13 > 0:09:15but his own poetry is,
0:09:15 > 0:09:18I think, studied rather than read.
0:09:20 > 0:09:24Ezra Pound had set out to reshape poetry for the 20th century.
0:09:25 > 0:09:27But he had an important ally,
0:09:27 > 0:09:31a protege who would, in time, come to eclipse him.
0:09:33 > 0:09:36In 1914, TS Eliot, another American,
0:09:36 > 0:09:38was drawn to London
0:09:38 > 0:09:41and into Pound's modernist literary circle.
0:09:43 > 0:09:46It's an interesting fact that in the English tradition,
0:09:46 > 0:09:49modernist poetry emerges with two American poets working together,
0:09:49 > 0:09:53Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, both of whom had left America
0:09:53 > 0:09:58and come to Britain and were working together to create something
0:09:58 > 0:10:02that would be innovative and fresh in poetry.
0:10:03 > 0:10:07For Pound and Eliot, the idea of escaping America was something that
0:10:07 > 0:10:12they had to do in order to write in the way that they wanted to.
0:10:12 > 0:10:14Partly because the idea of exile, I think,
0:10:14 > 0:10:17appealed to both of them enormously.
0:10:17 > 0:10:21I don't think they really felt attached to the
0:10:21 > 0:10:23mass culture of America.
0:10:23 > 0:10:27In fact, both of them felt rather ambivalent towards it.
0:10:29 > 0:10:33Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis in 1888.
0:10:35 > 0:10:38He studied philosophy at Harvard, Paris and then Oxford,
0:10:38 > 0:10:42where his towering intellect set him apart from his peers.
0:10:46 > 0:10:50In London, Eliot spent his days working on foreign accounts for
0:10:50 > 0:10:55Lloyds Bank in the city, and then at publishing house Faber and Faber.
0:10:56 > 0:10:59There, he cultivated a studiedly unpoetic image.
0:11:02 > 0:11:06I think there has always been an idea that poets must be anarchic
0:11:06 > 0:11:08and dress in a flamboyant fashion,
0:11:08 > 0:11:11as, for instance, Ezra Pound did.
0:11:11 > 0:11:13Along comes TS Eliot. He wears a suit,
0:11:13 > 0:11:16he has an umbrella and a bowler hat. He is a city gent.
0:11:16 > 0:11:18And this is a huge breakthrough,
0:11:18 > 0:11:21you know, poets can look like anybody else.
0:11:21 > 0:11:25And yet, they are also writing the great poetry of the 20th century.
0:11:26 > 0:11:30Together, Pound and Eliot formed the most important partnership
0:11:30 > 0:11:35of 20th-century poetry, editing and promoting each other's work.
0:11:35 > 0:11:37Eliot's poetry reflected the turmoil
0:11:37 > 0:11:41and fragmentary state of the modern world.
0:11:41 > 0:11:44He appeared tantalisingly rarely on television,
0:11:44 > 0:11:49but he was filmed recording his poem, Four Quartets, for the BBC.
0:11:49 > 0:11:53The dove descending breaks the air
0:11:53 > 0:11:56With flame of incandescent terror
0:11:56 > 0:11:58Of which the tongues declare
0:11:58 > 0:12:02The one discharge from sin and error
0:12:03 > 0:12:07The only hope, or else despair
0:12:07 > 0:12:11Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre
0:12:11 > 0:12:15To be redeemed from fire by fire.
0:12:16 > 0:12:20POWERFUL EXPLOSIONS
0:12:22 > 0:12:25The First World War gave Eliot the impetus to write his most
0:12:25 > 0:12:29celebrated and revolutionary work, The Waste Land.
0:12:32 > 0:12:35Drawing on Pound's collage method of composition,
0:12:35 > 0:12:38the poem would come to define the emptiness
0:12:38 > 0:12:40and disillusionment of the post-war world.
0:12:41 > 0:12:45The Waste Land was modernist poetry's masterpiece.
0:12:50 > 0:12:52The Burial Of The Dead
0:12:54 > 0:12:57April is the cruellest month
0:12:57 > 0:13:00Breeding lilacs out of the dead land
0:13:00 > 0:13:04Mixing memory and desire
0:13:04 > 0:13:07Stirring dull roots with spring rain.
0:13:08 > 0:13:10Winter kept us warm
0:13:10 > 0:13:13Covering Earth in forgetful snow
0:13:13 > 0:13:17Feeding a little life with dried tubers.
0:13:19 > 0:13:22The Waste Land is probably our most famous
0:13:22 > 0:13:25artistic response to the First World War.
0:13:25 > 0:13:29It's very clearly a reaction to the
0:13:29 > 0:13:34sense of moral and spiritual and artistic breakdown.
0:13:34 > 0:13:37What is that sound high in the air
0:13:37 > 0:13:40Murmur of maternal lamentation
0:13:40 > 0:13:44Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains
0:13:44 > 0:13:46Stumbling in cracked earth
0:13:46 > 0:13:49Ringed by the flat horizon only
0:13:49 > 0:13:52What is the city over the mountains
0:13:52 > 0:13:57Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
0:13:57 > 0:13:59Falling towers
0:13:59 > 0:14:03Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
0:14:03 > 0:14:06Vienna London
0:14:06 > 0:14:07Unreal.
0:14:10 > 0:14:13It is a poem that's radically de-centred.
0:14:13 > 0:14:16There's no perspective that unites it all.
0:14:16 > 0:14:19It is a poem about incoherence.
0:14:19 > 0:14:22It is a poem about looking for origins,
0:14:22 > 0:14:25for meanings, for trying
0:14:25 > 0:14:29to find a way to start over and finding that unbelievably painful.
0:14:31 > 0:14:35It's modernist in that the fragments of memory, bits of books,
0:14:35 > 0:14:39bits of culture, bits of overheard conversations.
0:14:39 > 0:14:42He puts them all in one poem
0:14:42 > 0:14:46and somehow manages to write
0:14:46 > 0:14:48and create the 20th century.
0:14:48 > 0:14:50It was written quite early in the century,
0:14:50 > 0:14:53but it absolutely looks forward.
0:14:55 > 0:14:59Alongside references to ancient myth and popular culture,
0:14:59 > 0:15:03the poem captures glimpses of contemporary life.
0:15:03 > 0:15:06Sometimes they're just conversations, you know,
0:15:06 > 0:15:08he talks about a woman talking about her husband, going,
0:15:08 > 0:15:11"When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said - I didn't mince my words,
0:15:11 > 0:15:14"I said to her myself, 'Hurry up, please, it's time.'"
0:15:14 > 0:15:16So you've got this bar, you can hear the barman, you can
0:15:16 > 0:15:20hear the ladies talking about a soldier, about the war.
0:15:20 > 0:15:23Now Albert's coming back, Make yourself a bit smart.
0:15:23 > 0:15:26He'll want to know what you've done with that money he gave you
0:15:26 > 0:15:29To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
0:15:29 > 0:15:32You have them all out, Lil, And get a nice set,
0:15:32 > 0:15:34He said, I swear I can't bear to look at you.
0:15:34 > 0:15:38He's got this ability to make us hear what he heard,
0:15:38 > 0:15:41so he's making your ears get pricked up
0:15:41 > 0:15:44so that you are hearing more heightenedly and, actually,
0:15:44 > 0:15:49that is what poetry is, is us hearing ourselves better.
0:15:49 > 0:15:50It throws light on things.
0:15:50 > 0:15:57All art does that, it just sandblasts reality with light.
0:15:57 > 0:16:00High modernist poetry, particularly, is represented by The Waste Land,
0:16:00 > 0:16:04which is by far the most influential single poem of the 20th century,
0:16:04 > 0:16:08I think. It sort of cleared everything away, I mean,
0:16:08 > 0:16:13it liberated the next generation of poets from the past.
0:16:13 > 0:16:15It was as if after The Waste Land,
0:16:15 > 0:16:17all sorts of new things could become possible.
0:16:19 > 0:16:22The desolation of the First World War had led Eliot to
0:16:22 > 0:16:24write his masterpiece.
0:16:24 > 0:16:27But out of the horrors of the front lines
0:16:27 > 0:16:30would come a new, more direct kind of poetry.
0:16:30 > 0:16:34Faced with the unrelenting trauma of trench warfare, a group of
0:16:34 > 0:16:40soldier poets created some of the most moving poetry of the century.
0:16:40 > 0:16:43First World War poetry is just an outstanding
0:16:43 > 0:16:45movement in British verse.
0:16:45 > 0:16:48I think it's to do with this idea of,
0:16:48 > 0:16:53you know, trained literary minds on the front line.
0:16:53 > 0:16:56You know, you got these highly articulate,
0:16:56 > 0:17:00highly intelligent people who could work wonders with words,
0:17:00 > 0:17:03and suddenly they were there holding rifles
0:17:03 > 0:17:08and witnessing colossal, seemingly endless waste of human life.
0:17:08 > 0:17:11That's what got reported back to us in verse.
0:17:13 > 0:17:14The poetry of Wilfred Owen
0:17:14 > 0:17:18and Siegfried Sassoon broke new ground with its raw
0:17:18 > 0:17:21and shocking description of the horrors they witnessed.
0:17:24 > 0:17:28"All a poet can do today is warn", said Wilfred Owen, and,
0:17:28 > 0:17:31if you like, Owen and Sassoon are protest poets.
0:17:31 > 0:17:34They are telling people what it's like at the front
0:17:34 > 0:17:38and that nobody should have to put up with these conditions.
0:17:38 > 0:17:42SHELLING AND SHOUTING
0:17:44 > 0:17:49Fighting alongside Sassoon in France was Robert Graves,
0:17:49 > 0:17:53captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and budding poet.
0:17:53 > 0:17:56The war had a profound effect on Graves' poetry,
0:17:56 > 0:17:58and in 1916 his first
0:17:58 > 0:18:00volume of verse was published.
0:18:02 > 0:18:05That same year, his name appeared in print again,
0:18:05 > 0:18:09this time in a national newspaper, listed among the dead.
0:18:12 > 0:18:17Many years later, Graves reflected on his own death for the BBC.
0:18:19 > 0:18:21I was 22 hours dead.
0:18:21 > 0:18:24It was on my 21st birthday and that's where I started again,
0:18:24 > 0:18:28you see, I'm now only 53 instead of 74.
0:18:28 > 0:18:30You were reported dead?
0:18:30 > 0:18:34They closed my bank account, they wrote to my parents
0:18:34 > 0:18:37and said how heroic I was, they did everything.
0:18:37 > 0:18:42They stole all my kit and I appealed for it but I never got it back.
0:18:47 > 0:18:48As the war ended,
0:18:48 > 0:18:52Graves wrote a poem recalling the jubilation of Armistice Day.
0:18:54 > 0:18:55Armistice Day, 1918.
0:18:57 > 0:19:01What's all this hubbub and yelling, Commotion and scamper of feet
0:19:01 > 0:19:04With ear-splitting clatter of kettles and cans
0:19:04 > 0:19:07Wild laughter down Mafeking Street?
0:19:07 > 0:19:09O, those are the kids whom we fought for
0:19:09 > 0:19:11You might think they'd been scoffing our rum
0:19:11 > 0:19:14With flags that they waved When we marched off to war
0:19:14 > 0:19:16In the rapture of bugle and drum.
0:19:18 > 0:19:21But his anger at the futility of the war meant that celebrations
0:19:21 > 0:19:23were of little comfort.
0:19:24 > 0:19:26When the days of rejoicing are over
0:19:26 > 0:19:29And the flags are stowed safely away
0:19:29 > 0:19:32They will dream of another wild "War To End Wars"
0:19:32 > 0:19:35And another wild Armistice Day
0:19:35 > 0:19:37But the boys who were killed in the trenches
0:19:37 > 0:19:40Who fought with no rage and no rant
0:19:40 > 0:19:43We left them stretched out on their pallets of mud
0:19:43 > 0:19:45Low down with the worm and the ant.
0:19:50 > 0:19:541920S SWING MUSIC
0:19:59 > 0:20:02In the 1920s, a weary post-war Britain was keen to put
0:20:02 > 0:20:06the misery of the trenches behind it.
0:20:06 > 0:20:08But perhaps it wasn't quite ready for a poet
0:20:08 > 0:20:10who was about to make a dramatic entrance.
0:20:13 > 0:20:16The eccentric, aristocratic Edith Sitwell.
0:20:18 > 0:20:20On the 12th June, 1923,
0:20:20 > 0:20:23Sitwell performed her poem, Facade,
0:20:23 > 0:20:25in London's Aeolian Hall.
0:20:26 > 0:20:28Sit and sleep
0:20:28 > 0:20:30Periwigged as William and Mary...
0:20:30 > 0:20:33She read her poems from behind a painted curtain.
0:20:33 > 0:20:36This version was designed by artist John Piper.
0:20:36 > 0:20:39..the reynard-coloured sun and I sigh
0:20:39 > 0:20:41Oh, the nursery-maid Meg
0:20:41 > 0:20:43With a leg like a peg
0:20:43 > 0:20:45Chased the feathered dreams like hens,
0:20:45 > 0:20:46And when they laid an egg...
0:20:46 > 0:20:50Music by composer William Walton accompanied her words.
0:20:50 > 0:20:53..the serene King James would steer.
0:20:53 > 0:20:57Her experimental blend of words and music took poetic convention
0:20:57 > 0:20:58and gave it a good shake.
0:20:58 > 0:21:02..picked it up as spoil to boil for nursery tea, said the mourners.
0:21:02 > 0:21:06The poems are rich in quickfire wordplay, free association
0:21:06 > 0:21:08and modernist jazz rhythms.
0:21:08 > 0:21:11And whistling down the feathered rain Old Noah goes again.
0:21:11 > 0:21:14Facade was quite an extraordinary undertaking.
0:21:15 > 0:21:20It had this great kind of wheezing, arrhythmic poetry,
0:21:20 > 0:21:25and then the performance element, with Sitwell behind a screen
0:21:25 > 0:21:28and declaiming these words through a megaphone,
0:21:28 > 0:21:32so her voice ringing around the performance space.
0:21:32 > 0:21:36It was, I think, quite alienating for members of the audience.
0:21:37 > 0:21:39Puzzled theatre-goers thought they were
0:21:39 > 0:21:42the victims of an elaborate hoax and, overnight,
0:21:42 > 0:21:46Sitwell became the most talked about poet in England.
0:21:49 > 0:21:52But Sitwell was serious about revitalising
0:21:52 > 0:21:57poetry for the modern age, as she explained later on BBC radio.
0:22:01 > 0:22:04'At that time, a change in the direction,
0:22:04 > 0:22:07'imagery and rhythms in poetry was taking place,
0:22:07 > 0:22:12'owing to the rhythmical flaccidity the verbal deadness, the dead
0:22:12 > 0:22:17'and expected patterns of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.
0:22:17 > 0:22:20'It was therefore necessary to find rhythmical expression
0:22:20 > 0:22:23'for the heightened speed of our time.'
0:22:25 > 0:22:27Sitwell was a poetic innovator,
0:22:27 > 0:22:31but it was her strikingly eccentric looks that drew the most attention.
0:22:31 > 0:22:34At six foot tall and draped in Tudor gowns
0:22:34 > 0:22:37and jewels, she cut quite a dash.
0:22:38 > 0:22:43Everything about Sitwell was a performance - the clothes...
0:22:43 > 0:22:45and she knew she looked weird,
0:22:45 > 0:22:49and so her decision was to look even weirder and to make
0:22:49 > 0:22:52no allowances, people had to know
0:22:52 > 0:22:55that she has to be a poet - look at her!
0:22:57 > 0:23:02In 1959, she was interviewed by John Freeman for the celebrated
0:23:02 > 0:23:04BBC series, Face to Face.
0:23:07 > 0:23:11Dame Edith, the world outside your own circle of friends
0:23:11 > 0:23:14tends to think of you as remote, eccentric,
0:23:14 > 0:23:17forbidding and rather dangerous.
0:23:17 > 0:23:19Now, perhaps that's a false impression, and I want you
0:23:19 > 0:23:23to tell me, face to face, what sort of person you really are.
0:23:23 > 0:23:28Now, first, your appearance, why did you devise your personal
0:23:28 > 0:23:30style of clothes that you wear so often?
0:23:30 > 0:23:34Well, because I can't wear fashionable clothes.
0:23:34 > 0:23:40You see, I'm a throwback to remote ancestors of mine and I really
0:23:40 > 0:23:43would look so extraordinary if I wore coats and skirts.
0:23:43 > 0:23:45I would be followed for miles
0:23:45 > 0:23:48and people would doubt the existence of the Almighty,
0:23:48 > 0:23:50if they saw me looking like that.
0:23:50 > 0:23:52There was the dressing-up aspect,
0:23:52 > 0:23:57but there was also the idea that she is, as we think of her,
0:23:57 > 0:24:01a series of modernist lines and angles,
0:24:01 > 0:24:03she somehow transcends the flesh,
0:24:03 > 0:24:06which she didn't really have much of,
0:24:06 > 0:24:09and becomes lines and bones
0:24:09 > 0:24:13and costume jewellery and turbans and rings.
0:24:13 > 0:24:16She is a confection, a construction.
0:24:16 > 0:24:17She's like something that's been built,
0:24:17 > 0:24:19rather than something that was lived.
0:24:19 > 0:24:23You asked me just now, you said that people's idea of me
0:24:23 > 0:24:28was that I was eccentric and savage?
0:24:28 > 0:24:30Forbidding and dangerous.
0:24:30 > 0:24:34Well, I don't think I'm forbidding, excepting when I absolutely refuse
0:24:34 > 0:24:37to be taught my job by people who know nothing about it.
0:24:37 > 0:24:39I have devoted my whole life to writing poetry,
0:24:39 > 0:24:41which is to me a form of religion.
0:24:41 > 0:24:45And I'm not going to be taught by people who know nothing about it.
0:24:45 > 0:24:47I think it's very impertinent.
0:24:47 > 0:24:49I mean, I don't teach plumbers how to plumb.
0:24:50 > 0:24:53Despite dressing like a historical relic,
0:24:53 > 0:24:56with her poetry, Sitwell was ahead of her time.
0:25:14 > 0:25:19There is a genealogical relationship between Sitwell and rap,
0:25:19 > 0:25:23because her poetry was popular in recorded form,
0:25:23 > 0:25:25you bought a Sitwell LP.
0:25:25 > 0:25:27Her work should always be listened to -
0:25:27 > 0:25:31don't read it if you don't have to. Hear her perform it,
0:25:31 > 0:25:34because the music of it is in there in her voice.
0:25:55 > 0:25:58The 1930s took Britain into an age of political tension,
0:25:58 > 0:26:02economic crisis and high unemployment.
0:26:05 > 0:26:08In Europe, political leaders were squaring up
0:26:08 > 0:26:11for another devastating war.
0:26:13 > 0:26:17From this uncertainty, a young writer emerged, convinced that
0:26:17 > 0:26:20poetry should have an engaged, political voice.
0:26:23 > 0:26:27Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, the son of a doctor.
0:26:29 > 0:26:33He won a scholarship to Oxford University, where he held sway
0:26:33 > 0:26:38over a group of idealistic young writers with strong left-wing views.
0:26:38 > 0:26:42They believed their duty as poets was to inspire political change.
0:26:45 > 0:26:48In his 20s, Auden travelled to Berlin,
0:26:48 > 0:26:50to bear witness and report back.
0:26:52 > 0:26:54There, he discovered and wrote about
0:26:54 > 0:26:56a Europe on the brink of catastrophe.
0:27:01 > 0:27:03If you read Auden's poetry of the '30s,
0:27:03 > 0:27:05there is a kind of urgency to it.
0:27:05 > 0:27:08He wrote about demagogues, dangerous leaders,
0:27:08 > 0:27:10such as you were seeing in Hitler and Mussolini.
0:27:10 > 0:27:15He is engaged and politicised and at the same time he's a very individual
0:27:15 > 0:27:20voice, fantastically mature and precocious from the start.
0:27:22 > 0:27:25Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
0:27:25 > 0:27:29And the poetry he invented was easy to understand.
0:27:29 > 0:27:33He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
0:27:33 > 0:27:36Was greatly interested in armies and fleets.
0:27:36 > 0:27:41When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter
0:27:41 > 0:27:46And when he cried, the little children died in the streets.
0:27:49 > 0:27:54Hungry to experience conflict, in 1937, Auden volunteered
0:27:54 > 0:27:59for the Republican forces fighting Fascism in the Spanish Civil War.
0:28:01 > 0:28:03My first guest, WH Auden.
0:28:03 > 0:28:05APPLAUSE
0:28:05 > 0:28:09But in later life, Auden would come to reject his youthful belief
0:28:09 > 0:28:12in the power of poetry to inspire change.
0:28:12 > 0:28:16He was interviewed by Michael Parkinson in 1972.
0:28:16 > 0:28:22You seemed to deny the thing that a lot of people suspect a poet hopes
0:28:22 > 0:28:26he could be, which is a kind of social, political reformer.
0:28:26 > 0:28:31No, that they can't be. At least, not in the West.
0:28:31 > 0:28:35By all means, let a writer or poet,
0:28:35 > 0:28:41if he feels like it, write what we now call an "engage" poem.
0:28:41 > 0:28:44But he must not imagine that by doing so
0:28:44 > 0:28:48he will change the course of history.
0:28:48 > 0:28:51Nothing I wrote postponed the war for five seconds,
0:28:51 > 0:28:53or prevented one Jew being gassed.
0:28:53 > 0:28:58- Yes.- Now, of course one can do them, but one mustn't imagine that
0:28:58 > 0:29:01one can change the course of history by doing it.
0:29:01 > 0:29:06I mean, if one asks what the function of not just literature
0:29:06 > 0:29:12but of all the arts is, first of all I'd say what Dr Johnson said.
0:29:12 > 0:29:17The aim of writing is to enable readers a little better
0:29:17 > 0:29:20to enjoy life, or a little better to endure it.
0:29:23 > 0:29:27Auden's verse became less urgent and more reflective.
0:29:28 > 0:29:31The BBC visited him at his summer home in Austria.
0:29:34 > 0:29:36As I walked out one evening,
0:29:36 > 0:29:38Walking down Bristol Street,
0:29:38 > 0:29:40The crowds upon the pavement
0:29:40 > 0:29:43Were fields of harvest wheat.
0:29:43 > 0:29:45And down by the brimming river,
0:29:45 > 0:29:46I heard a lover sing
0:29:46 > 0:29:49Under the arch of a railway,
0:29:49 > 0:29:51"Love has no ending.
0:29:51 > 0:29:53"I'll love you till the ocean
0:29:53 > 0:29:55"Is folded and hung up to dry
0:29:55 > 0:29:58"And the seven stars go squawking
0:29:58 > 0:29:59"Like geese about the sky."
0:30:01 > 0:30:05The reason that he's so important
0:30:05 > 0:30:09is to do with the incredible technical versatility
0:30:09 > 0:30:11and freedom of his poetry.
0:30:11 > 0:30:16It was often said that WH Auden had this peculiar gift of making
0:30:16 > 0:30:19ordinary words sound terribly poetic
0:30:19 > 0:30:23by putting them into echoing patterns of sounds.
0:30:23 > 0:30:27It's as if the experiments of people like Pound and Eliot
0:30:27 > 0:30:32have freed him to go back to the roots of what English poetry can do.
0:30:33 > 0:30:36"Stand, stand at the window
0:30:36 > 0:30:38"As the tears scald and start,
0:30:38 > 0:30:40"You must love your crooked neighbour
0:30:40 > 0:30:43"With your crooked heart."
0:30:43 > 0:30:45It was late, late in the evening,
0:30:45 > 0:30:47The lovers, they were gone,
0:30:47 > 0:30:50The clocks had ceased their chiming
0:30:50 > 0:30:52And the deep river ran on.
0:30:55 > 0:31:02On the whole, I think one's rather proud to serve a medium which,
0:31:02 > 0:31:06in our time, when the public has learnt to consume
0:31:06 > 0:31:10almost everything like cans of soup,
0:31:10 > 0:31:13poetry is somehow or other remained something you either have
0:31:13 > 0:31:14to read it or leave it alone.
0:31:14 > 0:31:18It's rather nice, I think, that one has this medium.
0:31:18 > 0:31:21At any rate, as few as one's readers may be,
0:31:21 > 0:31:24at any rate, one knows they can read.
0:31:32 > 0:31:35If Auden came to distance himself from politics,
0:31:35 > 0:31:40one fellow poet never wavered in his political commitment.
0:31:42 > 0:31:45Hugh MacDiarmid was born Christopher Grieve
0:31:45 > 0:31:49in the Scottish Borders in 1892.
0:31:49 > 0:31:52Fiercely patriotic, MacDiarmid was a member of both
0:31:52 > 0:31:55the Communist Party and the Scottish National Party.
0:31:55 > 0:31:59He also listed Anglophobia as one of his hobbies.
0:32:02 > 0:32:04I am a Scotsman, as you can hear.
0:32:04 > 0:32:09In the Declaration of Arbroath, way back in 1320,
0:32:09 > 0:32:12perhaps the greatest democratic pledge of all time,
0:32:12 > 0:32:15my people, the Scottish people, swore
0:32:15 > 0:32:18that as long as a hundred of them remained alive,
0:32:18 > 0:32:22they would never allow themselves to be dominated by the English.
0:32:22 > 0:32:24APPLAUSE
0:32:27 > 0:32:32My people have done little but betray that oath ever since.
0:32:33 > 0:32:38Some poets get their engine out of a kind of rebellion against the world.
0:32:38 > 0:32:40He was deliberately very provocative,
0:32:40 > 0:32:44he thought that was part of his duty, to be provocative.
0:32:44 > 0:32:48MacDiarmid felt that Scotland had lost itself,
0:32:48 > 0:32:52and that its identity could be reclaimed through poetry.
0:32:52 > 0:32:54But for him, the experience of being Scottish
0:32:54 > 0:32:58could not be properly expressed in English.
0:32:58 > 0:33:03He formulated an ambitious plan to create a new Scots language.
0:33:03 > 0:33:08I myself was convinced that there was nothing that the Scottish mind
0:33:08 > 0:33:12could conceive that couldn't be better expressed in Scots
0:33:12 > 0:33:15than in English, or any other language.
0:33:15 > 0:33:21There's a whole range of feelings, of combinations of ideas,
0:33:21 > 0:33:25all related to the specific character of Scottish landscape
0:33:25 > 0:33:28and to the history of the Scottish race
0:33:28 > 0:33:32in relation to their landscape, which is embodied in the vocabulary of
0:33:32 > 0:33:38Scots and which is very little used in the last couple of hundred years.
0:33:38 > 0:33:41He passionately wanted to write Scots
0:33:41 > 0:33:43and he wanted that not to be a backward-looking thing.
0:33:43 > 0:33:49He wanted to fuse modernism and language that was often antique.
0:33:49 > 0:33:55He didn't write dialect, he made a new, plastic language.
0:33:55 > 0:33:57He was actually before his time,
0:33:57 > 0:34:01he was before his time while using this old language
0:34:01 > 0:34:04in this amazing way.
0:34:04 > 0:34:08In 1978, MacDiarmid read his most famous work,
0:34:08 > 0:34:10A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle,
0:34:10 > 0:34:11for the BBC.
0:34:13 > 0:34:14O, Scotland is
0:34:14 > 0:34:15THE barren fig.
0:34:15 > 0:34:17Up, carles, up
0:34:17 > 0:34:18And roond it jig.
0:34:18 > 0:34:20Auld Moses took
0:34:20 > 0:34:21A dry stick and
0:34:21 > 0:34:22Instantly it
0:34:22 > 0:34:23Floo'ered in his hand.
0:34:23 > 0:34:25Pu' Scotland up,
0:34:25 > 0:34:26And wha can say
0:34:26 > 0:34:27It winna bud
0:34:27 > 0:34:28And blossom tae.
0:34:28 > 0:34:29A miracle's
0:34:29 > 0:34:30Oor only chance,
0:34:30 > 0:34:32Up, carles, up
0:34:32 > 0:34:33And let us dance!
0:34:36 > 0:34:39The poem is a long monologue in which a drunk man lying on
0:34:39 > 0:34:43a hillside contemplates Scotland's position in the world,
0:34:43 > 0:34:45and rages against its seeming passivity
0:34:45 > 0:34:48in the face of English domination.
0:34:50 > 0:34:54Inside this flimsy story of somebody lying drunk in a ditch,
0:34:54 > 0:34:57all this stuff goes through his head,
0:34:57 > 0:34:59and it's ancient, it's modern
0:34:59 > 0:35:06and it's very angry and it's very anti British Empire.
0:35:06 > 0:35:09It's one of the most brilliant and game-changing poems
0:35:09 > 0:35:11that have ever existed.
0:35:13 > 0:35:17MacDiarmid helped spark a renaissance in Scottish literature.
0:35:17 > 0:35:21But in later life, he felt the battle was far from over.
0:35:22 > 0:35:23It's very questionable,
0:35:23 > 0:35:29whether the whole business that I started wasn't too late.
0:35:32 > 0:35:37I was hopeful when England lost its Empire.
0:35:38 > 0:35:43It might not be, but England's fighting back, of course,
0:35:43 > 0:35:46and still thinks it is a world influence
0:35:46 > 0:35:48and a world mission and so on.
0:35:48 > 0:35:51Let's get rid of England, somehow or another. Completely.
0:35:51 > 0:35:53- JOAN BAKEWELL:- You're still hopeful?
0:35:53 > 0:35:55- Hmm? - You're still hopeful?
0:35:55 > 0:35:56I'm still hopeful, yes.
0:36:01 > 0:36:03In the suburbs of North London,
0:36:03 > 0:36:07another poet was planning her own quiet rebellion.
0:36:08 > 0:36:13Stevie Smith lived with her spinster aunt and worked as a secretary.
0:36:16 > 0:36:19But behind the curtains of her suburban home,
0:36:19 > 0:36:22she created poetry that defied all expectation.
0:36:25 > 0:36:29Stevie Smith is a rebel, complete.
0:36:29 > 0:36:32She's going to write poetry
0:36:32 > 0:36:34and she's going to mock the way we write poetry.
0:36:35 > 0:36:40She was actually taking the kind of assumptions
0:36:40 > 0:36:43we make about poetry and what's important and how poetry works,
0:36:43 > 0:36:48and she was just refusing to even try.
0:36:50 > 0:36:54Her poetry was both jaunty and unsettling,
0:36:54 > 0:36:58apparently naive, yet preoccupied with death.
0:36:58 > 0:37:02She is seen here in rare BBC footage from 1965.
0:37:04 > 0:37:05In my poems,
0:37:05 > 0:37:08the dead often speak and the ghosts come back.
0:37:08 > 0:37:11Here is a poor man who got drowned.
0:37:11 > 0:37:13His friends thought he was waving to them from the sea,
0:37:13 > 0:37:15but really, he was drowning.
0:37:17 > 0:37:19Nobody heard him, the dead man,
0:37:19 > 0:37:21But still he lay moaning:
0:37:21 > 0:37:24"I was much further out than you thought
0:37:24 > 0:37:26"And not waving, but drowning."
0:37:28 > 0:37:30Poor chap, he always loved larking
0:37:30 > 0:37:31And now he's dead
0:37:31 > 0:37:35It must have been too cold for him, his heart gave way,
0:37:35 > 0:37:36They said.
0:37:36 > 0:37:41"Oh, no, no, no, it was too cold always",
0:37:41 > 0:37:44(Still the dead one lay moaning)
0:37:44 > 0:37:48"I was much too far out all my life
0:37:48 > 0:37:51"And not waving, but drowning."
0:37:54 > 0:37:57Beyond the apparent simplicity of her poetry
0:37:57 > 0:38:00lay a carefully crafted and innovative style.
0:38:03 > 0:38:05The poetry that was written by gentlemen,
0:38:05 > 0:38:08for gentlemen to read in the years when everybody learnt Latin
0:38:08 > 0:38:11and Greek at school is over, it's gone.
0:38:11 > 0:38:15You want rhyme - bugger you, you're not getting a rhyme.
0:38:15 > 0:38:19You want a story - I can't even be bothered telling you a story.
0:38:19 > 0:38:24She's going to write in chip-chop rhythm, she's going to use
0:38:24 > 0:38:29extraordinary, limited vocabulary, high level of repetition.
0:38:29 > 0:38:33And it works in a minimalist way.
0:38:34 > 0:38:36People in rather odd circumstances are what
0:38:36 > 0:38:40most of my poems are about, mixed up with arguments,
0:38:40 > 0:38:43religious difficulties, ghosts, deaths,
0:38:43 > 0:38:49fairy stories and a general feeling of guilt for not writing more.
0:38:49 > 0:38:54Stevie Smith cultivated a certain view of herself as
0:38:54 > 0:38:59the hare-eyed spinster of Palmer's Green,
0:38:59 > 0:39:03producing these, in a way, wilfully eccentric poems,
0:39:03 > 0:39:08oddly naive little works with these rather childlike drawings
0:39:08 > 0:39:11appended to them, and yet, I think,
0:39:11 > 0:39:16despite that sort of atmosphere of cultivated eccentricity,
0:39:16 > 0:39:21there is something very hard within her and something very dark too,
0:39:21 > 0:39:25that sort of destructive element there is inside her work,
0:39:25 > 0:39:28it's so raw and so powerful.
0:39:29 > 0:39:33The general feeling about love in the poems is nervous.
0:39:33 > 0:39:35Like this poor little child who has been turned
0:39:35 > 0:39:40to stone in his mother's lap. She clutches him and cries,
0:39:40 > 0:39:46"I'll have your heart, if not by gift, my knife shall carve it out.
0:39:46 > 0:39:48"I'll have your heart, your life."
0:39:50 > 0:39:54It's precisely the darkness that reminds you that actually,
0:39:54 > 0:39:58what you're mistaking for whimsy is this minimalism.
0:39:58 > 0:40:02It's asking you to back off and take another look.
0:40:07 > 0:40:12The onward march of the suburbs in the interwar years provided
0:40:12 > 0:40:16inspiration for a poet with an altogether more benign vision.
0:40:18 > 0:40:22Miss J Hunter Dunn, Miss J Hunter Dunn,
0:40:22 > 0:40:26Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun,
0:40:26 > 0:40:30What strenuous singles we played after tea,
0:40:30 > 0:40:33We in the tournament - you against me!
0:40:33 > 0:40:37Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! Weakness of joy
0:40:37 > 0:40:40The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
0:40:40 > 0:40:43With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
0:40:43 > 0:40:47I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.
0:40:48 > 0:40:54John Betjeman was born in 1906, the son of a luxury goods tradesman.
0:40:54 > 0:40:56As a child, Betjeman was painfully aware
0:40:56 > 0:41:00of his family's low status in Britain's class system,
0:41:00 > 0:41:04a preoccupation that would later come to define his poetry.
0:41:04 > 0:41:08Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,
0:41:08 > 0:41:12Above us the intimate roof of the car,
0:41:12 > 0:41:16And here on my right is the girl of my choice,
0:41:16 > 0:41:19With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.
0:41:19 > 0:41:23And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,
0:41:23 > 0:41:27And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
0:41:27 > 0:41:30We sat in the car park till twenty to one
0:41:30 > 0:41:35And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.
0:41:37 > 0:41:41Betjeman's verse saw a return to elements of poetry
0:41:41 > 0:41:43discarded by the modernists -
0:41:43 > 0:41:49regular rhyme, familiar rhythm and a wry sense of humour.
0:41:50 > 0:41:53A passionate lover of buildings,
0:41:53 > 0:41:56he championed Victorian architecture at a time when historic towns
0:41:56 > 0:42:00and cities were being threatened by modern ideas of progress.
0:42:03 > 0:42:06He became a poet of a passing England,
0:42:06 > 0:42:10an England that was being subsumed
0:42:10 > 0:42:13under the concrete of new developments.
0:42:13 > 0:42:16And there is something in the work like that too,
0:42:16 > 0:42:19it's attached to rhyme and rhythm
0:42:19 > 0:42:25in an attractively conventional, consoling, comforting way.
0:42:25 > 0:42:29So just as he defended the Victorian architrave,
0:42:29 > 0:42:33he's there, defending certain kinds of end stopped rhyme
0:42:33 > 0:42:36when other people are rejecting it or seeing that
0:42:36 > 0:42:40as the equivalent having too many knick-knacks over your fireplace.
0:42:42 > 0:42:45He slightly strikes you as a fuddy-duddy,
0:42:45 > 0:42:49but actually, he embraced TV, modern media,
0:42:49 > 0:42:51newspaper, radio,
0:42:51 > 0:42:54he wanted to run with that,
0:42:54 > 0:42:55and I think he understood how
0:42:55 > 0:43:01poetry could work with the general reader and the general public.
0:43:01 > 0:43:04Well, if you mention the word "poet" to most people,
0:43:04 > 0:43:06they'll reach for the sleeping tablets.
0:43:06 > 0:43:09Well, there's one poet who manages to bridge that hitherto unbridgeable
0:43:09 > 0:43:14gap between the public and his art, he is Sir John Betjeman.
0:43:14 > 0:43:16APPLAUSE
0:43:17 > 0:43:20Betjeman found a natural home in front of the camera
0:43:20 > 0:43:23and was a regular guest on prime time chat shows.
0:43:31 > 0:43:33What is the function of a poet, Sir John?
0:43:33 > 0:43:40I think primarily, it's to say things simply, shortly,
0:43:40 > 0:43:43rhythmically, memorably.
0:43:43 > 0:43:46And it's luck, it's inspiration,
0:43:46 > 0:43:47there is such a thing as inspiration.
0:43:47 > 0:43:51And when you tell me that thing, if it's true,
0:43:51 > 0:43:55that my poetry is read by people who don't ordinarily
0:43:55 > 0:43:59read poetry, that's all I could want to happen.
0:43:59 > 0:44:04Betjeman could speak to a couple of million people through
0:44:04 > 0:44:10one transmission, and I take my hat off to anybody who can take poetry
0:44:10 > 0:44:14out to the general public, cos the general public don't always want it.
0:44:14 > 0:44:18And he forged a link and a bond with them.
0:44:18 > 0:44:20Some of that was through his personality,
0:44:20 > 0:44:23but a lot of it was through his work.
0:44:23 > 0:44:26I am a young executive,
0:44:26 > 0:44:28No cuffs than mine are cleaner.
0:44:28 > 0:44:30I own an oblong briefcase
0:44:30 > 0:44:32And I use the firm's Cortina.
0:44:32 > 0:44:36In every roadside hostelry from here to Burgess Hill
0:44:36 > 0:44:39Les maitres d'hotel all know me well and let me sign the bill.
0:44:39 > 0:44:41You ask me what it is I do.
0:44:41 > 0:44:43Well, actually, you know,
0:44:43 > 0:44:47I'm partly a liaison man and partly PRO.
0:44:47 > 0:44:50Essentially, I integrate the current export drive
0:44:50 > 0:44:54And basically, I'm viable from ten o'clock till five.
0:44:54 > 0:44:58Those poems, they're not facile. They're not just party tricks.
0:44:58 > 0:45:01He's got a good eye for social conventions
0:45:01 > 0:45:05and a tongue for undermining things when he chooses.
0:45:05 > 0:45:08I do some mild developing.
0:45:08 > 0:45:10The sort of place I need
0:45:10 > 0:45:14Is a quiet country market town that's rather run to seed.
0:45:14 > 0:45:17A luncheon and a drink or two, a little savoir faire,
0:45:17 > 0:45:21I nobble half the council, the banks, the clerk, the Mayor.
0:45:21 > 0:45:24And if some preservationist attempts to interfere
0:45:24 > 0:45:28A 'dangerous structure' notice from the Borough Engineer
0:45:28 > 0:45:32Will settle any buildings that are standing in our way -
0:45:32 > 0:45:36The modern style, sir, with respect, has really come to stay.
0:45:36 > 0:45:38That's beautiful.
0:45:38 > 0:45:40APPLAUSE
0:45:50 > 0:45:53Far from the television studios of the capital,
0:45:53 > 0:45:57another, more solitary poet was waging his own war
0:45:57 > 0:45:59against the decline of a precious culture.
0:46:01 > 0:46:07RS Thomas was a Welsh Anglican priest and a staunch nationalist.
0:46:07 > 0:46:10Written in his parish in the remote hills of North Wales,
0:46:10 > 0:46:14his poems are deeply rooted in rural life.
0:46:14 > 0:46:17But far from romanticizing the countryside,
0:46:17 > 0:46:21Thomas's work evoked the harshness of the Welsh landscape and
0:46:21 > 0:46:26the struggles of isolated farming communities in the mid 20th century.
0:46:29 > 0:46:31Too far for you to see
0:46:31 > 0:46:35The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot
0:46:35 > 0:46:39Gnawing the skin from the small bones,
0:46:39 > 0:46:42The sheep are grazing at Bwlch-y-Fedwen,
0:46:42 > 0:46:46Arranged romantically in the usual manner
0:46:46 > 0:46:49On a bleak background of bald stone.
0:46:52 > 0:46:54Too far for you to see
0:46:54 > 0:46:58The moss and the mould on the cold chimneys,
0:46:58 > 0:47:03The nettles growing through the cracked doors,
0:47:03 > 0:47:06The houses stand empty at Nant-yr-Eira,
0:47:07 > 0:47:11There are holes in the roofs that are thatched with sunlight
0:47:11 > 0:47:14And the fields are reverting to the bare moor.
0:47:17 > 0:47:21Though he shunned the media, Thomas agreed to make two films
0:47:21 > 0:47:25with the BBC about his life and work in the Welsh hills.
0:47:26 > 0:47:31I came out of a kind of bourgeois environment.
0:47:31 > 0:47:36And, er, this muck and blood and hardness
0:47:36 > 0:47:43and the rain and the spittle and phlegm of farm life
0:47:43 > 0:47:46was, of course, a shock to begin with, and one felt
0:47:46 > 0:47:51that this was something not quite part of the order of things,
0:47:51 > 0:47:58but as one experienced it and saw how definitely part of their lives
0:47:58 > 0:48:03this was, sympathy grew in oneself,
0:48:03 > 0:48:06and compassion and admiration.
0:48:08 > 0:48:13I did find that the strongly charactered hardness of these,
0:48:13 > 0:48:17er, border people really did make an impression on me,
0:48:17 > 0:48:21as far as poetic material was concerned.
0:48:21 > 0:48:23CHURCH BELL TOLLS
0:48:28 > 0:48:31For Thomas, language and imagery connected his work
0:48:31 > 0:48:34as priest and as poet.
0:48:35 > 0:48:39Poetry is religion, religion is poetry.
0:48:39 > 0:48:43The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet.
0:48:45 > 0:48:50The New Testament is metaphor. The Resurrection is metaphor.
0:48:52 > 0:48:56When I preach poetry, I am preaching Christianity.
0:48:56 > 0:48:59And when one discusses Christianity,
0:48:59 > 0:49:05one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects.
0:49:05 > 0:49:10The core, the core of both are imagination, as far as I'm concerned.
0:49:10 > 0:49:14He couldn't bear literalism, he loved the fact that poetry
0:49:14 > 0:49:21and religion provided for each other very ready explanations.
0:49:21 > 0:49:28He could link in his imagination the idea of the story
0:49:28 > 0:49:32of the Resurrection with the word metaphor,
0:49:32 > 0:49:37that is how he wrote his sermons, how he thought about God,
0:49:37 > 0:49:39how he wrote his poems,
0:49:39 > 0:49:43and I believe it all to be one whole way of being.
0:49:43 > 0:49:45HE SPEAKS WELSH
0:49:45 > 0:49:49Despite his isolated existence,
0:49:49 > 0:49:53Thomas was passionately committed to contemporary causes.
0:49:53 > 0:49:55He was well-known for his campaigning -
0:49:55 > 0:49:59for nuclear disarmament and for wider use of the Welsh language.
0:50:01 > 0:50:05'As the arson campaign enters its 14th week, police in Wales
0:50:05 > 0:50:10'have warned that all homes owned by English people are now at risk.'
0:50:10 > 0:50:11Most controversially,
0:50:11 > 0:50:15when a militant Welsh nationalist group burnt down English-owned
0:50:15 > 0:50:19holiday homes in the 1970s, Thomas was moved to defend them.
0:50:36 > 0:50:39Where can I go, then, from the smell
0:50:39 > 0:50:43Of decay, from the putrefying of a dead nation?
0:50:46 > 0:50:48I have walked the shore
0:50:48 > 0:50:49For an hour and seen the English
0:50:49 > 0:50:51Scavenging among the remains
0:50:51 > 0:50:55Of our culture, covering the sand
0:50:55 > 0:50:58Like the tide and, with the roughness
0:50:58 > 0:51:00Of the tide, elbowing our language
0:51:00 > 0:51:05Into the grave that we have dug for it.
0:51:16 > 0:51:20Born only a year after the reclusive RS Thomas was another
0:51:20 > 0:51:24Welsh poet, but one who lived and died squarely in the limelight.
0:51:26 > 0:51:29Dylan Thomas, the son of an English teacher,
0:51:29 > 0:51:32was born in Swansea in 1914.
0:51:32 > 0:51:35He developed an early love for words and their sounds.
0:51:37 > 0:51:40He was a prodigal poet, writing much of his most famous work
0:51:40 > 0:51:43while still living with his parents.
0:51:44 > 0:51:48His first collection was published in 1934, and soon after,
0:51:48 > 0:51:50he began broadcasting for the BBC.
0:51:52 > 0:51:56In 1949, he recorded a poem written to mark his 30th birthday.
0:51:58 > 0:52:03Here is a poem called Poem in October.
0:52:03 > 0:52:06It was my thirtieth year to heaven
0:52:06 > 0:52:09Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
0:52:09 > 0:52:11And the mussel pooled and the heron
0:52:11 > 0:52:13Priested shore
0:52:13 > 0:52:15The morning beckon
0:52:15 > 0:52:18With water praying and call of seagull and rook
0:52:18 > 0:52:22And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
0:52:22 > 0:52:24Myself to set foot
0:52:24 > 0:52:25That second
0:52:25 > 0:52:29In the still sleeping town and set forth.
0:52:32 > 0:52:35I can remember the sound of Dylan Thomas's voice
0:52:35 > 0:52:39coming out of the radio, it was very deep and fruity, and also
0:52:39 > 0:52:43this accent that you could almost feel like you could
0:52:43 > 0:52:48touch it and get into it, so when he said things like "all shining",
0:52:48 > 0:52:54and if you had an old radio, it would rattle a bit as well.
0:52:54 > 0:52:56In a way, the BBC made him,
0:52:56 > 0:52:59they gave him his voice and he gave his voice to the radio.
0:53:02 > 0:53:06Thomas's writing was precocious and original, full of an exuberance
0:53:06 > 0:53:10for words, at odds with the sparse poetry of his contemporaries.
0:53:11 > 0:53:13Dylan Thomas is a poet who isn't trying
0:53:13 > 0:53:16to join the classical tradition,
0:53:16 > 0:53:18he just breaks it by bursting out,
0:53:18 > 0:53:24I suppose he's a pure talent, he's a kind of volcano of talent.
0:53:24 > 0:53:28He was the first star, a public star,
0:53:28 > 0:53:32as in on the BBC, he became a sort of rock star, but he was a poet.
0:53:32 > 0:53:33And that's unusual.
0:53:33 > 0:53:37With Dylan Thomas, you get a return to the old idea of the poet
0:53:37 > 0:53:40as a bard, an orator.
0:53:40 > 0:53:42I mean, he was a great performer of his own work,
0:53:42 > 0:53:44great reader of his own work.
0:53:44 > 0:53:47It's extravagant.
0:53:47 > 0:53:50It's word breeding another word, image breeding image.
0:53:50 > 0:53:53We have lushness and rhetoric.
0:53:53 > 0:53:56For him, poems had to be read aloud, he loved the sound of words
0:53:56 > 0:53:59and that was really crucial to the way he wrote.
0:54:00 > 0:54:02In London, as his career took off,
0:54:02 > 0:54:08Thomas's legendary hard-drinking reputation began to take root.
0:54:08 > 0:54:12Remarkably, no footage or filmed interviews with Thomas exist.
0:54:12 > 0:54:16But his widow, Caitlin Thomas, gave an interview to the BBC
0:54:16 > 0:54:19in 1977 about life with the poet.
0:54:21 > 0:54:25From the very start, he had just the one idea -
0:54:25 > 0:54:27the poems and the booze.
0:54:27 > 0:54:29In that order, was it, then?
0:54:29 > 0:54:32Yes. The poems, they were more important,
0:54:32 > 0:54:38but I think he used the booze to kind of wipe out the poems,
0:54:38 > 0:54:40not to think about them when he wasn't writing them.
0:54:40 > 0:54:42How did he write poetry,
0:54:42 > 0:54:44and was it easy for him, or difficult?
0:54:44 > 0:54:46No, no, no, it was terribly difficult for him.
0:54:48 > 0:54:51He used to go into his little shed and scrape and scratch and mutter
0:54:51 > 0:54:55and mumble and intone and change
0:54:55 > 0:54:57and he was frightfully slow, you know.
0:54:57 > 0:55:00In one whole long afternoon from about 2:00 to 7:00,
0:55:00 > 0:55:02he might have done just one line,
0:55:02 > 0:55:05or taken out one word, or put in one word.
0:55:07 > 0:55:10Much of Thomas's poetry paints a nostalgic picture
0:55:10 > 0:55:12of his childhood in Wales.
0:55:17 > 0:55:21Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
0:55:21 > 0:55:26About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
0:55:26 > 0:55:29The night above the dingle starry,
0:55:29 > 0:55:32Time let me hail and climb
0:55:32 > 0:55:35Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
0:55:35 > 0:55:39And honoured among wagons, I was prince of the apple towns
0:55:39 > 0:55:45And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
0:55:45 > 0:55:48Trail with daisies and barley
0:55:48 > 0:55:52Down the rivers of the windfall light.
0:55:55 > 0:55:58It is a nostalgia for his childhood, but not one that he was
0:55:58 > 0:56:03trying to repeat in his life, it's a nostalgia seeped in technicolour,
0:56:03 > 0:56:09his memory, and it's as if there's a sort of saturation in his memory.
0:56:09 > 0:56:14Thomas's image as the fast-living enfant terrible of poetry
0:56:14 > 0:56:17became fixed in the public imagination.
0:56:17 > 0:56:21It was a role he would adopt until his death in 1953.
0:56:22 > 0:56:25For his widow, his demise had seemed inevitable.
0:56:26 > 0:56:29He was always convinced that he was going to die
0:56:29 > 0:56:30before middle age, wasn't he?
0:56:30 > 0:56:33Yes, he was, he had a ridiculous,
0:56:33 > 0:56:37romantic idea, you know, of the poet starving in the garret,
0:56:37 > 0:56:40and all that helped the image he was trying to build up
0:56:40 > 0:56:44of the tubercular, consumptive, dying, pale poet,
0:56:44 > 0:56:49and he wanted to be long and sickly and green and all that.
0:56:49 > 0:56:53But in fact, of course, he was square and small and not like
0:56:53 > 0:56:55the conventional idea of a poet at all.
0:56:57 > 0:57:02Thomas undoubtedly cultivated the image of the Poet, capital P,
0:57:02 > 0:57:04which had almost been killed off.
0:57:04 > 0:57:08So it was the poet as the drinker - and my God, Thomas was a drinker -
0:57:08 > 0:57:10the poet as womanizer.
0:57:10 > 0:57:12There was something in the end rather infantile
0:57:12 > 0:57:14and innocent about Dylan Thomas,
0:57:14 > 0:57:17and suddenly this worldly success came to him,
0:57:17 > 0:57:20and he couldn't cope with it and of course, it killed him.
0:57:22 > 0:57:28Was he the same man in his own private life
0:57:28 > 0:57:30as he projected publicly?
0:57:30 > 0:57:33No, he was rather off-stage in the house.
0:57:33 > 0:57:36He liked his warm slippers, you know,
0:57:36 > 0:57:39and his dish of titbits and pickled onions and sardines,
0:57:39 > 0:57:44anything with a lot of vinegar, and cockles, all put on a plate which
0:57:44 > 0:57:48he'd stuff into his mouth when he was listening to the cricket scores.
0:57:48 > 0:57:51So, you know, I keep... He was just Mr Everyman
0:57:51 > 0:57:55until he put on the act of being the poet, or until he wrote his poetry.
0:57:58 > 0:58:03Oh, as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
0:58:03 > 0:58:08Time held me green and dying
0:58:08 > 0:58:12Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
0:58:18 > 0:58:22Next time - the aftermath of war breeds a new kind of poetry,
0:58:22 > 0:58:26keen to reflect the voice of the ordinary man and woman.
0:58:26 > 0:58:31A new kind of poet from outside the world of the educated white male.
0:58:31 > 0:58:33And a new kind of audience,
0:58:33 > 0:58:37many turned on to poetry for the first time.