And another worthwhile read from Arts and Letters.

It is unfashionable to speak of national characteristics. Queasy types think it is akin to racism. But the truth is that nations are definably different. Most importantly, they differ in what they do best. No nation has produced better essayists than France, none has produced better composers that the Germans, better painters than the Italians, nor better novelists than the Russians. America invented jazz and still masters the form and, though some may dissent, her record in film is unsurpassed. And the English? The English do poetry.

Poetry has no serious contenders as the English national art. Ah, it is often said, but Shakespeare wrote plays. And so he did. But consider these plays. Hamlet is a weird drama made magnificent by a torrent of peerless poetry, and I have always thought of it as a long poem whose cosmic structure seems to pivot on the words “We defy augury”. Shakespeare is the greatest playwright on earth, but he is heaven’s poet. And the list of his poet-compatriots – Chaucer, Browning, Dryden, Wordsworth, Clare, Donne, Auden, Tennyson, Keats, Pope, Herbert, etc. etc. – closes the case. We are a nation defined by and consisting of poets. To deny this is to deny England.

I will just add that C. S. Lewis was quite right to contrast poetry with the other English profession: shopkeeping.

Also, Mr. Appleyard does not, to my taste, go back far enough. English poetry may be said, with more truth at least to my untrained and tone-deaf ears, to end with Chaucer rather than begin there. Perhaps he feels that poetry which is no longer more-or-less immediately recognizable is no longer English poetry, an opinion to which I am sympathetic. But I will take the Pearl over Auden's corpus any day.

Also, speaking as someone who has at certain times of his life put a great deal of effort into the writing of sonnets, I can only asperse, scorn, and detest that Italianate invention. Those "jangling stops", which Milton later makes a sign of Babel's curse, are hard.

Come to that, how can one go through an article on English poetry and not mention Milton? For all that Graves didn't like him, he remains one of the greatest English poets ever. We find him a bit distasteful these days, as a reminder of that vulgar time when the English possessed actual religious beliefs, but that is no indictment of his craft. This ignorance seems to be rather widespread. I remember wondering at it when several students asked a tutor what translation of Paradise Lost she favored.

I had in my youth a plan to translate Paradise Lost into Latin hexameters, and illustrate each book with woodcuts à la Doré. The only things stopping me were my utter ignorance of Latin, hexameters, and woodcuts.