LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

ANTHONY THWAITE (b. 1930) writes more directly than most. Simple Poem is a credo, maybe:

I shall make it simple so you understand.

Making it simple will make it clear for me.

When you have read it, take me by the hand

As children do, loving simplicity.

This is the simple poem I have made.

Tell me you understand. But when you do

Don't ask me in return if I have said

All that I meant, or whether it is true.

The poet hates theorizing in the margin of the text, in the same way that Eliot felt paraphrasing a poem was a sacrilege. Reading is an intimate experience which has nothing to do with highbrow debates about the quality of a poem (Essays in Criticism):

I like this more than that.

That is better than this.

This means this and that.

That is what this one wrote.

This is not that at all.

This is no good at all.

Some prefer this to that

But frankly this is old hat.

This is what Thissites call

Inferior this, and yet

I hope I have shown you all

That that way lies a brick wall

Where even to say 'Yes, but . . . '

Confuses the this with the that.

Instead, we must ask 'What is this?'

Then, 'Is that that sort of this,

Or a modified this, or a miss

As good as a mile, or a style

Adopted by that for this

To demonstrate thisness to those

Who expect a that-inclined prose

Always from this one – a stock

Response from readers like these.'

But of course the whole thing's a trick

To make you place them among those

Who only follow their nose,

Who are caught on the this/that spike

But who think they know what they like.

The whole poem is a splendid lesson taught to those critics who feel they can make or mar a text. The rhyme is destructive and so are the deliberately clear words, which leave no ambiguity on the page. Criticism has, or ought to have better things to do than legitimize ‘Thissites’.