Making It New 1908-1955 Great Poets in Their Own Words

As Britain entered the 20th century,

English poetry seemed stuck in a rut.

Poets wrote about nature, or celebrated

the glories of empire, in language that was formal and ornate.

But as old certainties crumbled, new generations seized their chance

to rewrite the world and build a new kind of poetry from the ruins.

They found words for the complexity, the upheaval

and the doubt of the modern age.

And there was another revolution...

In the 20th century,

television brought poets into millions of living rooms.

As the BBC cameras rolled, poets took the chance to explain

themselves to a mass audience for the first time.

In this first programme,

we'll meet the giants who set out to write for the new century.

April is the cruellest month

Breeding lilacs out of the dead land

Mixing memory and desire...

From TS Eliot, who dragged poetry into the modern age...

When he left, respectable...

..to WH Auden, witness to the chaos of the 1930s...

The little children died in the streets.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs...

..to Dylan Thomas, whose lyrical voice held audiences spellbound.

The night above the dingle starry...

There were eccentrics, too.

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

National treasures...

..and political rebels.

We must get rid of England, somehow or other. Completely.

Between them, they rewrote the rules of poetry for a new age.

This is how they did it, in their own words.

London at the turn of the 20th century.

While other European cities were in the grip of artistic

revolutions, British culture remained reassuringly traditional.

In 1908, a radical young American arrived in London on a mission

to, in his words, make poetry new.

Ezra Pound was born in Idaho in 1885.

As a student, he had resolved to

"know more about poetry than any man living."

In London, he planned to start a poetic revolution.

The poetry of the 1890s, in England in particular, was dominated

by a rather mournful, nostalgic, kind of pastiche poetry, really.

A poetry that sort of imitated earlier Victorians,

imitated the Romantics, and had a sort of decadent feel about it.

Pound absolutely loathed this.

He thought British poetry was flabby, it was dull,

it was repetitive and he kind of put it on a diet.

Everything had to be spare, every word had to count.

Sent it to the gym, gave it a face-lift.

And, you know, he was a great pioneer of modernism.

In 1913, he wrote a modernist manifesto stating that poets

should aim for precision with words,

clear imagery and break free from familiar, traditional rhyme.

His poems were pared down and precise,

sometimes only a line or two long.

But Pound wasn't starting from scratch,

he was harking back to ancient sources.

It was Chinese text that perfectly captured

the precision of language and image that inspired his radicalism.

Ezra Pound rarely appeared on camera, but in 1959 he was filmed

for the BBC in Italy, demonstrating the qualities of Chinese writing.

You have the primitive sun,

then when they want to make it pretty, they square it up...

and that's the sun.

Then for the dawn, you've got the sun over the horizon.

What was exciting for Pound about Chinese poetry,

and the Chinese pictograms themselves, was that it seems as

if the image is just there in just a few beautiful strokes of a brush.

That's all compressed into one space.

That is like a reply

to the great frothing of what they saw as

the decadent writers of the 1890s.

Pound's life's work was an epic called The Cantos, a collection of

poems that ranged through history

and ancient cultures to the modern day.

The Cantos remain among the most complex

and challenging poems of the century.

The Cantos were a sprawling,

epic attempt to incorporate nothing less than virtually everything

that had ever been written in any poetic tradition in the world.

It was unbelievably ambitious and it was also, as a consequence,

it was fragmentary, it was elliptical, it was collage.

It was bits and pieces of a great many traditions,

in a great many languages and even a great many alphabets.

Pound read a controversial section of The Cantos for the BBC.

In the poem,

he attacks capitalist society for immoral money-lending or usury,

which Pound calls "usura", an evil for which he blames Jewish bankers.

With usura hath no man a house of good stone

Each block cut smooth and well-fitting

That design might cover their face,

With usura hath no a man painted paradise on his church wall...

Pound's ideas about global capitalism were bound up with

anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in which he believed that

it was Jewish people who were controlling capital and that it was

Jewish greed, the stereotype of the Jewish usurer,

who was the puppeteer.

With usura the line grows thick

With usura is no clear demarcation

And no man can find site for his dwelling

Stonecutter is kept from his stone

Weaver is kept from his loom

With usura wool comes not to market.

CROWD CHEERS

In his 30s, Pound's politics grew increasingly extreme.

He believed fascism was the answer to what

he saw as failing Western democracy.

There's a strange idea that if you're modernist,

you're somehow or other progressive politically,

and that you're somehow part of a general liberal outlook.

This isn't the case.

Plenty of the modernists were quite keen on fascism

and you can see a relationship,

if you like, between the language that Pound uses about poetry,

wanting it to be spare and hard and dry,

and he wants the images to be powerful and working in themselves,

and the way in which he and others worshipped Mussolini.

After the Second World War, Pound was imprisoned for his fascist

views, deemed anti-American.

On his release, he returned to Italy.

I can remember that it was pretty controversial that the BBC went

and found him, and dug him out and interviewed him.

Society had cast him out, the poetry world had cast him out,

and he was this slightly prophet-like

figure, raging in the wilderness.

Pound's main importance and his accepted reputation

is as sort of the midwife of modernism, really.

And so he's a kind of high priest of early 20th century literature,

but his own poetry is,

I think, studied rather than read.

Ezra Pound had set out to reshape poetry for the 20th century.

But he had an important ally,

a protege who would, in time, come to eclipse him.

In 1914, TS Eliot, another American,

was drawn to London

and into Pound's modernist literary circle.

It's an interesting fact that in the English tradition,

modernist poetry emerges with two American poets working together,

Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, both of whom had left America

and come to Britain and were working together to create something

that would be innovative and fresh in poetry.

For Pound and Eliot, the idea of escaping America was something that

they had to do in order to write in the way that they wanted to.

Partly because the idea of exile, I think,

appealed to both of them enormously.

I don't think they really felt attached to the

mass culture of America.

In fact, both of them felt rather ambivalent towards it.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis in 1888.

He studied philosophy at Harvard, Paris and then Oxford,

where his towering intellect set him apart from his peers.

In London, Eliot spent his days working on foreign accounts for

Lloyds Bank in the city, and then at publishing house Faber and Faber.

There, he cultivated a studiedly unpoetic image.

I think there has always been an idea that poets must be anarchic

and dress in a flamboyant fashion,

as, for instance, Ezra Pound did.

Along comes TS Eliot. He wears a suit,

he has an umbrella and a bowler hat. He is a city gent.

And this is a huge breakthrough,

you know, poets can look like anybody else.

And yet, they are also writing the great poetry of the 20th century.

Together, Pound and Eliot formed the most important partnership

of 20th-century poetry, editing and promoting each other's work.

Eliot's poetry reflected the turmoil

and fragmentary state of the modern world.

He appeared tantalisingly rarely on television,

but he was filmed recording his poem, Four Quartets, for the BBC.

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

POWERFUL EXPLOSIONS

The First World War gave Eliot the impetus to write his most

celebrated and revolutionary work, The Waste Land.

Drawing on Pound's collage method of composition,

the poem would come to define the emptiness

and disillusionment of the post-war world.

The Waste Land was modernist poetry's masterpiece.

The Burial Of The Dead

April is the cruellest month

Breeding lilacs out of the dead land

Mixing memory and desire

Stirring dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm

Covering Earth in forgetful snow

Feeding a little life with dried tubers.

The Waste Land is probably our most famous

artistic response to the First World War.

It's very clearly a reaction to the

sense of moral and spiritual and artistic breakdown.

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains

Stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal.

It is a poem that's radically de-centred.

There's no perspective that unites it all.

It is a poem about incoherence.

It is a poem about looking for origins,

for meanings, for trying

to find a way to start over and finding that unbelievably painful.

It's modernist in that the fragments of memory, bits of books,

bits of culture, bits of overheard conversations.

He puts them all in one poem

and somehow manages to write

and create the 20th century.

It was written quite early in the century,

but it absolutely looks forward.

Alongside references to ancient myth and popular culture,

the poem captures glimpses of contemporary life.

Sometimes they're just conversations, you know,

he talks about a woman talking about her husband, going,

"When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said - I didn't mince my words,

"I said to her myself, 'Hurry up, please, it's time.'"

So you've got this bar, you can hear the barman, you can

hear the ladies talking about a soldier, about the war.

Now Albert's coming back, Make yourself a bit smart.

He'll want to know what you've done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, And get a nice set,

He said, I swear I can't bear to look at you.

He's got this ability to make us hear what he heard,

so he's making your ears get pricked up

so that you are hearing more heightenedly and, actually,

that is what poetry is, is us hearing ourselves better.

It throws light on things.

All art does that, it just sandblasts reality with light.

High modernist poetry, particularly, is represented by The Waste Land,

which is by far the most influential single poem of the 20th century,

I think. It sort of cleared everything away, I mean,

it liberated the next generation of poets from the past.

It was as if after The Waste Land,

all sorts of new things could become possible.

The desolation of the First World War had led Eliot to

write his masterpiece.

But out of the horrors of the front lines

would come a new, more direct kind of poetry.

Faced with the unrelenting trauma of trench warfare, a group of

soldier poets created some of the most moving poetry of the century.

First World War poetry is just an outstanding

movement in British verse.

I think it's to do with this idea of,

you know, trained literary minds on the front line.

You know, you got these highly articulate,

highly intelligent people who could work wonders with words,

and suddenly they were there holding rifles

and witnessing colossal, seemingly endless waste of human life.

That's what got reported back to us in verse.

The poetry of Wilfred Owen

and Siegfried Sassoon broke new ground with its raw

and shocking description of the horrors they witnessed.

"All a poet can do today is warn", said Wilfred Owen, and,

if you like, Owen and Sassoon are protest poets.

They are telling people what it's like at the front

and that nobody should have to put up with these conditions.

SHELLING AND SHOUTING

Fighting alongside Sassoon in France was Robert Graves,

captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and budding poet.

The war had a profound effect on Graves' poetry,

and in 1916 his 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,

you see, I'm now only 53 instead of 74.

You were reported dead?

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

And 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.

1920S 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.

On the 12th June, 1923,

Sitwell performed her poem, Facade,

in London's Aeolian Hall.

Sit and sleep

Periwigged as William and Mary...

She read her poems from behind a painted curtain.

This version was designed by artist John Piper.

..the reynard-coloured sun and I sigh

Oh, the nursery-maid Meg

With a leg like a peg

Chased the feathered dreams like hens,

And when they laid an egg...

Music by composer William Walton accompanied her words.

..the serene King James would steer.

Her experimental blend of words and music took poetic convention

and gave it a good shake.

..picked it up as spoil to boil for nursery tea, said the mourners.

The poems are rich in quickfire wordplay, free association

and modernist jazz rhythms.

And whistling down the feathered rain Old Noah goes again.

Facade was quite an extraordinary undertaking.

It had this great kind of wheezing, arrhythmic poetry,

and then the performance element, with Sitwell behind a screen

and declaiming these words through a megaphone,

so her voice ringing around the performance space.

It was, I think, quite alienating for members of the audience.

Puzzled theatre-goers thought they were

the victims of an elaborate hoax and, overnight,

Sitwell became the most talked about poet in England.

But Sitwell was serious about revitalising

poetry for the modern age, as she explained later on BBC radio.

'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...

and she knew she looked weird,

and so her decision was to look even weirder and to make

no allowances, people had to know

that 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 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, why did you devise your 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 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 asked me just now, you said that people's idea of me

was that I was eccentric and savage?

Forbidding 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 me a form of religion.

And I'm not going to be taught by people who know nothing about it.

I think it's very impertinent.

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

Despite dressing like a historical relic,

with her poetry, Sitwell was ahead of her time.

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 in there in her voice.

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 is a kind of urgency to it.

He wrote about demagogues, dangerous leaders,

such as you were seeing in Hitler and Mussolini.

He is engaged and politicised and at the same time he's a very individual

voice, fantastically mature and precocious from the start.

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,

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 seemed to deny the thing that a lot of people suspect a poet hopes

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

No, that they can't be. At least, not in the West.

By all means, let a writer or poet,

if he feels like it, write what we now call an "engage" 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.

-Now, of course one can do them, but one mustn't imagine that

one can change the course of history by doing it.

I mean, if one asks what the function of not just literature

but of all the arts is, first of all 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.

Auden's verse became less urgent and more reflective.

The BBC visited him at his summer home in Austria.

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 the 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.

It's as if the experiments of people like Pound and Eliot

have freed him to go back to the roots of what English poetry can do.

"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 learnt to consume

almost everything like cans of soup,

poetry is somehow or other remained something you either have

to read it or leave it alone.

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

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 am a Scotsman, as you can hear.

In the Declaration of Arbroath, way back in 1320,

perhaps the greatest democratic pledge of all time,

my people, the Scottish people, swore

that as long as a hundred of them remained alive,

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

APPLAUSE

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

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 landscape

and to the history of the Scottish race

in relation to their landscape, which is embodied in the vocabulary of

Scots and which is very little used in 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 was often 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 roond it jig.

Auld Moses took

A dry stick and

Instantly it

Floo'ered in his hand.

Pu' Scotland up,

And wha can say

It winna bud

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.

It might not be, but England's fighting back, of course,

and still thinks it is a world influence

and a world mission and so on.

Let's get rid of England, somehow or another. Completely.

-JOAN BAKEWELL:

-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 lived with her spinster aunt and worked as a secretary.

But behind the curtains of her suburban home,

she created poetry that defied all expectation.

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 poetry was both jaunty and unsettling,

apparently naive, yet preoccupied with death.

She is seen here in rare BBC footage from 1965.

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, deaths,

fairy stories and a general feeling of guilt for not writing more.

Stevie Smith cultivated a certain view of herself as

the hare-eyed spinster of Palmer's Green,

producing these, in a way, wilfully eccentric poems,

oddly naive little works with these rather childlike drawings

appended to them, and yet, I think,

despite that sort of atmosphere of cultivated eccentricity,

there is something very hard within her and something very dark too,

that sort of destructive element there is inside her work,

it's so raw and so powerful.

The general feeling about love in the poems is nervous.

Like this poor little child who has been turned

to stone in his mother's lap. She clutches him and cries,

"I'll have your heart, if not by gift, my knife shall carve it out.

"I'll have your heart, your life."

It's precisely the darkness that reminds you that actually,

what you're mistaking for whimsy is this minimalism.

It's asking you to back off and take another look.

The onward march of the suburbs in the interwar years provided

inspiration for a poet with an altogether more benign vision.

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 elements of poetry

discarded by the modernists -

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 is something in the work like that too,

it's attached to rhyme and rhythm

in an attractively conventional, consoling, comforting 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 the equivalent 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,

he wanted to run with that,

and I think he understood how

poetry could work with the general reader and the general public.

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

they'll reach for the sleeping tablets.

Well, there's one poet who manages to bridge that hitherto unbridgeable

gap between the public and his art, he is 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.

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

that my poetry is read by 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, cos the general public don't always want it.

And he forged a link and a bond with them.

Some of that was through his personality,

but a lot of it was through his work.

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

Les 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

Far from the television studios of the capital,

another, more solitary poet was waging his own war

against the decline of a precious culture.

RS Thomas was a Welsh Anglican priest and a staunch nationalist.

Written in his parish in the remote hills of North Wales,

his poems are deeply rooted in rural life.

But far from romanticizing the countryside,

Thomas's work evoked the harshness of the Welsh 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.

I came out of a kind of bourgeois environment.

And, er, this muck and blood and hardness

and 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 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.

I did find that the strongly charactered hardness of these,

er, border people really did make an impression on me,

as far as poetic material was concerned.

CHURCH 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 is metaphor. The Resurrection is metaphor.

When I preach poetry, I am preaching Christianity.

And when one discusses Christianity,

one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects.

The core, 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,

that is 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.

HE SPEAKS WELSH

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.

'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.

Where can I go, then, from the smell

Of decay, from the putrefying of a dead nation?

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.

Born only a year after the reclusive RS Thomas was another

Welsh poet, but one who lived and died squarely in the limelight.

Dylan Thomas, the son of an English teacher,

was born in Swansea in 1914.

He developed an early love for words and their sounds.

He was a prodigal poet, writing much of his most famous work

while still living with his parents.

His first collection was published in 1934, and soon after,

he began broadcasting for the BBC.

In 1949, he recorded a poem written to mark his 30th birthday.

Here is a poem called Poem in October.

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood

And the mussel pooled and the heron

Priested shore

The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall

Myself to set foot

That second

In the still sleeping town and set forth.

I can remember the sound of Dylan Thomas's voice

coming out of the radio, it was very deep and fruity, and also

this accent that you could almost feel like you could

touch it and get into it, so when he said things like "all shining",

and if you had an old radio, it would rattle a bit as well.

In a way, the BBC made him,

they gave him his voice and he gave his voice to the radio.

Thomas's writing was precocious and original, full of an exuberance

for words, at odds with the sparse poetry of his contemporaries.

Dylan Thomas is a poet who isn't trying

to join the classical tradition,

he just breaks it by bursting out,

I suppose he's a pure talent, he's a kind of volcano of talent.

He was the first star, a public star,

as in on the BBC, he became a sort of rock star, but he was a poet.

And that's unusual.

With Dylan Thomas, you get a return to the old idea of the poet

as a bard, an orator.

I mean, he was a great performer of his own work,

great reader of his own work.

It's extravagant.

It's word breeding another word, image breeding image.

We have lushness and rhetoric.

For him, poems had to be read aloud, he loved the sound of words

and that was really crucial to the way he wrote.

In London, as his career took off,

Thomas's legendary hard-drinking reputation began to take root.

Remarkably, no footage or filmed interviews with Thomas exist.

But his widow, Caitlin Thomas, gave an interview to the BBC

in 1977 about life with the poet.

From the very start, he had just the one idea -

the poems and the booze.

In that order, was it, then?

Yes. The poems, they were more important,

but I think he used the booze to kind of wipe out the poems,

not to think about them when he wasn't writing them.

How did he write poetry,

and was it easy for him, or difficult?

No, no, no, it was terribly difficult for him.

He used to go into his little shed and scrape and scratch and mutter

and mumble and intone and change

and he was frightfully slow, you know.

In one whole long afternoon from about 2:00 to 7:00,

he might have done just one line,

or taken out one word, or put in one word.

Much of Thomas's poetry paints a nostalgic picture

of his childhood in Wales.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons, I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley

Down the rivers of the windfall light.

It is a nostalgia for his childhood, but not one that he was

trying to repeat in his life, it's a nostalgia seeped in technicolour,

his memory, and it's as if there's a sort of saturation in his memory.

Thomas's image as the fast-living enfant terrible of poetry

became fixed in the public imagination.

It was a role he would adopt until his death in 1953.

For his widow, his demise had seemed inevitable.

He was always convinced that he was going to die

before middle age, wasn't he?

Yes, he was, he had a ridiculous,

romantic idea, you know, of the poet starving in the garret,

and all that helped the image he was trying to build up

of the tubercular, consumptive, dying, pale poet,

and he wanted to be long and sickly and green and all that.

But in fact, of course, he was square and small and not like

the conventional idea of a poet at all.

Thomas undoubtedly cultivated the image of the Poet, capital P,

which had almost been killed off.

So it was the poet as the drinker - and my God, Thomas was a drinker -

the poet as womanizer.

There was something in the end rather infantile

and innocent about Dylan Thomas,

and suddenly this worldly success came to him,

and he couldn't cope with it and of course, it killed him.

Was he the same man in his own private life

as he projected publicly?

No, he was rather off-stage in the house.

He liked his warm slippers, you know,

and his dish of titbits and pickled onions and sardines,

anything with a lot of vinegar, and cockles, all put on a plate which

he'd stuff into his mouth when he was listening to the cricket scores.

So, you know, I keep... He was just Mr Everyman

until he put on the act of being the poet, or until he wrote his poetry.

Oh, as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Next time - the aftermath of war breeds a new kind of poetry,

keen to reflect the voice of the ordinary man and woman.

A new kind of poet from outside the world of the educated white male.

And a new kind of audience,

many turned on to poetry for the first time.