David E Anson muddypoetry
iNSPIRATION
My journey with poetry began probably as a small child with my gran reading to me from her childhood copy of A A Milne’s When We Were Very Young. Perhaps not a great work of deep intellectualism BUT it was a significant step in my appreciation of poetry – a very strong use of rhyme and rhythm and a clear narrative. Perhaps there is also someone's PhD in there about social injustice or gender politics; I don’t know. The fact that I can still remember that James James Morrison Morrison Whetherbe Goerge Du Pree, Took great care of his mother though he was only three … Tells us something about the way we can carry poetry with us.
A more significant point in my journey with poetry was as an A level student studying Seamus Heaney. Heaney’s poetry has had a lasting effect on me, there is something in the beauty of his language, the honesty of his phrasing, the clarity of his story telling and the multi-layered depth of his work that strikes a chord. His poetry is deeply political, deeply moving and intensely beautiful. At 17 his poetry captured my imagination and inspired me to write a style of poetry that I still pursue today. It was in Heaney’s poetry that I realised the force that poetry can be for change and for influence. Something that goes beyond the simple aesthetic beauty of language.
I read English Literature at university and I was immersed in much poetry and as an adult there have been a few poets who have really struck a chord for the power of their poetry to inspire awe and wonder. I love Milton's Paradise Lost for the muscular urgency and vigour of his language and imagery. In book one when Satan is ‘hurld headlong flaming’ out of Heaven for presuming to overthrow God, the idea of a flaming mass shooting down from Heaven like a fallen star with the ‘hideous ruine and combustion’ that follows his descent is such a rich paring and conjures up so perfectly a very physical image of his filthy damnation.
As a teacher I have had the privilege of continuing a very intimate relationship with literature and I particularly enjoy teaching the poetry of John Keats. Recognising some of his inspiration in Milton, Keats attempted to write his own epic poem ‘Hyperion’. In it, Keats describes a group of middle aged Gods who have been overthrown by the next generation of bright young things; all apart from Hyperion, God of the Son, that is. At the very end of Book One Hyperion sets off from the burnished halls of his flaming kingdom to try and help his brothers reclaim their power and in doing so he leaves the safety of his kingdom:
...with a slow incline of his broad breast,
Like to a diver in the pearly seas,
Forward he stoop'd over the airy shore,
And plung'd all noiseless into the deep night.
There is something of Milton’s description of Satan about this moment and it is the richness of Keats’s simile comparing this magnificent God to the very human characteristic of a swimmer that captures something of the poet's own mortality. It isn’t the sea he is diving into, but space! Or perhaps Hyperion is really a poet diving into the endless space of his imagination.