Luke Roberts. Living in History: Poetry in Britain, 1945–1979

The Spring 2007 issue of Chicago Review on ‘New British Poetry’ contained a fold-out, faintly parodic poster diagramming ‘Styles of British Poetry 1945–2000’ by the reliably idiosyncratic scene chronicler (and noted poet) Andrew Duncan. There is nothing parodic about Luke Roberts’s Living in History, a seriously researched, deftly argued, and timely reassessment of post-1945 Anglophone left-wing poetic history and historiography. Its accomplishment nevertheless calls to mind Duncan’s diagram and its fugitive lines of intersecting influence and identification, not least because Roberts’s analysis of poetical and political commitment within and without the borders of the British state is exuberantly diagrammatic. Such constellations of poets and their works, as Roberts shows, are by their very nature shifting and transitory. They are characterized by both confluence and contradiction; their moments of bright, shining promise are, more often than not, either subject to the fluctuations of personal desire and political priority or obscured for later generations by equally transient critical priorities.

The signal achievement of Living in History is indicated by Roberts’s subtitle: this is a study of Poetry in Britain, rather than British poetry, a demarcation that provides the book’s guiding anti-state critique of colonial heritage, racist border policy, sexist and homophobic legislation, and carceral capitalism. It is a compelling organizational strategy that ensures Roberts’s narrative flows with a freshness rarely afforded to the academic discussion of poetry. The discussion begins with Kamau Brathwaite and sweeps through a fair field of literary activism and poetry concerned with abolishing borders of all kinds, from Mazisi Kunene to J.H. Prynne (from whose poetry Roberts’s title is drawn), Linton Kwesi Johnson, Denise Riley, and Cecilia Vicuña. Their work is read as part of the historical record of dissent from and agitation against the colonial state’s myriad persecutory negations, especially its policing of bodies, desires, and identities. Within this frame, Roberts’s readings are sensitive, persuasive, and sometimes beautifully revelatory (such as the reading of Bill Griffith’s ‘anti-carceral poetics’ in Chapter 7). On the uneven critical attentions that have met, or missed, these poets’ works, Roberts is an expert, his tone even and precise. The connections he draws extend to poets and communities that transgress the boundaries of his temporalization, including Bhanu Kapil and contemporary scenes in Brighton and Cambridge.

Roberts claims not to ‘ignore questions of form’ and works ‘via the close reading of individual poems’. His close readings overwhelmingly treat formal ambivalence as evidence of the poet’s divided, suppressed, or fluctuating political commitments. This can produce dazzling results, as in the chapter on Lee Harwood’s early queer love poetry, and slide into the ‘colonial camp’ (Tony Lopez’s phrase) of his later verse. Roberts is such a seductively desirous writer that he repeatedly telegraphs the affective methodology of his book in the kind of language that in lesser scholarship would register as affected bet-hedging: the frequent variations on ‘I want to say that’ or ‘I want to argue’ indicate moments of tentative reaching for the evidence of cultural and political dissent or agitation that are the book’s bread and butter. But such moments sometimes threaten to tip the close readings into scenes of projective identification or convenient idealization, as in the reading of Denise Riley in Chapter 5: ‘Does [Denise Riley’s poem “In 1970”] think about disabled girls, non-disabled, those who swim and those who can’t? [paragraph break] I want to say that it does.’

The agile revisionism of Living in History unpicks the uncritical assumptions in the poetry and its criticism, broadly, as such: misogyny and homophobia pepper the work of the white, sometimes Marxist men (Roberts points to John James’s latent homophobia and Ed Dorn’s virulent misogyny), while the Black South African poet Mazisi Kunene ‘could be accused of effacing labour’; the radical feminists were essentialist; the socialist feminists were all white; and none of them (with perhaps the dubious exception of Riley’s swimming poem) talk about the disabled. Yet despite his agility, there is a kind of circularity to Roberts’s critical method. To summarize more bluntly than his style deserves, these poets are interesting because their political commitments are, or at least can be, righteous; their political commitments are reflected in their poems; and their poems reveal the poets’ feelings about their political commitments. What we learn about the poets is capacious, but what we learn about their poems is, for the most part, how they indicate the kind of people the poets were, the kinds of struggles they engaged in or ignored.

Roberts argues that the disdain for biographical readings in opposition to the ‘egotism’ of confessionalism has led to a wilful ignorance of the social life of poetry that must be recovered for the political significance of a Bill Griffiths or an Arthur Nortje to be properly acknowledged. The value of this approach is evident in the book’s meticulous historical materialist focus on social context and the meaning of precarious poetical vocation under duress. But the risks of Roberts’s approach are a concomitant neglect of the formal proclivities of the verse in question that reach beyond the personal. An early example of this comes in Roberts’s reading of Prynne’s feelings about revolutionary Marxism in the 1960s. Roberts’s attention to the life history of the poet is welcome, especially as a corrective to the more speculative perambulations of recent treatments such as Jeff Dolven and Joshua Kotin’s epistolary reading of Prynne’s 2019 sequence Parkland (The Parkland Mysteries, 2023). The problem is that Roberts goes too far in the opposite direction. That ‘Prynne is happy’ about continental drift in ‘The Wound, Day and Night’ becomes in his reading evidence of Prynne’s ‘oceanic’ emotional life. Some discussion of the relationship between sentiment, Wordsworthian ecstasy, and what the poem ends by referring to as ‘that enfeebled history’ it yearns to overcome would allow Roberts’s reading of Prynne’s happiness to reach out into the poem’s arrangement of its lyric precedents the better to inform the poet’s song of fragile optimism.

Elsewhere the emotional weight of the readings is Roberts’s own, as in the chapter on Anna Mendelssohn, which narrates the author’s poetical trajectory as it overlaps, fleetingly, with Mendelssohn’s last years. He writes that ‘my experience of [Mendelssohn’s] poems is one where the reparative, against all odds, is maintained’. He acknowledges that his psychoanalytic reading of Mendelssohn’s ‘negativity and aggression’ might be too ‘reparative’ (Leo Bersani would have called it ‘redemptive’). Despite the careful, affective scaffolding through which Roberts builds his case for a Mendelssohn that ‘gave form and shape to our political thinking’ in the 2010s, the disjunction between some of the poetry he quotes and the claims he makes on its behalf remains palpable. If ever there was a poet whose work overwhelmingly does not ‘[hold] open possibility’, as Roberts suggests it does, but rather repeatedly and traumatically shuts it down, it was Mendelssohn.

Praise such as ‘important’ (or my ‘timely’, above) carries its own risk: that such words are worn through with overuse, part of the lacklustre vocabulary of a dispassionate review culture. Roberts’s book makes me want to use them anyway, and in doing so to shake off their habitual overtones in a bout of enthusiasm. Roberts is himself a poet of ardent sensibility and Marxist solidarity. Living in History is welcome not only in terms of its scholarly achievement, but in terms of its commitment to the ‘inexhaustible and intractable demands’ made by the poetry it cares about.