Sherry Chandler

View from the other side

In his June 7 broadcast of So Here We Are: Poetic Letters from England, David Caddy, editor of Tears in the Fence, introduces us to William Barnes, a mid-19th century English poet who wrote in the Dorset dialect.

Barnes’s choice to write in dialect was political: he wanted to expunge from English those French and Latinate words that he saw as a marker of classicism:

There is a view of the origins of English literary language that late fourteenth century and early fifteenth century poets took the wrong course within vernacular English as it slowly emerged as a distinct language. At that time the bulk of the population spoke Middle English dialects influenced by successive invaders, the Normans, Vikings, Angles, Saxons and Jutes. The official languages of government were French and Latin and they dominated the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman dialects. The dialect of London, of the City of London that is, became the first English literary language through borrowings from other languages, the power of print and the position of its users during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The London poets, Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and so on, had to make difficult choices about which dialect to write in. It is this borrowing from other languages that so upset Barnes.

One impact of the London poets’ choice of literary language is that a cultured English person should know the parts of language that are reliant upon knowledge of Latin, Greek or French and can use them for purposes of power. Similarly the ability to quote from other language in conversation is seen as the mark of a powerful person. Obviously the less well educated and poorer people would not ordinarily be able to fully understand such a person.

Here is perhaps a key to why Barnes and [American poet Charles] Bukowski are not acceptable to the English canon, despite tremendous popularity and much academic interest. They use localised versions of English. They write, as it were, in another language.

So here we are on the other side of the poetry wars. Whereas many of the poets I met at West Chester look to the Movement for succor from the dictatorship of free verse, Caddy sees the Movement as aristocratic and oppressive, blocking more populist movements from the canon:

However, the position of dialect English, of poets like Barnes and Clare, and of the counter-Movement poets of the Sixties, is untenable. Whole traditions are excluded. Essentially those Sixties poets that absorbed the rich heritage of American poetics from Pound, the Imagists, William Carlos Williams, the Objectivists, New York School, Black Mountain, San Francisco and Beats have been ignored and marginalised despite international success and the achievement of a published Collected Poems. The impact of those diverse poetries was enormous, in stark contrast to the neo-Edwardian Movement poets in terms of developing a counter-culture of poets, poetry magazines and presses in both high and low modernism.

Of course, an ocean separates these two attitudes, and the culture of the two nations is very different. One might say that the culture of the US tends toward chaos while that of the UK tends toward stasis. Poppysmatus chides me for making broad generalizations like that so I only say one might say that the nature of a counter-culture might be different in the two nations even though we share a language and think we understand one another.

I tend toward populism but I also rebel against orthodoxy and so I swing like a pendulum from side to side, crying, as naïvely as Rodney King, “why can’t we all just get along?”

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