Time to write: Conundrum

 A friend and I were chatting about poetry recently and I was asked who my favourite poets were of the last seventy years, more or less my life span so far. I was stumped initially because I don't generally think about poets in that way. There are poets whose work I like more than others, but, though content and context are important, I'm usually far more interested in knowing how they achieve what they do in a particular poem or in a sequence or as constant themes through the years.

After some thought, I came up with three - Tony Harrison, Derek Mahon and Geoffrey Hill, all very different poets. There are reasons for choosing those, but I won't go into them now. On thinking about these three later, I wondered what else might connect them to me. It turns out that they all had working-class childhoods and had made it through educational opportunities opened out after WW2 - like me. I'd known about Harrison's background, of course, but was less familiar with those of Mahon and Hill.

What was my unconscious doing?

Harrison I could account for; he's made the split between a working-class birth and later middle-class accretions his poetic/dramatic life's work. Mahon was far more subtle in expression, but has written, often elliptically, about his roots, his education and the Irish Troubles. Hill didn't as such, but, in his early poetry, involved himself in the mythology and historical impact on the area into which he was born, locating his poetry regionally. He did, though, admit in an interview in later life how unhappy his childhood was at home.

That split is probably the core; I'd experienced it, too. It would have affected all three poets in different ways. Harrison's weathered it reasonably well, possibly because he's always been so openly interested in his roots and went public about the splits it caused for the educated him. Mahon turned into a toper in middle years and Hill suffered from severe depression for most of his life. Who really knows what's at the root of those issues for those two; to date, only conjecture is possible. More might be revealed when the biographies are written.

My way through it was to lean on my father's pride in working-class life and anger at the necessity of its struggles. "You're as good as they are," he'd say, "provided you turn out to be useful." He meant, useful to people who'd need help, laconic language being much employed in my family. Always provisos from my Dad, even unspoken ones! There could have been, though, worse advice to take on board.