Book Review: Six Poets

Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin – an Anthologyby Alan BennettYale University Press, 2015Beware of “beloved,” since it's a blessing to bore. With the possible exception of David Attenborough, there's no more beloved figure in the British cultural world than Alan Bennett, the diarist, playwright, and novelist who's given the world “The History Boys,” “The Madness of King George III,” “The Lady in the Van,” the wonderful novella The Uncommon Reader, and a series of hilariously hangdog annual diaries for The London Review of Books. An author with such a resume who's still alive in his 80s is in a position to inflict a great deal of tedium on a well-disposed world.At first glance, something like Bennett's Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin – an Anthology (a Yale reprint of the companion volume the author wrote in 1990 to accompany his BBC series of the same name), seems like the perfect delivery-device for such tedium. It's true that Bennett began life as an academic, but that was during the early years of the reign of Queen Victoria – the knack can be lost or misplaced. And despite working with words for his entire career, Bennett is neither a literary critic nor a poet, so a book like Six Poets, a guided tour through the works of Thomas Hardy, A. E. Houseman, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Philip Larkin in a total of some 200 pages, can only promise impressions, memories, glimpses, and sentimentality.All of it will be engagingly written, of course, but it will be mostly engagingly written toward overworked young commuters in Leeds and overleisured retirees in Islington. The background and explanations with which Bennett interleaves his verse choices thus always entertains, sometimes simplifies, and never challenges, as in a typical bit about Thomas Hardy's turn to writing verse full-time:

Hardy had given up writing novels in 1896 after the hostile reception of Jude the Obscure, a copy of which, it's particularly worth noting today, was burned publicly by a bishop. He had written poetry all his life and now devoted himself exclusively to it. I suspect that it was what Virginia Woolf called the 'architecting' of novels that no longer appealed to him. Poetry has it over the novel in that it uses fewer words. You can do more with less.

You certainly can, if you set your mind to it. Six Poets tries its best to do more with less, and the extent to which is succeeds is also the extent to which it fails. Its chapter on Houseman is its most frustrating, especially since somebody like Bennett – a gag writer who managed by dint of hard work to make his way to the “serious” side of the hall – ought to do a much better job at assessing the complexities of a poet so routinely written off as shallow and saccharine. Instead, we mostly get the Top Ten Houseman quotes retreaded:

Houseman was not an easy man. Timid in appearance – someone said of him that he looked as if he came from a long line of maiden aunts – he could be caustic and severe, and was ruthless with intellects less gifted than his own and with any form of slipshod work. “The faintest of all human passions,” he said, “is the love of truth,” but not with him, and from that love of truth came a mistrust of religion as profound as that of Hardy.

Conversely, the section on Auden is the book's longest and best, although even here a certain awkwardness arises from the territoriality of a poet Bennett personally saw and heard:

The turning point in Auden's life came, or is supposed to have come, when he and [Christopher] Isherwood went to the United States at the start of 1939 and stayed there, both eventually becoming American citizens. Silly people at the time took this to be cowardice, which it wasn't, and even people who admired him thought Auden's poetry was never as good afterwards. But this wasn't true either.

Readers knowledgeable about any of Bennett's chosen subjects will be alternately bored and irritated by Six Poets, and Bennett's many fans will find his insights here considerably flattened without his presences to deliver them. They at least can take comfort in the fact that the audio version of this book is read by the author.