Poetry in Oxford: Fit for verse

How I found friends for life amongst the poets

JMW Turner’s '“The High Street, Oxford” (1810). Private collection, courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

And if unfit for tombs and hearse

Our legend be, it will be fit for verse.

John Donne, The Canonisation

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Some of you may remember that in my post about my attempt to introduce Kurt Vonnegut to an audience in Oxford on behalf of the Literary Society, I mentioned that I also had a role in the Oxford University Poetry Society (OUPS). In this post, I’ll write a little about my experience with the OUPS, and in a later one, I'll look in detail at the work of one of the poets who gave a reading for it. 

If I tell you that in the early 1980s I rose to the dizzying heights of the presidency of the Oxford University Poetry Society, honesty impels me to add that this was because only 3 or 4 people were interested in having roles in OUPS, and the others had either already been president or were patiently waiting their turn. The only mark of office was the temporary custody of a humble black metal box containing, as I recall, some blank receipts and a small amount of cash. There was no lock on the box, and the sticker marked “OUPS” that adorned its lid had been half torn off. Humble doesn’t begin to describe it. 

My first experience of OUPS was at “Freshers’ Fair,” where first-year students were recruited into student-led societies and clubs. Some societies were grand and imposing, such as the Oxford Union. Some were highly sought-after, such as the Dramatic Society, seen as a possible route to acting (or directing) fame; or the political clubs, seen (rightly, along with the Union) as a possible route to a political career; or the university newspaper, perceived (plausibly) as a stepping stone on the way to Fleet Street. And at the other extreme came tiny societies like OUPS. In the hall where the various societies set out their stalls, OUPS was tucked away in a quiet corner, along with societies promoting the least popular foreign languages and, quite possibly, stamp collecting. It was a backwater—practically a dried-up culvert. 

This Freshers’ Fair hierarchy (Oxford was nothing if not hierarchical) crudely reflected the preferences that the university’s “bright young things” entertained in terms of career choice (outside law or medicine)—journalism, politics, acting; careers in which you could wing it and succeed if you had enough self-confidence and some gift for language (or the right connections, but that’s another story). And if not, there was always the City, where the “right sort” could fit in well and make a lot of money out of managing other people’s money (connections would help there, too). 

Pre-Raphaelite murals on the upper walls of the Oxford Union Library

It's tempting to go further and suggest this was part of a story that’s still playing out in Britain. At the Fresher’s Fair and indeed in the university as a whole, there was no evidence, as I recall, of any interest in making things, inventing, or innovating. For most of us, the future seemed to be about making the most of whatever gift for words we had.¹

And the formula worked rather well for some: seven of the last nine British prime ministers (going back to 1979) studied at Oxford. Consider the implications of an institution that was basically a finishing school for future government leaders and whose students showed no interest in the generation of prosperity (as opposed to the management of money). You could, perhaps, build an argument that this points towards Britain’s current rentier capitalist model, an anti-innovation economy that has failed all but the lucky ones who have rents to collect. 

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Anyway, back to OUPS. I sauntered past the friendly huddle at the Portuguese Society and the stragglers who’d tracked down the philatelic society to the desk grandly marked “Oxford University Poetry Society,” which the scions of “good” families and ambitious kids from government schools were entirely, almost ostentatiously, ignoring. Clearly, poetry was not marked on the roadmap to Westminster, the City of London, or the Inns of Court. 

But somehow I found myself walking up to the amiable-looking young man half dozing on the other side of the OUPS desk. He turned out to be a third-year student from Balliol College who was kind and encouraging, and perhaps relieved to have someone expressing interest. I signed up on the spot. 

I also joined the Oxford Union, signed up for Cherwell, the student newspaper², and even put myself down for what would be a disastrous audition for the Dramatic Society. But it was poetry that welcomed me mostly warmly—this shy young man from the sticks (or boondocks), who hadn’t attended the “right kind of school” and who instinctively shrank away from the noisy company of the “Hooray Henrys.” I didn’t know it then, but I’d found a kind of home.

John Donne, probably 1595. Artist unknown. Donne entered Hertford College, then known as Hart Hall, in 1584, 303 years before I did.

I should add that although the OUPS was wholly beneath the attention of those distinguished souls destined to “run the country” (a phrase they liked to use), Oxford was in fact a city of poets. The great sonneteer Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) had studied there, as had Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). And I was studying at the college attended centuries before by John Donne (1572–1631). You could say that poets haunted the city. In modern times, Larkin had studied there, and he later recounted how he’d read, with envious bewilderment, the published work of contemporaries³.

And in the early eighties, I would stare through the windows of Blackwell’s bookshop on Broad Street with frank admiration at the books published by James Fenton, Craig Raine, and others. Sometimes, you’d see them walking along the same street. You’d half expect to see Donne or Sidney strolling with them. And all the time, there were workshops taking place where serious young writers who would make a name for themselves later used to meet to share their latest poems. If you looked, poetry was everywhere.

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The readings we held at OUPS were modest in ambition and mostly sparsely attended. The readers were well-established poets, but they were far from household names and certainly not in the same league of popularity as Kurt Vonnegut. 

These visiting poets struck me as generally kind, thoughtful, and modest, and I was moved by the quiet seriousness with which they approached their craft. Even if they didn’t earn a living from poetry, they had made their names through their skills and commitment as writers. This singular fact—that people could devote their entire lives to writing and reading poetry—has stayed with me as a vision of what a life well spent could look like. 

I suspect their turning up to read their poems to a handful of listeners had relatively little to do with the modest fee—ten or twenty pounds per reading, I think—and more to do with a desire to connect with their audiences. They did sometimes sell a few copies of their books, but I think they saw these trips more in terms of vocation than promotion. It was as if they assumed it was part of a poet’s life to read in a shabby college room and sip warm ale afterwards with a few eager-faced students or acquaintances from the wider Oxford poetry community. 

And these were not the beer-fuelled bacchanalia of OUPS lore, according to which, decades earlier, Dylan Thomas would only read when promised a crate of beer for his refreshment. The mood was subdued and serious, and the after-reading antics were confined to the occasional waspish put-downs of fellow poets not present. 

Sir Philip Sidney around 1576. Artist unknown.

OUPS could only afford to organise these readings because of the support we received from the National Poetry Secretariat. If the name sounds like something out of an Eastern European socialist republic, it was actually part of an earlier commitment to public funding for the arts that had first helped create the BBC and then brought us the Arts Council of England. The Secretariat, long since defunct, seemed to be a one-woman band, brilliantly run by Pamela Clunies-Ross, who terrified all of us but did a wonderful job of connecting societies like OUPS with poets wishing to read (and, importantly, would pay their fee). At some point, this had been considered a good use of public funds. But now the eighties had arrived; Margaret Thatcher was consolidating her power, and the reign of the market as the supreme and only god was beginning. Before long, such funding would end.⁴

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I don’t know what became of the black box or the OUPS after I left the university. But I do know a lasting love of contemporary poetry was building its foundations in me at that time.

Of course, I never made any serious attempt to join those running the country, nor did I become a famous journalist, much less an actor or stage director.

Shelley in 1819. Painted by Alfred Clint, based on an original by Amelia Curran.

But I can’t say I have any regrets on that score. One of those many Oxford poet-ghosts, Sir Philip Sidney, wrote a Defence of Poesy in which he wrote of “the planet-like music of poetry” and deplored or pitied the reader with “so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry.” I’m glad I decided to walk with the sky-gazing poets—both the living and the dead. 

But in one way, perhaps I wasn’t so different from those following the crowds to Westminster. For, after all, hadn’t another of the Oxford poets, Shelley, suggested in his own Defence of Poetry (published in 1840), that there were other kinds of parliaments to attend when he proclaimed that poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world?”⁵

1. Of course, there were people studying engineering. But among the people I knew, nobody took engineers seriously (how foolish we were), and, more worryingly, you could probably say the same about the British ruling classes.

2. I ended up mostly reviewing books of poetry.

3. For example, having read John Heath-Stubbs' "Leporello," he found himself "profoundly bewildered," wondering, "What sort of poetry was this—who was he copying?” Required Writing (Faber 1983, p. 28). It was a city crowded with poets.

4. It seems that Clunies-Ross resigned in 1988.

5. There was, of course, one well-known English poet who enjoyed a career as both kinds of legislator. Andrew Marvell (born 1621) sat as member of parliament for Hull from 1659 until his death in 1678. He studied at Cambridge.