You wouldn’t guess from the cover design—three songbirds silhouetted over swatches of picturesque Englishness—but Catherine Clarke’s A History of England in 25 Poems hits one of its sweet spots with a chapter called “The Arse-End of England”. All the chapters here offer a case study of a short piece of verse: a cutting replanted in its historical context and explored through the stories seeded around it. The cumulative result is an unpredictable wander around the garden of English literature, with roses and root vegetables intermixed, and many of the best things dug up and presented with the earth still on them.
The ballad called “Bum-fodder” is one of them. It takes satirical aim at the so-called Rump Parliament which was, Clarke writes, “on its last legs” in early 1660, following the failure of Richard Cromwell to continue the reign of his father as Lord Protector. The Royalists, who would soon bring about the restoration of the monarchy, scented blood. Before that, however, there was another smell in the air: a “stinking Rump” that was “all be-shit”, even though it still seemed possible it would manage to get “off the hooks”—a phrase which the witty rhymer (possibly the Royalist poet Alexander Brome) returns to its meaty meaning with mention of “Butchers and Crooks”.
Clarke carefully explains the political thrust of all this knockabout commentary, then brings it alive with that reliable witness of the times, Samuel Pepys, who reports that, on the dissolution of parliament, butchers on the Strand “rang a peal with their knives that they were going to sacrifice a rump”. Pepys joined in the celebrations himself, recalling an evening with friends who sang “a song made upon the Rump”. Perhaps, Clarke suggests, Pepys and his pals were singing “Bum-fodder”, a broadside printed on cheap paper that may well have served, after reading, as actual toilet paper, or “bum-fodder”—a term which gives us our own slang for worthless paperwork, “bumf”.
In singing the praises of Pepys and penny ballads, though, I’m aware I may be colluding in the complacent parochialism that the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid once attacked in his poem “England is Our Enemy” (1955). MacDiarmid describes the “official” English literary critic as sounding rather uncomfortable around great poetry, but becoming genuinely enthusiastic about Pepys:
He salutes the little pawky diarist
With an affection, an enthusiasm,
For his industry, his pawkiness,
[...]
Then he asserts amazingly:
‘This is scarcely literature’
Instead, in what MacDiarmid hears as a “typically English” judgement, the critic’s raptures suggest “it is something very much better”.
What is better than literature in the mind of the “typically English” reader? You’d suspect, looking around the bookshops, that it’s history. Books that combine both have always appealed to a reading public taught at school to think of poetry and history as mutually illuminating. In the same year that Tory politician Kenneth Baker, as Margaret Thatcher’s education secretary, introduced the national curriculum, he also found time to put together The Faber Book of English History in Verse (1988); when he was out of office, he assembled The Faber Book of War Poetry (1996). But Wilfred Owen et al are a tragic exception, created by mass conscription. Good poets were not always eyewitness to historical events, or even interested in them after the fact. So to tell a continuous history of England through its poetry requires interpretative ingenuity.
Clarke’s introduction does seem a little anxious about taking this challenge on. After an opening scene set in the rare books room where she is reading Rump Songs and contemplating a “tiny, twisty” wormhole burrowed through the pages of that volume (which reminds her both of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and an Anglo-Saxon riddle about bookworms), she worries over the “complicity” of histories of England in homogenising the cultural diversity of “our north Atlantic archipelago”; notes that not all the poems included “are my favourite poems”; and concludes that in choosing just 25, “I’ve felt a keen sense of what’s missing – of what’s not there”.
To rectify this, the publisher includes blank pages at the end of the book “for your own poem choices”, which feels like a quaint gesture in a volume that also promises to foster the critical reading skills needed on “the multimedia battlegrounds of our world today”. And it somewhat skirts around the obvious solution: include more poems. The significant-sounding cardinal number has become a popular hook for popular scholarship—the thinking person’s listicle—ever since Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010). Its appeal is to be both neat and arbitrary: the secular limit of number imposed on the ideologically suspicious grand narrative. The disadvantage of disposing with continuity in favour of stackable units is that it chops up rich raw material—such as poetry in English—into a lucky dip.
It is to Clarke’s credit that she exploits this constraint to choose many poems that will surprise anyone expecting the Greatest Hits of English Lit. We begin perhaps inevitably, though, with “Caedmon’s Hymn”, the Old English praise song attributed to an inspired cowherd by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Philip Larkin had to study this pious cry of revelation in his final year at Oxford, and wrote witheringly to Kingsley Amis: “If I’d composed a poem like that one, I’d keep it jolly dark, my God I would.” But Clarke trained as an Old English scholar, so she knows how to make survivals from that age gleam from interesting angles, explaining how the language of warrior culture has been repurposed by Christianity (God becomes the “heaven-kingdom’s guardian”) in alliterative verse that was in fact a scribal translation of Bede’s Latin.
We then move on to the 10th-century narrative of coastal defence, The Battle of Maldon, to be shown how anræd (single-minded), the epithet applied to its real-life hero, the Dane-taunting Byrhtnoth, contrasts pointedly with the popular name for the king at the time of the battle, Æthelred the Unready—where unræd means “weak-counsel”, indecisive.
“We are a land / hammered by restraint,” wrote JH Prynne in 1968; “it is / the battle of Maldon / binds our feet”. The idea of England, that is, too readily shrinks to an “island story” (Prynne’s internationally spirited poem is called “Song in Sight of the World”). And in the centuries that followed it’s hard to escape the pull of that consolidating myth. This leads to a chapter where Clarke tries valiantly to show how “reading around the edges” of a piece of jingoistic doggerel called the “Agincourt Carol” (1415) reveals the more complex history of Anglo-Welsh relations at this time. Her point is that none of this is in the flag-waving carol itself—but that fact rather awkwardly highlights her primary text’s lack of both poetic subtlety and historical veracity.
Conversely, it can sometimes feel as though the lyric art of established classics takes second place to the need to tell a story around them. To go from the raggedy “Agincourt Carol” to Thomas Wyatt’s haunting sonnet “Whoso list to hunt…” is to experience vertigo in the uses of verse. But Clarke’s suspenseful insistence that the main question here is whether it is a “smoking gun” confirming Wyatt’s rumoured affair with Anne Boleyn leads her into the unwary claim that “perhaps the whole pleasure of the poem–then and now–lies in the variable relationship between poetry and reality”. Surely the pleasure of the poem lies in its poetry, regardless of any historically verifiable reality: the way Wyatt organises words into rhythms and images that suggest subtleties and depths of emotion. The speaker’s doggedly repeated “I”, for example, suddenly disappears at the eleventh line’s evocation of the loved one’s bejewelled neck, only to return in a twist of ventriloquism for the final couplet, which translates what is “graven in diamonds” around that neck: “Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am / And wild for to hold, though I seem tame”. One fervent voice is usurped by another. It may not be a smoking gun—as Clarke eventually concludes—but it’s still an arrow to the heart.
All of which is why the best chapters of this book are those where a lesser-known but skilful poem is recovered from neglect: there is pleasure to be had in the verse, and pleasure in the way it illuminates an era. It’s good, for example, to encounter John Dryden’s superb Annus Mirabilis (1667), with its documentary quatrains of the Great Fire of London (water to extinguish fires was traditionally kept in churches, hence the line “Some run for buckets to the hallowed choir”). And it’s even better, after this, to meet “Crumble-Hall” (circa 1745), a long poem by a domestic servant, Mary Leapor, who used the pungent mock-heroic couplet of Pope and Swift to describe someone doing the washing-up:
The greasy Apron round her Hips she ties,
And to each Plate the scalding Clout applies:
The purging Bath each glowing Dish refines,
And once again the polish’d Pewter shines.
Virginia Woolf, who famously imagined the failed literary career of “Shakespeare’s sister”, would have loved Mary Leapor. Sadly, like Judith Shakespeare, Leapor also died young—and here Clarke’s historical closereading hits a bullseye that resonates around the 18th-century world. Explaining why burial in a woollen shroud legally signified her relative poverty, Clarke contrasts the dead poet with her employer, Richard Chauncy, a textile merchant with the East India Company, who imported the luxurious fabrics that only the rich could afford to take to the grave.
As John Carey wisely observed in his survey volume A Little History of Poetry (2020), “It is not clear that The Epic of Gilgamesh” —the oldest surviving work of literature—“was thought of as poetry in our sense of the word”. The same might be said of some of the choices in the first half of A History of England in 25 Poems, and explains why its strongest run of chapters is the last 10. These cover the most recent two centuries, when our sense of the word “poem” as a verbally inventive, self-contained statement of the speaker’s feelings became the dominant meaning. The final three chapters, in particular, pick out excellent pieces by Fleur Adcock, Grace Nichols and Zaffar Kunial to consider variously the North/South divide, the history of Commonwealth immigration and contemporary political disputes over ideas of Englishness.
It is fair to say that, if you hung a St George’s cross from a lamppost last summer, this history of England is not going to be your cup of tea. Although it wears its learning lightly, and sometimes with a slightly apologetic jolliness (the Ecclesiastical History of the English People “isn’t a snappy title”), it also steps carefully around any politically simplifying notion of “Englishness”. That said, there is, surprisingly, no acknowledgement of Scottish and Irish poets as part of the history of “English” poetry (Wales gets a foot in the door via Edward Thomas). And I wasn’t convinced by Clarke’s claim, at the start and the end, that such an approach to reading can lead us into “radical empathy” with the past—partly because it’s not clear how this resonant idea differs from the normal empathy required to read imaginative literature and historical documents, and partly because it again seems to assume a model of personalised lyric that wasn’t always primary in earlier eras, or even for some poets now.
Kunial has written that “I like how poetry can hold this mossy sense of folded-in worlds”, and this is exactly what Clarke memorably demonstrates in her reading of his poem from 2022, spoken by a retired cricket groundsman. In it, a lovingly evoked patch of long grass—which might be an image of English poetry itself—is said to have an “authorless sway”, echoing the archaic meaning of “sway” (a reigning power) as sung in a hymn at Queen Elizabeth’s funeral the same year. Such insights into the past lives of the words in our mouths are perhaps the best we can ask of poetry as history.
