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Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before

Perhaps England's greatest living lyric genius, comparable, in his strange ways, to Bob Dylan, but far more contemporary, is Morrissey, of The Smiths, who were the greatest band of the 1980s, anywhere. Like millions of my generation, I loved him - and still love his songs. It therefore comes as something of a major disappointment to read that the man allegedly believes England has been "flooded" by immigrants, and that the UK's multicultural dynamism has swept away a whole way of "English" life. Move over, Larkin (another great miserabilist), is there still room in Little England for another grumpy old fart? What is is with the British? All their best male wits are essentially conservatives, at least traditionalists - including the irascible Mr. Fry, who thinks modern poetry is mainly rubbish. Wouldn't it be refreshing to hear of a male British genius wildly open to the new, the exotic and the foreign? Then again, if the songsmith has been misquoted (as we all must hope) by The NME, then maybe it is still Viva Morrissey!
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Tom Phillips said…
Indeed, Morrissey, of course, may well have been misquoted but given his flirtations with Union Jacks waved at Madness gigs and so on, it's probably only sensible to think the worst. The resurgence of 'Little Englandism' at the moment is truly depressing - especially if you've had the misfortune to read the Daily Mail recently. Even more depressingly, on the poetry front, many a 20th century male British poet appears to have signed up to the LE phenomenon: it's not just Larkin. The political affiliations of many an MBP (and a few adopted ones, like Pound, Eliot etc) have proved to be not encouraging. All this appears especially enraging when Europe in particular is opening up like never before. How many poets know where Kosice is? It's going to be European capital of culture in a couple of years' time. As for Morrissey: well, in his own words, 'the queen is dead, boys'.
Fri Nov 30, 09:41:00 pm 2007
Paul said…
Well yes and no and up to a point ... lovers of the Smiths would have to acknowledge that one of the things that catalysed Morrissey's lyrical genius back in the glory days was his sense of rootedness - his cultural references to a very English vision: much of it grim and grey and hopeless, but Romantic nonetheless - and very place-specific. I haven't read the NME interview, but for years Morrissey, like the nostalgic romantic that he is, has been mourning the loss of the cultural identity he knew and valued. This is probably the flip side of the rootedness and sense of identity that informed his early brilliance. Probably you can't have one without the other.

As for 'Little Englandism' - I have never known quite what this meant, and its critics never seem to define it. (I have never known, either, why a national flag should be 'offensive' - unless it's a swastika, perhaps.) Parochialism in poetry, as Kavanagh famously pointed out, can be the making not the breaking of verse, and plenty of non-English poets, from R S Thomas to Robinson Jeffers, can demonstrate the truth of this.

Ultimately there is no reason why a poet cannot be connected to his own culture, landscape and identity and be more than welcoming of others. I would have thought that both were essential. Boring and narrow-minded xenophobia never created great art - but, actually, neither did the extremes of modernism, by which we are all deemed internationalist citizens of nowhere in thrall to the inhuman machine of Progress.
Mon Dec 03, 12:45:00 pm 2007
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