POETS AND POETRY

HL Deb 22 November 1978 vol 396 cc986-1036

3.1 p.m.

Lord WILLIS rose to call attention to the conditions of poets and poetry in Britain; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move my Motion for Papers. We move now, as it were, from kidneys and Statutory Instruments through to matters of the soul. As your Lordships know, this is a short debate and I am enormously encouraged by the number of noble Lords who have put down their names to speak on this subject, but I have been threatened by the Whips with drastic action if noble Lords do not keep their speeches down to nine or 10 minutes—that is excepting the opener of the debate and, of course, the Government speaker. Seriously, if noble Lords would bear in mind that there are a number of speakers and would try to keep their speeches to a reasonable length, I am sure that would help everybody.

Although I cannot be quite sure, I believe this is the first time that poetry and poets have been the subject of a full debate in Parliament. In another place, of course, they cannot debate the subject because they are allowed to debate only those matters which come within the prerogative of the Government, and, thank Heavens! poetry does not yet come within those boundaries. In your Lordships' House we are not so restricted, but, although from time to time we have debated the arts in general, we have never specifically discussed poets and poetry. I have made a cursory search, although not a thorough one, and I can find no record, for example, of Lord Alfred Tennyson speaking on the subject nor of Lord Byron doing so; but I have wondered sometimes whether Tennyson was thinking of the first formal introduction to the Lords of Peers when he wrote those marvellous lines in The Lotus Eaters: In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it seemed always afternoon". Or was he thinking perhaps of the people on the two Front Benches after a long debate when he wrote: Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white". Which side of the House, I wonder, was Lord Byron thinking of when he wrote—and I am quoting from memory: You can't believe a word they utter. Besides, they always smell of bread of butter".

I am delighted to say that the tradition of Lords who write poetry still continues. The noble Lord, Lord Moyne, wrote to apologise for his unavoidable absence from this debate and told me not only that he has published verse but that he still writes it. I believe that the noble Earl, Lord Gowrie, who is speaking today, has published poetry and I think and hope that he still writes it. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Parry, and the noble Lord, Lord Hale, also have published poetry, and there must be others. I hope they may reveal themselves this afternoon. It is not something to be ashamed of. Again, Lord Byron summed it up for all of us: Lords, too, are bards. Such things at times befall, And 'tis some praise in peers To write at all".

I have to confess that my own interest in poetry is that of a consumer rather than a creator. I have written, though never published, some verse, perhaps because I lack that streak of divine madness which I think marks off the really great poet from just the versifier. And I was warned off very early when I had a dangerous experience with poetry, which taught me that verse, like virginity, must be approached with caution. I had the temerity to write and send some poems of immoderate passion to the girl who later became my wife. Unluckily, she was away at the time and the letter was opened by her mother. It became rather confusing and almost wrecked my chances. She thought that her daughter had either taken up with a madman, or that I was approaching her.

But, more seriously, I want first to place on record my own personal sense of gratitude to poets, past and present. I find it almost impossible to put into words what poetry has meant in my life. It has given me immense pleasure, of course, but that is an inadequate description. Perhaps "delight" is the word I am looking for. I had the great fortune when I was a small child at an ordinary State school in Tottenham to have an English mistress called Miss Haas who saw something in me, I hope, and so we spent hours after school reading poetry aloud to each other. I got tremendous pleasure out of it, and it at least gave birth in me to a love of words and a love of poetry that has stayed with me all my life. When I am at home my greatest relaxation comes from listening to something from my collection of recorded verse. For poetry should be heard as well as read—a point I want to come back to in a moment. When I travel I take with me one of three poetry books which I should like to recommend to your Lordships because they have given me such pleasure. They are, first, Other Men's Flowers—a marvellous anthology compiled by the late Field Marshal Lord Wavell. Secondly, a book that needs no introduction to anybody, Palgrave's Golden Treasury, and, thirdly, The Penguin Collection of Modern Poetry.

These and many other volumes and individual poems have given me delight—and I stress the word "delight". That is surely so rare a thing that we cannot afford to turn our backs upon it. And of course it goes beyond delight. There are times when the poet's vision is unique, when he sees farther and deeper than the politician and the businessman or the sociologist. At his best the poet is, in a sense, an engineer of the human soul, expressing in words that we should like to use but cannot think of, our fears and hopes, our pleasures and our tragedies in a way that sometimes makes the heart throb like a drum. Perhaps because it is so difficult to put into words what I am trying to say I may try to illustrate what I mean by one or two examples. Suppose I were to say to your Lordships something like this: The aging process will, of course, affect these men and women in much the same way as it affects other men and women. But in a different sense and for special reasons it will not do so. Memory-wise, they will remain in an on-going situation". If I said that to your Lordships you could be forgiven for thinking that I was quoting from the pages of New Society, and you would certainly not remember a single word of it. But put the same thought in the mind of the poet and you get something that millions of people will never forget: They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them". Or, taking a similar theme, if I were to say: These fat war profiteers and their fatuous women sitting comfortably in the theatre and applauding every jingoistic sentiment appall and disgust me. I'd like them to see and feel the awful reality of war", you would feel, quite rightly, that I was angry about profiteering in World War I and that I wanted to express my indignation, but the words are hardly memorable. Siegfried Sassoon said it in about ten words: I'd like to see a tank come thundering down the stalls". That expresses it all, and I hope I have made the point. If it needs any reinforcement, coming right up to date I recommend that you read Roger Woddis in the New Statesman each week. He puts into a few lines of verse thoughts, ideas and emotions which, in the hands of our political columnists, would take column after column, page after page.

I should like to add one further point before coming to more practical thoughts. If you wish to know which way the wind is blowing in Britain, if you wish to know how our young people think and feel, then buy, read and listen to the work of our young modern poets. You may not like the style, you may think it awkward and exaggerated, not at all what you expect of poetry. Indeed, some of it is rubbish. But the best of the poets writing today have a true vision, and we should do well to listen to their voices. What is more, my Lords, if we dare to sit in this House or in another place, we have a duty to listen to their voices.

My Lords, the most interesting feature of the scene at the moment, and in the last few years, has been the development of poets taking their work to audiences of every kind. Few contemporary poets sit in ivory towers, though many of them do still sit in attics. Most of them go out to audiences and read and discuss their work. Apart from anything else, it helps them to make a small living. There are many poets who manage to do that today. There were, in 1977, 171 regular poetry groups in Britain, and hundreds of other less regular meetings in pubs and clubs. One of the most exciting developments is a scheme operated by the Poetry Society, and which, to their eternal credit, is funded by W. H. Smith and Son, called Poets in Schools. Under this scheme, 15 to 20 poets visit schools and work with children. Some Regional Arts Associations fund similar schemes. But the demand from the schools—and this is interesting—far exceeds the funds available.

This to my mind, is one of the keys to the future of poetry in Britain—this work in the schools. For example, there are no proper facilities for training English teachers to deal with the teaching of poetry. The Poetry Society wants to establish short courses for such teachers, but at the moment it has no financial resources for this important work. Another key issue is the question of publishing. Very little contemporary poetry is available to the public through the mass media or through mass publication. It is mainly published by the small presses which are not widely distributed. The scope may again be seen by the 1977 figures. It may astonish your Lordships to know that there were 906 new collections of poetry published in that year, but they were published by no fewer than 304 publishers, all or most of them very small presses. Poetry, with the exception of works by people like Betjeman, is not commercially viable, and it will not become so unless we can start with the children in the schools and teach them that the understanding of contemporary poetry is as important as the understanding of the classics, and if we all realise how important and fundamental poetry is to our society.

Today, my Lords, we have an opportunity which was denied to the poets who wrote a century or more ago. We do have the means to record poetry and to record poets reading their works. I should like to see the establishment of a British Library of Recorded Verse, and I know this is one of the dreams of the Poetry Society. It could be housed at the National Poetry Centre, and it would cost about £50,000 a year to initiate. This is not a large sum, and surely it is at least as important to preserve the best poetry of today and the voices of its creators as it is to save, say, a valuable picture for the nation. If we were living in an age when we had Tennyson and Byron, would we not all like to hear their voices on a recording or even to see them on a videotape? That seems a very small sum of money to achieve something for the nation.

Finally, my Lords, I come to the Poetry Society itself, which has done, and is doing, so much invaluable work not only on behalf of poetry, but on behalf of us all. Much of the stimulation given to poets, public readings, and publishing comes from the Society. It offers a wide range of facilities: a library, a bookshop, printing facilities, an information service, an education department, and it houses the National Poetry Secretariat. The Poetry Society does all this and more on a grant of £60,000 per annum from the Arts Council, plus a small income from membership fees and other activities. Once again, that is a tiny pittance in comparison with the amounts devoted to the other arts, like opera and the theatre.

I know that some noble Lords who are to speak in the debate will tell us a little more about what the Arts Council does for poets and poetry, and I do not deny that it does an enormous amount. I am not among those who wish to attack the Arts Council, though I do have certain criticisms of the way it operates. But it is true that each year the Government gives the Arts Council enough money to clothe one small child and then expects it to buy outfits for several adults. I have the greatest sympathy for its administrators, who have to make painful value judgments and weigh the value of every penny.

Having said that, I think that it should take another look at the amount it gives to literature. In the year 1976–77 the total expenditure in this field was £461,000, about 1¼ per cent. of its total budget for that year. By comparison, music and drama alone received £9½ million, and I am excluding from that the huge sums paid to the Royal Opera, the National Theatre and other national organisations. I think the balance is wrong and I hope the Arts Council will do something about it. I hope, too, that private and industrial sponsors may be persuaded to come forward and provide sponsorship. Why should not companies like EMI, to name just one, or some of the great television companies, help provide both funds and facilities for the creation of a National Library of Recorded Verse? Why do not the TUC and the CBI establish funds which would encourage poets in industry?

My Lords, I have left a great deal of ground uncovered, partly because I know it will be covered in the debate and partly because of the time factor, I hope other speakers will fill some of the gaps I have left. But I hope at least I have said enough to convince your Lordships that the poet is as important to our society as the engineer, the carpenter or indeed the politician. Take a roll call of the greatest names in our history and the poets lead it ten-fold. And it is an interesting thought that if there had been no such thing as the expiry of copyright the amount of royalties we would have earned simply from the export of Shakespeare's plays would have paid off our National Debt. That is where poets come in our society.

There can be few of us who do not feel depressed at times when we look at modern society. It seems to me, certainly on occasions, that we are living, as Keith Waterhouse the journalist once put it, in a junk age, an age when there is a lot of noise but nothing happens, when jobs are manufactured but not products, when politics is no longer the art of the possible but the craft of survival, when the ideas advanced by our leaders are so devoid of vision that crackpot theories and "weirdo" sects can seize hold of the minds of millions. Where is the vision for the year 2000? I have two grandchildren. I want to know, what kind of world is it going to be like for them in the year 2000? But instead, what happens? We tinker, we do small things. We do need, surely, in Government and in politics, on all sides, a little more vision than a proposal to make the wearing of seat belts compulsory. Our poets cannot solve these problems; that is not their task. But they can help to show us what is wrong with the present and give us some penetrating vision of tomorrow. And they can bring some delight to our lives.

I conclude once again by quoting a little poetry, from James Elroy Flecker's Hassan: Ah, if ever there shall arise a nation whose people have forgotten poetry or whose poets have forgotten the people, though they send their ships round Taprobane and their armies across the hills of Hindustan, though their cities be greater than Babylon of old, though they mine a league under the earth or mount to the stars on silver wings—what of them? They will be a dark patch on the world".

My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.

3.20 p.m.

Viscount ECCLES

My Lords, I had no idea what aspect of poetry the noble Lord, Lord Willis, would discuss and I must confess that the question which he has opened up, which seems to be that we have many good poets and all we have to do is to find better ways of making their work known, is not exactly my own view. As I listened to the noble Lord, I thought that anyone who cares very much about poetry must have a very special and individual view.

Speaking for myself, I cannot do without poetry. Ever since my mother read aloud to her children the verses of Robert Louis Stevenson, I have had to have poetry close at hand. As the years have passed, I think that my chief reflection is how very few great poets there have ever been. If one opens a comprehensive anthology—for example, one of the Oxford books—of English Verse, American Verse or French Verse one notes how very few names appear in the index and of those names how very few remain in one's mind forever. The anthologies also show us that good poets tend to come together within comparatively short periods alternating with periods, such as we are living through now, when very little good poetry is written.

For my part, I think that poetry is like grand opera. It is a form of art from which little or no pleasure can be derived where the work is second-class. It is only the best operas that are worth going to and it is only the best poems that live to be read generation after generation. On the other hand, second-class novels, plays, popular music and much painting and drawing continually give pleasure although they are clearly not in the first rank. I do not find that to be the case with poetry and I suppose that that is because of the complex bundle of qualities that are required by a great poem. It must have a structure; it must use words which mean something and which evoke responses beyond the intellect, and words which make music. All that is extremely difficult to do in one piece of writing if the reader is to feel himself in contact with life at a depth that he cannot discover by himself.

I know I shall be told that one can enjoy a limerick for its wit and humour and one can enjoy a lyric for the sound of the words, whatever they may mean. But very few poems achieve the aesthetic and rational whole that makes them compulsory reading over and over again. Therefore, it is rather extraordinary that such an enormous number of people try their hand at poetry and want to get it published. When the Arts Council advertised for poems from which to select an anthology of the previous year's work, would your Lordships believe how many poems were submitted?—42,000. It took a whole summer to go through them all and I wonder how many of them would have ever been read twice had they appeared on the printed page.

We are going through a bad patch with the poets today. Let us consider the recent death roll: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Wystan Auden, Cavafy and Seferis. They all died within the last 25 years. Who are their successors? Whose next book of poems do we look forward to with excited impatience? Philip Larkin's, perhaps; but who else?

The situation is very different now from what it was 50 years ago. I had just gone up to Oxford when the Hogarth Press published Tom Eliot's The Waste Land at half-a-crown in blue wrappers. It is now worth more than £100 if one has a clean copy. For weeks after that poem came out we hardly talked about anything else. However, in the last 10 years how many poems have made a comparable impact or anything like it? If my noble friend Lord Gowrie, who knows much more about poetry than I do and who is to wind up the debate, will forgive me, I think that the answer is, not a single one. I doubt whether there is any published poet in this country or America who can be expected to write a poem of similar importance.

Good poets are scarce and always have been and the scarcer they are the more we should be sure that no one with talent fails to be published. The noble Lord, Lord Willis, has mentioned a number of ways in which the modern poets are assisted in their publication and he looks forward, I think quite rightly, to recorded sound. I do not claim to have all the information by any means, but it seems to me that promising poets now receive more help in getting their work into print than ever before. Not only are there subsidies from the Arts Council—and I am sure that we all look forward to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, who knows much more about that than I do—but, the Editors of the small magazines, the weeklies and monthlies, are always on the lookout for good poetry. I suppose that there are at present an exceptional number of versifiers wanting to be published, but that does mean that their work is worth publishing. I should say that if a poem has quality someone will publish it, and if it does not have quality it should not be printed with the aid of public funds.

Of course, whether poets are paid enough for the poems that are published is quite another matter. The chances are that in an age of science and technology all labour-intensive work is relatively underpaid and will probably be more underpaid as time goes on. However, in my experience a poet who has any good work to his credit can earn his bread and butter by broadcasting, reviewing, lecturing, teaching or working in a library. I cannot believe that most of the poets who continue to be read with pleasure ever did earn a living by their poetry alone. Surely they needed the experience of the world which a job gives and surely today the media provide them with opportunities more abundant than were ever available before.

I am sorry to say that it appears that some modern poets do not want to earn a living other than by writing poetry. I have often been astonished at the number of artists and writers who appear to think that society owes them a living, irrespective of the quality of their work. Supposing doctors used the same argument. What scorn we should pour on them! When I was in the Government it was often said that someone who was living the life of an artist or poet deserved to have a grant to keep him and his family going. That is a new attitude. I do not think that that attitude occurred much before the last 10 or 15 years. Of course, I am all in favour of experimental art, whether it is painting or literature, but its support is best left to the private patron who can take a chance and who can back an artist or a writer the quality of whose work is still in doubt.

On the aspect of backing poets, it would be a very good thing if more of us were to subscribe to the small magazines that do so much good. I was astonished at the number quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Willis. Five or six of the most important include, Agenda, New Poetry, the New Review, the London Magazine and Outpost, which is very good. I looked in your Lordships' Library and found that we subscribe to two of those. If your Lordships thought it right, I would suggest to the Librarian that we should subscribe to three or four others, because that would be one way of helping new poets get their works published. We do not have to back the man directly; there is an editor between us and the poet to select the poems. I should like to see those publications in the Library. However, I do not think that direct subsidies should be increased unless evidence of quality exists. As far as I know, public funds are now sufficient to get poems of reasonable quality published by someone.

I wonder whether the readership will ever grow. I suppose that it was much greater in Tudor times than it is now because, of course, there were not so many other activities in which people could take an interest. It might grow. I should like to conclude by trying to answer that question with a quotation from Wallace Stevens, who is my favourite American poet. He wrote to a friend that everyone should like poetry as children like snow; and that we would all like it that way if only poets wrote it well. Let us hope that the coming generation of poets will write well and will find a growing public for their art.

3.32 p.m.

Lord MACKIE of BENSHIE

My Lords, I follow the noble Lords who have spoken with a certain diffidence which is foreign to my character. I am emboldened to speak on this admirable subject, proposed so ably and with such great courage by the noble Lord, Lord Willis, because of the attitude of my colleagues—who, happily, are sitting around me here—at the Party meeting at which we discussed poetry. When my noble Leader—to whom I yield to no one in my admiration—came to raise the matter he said, "God bless my soul, poets and poetry—do we have a poet?" All my noble colleagues, who are absolutely marvellous on the social services and other subjects—my noble friend Lady Seear knows more about the economy—said, "Good gracious, who do we have?" Eventually when no one spoke up—they all faltered—I said that I would speak, whereupon my noble Leader looked at me and I could see the thoughts passing through his mind: "Mackie is sound on agriculture and bearable on forestry, but poetry? God bless my soul what are we coming to!" However, with great English forbearance he said," Of course, George, if you want to speak, do speak". He looked round wildly for support from his colleagues who all hung their heads in shame, wondering what the devil was going to come when Mackie rose to speak about poetry.

The point I seek to make is that my English colleagues in particular—we did not have a Welshman present—think that poetry is a very different thing and does not belong to ordinary life. As the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, said, one appreciated it 50 years ago when one was young, but now, 50 years later, one looks at the cost and deplores the fact that there is no poet worth hearing. I am afraid that that is the attitude which prevails throughout most of your Lordships' House. People believe that poetry is a thing apart. Eventually at our meeting someone had an inspiration and said, "Viscount Barrington is a real poet". Looking at me in a scathing way he said, "We will get him to speak".

I want to speak because I think that poetry should be for many people—people of action, people who are great men in other spheres. Everyone should be interested in poetry and gain pleasure from it, as everyone really has. It is only as they get older that they appear to cultivate gravitas or something and forget about the pleasure that they have had from poetry in the past. I believe that England suffers more from this than other places. I went to China in a delegation with the noble Lord, Lord Rhodes, and I was astonished to find that Chairman Mao's poetry was widely published and widely read. Indeed, I was even more astonished to find that I read it myself and gained a great deal of pleasure, particularly from his early poems on the Long March; many of them were absolutely beautiful. When he became old and became the Head of State in 1961 he looked at the Women's Militia and in his book he said: How bright and brave they look shouldering five foot rifles on the parade ground, lit up by the first gleams of day; China's daughters of high aspiring minds, they love their battle array not silks and satins". When he said that I thought that perhaps even Chairman Mao's poetry was deteriorating under the heaviness of the cares of State and that his early poetry was very much better. It was rather like our Prime Minister producing poetry today which would run something like: Against inflation I am steely, And if I'm not, then so is Healey". Nevertheless, in China poetry obviously had an enormous influence on all the people, and it was practised and enjoyed by leading people as a part of life.

I think that on this occasion I am entitled to say something about Scotland. I do not know any other nation whose national day is to celebrate their national poet. Burns Night means more to Scotsmen than probably anything else. I admit that it is strongly mixed with a desire to enjoy strong drink, but Burns allowed this when he said that Freedom and whisky gang the gither". What I am afraid of, and why I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Willis, for initiating this debate, is that that genuine love of poetry is declining. At one time in Scotland one could go to the smallest village and if you were proposing the Immortal Memory, you had to be absolutely sure that you were on the ball. If you were slipshod or did not prepare, you could be certain that five or six people in that audience would pull you up and tear you to pieces thereafter.

Burns permeated the thinking of Scotland. He certainly permeated the political thinking. Much of the democratic spirit of Scotland is certainly due to the poetry of Burns. I should like to see it extend much further. I well remember a friend of mine in my own village who was a sergeant of police. He was a very good poet and knew acres of poetry, if I can put it that way, in agricultural fashion. He did not confine himself to Burns, but genuinely appreciated poetry. Up in far Dunbeath and Caithness I know a man called Joe Sutherland, the bard of Dunbeath. He writes excellent and amusing poetry; some of it is perhaps at not a very high level; but it is all in line and is the poetry of the people. The same is true on my own farm; poetry is appreciated by most of my men. But we need to do more to help it. That is why I think that, by the attendance of noble Lords and the number speaking in this debate, this House is doing a great service. I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Willis, and I hope that all noble Lords will help to rescue poetry and poets from the position of "apartheid" which they hold at present.

3.40 p.m.

Lord HUTCHINSON of LULLINGTON

My Lords, as a newcomer to your Lordships' House it did not take me long to learn that the most alarming characteristic of the proceedings here is the depth and extent of the knowledge of those who take part in debates, as exemplified, if I may say so, by the last noble Lord to speak. As a mere advocate in the courts, I found myself very soon surrounded here by noble Lords—some learned, some friends—whose knowledge of the law of course far exceeded anything that ever emerges from the Central Criminal Court, so that when the noble Lord, Lord Willis, put down this Motion on poetry I must say that I breathed a sigh of relief that at last here in this House was a subject in the understanding of which knowledge really plays little part. So with due humility I felt perhaps that I might make an equal contribution.

I suppose that poetry is the manifestation of this nation's greatest and most particular genius. Poets are still honoured here, if only when they are doddering or dead. Naturally I thought that it would be appropriate to raid the great storehouse of British poetry for a relevant quotation. These words which I have found reflect correctly my own situation today: Lord Heygate had a troubled face, His furniture was commonplace, The sort of Peer who well might pass For someone of the middle class. I don't think you will want to hear Much from this unimportant Peer". But some importance has been thrust upon me, and I can declare an interest. It has not taken me very long in this House to appreciate that the phrase "declaring an interest" is really a polite way of saying, "I know very much more about this subject than anyone else who is going to take part in the debate." But my declaration, which I trust does not contravene the Official Secrets Act because it is in fact in relation to a QUANGO appointment, is that I happen to be Vice-Chairman of the Arts Council of—and I emphasise still—Great Britain.

I can assure your Lordships that poetry, which means poets, received very substantial support indeed in many imaginative ways from the Arts Council in England, Scotland and Wales. The noble Lord, Lord Willis, mentioned a figure from the Arts Council budget devoted to literature. If I might bring that figure more up-to-date, I think in all three countries the figure is nearer £900,000 spent last year on literature, which is a little over 2 per cent. of the total budget. But I do not think that percentages are perhaps a sensible way of looking on this kind of division of money, when your Lordships appreciate that before one actor goes on to the stage in the National Theatre, or one customer goes through the doors, over £1 million has to be found to open those doors for that audience. It costs very much less to keep a poet warm.

In fact, of that amount about half a million pounds is spent in the furtherance of poets and poetry by the Arts Council in England, although it is difficult of course to extract exactly the amount which goes towards poetry rather than other forms of literature. How does that come about? There are a large number of headings, and I shall go through them quickly in order to assist your Lordships to have some idea of what the Council is doing for poetry. Poets come off better than novelists and other writers so far as the Arts Council is concerned. There are direct grants which enable poets to buy time to complete a work or task which they have.

I do not know why, but there is a view that poets should live on what they earn like other people, but the trouble is that they do not earn enough to live on and in a civilised society they have surely to be helped. There are the small presses, to which the noble Lord, Lord Willis, has already referred; £34,000 went to eight of them last year. They are the most enterprising lot of publishers. They may publish anything from two to 12 volumes in the year, volumes of poetry which no commercial publisher would think of publishing. There are the magazines; 12 of them last year supported to the extent of something over £80,000, and four of them entirely devoted to poetry.

There is the Poetry Society, to which the noble Lord, Lord Willis, has already referred—a very substantial sum of £60,000; some people would think too much. This remains to be seen, because that Society, as your Lordships will probably appreciate on what is supposed to be a non-controversial subject, was rent with internal dissensions over the years. Indeed, their headquarters are in Earl's Court Square, and rumour had it that one of the reasons why the Motor Show moved from Earls Court to Birmingham was that they could not put up with the noise which emerged from Earl's Court Square. But of that £60,000 no less than £20,000 is earmarked for public readings by poets up and down the country—this, too, the noble Lord, Lord Willis, has referred to—in all sorts of places such as public houses, halls, and so on. They publish their own periodical, The Poetry Review, and they have a print shop in which any poet, if he so desires, can go and print a volume of his own works at cost price.

There are the creative writing fellowships. Last year no fewer than a dozen colleges and polytechnics received grants from the Council in order to employ writers—and of course some of them were poets—entirely on their own terms to lecture, to give seminars, to meet and help young people who are interested in poetry and literature. Something like £63,000 went towards that endeavour. Two schemes backed by the Council were Writers on Tour and Writers in Schools. Under the first, Writers on Tour, four or five authors may get together and go to some area in the country and spend a week in it giving lectures, going to meetings, going to schools, going to art centres. For Writers in Schools there is a long list of writers and authors. This is sent to schools, which then, of their own initiative, ask those writers whether they are prepared to come and talk to the schools.

Grants are made to the established publishers to asist them to publish works which they would not otherwise be able commercially to do. There is the Poetry Book Society, with 1,000 members, which guarantees that four times a year 1,000 copies of a new volume of poetry will be bought; and any noble Lords who would like an exercise in rejuvenation might be prepared to join that society. There is the Arts Council's annual poetry anthology, referred to by the noble Viscount, for which, as he said, no fewer than 42,000 entries were received last year. There is the poetry library at the Arts Council, the best library in the country for poetry from which anyone can take out any work, for nothing. Then there is the new venture which the Arts Council has been backing, the non-profit distributing bookshops, of which 10 or 12 have been opened in the last two years, and which afford yet another outlet for poets and writers.

That is the list setting out what the Council is doing for poetry. The Council's chartered duty is to develop and improve the knowledge and understanding and practice of the arts and to increase their accessibility to the public. I do not think noble Lords will disgaree with me when I say that that list shows without doubt that much is being done to develop and improve the knowledge and understanding of poetry and the accessibility of poetry to the public. Whether it can or ever will improve the practice of the art is, of course, a controversial question, and I appreciate that is an area on which I must not trespass today.

I end by saying that artists need help. Their lives are based on hard and disciplined work with, on the whole, very little personal reward. Of course, there is always the danger of the subsidised poet—of the literary lounger, of the intellectual charlatan who takes the bureaucrat for a spurious ride; but the Council are a hard headed lot, the staff is increasingly expert at the tender art of evaluation, and I sincerely hope they will always continue to dare much and make mistakes and sometimes fall flat on their faces because to stretch out to the edge of endeavour is never possible unless one sometines goes over that edge. Public debate such as we are having today is of inestimable value for the poet, for the public and for those who administer public funds on behalf of the arts. It is wholly appropriate that the first debate such as this in this House should be centred on our greatest art—that of poetry.

3.54 p.m.

Lord MILFORD

My Lords, I wish at the outset to thank the Government Whip and those who have given me the wonderful job of congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, on his maiden speech. It was a speech full of hope, a positive speech, and I hope we shall hear very often from him in this House because he is such a civilising agent.

I also wish to thank the noble Lord, Lord Willis, for bringing this matter before the House because we are discussing what in my view is one of the most important assets we have in Britain; we are debating part of the potential wealth of this country and we ask the Government to find a sum of money to help produce something that could last forever as part of the British treasure. We are asking for a sum which is absolutely minute compared with, for example, the vast sums we spend on arms, which are soon out of date and of which we already have enough to blow up the whole of humanity.

For me, there are two main approaches to this debate. The first is how to help poets who are struggling to live to go on with their work and help them feel they are producing something which the community wants. It must be so despairing to produce and put away in a folder sheet after sheet of paper on which one has put down one's deepest and intimate thoughts, experiences and dreams, which one hopes will be illuminating for other people though one can find no way to reach those people. It must lead to the most terrible frustration.

The visual arts are subsidised and visual artists can get jobs, part-time, teaching, and then have some time in which to do their own work; it may not be satisfactory and it may be frustrating, but it allows them to earn money and to get on with their work. Why can that not happen to writers and poets? Why can we not have poets and writers on the campus at universities in the way they do in America? At our older universities there are no live poets on the campus to give to, and receive from, students and staff. Why can we not have teaching careers for writers at art and technical colleges and universities? If they were allowed to be on the campus as writers teaching writing and poetry, it would be valuable for them to receive from the students and be able to give to the students, so creating a wonderful two-way traffic.

I come to my second hobby-horse, about which I have talked before in this House, though the remarks of Lord Hutchinson make mine sound rather gloomy because he is so positive about what is being done. I want to know how to get more people wanting to read, to listen to and to understand what poetry is about. I want them to know why it can be so enriching. How does one build a bridge between other craftsmen—builders, mechanics, engineers, carpenters and metal workers—and poets, who are craftsmen too? To many people in this country poets are not ordinary human beings. If you are asked in a pub, "What do you do, mate?" and you reply, "I'm a poet", the conversation will probably not last very long. That is a situation that I want to break down; that poets and writers are human beings doing a job like anybody else. We must subsidise the poet so that he can work at his art, but somehow we must also get the public to appreciate his work and be hungry for his produce.

Every child loves drawing, painting, playing some form of musical instrument and making up rhymes and verse. But what happens at about the age of 12? Does not education switch too much from the enriching humanities towards making young people useful for jobs in this commodities society in the future? Surely the balance of emphasis must be altered. We are moving into an era of shorter working hours, a shorter working week, more unemployment, and increased leisure time, and this leisure must be channelled into creativeness. The mass media must be more positive in showing what poetry, literature, and drama are about.

I welcome the Arts Council's appointment of an education liaison officer. It is a tremendous step forward to liaise between organisations providing the arts and organisations of education at all levels. At last the bridge may be built. The first major step should be to develop and improve knowledge, understanding and practice of the arts, and to co-operate with any other body in achieving this wonderful aim. It is tremendously important to encourage closer integration between the providers of education and the providers of the arts. It is especially important to do this for poetry and poets, and to break down the image of the preciousness and the unreality of poets, which is so widespread among ordinary people, in the tide of alienation which is fragmenting society. This is a job for the Minister for Education, and for any Minister for the Arts; and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge, will have much to say on this point this afternoon.

Why is it that in Britain poets and artists appear to be on the other side of the fence, and not in the same field as the rest of the workers? I recall being in Chile a few years ago, and there was Neruda reading his poetry down the mines, and those listening were enthralled. Why should that differ so much from what happens here? If one went at lunch time into a factory, got on to a platform and read poetry while the workers were all eating, would it, or would it not, go down well? I should like to try such a thing. During the war, for instance, we used to go around speaking in factories on all kinds of subjects while the workers were eating, and they listened. I remember on one occasion a jazz band visiting a factory. We were all singing songs, and people listened. Why can that not be done with poetry?

In 1977 the Arts Council ran the first ever conference on adult education and the arts, as I discovered in a report I read today, and the places for the conference were over-subscribed. There were equal places for both the art providers and the adult education providers. This year and next year there are to be similar conferences all over the country, embracing schools, colleges and universities. This is a tremendous beginning—

Baroness WHITE

My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, I should like to suggest that he comes back to Wales and attends our local Eisteddfod as well as the national one. There he will hear plenty of Welsh poetry.

4.5 p.m.

Lord DAVIES of LEEK

My Lords, there is hope for Britain. I cannot see any other assembly in the world devoting its time to what some people would consider an esoteric subject, such as the destiny of poetry and how we are to help poets. How little do people know that the spring of creation itself came from the proper use of the word! One opens Genesis and one sees that first there was the word—the miracle of semantics. This is the great secret of the poet. It is the poet who has moved nations to greatness. We do not want to look only to the intellectual, who is concerned with thinking; God help him if he cannot feel as well! Essentially the best poet can balance intellectuality with tactility or feeling; and that is the greatness of poetry. I see that I am to be honoured by being followed in the debate by a poet, the noble Viscount, Lord Barrington, who may, in his own philosophical way, have a few words to add on this subject. First, as a matter of courtesy, I wish to thank the maiden speaker for an informative, constructive, and vital speech that will be of great use to the House and to the nation. I thank the noble Lord for digging into the caverns of bureaucracy, where he has shed some light, even if only from a sixpenny flashlight. We need more of this.

Swinburne, talking of the living world, said: Change in a trice The lilies and languors of virtue For the raptures and roses of vice". That is the kind of world in which we are living at the moment. I also wish to thank the noble Lord, Lord Willis, for having the genius to raise this subject for debate; and he has a touch of the great divine spark too. God help me if I am to keep my speech to about 10 minutes because this is a brilliant subject, dealing with the conditions of poetry and poets in Britain.

When I was a child we were forced to use our memory, to learn poetry by heart and by rote, and this proved so valuable as one grew older. The philosophy of Shakespeare meant very little to me when I had to analyse it in English. It bored me, and sometimes when I was a little child it made me cry because I did not get the right moods or the right strength. No one speaks now of weak and strong verbs in the English language. I have books all around me, and sometimes at night I open a page of one of them and see a work of Shakespeare's that I learned when I was nine, 10 or 12 years old. It contains a whole gamut of human activity and human philosophy.

One of the tragedies today seems to be that Her Majesty's Inspectors of schools—I know this from my own lecturing and teaching days—seem to think that it is not right for children to learn to recite verses of poetry in chorus. I recall listening to children at one time in a Welsh school in wild Cardiganshire. They were in a little classroom in the hills—I can see it now. They recited for instance: "Under the spreading chestnut tree…" Oh, the rhythm of it! There would be 40 little brats reciting. Their eyes were alight. I can remember the joy of seeing a windmill brought to life: Behold, here I stand, the windmill, and with my jaws I grind … et cetera. They were great experiences, and life was colourful, even if you did not have a penny in your pocket.

It is no good thinking only about intellectuals when you come to poetry. What of the quarrymen, the colliers, the fishermen? What of the fishermen of Scotland, those around Mull? I recall once going to a fisherman's funeral there. Those great strong men ooze with poetry, and they are not ashamed to admit that they love the rhythm of their language, as well as the effect of their speech on their motive forces. We must do something about it; it is part of Britain's inheritance.

The noble Lord, Lord Willis, made a great point when he reminded us that, had there been royalties on the reproduction of Shakespeare these last 300 years, they would have paid the National Debt. He is probably right. Virgil, in one of his great phrases uttered the words, "lacrimae rerum"—the tears of things. It is a strong and noble phrase, covering man's passage from his cowering in prehistoric caves to the height of his greatness or his achievement in technical and communication systems, and to the utmost depth of his folly in an oil-polluted, warfaring world, capable of destroying what was supposed to be God's greatest achievement—man. Wordsworth spoke of, the still, sad music of humanity". It is not now so still; and certainly, with its cacophony and the barbaric warp which it pitches over the world, not so musical.

We are apt to forget that massive inventiveness in producing the machines of war and destruction—or, for that matter, great ingenuity in producing wonderful labour-saving tools like computers, laser beams and now, for the lazy schoolboy, cheap calculators to do his tables and his sums—is not necessarily the measure of the strength and level of our culture, or of our civilisation. We now have the means to produce enough for mankind to live in moderate comfort; and yet fear, mistrust and the dark hood of tragedy are probably more widespread now than at any time. The fact that, this week, somewhere in the world, 400 people have committed suicide as a result of some kink in their mental set-up, some kink in the dark black magic of their religous belief, hardly moves the people of Britain that much. It is accepted through the massive media of modern times as a speck on the motion of mankind towards either his destiny or his death. To people like myself, it is just amazing. One wonders: Why is it? What is happening? Those are the tears of things that Virgil talked about, and they are now flowing more freely than ever.

There was a flowering of learning—of literature, music and poetry—during the Elizabethan period, but let us not forget that there were only four million people on this little island in those days. The lovely loneliness that mankind desires—solitude—was there. If you had a pair of strong legs, you could get to it in five minutes. Now the wen of our great cities, the raucous noise of our engines and our machines, is making man more neurotic than a March hare. He is not able to sit still. Today I drove in one of man's machines from Golders Green to Westminster, and people were grinding their teeth, making signs to each other, going round the bend faster than Davies was coming to this noble House. This is what is happening to man, and he thinks he is doing well. Then he swanks to his neighbour while he wipes and washes his little machine on a Sunday instead of bothering to meditate and think why he has been put upon this earth. It is no good, because he is destined to finish himself, anyway.

My Lords, one other thing. The English Renaissance was fed by many streams of literature, poetry and science; they were all there in the time of Queen Elizabeth I. Shakespeare's first known poem was Venus and Adonis, and was dedicated to his patron, the Earl of Southampton. It was Ben Jonson who contemporaneously said of Shakespeare: He was not for an age, but for all time". What patronage will you get today? asked the noble Lord from the other Bench. The possibility of winning a prize on Littlewoods Pools is the height of most people's amibition today; and they go crazy every Sunday or Saturday night, seeing what they have drawn. Then they utter a great meteororic phrase if they win one-third of a million, and it is three words long: "Spend, spend, spend!" In that kind of world we need more poetry. Man must have time to stand and stare. It was a tramp, not an intellectual, who wrote the beautiful lines: The rainbow and a cuckoo's song May never come together again; May never come This side of the tomb. What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare". What are we missing? If, in its own small way, this debate introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Willis, makes only a few hundred people in Britain think about these things when Hansard is published, it will add some grains to the rock of British greatness.

In the past many of the poets, dramatists and writers depended on patronage. Those days are finished. We do not want patronage; we do not want to be subservient. The nation as such can do what it is doing, as was pointed out by our maiden speaker; but we need more. If we sold only one of our jet planes it would subsidise what we are aiming at for quite a generation. I was going to mention some of the organisations like the Society for Poetry, but I notice the time—twelve minutes. The time has gone very quickly; it has whistled by. There are papers like Penguin New Writing—and I want to pay a tribute to Penguin. Oh! if I had the opportunity to quote some of the Welsh verse from The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse. I congratulate Penguin on getting them together. There they are—colliers, intellectuals, judges, doctors, lawyers, ploughmen, who have contributed to the thinking of Wales. If only, in modern civilisation, it was as simple to produce an improved type of poet as it is to produce a laser beam, a television set or a tank, what a world it would be! That is just a cry from my heart.

The advance of technology, our conquest of space and so on—none of these things has given us a new Shakespeare. Can a new type like that come again? I should like to ask the Government how they are further enlarging (this is information which I did not know before, but which has now been given to us) the channels through which new and well-known poets can experiment. I deprecate the tendency that has grown up in our schools—and I hope the Ministry of Education will do something about it—to clamp down on learning passages of great literature by heart, by memory or by rote, whichever you want to say. The schools are thereby taking away some of the best of the British heritage—Welsh, English and Scotch. In the schoolrooms and in those lower schools kids can learn reams of stuff". I could keep your Lordships here by quoting from Penny Poets, dated 1896. In my study I have Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Thomson's Seasons. They are all there, and they cost a penny. I guarantee they are worth about five guineas each now, those little booklets. They were published in their thousands in the 1900s. People then believed in something beyond just bare material things.

My Lords, it is nearly time to finish, and I want to quote Sir Isaac Foot. There is none of the great Foot family in the House today; but I have copies of The Listener right back to 1934, and I remembered the right honourable Sir Isaac Foot—and the Lords Spritual will appreciate this—speaking on the 400th anniversary of the production of the English Bible. If you look at The Listener for 30th March 1938, you will see that it contains a marvellous speech by Sir Isaac Foot, and I shall finish with this out of sympathy for noble Lords listening.

Before the war, the right honourable Sir Issac Foot gave out his basic belief that the loss of the English Bible would mean—and do not let me pose as a great devout Christian; I am an ordinary type of guy who is trying to do his best—that we would no longer be the same people. He praised, on the 400th anniversary of the printing of the Bible and its translation into English, the simplicity, strength and beauty of the language; and then he quoted a trade union leader of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, George Loveless. The leader of the Tolpuddle Martyrs was sentenced to transportation. If your Lordships take the trouble to look up the trade union report of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, published some years ago, to read the letters of Loveless or his defence speech in the dock, you would be astonished. Sir Issac Foot wrote: Where did this village labourer get his style? Where did he get the noble simplicity of his diction and the majesty of his phrase? The answer is simple. This unschooled peasant was a devout student of his Bible". We should know, too, that the Bible was put into English at the price of men's blood: Tyndale, Cranmer, Frith, Rogers were all roasted at the stake in that mad world which had the same craziness about religious differences. This beautiful and noble language, through the blood of man now put into English, was in jeopardy. This miracle is one which is forgotten. It is worth, even if a man is an agnostic, to know the beautiful flow of it.

In 1536, when English was forced on to the Welsh people, we had the translation of the Welsh Bible. The language is beautiful. Here I will finish with this question. How many people get a small pension who are poets? What help is there for the National Eisteddfod? There should be something. One of the great heroes who won the Chair at the National Eisteddfod in Birkenhead in 1917 was killed on the Western Front six weeks before the award; and he was remembered and is still remembered. Fortunately, for many years the Welsh Eisteddfod has encouraged the Chairing of the Poet. I never reached those heights myself, but in my grammar school I got second place. I pinched three-quarters of a poem, I admit. We were not forced, but encouraged, to do all we could to write.

Finally, thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Willis, and to the maiden speaker, and I hope that although this may not set England aflame for poetry, at least the noble Lord, Lord Willis, has set alight a sparklet that will encourage the poets of Britain today.

4.24 p.m.

Viscount BARRINGTON

My Lords, I have often been embarrassed in this House when rising to speak when I had no notes and did not know what to say. I would like to begin by three messages of thanks. It is a great privilege, as always, to follow the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek. I have done it before. He said so much better than I could have done many of the things that I should have liked to have said, and said it at such length and with such brilliance that he got me a little confused at one point.

I entirely agreed with him as to what he said about Man's position here, and I jotted down a note about, Man, proud man, Dressed in a little brief authority". And I noticed with an unconscious Spoonerism that I had turned "Man" into Adam, and dressed him in a "brittle, leaf authority."

As we have only a short time to speak, I should like next to thank the noble Lord, Lord Willis, for introducing the subject particularly so appropriately on St. Cecilia's Day. Whether that was deliberate I do not know. Whether St. Cecilia is the patron Saint of poets—well, the words about "Voice and Verse" we all know. If she is not, then I suppose that St. John is; because the noble Lord who has just spoken attributed to Genesis some words at the beginning of St. John's Gospel: In the beginning was the Word …". I feel that if we can now come down to the subject of "words", and if I can then sit down as quickly as possible, I will help this debate in the only way I can.

I am also embarrassed because the noble Lord, Lord Mackie of Benshie, whose speech I followed with great interest and agreement, made one remark I should like to contradict. He said that I was a poet. I am not a poet; I have never been one, much as I should like to be. That brings me to the only point that I can possibly contribute to this debate.

No mention has been made here as to the subject which took up Professor Housman's lecture on "The Name and Nature of Poetry", a long time ago—the difference between Poetry and Verse. He made a very clear distinction, and I believe that it would help; especially because the only point I want to make (in agreement with everyone else) is that all of this is a question of hearing, and of getting into one's memory. We know all about the poet's eye in a fine frenzy of rolling". We have all heard of the voice of the Bard who present, past and future sees", but most poetry and verse are matters of hearing (because they both began before writing was invented) and, above all, of memory.

I believe that it is necessary for people now to realise that there is a distinction between these. The only distinction I can make is that you can have verse which is not poetry, verse which is poetry, poetry which is not verse, and something that is not poetry and not verse. I do not know if I can make that any clearer, except by saying that most people recognise that a limerick is verse but not necessarily poetry; and it can be bad verse or good verse. Many limericks are brilliant. To take two examples of limericks which are deliberately bad, one refers to … the young man of Japan Who wrote verses that no one could scan. When they said that 'the thing Doesn't go with a swing', He replied, 'No, my object is to get as many syllables as possible into the last line as I conceivably can'. Most people would realise that that rather breaks the form of a limerick. Another one, written, I think, by the same writer, who was a brilliant versifier, W. S. Gilbert, runs as follows: There was a young man of St. Bees Who was stung in the arm by a wasp. When they said, 'Does it hurt?' He replied, 'No, it doesn't. I'm so glad it wasn't a hornet'. One of them was perfectly right on metre and the other perfectly right on rhyme. But poetry does not necessarily mean metre or rhyme; although for all of us who were brought up on Palgrave's Golden Treasury or anything up to the Oxford Book of English Verse, or anything up to the beginning of the First World War—when poetry took a new line—it meant to us, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek, said: Beneath the spreading chestnut tree De dum, de dum, de dum … As an example of something which is both poetry and verse, I will not quote the whole of the Ode to the West Wind by Shelley. It is in a complicated metre, it ryhmes completely, and I do not think anyone would say that it is not poetry. It also has one of the few things that poetry has in common with verse. Most people remember the last line: If winter comes can Spring be far behind?", which is really what we are talking about in this debate.

If one wants an example of something that is poetry but not verse, although it may have been verse in the original Hebrew, like any of the Psalms, I suggest a passage like: Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them". These are words which "vibrate in the memory", just as, to pick another quotation: Music when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory". Very few people can forget these things, though there is no rhyme, nor metre. That is poetry without being verse.

If one wants an example of neither verse nor poetry, I suppose one could have taken a railway timetable, which at one time was useful—perhaps more useful that it is now. Instructions on a railway are not meant to be verse, and are not meant to be poetry. It is only accidental if you get: "No smoking after Woking."

The point I should like to come to is how can one help poets as opposed to versifiers? My feeling is that, although all the other arts can be helped by money, poetry is one that cannot. A poet, as distinct from a versifier, is essentially not a professional but an amateur. That fits in with what the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek, said about it being the most human of the arts. You can be a professional musician without being necessarily a very good musician. You can be a professional potter, you can be a professional at all the other arts; but I do not believe that it is possible to be a professional poet.

In the days of the Second World War there was a regrettable lyric about trees: Poems are made by fools like me; But only God can make a tree". On the lines that "God helps those who help themselves" one can adapt this to say: Poetry helps some fools who know it; But only God can help a poet". Only He can. Poetry is one of the things that either comes or goes, like the rainbow. All encouragement should be given to it; and great encouragement is given by this debate to the fact that it should be heard as well as seen.

The reason why poetry is the most difficult of the arts is that a poet is trying to do so many things at the same time. He is trying to compress time and eternity together. My Lords, I have already been speaking for 10 minutes, without saying much that I wanted to say. That is far too long. I do not know whether your Lordships will remember this: To see a world in a grain of sand; And heaven in a wild flower; To hold infinity in the palm of your hand; And eternity in an hour". That is what poetry is trying to do. "The lunatic, the lover and the poet" are all classified together by Shakespeare. The Peer is not included. But Peers have been classified together with lunatics and poets, and I think that we should help the noble Lord, Lord Willis, in every way.

Lastly, I want to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson of Lullington. I was studying law at the same time as he was and, in order to get through the examinations, I remember putting into verse the case of Lasky v. Maloney. It was a verse of only eight lines, but I can still remember it. Verse is easy to memorise, poetry is not. Poetry goes deeper down, but is more important.

4.35 p.m.

Lord VAIZEY

My Lords, I should like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Willis, for introducing this debate. I am a member of the union of which he is president. He is a very effective president. I cannot help feeling that the Prime Minister must wish that the presidents of all the other unions were as amenable and effective as the noble Lord, Lord Willis, is. He has been particularly silent about the important part of the Queen's Speech regarding the introduction of the public lending right. We hope that during this Session of Parliament this immensely important step forward regarding the recognition of the rights of writers, including poets, will take place. We are particularly obliged to the noble Lord, Lord Willis, for that Bill.

I join with other speakers in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, on his maiden speech. It was particularly helpful and it eroded a large part of what I had prepared to say about what the Arts Council is doing. We also count on him, now that he has joined us, to get us all off the various charges which might be preferred against us in the future.

I should like to raise a number of crucial points. I am somewhat disappointed in what the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, said about the present state of poetry. I was brought up to believe that for 600 years a distinguished, if not great, lyric poet has been writing in English. I share with the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, the belief that the chief glory of this country lies in its poetry. I cannot believe that after 600 years for some sudden unexpected reason the wells of poetry have run dry. If it seems to people as cultivated and sympathetic as the noble Viscount that poetry which is now being written is not as distinguished as the poetry that he was brought up to enjoy, there may be a number of reasons for that.

One reason has been admirably covered by the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson: there has not been sufficient patronage given to poets. It is a myth that in the past poets did not get a living wage. A large number of poets throughout our history have been paid in one form of another, either for their production or they have been subsidised by wealthy people, colleges or whatever it may be. That is something which is very important and should be continued by the Arts Council. I share with the noble Lord, Lord Willis, the hope that industry and the trade unions will extend their beneficence in this direction. The educational institutions—certainly those to which I have been attached—are already doing so, as has been mentioned.

There are two other points which are important. First, there can be little doubt that the audience for poetry is diminishing. The noble Lord, Lord Mackie of Benshie, made a very important point when he referred to the way in which the enjoyment of rhythm in speech, by ordinary people and by cultivated people, is declining in this generation as compared with generations that have preceded this one. I cannot help feeling that that has something to do with the educational system, and, in particular, with the way that English is now taught in our schools. There has been a revolution in the teaching of English, a revolution which is to be welcomed in many respects because it is concerned with the cultivation of the moral values, the sense of moral values, through the medium of creative literature in the classroom. But in the process of encouraging children to express themselves and, through expressing themselves, to understand the diversity, width and breadth of moral expression, the ordinary learning of verse and how verse is constructed has diminished.

One of the reasons why people are less interested now in rhyme, in rhythm and in the way in which English is actually spoken is the very simple fact that as a result of this pedagogical revolution in our schools, poetry is no longer taught or learned as it has been for hundreds of years in all four countries of the United Kingdom. Obviously, I would not wish to go back to the old styles of teaching method, but I would hope very much that as the pedagogical progress takes place there will be some attempt to recapture the sense of the value of spoken English and, in particular, the rhythms of our enormously rich language. I know that in this I have the support of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek, with his very great experience.

The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek, also raised another point which is really the second major point I want to make this afternoon; that is, that an enormous amount of pressure in modern society in the official classes exists in fact to kill the sense of English as a living, vital language which goes right back to the time of Chaucer and before. The noble Viscount, Lord Barrington, quoted: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God". Those of us who have the misfortune to continue to go to the Church of England every Sunday and listen to Series 3, which is of course utterly different from the prayers with which your Lordships' House begins its daily considerations, will know that that magic phrase has been abolished by the Church of England. Whereas the clergyman used to read out: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God", he now reads out: When all things began the Word already was. The Word dwelt with God, and what God was the Word was". This is a classic example of the total destruction of any sense of meaning of phrase or rhythm in the very, very first words of the foundation of the Christian faith as we have been brought up to believe it.

Several noble Lords

Hear! hear!

Lord VAIZEY

My Lords, we can go right through the whole of Series 3 and in particular that atrocious production, The New English Bible, and see what has happened to English. That is why, in my view, the sense of understanding of poetry as an ordinary living thing is being killed. No incipient Tolpuddle martyr could now go to any church and hear any kind of English that is actually worth listening to. Take, for example, the very simple phrase, "and with Thy spirit". In the modern church, they now say, "and also with you". If people cannot sense the difference between what one phrase is drawing upon and what the other phrase is drawing upon, then in fact the sense of English language has disappeared, and it is not at all surprising that the sense of poetry has also disappeared.

The MINISTER of STATE DEPARTMENT of EDUCATION and SCIENCE (Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge)

My Lords, the noble Lord is not doing quite justice to the Church. Series 3 is voluntarily adopted in some parishes and is in no sense universal. I am glad to say that in my parish we have the old system still existing.

Lord VAIZEY

It is always wise, my Lords, to go to church with the noble Lord because he, like other eminent people, seems to be able to have an influence on the vicar. It is certainly not true, I am afraid, of the churches which I attend.

Several noble Lords

Hear, Hear!

Lord VAIZEY

My Lords, take for example, one other shift that has been made. The Te Deum has been changed from: We praise Thee, O God. We acknowledge Thee to be the Lord to You are God, we praise You". If God does not know he is God, I cannot imagine what He is doing. We used to say: O, Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world". This has been changed to: Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world". I could go on, if time permitted, to give many more examples of the way in which the Church of England and other official institutions have simply radically destroyed the language, the historic language, which takes us right back to the original foundations of English. When you do that, what you do is to destroy utterly the sense and meaning of the greatest part of English literature. You make it literally impossible for children to understand what our great poets have written about. Therefore, for example, in the past when people could go to the theatre and see Sir Henry Irving in Shakespeare, the Shakespeare which they were hearing on the stage bore a very real resemblance to the Shakespeare which they were hearing in church on Sunday and, indeed, in the streets. Now, the language which they are hearing in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre—perhaps the greatest productions that there have been in the theatre for many generations—is, for them, not connected to any ordinary experience in ordinary daily life.

It is for that reason that I hope the noble Lord the Minister for the Arts, and other noble Lords who have influence in their parishes—perhaps the noble Lord the Minister for the Arts represents rectors of parishes: I hope he does—will represent people who believe in the old form of service. I hope also that the schools will once more return to attempting to teach the great traditions of English spoken poetry.

4.46 p.m.

Lord RITCHIE-CALDER

My Lords, like everyone else who has spoken, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Willis, for having given us this opportunity, which I think is a remarkable thing, to debate this subject, so that in the moment of our dismay and decline, as people keep on reminding us, we ought also to remind ourselves that we have a concealed, if not invisible, asset in the form of our poets and our literature. This is something which is very important. I claim no virtue as a poet. Your Lordships will be glad to know that any attempts at poetry I ever made—which were very good!—were lost in the London blitz. No one has been examined on them, or suffered from them. The only other claim I can make is that I was a chairman of the Metrication Board and I ought to have known about conversion into metres but I never quite got around to it in poetry. I also want to thank, as we have all done, the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson, for his maiden speech. It was not only fascinating, as we always condescend to say of maiden speeches, but explored the facts and was full of information and real encouragement.

This occasion—I think we have all said it—is unique. We very rarely get around to looking at our meaningfulness. We discuss all the things that are affecting our means of existence but we never get around to discussing the meaningfulness of that existence. This is true of this moment of our existence when we are trying very hard to achieve material satisfaction for everyone. I should like to remind your Lordships that one of the winners of the Newdegate Prize for Poetry was Julian Huxley, who, a propos of the Welfare State, said: After the Welfare State, the fulfilment state". If we are going to acquire any merit or durable sense in the course of history we have to transform the Welfare State into the Fulfilment State and the people we have to release for fulfilment are, in fact, those with natural talents and practical aptitudes and skills, whom we want more than anything else to vitalise our way of life. Beyond everything else, I believe we have to release the natural genius of our people.

I am not saying that every one of us is a poet: what they have to discover is that they have within themselves the resources to find meanings that other people do not find in life. Otherwise, we are going to finish up with total cultural bankruptcy. We are going to have a cultural monochrome and everyone will simply be accepting the standards of everybody else. We have to find a way of releasing this quality, which is the discrimination of one personality from another, without rejecting but adding up to a totality. We have got a cultured society in that sense, but each one must find some way within his own nature and capacities a contribution which makes him, in his own terms, unique.

We have discussed how you encourage poetry. I have my own scruples, like many others, about how far you can ultimately feather-bed poets and artists without lulling their genius into fashion-ability. But there are certain things you can do. One of the great problems which is implicit in our discussion today is the frustration of poets—and I know many poets—and the fact that they cannot see themselves in print. We have been told that there are all kinds of opportunities, but the fact is that you can write poetry and then put it in the deep freeze. But, mainly, a poet wants somehow to communicate that poetry. We have the printed word, which is limited in the sense of access, or distribution of the talent of poets. I was thinking of the poets with whom I grew up. This is not boasting, but I was included among their friends. But what would have happened if we had not had the BBC at the time when Louis MacNeice and W. H. Auden were trying to break through? They found their way into the media at that time.

One of the biggest contributions that the BBC has made is in the fact that it gave a living to people like Louis McNeice and Dylan Thomas. I still remember the Stag and the Hounds, and the discussions between Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice as to how they were going to get their next week's rent, which they usually got from the BBC. There must be some encouragement. I am not asking for automatic grants with which to provide poets; there is no such thing. You cannot buy creativity; you can only release it. Therefore, if you are to do any good you must provide the springs by which this inspirational source, which I believe to be in all of us, can find an outlet and a community of concern.

This is something which the Government—I am not laying any burden upon the Government—can encourage, together with the Arts Council and everybody else. We must invent something in this country which will take into account not only the archival resources which we have, in terms of the poets of our past. As has been said, if we gathered the royalties of Shakespeare, we would not have a national debt. If we could collect the royalties of Robert Burns in the USSR, we would not need North Sea oil. What is it that is recognised there? There is a commitment to the universal values of our national bard. But how did it happen that "My love is like a red, red rose" is printed in 100 languages? How did it happen that the sales of Robert Burns in the USSR are so great, and not just because it is a big country. His work is being printed in the original which the aesthetes, the selected few, will be reading, but it is also printed in Russian translation in the USSR.

What is the secret? It is that there is a carrier wave of poetry. That is the programme wave into which you tune and discover something. They have discovered, "A man's a man for a' that". That was the carrier wave of Robert Burns' poetry. How can we find ways to release these capacities? I shall not criticise our educational system. I want only to say that we need a greater input into our educational system of the recognition that each and every child has the possible spark of an aptitude, which may be music, poetry or something else. But you should never have to wait until you grow up to discover that.

In science, we say that science is asking why; the everlasting question. Every child asks why, and every teacher says, in effect, "You cannot understand that, until you know all about kinetics and dynamics". The moment you have rejected that curiosity, you have dulled that child's appreciation, and it is happening similarly and all the time in our poetry, in our literature and so on. We have been told that you have to understand something, before you can appreciate its significance. It is not like that at all. What you have to do is to provide the means by which a child without feeling obligated and without having the set pieces that we had, can discover poetry. Of course, we woke up in the night, just as my noble friend Lord Davies did, and picked up Shakespeare and looked at the passages that we were compelled to learn. But how often have we thought of those passages in relation to anything we did in our lifetime? The point is that it has to be spontaneous. All I am asking for, beyond the Welfare State, is the Fulfilment State.

4.56 p.m.

Lord KILMARNOCK

My Lords, I suspect that the most commonly-held view of poetry is that it should be left to fend for itself; that it requires only inspiration, pen and paper, and that if it is any good it will emerge mysteriously in some way or other. That may well be our loss. I here declare an interest, like the noble Lord, Lord Willis, as a consumer. I read very little except poetry for pleasure. When I have done my duty by the papers, Hansard, papers for the sub-committee on which I sit and other homework consisting of more or less jargon-laden reports, I simply cannot stomach any more prose, even good prose. I read no novels, unless they are by friends. The marvellous quality of good poetry is that it compresses a great deal into relatively few words, and yet is never so hermetic or esoteric as to be impenetrable, though sometimes one may have to tussle with it a little. But that is no bad thing.

I believe that the pattern of modern life would lead a great many more people to turn to contemporary poetry for refreshment and stimulus, if it were more widely current, more readily available and more generally in evidence. I know that there are prizes, anthologies, poetry reviews and satirical verses in intellectual weeklies, some of which we have heard about this afternoon, but not much of this spills over into the average person's life. Poetry remains a distraction of the cultural élite. This is not its proper role. What has gone wrong?

First, we must look at the poet himself. If he is rejected by his fellows, as an idle babbler on the banks of the mainstream of industrial life, is it not to be expected that he will give himself up to introspection and private fantasy? Of course, it is a chicken-and-egg question, because the more pronounced his withdrawal the less he will be needed, and the less he is needed the further he will withdraw, until a point is reached when there seems to be no possibility of his ever returning to the market place, where story tellers and ballad makers flourished before the age of literacy. What does this matter, some may ask. We are all literate now. Bards were for simple folk in the past. We do not need them any more. My Lords—I speak soberly and without hyperbole—we need them quite desperately.

One of the most important functions of poetry is to return meaning to language. Our language is being eroded daily by widely accepted variants, such as UN-English, Euro-English and the type of English used in many international organisations. However free his associations, or however gnomic his utterance, no poet abuses language in the way that not only bureaucrats but the rest of us do constantly all the time. The true poet aims at accuracy greater than that of a machine tool, at a breathtaking approximation to experience. His role is therefore quite vital. He is not, or ought not to be, just a fringe figure catering for addicts of the slim volume such as myself. He is an important member of society. When language becomes or turns into abstract gobbledygook, our capacity for clear, honest thought will simply disappear. With his intense concern for language, the poet stands between us and this appalling threat.

We need him no less than he needs us. So where shall we meet? This really is the point of this debate, for which we are so indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Willis. We have heard something about the forums and meeting places. We have heard the record of the Arts Council, ably presented by the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, whom I should very much like to congratulate on his speech. I should like to add two more suggestions. First, I turn to Spain, where poets were highly valued literary craftsmen with a recognised place in society from the Middle Ages until 1939, when General Franco's victory obliged them to carry their lamps and their fuel into exile.

One of their most important outlets was the local Press. Antonio Machado—in my estimation one of the three greatest poets writing in the Spanish language in this century—contributed for years to El Porvenir Castellano, which was one of six papers, no less, serving the provincial capital of Soria, which had a population of under 6,000. Later, when events began to build up towards the Civil War, his work appeared regularly in the Diario de Madrid, and from November 1935 regularly in El Sol until the outbreak of war, when he put his pen and his life at the service of the Republic. This is as if T. S. Eliot or W. H. Auden had been allotted substantial regular—not occasional but regular—space in a national daily tabloid.

Returning to this country, poets are not likely to get much out of public lending right, although I sympathise with the Bill which will shortly be back for a third time in your Lordships' House, but I do not see why their associations or writers' cooperatives should not sound out local newspaper editors. And when the paper is resistant, is not this when the local body responsible for stimulating the arts—the Regional Arts Association or the local council—might properly intervene to buy space, regular space, and thus create a regional forum for poets? This might be more effective—it would certainly achieve wider circulation at less cost—than the little magazines. The idea might also be applicable to sound radio.

When a poet has published a number of poems in the Press or in reviews, it is natural that he should want to issue a collection. Unfortunately, the slim volumes we used to know have largely disappeared. I have been looking through some of the Faber and Cape editions of the 1930s and 1940s and they are almost perfect containers for their wares; in the most practical sense they are easier to handle than a paper in trains or on the Underground. I think that this is an area of publishing where further support by the Arts Council should be seriously considered. A further point is that it could be beneficial to those emerging from polytechnics with diplomas in graphic design and typography seeking desperately where to apply their skills.

Finally—I have been asked to be brief—I repeat my conviction that a language which is not thoroughly irrigated by poetry will become so desiccated, so much a prey to shorthand formulae and jargon, that a threat will arise to meaning itself, with all the dangers that this would unleash for our daily social and political life.

5.2 p.m.

The Earl of GOWRIE

My Lords, we are going to go at a bit of a lick, so if Hansard will fasten their seatbelts I will help them out later on. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Willis, caught the eye of the Muses and drew lucky in the ballot for today's short debate. I would also add my congratulations to the maiden speaker for one of the best informed maiden speeches that I have heard in this House.

It is a particular pleasure for me to take part in the debate, as my favourite types of literature are poetry and the modern detective novel: a combination which, for some odd reason or another, I think is shared by many people. The noble Lord, Lord Willis, is a distinguished practitioner of the latter form. However, to go from the sublime to the ridiculous, I should declare an interest, as I have a book of verse—and I stress that word—in print which brings me in royalties of about £14 a year. That royalty gives me more pleasure than anything else I earn, but I have to say that it did once occasion the most spectacular embarrassment I have ever suffered. The book was published when we on this side of the House were in Government and I had to submit it for vetting by the Cabinet Office. It is one thing to bare your soul to public and critical view, but it is quite another to have the same soul scrutinised for sources of potential political embarrassment.

I, at least, fared a little better than the late right honourable gentleman Mr. John Strachey, who was refused permission to publish a poem during the Attlee Government's period in Office. When he incredulously asked why, the Prime Minister rang him up and gave a characteristically terse answer: "Rotten poem. Doesn't rhyme and doesn't scan". I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, as Minister for the Arts in the present Government, when he comes to reply will give absolutely cast iron assurances to the Lords in Waiting on his own side of the House that if they wish to break into verse they will do so without such scrutiny.

As other noble Lords have pointed out, this House is no inappropriate forum for the debate. We have fielded two sublime poets, Byron and Tennyson, and a cluster of good ones. I am sorry to say that the noble Lord, Lord Byron, was no Conservative. Remembering his Lines on Castlereagh, I shudder to think what he would say about a modern conservative statesman of comparable world authority—Dr. Kissinger, for instance. The ancestor of the noble Lord, Lord Rochester, I would say was first rate but unfortunately his best poems are unparliamentary in language. Lord Tennyson's name suggests that the Prime Minister should be ennobling more contemporary poets because they could certainly use the attendance allowance. If the later Hugh McDiarmid had been elevated, we would have had another Scottish Nationalist in the House to join my (until recently) noble friend Lord Belhelvie and Stenton, not to say another Communist to join the noble Lord, Lord Milford. If Mr. Basil Bunting, whom I would say is, with Mr. Graves and Mr. Larkin, our foremost poet today, came here, we would have a great and needed voice from Northumberland; and if we had Mr. Larkin we might even, I dare say, have yet another Tory in our midst.

When I tried to get briefing for this debate from organisations interested in the problems facing poets in this country, I was asked whether the debate would proceed along Party political lines. Of course, I answered, rather shocked, that it would not. On reflection, I think that this is perhaps a pity, as we know that the great problem facing contemporary poets is lack of patronage. In former times, they were on occasions quite well reimbursed for using their skills to attack or defend a political régime. Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel was instrumental in Shaftesbury's downfall—the only time that I can think of when a poem has brought down a Government. Byron's Don Juan, allied to his huge international following, which was comparable only with the rock stars of today, certainly did great harm to the Tories' foreign policy. Incidentally, Byron earned £12,000 in 1812 for that particular poem, which I think today would drive him into fiscal rather than sexual exile. Milton and Marvell held high office under Cromwell. Marvell wrote one of the subtlest and greatest political poems in the language, the Cromwell Ode, and assisted at The Lord Protector's funeral in the Abbey. Two years later, he was a Member of Parliament in the Restoration Parliament that voted to dishonour Cromwell by digging up his body and beheading it. But such political covering of bets did not stop him from being, in my opinion, a sublime poet. Milton faced the scaffold for a time after the Restoration, but in the end Charles II wanted him back working for the Administration of the day. Milton's wife urged him to do so but he replied, "You, Madam, would ride in your coach, but I will live and die an honest man". It would be pleasant, therefore, if we could debate poets and poetry occasionally in political terms. Our greatest poets certainly were not shy of doing so. Two recent poets of greatness, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, were in the High Anglican, High Tory tradition which I try to serve politically, as were Swift and Pope before them. While on that subject, may I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, on a magnificent speech. I may not always follow him on incomes policies when we debate economic affairs, but on the liturgy he is terrific.

When I read great radical poets like Hugh McDiarmid and Pablo Neruda, it is often with fear as well as admiration. On the all-important issue of financial support for poets, the ill-fated Allende Government in Chile sent Neruda as Ambassador to Paris. The Greek Government of the day sent George Seferis to London. It might be a good idea for the Foreign Office, jointly with the British Council, to offer British poets of distinction not Ambassadorships, perhaps, but periods of paid attachment to foreign embassies. There is a sound diplomatic argument. Poets have considerable standing overseas. They are, in a way, alternative ambassadors. Both Yevtushenko and my old, dear and daily missed friend the late Robert Lowell exerted considerable goodwill for Russia and America at a time when both countries were being condemned for their foreign policies—and condemned, I may say, by the poets I mentioned themselves.

It would, as I have said, have been pleasant to debate poetry in political terms, but it is time to come back to the plain prose of money. The lesson of today's debate surely is that if we value our poets we must see that they get more money. I take the point of my noble friend Lord Eccles, but I would say to him that it is not simply a matter of subsidising indifferent poets. It is a matter of getting more substantial sums of money into the hands of good poets. I think the belief that poets flourish in poverty dies hard and is something of a romantic fallacy. We pay the interpreters of art—opera singers, actors and musicians—not well enough, may be, but well enough by comparison with most poets. Despite the excellence of much contemporary British poetry and despite the sad but inevitable need for State patronage in an age unsympathetic to private wealth (and I wonder where the poet Pope would have been without the ancestor of my noble friend Lord Bathurst), support for British poetry is rather pathetic. As the noble Lord, Lord Willis, said, it receives a great deal less than 1 per cent. of the total Arts Council grant and we really must do better. We should increase the number of poets in residence at universities and schools, and we should make it easier for bodies like the Poetry Society—and I declare an interest here as a member of its general council—to improve the distribution of books and poetry. The Poetry Society has an excellent scheme to this end and I would commend it to the noble Lord the Minister of the Arts by sending him the papers on it, if necessary.

In an age of competing and corrupting "sociologese" as the noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, reminded us; in an age of Lord Willis's "ongoing situations"; in an age when the BBC's Home Service is rechristened "Radio Four UK", we badly need good poets. Like others, I should like to end with a brief quotation. It is from the poem which Auden wrote to Louis MacNeice after the latter's death: … After all, it's rather a privilege amid the affluent traffic to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into background noise for study or hung as a status trophy by rising executives, cannot be 'done' like Venice or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon being read or ignored: … My Lords, in our own way we are trying to serve that art this afternoon. We ignore it at peril.

5.12 p.m.

Lord DONALDSON of KINGSBRIDGE

My Lords, it has been a fascinating and, I think to all of us, a most unusual afternoon; and the success of it is shown by the agreeably short time allowed to me to sum up. So with an easy conscience I shall be able to leave out a lot of what I had prepared to say and, without going quite so fast as the noble Earl, Lord Gowrie, to have a look at this debate rather than to cap quotations in the way the Persians used to do so happily with one another.

Despite what my noble friend Lord Vaizey said, poetry has nearly always been the least profitable of the arts. There have indeed been periods in history when poets were properly valued but in general I think they are few and far between. Hafiz is still the best known name in Iran and the Persians' delight in poetry has not died with the impact of new modern methods. The golden age of classical Rome was a good time for poets, when Horace sipped Falernian wine in his garden and Virgil was more admired by the great than any Poet Laureate. It was nice that my noble friend Lord Davies of Leek quoted Virgil this afternoon because he has not been quoted in this House in my hearing for quite a time; "lacrimae rerum" was what I think he quoted.

The Victorian times were good for poets, but since then poets have found it harder and harder to make a living and fewer and fewer of them have done so from poetry alone. The only great poet I have ever known was Walter de la Mare, whom I loved and admired. In fact, I was staying as his guest once when his house caught fire, which made rather a bond. But, though he made a modest living, I should think the main earner was his prose rather than his poetry. And of course he worked for a good many years not at all happily in an office before he could keep himself as a writer. Our present Poet Laureate is an immensely popular poet, but I doubt whether he could live at the standard he is accustomed to on the proceeds of his poems alone. Yet as somebody said earlier the obstacles to writing poetry are less than in any other art. A pencil, a piece of paper—no studio, no paints, no musical instruments to bring complaints from the neighbours, no dissatisfied clients, no overheads. In fact, all that is needed is the one thing that is so often lacking, which is inspiration.

I meant to give the House some account of what the Government, through the medium of the Arts Council, are doing for poetry, but this has been done so clearly by the Council's vice-chairman, my noble friend Lord Hutchinson of Lullington in his admirable maiden speech, that I need say no more, and that will save nearly three-quarters of a page, your Lordships will be glad to hear! It is indeed a help to have the vice-chairman here to help me in my perennial defence of Government policy. We can maintain a strong front against all criticism, I by saying that it is for the Arts Council and not the Government to decide, and he by saying that the Government do not give the Council enough money. Between us I am sure we shall be able to silence all captious criticism. Anyway, I add my sincere congratulations to those already bestowed on my noble friend.

I think we must say—and I do not believe that any noble Lord has yet said this—that poets and poetry are not without honour in the community. The choice of the Poet Laureate or of the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University is always a matter of great national interest. The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry has been awarded for nearly half a century. The Poet's Year Book for 1978 lists nearly 100 poetry prizes to be won, together with 26 sources of fellowships and bursaries. Every year new poets come to the fore and fresh activities take place.

I should like to mention one particular organisation which has not been mentioned, which is the Arvon Foundation, whose Devon base I visited in 1976. It was the brain child 10 years ago of two writers, John Moat and John Fairfax, and was set up to provide creative writing centres where parties of students could live side by side with distinguished poets and writers; and then Ted Hughes, a very distinguished poet himself, has set up an equivalent branch of that in his native Yorkshire. That is something quite useful.

But there are some grounds for concern. During my lifetime the familiar metres and rhymes with which every schoolboy was conversant have been discarded and the traditional framework of prosody has been challenged. Furthermore, the great changes in society and the world during this century have rightly found both mirror and expression in poetry; but paradoxically as poetry has become allegedly more relevant, more political, more vernacular, it has ceased to command the wide audience it had in the Victorian era. This must be due to the fact that so much modern poetry is hard to understand, even obscure, and here I have to say that I am rather on the side of the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles.

I should like to quote one small piece from the Popularisation of Modern Poetry by Jim Mulligan, which is entirely devoted to a study—and an affectionate study—of modern poetry; but he quotes a critic called Nigel Firth, who says, The whole concept of poetry nowadays is as something esoteric, intellectual, involved and élitist". I am not saying that I agree with that, but I find a lot of it extremely difficult to read and I think others do. On the other hand, I find exactly the same thing with a lot of modern music and modern pictures, so one really need not make too much fuss about it. The thing we must be absolutely certain about is that it is not the Government who are going to say which poets deserve support. This must be done in the sort of way it is being done now, although perhaps there must be more of it. But, on the whole, I think the Arts Council are not far wrong in both the amount they spend on this not very large public and also in the way they select the people to get it. I think the most profitable way in which they can assist poets is by helping them to be published. I thought the suggestion made by the noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, of taking space in ordinary papers was a very interesting one, which will be looked into.

My noble friend Lord Willis pleased me very much because the first quotation he gave was from a translation of the Hebrew. It was Bible prose which to me is the greatest prose and the greatest poetry we have in this country. I am not a great reader of poetry, but I do read the Bible occasionally for pleasure and not only for religion. The discussion that my noble friend Lord Vaizey started was one I am not going to pursue, because I agree with him personally but I do not think I want to see anybody telling parishes what to do. I agree with the Church of England's perfectly clear view that the local people make their own decisions, and this is our policy throughout.

I have only another couple of minutes because I must leave Lord Willis a minute to sum up, but I must take up another point he raised: the importance of getting a record of poets' voices. Let me tell the House that my Department's support of the British Institute of Recorded Sound has enabled it to have, I am absolutely certain, the best poetry archive in the world. It goes back to Browning's voice in 1888; it includes Tennyson; it includes Kipling reading the only poem he ever recorded; and it includes the entire BBC collection from 1934. The whole archive amounts to thousands of records and tapes. Very few people go and ask to hear them, but I do suggest this is something that people who are interested in poetry will find available here. It is your money as taxpayers which I and my predecessors have used to support this very energetic and effective body. Their cataloguing is not yet finished; you may have some difficulty in finding what you want in 10 minutes, but the material is there. More than that, there are 40 LPs of Mexican poets and 20 of Dutch poets reading their own work, Tolstoy reading on four records in English, French, Russian and German from records of 1906, and a collection from the United States continuous from the 'twenties to the present day.

I must stop. It is a pity because I should have liked to talk a great deal longer. I must mention one or two points. I spoke of Hafiz as the most famous name in Persia today. I think Burns is the most famous name in Scotland, and I should think Shakespeare is the most famous name in England, so I do not feel we need bow too much in that way. But whereas we are told by the noble Lord that the Scots will sit round and listen to Burns being quoted, and the Persians are constantly doing this, I do not think it is a factory floor job at the moment in the English factories, particularly in the southern English factories. I think there is a long way to go. I think the reason we do not do this—it was the noble Lord, Lord Milford, who raised the point—is because people do not want it, and that is as far as we can get until they do. It is up to us to try and spread the doctrine.

My noble friend Lord Davies raised the question of learning and reciting by heart. My noble friend's speeches on subjects of this kind are pure poems themselves which we all enjoy thoroughly. It is thanks to him I have so little time; I am very grateful to him. It really was a splendid speech. One thing he said was that he thought we should continue learning and reciting by heart. I have quite a lot of information here about education which I am not going to give you, because I think you all want to hear the opener to whom we owe so much for a most brilliant and amusing and witty introduction. I think the best thing I can do is to hand over to him with a lot of my finest gems unrevealed.

5.27 p.m.

Lord WILLIS

My Lords, I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in what I think has been a fascinating debate. I want to thank in particular the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson, for his maiden speech and for the very fine contribution and information that he gave, although I thought I detected a tiny note of complacency. I just want to select two or three points from the debate. I should like to thank all speakers individually, but I am sure they will forgive me if I do not. The first point that was brought out in the debate—by the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, the noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, and by the noble Lord, Lord Mackie—was this question of the way in which English is being ruined. If I may speak on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, about the English Bible, which is no concern of mine, may I put it this way: I do not think he was complaining that people have a choice, that it is up to people in the parish whether they have this version or that; what he was complaining about was that somebody should have had the temerity to attempt to do it at all and what was wrong with the St. James's Version that we should not have kept it. I must say I absolutely confirm and agree with that. I go on from that to this question of the schools. I think my noble friend Lord Donaldson was absolutely right; there has been a kind of diminishing attention to poetry in schools, largely because some modern poetry is difficult to understand—not all of it—and that the appreciation of the rhythms and so on of the old poetry has gone. Some essence of discipline has perhaps gone. I think we need to look at that, too.

If I may make two final points, I have never understood—and I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Gowrie, on this—the attitude of people who suggest that poets have no right to a livelihood, that it is an amateur thing that you just do on the side. Nobody would ever say that of a miner, or an engineer, or anybody else in our society. I thought the whole point of this debate was that we were all agreeing that poets were enormously important to our society and sometimes made a greater contribution than the professions I have just mentioned. In many other countries they give established poets State pensions at a very young age so that they can continue to write. I am not suggesting that, because I know we are in a time of economic stringency. What I do want to see is more put into the field, so that more poets can grow or at least more poets can have an opportunity to earn more money. In other words, the very admirable things that the Arts Council is doing, and in particular the Poetry Society is doing with Arts Council support, ought to be extended. I should like to see much more of that done, so that poets can find an audience either through the printed word or by people listening.

I should like, finally, to pay a tribute which I forgot, but I have been reminded by the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie-Calder. We owe an inestimable debt of gratitude to the BBC for what they have done over the last decade or more to promote the idea of poetry, to popularise it and to give a voice to new young poets. They have done a marvellous job. It only emphasises the point I keep making; if the Government want a BBC they have to give them a licence fee; and it is no good tinkering round giving them two or three pounds. You have got to give them a whacking great increase.

Lord DONALDSON of KINGSBRIDGE

My Lords, that is a Home Office matter.

Lord WILLIS

Yes, my Lords, I said the Government. I think we are going to have the same thing as last year where they get a couple of quid increase, and the same problems will arise. One day, in the next two or three years, we arc going to have a great crisis in this great national institution. My Lords, our revels are over. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.