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!
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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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.