Ranking the greatest English poets

Plus Ozempic, the Enlightenment and Tony Judt

Hello,

Welcome to Cultural Capital. In my column this week I wrote about the death of the bourgeois bohemian elite.

I also had a lot of fun arguing with Henry Oliver on his Common Reader podcast about who the twenty greatest English poets are. Obviously this is a highly subjective and arbitrary exercise. Really, it just provided an excuse to talk about poetry. It’s sometimes said that English has the richest poetic tradition in the world and talking through the highlights I was reminded why. There is just an amazing amount of stunning stuff. Until about the middle of the twentieth century, English poetry seemed to be reliably producing one or two major geniuses every fifty years.

It was also an opportunity to quote some of my favourite bits of poetry.

John Keats

I always think these lines on Satan’s architect Mulciber are the ones to give people who need a way into Paradise Lost:

Nor was his name unheard or unador’d
In ancient Greece; and in Ausonian land
Men call’d him Mulciber; and how he fell
From Heav’n, they fabl’d, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o’re the Crystal Battlements: from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A Summers day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star,
On Lemnos th’ Aegaean Ile: thus they relate,
Erring…

You get a bit of a sense of the scope and the scale (in both time and space) that make Paradise Lost such an extraordinarily powerful work of art.

I mentioned some other lines from Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey but I wish I’d nominated this famous bit on Wordsworth contemplating “the beauteous forms of nature” which I think must be one of the most profound things ever written in English:

Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

I especially love “the burthen of the mystery … the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world”. All this unintelligible world!

Some lines of Coleridge’s I wish I’d quoted as well as the more famous ones from Frost at Midnight are these from the Eolian Harp:

O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere—
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so filled;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument.

I always think the lines, “Methinks it should have been impossible / not to love all things in a world so filled” have such a moving generosity and optimism about them.

Henry quoted a great bit of Keats from The Eve of St Agnes. Madeline is heading to bed:

Out went the taper as she hurried in;
Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:
She clos'd the door, she panted, all akin
To spirits of the air, and visions wide:
No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!
But to her heart, her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side;
As though a tongueless nightingale should swell
Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.

A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,
All garlanded with carven imag'ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings
A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.

I’d always felt more that I respected Keats than I really loved him. I was slightly put off by how fey and poetic he can get. I always felt there was something slightly undignified about being a grown man and sitting down to read someone who says things like “Hark! ‘tis an elfin-storm from faery land”. But since the podcast I’ve been reading him again. It’s finally clicked and I am a convert. As with all great poets you just have to stop complaining and submit to another vision of the world. And when you do just let yourself go with the dreamy bejewlled atmosphere it is completely enchanting. My favourite line from that passage is “Its little smoke, in pallid moonlight, died”. So evocative and in the space of just one line!

You can listen to the podcast here.

Other Things

Economic Impact of Ozempic
Written in a slightly grating businessy style (how can anybody write things like “but here’s the plot twist!” and “did this post resonate with you?”) but this article about the economic impact of Ozempic was interesting:

In 2021, Lisa Chen, a software engineer, started a new weight-loss medication. Then, something interesting happened at her local coffee shop, her employer's healthcare costs, and the global economy.

In six months, Lisa stopped buying her daily morning muffin, causing the coffee shop to lose $600 in annual revenue from one customer. Within a year, she canceled her beer-of-the-month subscription and stopped ordering late-night DoorDash. By 2023, her grocery bill dropped 40%, alcohol spending fell 85%, and impulse Amazon purchases plunged 60%.

Lisa is one person. Her story will become the story of hundreds of millions.

Good Recording of The Eve of St Agnes
If you want to listen to recordings of poetry you’re often stuck with modern actors who over-emote or old-fashioned actors who are unbelievably fruity in their delivery. I found this recording of The Eve of St Agnes on Spotify. It definitely falls into the fruity category but I actually think its a really good reading and its been helping me to properly appreciate the poem.

Good Audiobook about the Enlightenment
I ditched my Eric Hobsbawm audiobook and have started listening to Ritchie Robertson’s The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790. I thought it would be a bog standard trot through the subject but it turns out to be fantastic. So interesting and thoughtful. I’m currently on the bit about the Enlightenment assault on the church. Not to sound too much like Steven Pinker but it’s hard not to be inspired by the bravery and intellectual independence of the people who first faced down organised religion. Robertson is also extremely interesting on a topic that is perennially fascinating to me: how religious were people before the enlightenment? He has all kinds of interesting evidence about the numbers of ordinary people who didn’t believe or who seemed lukewarm or badly informed about faith. I’ve bought the physical book so I can get through it faster (still got more than 25 hours to go on the audiobook despite listening to it almost constantly) so it might be the subject of a future post.

Tony Judt on Eric Hobsbawm
A Cultural Capital reader sent this very interesting piece on the life of Eric Hobsbawm by the historian Tony Judt (whose collection of essays When the Facts Change is well worth getting):

Eric Hobsbawm is decidedly a man of order, a “Tory communist,” as he puts it. Communist intellectuals were never “cultural dissidents”; and Hobsbawm’s scorn for self-indulgent, post-anything “leftism” has a long Leninist pedigree. But in his case there is another tradition at work. When Hobsbawm scornfully dismisses Thatcherism as “the anarchism of the lower middle class,” he is neatly combining two anathemas: the old Marxist abhorrence of disorderly, unregulated self-indulgence; and the even older disdain of the English administrative elite for the uncultivated, socially insecure but economically ambitious service class of clerks and salesmen, formerly Mr. Pooter, now Essex Man.

Eric Hobsbawm, in short, is a mandarin—a Communist mandarin—with all the confidence and prejudices of his caste.

This quotation from Hobsbawm’s memoirs (I’ve not read them) will resonate with twenty-first century readers:

It is difficult for those who have not experienced the “Age of Catastrophe” of the twentieth century in central Europe to see what it meant to live in a world that was simply not expected to last, in something that could not really even be described as a world, but merely as a provisional way-station between a dead past and a future not yet born.

I always want to read good essays so please send me any you think are interesting - either by replying to this email or in the comments.