Something small: the Collected Works of Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton's posthumous Collected Poems contains 62 poems, which take up one page each, except "Larkinesque" which extends 7 lines onto the following side. Many of them have fewer than 10 lines; some fewer than 30 words. Hamilton died comparatively young by modern standards, aged 63 in 2001, but that is still an extraordinarily small body of work, even if you include the additional 20 pages of juvenilia and unpublishedalia at the back.

Hamilton's poetry was all about modesty. Rather than "I" his favourite pronoun was "you"; he sought to express not so much his own thoughts as the experience of those he loved:

Tight in your hands,
Your Empire Exhibition shaving mug.
You keep it now
As a spittoon, its bloated doves,
Its 1938
Stained by the dropping of your blood.
(Birthday Poem)

He wrote of his approach: "It wouldn't be about me; rather, it would be about my inability, however intensely I felt, to do anything about the suffering" (quoted by Alan Jenkins). His father died, and his wife was institutionalised with mental illness. These were the subjects of his earlier adult verse.

He believed his poetry had a kind of magical power: "But did I truly think that poetry, if perfect, could bring back the dead? In some way, yes, I think I did." (Preface to Fifty Poems.) This may seem surprising, but other down-to-earth figures like B S Johnson had equally mystical beliefs (Johnson followed Robert Graves's theory about the White Goddess). Without questioning the sincerity of Hamilton's claim, it was probably an idea that came to him only occasionally, like a Catholic who glimpses a cathedral spire in a faraway city, and decides on salvation. And there are many ways of bringing back the dead.

In the preface to his Fifty Poems, he tells how he "decided [...] to keep the whole business of 'my poetry' quite separate from the rest of my so-called literary life: a life of book reviews, biographies, anthologies and magazines." Hamilton was prolific, just not in poetry; only in prose.

Alan Jenkins quotes Hamilton's biography of Matthew Arnold: "It is a sad thing to see a man who has been frittered away piecemeal by petty distractions, and who has never done his best. But it is still sadder to see a man who has done his best, who has reached his utmost limits - and finds his work a failure, and himself far less than he had imagined himself."

Arnold gave up his lyric poetry to pursue his other role, as an enormously influential educationalist. Hamilton wrote: "What the age didn't need were more poems of the kind that Arnold did have a real gift for, and had indeed already written: lyric poems of the self, that Arnold self which, as he came to believe, had or should have had better things to do than, well, write lyric poems."

The introduction to Fifty Poems describes a sense of failure, of embarrassment, of years wasted: "The raggedness of everything, the booze, the jokes, the literary feuds, the almost-love affairs, the cash, the somehow-getting-to-be-forty, and so on."

Did Hamilton in some sense give up on poetry, or did he simply find himself unable to write it, or was it a combination of the two? Did he believe in the unimportance of poetry, or at least of his own poetry, being a brilliant editor and critic of others? Was this a cover-up for his idleness and inebriation, or was he in some way a broken man?

In a 2007 interview with the Guardian the American novelist Thomas McGuane talked about the death of his sister from a heroin overdose more than 30 years before: "I think everyone, sooner or later in their lives, has something they never get over and in fact, I don't want to get over it."

McGuane added, "I find it more consoling to think of myself as little than to think of myself as big. I think I've gotten that from animals, particularly dogs. Dogs live such a modest life and they don't live long, and the more you're around them, you kind of accept that."

McGuane's novels are very different from Hamilton's poetry; McGuane writes ironic tales of the failed dreams of the American west, comedies of manners, books that are never entirely serious even when celebrating the joys of nature, the wild, the ranch, horseriding, freedom, and escape from human society. Hamilton's poetry is utterly serious, even if sometimes blackly comic. But in both writers there is a sense that they do not wish to write epically; they would rather be small.

Book(s) for sale

Craig Saper, ed., Words (2009). In January 1931, Bob Brown worked with Nancy Cunard's Hours Press to publish Words—two sets of poems printed in a single volume. The book was subtitled "I but bend my finger in a beckon and words, birds of words, hop on it, chirping." One set of poems was printed in 16-point Caslon Old Face, a classic font style used in all Hours Press publications. The other was relief-printed from engraved plates at less than 3-point size (perhaps, according to Cunard, less than 1-point). Because the subtitle was also printed in the microscopic text, archives, libraries, and bibliographies often mistakenly omit it.

Although Brown was, for Cunard, "at the very center of his time, a zeitgeist in himself," they printed only 150 copies, and the book passed into relative obscurity. It is generally mentioned only as a footnote in discussions of Cunard's life or in reference to Readies for Bob Brown's Machine, Brown’s better-known anthology of experimental texts by modernist writers, including Cunard herself. Over time, this experiment in blurring the distinction between text on the one hand and its design and presentation on the other has become a major prophetic work. Noted Brown scholar Craig Saper brings Words back to light, with a thorough explication of its meaning and role in literary history.

(Charles Bernstein's blog)

---

In the reading-machine future
Say by 1950
All magnum opuses
Will be etched on the
Heads of pins
Not retched into
Three volume classics
By pin heads.
—Bob Brown

One of the most important in the series of experimental texts written and published by Bob Brown in the early twentieth century, Words is among the very first literary works to anticipate the post-McLuhan melding of message and medium, with text being dramatically reshaped and even redefined by the myriad new ways people now deliver it to one another. Words is two sets of poems—one set in conventional type, the other set in 1-point type and requiring use of a magnifying glass—the sets of poems simultanously outstanding in their own right and part of a fascinating poetic commentary and dialog with one another.

Part of the thriving expatriate literary scene in 1930s Europe, and a friend and collaborator with Marcel Duchamp and other Surrealists and Dadaists, Brown predicted that technological progress would so dramatically change the world that the reading experience—and, for that matter, the very nature of text—would be completely changed by the devices and media through which we communicate written art and ideas to one another. At the time, Words and other Brown experiments seemed simple, playful, and largely pointless games. In retrospect, they are remarkable works of prophecy and commentary. Noted Brown expert Craig Saper’s afterword furnishes enlightening context to the republication of this prescient collection of poetry.

(Rice University Press website)

Naturalism as a radical act

The previous entry explained how realism is not a central feature of fiction when the history of the novel is considered. However, the other side of this is that realism, or naturalism, when it appears in literature can actually be radical and avant-garde. By naturalism, I mean the representation of the everyday lives of ordinary people: not kings, heroes, saints, millionaires, or murderers, but people doing the quotidian tasks of growing or acquiring food and money, working, cooking, cleaning, relating to their family, colleagues, and complete strangers.

As mentioned in the previous entry, the novel began as a highly non-realist form. Early proto-novels such as Utopia (1516), Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-52), and Don Quixote (1605-15) were of a fantastical or mock-heroic quality, although all three works referred to contemporary society in different ways. Later, writers like Richardson and Austen embourgeoised the novel, although their upper-middle-class heroes and heroines were far from the median income or average life expectancy of the time.

While the social problem novel became a genre of the mid-19th century (North and South, etc), such works are little read today; the next big change was the development of French naturalism. This focussed on the lives of the urban poor, describing factory workers and miners, but finding a surer market with tales of prostitutes, pimps, and other petty criminals. Thus a genre which could have been unflinching in its portrayal of the everyday instead became sensationalist. French naturalism influenced American writers like Theodore Dreiser, who focussed on tragedy and a doctrine of social Darwinism, and Alfred Doeblin, whose Berlin Alexanderplatz treated the material of the French naturalist novel (pimps, whores, and drunks) in a highly unnaturalistic fashion.

With modernism, the search for a new form to portray everyday life meant that an increasing interest in the mundane was combined with greater formal experimentation. Novels such as Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, and later BS Johnson's The Unfortunates portrayed a single day in the life of one or two characters, interspersed with flashbacks. Notwithstanding the difficulty of Ulysses, a novel covering a day brings reading time close to real time (it only takes a few hours to read Mrs Dalloway). This reduction of the novel's timespan reached perhaps its peak with Christine Brooke-Rose's Such, which covers three minutes of a man hovering between life and death, but despite its minute focus and deep interest in both science and human experience, can hardly be called naturalistic.

Beckett, a sort of follower of Joyce, sought to approach the essence of human existence from another angle: while he focused on disease, decay, and death, he stripped his novels of extraneous naturalistic detail in pursuit of a universality - his characters wandered through a timeless rural Ireland or were trapped in semi-abstract prisons. The French new novel emerged in the 1950s as one of the last threads of modernism, seeking to describe the world without recourse to plot or character. This never entirely caught on in the English-speaking world, although it influenced writers such as the already-mentioned Johnson and Brooke-Rose, and Ann Quin. Quin's Three describes a not entirely happily married middle-aged middle-class couple picking through the papers of a dead young woman while going about their own lives in a quiet country cottage, the stillness and isolation of the location reflecting the lack of action.

Outside literature, the Mass Observation movement in Britain of the 1930s sought to record and measure every detail of British life; it later fed into the growing market research industry. Through the 20th century, genre literature increasingly engaged with the underclass, particularly in crime fiction which moved from the parlours of Agatha Christie to the streets of Iceberg Slim. The rebirth of naturalism in the 1970s and 1980s had a political context: identity politics and a growing interest in the socially marginalised, combined with systems of public education that extended university study to the working class, led both sociologists and fiction writers to focus on the poor, abused, women, gay, racial minorities, etc.

In this context, I would single out James Kelman's The Busconductor Hines. This is the story of a few months in the life of a bus conductor in the Glasgow area (Kelman wrote far away from the Scottish literary centre of Edinburgh). This novel includes not only lengthy descriptions of life on the buses and the staff canteen, but also detailed accounts of the preparation of mince and many scenes of childcare. Kelman has produced other, perhaps greater works (like A Disaffection in which a sullen schoolteacher reflects on Scottish culture and the futility of his job in a more political way) but Hines is the novel that will tell you how to make mashed potatoes.

Fiction and realism

Fiction has always had a problematic relationship with the truth. The reader with only a loose conception of literature may believe the story that from the first days of the novel, fiction has been essentially realist and naturalist and neutral, only waylaid into experimentalism and reader-bamboozlement in the early 20th century by a few foreigners: an alien influence that can easily be driven out (by agencies such as the Betty Trask Prize, awarded each year to work of "a romantic or traditional, but not experimental, style").

However, fiction and realism have seldom gone together. Certainly, early novels Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe pretended to be true, copying the style of actual travellers' tales. They used this pretended realism to present fantastic or exotic tales of far-off lands; while Swift commented on his own society, he never sought to accurately represent it. Other novels like the epistolary Pamela and Les Liaisons Dangereuses took the form of genuine documents, letters between the protagonists. Yet a novel written from the shifting position of different letter writers or a deceptive journal style is not what most people consider to be realist fiction, with its transparent presentation of the facts of human life.

Prior to the birth of the novel, literature was not about creating original stories. Shakespeare worked with history and pre-existing tales; other writers used the Bible or created elaborate allegories. Nor was it in the main about life as it was lived; the popular theatre was full of conventions (men playing women, blank verse dialogue, etc), and derived from the still less naturalistic medieval allegories.

Similarly earlier novels were less about reality than literary games. Tristram Shandy played games from a different direction, a fictional life story that failed to tell anything of Shandy's life but was all about the impossibility of this telling. Right from their birth with Don Quixote, it was clear that novels were uncertain whether people would take them to be true or lies, whether they would understand and appreciate, mock, or take over the fictional world and write their own sequels.

Alongside the 19th century tradition of the important social realist novel, there is a secret less reputable lineage of horror, from Mary Shelley through Poe, Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, and Bram Stoker. A key thread of 19th century literature was the gothic: it influenced Hawthorne and Melville in the USA, and in Britain was crucial for Emily and Charlotte Bronte and Dickens. James Hogg used the style to offer a critique of Scottish history and religion. Even Jane Austen, that model of middle-class superego, wrote Gothic parody and pastiche.

For all the claims that Victorian England was the heyday of realist fiction (Gaskell, George Eliot, Dickens' more serious novels), there are key works like Charlotte Bronte's Villette. An ironic retelling of her own youthful adventures, Villette intersperses gothic elements into a narrative that constantly refutes the reader's desire to know more about its central character and Bronte herself, playing in a metatextual fashion with the notion of literary fame and the relationship between author and character; six hundred pages of self-denial with an ambiguous ending.

Edgar Allan Poe's influence on French late romanticism, modernism, and the avant-garde was immense - allegedly because he read better in French than English. A great hoaxer, he played with notions of truth; following Dafoe or Swift, he wrote a tall traveller's tale with Arthur Gordon Pym and pretended it was a real story of adventure. But his enclosed worlds of fear, paranoia, dread, and love, conjured up by wispy words and falling away again into ruin or dark tarns, set the scene for modernism from Kafka to Beckett. Much of Dostoevsky, too, is largely concerned with people going mad in small dingy rooms; Dostoevsky admired Poe and copied his fictional detective for Crime and Punishment.

After that came the period when everybody acknowledges literature lost its interest in realism. The classic early modernist novel - Conrad, Ford, Fitzgerald - was an unfinished tale told second- or third-hand by someone who failed to realise the full significance of what he was saying. Authors pursuing realism now wrote in highly non-traditional forms: Joyce, Dos Passos, Alfred Doeblin, and Virginia Woolf all in different ways rejected the normal principles of narrative to document their modern world, which seemed a place where traditional stories of human agency and conventional narrative had no place.

Perhaps the greatest work of literary history and criticism is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Yet the history of western literature is not about finding an accurate representation of reality, but of creating lies. Any truth it finds is momentary and fragmented and self-contradictory, ready to crumble into ruins at the slightest touch.

Buddy Wakefield: travelling preacher

Buddy Wakefield is one of the leading figures in slam poetry, a form of performance poetry or spoken word performance. A combination of troubadour, writer, and motivational guru, he travels the countryside bedazzling appreciative audiences his inventive symbols and uplifting message. He won the individual World Poetry Slam Championships in 2004 and 2005, and has had success in team events. Wakefield is an entrancing performer, jerkily full of energy, casually dressed with a shaven head, jumping up and down in rhythm, contorting his face, and using his arms held out down in front of him for punctuation. He has recorded for Strange Famous Records, founded by rapper and poetry slam performer Sage Francis, and for folk singer Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe label.

Wakefield was born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1974, and worked as an executive assistant in Gig Harbor, Washington. Then in 2001, according to legend, he sold all his possessions except for a Honda Civic and began to travel the USA performing poetry and meeting people, sleeping on couches or in his car. This mode of life goes back in myth to the Provencal minstrels of the middle ages, but more recently is associated with folk singers like Woody Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Willy Mason.

Convenience Stores (YouTube) is one of his simpler pieces, about a conversation with a woman in a store at an isolated truck stop, in which he speculates about her loneliness before she reveals her dream of escape. There's a certain quality of tourism to much of his work, as he travels the world encountering sad people, and moralises a bit. His work is also full of exhortations to live life and experience reality; coupled with frequent religious references, his work has an oddly upbeat, self-help, chicken-soup quality that is suited to the emotional atmosphere of a live show but resembles an evangelical church.

His didacticism is shown in another tale of the road, Information Man (YouTube), which describes an encounter between the narrator and someone staffing an information booth at a rest area. There are some customarily great Wakefield images: "I am standing like shoe polish on an overstocked shelf hoping that one day somebody will pick me to make things better". But soon it becomes clear this is a poem with a message:

If you've never been rocked back by the presence of purpose
this poem is too soon for you
return to your mediocrity
plug it into an amplifier
and rethink yourself
some of us are on fire for the answer

It continues to explain:

I talk a whole bunch but I really only know a few things...
I know our shoes were stitched from songs about highways
The best songs are the ones about Georgia even though I've never been there
Cause it's the only place that still believes in Jesus
I know whatever it is you believe in you've got to spare yourself the futility of making fun of God
Because that guy hasn't even talked in like - ever.
...
You are the centre of the universe
If you weren't you wouldn't be here.

Jean Heath (YouTube) is about a funeral, in the genre of moralising tale that condemns the shallowness and insincerity of those who encounter suffering or death (Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich rules this tradition). It gets the audience onside by letting them share in the condemnation of people who - shockingly - eat and talk about themselves at funerals.

Flockprinter (YouTube; text) is about flock wallpaper and God, and shows his ability to wrest a metaphor out of the most ordinary sight:

Flockprinting is an aggressive electrostatic action
using severe heat to force finely chopped fibers
onto patterns of fabric
ultimately resulting in
soft touch.

There is a tension between observation and moralising, because the one requires an openness and the other a firm point of view. Similarly, there is a paradox in travelling the world to learn about it, because all your encounters will be in a certain sense trivial, at convenience stores and rest areas, and much of life will remain behind closed doors. But his imagery is inventive, his messages underlaid with wit, and to watch him perform is astonishing.

Those prudish Americans!

It's a common myth that Victorian English people were so appalled by the sight of a bare ankle that they placed skirts or trousers around piano legs. In fact, this was first reported as something done not by the prudish English but by Americans. It seems to come from Frederick Marryat's Diary in America Volume II, from 1839. Marryat was an English naval officer and novelist who visited North America in the late 1830s, helping to defeat a rebellion in Canada and touring the USA. Like Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope, who both visited the USA around the same time, he wrote a detailed account of his travels.

Only the last paragraph of this excerpt is relevant, but the earlier provide an amusing build-up.

When at Niagara Falls, I was escorting a young lady with whom I was on friendly terms. She had been standing on a piece of rock, the better to view the scene, when she slipped down, and was evidently hurt by the fall; she had in fact grazed her shin. As she limped a little in walking home, I said, "Did you hurt your leg much." She turned from me evidently much shocked, or much offended; and not being aware that I had committed any very heinous offence, I begged to know what was the reason of her displeasure. After some hesitation, she said that as she knew me well, she would tell me that the word leg was never mentioned before ladies. I apologized for my want of refinement, which was attributable to my having been accustomed only to English society, and added, that as such articles must occasionally be referred to, even in the most polite circles of America, perhaps she would inform me by what name I might mention them without shocking the company. Her reply was, that the word limb was used; "nay," continued she, "I am not so particular as some people are, for I know those who always say limb of a table, or limb of a piano-forte."

There the conversation dropped; but a few months afterwards I was obliged to acknowledge that the young lady was correct when she asserted that some people were more particular than even she was.

I was requested by a lady to escort her to a seminary for young ladies, and on being ushered into the reception-room, conceive my astonishment at beholding a square piano-forte with four limbs. However, that the ladies who visited their daughters, might feel in its full force the extreme delicacy of the mistress of the establishment, and her care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge, she had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!

(on archive.org, or reprinted Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, MT, 2004, p90, accessible via Google Books)

Lost and Found

Some examples of lost, mislaid, stolen, or destroyed, music, books, and films, plus some subsequently recovered.

Keith Waterhouse left the first 10000 words of his novel Billy Liar in a taxi and had to start it again.

John Stuart Mill accidentally destroyed the only manuscript of Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution, mistaking it for scrap paper and setting fire to it, but Carlyle rewrote it and it became a classic.

Andre Malraux's manuscript novel The Struggle against the Angel was destroyed by the Germans in World War Two; Malraux, who fought in the French Resistance, was also captured but survived. Only a fragment of the book escaped destruction, and was later published as The Walnut Trees of Altenburg. Malraux did not write any more novels, but served in de Gaulle's governments and became an important art historian.

John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester burned many of his more immoral poems when he decided to reform.

Ralph Ellison lived 40 years after the publication of his masterpiece Invisible Man without ever producing a followup, but with many excuses for not writing it - he claimed to have lost 365 pages of it in a house fire, but the truth of this excuse is disputed. His work in progress was published posthumously as Juneteenth.

Fantasy writer David Eddings accidentally burnt down his office when he attempted to test whether a liquid leaking from his car was water or gasoline by setting fire to it. However, it was not reported that he lost any work.

William Faulkner died in 1962; The Dreadful Hollow, a vampire screenplay set in Victorian England and possibly written as a joke, was found among his papers in 2007. Faulkner was a successful screenwriter, working on The Big Sleep, Mildred Pierce, and To Have and Have Not among other films, and there were rumours when it was discovered that The Dreadful Hollow would be filmed with a $60m budget, but this doesn't seem to have happened.

Graham Greene's detective novel The Empty Chair written in the mid 1920s was unearthed in his archives in 2008. Unfortunately he never finished it, so nobody knew whodunnit.

Many works narrowly escaped destruction on the author's death when friends and relatives disobeyed the author's will. Nabokov left instructions for his unfinished manuscript The Original of Laura to be burnt after his death in 1977. His wife saved it and it sat in a Swiss bank vault for 30 years. Despite being little more than notes on index cards, it was published in 2009; reviewers were embarrassed or critical (Washington Post, Guardian, Telegraph). Virgil did not finish writing the Aeneid before his death, and legend says he ordered its destruction. Max Brod failed to carry out Franz Kafka's wish that he destroy unfinished manuscripts. In contrast, Ted Hughes destroyed some of Sylvia Plath's diaries upon her death, apparently without her authorisation.

Gerard Manley Hopkins spent his lifetime agonising over whether he should write poetry and released only a few mild verses that did not show his true genius; he died in 1889 but it wasn't till 1918 that his friend Robert Bridges published his poems. Emily Dickinson was another poet almost unpublished during her life; she died in 1886 and her sister Lavinia discovered her poems shortly after; they were published by friends in 1890. However, this collection was heavily edited and it was not until 1955 that a scholarly edition was produced that made no attempt to correct her strange rhythms and half-rhymes.

The history of popular music is full of legendary missing recordings. The mastertapes of Green Day's Cigarettes and Valentines album were stolen and they recorded something else instead - the American Idiot album. The tapes of an album by Peter "Where do you go to my lovely?" Sarstedt recorded in 1970 were lost for 30 years; it was released as the Lost Album in 2008. There is a missing album by Johnny Marr and Ian McCulloch (Echo and the Bunnymen), recorded in 1993, stolen from a courier van on their way to fellow Bunnyman Will Sergeant.

The BBC followed a deliberate policy of deleting old programs on videotape so that the tapes could be reused. This means there are no recordings of episodes of classic shows from Doctor Who to Dad's Army, as well as classics like Hancock's Half Hour, live broadcasts from Top of the Pops to the BBC's coverage of the first moon landing, adaptations of Madame Bovary and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and many televised plays including The Madhouse on Castle Street (1963) which featured Bob Dylan's first acting performance. Sometimes an old telecine recording turns up, or a tape leant to an African broadcaster returns home, but the supply is surely drying up.

Where are the right-wing writers?

It's a common supposition on both left and right that everyone in the arts is a liberal, lefty, communist, or fellow traveller; at most there's one or two exceptions writing from a conservative position. Thus, Tony Kushner in Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy has Laura Bush say:

The liberals may have nearly all the poets and painters and everybody else but WE have Dostoevsky and he obliterates the whole kitandkaboodle, we have Dostoevsky and so we win.

But is this the full story? For your consideration, I present the following. From libertarians to upper-class high-church snobs, with a smattering of one-nation tories, Nazi sympathisers, and the unprincipled rich, here's a list of notable novelists, poets, and a few other literary types of a rightist persuasion.

1. Kingsley Amis - despite early socialism, he moved rightwards through his life to become a curmudgeonly conservative
2. Martin Amis - in recent years has followed his father's path, with his views on Islam condemned by many left-wingers; also anti-communist, writing books about Stalin
3. Jeffrey Archer - popular novelist and former Conservative Party MP; also convicted perjurer
4. Honoré de Balzac - royalist and chronicler of a society in decline
5. Hilaire Belloc - the poet and writer, known for his verse for children, was an admirer of fascism and especially Mussolini; he was a devout Catholic and has been accused of anti-semitism
6. Saul Bellow - a youthful leftist he moved to the right, was culturally conservative, opposing political correctness and multiculturalism
7. John Betjeman - a small-c conservative: an admirer of the English upper classes, a campaigner to preserve disappearing aspects of England, scornful of mass culture, and a Catholic
8. William Peter Blatty - the Exorcist writer is a donor to the US Republican party
9. Robert Brasillach - French novelist and journalist who collaborated with the Nazis
10. Rupert Brooke - upper-middle-class poet known for his patriotic World War One verse, although he also moved in liberal circles
11. John Buchan - the author of the 39 Steps was an MP for the Unionist Party in Scotland (which later merged with the Conservative Party), a keen imperialist, and has been accused of racism
12. Jorge Luis Borges - the Argentinian postmodernist was an admirer of Latin American dictators, including Pinochet
13. William F. Buckley, Jr - writer, tv presenter, and occasional novelist, a leading intellectual of US Republicanism from the 1960s to the 2000s
14. Roy Campbell - South African poet and Catholic, he moved to Spain in the 1930s and supported Franco (unlike most writers who went to Spain); turned against the Bloomsbury group after his wife had an affair with Vita Sackville-West
15. Orson Scott Card - best known for science fiction novels such as Ender's Game, he is also a pro-Republican commentator and a Mormon
16. Thomas Carlyle - Scottish historian, satirist, and essayist who distrusted democracy and modernity, and believed nations needed great men to lead them, writing an admiring biography of Frederick the Great
17. Willa Cather - a novelist who was conservative both in aesthetics and politics
18. Louis-Ferdinand Céline - the modernist novelist was an anti-semite and supporter of Vichy France
19. François-René de Chateaubriand - French royalist and a devout Catholic
20. GK Chesterton - humorist and Christian apologist, converted to Catholicism; George Orwell accused him of writing "endless tirades against Jews"
21. Agatha Christie - reactionary conservative who portrayed a bygone England, her early books included various racial caricatures
22. Winston Churchill - winner of Nobel prize for literature for his non-fiction, and Conservative prime minister
23. EM Cioran - Romanian philosopher and essayist, a pupil and follower of far-right philosopher Nae Ionescu
24. Tom Clancy - popular spy novelist, has donated large amounts of money to the US Republican party
25. Robin Cook - the thriller writer, not the deceased British Labour politician, is a Republican donor
26. James Fenimore Cooper - wrote widely on political matters, influenced by Jefferson, notably supporting the landowners in the New York Anti-Rent Wars in the 1840s and 50s
27. Patricia Cornwell - crime writer and Jack the Ripper enthusiast who has made large donations to the US Republican party, despite being a lesbian who has spoken out for equal rights
28. Noel Coward - naturally conservative, author of comedies about the upper middle classes, although he was an agnostic
29. Michael Crichton - climate-change denialist who satirised political correctness and accused liberal magazine editor Michael Crowley of being a small-dicked paedophile
30. Ian Curteis - British writer whose play about the Falklands war was allegedly a victim of censorship by the left-wing BBC
31. Robertson Davies - Canadian novelist with old-fashioned literary style and reactionary politics
32. Benjamin Disraeli - Conservative prime minister and novelist, the father of moderate one-nation conservatism
33. Michael Dobbs - conservative politician and prolific novelist, best known for Francis Urquhart books
34. John Dos Passos - modernist novelist, initially a communist, he moved all the way across the political spectrum to become an admirer of Joe McCarthy
35. Feodor Dostoyevsky - a reformer in his youth, he later moved to the right, seeking to defend the traditional Russian spirit
36. Mircea Eliade - Romanian fiction writer and philosopher of religion, a fascist in the 1930s
37. TS Eliot - former banker, socially and politically conservative, also accused of anti-semitism, said: "I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics"
38. James Ellroy - critically acclaimed crime novelist has expressed right-wing authoritarian viewpoints, e.g. defending the LAPD over the Rodney King beating, but elsewhere claims this was just controversialist nonsense
39. William Faulkner - although a liberal in his attitudes to race, the Southern US novelist is generally judged to be overall conservative
40. Julian Fellowes - a writer whose subject is the English upper classes, his Conservative politics are no great surprise, and he's often on lists of celebrity Tory supporters
41. Fillià - Italian futurist writer and painter known for his religious art, had links with fascists
42. Frederick Forsyth - the British thriller writer has long been a supporter of the Conservative Party
43. George MacDonald Fraser - the author of the humorous Flashman novels was a military man and a traditionalist in many areas of life, prominently campaigning against the metric system
44. Robert Frost - American poet of conservative political views who became a national treasure and spoke at Kennedy's inauguration; he played at being a farmer but earned his money from teaching
45. JW von Goethe - romantic conservative, admired the upper classes, and opposed the numerous revolutions of the late 18th/early 19th centuries
46. Terry Goodkind - Ayn Rand-influenced sword and sorcery writer with enormous sales
47. Knut Hamsun - Norwegian Nobel laureate (Hunger) and later a Nazi sympathiser
48. Robert Heinlein - right-wing libertarian militaristic writer of (mostly) intelligent science fiction
49. Hergé - Belgian comic-book writer of conservative politics, accused of racism and collaborating with the Nazis
50. Michel Houellebecq - anti-political correctness, anti-Islam, anti-women, for his admirers he offers a critique of modern liberal humanism
51. Ted Hughes - misanthropic violence-loving nature poet who detested modern life and became poet laureate and friends with the Queen Mother
52. JK Huysmans - in his early life, a writer of Zola-influenced liberalism, he dallied briefly with fin de siecle decadence but converted to Catholicism and became a conservative
53. PD James - English crime novelist and a Conservative peer in the House of Lords
54. Antony Jay - Thatcherite writer of satirical sitcom Yes Minister
55. Ernst Jünger - German writer who glorified the military following World War I and opposed democracy
56. Jack Kerouac - the beat novelist moved right in the 1960s, supporting the Vietnam war, becoming friends with William F Buckley, and returning to the Catholic faith he was raised in
57. Rudyard Kipling - poet of British patriotism and imperialism, defender of the British soldier
58. Dean Koontz - thriller writer and supporter of US Republican party
59. Philip Larkin - his posthumously-published letters revealed a racist, misogynistic, right-wing private man, while his poetry showed a kindlier backward-looking conservatism
60. DH Lawrence - novelist and poet had liberal views early in his life but later moved towards fascism
61. CS Lewis - Christian apologist and a moderate conservative, though he avoided political association and refused a CBE from Churchill
62. Wyndham Lewis - influenced by the Futurists, he was briefly a supporter of Hitler, and often anti-semitic
63. Liu Xiaobo - the Chinese writer, poet, and Nobel Peace Prize-winner was an admirer of George W Bush and a defender of American imperialism who criticised John Kerry for being insufficiently right-wing; also anti-Islam
64. Mario Vargas Llosa - once a supporter of Castro, he became a free-market centre-right politician, while defending human rights, and ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru
65. André Malraux - the novelist, art historian and resistance fighter fought for the Republican side in the Spanish civil war, but in the 1960s he served as Charles de Gaulle's Minister of Cultural Affairs
66. Thomas Mann - a supporter of the Kaiser in his youth, he moved in a liberal direction during the Weimar republic
67. FT Marinetti - Italian proto-fascist poet, active as both an artistic and political leader; he split with Mussolini because he felt the Fascist party was too backward-looking
68. Allan Massie - Scottish conservative historical novelist and journalist
69. HL Mencken - satirist who opposed the New Deal and hated Franklin Roosevelt
70. Stephenie Meyer - Mormon vampire novelist of conservative views
71. Yukio Mishima - right-wing anti-democratic Japanese novelist and playwright who attempted a military coup
72. Marianne Moore - like many in Pound and Eliot's circles, she was right-wing, a defender of American capitalism
73. Iris Murdoch - a youthful communist and populariser of Sartre, she seemed to move rightwards, and like Ayn Rand was a fan of strong-willed almost demonic men; her philosophy focused on topics such as moral virtue; she opposed literary experimentalism, and demanded striking miners be shot
74. Vladimir Nabokov - a conservative aesthete who fled Stalin's Russia
75. VS Naipaul - Indo-Trinidadian Nobel laureate, conservative, accused of disliking the third world and Muslims
76. Flannery O'Connor - Catholic moralist who mocked the godlessness of modern life in grotesque fiction
77. Alexander Pope - conservative satirist
78. PJ O'Rourke - satirist of right-wing sympathies
79. John Osborne - angry young man who turned into a cantankerous old man
80. Luigi Pirandello - experimental playwright allied himself with Mussolini, although his supporters claim it was purely from self-interest
81. Ezra Pound - sophisticated and erudite aesthete, accused of being sympathetic to Mussolini in World War Two and imprisoned
82. Anthony Powell - his Dance to the Music of Time chronicled rich English bohemians and he was an upper-class conservative
83. Marcel Proust - upper-class aesthete, although homosexual, came from a conservative background; he avoided politics and his political position is contested
84. Ayn Rand - popular philosopher and author of very long novels, known for her defence of entrepreneurs and for championing reason over emotions
85. John Crowe Ransom - conservative US Southerner, involved with the Southern Agrarians (backward-looking pro-Confederate grouping) for a time
86. Tim Rice - the lyricist, writer, and TV personality has supported the Conservative party for ages; he also does a lot of good work for charity
87. Walter Scott - Scottish historical novelist of Tory sympathies, active in conservation but condemned by Mark Twain for romanticising war and chivalry; while pro-Jacobite and romantic about Scottish history he also defended the union with England
88. Moshe Shamir - Israeli novelist, playwright, and politician, moved from early socialism to right-wing Likud and Tehiya parties
89. Alexander Solzhenitsyn - the Soviet dissident had an understandable hatred of communism; on his arrival in the USA he allied himself with the neo-conservatives who believed the Soviet Union was the gravest threat to the USA's existence, and called for its destruction
90. Nicholas Sparks - the author of drippy romantic fantasies donated to Republican senator Elizabeth Dole
91. Gertrude Stein - collaborated with Vichy France; claims that she called for Hitler to be given the Nobel Peace Prize were probably a joke
92. Wallace Stevens - insurance company executive who wrote abtruse modernist poetry
93. Tom Stoppard - playwright is generally reckoned to be slightly right of centre despite his human rights work; an anti-communist long-associated with east European dissidents
94. Jonathan Swift - conservative, devout Anglican satirist, converted from Whig to Tory
95. Allen Tate - American agrarian poet, who later became a Roman Catholic and a legendary womaniser
96. Alfred Lord Tennyson - the poet laureate was a traditional English gentleman who celebrated military virtue and the chivalrous middle ages, but was more liberal on some causes - he refused a baronetcy from Disraeli and was agnostic
97. Hunter S Thompson - a libertarian and great believer in gun rights, although he hated most Republicans (despite a grudging respect for Nixon)
98. JRR Tolkien - deeply conservative and strongly Catholic throughout his life, he supported Franco in the Spanish civil war, although he hated Hitler for perverting northern-European myths and traditions
99. John Updike - novelist who wrote about suburbia with a conservative viewpoint
100. Robert Penn Warren - poet, critic, and novelist (political satire All the King's Men), who had links with the Southern Agrarians but moved left and later became a father figure of American liberalism
101. Keith Waterhouse - the author of Billy Liar was a Daily Mail columnist for decades until his death
102. Evelyn Waugh - satirist of the British upper classes and author of Brideshead Revisited, a right-wing Catholic
103. AN Wilson - British novelist, biographer, and newspaper columnist for the right-wing press, of firmly Conservative views
104. PG Wodehouse - although he satirised British fascism in the 1930s, he did broadcasts from Nazi Germany in World War Two, and has been condemned as a collaborator; certainly a small-c conservative
105. Tom Wolfe - satirist, journalist, and winner of the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Prize, an admirer of George W Bush and long-time Republican
106. William Wordsworth - a radical in his youth, he became more conservative as he got older, repudiating his initial support for the French Revolution and eventually becoming a member of the establishment
107. WB Yeats - Irish nationalist and mystic, a Nobel laureate for his poetry, who became increasingly conservative and eccentric and even flirted with fascism

Some suggestions from: Sans Everything, Ranker, WP, Bookslut, Iain Dale, BBC, ChuckerCanuck, Daily Mail, LibraryThing.

And the winner is ...Art

With the Mercury Music Prize shortlist and Booker longlist both recently announced, it's a good time to look at British prizes for the arts.

The Mercury music prize (now known as the Barclaycard Mercury Prize) was established in 1992 by the now-defunct telecoms brand (part of Cable & Wireless) for the best British album of the previous 12 months, chosen from a shortlist of 10. It was intended as a more credible and serious prize than the widely-mocked Brit Awards, which were generally reckoned to pay more attention to sales than to quality. The Mercury prize was about promoting telephony and now credit cards, but also celebrating the best new music.

It has been frequently surrounded by controversy. The prize has been accused of being deliberately opaque in its rules and administration, with a generous definition of British that included Antony and the Johnsons, and the judges being kept secret for many years (they typically include music industry figures and journalists such as Conor McNicholas, now editor of Top Gear magazine, formerly of NME). While many literary prizes publish the rules and provide applications forms online, the precise criteria for the Mercury are not displayed publicly.

There have also been claims of sexism and racism over its fondness for white male guitar bands, and tokenism when non-white acts won - despite this, winners have included Dizzee Rascal, Ms Dynamite, Talvin Singh, and Roni Size. The shortlist has often seemed to comprise a token jazz record, a token folk act, a token pop act, a token black act, a token dance act, formerly a token classical act (they seem to have given up on classical music), and the remaining list all indie/rock. The judging panel seldom includes significant expertise in jazz, classical, or traditional folk, yet decides between a wide range of genres.

The Brit Awards are given by British trade body the British Phonograpic Industry. They begun in 1977, when the Beatles won 3 awards, and have a chequered history of disastrous live shows and controversial events: Jarvis Cocker invading the stage during Michael Jackson's performance, the KLF performing with Extreme Noise Terror and bringing a dead sheep, bizarre nominations for best male and female solo act who hadn't released any records in the year in question, and the usual autocue failures, drunken bust-ups, shouts, and boos (see Wikipedia). Most awards are voted by British Phonographic Industry members, though the public choose a few, such as best single. In recent years they have sought to compete with the Mercury prize with the Critics' choice award for best upcoming artist, given to Adele in 2008 and Florence and the Machine in 2009. There is a separate ceremony for classical music.

The Brits and Mercury prize are rivalled by such events as the Q Music Awards and the NME Awards, promoted by magazines and focussing on the music that appeals to their readership. The MOBO awards are given for Music of Black Origin, with prizes for best hiphop, soul/R&B, jazz, reggae, gospel, African act, and DJs. Despite its name, white people such as Amy Winehouse and Tim Westwood often win. The MOBOs typically vie with the Brit Awards for starry guest performers, spectacle, and incomprehension over how the winners were chosen.

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The Booker Prize, for the best novel of the year, is the most well-known and generally highly-regarded of the serious British arts prizes. It was first awarded in 1969 as the Booker-McConnell Prize, and was known for many years after the wholesaler Booker, who sponsored it until 2001 - despite the lack of commercial value in associating a grocery company with a literary prize. Since 2002, it has been sponsored by Man Group, a London-based investment company which began as a rum and sugar broker in the late 18th century, making it one of the few literary prizes whose income is founded on slavery.

The franchise has now been extended with an international prize given every 2 years, a Russian version, and occasional ventures like the Booker of Bookers which has been awarded for notable anniversaries in the prize's history, generally to Salman Rushdie. The Booker winner is chosen by a jury combining eminent figures in arts and broadcasting (for 2009 these include John Mullan, professor of English at University College London, Radio 4 broadcaster James Naughtie, and critic Lucasta Miller), plus a token celebrity (Sue Perkins in 2009); they are required to read around 100 books, select a longlist and a shortlist, and then pick a winner.

The prize has an impressive website, which includes the rules and entry form. Entrants must be from the UK, the Commonwealth, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. In 2009, 132 books were considered, of which 11 were "called in" by the judges, i.e. they were not entered for the prize but the judges felt they were of merit. Publishers may submit 2 books each, but anyone shortlisted in the last 5 years may submit a book over and above that limit, and judges can consider books that have not been formally entered (this allegedly leads to publishers not submitting their top novel in the hope that the judges will call it in anyway, and submitting 2 other less good novels so they can get more books in contention). There is no limit on how many times you can win it.

The winner gets £50 000, while authors with shortlisted novels get £2500 and a hand-bound copy of their own novel. However, this does not come for free: publishers submitting a book must undertake to pay £5000 if the book is shortlisted and another £5000 if they win. This payment does not guarantee a place in the shortlist, and is intended to pay for publicity; they must also ensure 1000 copies of the book are available for sale after the longlist is published - online books are eligible but paper copies must be sold if the work is shortlisted. Publishers must also supply the pages to be bound into the hand-bound prize for the shortlisted authors. Shortlisted works must be made available as e-books and given to a charity to be recorded for the blind (a process which the Booker Prize Foundation funds). And nominees get to go to a prize dinner, which is generally televised.

The other main literary prize in the UK was known for many years as the Whitbread Prize. Like the Booker it takes its name from an implausible source, the brewer Whitbread; since 2006 it has been known as the Costa Book awards, after another Whitbread brand. It is made up of a collection of five prizes for best novel, first novel, children's book, poetry, and biography (including autobiography and memoir), and a book of the year selected from the five winners. Each category is judged by 3 people and winner gets £5000, while a 9-person jury (including a fairly distinguished chairperson, one judge from each category, and three "people in the public eye who love reading") chooses who receives the grand prize and an additional £25 000.

Application forms which include the rules can be downloaded. The author must have been resident in the UK and undertake to be available for publicity; the publisher must promise to bring out a paperback promptly if they win. Publishers of shortlisted and winning novels must "use their best endeavours" to put Costa stickers on their books, and put "approved Costa Book Awards crediting" on the cover of later editions. As well as providing considerable advertising for Costa thereby, winners of the category awards must provide £3000 for publicity, and the grand winner £4000.

The oldest UK literary prize is claimed to be the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, administered by University of Edinburgh, and established by the wife of the eponymous publisher. Prizes are given for fiction and biography, and in the initial year 1919 Hugh Walpole's The Secret City and Henry Festing Jones's Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835-1902) - A Memoir won. A Passage to India, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, I, Claudius, The Heart of the Matter, and Arthur Waley's translation of Monkey are among the more notable prizewinners.

The winners, who get £10000 each, are chosen by the university's professor of English, with graduate students assisting in the judging. Notably, the same author cannot win in more than one year, although they can win both prizes in one year - nobody has yet. It is unusual among British literary prizes in admitting American entries: The Corrections and Cormac McCarthy's The Road have won in recent years. Submission simply involves sending a copy of the book without any application form or commitment to pay anybody any money; the leisurely process begins with submissions in December and the prize is awarded the following August.

Less notable is the Betty Trask Award, given to "traditional or romantic" first novels. It is administered by the writers' trade union the Society of Authors, awarding a total of £25000 each year (in various proportions) to British and Commonwealth authors under 35 to use to travel abroad. Winners include Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Alex Garland's The Beach. Unusually it is open to published or unpublished novels, though publishers are required to assist with publicity. Winners are decided by a panel of five judges, who may select books that were not submitted, and can withhold prizes if no book is good enough.

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In the visual arts, the Turner Prize is by far the most celebrated award in Britain. It was set up in 1984 by a group called the Patrons of New Art to promote contemporary art, is administered by the Tate gallery, and named after the British painter JMW Turner. Curiously, like the Man Group, Henry Tate's money originally came from sugar. It has been sponsored by (then-)anonymous donor Oliver Prenn, American investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert (whose 1990 bankrupcy, due to illegal junk bond deals, led to the awards being cancelled that year), Channel 4, and Gordons Gin; the prize is currently £40 000, up from £10 000 initially.

Originally it went to the best British painter based on work of the previous year, but since then has been skewed to a more youthful market, with entrants required to be under 50. The public can nominate entries, although some people have claimed that little attention is paid to these. The shortlist and winner are chosen by a team of judges, who include curators and critics, with one token non-art-world person per year. Shortlisted artists exhibit in a special show, normally in one of the Tate's galleries, but the award isn't judged on this, just on the work for which they were already shortlisted. Restrictions on how many times an artist can be shortlisted have been tried, but are no longer enforced.

Parodying the Turner Prize, The K Foundation (otherwise known as pop act the KLF) offered the K Foundation Art Award (Wikipedia; Stewart Home) in 1993 for the artist who had produced the worst body of work in the previous 12 months. It went to Rachel Whiteread, who also won the Turner Prize that year. The K Foundation award was twice as valuable, £40 000 against the £20 000 of the more official prize. She reluctantly accepted the larger prize when the K Foundation threatened to burn the money - probably not an idle threat as they later burned a million pounds just for fun.

The BP portrait award claims to be the world's most prestigious portraiture award, offering a £25 000 first prize and second and third prizes, as well as an exhibition of selected works. It is open to artists aged 18 and over, and judged by a panel including curators, critics, artists, and a representative of the sponsoring oil company. An application form is available from their website during application season.

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Not mentioned here are perhaps the best known arts prizes in the UK, The British Soap Awards, and the BAFTAs for film and TV. The latter are voted for by members of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and carry a similar weight to the Oscars in the USA.

There are many ways of running an arts prize, from the simple to the opaque. Some are run as publicity tools with requirements for winners to take part in promotion, wear stickers, pay money, and follow arcane procedures; while others simply involve sending your work in an envelope and trusting the judging panel will pick the best. Few have any public involvement in the selection process.

As to the question of why we should take any award seriously, the awards organisers typically feel that should depend on the cash sums awarded and the glitziness of the awards ceremony. However most people will esteem an award based on the expertise of the judging panel, the openness of the selection procedure, and the list of previous winners.

The war against modern poetry

The 20s and 30s saw a flourishing of experimental, modernist poetry, often with marxist or left-wing politics. According to Al Filreis's book Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960, this all changed after World War Two when conservative critics launched a counter-attack; they reasserted a more traditional form of poetry based on the lyric and expressing emotion, helping to kill off literary experimentation and ushering in a post-ideological age. Two reviews, by Charles Bernstein and Sarah Ehlers (pdf) explain Filreis's argument, and largely agree with it.

Ehlers explains how

in the middle of the 20th century, conservative critics decried experimental verse forms in an attempt to destroy the modernist avant-garde and to undo its associations with the Left. Yet by treating modern poetic experimentalism as a form of communist subversion, and by privileging a traditional lyricism defined by individual expression and reflection, it appears that these critics effectively convinced American audiences that poetry and politics don't mix.

The anti-communist critics, such as Stanley Coblentz's League for Sanity in Poetry, attempted to remove the politics from earlier poets. They rewrote the history of poetry to their own ends, turning Whitman from a radical socialist (and homsexual) into a nationalist, an epic poet to match Virgil or de Camoes, and used attacks on poetical experimentalism to discredit the political views of the largely left-wing experimental poets of the 1920s and 30s.

The anti-communists focussed on the difficulty and non-accessibility of modernist poetry, using its apparent rejection of the mass audience to discredit it: modernist poetry became an enemy of the public. The conservatives feared modernist poetry's rejection of hierarchy, with Donald Davidson condemning paratactic verse for its "treacherous political irresponsibility in the act of eschewing relations of cause and effect while the related elements [are] left to stand in unordered, unsubordinated lists." (AF) Bernstein points out the contradiction that leftist writers were often seen as democratic, yet in the 1950s left-wing modernist forms were accused of elitism and anti-populism.

Traditional lyric poetry was seen as staying true to individual emotions, while modern verse was about abstractions. The 1950s anticommunists used similar language to that of Hitler's art criticism: "The vocabulary of thirties-bashing was cast in the idiom of incurability; tropes of cancer and mass death abounded. Leftist writing of the 1930s was dismissed 'in a phrase: it was an alien growth' ... 'poison'" (AF). Lucien Burman condemned Gertrude Stein's influence "still to be found in many strategic strongholds, like the lurking germs of a yellow fever, they must be constantly fought and sprayed with violent chemicals lest the microbes develop again and start a new infection."

As the conservatives tried to shape poetry to their will, modernists were accused of imposing critical orthodoxy and perpetrating a "Big Lie": the lie that their work was poetry at all. Coblentz claimed modernist leftists would use the state security apparatus to impose their poetic ideas on the nation. Pinnacle, the magazine of the League for Sanity in Poetry, compared modernism to genocide. Peter Viereck linked the modernist "anything goes" philosophy with totalitarian mass murder.

The effects of this conservative campaign were long-lasting. 1950s magazines like Poetry refused to publish new verse by writers with radical politics even if the poets had been previously published there. Many poets saw their reputations ruined. The critical landscape shifted from the radicalism of the early 20th century to the system we now have. Bernstein sees traces of the anti-modernism persisting, in a belief that mainstream aesthetic principles are common sense, and a continuing pressure towards non-ideological poetry that accepts the dominant norms; the literary establishment claims that the avant-garde has won, as an excuse to say experimentalism's time has past.

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It is common on the left to explain post-ideological traditionalist poetry and literature as an inevitable product of late capitalism, but the account given by Filreis seem to show that contemporary ideas about poetry were creations of people with a specific political program and perhaps not historically necessary. It also shows how decisions about the literary canon often reflect political needs; battles over the interpretation of classic poets are frequent, and it can be seen here that they often have very high stakes.

Filreis's work follows earlier studies such as Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders (Reviews Monthly Review; CIA) which described how the CIA and other anti-communist organisations funded journals such as the Partisan Review, promoted writers such as George Orwell, and most famously supported abstract expressionism. The influence of these policies is debatable; while some people claim abstract expressionism was otherwise worthless and its valorisation is all a CIA plot, a more measured response sees the CIA as attempting to shift the world's cultural balance from Europe (with its strong left-wing tendencies) towards the USA. Promoting abstract art also damaged the left-wing representational art that had been popular in public contexts in the 1930s and 40s, funded by New Deal money, with the many followers of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and black artists like Jacob Lawrence. And art is not a matter of isolated geniuses: they require money, often from government or institutional sources (most American poets seem to earn their living through universities), but also a supportive creative and critical community.

There was certainly debate in the 1950s as to whether anti-communists should fund the abstract expressionists or more traditional artists, so it's noteworthy that in poetry the opposite side seemed to win compared to what happened in painting. And now we have an art world dominated by abstraction and conceptualism, and a literary world that seems shy of experiment. Cultural history often seems to conservatives to be a history of great men and women, and to those on the left as a story of historical inevitability under the wheels of capitalism, but Filreis shows that neither view is sufficient, and literary reputations and the success of artistic movements often hinge on political expediency and decisions that have little to do with art.