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| Vernon Watkins |
Sunday, October 8th, 2017
Richard Ramsbotham
50 years ago, on Sunday 8th October 1967, the poet Vernon Watkins dropped dead on a tennis court in Seattle. On the same day the former Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee died and Che Guevara was arrested in Bolivia, before being executed on October 9th. The Sunday papers will perhaps be filled with 50th anniversary articles on Attlee and Guevara.
The sad truth is, though, as newspaper editors know, that Guevara and Attlee will both “sell copy” - and poetry won’t.* Or certainly not in the uncompromising and undiluted form in which Vernon Watkins wrote it. The usually reticent T.S. Eliot called one of Watkins’s early poems: “a magnificent tour de force (…) it takes one’s breath away.” Marianne Moore named him: “O imagnifico,/ wizard in words.” W.B. Yeats told him: “I am not quite certain that I always get your meaning, but I always find beauty.” For Dylan Thomas, Watkins was: “the only other poet except me whose poetry I really like today”. Philip Larkin wrote: “In Vernon’s presence poetry seemed like a living stream… He made it clear how one could, in fact, ‘live by poetry’”. And Kathleen Raine called him: “the greatest lyric poet of my generation.” Regardless of what these or any other voices may have said, however, no Sunday Newspaper showed the slightest interest in an article about Watkins on the 50th anniversary of his death, linked to Carcanet’s republished Vernon Watkins - New Selected Poems.
Not that this would have troubled Vernon Watkins. Should fifty years pass without recognition, he’d happily wait for another fifty: “a poet… mustn’t really mind if even fifty or a hundred years go by before his work is felt by people exactly attuned to it, because that’s happened to very great poets in the past.” For ourselves, though, the almost complete silence in the literary world about Vernon Watkins, other than in Wales and above all Swansea, is a shame.
For Vernon Watkins’s voice, besides its long-term validity, also has much to say to our own time. As for example when he spoke of the frequently hollow sound of politicians’ words:
Lord, defend us from the peroration,
Silence all that politicians say,
They who plough us in to make a nation
Have not known the vision we obey.
His refusal to go along with any kind of nationalism was rooted in his true sense that individuals are more important than any groups or parties, let alone nations.
At the same time he was profoundly linked to the whole culture of Europe. He spoke fluent French and German and translated not only a wide variety of French and German poetry, but also Homer, Dante and even some Hungarian poems. Refusing to stoop to nationalist sentiments even in wartime, he spent much of the Second World War translating Novalis, Rilke, Heine and Hölderlin**. He therefore never merely looked on at Europe from outside, but developed a voice genuinely able to address the crisis Europe went through in the mid 20th century. This was recognized by the poet David Wright, who described Vernon Watkins as “one of the very few who have the moral ability to scan the lineaments of our present predicament without turning into a stone, or rattling like a pebble.” Kathleen Raine acknowledged this too and stated: “He is a poet of European stature, and as such he will come to be known.”
50 years ago today Vernon Watkins set off, against the sensible advice of his wife Gwen Watkins, (who is still alive and well, aged 93) and played too much tennis in far too great a heat, collapsed on court and died of a heart-attack before reaching hospital. He was, at the time, a candidate to become the new Poet Laureate. Had he lived and been chosen, his name would be remembered today. There was clearly a rightness that this did not happen. Journalistic acknowledgement could never have mattered to him, who wrote: “To me neglect and world-wide fame were one.” And even if his death was unexpected for all who knew him, and presumably also for himself, it wasn’t for his Muse, who he had always remained true to. Before that fatal game he wrote a new version of a poem he had begun a little earlier, and left it neatly on his desk, where Gwen Watkins discovered it soon afterwards. It was his own extraordinary farewell.
Second Air
After all is said,
Then the words alone
Keep a single thread,
Yes, one tone.
Perfect music is
What it had to be:
Wit, the gift of grace,
Bound, yet free.
Everything is caught,
Singular and glad;
Then the after-thought,
Though not sad,
Leads us to a plain
Where the stream is dry,
And we hear again
That low sigh
Earth has breathed who hears
After all is said,
One with many tears
Still unshed.
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* This blog was written before I’d read the Sunday Papers. 50 years is clearly a long time in politics – too long. There were, in fact, no articles on Attlee or Guevara either.
** Michael Hamburger met Vernon Watkins in 1942, and they became good friends. Hamburger urged Watkins to publish a book of his war-time translations of Hölderlin. Watkins sought instead to publish a book of his translations of Hölderlin, Heine and Rilke. The book Faber finally brought out was only of his translation of Heine’s The North Sea. Watkins’s Selected Verse Translations were published by Enitharmon Press in 1977.
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Blog by Richard Ramsbotham.
Richard Ramsbotham is the editor of Carcanet’s: Vernon Watkins – New Selected Poems. He has recently completed an 80,000 word biography of Vernon Watkins, which is still looking for a publisher. (Any suggestions welcome!)
New Selected Poems is available to buy here.