Bolshevism It’s Alfred Noyes’s 133rd birthday: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Alfred_Noyes.jpg I’m going to be unfair to him, and ignore his pacifism and his defence of Roger Casement [after his earlier attack on Casement] and his comic poems for children. First, why is that trashy poem The Highwayman in the Key Stage 2 Literacy Strategy? Yes, you can do boring lessons on metaphor and alliteration and sound patterns, but do we really want ten-year-old boys to read about Bess in lines like these: ‘..They gagged his daughter, and bound her, to the foot of her narrow bed….They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest./ They had bound a musket beside her, with the muzzle beneath her breast!... She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood!... Her musket shattered the moonlight,/ Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him—with her death.’ This is a picture of true love to share with children? Second, remember what Noyes wrote in 1922 about Ulysses, under the heading Rottenness in Literature in the Sunday Chronicle: ‘It is simply the foulest book that has ever found its way into print…The writing of the book is bad simply as writing…there is no foulness conceivable to the mind of madman or ape that has not been poured into its imbecile pages…the only sound analysis of the book in this country was…that it was ‘couched in language that would make a Hottentot sick’…it is the extreme case of reduction to absurdity of what I have called the ‘literary Bolshevism of the hour’…’ Compare, as they say, and contrast. [PS: A confession. We had to copy bits of this out in the junior school. It’s sentimental and slack but I’ve got a soft spot for it which is indicative of nothing but nostalgia: allpoetry/poem/8497221-The-Old-Grey-Squirrel-by-Alfred_Noyes]
Posted on: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 10:06:51 +0000
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