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Five men and one woman who took on impossible job – of poet laureate

Sep 12 2022 - 5 min read

Several of the poets appointed by, or inherited by the Queen, had to deal with public mockery. No wonder Philip Larkin turned down the role

'Queen Elizabeth receives Simon Armitage to present him with the Queen's gold medal for poetry upon his appointment as poet laureate during an audience at Buckingham Palace, London in May 2019'
Jonathan Brady/PA

“Oh, God, the royal poem!” John Betjeman wrote to a friend early in his laureateship. “Send the H[oly] G[host] to help me over that fence. So far no sign: watch and pray.” For a woman who wasn’t noted for a deep interest in literature, the Queen was served by some highly skilled poets laureate. Yet almost all found the job burdensome, and none produced his or her best work while wearing the laurels – certainly nothing to match, say, Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade.

The official verse they wrote in some ways mirrors changing attitudes towards the monarchy over the course of Elizabeth II’s long reign. Though, given that most holders of the job have written poems on a wide range of themes – not just to mark royal hatches, matches and dispatches – it’s fair to say that their work reflects broader shifts in social and political concerns.

Aware of the dangers of falling into empty sonorities that can only echo the distance between a remote public figure and the rest of us, laureates most often adopted the technique of trying to see through to the elementally human concerns presumed to exist behind the ceremonial. It’s a strategy suited to contemporary mores in poetry – as opposed, say, to a more bardic, laudatory voice – though it’s still no guarantee of literary merit. Carol Ann Duffy’s The Throne, written to mark the 60th anniversary of the coronation in 2013, enunciates this approach explicitly:

...The crown translates a woman to a Queen

endless gold, circling itself, an O like a well,

fathomless, for the years to drown in – history’s bride,

anointed, blessed, for a crowning...

An alternative strategy was to produce a paean to England’s pastoral heritage, which the monarch is supposed either to embody or to act as protective guardian for. Either way, the struggle to avoid a cheerlessly dutiful tone was almost always a losing one. John Masefield (laureate 1930-67), the poet inherited by the Queen from her grandfather, George V, was that rare thing, a genuinely popular poet (as well as novelist and dramatist), and the last of the generation of Georgian poets (he was born the same year as Edward Thomas) who represent a conservative, some would say reactionary, alternative strand in 20th-century verse to the modernism of TS Eliot and WH Auden. His first poem for the Queen, Line on the Coronation of Our Gracious Sovereign in 1953, takes the pastoral-heritage approach. It verges on doggerel:

This lady whom we crown was born

When buds were green upon the thorn

And earliest cowslips showed;

When still unseen by mortal eye

One cuckoo tolled his ‘Here am I’ …

Masefield published a huge amount of laureate verse, on the deaths of Winston Churchill, TS Eliot and John F Kennedy (“All generous hearts lament the leader killed, / The young chief with the smile, the radiant face”), on AE Housman’s centenary and the birth of Prince Charles (a sonorous little quatrain, full of abstractions about service and destiny). Despite his enormous success as a writer, he retained a modesty that, according to one possibly apocryphal story, led him to accompany his poems with an SAE when sending them to the Times, in case they should be deemed unsuitable for publication.

The appointment of Cecil Day-Lewis (1968-72) marked a passing of the baton to one of the representatives of that other strand of poetry (and a member of the generation that embraced communism in the 1930s), but the poetry itself fared little better. He was only too aware of this. As his widow, Jill Balcon, wrote, his laureate poems “are verses with no pretension to being poetry”. He made it clear on becoming laureate that he would involve himself in public issues that interested him, rather than concentrating on royal events. In other words, he would strive to provide a poetic voice for the nation as a whole.

On being appointed, he told Balcon: “If I can write some verses on the amalgamation of six Teesside boroughs, I shall feel I’ve really achieved something.” He did just that, in Hail, Teesside!:

You are bridge-builders still. Only, today

You draw six towns into a visioned O,

Spanning from town to town the ebb and flow

Of destiny. A dream is realised...

His first poem on becoming laureate, Then and Now, was commissioned by the Daily Mail as part of its “I’m backing Britain” campaign, a short-lived attempt, in the wake of the Wilson government’s devaluation of sterling, to boost the flagging economy by encouraging workers to put in unpaid overtime:

To work then, islanders, as men and women

Members one of another, looking beyond

Mean rules and rivalries towards the dream you could

Make real, of glory, common wealth, and home.

During his relatively brief tenure, much of it marked by serious illness, Day-Lewis produced poems for the Old Vic’s 150th anniversary, Oxfam’s 25th, for National Library Week, to encourage environmental awareness, for Beethoven’s bicentenary – and just one for a royal event: the poem For the Investiture of the Prince of Wales, published in the Guardian on 1 July 1969.

Your mother’s grace, your father’s gallantry

Go with you now to nerve and cheer you

Upon the crowded, lonely way before you.

Betjeman’s poem on the same event – written three years before he succeeded Day-Lewis – was rather more successful, mainly by virtue of making no attempt to rise to the gravity of the occasion:

Then, sir, you said what shook me through

So that my courage almost fails:

‘I want a poem out of you

On my Investiture in Wales.’

Betjeman (1972-1984) was another genuinely popular figure, in the Masefield mould, known widely through his television appearances and his accessible, wryly fogeyish verse. The day after his appointment, he told this paper: “I don’t think I shall write about public occasions unless I can feel them, it is better not to write than to write badly … I would not, for instance, be at all interested in writing a poem about the entry of Britain into the economic market, or whatever it is. Not my kind of subject.” A year into the job, however, he was already feeling the pressure and calling for spiritual help. A kicking from the press didn’t help. “I have been having a terrible time in the newspapers – misrepresented, lied about, often with the best intentions, and made so nervous I hardly dare put pen to paper,” he wrote. “Perhaps it would be rather a good thing if paper runs out.”

Original: The Guardian

Author: Adam Newey