English Advance Access published online on September 11, 2009
English, doi:10.1093/english/efp030
BERNARD SPENCER'S ‘BOAT POEM’
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Abstract |
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This essay, based on manuscripts of ‘Boat Poem’ preserved in Special Collections at the University of Reading, aims to highlight the enduring qualities of Bernard Spencer's neglected art. It focuses on the poet's idea, adapted from George Seferis, that poems are waiting to be met with in experience, and that it is the poet's task to recognize and portray them. I document the occasions of ‘Boat Poem’ in Ibiza, and in the poet's biography. His work on the poem is explored in detail to reveal how it links the objects in the seaport evocation and their meaning for a middle-aged man with a history of uncertain health about to marry a woman more than half his age. The essay argues for an understated and balanced truth to encountered occasion in Spencer's poetry, a non-appropriative poise between what the scene means and what it means to the poet. Furthermore, in the concluding section to the essay, these values are compared with the styles and cultural implications of two modernist boat poems (Eliot's ‘Marina’ and Seferis's ‘In the Manner of G. S.’), suggesting that Spencer's style works towards establishing another note in English poetry, a note concordant with the poet's experience as a representative of the British Council during the decades of decolonization, in which his country's literature and its writers had to find a different balance between themselves, their culture and traditions, and the places where they were posted, places with histories and values independent of their own.
* Correspondence to Prof. Peter Robinson, Department of English and American Literature, University of Reading, Whiteknights, PO Box 218, Reading, Berkshire RG6 6AA, UK.