Sui generous

As the newspapers have dutifully reported, a poet won something this week: the poet being David Harsent and the something being the T. S. Eliot Prize. The award gains in piquancy when it is noted, too, that it is fifty years since Eliot’s death (the award, named in his honour and funded by the Eliot Estate, has been going for almost half of that time). The judging panel of three, chaired by Helen Dunmore, chose Harsent’s collection Fire Songs over 112 others, for its “technical brilliance and prophetic power” (how can they be sure about that latter quality, I wonder?). Harsent, apparently, is a poet for “dark and dangerous days”.

Now, taking issue with prizes and prizewinners has about as much point as putting peas back in a pod. For how – so the argument goes – are we to distinguish fair comment from the wails of the envious and the noise of sour grapes being swallowed? And if the prize is one for poetry, for heaven’s sake – well, need we say more? The stakes are so low, the rewards so small, the impact so muffled.

But – actually – they aren’t, or not any more. . . .

Harsent’s latest winnings are a far-from negligible £20,000 – raised this year from a previous £15,000 to “mark” the half-century since Eliot’s death, in the papers’ curious phrase (a form of commemoration that, we are sure, would have delighted the author of The Idea of a Christian Society, also – indirectly – of Cats). And only a couple of years ago the same David Harsent found himself on the receiving end of a cool C$65,000 as winner in the international category of the Griffin Poetry Prizes – the most generous given for poetry in the Western world. Who says lightning – or good fortune – doesn’t strike twice, even in dark and dangerous days?

At a time when, outside the world of little magazines (and with one or two honourable exceptions), the reviewing of poetry is more and more squeezed for space and pushed further and further to the sidelines, the culture of prizes and instant “bankability” will almost certainly have a disproportionate impact on the general reading public. This being so, interested readers will be reassured to know that Harsent, who has been, since 2013, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton, has garnered some lofty praise in his progress to his current eminence. Such as the Independent’s review of Fire Songs, from August last year:

"Truly significant poets continue to challenge their readers from book to book. Some – like W. B. Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz and even R. S. Thomas – go on to have 'late great' flowerings. David Harsent may not be at the 'late' stage yet, but with every book his stature as a truly significant writer becomes more undeniable."

Readers of the Independent would not have been surprised to hear this. Only a few years ago, in 2011, they would have learned of Harsent’s stature in a review of his previous collection, Night:

"Truly significant poets write like no one else, and David Harsent is both sui generis and unsurpassed. Taking over where his Forward Prize-winning book Legion left off, Night conducts an examination of the human psyche that is unique in both the unflinchingness of its gaze, and the narrative metaphors it uses to explore dream-life, terror and hidden impulse."

“Truly significant”, here, takes on an unfortunate ring of the circular or self-fulfilling, as in: likely to win big prizes. (For a slightly different take on Night, readers are referred to the TLS’s review, "Grime after grime", July 1, 2011.) Both of these first paragraphs, incidentally, are the work of the same reviewer, Fiona Sampson – and why shouldn’t they be? She used the same paper as a vehicle for praise of that earlier Harsent collection, Legion, and his translations of Yannis Ritsos, so is nothing if not consistent in her views. Sampson, the former editor of Poetry Review, now editor of Poem, and a poet who has herself been praised as “sui generis” by none other than David Harsent, was also, as it happens, one of the judges of the 2014 Eliot Prize. She has also been, since 2013, Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton.

Isn’t this the sort of thing a journalist, even an arts journalist, ought to find curious? – that a judge of a poetry competition could read over 100 books and find that the best of them turns out to be the work of a colleague of hers. (Even Roehampton’s own website, in announcing Harsent’s coup, seems to avoid noting the involvement of another member of the faculty, while linking to Sampson’s review of Fire Songs.) Perhaps what we should be celebrating this week is the remarkable power of coincidence? Or the remarkable power of loyal championship, since Sampson was also, in 2012, one of two judges who awarded the Griffin Prize to Harsent for Night, after reading 481 volumes of poets from thirty-seven countries?

Before you jump to conclusions, though, bear in mind that the award of the Eliot Prize does not rest solely with a single critic, or even a single academic department in Roehampton, but is the work of many hands – the Poetry Book Society, who administer the prize, have confirmed that a “clear and unambiguous” verdict was reached in the proper way, with all three judges playing their parts (the third was the poet Sean Borodale). And Sampson’s admiration for Harsent is, as another poetry critic, Jeremy Noel-Tod, reminded me, “clearly very sincere”. “Having reviewed his latest book, Fire Songs, warmly in the Independent”, he points out, “she also made it one of her Books of the Year in the same newspaper.” But, Noel-Tod continued,

"As T. S. Eliot himself said, 'it is part of the business of the critic . . . to see literature steadily and to see it whole', and I would suggest that no critic should endorse one writer too often. There is a danger of becoming so impassioned in advocacy of a particular cause that it loses the authority of objectivity, or even has an inverse effect – just as we sometimes fail to read the book that a friend insists we borrow."

Others may carp (mainly in the Twittersphere), but it is difficult in the small world of poetry (and poetry prizes for £20,000) to avoid accidentally treading on a colleague’s toe, as it were, every now and then. Why, it seems only yesterday that one heard complaints to the effect that the big prizes seemed to be a perpetual game of musical chairs that only ever stopped at one or other of a few powerful poet-publishers and their favoured poets. Chris Hollifield of the PBS takes the (slightly defeatist?) view that “if you excluded everyone who’s ever worked with someone or is married to someone [!] you’d never get a judging panel together”. Or, as the poet and sometime poetry competition judge Ruth Padel opined in 2006:

"The competitions where the writers are known I find difficult. I was judging the T. S. Eliot Prize. You are dealing with the work, it's the work that is the important thing. But you also know the people and I find it very painful indeed. At the moment I'm a Poetry Book Society selector. . . but I find this painful too; the poets are your friends quite often and you know just how it will affect their lives. I'm glad I'm going to stop quite soon."