A Poet Could Not But Be Gay: Some Legends of My Lost Youth

by James Kirkup

Moving and humorous as well as uninhibited in its homo-erotic exposures, this recounts the author's disaffections with England and subsequent experiences in Sweden and then in Spain, where he falls passionately in love with a young American man. Kirkup is a distinguished poet who has spent much of his life teaching in Japan.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published September 13, 1991

About the author

James Falconer Kirkup, FRSL was a prolific English poet, translator and travel writer. He was brought up in South Shields, and educated at South Shields Secondary School and Durham University. He wrote over 30 books, including autobiographies, novels and plays. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

James Kirkup was amid to late 20th century English poet, he is best known, indeed notorious, because one of his poems 'The Love That Dare Not Speak its Name' which was published in Gay News in 1976 was prosecuted for blasphemy, was found to be blasphemous. The publication and editor of Gay News were fined and it is still illegal to publish this poem in newspapers or magazines in the UK (though it has been and there was no prosecution - but that doesn't mean it could not be prosecuted. The law still stands. But Mr. Kirkup was a greater poet then this notorious poem wou!d suggest. He was also an author and a translator of some note. Indeed he is so prolific under both his own name and numerous pseudonyms that I have to find a complete or accurate list of his work. The list on Goodreads is a joke, you would do better looking at a site such as AbeBooks.UK to discover his varied and extensive translations of novels from numerous languages including French, German and Japanese.

Yet since his death in 2009 at 91 he has slipped further into obscurity. Even his poetry is out of print and I don't believe there are any biographies in the pipeline. I can't judge his poetry - though he was highly regarded when he started publishing in the 1950s. He held university in the UK and abroad and spent a lot of his life outside the UK, particularly in Japan. There is something redolent of post war England between the 1950s and end of the 1970s about Kirkup's life. A time when 'the best new English poetry' was published by Oxford University Press, of plentiful tenured academic posts in the expanding new Universities, and of a clubable, very male, very Parnassian, world of The Listener, British Council and the BBC, which saw themselves as promoters of culture and civilization. It is a world that disappeared with Margaret Thatcher. Kirkup fit right in there he wasn't ways an outsider buthe was seen as 'our outsider'. Although his poem was at the centre of one of the great early 'gay' challenges Kirkup won't register otherwise on the story of gay liberation in the UK. He was too old but also he was not in the mainstream because he lived abroad and while totally open about his sexuality he was safe in tenured positions.

All of this a long introduction is to try and explain who Kirkup was and why publishing memoirs. Really I don't think I've done a good job. I found this his third volume of memoirs, A Poet Could Not But Be Gay, like its predecessors to be very amusing, with many insights into life in the UK and Japan in the 1969s, but mostly about his life which doesn't connect or intersect with much of what was going on in the UK or not with what we now care to remember. That ultimately is the problem with Kirkup, probably a good poet and translator but ultimately he was part of a specific BBC/British Council 'Mandarin' official culture that grew up in the wake of the post war and subsequent Labour governments to transform the UK into a more equal place but also one were the government was the source of patronage. It had good intentions but it was stuffy, bureaucratic, self centred and inward looking. It is a world so vanished it is hard to believe it ever existed.

If Kirkup lives on it should be through his poetry but that is a subject I am unequipped to comment on.