Manifesto of the Suburban Romantics

Pollards Hill, south London

For years now and in countless emails my old friend Maolsheachlann (alias the Irish Papist) and I have been lamenting the state of poetry in the English-speaking world, or at least in Britain and Ireland.  Our main complaint has been simply that almost nobody is writing the sort of poetry that we want to read — musical poetry, poetry that rhymes and scans or which at least does not scorn tradition, which appeals as strongly to the heart as to the intellect, which essentially affirms human dignity, and from which the ordinary person can glean an intelligible meaning.

Bentley Rise, near Doncaster

The first edition of John Masefield’s Collected Poems sold 80,000 copies and his poems were read in pubs; who can say that today?  The nearest anyone comes to that sort of appeal is the priest-poet Rev. Malcolm Guite, whose 28,000 newsletter subscribers and sold-out readings are testament to his justly-celebrated poems — but he feels like an honourable exception.  It is not just about numbers, of course, but most modern poets seem actively to be striving to shrink their readership, not to widen it.

Dawn over Dulwich, south London

And yet, as Ralph Vaughan Williams once declared, ‘the composer must not shut himself up and think about art; he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole community.’  Surely this is as true of poetry as it is of music.  Wherever there are human beings there must be a hunger for verse and song, because, whatever else has changed utterly in our world since Masefield’s heyday, the hearts of human beings are still made of the same raw material, and remain the same vessels of joy and sorrow aching for correspondence and resonance.  The calling of today’s poets is the same as ever — to write what will answer that longing.  But too few seem to realise this.

Mitcham, south London

Maolsheachlann has done more than most to try to redress this situation, namely by living out his own vocation as a poet and sharing his work on his ever-readable blog.  But in submitting his poems to various magazines and journals he has run up against a second obstacle: the reluctance of publishers and editors to publish poetry.  Even magazines which ought to be sympathetic both to Maolsheachlann’s work and his themes have turned down poem after poem with pat answer after pat answer.  He reports a shyness, or an embarrassment about it — as if even they are unsure what it is actually for.

Coulsdon, Surrey

What can we do about all this?  Well, one of the great advantages of poetry is that it can speak for itself; when it is recognised and loved, it needs no other justification.  But poets themselves may need inspiration to get there, and their readers encouragement.  At past moments of poetic decadence or despondency, new movements have arisen to revitalise things and give a clear, though not constraining, new direction.  Maolsheachlann and I think this is such a moment.  

So here is our idea: Suburban Romanticism.  And here is its draft manifesto.

1. The Suburban Romantics are on the side of life.
2. The Suburban Romantics favour all the poetic conventions that were the poet’s stock-in-trade up to the day before yesterday, especially rhyme and metre.
3. The Suburban Romantics believe that traditional poetic forms (such as blank verse, the sonnet, the ode, the villanelle etc.) are just as valid in the twenty-first century as they were in the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.
4. The Suburban Romantics do not agree with Thoreau that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation”, or with Wilde that “most people exist, that is all”.  We celebrate the routine, the ordinary, the workaday, the familiar.
5. The Suburban Romantics are not afraid of sentimentality or nostalgia, nor are we afraid of challenging or subverting sentimentality or nostalgia.
6. The Suburban Romantics do not genuflect before any transitory socio-political orthodoxies.
7. The Suburban Romantics want to evoke mystery, not practice mystification.
8. The Suburban Romantics are nourished at the wells of myth, legend, archetype, the sacred, the proverbial, the folkloric, the sacramental, and so on.
9. The Suburban Romantics do not disdain the topical, the ephemeral, the colloquial, the commercial, and so on.
10. The Suburban Romantics accept that the great majority of people (and perhaps an ever-increasing majority) are destined to live in suburbs, conurbations, commuter towns, housing estates, and so on.  We insist that these can be the subject and setting of poetry; not just the poetry of satire and protest, but the poetry of affirmation and celebration as well.  We seek the re-enchantment of the world, the transfiguration of the commonplace.
11. The Suburban Romantics have a special respect for Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, who demonstrated beyond all doubt that traditional forms can be used to explore contemporary life.
12. The Suburban Romantics are quite willing to use irony, but not to live in it as our natural element.
13. Suburban Romanticism is not a straitjacket.  We do not preclude forays into free verse, rural themes, bleakness, misanthropy, obscurity, or any of the things against which this manifesto is a riposte.  But they should be the exception, not the rule.

Wimbledon

I ought to be clear: the idea is not that all Suburban Romantic poems have to take suburbs as their theme or setting; ‘Suburban’ in this case conveys more of a disposition, or a sense of scale.  ‘Provincial’ — which is perhaps a precise term for Philip Larkin’s outlook — might be an equally valid term, I think.  Likewise, a Suburban Romantic poem may strike a major or a minor key, praise or mourn, and sing of places or people alike.

Worcester

What it all look like in practice?  Here are some poems I would retrospectively claim for the Suburban Romantics.  

• Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh’s own A Gable Wall
• John Betjeman, The Metropolitan Railway or Middlesex
• Vernon Scannell, A City Remembered (the city in question is Leeds, by the way)
• Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings
• Vernon Watkins,  Trees in a Town
• Carol Ann Duffy, Prayer (if only more of her poetry were like this!)

What do readers think?  Does this sound like the sort of poetry that you would like to read?

Wimbledon Common