The poem has an image of a mind lying open like a drawer of knives and since Larkin thought Mrs
The poem has an image of a mind lying open "like a drawer of knives", and since Larkin thought Mrs T "a blade of steel" it was as if the poem had become a kind of tribute to her.If political leaders invite poets to dinner, it is to show the world how chic or civilised they are, how well disposed towards writing, publishing and the arts. And if poets accept the invitation, it is because they like the idea of exerting influence (and the free food and drink) Disappointment invariably follows. When Kennedy had Robert Lowell to dinner at the White House 35 years ago, Lowell was flattered and told his host (with whom he had a close friend in common, whose name was Blair): "You are the first President who's treated your peers as equals." But when next morning JFK sent the 7th fleet to Laos, Lowell felt cheated, as if the presence of poets at the White House had been mere window dressing, whereas "we should be windows".The idea of being a window for politicians, enabling them to see clearly and take the wider view, is a beguiling one for poets. In this century, both Yeats and Auden wrote passionately about the great political events of their day. But Yeats was sceptical about the power poets have - "We have no gift to set a statesman right" - and Auden, too, decided that they are "singularly ill-equipped to understand politics or economics".Most politicians think this as well, but it doesn't preclude the hope that their struggles might be eulogised by some friendly versifier.
It isn't unknown for poets to flatter with an ode, Milton having written one for Cromwell, "our chief of men". There was a time when British poets and politicians mingled freely with each other - when the poets were the politicians. But as the specialising of the two professions has forced them apart, so the opportunity for informed political verse has been diminished. "To write a good poem on Churchill," Auden thought, "a poet would have to know Winston Churchill intimately, and his poem would be about the man, not about the Prime Minister."There are no living poets intimately acquainted with Tony Blair, so far as I know.
Indeed some suspect that there are no living persons intimately acquainted with him, except perhaps Cherie. We know all about his gleaming smile, but nothing of his bite. We've had bright fragments of what he thinks and feels, but wonder about the masses left unsaid. Once he is in office, wielding power and making policy, all this will change. But for now there's little to make poets start reaching for their pens.Perhaps it's just as well. Auden thought that a poem built like a political democracy would be "formless, windy, banal and utterly boring"; a New Labour poem would risk being all these things, and blandly cheerleading as well.
An anti-Blairite poem is even less thinkable: for a week or two at least poets should allow themselves to dream. When Osip Mandelstam condemned his leader, Stalin, he was exiled. Poetic dissidence is less harshly punished in the UK, where our Mandelstams are safe to satirise Mandelsons. All the same, this is hardly the moment to carp.The problem is that writers tend to be oppositional even at the best of times, and after 18 years the habit of protest - whingeing as Margaret Thatcher called it - is deeply ingrained. To lend support to a new administration, if only passively, requires a different art: a leap of faith, a willingness to be carried along with the tide, patience. It may even require that public poets be silent, until they can see what the new nation looks like.In "The Morning After", Tony Harrison writes of the VJ parties he watched as a child in August 1945, and of howthat, now clouded, sense of public joywith war-worn adults wild in their loud flinghas never come again since as a boyI saw Leeds people dance and heard them sing.On Friday lunchtime, as children waved Union Jacks outside Downing Street, that sense of public joy did come back, for the first time in many years.