Deaths of the Poets by Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley Hamish Robinson

HAMISH ROBINSON Deaths of the Poets by Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley Jonathan Cape £14.99

The tale of every death, even the most placid, will be touched by some measure of terribilità. A volume entitled Deaths of

the Plumbers, properly done, would, one suspects, be just as hair-raising as stories of the deaths of poets – perhaps more so. Likewise, one suspects that there are plenty of people leading lives of quiet scandal and recklessness – by way of a preface to extinction – that would put even the most dissolute poet to shame. There is, then, prima facie, nothing exemplary about the manner in which poets succumb to mortality – it is a beaten path – and when the authors of the book under review, struck by the susceptibility of their fellow poets, ask if writing poetry is to ‘court death’, the short answer is, to live is to court death. And yet we are interested in the deaths of poets, and Michael Symmons Roberts’s and Paul Farley’s line of enquiry has a long history.

Poets, along with philosophers and tyrants, were among the first subjects of popular biography in the classical period. All three professions involved issuing precepts for living, and the lives – and deaths – of those doing the issuing were naturally of interest in so far as they

could be regarded as an illustration of those same precepts. Indeed, as a genre, biography has never been without an element of malicious irony. Not only was all poetry regarded as a species of advice, in the case of poets, additional interest was provided by their prophetic character. Poets were said to be able to confer immortality by way of lasting praise, and their gifts in this respect to be of divine origin: they had one foot in another world, and could, in some sense, see beyond. In the Christian era, the poet’s functions were progressively squeezed: while he might confer a degree of worldly praise, immortality and even precepts for living became the province of established religion, and latterly of science. In Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the

Poets, except in rare cases, the poet is a largely hollow figure, even delusional. He lives by pleasing his readers, and rarely succeeds, or not for long, and the individual lives generally end up resembling morality tales like ‘A Rake’s Progress’: poverty and madness await the poet without an alternative career. In the Romantic period, the poet regained something of his old foresight: in the turbulent world of revolutionary politics, he became the interpreter of aspirations, the visionary, the avant-garde; his death a sacrifice to a future in which he would be understood and revered. Symmons Roberts and Farley are the happy inheritors of all these motifs.

Although their title nods to Johnson’s great collection, Deaths of the Poets is not strictly biographical, but a travelogue, following the formula of countless TV and radio shows: in this case, two amiably diffident presenters set out in doggedly geographical pursuit of a notional subject, and in so doing, generate a gentle stream of incident and rumination. The incident includes interviews with widows, children and friends of the deceased; conversations with academics, fellow poets and curators; exchanges with propertyowners, supers, tour-guides, barmen and waiters; visits to graveyards, houses, hospitals, offices and libraries; flights, train journeys, excursions in hire cars and taxis; stops for coffee or alcohol. The canon of dead poets chased down ranges from Byron and Clare to O’hara and Weldon Kees, the settings from Vienna (Auden) to Minneapolis (Berryman). Their best chapters are those in which they are thoroughly grounded in the poet in question (Larkin) or where their ruminations come closest to reportage (Rosemary Tonks), and they are not merely chewing over the old myths (Plath). And all this is largely entertaining. However there is a problem with the text – at least in proof: it is, in parts, very badly written. I do not mean that the writing is merely perfunctory (‘It’s the bed that punctures the routine air of looking around at exhibits’), or careless (‘Cervantes was a soldier in the Spanish Navy’), but that at times it descends into incoherence (‘That we are all going to die, that a poem can happen anywhere, the most unlikely spot, and inscribe its shape despite our awful foreknowledge, means it’s also time to admit it will definitely happen to us – though hopefully not before we hand this in…’). All of which comes as a mild surprise in a book that has been produced by two prize-winning poets, published by a third and, according to the acknowledgements, copy-edited by a fourth.