Saturday, December 22, 2007

down with 1937

Poetry Review of London was for many years a magazine that specialized in publishing poems that were not only conservative but were indeed themselves about the campaign that would have to be waged in order to save poetry from both the modern sensibility and poetry's entanglements with leftism.

In a 1950 issue of the magazine**, we find a two-line ditty by one P.E.B. Canny. It's title is "Nineteen Thirty-Seven." This is 1950 so we already have a sense of its skepticism or distaste. 1937: yuck. Can't be good. Indeed, the poem's two lines run as follows:

Can there be worse
Than this extra-Auden-airy verse?


** vol 41, no. 2, p. 64