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Having been asked to write about the poetry of London, I am surprised to find that there isn’t much of it and that, of what there is, not much is very good. Take two recent anthologies of writing about London: A.N. Wilson’s magisterial Faber Book of London and Anna Adams’ London in Poetry and Prose (Enitharmon). Wilson is ninety per cent prose and Adams has filled out what was evidently intended as a poetry anthology with prose extracts by Dickens, De Quincey, Mendelssohn and Clare.

Even then, both anthologists have had to include poems which are not about London in any meaningful sense, such as 'To a Nightingale' because Keats wrote it while living in Hampstead and the most anguished section of Tennyson’s 'In Memoriam' (“Dark house by which I once more stand”) because Arthur Hallam lived in Wimpole Street. Other poems mention London but could equally well be set elsewhere, like Hardy’s 'Beyond the Last Lamp' and Ted Hughes’ 'Epiphany' in Birthday Letters. There is also a tradition of political poems (not generally included by Wilson and Adams) which are set in London only because it is the seat of the royal court and the Government, like Marvell’s description in his 'Horatian Ode' of the execution of Charles I, and Tennyson’s 'Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington'.

None of these poems is about London because they have no sense of the city as a place or of its people, no sense of what it is like to live in London at a particular time. London seems to have been difficult to write about in verse, although it has been written about memorably in prose. The problem for poetry centres on the sheer number and variety of people in a great city. Faced with the swarming diversity of city life, the lyric impulse, which seeks to express deeper personal feelings, seems to be stifled and takes refuge in describing people and their behaviour, which is the basis of satire. I’ll suggest that many London poems, though not often the best, are satirical; that the finest London poems have been written by a very few poets in response to unprecedented circumstances; and that, for various reasons, we are entering a period in which good new poetry about London is being written.

***

The earliest substantial poetry of London is comic: consciously in the interplay of Chaucer’s pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales which is so different from its source, the Decameron, that I sense that it would have occurred only to the inhabitant of a city where argument is a way of life; and unconsciously in Thomas Hoccleve’s The Regimen of Princes (1412), the first ‘confessional’ poem set in London in which, with remarkable frankness, Hoccleve records his depression and prurience, falling into conversation with a highly conservative beggar with whom he laments the current decline of morals. Three centuries later both works would no doubt have been written in prose.

By the late 17th century, the problem for satirical verse had become the selection of targets unaided by plot or argument. Swift wrote acute observational pieces about London including 'A Description of a City Shower' expressing his relish in filth:

Sweepings from butchers’ stall, guts, dung and blood,
Drown’d puppies, stinking sprats, all drench’d in mud,
Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood

but he was much more successful as a writer of prose. Samuel Johnson, arriving in London aged 29 and eager to impress, wrote his 'London' as an imitation of Juvenal. In the event, it is mostly a lame piece of work, obviously written by someone with no great knowledge of London, choosing easy targets (the crime rate, venal lawyers, castrati on the stage) and spending much of its length attacking France and Spain. It gives no indication of the man who grew to love London: “No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford”.

The first major London poet after Chaucer is Pope. His target is literary London but, within this limit, he writes with unparalleled ferocity and elegance. In The Dunciad, he portrays London succumbing to Dullness, nailing individuals like Colley Cibber as he goes:

Like the vile straw that’s blown about the streets,
The needy Poet sticks to all he meets,
Coach’d, carted, trod upon, now loose, now fast,
And carry’d off in some dog’s tail at last.

The ferocity is in the elegance. What Pope achieves, and what no successful London poet has been able to ignore, is the need to be highly skilled with form and inventive with language.

As London gradually approached its modern form, poetry about London declined into light satirical verse by writers like Frederick Locker Lampson, James Smith and Winthrop Mackworth Praed, often appearing first in the satirical magazine Punch. The finest 20th-century poet in this tradition was John Betjeman who, in poems like 'Parliament Hill Fields' and 'The Metropolitan Railway', described mid-century London with precision as well as affection. He was very astute about certain kinds of Londoner, especially women: the night club proprietress ('Sun and Fun'), the upper-class lady at prayer in wartime ('In Westminster Abbey') and the commuter – “Gaily into Ruislip Gardens / Runs the red electric train. / With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s / Daintily alights Elaine” ('Middlesex'). Poetry about London had declined into gentility and, after Betjeman and a few other skilled satirical writers like William Plomer, declined further as the occasional topic of New Statesman literary competitions.

Surprisingly, no worthwhile London poetry has arisen from the major social developments of the past hundred years. The socialist and suffragette movements produced mostly rants and marching songs. The African, Caribbean and Indian subcontinent immigrations of the Fifties onwards brought, for the first time, substantial numbers of immigrants who didn’t need to learn English and so could write about their experience at once. In the event, their experience of near-universal racism made it unnecessary to differentiate London from elsewhere. One of the first collections of West Indian poetry in London was Bluefoot Traveller, published in 1976 by a predecessor of Magma at The City Lit. The poems are about equally divided between the nostalgic like James Berry’s 'Lucy’s Letter' and 'Echoes of a Summer Festival' and the angry like E.A. Markham’s 'A New Manifesto': “On my visit to the country / of overcoats I saw / wet walls and animal- / life outgrowing tenants / in their homes but left them / determined patriots still”. The same need to confront a general, not London-specific, phenomenon is shown by satires like Wole Soyinka’s 'Telephone Conversation'; by the oral poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah; and by the meditations of second-generation writers like Moniza Alvi and Daljit Nagra.

There is also a continuing lack of a gay/lesbian poetry of London. Although many gay men and lesbians have moved to London over the years to escape the restrictions of their home towns, the pressure to remain hidden or at least discreet is still strong. The most famous London poem by a known gay man is Noel Coward’s 'London Pride' which, for all its sentimentality, I find moving as a statement by a man who stayed for the war when many other gay men (Auden, Isherwood, Britten, Pears) left for America, for the good reason that, under a Nazi occupation, they would have been murdered. Increased sexual freedom in the second half of the 20th century hasn’t led to the expression of gay/lesbian sexuality in a London context, of the kind achieved by poets like Ginsberg, Ashbery and O’Hara in New York. Apart from openness, this would have required some expression of enthusiasm for life in London which is alien to the tradition of writing about the place.

There are only two well-known poems that praise London unconditionally and neither can be taken at face value. The first appears in anthologies as William Dunbar’s To the City of London, a poem of seven stanzas each ending “London, thou art the flour [flower] of cities all”. However, the standard edition of Dunbar’s works merely attributes the poem to him. It was written for a reception in London in 1501 as part of a Scottish delegation’s attempt to arrange the marriage of James IV of Scotland with Margaret Tudor. The author and reciter was a servant of the Scottish ambassador, which Dunbar was not, and ends with glutinous praise for the Lord Mayor of London – “No Lord of Parys, Venyce or Floraunce / In dignytie and honoure goeth to him nye”. No doubt the Lord Mayor’s support for the marriage was being sought. The poem is thus not a heartfelt response by a major Scottish poet to the glories of London, but part of a diplomatic package written by an in-house versifier.

The second poem is Wordworth’s 'Composed Upon Westminster Bridge':

This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky:
All bright and glittering in the morning air…

Wordsworth describes a London wholly without people or, indeed, any sign of life – the air is “smokeless”. The city appeals to him like an uninhabited “valley, rock or hill” and there is a striking unintended irony in the last line (“And all that mighty heart is lying still!”) – the heart is still when the person is dead. At the deepest level, Wordsworth prefers the city without life.

Wordsworth wrote the poem “on the roof of a coach, on my way to France”. When he spends time in London rather than passing through, as he describes in 'The Prelude', the mass of people appalls him (“The face of every one / Who passes by me is a mystery”) and he is terrified of the mob (“What say you, then, / To times, when half the city shall break out / Full of one passion, vengeance, rage, or fear?”). Wordsworth’s queasiness is shared by Cowper and by Coleridge who, in 'The Lime Tree Bower My Prison', tells his old friend Charles Lamb “thou hast pined / And hungered after Nature, many a year, / In the great City pent” – a view rejected by Lamb, a lifelong Londoner.

The only serious alternative view is that of another lifelong Londoner, William Blake. While Wordsworth was declaring in Lyrical Ballads that the pastoral tradition had been made defunct by the need to write in “a selection of the language really used by men”, Blake was demonstrating in Songs of Innocence and Experience that the pastoral tradition had been destroyed by the city. Poem by poem, the pastoral paradigm is shown to be meaningless – 'The Lamb' becomes 'The Tyger' (an animal displayed in the zoo at the Tower of London and so, for Blake, a London image) and 'The Ecchoing Green' is overwhelmed by London:

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.

Blake is the greatest of London poets and also, in his prophetic books, London’s greatest poetic failure. He was responding to an unprecedented situation – living in the world’s first industrialised metropolis. Like Pope he is skilled with form, as in the truncated questions in 'The Tyger' (“What dread hand? & what dread feet?”) and, unlike Pope, he sometimes uses symbols. But his greatest strength is his realism; for a time, he was able to write with unprecedented directness. During the 1790s he lived at Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, three streets from some of the worst slums in London. It was here that Blake saw the “marks of weakness, marks of woe”; the gonorrhoeal teenage prostitutes who “blight with plagues the marriage hearse”; and the birds caged and hanging in windows which he came to see as a metaphor for the people themselves (“A robin redbreast in a cage / Puts all Heaven in a rage”). Nearby was the Surrey Asylum for Orphan Girls (“Babes reduced to misery / Fed with a cold and usurous hand”). Walking to visit print dealers in the City, he would pass the Lambeth slaughterhouse (“the ox in the slaughterhouse moan”). Examples could be multiplied. For all the vividness and originality of his imagination, much of Blake’s successful poetry is dense with references to the life he saw about him daily.

In the prophetic books, however, his writing loses contact with reality and becomes impenetrable. He describes London as the battleground of spiritual forces, but whenever the spirit world touches the real one, it hovers on the edge of bathos:

Above the rest the howl was heard from Westminster louder & louder:
The Guardian of the secret codes forsook his ancient mansion,
Driven out by the flames of Orc… he fled
Groveling along Great George Street thro’ the Park gate: all the soldiers
Fled from his sight: he drag’d his torments to the wilderness.

Blake was attempting something unprecedented – a mythological drama in a local setting – and failed to understand, as the South American magical realists did much later, that the more fantastic the action, the more solidly it needs to be anchored in realistic description.

Eliot achieves this integration of myth and reality in 'The Waste Land', the one indisputably great London poem of the 20th century. It was written at a time of intense distress in the capital of a country exhausted by the Great War. He registers the misery of daily commuting in terms that echo Dante’s Inferno (“A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many”), but also describes the simple pleasure of a lunchtime walk:

        I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

I find this touching because the bank clerk can never enter the warmth of the fish-porters’ bars, which he would prefer, and has to make do with the cold beauty of City churches. Eliot’s mythmaking in 'The Waste Land' succeeds because it is rooted in the reality of London with which the echoes of past cultures chime and counterpoint in an extraordinary fluidity of form.

After 'The Waste Land', in a development oddly parallel to Blake’s, Eliot retreated into more generalised myth, in his case Christian and classical, and never wrote as resonantly of London again. The stalled Tube train in 'East Coker' is no more than a brief image. The meeting with the ghost in 'Little Gidding' is set after an air-raid – the poet and ghost “trod the pavement in a dead patrol” like Air Raid wardens. But the focus is on the ghost and his revelations; the London details have become thin.

The blitz inspired in some poets descriptions of rhetorical power which were unprecedented for them and for English verse, at least since the 17th century. Edith Sitwell’s 'Still falls the Rain' envisions London under the bombs as Christ crucified, as does David Gascoyne’s 'Ecce Homo'. More originally, Mervyn Peake’s 'London 1941' describes a bombed building as a mother, developing through a series of extraordinary images to:

Across a world of sudden fear and firelight
She towers erect, the great stones at her throat,
Her rusted ribs like railings round her heart;
A figure of dry wounds – of winter wounds –
O mother of wounds; half masonry, half pain.

In 'The Streets of Laredo', Louis MacNeice expresses the terror and madness of firebombing with an intensity no one else has matched – a fluency made possible by his remarkable decision to call London Laredo and parody the cowboy ballad, ending with “the voice of the Angel, the voice of the fire”:

O late, very late, have I come to Laredo
A whimsical bride in my new scarlet dress
But at last I took pity on those who were waiting
To see my regalia and feel my caress.

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Pope, Blake, Eliot and the poets of the blitz all achieved an originality of form, language and image that enabled them to respond enduringly to their experience of London at times of conflict and deep change. Some periods are probably more conducive to good London poetry than others and one of these may be now. The largest and most ethnically diverse city in Europe, at the cultural cusp of Europe and America, London is now apparently under threat from a version of Islam – a place where life is simultaneously, at different levels, more free (and enjoyable) and more constrained than previously.

At times there is a strangeness about London which is difficult to put into words, but several younger poets have found ways of making evident what it’s like to live in London now. They have read O’Hara and Ashbery, and use a variety of modernist techniques – unexpected narrative shifts, unexplained juxtapositions, ironic use of quotation, conscious play of content against form – but not the suppression of context which gives much American poetry its free-floating, disengaged quality. They are too socially aware to be New Yorkers. They are also much funnier than their American predecessors, with a range of tones that pitches their poems with some precision between seriousness and humour.

The doyen is Matthew Caley whose 1995 Sirens (The Brixton Soundtrack) describes Brixton in sonnets which have learnt from Pound and Quoofperiod Muldoon, are realistic and equally at home with beauty and terror, as in 'Meeting the Dealer':

Who is Blind Pugh exhumed in a baseball hat
the yellow blip a little
stigmata of jaundice pressed into your palm.
He appeals for £50. Your mind appeals for calm…

Naiads
and dryads
beat on silver trays and varnished gongs

or flap their Daily Mails like dragons’ wings.
Above your head a poster quotes John Keats –
much have I traveled through the realms of gold.

(Caley’s latest book is reviewed on page 63.)

Apparently more whimsical, John Stammers moves lightfootedly between philosophical speculation, cultural reference, self-mockery and implied anguish, establishing the voice of the metropolitan intellectual anxious (as who wouldn’t be these days?) not to be taken too seriously. This is brilliantly delivered in 'Composed on the Millennium Bridge on the Morning of its Re-opening 22nd February 2002' in Stolen Love Behaviour which begins as a parody of Wordsworth:

City of random architectures, effluvia and bridge
in which we debouch onto the new Millennium:
Plexiglas, hawser and the old marriage
of the here and now to the wide world’s conundrum…

and moves via an echo of the Book of Common Prayer, Macbeth, Zen-like sayings and Sir Christopher Wren’s memorial to a state of mind, lightly sketched but seriously meant, that crossing the bridge is both desirable and meaningless. It’s hard to think of another poem that so perfectly captures a mental state commonly experienced by Londoners when present at events which the media portray as important – the sense of being on the brink of an insight that probably won’t happen, of a vivid and complex experience whose memory will soon fade.

Jonathan Asser works with prisoners and his poems in The Switch have the hard-edged, almost inconsequential quality of prisoners’ stories, as with the prostitute unbalanced by the death of her goldfish during a TV quiz programme ('Lost in Bayswater') and the homicidal cleaning-lady in 'No Mercy' whose bullet achieves slow motion by reference to Zeno of Elea: “The bullet, meanwhile, was on course – / as if trying to prove that to halve all the distances / meant that the target could never be reached”. In Stranded in Sub-Atomica Tim Turnbull has a more comic but still mordant view of the decline of a culture, with an undertow of foreboding in poems like 'In the Prospect of Whitby after the Private View' where the “arty hangers- on”, watched by Bangladeshi kids, “well dressed but walking, coked up and talking / too much and too fast and heading upstream / to see what the city has to offer. / Oh yeah, two thousand years of culture”; and, more radically, in 'Revolutionary Art' which reveals that the world’s most impressive conceptualist artists, who make London’s artists sick with envy and are “hirsute enthusiasts who, it’s safe to say, will never visit Tate Modern”, are the Taliban who blew up the Buddhas at Bamiyan.

And in A Voids Officer Achieves the Tree Pose Annie Freud has poems of sexual passion originating at Centre Point, Broadway Market and Copenhagen Street which are ostensibly narrative but wholly unpredictable. It’s impossible to summarise these poems, but their tone can be gleaned from what follows the meeting in Copenhagen Street:

In a bar they exchanged jokes, one each.
He talked about his work, the study of disease;
that pleased her, and she felt a shadow at last
get up and leave her to her own devices.

Unease and morbidity, and being freed from them possibly by the comfort that a pathologist would be able to deal with one’s own pathology, are sketched lightly and deftly.

These are not the only recent London poems, of course. Kate Clanchy’s Present (in Samarkand) beautifully and transformingly recounts a train journey home through the London suburbs and Alice Oswald has a less convincing response to Wordsworth ('Another Westminster Bridge') in Woods, etc. But some non-modernist poems about London, like Neil Rollinson’s in Spanish Fly (2001) which were convincing when they appeared, now seem dated. Caley, Stammers, Asser, Turnbull and Freud are showing that it’s possible to write about London in a way not previously achieved. They know each other and are mostly published by Donut Press (as well as having all appeared in Magma), so it’s not too soon to talk of a School of London. Remember, you read it here first.

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