Rewarding in a rather straightforward way

Victoria Moul and Jeremy Wikeley discuss 'Poems Beautiful & Useful'

Something a little different this week: I’m delighted to share an interview with Victoria Moul. Victoria is a scholar, poet and translator living in Paris. She writes weekly about poetry and translation on her Substack, Horace & friends, which I cannot recommend highly enough. She is also the editor of a new pamphlet, Poems Beautiful & Useful, now available from Headless Poet, a new small press dedicated to the art of the introduction, published by yours truly.

Headless Poet aims to (re)introduce readers to poets of the past, especially work which has been buried by time. There will also be a series of short introductions to (my pick of) the best new poetry. In that spirit, Poems Beautiful & Useful presents twenty ‘popular’ poems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which are, in most cases, not well known today. It will, I think, be of interest to curious readers and specialists alike. In this — and in the masterful way in which Victoria has navigated the format’s limits (just thirty-six pages, including the intro) — it really exemplifies what the project is all about.

Copies are available on the website, here: https://www.headlesspoet.com/shop. You can also sign up for a year’s subscription in advance (five pamphlets, delivered to your door). And, for those in the area, Headless Poet will have a stall at Free Verse, the Poetry’s Society’s annual book fair, on Saturday 25 April at St. Colomba’s Church of Scotland, Knightsbridge, London.

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Jeremy Wikeley: I thought I would start with that word ‘popular’ in the subtitle. How do we know what was most popular with early modern readers? How, if at all, does it differ from the ways in which we remember it today?

Victorial Moul: The period between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth century had an amazingly rich and lively poetic culture, with a great deal of poetry circulating in both print and manuscript. We’re used to the idea of handwritten (manuscript) material for private purposes, a personal notebook or commonplace book for example, but in this period, especially the first part of it, manuscript was still also used for publication of a kind, with a professional scribe sometimes employed to copy a work or a collection of works. These might then be bound and presented as a gift or passed around. Obviously not everything printed in this period has survived; and for manuscript even more has been lost. But even so, we have a lot of sources for the poetry that was being written and read in early modern England.

For Poems Beautiful & Useful I was thinking particularly about the collections of manuscript material kept by individuals for their own use — this might be quite a carefully curated personal anthology or a much more chaotic box of loose papers in an archive, a mix of poems copied by the owner and pieces passed on to him or her by friends and acquaintances. I have worked a lot with this sort of material for about 20 years so I know it very well and one thing that’s obvious when you’ve done a lot of this kind of work is that the poems you see most often — the ones people bothered to write down or pass on most frequently — are not necessarily the ones you find in anthologies today.

There are a few different reasons for this. In any given year a lot of the most popular poems were topical ones — like a rude epigram about the king’s dodgy new favourite or the scheming tendencies of French Jesuits. This kind of thing is fascinating for the historian but they tend not to be so compelling for us today. But it seemed to me that there were quite a lot of poems that I came across frequently in manuscript but rarely or never in modern anthologies, and which still struck me as good poems. Many of these treat themes rather than specifics: how we should respond to love, lust, ambition, war or loss. Readers and writers at this period took it for granted that the best poems were also, in some sense, useful.

As I worked on selecting poems for the anthology, I did depart a bit from a strict definition of popular. I mean that some of the poems included here did not circulate much or at all at the time, but I chose them because they are good poems in themselves, which I thought deserved to be better known, and because they are also in all cases examples of a kind of poem which was very popular then and is less common today. The selection includes a few poems which are paraphrases of scripture, for example, because this was one of the single most popular kinds of poem at the time — both to read and to have a go at writing oneself. And I also wanted to give readers a sense of the relative indeterminacy of authorship at this period — that we still have poems that might be by poets as familiar as Jonson or Herbert, but we’re not completely sure. I hope this gives readers a glimpse into the work that goes on ‘behind the scenes’ in creating editions.

Jeremy: In his (rightly glowing) review, Henry Oliver makes the point that you haven’t included anything by John Donne. I found that interesting, because I don’t think Donne quite fits here. Rightly or wrongly I think of him as a poet who overwhelms the reader, whereas these poems are more companionable, for want of a better word. But of course, presumably in part thanks to T. S. Eliot, we do tend to associate this era with Donne in particular and with the ‘Metaphysical’ poets generally. Some of the poets here would, in other guises, appear in a ‘Metaphysical’ anthology, but not all of them and perhaps not these particular poems. Do these distinctions make any sense to you? Is it fair to describe the selection as a whole as a kind of response to Eliot?

Victoria: Yes, I think Donne and Milton are probably the two most obvious omissions, though we don’t associate Milton so much with shorter verse anyway. Donne is a good example of a poet who was demonstrably popular at the time — there are quite a large number of manuscripts containing copies of his poems — and is central to the “canon” today, though as you imply in your question, he was out of fashion for a long time in between before being revived in the earlier 20th century. I left him out for two reasons. For the pragmatic one, that I wanted to use the pamphlet to introduce readers to less familiar poets, and if I had to guess I’d say that Donne is probably the single best-known poet from the early seventeenth century, at least for British readers. (He was on the A level syllabus for a long time as well.) The other reason is one you also hint at in your question, I think — in this pamphlet I was interested in showcasing verse that, though quite varied, gravitates towards or centres around a kind of practicality or simplicity. That’s not to say that these are all simple poems, but that they have a kind of rootedness to them that I don’t associate so much with Donne — they are tethered a bit more straightforwardly to a message or an occasion. I think that the prominence of the ‘metaphysical’ tag, especially at school level, means that a lot of readers have this idea that early modern English poetry is paradigmatically rather difficult. I wanted to show how poetry of this period can also be rewarding in a rather straightforward sort of way.

Jeremy: I’m thinking about that wonderful line from Geoffrey Hill, which someone shared on Substack the other day: “We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other... Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be any different than we are?” But, of course, it makes just as much sense to say that, since being human is so difficult, why shouldn’t art offer us a place where we can experience something else? Being simple, beautifully, is terribly hard, in both form and in feeling.

I’m sure this says more about me than anything else, but I’ve always felt that there is a strain within modern poetry that sees difficulty as a virtue in itself and simplicity or clarity as somehow selling out — that there are certain poets who seem to take pride in being obscure. And then, on the other hand, there are clearly popular poets who take pride in being, for want of a better word, bad (see the recent ‘Worst Poets Club’ tour). We are back to the old split, real or imagined, between ‘popular’ and ‘literary’ work. That split seems as perncious now as ever, almost intractable. Does it go back to this period?

Victoria: Yes, it’s very hard to write simply isn’t it? This is noticeable in poetry but also everywhere else. One of the hardest things of all, with my scholarly hat on, is to write about very complex and quasi-technical matters in a genuinely straightforward way. To say just what you mean.

I like Hill very much and of course he’s right that everyone is difficult — perhaps complex is a better word. But I’m sure I’m not the only reader to feel, also, that Hill made a bit of a fetish of difficulty, that he used difficulty of various kinds, including setting complex technical challenges for himself, as a kind of strategy of avoidance. There’s something in Hill that seems almost daunted or embarrassed by the magnitude of his own lyric gifts. It’s an interesting phenomenon that I recognise in Cowley as well. I suspect Hill’s poetic “afterlife” might be rather like that of Cowley.

Most people, I think, would acknowledge that people and relationships and the world are indeed very difficult but also that there are moods, or moments, or aspects of life for all of us in which the important things actually seem simple.

I’m not at all against complexity or difficulty in poetry and wouldn’t want to give that impression. If anything I am rather obsessed by it — I come back and back in my own work to Horace, to Pindar, to Sanskrit poetry and grammar — these are all sort of paradigmatic examples of literary difficulty I suppose. I work a lot on very obscure early modern Latin verse and I am fascinated, both as a critic and as a poet myself, by translating poetry, which is immensely difficult — impossible, really. But I suppose like you I don’t see a contradiction. Poetry should be beautiful because that is, as it were, its proper virtue, and it should also have something to say. Pindar is very difficult, yes, because the literary conventions in which he was working were highly complex and they are very distant from ours, but he is also supremely beautiful and there is no doubt that he has something to say. Very “simple” poems can also be very beautiful. And of course many apparently “simple” poems — poems in what we might call the plain style — are in fact underpinned by very subtle and complex effects.

But I think the kinds of difficulty in Pindar, or even Donne, are probably rather different from what you meant when you talked about some kinds of contemporary poetry ‘taking pride in being obscure’. I think I know what you mean there and I don’t really have any patience with it. I’m thinking of something like the poem that just (depressingly) won the UK National Poetry Competition, ‘The Gathering’ by Partridge Boswell. Now that seems to me like an almost comically bad poem and a very good example of this kind of pointless and overwritten obscurity. When ‘meaning’s / odometer is broken’ — indeed!

Jeremy: ‘The Gathering’ completely baffled me on first and second reading: I needed your conversation with Hilary Menos to guide me through. Many of the lines I did understand (‘colourless gulag of pristine ceiling’) seemed straightforwardly ugly. Though I ought to qualify what I said above. Presumably no one — or next to no one! — sets out to be obscure for the sake of it, even if they might take pride after the fact. I’m fascinated by that idea of Hill being uncomfortable with his own talent. But not everyone has that excuse, either.

So what’s going on? Perhaps there’s an element of taking one’s own difficulties — difficulties thinking or writing about a subject, difficulties we all share — as a sign that something profound is happening, as opposed to what, for most of us, such difficulties usually are: the limits of our own understanding or ability.

In the case of ‘The Gathering’, Partridge clearly feels a heavy responsibility to write about the news in general and Gaza specifically. There is that line about ‘complicit silence’, which is a phrase you often see on social media. But poets can only write the poems they can write. It’s sheer vanity, though a common misconception, to think that the world needs anything else, any more than it needs an Instagram post. Perhaps he simply can’t write this poem. The poem feels pointless and overwritten because it’s coming from a place of genuine confusion.

Victoria: Yes, I think that’s a very shrewd and fair reading. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the writing of verse was of course just much closer to the cultural centre, the cultural mainstream than it is today so in that sense it was much easier for poets to comment on contemporary events without sounding silly or pretentious, or second-guessing themselves so much that the poem falls apart. For public poetry to work it has to be mainstream. To pull off one great, excoriating political poem — something like Marvell’s Ode on Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, for instance — you need a really deep substrate of routine verse squibs and satire as well as routine panegyric. We just don’t have that in modern, mainstream, ‘poetry magazine’, Anglophone literary culture, at least, and I think that makes any really effective political poetry very hard to achieve.

Jeremy: Certainly most contemporary poems of that nature don’t land for me as poems, and the constant horror of the news cycle only makes them more difficult, for want of a better word. But they do win prizes! See, also, the poem which won the 2025 Forward Prize for a single poem. As you’ve said before, judging a writing competition by committee is a pretty arbitrary task. I’ve seen these decisions play out in person in other contexts and it’s striking how often the importance of the subject matter becomes a convenient way to make an arbitrary decision.

But back to the pamphlet: what advice would you give to someone who was just starting out as an early modern poet and wanted to make a success of it? They wouldn’t be entering the National Poetry Competition.

Victoria: This is a great question! Most early modern poets weren’t professional poets and in fact for a lot of this period many people felt there was something a bit dubious or infra dig about writing ‘professionally’, that is, for money. Being able to turn a decent sonnet in English and write an epigram in Latin was, to a certain extent, just an expected sort of accomplishment for anyone (that is, mostly men) with a certain level of education.

As has probably almost always been the case, most of the more ambitious and prolific writers of the period were, in modern terms, something like middle-class. Well-educated men who were nevertheless not quite economically comfortable enough not to need a profession, or perhaps a younger son of a large family of gentlemanly background but straitened circumstances. Partly as a result, the biographies of the best poets are generally quite rich and varied. These are men who had, very often, travelled, served abroad in a military or diplomatic capacity, worked in a variety of positions; often taught a bit or been a tutor in a private household; had periods of success and prosperity but also often periods of real hardship or difficulty.

So ideally, as an aspiring early modern English poet, you are a young man who has had a good grammar school education. You don’t need to bother with a degree. Live on the continent for a few years as a student or gentleman companion if you are smart or Catholic enough, otherwise sign up for military service and ‘trail a pike’ (as Jonson put it) in Spain or the Netherlands (or wet old England/Scotland/Ireland if you’re unlucky enough to be the right age in the 1640s) to add a bit of manly grit to your work. Then come back to England and attempt to insinuate yourself successfully with a likely patron — ideally someone currently out of favour but about to come back in, like a good Protestant nobleman shortly before the death of Mary I, or a beleaguered royalist just before the Restoration. Sending him some well-timed verse — possibly in Latin — celebrating a family marriage or (even better) consoling him on a particularly painful loss is a time-honoured way to work your way into favour. Make sure you use your time abroad to get up to speed on the fashionable Latin, French and Italian poetry being written in more culturally advanced climes elsewhere in Europe, then on your return immediately rip off as many of the new forms as possible in English. Bonus points for nicking pretty much everything from the Jesuits while loudly proclaiming your pukka Protestant credentials.

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Victoria Moul is a scholar, poet and translator living in Paris. She writes weekly about poetry and translation on her Substack, Horace & friends.

Jeremy Wikeley is a poet, critic, and the editor of Headless Poet, a new small press dedicated to the art of the introduction. Subscribe for a year’s worth of (five) pamphlets, here: https://www.headlesspoet.com/shop