The Middle-Distance Poem: An Elegy

What was it? Where did it go?

Start here?

The middle-distance poem, which takes its name from middle-distance running, came into its own in the middle of the twentieth century, though its origins go back to the beginning of that same century, if not further. Among its number are some of the best long-ish (but not too long) modern poems in the English language, from Among School Children to The Whitsun Weddings. Critics, however, have written remarkably little about it. You won’t find the term in any literary histories or textbooks. In fact, you would be forgiven for wondering if I wasn’t just making the whole thing up to prove a point.

‘The owl of Minerva’, Hegel wrote, ‘spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk’.¹ Or, as Joni Mitchell put it, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. The middle-distance poem began its walk (or else a gentle jog) off into the long evening some time ago. Its zenith—zeniths tend to be—may also have been its passing. But every elegy is also an attempt at resurrection, and the middle-distance poem was a special kind of poem. Not the only one by any means, but one that we will miss more than we realise.

I miss it already. Whenever I pick up a new collection or a magazine, I am always on the look out for one. I am almost always disappointed.² Almost invariably, the modern long-ish poem lacks the middle-distance poem’s energy, its sense of direction, its intensity of feeling. I don’t think this is simply a question of ‘free verse’ crowding out metre. Indeed, the middle-distance poem’s absence is all the more noticable in the more form-friendly parts of the poetry world.

But this kind of talk only gets us so far. What I want to do here is begin to sketch out in very broad, provisional brush strokes some of the genre’s distinguishing features in the hope that better informed readers will be able to flesh them out later (or at least quibble productively). In short, how do you spot one in the wild?

1. The Middle-Distance poem finds its own form

The clue, of course, is in the name. We are looking for a long-ish poem, of more than forty lines, often more like eighty and some times longer still. Exact numbers aren’t important. More importantly, the poem will be written in regular, more or less metrical stanzas. A middle-distance poem comes in packets, like a train that dreams of being something lighter.

These stanzas will often, but not always, rhyme. For all its relative bulk, this patterning gives the middle-distance poem the kind of creatureliness we usually associate with shorter lyrics. There is no set stanza length or rhyme scheme, though because it has some way to go, its pace is always relatively measured. The middle-distance poem finds its own form, then unpacks itself.³

One of the easiest ways to find a middle-distance poem is to flick through a book by Philip Larkin. Many of Larkin’s middle-distance poems involve trains and, as we will see, this is not a coincidence. Here is what Barbara Everett said about Larkin’s train-poems. It is Everett, I should say, that set me off on this track, though she isn’t responsible for anything that follows:

If one wanted to distinguish a poem by Larkin from one written by an admirer and imitator, I think the factor would be the extremity of its energy and the extremity of the control that breaks the back of the energy. Neither seems to be equalled in contemporaries. The phenomenon produces characteristic structures like the train-poems. And it emerges, too, in disturbing and beautiful images of energy moving silent below a surface, at peace (like a mole) within its own inhuman articulacy.⁴

This is a very suggestive, and instructive, suggestion.

2: The Middle-Distance poem is strongly felt

Energy moving silent below a surface. We will come back to trains. Just two points for now. First, I think that energy Everett (who is a brilliant, brilliant critic by the way) mentions has something to do with the creatureliness I mentioned earlier.⁵ Larkin’s long-ish poems are alive in the way that a lyric is alive. So is any middle-distance poem worth its name.

There are, for the sake of argument, two sources poems derive their energy from: form and feeling. As Everett notes, in Larkin’s long-ish poems that energy is often submerged. The reader knows that The Whitsun Weddings is deeply felt. We can probably guess that it has something to do with the poet feeling cut off from other people, from life. But what we see are ‘inhuman’ images - waves, sunlight, weather (in many ways Larkin is an incredibly impersonal poet).

In other middle-distance poems, the poet’s feelings are closer to the surface. Regardless, the middle-distance poem is always a personal poem, a poem the poet had to write. Something, somewhere, is being worked out. This gives us another useful tip for the middle-distance-poem-spotter: the middle-distance poem is not a dramatic monologue. It is, however, dramatic.

3: The Middle-Distance poem goes on a journey

All that energy needs somewhere to go. Often, as in The Whitsun Weddings, we are taken on a literal journey, though not necessarily a ‘real’ one—the poem is an amalgamation of at least two separate trips. The Whitsun Weddings is all observation (the energy is below the surface). In Larkin’s other ‘train poems’—‘Dockery and Sons’, ‘I Remember, I Remember’—the journey provokes a reflection on the directions the poet’s life has, and hasn’t, taken. Middle-distance poems go on journeys. They also emerge from them.

Larkin’s engines are always rather languid. You can’t exactly hear the movement in the verse. In Louis MacNeice’s Train to Dublin, the train’s relentless rhythm patterns and repatterns the poet’s broken trains of thought:

Our half-thought thoughts divide in sifted wisps
Against the basic facts repatterned without pause,
I can no more gather my mind up in my fist
Than the shadow of the smoke of this train upon the grass -
This is the way that animals' lives pass.

The train's rhythm never relents, the telephone posts
Go striding backwards like the legs of time to where
In a Georgian house you turn at the carpet's edge
Turning a sentence while, outside my window here,
The smoke makes broken queries in the air.

Louis MacNeice is one of the masters of the middle-distance poem and he uses such a great range of transport to get there: cars, ferries and trains all feature (the rediscovery of the middle-distance poem will, I suspect, go hand in hand with the ongoing re-evaluation of MacNeice). But while machines are a great help, they aren’t the be all and end all. Elizabeth Bishop takes a bus. Yeats walks through a classroom and remembers Maud Gonne; Larkin walks into a church and ends up transported into the distant future. What matters is the movement, the sense of having somewhere to go.

When the person in the middle-distance poem moves through the world they encounters things: people, crowds, sights, ideas, history. Most of the examples I’m using here are staged: they take place, or appear to take place, at a particular time and place. But I don’t think there needs to be a literal journey. W. H. Auden sits in a dive on Fifty-second street, uncertain and afraid. There doesn’t even need to be a stage: Plath kills a man in her mind. Staged or not, the middle-distance poem always enacts an uneasy negotiation between between the individual and society. The solitary, self-sufficient romantic artist has come down from the mountain, but they are not entirely happy to be there.⁶

Then again, perhaps there doesn’t need to be an individual at all. In Beverly Hills, Chicago, there is more than one person behind the wheel. The ‘we’ is important.

It is only natural that we should look and look
At their wood and brick and stone
And think, while a breath of pine blows,
How different these are from our own.

In Derek Mahon’s shed there are… mushrooms.

Questions for further investigation

Why did the middle-distance poem flourish in Britain and Ireland in particular? Did it flourish in Britain and Ireland in particular or is it an Anglophone phenomenon? What is its relation to other languages? What, if anything, have the metaphysical poets got to do with it? How does thinking about the middle-distance poem change how we think about so-called ‘confessional’ poetry?

What are, or were, the social conditions which made the middle-distance poem possible? Are we really dealing with something distinctive and vital here, the hidden current of mid-century verse, or just iambic pentameter’s last hurrah? What are we going to do about D. H. Lawrence?

Whatever it is or was, the middle-distance poem is clearly endangered. It takes time, stamina and more than a passing interest in metre to write one. The middle-distance poet needs to work up an intensity of feeling, an energy they aren’t entirely in control of, but perhaps most importantly they need a sense of structure. Craft isn’t enough, technique isn’t enough: the middle-distance poet has to be able to build at scale, like the architect, the set desginer or the engineer.

Perhaps more to the point, almost everything about contemporary publishing culture mitigates against middle-distance work. Magazines don’t like to use all that space on one poem (unless you’re, say, Paul Muldoon and in any case ‘strength of feeling’ rules out his longer efforts). They often have line limits on submissions. Prize culture is particularly unwelcoming: the UK’s national poetry competition isn’t interested in anything over forty lines. And as for social media…

It’s important to stress that this isn’t (or isn’t just) an exercise in nostalgia. There isn’t anything archaic about the middle-distance poem, or at least readers don’t think so. Like high-quality modern furniture, decent social housing and old Penguin paperbacks, the middle-distance poem is one of those post-war inheritances that people hanker after for good reason, because they are reminders of a time when we still thought we deserved better. Poets like Plath and Larkin are always popular, including (perhaps particularly) among people who don’t otherwise read much poetry, but their most popular poems seem ‘long’ by contemporary standards: they certainly wouldn’t be eligible for the National Poetry Competition.⁷ For all that we talk about diminishing attention spans, a lot of their popularity rests, I think, on their willingness to go the distance, to entertain at scale: to take the reader with them.

I am ending where I started, on a down note. This is an elegy, after all. But there are promising signs out there, if you know where to look. British poetry, which is the only kind I’m really able to comment on, feels more ambitious at the moment than it has been for some time. Several poems in Tristram Fane Saunders’s first collection, Before We Go Any Further, approach middle-distance. My favourite, ‘Health’, finds the poet walking through a garden in Ventnor.⁸

I turn a corner past the greenhouse, find the blue pagoda.
In it, you are reading this. Hello. Can I sit down?
This is the closest I will ever come to being honest.

It is deeply felt (“All my friends are sick. I love them and I’m scared.”). The patterns build slowly but surely, especially in the end rhymes: pagoda, stigmata, doctor, matyr, water. Or perhaps the form has transformed into something I don’t recognise. There are ghosts of the middle-distance poem in the work of another British poet, Will Harris—he is, I think, often trying to escape it, which can itself produce remarkable effects, as in a poem like SAY (just look at those blocks).

Readers will have their own suggestions. All I am doing here is clearing the ground and, I hope, sending a smoke signal up to other enthusiasts. Perhaps you’ve spotted one yourself recently? Perhaps you’d be able to spare a few hours a month to help us maintain a middle-distance poem in your area? All correspondence should be sent to the Society for the Preservation of the Middle Distance Poem, c/o A Disused Shed in Co. Wrexford.

1. I am afraid I got this from Roger Scruton’s England: An Elegy.

2. I always hope that I might be about to write one. I am always disappointed.

3. The forms the middle-distance poem finds have changed over the years. Earlier examples, like Among School Children, were very formal. In the form’s post-war heyday, which coincides with the peak of the pop album and the popularity of The Beatles and The Beach Boys (this is not a coincidence), it was usually a little softer.

4. Poets in Their Time: Essays on English Poetry from Donne to Larkin

5. While Larkin’s train-poems are probably the best and best-known examples of the middle-distance poem, and I agree with Everett that there is something unique about them, I want to argue that they are nevertheless part of a broader tradition of middle-distance poetry; in fact, the intensity of Larkin’s engagement with that tradition is one of the places his own long-ish poems draw their energy from. In some cases (e.g. Church Going, An Arundel Tomb) Larkin’s middle-distance poems can be read as elegies for the middle-distance poem. Every elegy invents its own subject.

6. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the middle-distance poem so often takes place on public transport. It may also be why it flourished in Britain and Ireland.

7. There was a graph in a recent edition of the Economist tracking the length of novelists’ sentences over time against the size of their readership (interestingly, Daphne Du Maurier came out well on both counts). Have poems got shorter?

8. Ventnor is on the far side the Isle of Wight in the English channel. For those from further afield: the Isle of Wight is a strange, beautiful place, with all the challenges traditionally associated with coastal communities in the UK and its own sense of time (roughly, the 1990s). Good beaches.