Seamus Heaney & the London Origins of the Belfast Group

Like to begin by pointing out that we finally have the results

of the five year project on selecting the 250 highly recommended

books that students should read or at least be familiar with before they

graduate. And there are other posters that people can pick up on your way

out. We’re very glad to have

Steve Enis with us as the director of the

Harry Ransom Center. He occupies, in the opinion of many of us, the most important

job at the University of Texas. He speaks in a long line

of Irish topics that we have had. I think it helps to have

George Bernard Shaw making sure that you’re accurately presenting

the facts. We go all the way back, of course, to mention only a few Oscar Wilde.

At one time we heard Michael Yates, who was the former chairman of the Irish Senate

and the only son of the poet, Sir David Williams, who was

the vise chancellor of Cambridge University, speaking on the troubles in Northern

Ireland last week. Kevin Kenny and David Liora.

And we have Larry Graham, who is also an expert on Northern Ireland.

So, Steve, we’re very glad that you have the opportunity to hear about Seamus

Heaney and the Belfast poets. All right. Thank you, Roger.

I want to thank Roger for that, for inviting me to speak to the British Studies Group.

I’ve enjoyed these these afternoon lectures and delighted to be with you today. Good

to see British studies, regulars. Colleagues from the English Department and from the ransom center as

well. A few comments about this talk before I before

I get underway. I’m interested in where poetry comes from

and not only the individual experience and the individual poet’s

distinctive vision, but also the social conditions and the networks

that enable poetry to come into being. And it’s really

that latter topic, the social world that enabled what we now

refer to as the Ulster Renaissance that began quite precisely in 1963

in Belfast. It’s those networks and those relationships that I’ll be talking about today.

There are really two things that you should know before I begin. And one of them

is the key role that an academic and

aspiring poet named Philip Hobsbawm played in this this series

of events that I’ll be referring to. Hobsbawm was for many years

based in London, and he organized at that time in London,

something that was called with a very bland title, simply

the group. This was this was before creative

writing programs had been established in America or in the UK.

And Hobsbawm convened in London from the mid 1950s up until

he left in fifty nine. The group to hear one another’s

new poems to comment on them to provide what he called practical criticism about them.

Hobsbawm left in fifty nine, and the group ends up being managed by

Edward Alusi Smith, Teddy, Lucy Smith newspapers. We we hold here at the Ransom Center

and Hobsbawm briefly took an appointment at Sheffield, where he remained for about three

years before taking a post at Queen’s University in Belfast.

And that’s where I want to take up the story. His arrival in nineteen sixty three

in that year, Hobsbawm and his successor

at the London group co-edited this anthology, a book that’s

long since been forgotten, which you’ll hear some reasons why it’s been forgotten. But they co-edited

this anthology that came out that year.

When Philip Hobsbawm and Edward Alusi Smith co-edited an anthology

of work by group poets in 1963, they unwittingly

set themselves up as targets of attack. Among the earliest reviewers

of a group anthology was one by Julian Simmons in The Spectator.

And while respectful of a number of the individual poems, Simmons introduced

a note of disapproval that would be echoed by many other subsequent reviewers.

He wrote poetry as an individual art

before posing the question What can be gained by a cooperative

view of poems? In other words,

in other words, the publication of a group anthology did two things.

It defined this community of poets who came together to discuss one

another’s work. It established an identity as a group and it also provided

a basis for criticizing them. Nothing provoked reviewers more

than the notion that there was, among the poets, a common group as authentic.

In the spring of 1963, Seamus Heaney was

teaching at St. Joseph’s Training College in Belfast. When he wrote a review

of this group anthology, it was his very first book review,

one that I would add has escaped the notice of his bibliography. And it was published

in an obscure student publication in Belfast called Interest.

Unlike some of the hostile reviews being directed at the anthology, the 24

year old Heeney was appreciative of the idea of a writer’s group.

He noted the way the group operated that poems would be submitted to Hobsbawm

or his successor, Lucy Smith, that they a selection would be made.

They would be run off on a mimeograph machine. They would be sent to

all of the group members to read and study before coming to this session

so that the those attending had some familiarity with the work they were hearing

and could respond more meaningfully about the poems.

He was appreciative of the idea of such a group. He noted the effective way it operated,

informing and encouraging informed responses to the

work. Yet he, too, noted. But in his case, without any explicit criticism,

the way the group’s method contributed to similarities among the points

quoting Heaney. Not surprisingly, the poetic process represented by the group writers

is empirical. All the poems begin with a remembered or imagined account

of incident or character, and this concrete situation resolves itself

into an attitude or statement about some central problem of living.

About love. About marriage. Belief, war or punishment.

The poem Heaney continued in a statement that could well stand as a coda

for his own early verse, acts as a lens

which focuses intelligence on personal experience and burnishes

it into public art. Hainey likened the social

conditions out of which the group poems were produced to that of the 18th century coffeehouse,

and he singled out for particular praise the poems of Edward Lucy Smith, who he called

the most authoritative voice in the collection. Hobsbawm,

who you see here, had recently arrived in Belfast to take up a teaching

position at Queen’s, and he sent a copy of Heaney’s review to his

coeditor, Lucy Smith in London, with whom he remained in regular communication.

And here you see Lucy Smith. Quoting

from that letter, here’s what seems to me a very bright review and one of Queen’s literary magazines.

It’s true it doesn’t reach quite so wide an audience as a spectator. But this is a reaction from

the rising generation, not from the old fuddy duddies of yesteryear. And therefore,

very heartening. I think Heaney had quoted in that review, Hobs bombs

call for the creation of writing groups up and down the country. But he

concluded the review with a note of skepticism. Writing Suppose it’s vain

to expect that Belfast will rally to his call.

Hobsbawm would have taken note of two poems also in that same issue of interest

to poems by Heaney, one called Essence’s, the other welfare state,

the latter a reflection on the passing of rural traditions that that

takes as a subject, an aging generation of peat diggers, not unlike the grandfather

Heaney would later immortalized in a celebrated poem digging. Almost

four months later, something surprising happened. And that is, Heaney republished

the same review, something that doesn’t happen often. He republished

the same review in a more widely distributed publication called Hibernia. But this

time he introduced some changes into the review. What had happened is that

between the first review and the second, Hainey and Hobsbawm had met. And following

that meeting, Heaney felt compelled to reconsider some of his earlier statements.

Years later, Hobsbawm would share his memory of that first meeting.

Quoting Hobsbawm, he seemed incredibly pleased to be noticed,

to be taken up and spoken to. He kept grinning, a trade I

didn’t understand at the time, but I think it was pleasure at being recognized.

And here you see a photo taken just two years after that meeting

of a grinning Seamus Heaney with some of the school age children

surrounding him. Following that first meeting, Heaney rewrote

his review of a group anthology, silently dropping the words of praise for Lucy Smith

and instead singling out for attention one of hobs bombs poems. Making a substitution

between the coeditors Hobs Bombs Coin has the unfortunate title journey round the

inside of my mouth and refers to recent dental work. He’s come under attack,

as I say the well, I will not read the poem.

The substitution was a direct response, though, to Al Alvarez’s recent

attack in The Observer, where Alvarez had charged that the group poets as a

whole shared a fixation on nastiness, on torture,

wounding defecation and rotting teeth.

More significant than the shuffling of poets, however, was Heaney’s newfound enthusiasm for

writing groups across Ireland. One can only hope, he wrote in the second version

of this review, that Hobsbawm suggestion is taken up. If there were a group in

Belfast, Dublin, Cork and Galway, our young poets would find it easier to meet an audience.

Beginners would have a benefit of criticism from the established, and above all, interest should increase.

Hobsbawm had, in fact, already shared with Lucy Smith that he intended to begin

a writing group in Belfast like the one he had run in London, and when he

got around to convening that group of community based writers and aspiring

writers. Heaney was among the very first that he invited while

these events were transpiring in Ireland. Other reviewers of the anthology

were taking aim at the London group. Ian Hamilton, who was then editor

of the little magazine. The review was particularly harsh in his condemnation.

The trouble with the most distinctive poems in a group anthology he wrote is that they seem to have been composed

and frigid decoration of a formula interpretation of human experience.

We live in violent times. They seem to say, and therefore this violence

must be reflected in our verse. The poet, with his task so

clearly defined, sits back, gathers violent images and

joins a discussion group to compete with other poets for gruesome effects.

Hamilton singled out Peter Porter’s poem, Annotations of Al SCHWIRTZ

and George Macbeth’s report to the director as reflective of what he called a death

camp theme. Sylvia Plath had taken her life only a few

months. Before, and the gruesome effects of poetry seem painfully clear to all.

Yet more than a particular effect. Hamilton was objecting to the group method itself.

The charge was that the group poets had a draw, adopted a group as authentic.

The very manner of the poem’s composition led to a sameness in the themes

and effects of the work. Lucy Smith, in a moment of some despondency,

wrote to his coeditor writing I began to see that we will both be very

many years in living this book down. So it was in this context

well, in the immediate aftermath of Hamilton’s review, and while

the two coeditors were besieged from similar attacks from other quarters that Hobsbawm

ironically sets out and convenes and gathers likely

participants for a Belfast group to begin meeting at his and his wife’s home

at the start of Queen’s Autumn Term. In addition to Haiti, among those

he invited was a Belfast based playwright and sometimes poet named Stuart Parker,

who was at the time studying for his M.A. He invited a local

poet and songwriter, James Simmons, and a young civil servant named Joan Watson, whom

he’d met when she attended one of his adult education classes. Several

Queen’s colleagues were early participants, among them the Catalan language scholar Arthur

Terry and the George Eliot scholar W.J. Harvey, chair of the English department at the time.

Joan Watson has recorded her response to Hobs Bombs

Overture an invitation. She was flattered by, quote, the beautiful, spontaneous letter

she received in her reply. She noted how her own writing had been hampered

by a lack of a supportive community in the past. She wrote I had given

my poems to several people, only to be rewarded with

an incoherent expression and comments such as very nice with the result

that I was beginning to write less. I’d love to join your writing group, she

wrote, and I hope I can fulfill your expectations. Hobsbawm

asked Stuart Parker to launch the new Belfast group at its first meeting in October,

and Simmons later wrote that the evening hadn’t been bad that a young woman would have been. Joan Watson

was marvelous. Quoting Simmons. She didn’t say a word during the only meeting I’ve

been at, but Hobsbawm issues cyclers styled copies of one poet’s work for the next

week’s session, and it was hers, very stark and strong and wise.

Simmons was about to travel to Nigeria where he was going to spend

the coming year, but he attended the first meetings of the group regularly and he later

reported that he found the very stimulating after much lack of contact with poets.

He was particularly pleased when on the 19th of November, it came his own turn to read, and

Hobsbawm selected several of his most recent poems. Quite a fill up to my confidence,

he wrote. A close friend, Seamus Heaney’s first group

sheet included one of his most personal early poems,

midterm break, about the tragic death of his younger brother when his

brother was only four years old. While the date of that

group meeting went unrecorded, it would have been Michaelmas term in the autumn of 1963,

before Simmons had left for Nigeria. Heaney had only recently begun

submitting his work to local publications and the Belfast Telegraph,

and a few of these had begun a period including mid-term break in the Kilkenny magazine

that spring. And while the poem would be eventually

collected as first presented and its group sheet, other

poems from that first great group sheet would often undergo quite significant revision,

as did a poem called Turkey’s Observed or another early poem O Brave

New Bull, which would be retitled and undergo some revision

before a period in Haney’s second collection Door into the Dark. A number

of features of Haney’s mature work were a parent from the very beginning.

Many of the poems draw upon farming practices, upon rural speech

and customs that Hainey had witnessed and experienced in his youth. And three of

the poems from that first group, Chito Brave New Boule Mid-term Break and Turkey’s

observed introduce the first person I who who registers

experience and is in fact the real subject of these early.

Warms. Let me just share this point with you.

I sat all morning in the college sick bay, counting bells, nela and classes

to close at two o’clock. Our neighbors drove me home in the porch.

I met my father crying. He had always taken funerals in his stride and

Big Jim Evans say, and it was a hard blow. The baby cooed and laughed

and rocked the pram. When I came in and I was embarrassed by old men standing

up to shake my hand and tell me they were sorry for my trouble,

whispers informed strangers. I was the eldest away at school. As my

mother held my hand in hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

At ten o’clock, the ambulance arrived with the corpse starched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went in up into the room. Snowdrops and candles

soothe the bedside. I saw him for the first time in six weeks.

Pale are now wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple. He lay

in the four foot box. As in his cot? No, his scars, the bump or

knocked him clear. A four foot box of foot for every year,

while few contemporary accounts survive of participants responses

to these group sessions. Norman Bolar was working in the Careers

Advisory Service at Queen’s in 63 and also attending group meetings regularly.

He was impressed enough by Heaney’s reading of his poems to write Hobb, Hobsbawm and say-so,

quoting him This man Heeney. He’s got something. What he offers actually interest me

and makes me want to read more. Near the end of the autumn term, Heeney

presented a second selection of poems. An Advancement of Learning

had been published in the Irish Times some months before, and Fisher would appear there in

February. The group sheet also included a poem called Docker,

as well as the uncollected poems Amputation, National Trust and a Cistercian speaks.

Much has been made in the hindsight of the non sectarian makeup

of the Belfast group. But the reality of these societal tensions and

divisions outside the Belfast group were acutely familiar

to all its participants, and Hainey chose to address them directly, in particular

in his portrait of a Protestant dockworker. And

just a portion of this poem from the second stanza

in this descriptive poem describing the Protestant dockworker, that fist would drop

a hammer on a Catholic. Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again.

And then skipping down into the third stanza, a depiction of

something of the staunch ness of this brand of of

strict Protestantism that dominated and left left its influence over the whole

city. God is a foreman with certain definite views who

orders life and shifts of work and leisure. A factory horn will blare

the resurrection. The Belfast group offered

a safe space for these kinds of divisions to be discussed. And Hobsbawm,

who is Jewish, broaden the frame of reference even further.

Joan Watson opened the new term in January and she was followed the next

week by James Simmons, who brought along in a very uncharacteristic fashion for group

meetings, brought along his guitar and sang to the selection of his song, his poems.

The Belfast group was not yet attracting the kind of criticism that had been directed at

the London group, though the participants were beginning to share something of a group identity

around Belfast. In only a few months, Hobsbawm had, in fact succeeded

in identifying a group of young and talented Belfast writers.

He had put in place a structure for them to share their new work, and he had created, as Hany

would later write, an open house for poetry.

At the close of the term, before leaving for London for the summer, Hobsbawm posted his friend

and fellow poet Martin Bell a selection of what he thought were the best spring group

sheets writing. I’ve kept it down to the people I really feel have something.

Haney, Parker and Wharton and two story writers, McCafferty and Bond.

Following that summer break, Hobsbawm reported, quote, The

group here got off to a thunderous start. At the beginning of term, he

reported to be an inundated with with poems, stories and plays and

then said that he had quite enough to keep me going right through this term and halfway through the next.

There had been changes to the Belfast group over the summer. Stuart Parker had married

and left for a teaching post in America and Joan Warton, whom Hobsbawm thought

one of the most promising participants had moved to London. There were new additions

to the group as well. Harry Chambers had arrived in Belfast for a teaching post at Strand

Milice College, and he too began attending Hobsbawm, who was always the

networker. The connective tissue of this community invited John Boyd,

talks producer for BBC Northern Ireland, to attend to meetings

which he did. The poet Michael Longley,

one of Ireland, one of Ireland’s finest contemporary poets, Michael Longley,

had been living in London and had recently arrived in Belfast.

Having followed his future wife, Edna Broaddrick, to the city where she

had taken a teaching post at Queen’s Langley, when he reflected back

on group meetings, he would be dismissive and say I simply

followed Edna to group meetings. But in fact,

Michael Longley was already familiar with Hobsbawm his poetry and had reviewed

Hobs Bombs, previous collection for the Irish Times in April.

He’s in years. In subsequent years. Michael Longley would

talking about this history would express some ambivalence about his participation

in the group, and he had good reason to be ambivalent.

Because of that review he had written of Hobsbawm his work in

that review. He had called Hobsbawm a less accomplished Philip Larkin,

noting he shared something of Larkin’s interest and feelings of inadequacy.

Little wonder, then, if Longleaf attended his first group meeting in the Hummes Hobbs bombs home

somewhat reluctantly. While the group was resuming in Belfast,

a familiar debate erupted again in the pages of The Spectator, where

when Elizabeth Jennings made a passing reference to a group anthology noting that the volume has nothing

of the power or strength of a real literary manifesto, it was that a

side cast off line really in a piece largely focused on the movement poets.

But it nevertheless led to a month long Rahl in the letters column as one letter writer

after another condemned the London group or came to its defense. Hobsbawm,

writing from Belfast, was the first to step forward, pointing out matter of factly

that the group members shared no doctrine and that the group could more usefully be seen

as a forum for practical criticism. It was by now his standard

response to criticism of the London group or its more recent Belfast offshoot.

Hobsbawm had invited Seamus Heaney to read at the upcoming group meeting

that would coincide with the Belfast Festival, which was an annual arts festival in the

city. And in advance of that, Heaney gave Hobsbawm a sheaf

of poems, a substantial sheaf of poems for Hobsbawm to make a selection

for the group sheet. Hobsbawm, who is still in touch with Lucy Smith,

posted a letter about this, in his words, most

stupendous collection of poems. It was, he noted, almost enough for a

book and a very high quality throughout. It took me a considerable amount of

time to select the poems for the batch. As it is, I’ve allowed Heaney’s seven

poems one over the statutory number, which I’m sure you you. Lucy Smith

will agree is a dangerous precedent. Still, I feel

he deserves it, and I think this will be his annus mirabilis.

Unknown to Hobsbawm, Heaney had in fact already submitted that group of poems to

the Irish based Doleman Press and Dublin, and he was waiting word

on its acceptance. The Dublin based press was

making a good name for itself as a poetry publisher, Thomas Councillor’s. Another

September had been selected as a poetry book society choice, and Austen Clarke’s

later poems had received a Poetry Society recommendation. Recently,

a new distribution agreement with Oxford University Press promised a wider sales of Doleman

titles outside of Ireland. And Miller was known to produce a handsome,

well-made books. It was, in other words, a logical direction for Haney to turn.

But unaware that the manuscript was already under consideration by Doleman, Hobsbawm and Lucy

Smith were both both considering publishers that they could approach on Heaney’s behalf.

As to Heeney, presumably when he gets the collection together, you’ll recommend him to McMillan.

Lucy Smith wrote Hopp Hobsbawm, if you have no luck there. I’ll try Oxford.

In the end, the seven poems Hobsbawm shows from Haney’s manuscript included

well-known poems like Digging and Death of a Naturalist, Writer

and Teacher. Young Bachelor Scaffolding. Three of the poems had already been accepted

for publication in that student publication Interest, and four of them would eventually be collected

and death of a naturalist. His first his first collection, Hobsbawm

mailed Lucy Smith the group sheet with these seven poems

in advance of Lucy Smith’s visit for the Belfast Festival and under the direction

of the festival organiser Michael Emerson. Festival 64 was

a very ambitious programme of exhibitions and concerts and film

screenings and performances. The midday lectures, which were a feature

of the festival, included Anthony Burgess speaking on Finnegans Wake and Patrick

Cavin on the poet’s life at Hobsbawm Suggestion Poets.

The poet Martin Bell and Lucy Smith had been invited from London, and

Hobsbawm, writing to Belle of the preparations, reported that the entire place has been turned upside

down. Lucy Smith stayed with Philip and his wife Hannah when he visited Belfast,

and it was during this visit that he and Heeney met for the first time at

a dinner party, the hub at the Hobsbawm as Fitzwilliam Street House.

Lucy Smith had agreed to speak on modern poetry, a murderous

art. The title phrase a reference to Al Alvarez’s description of the final

poems of Sylvia Plath. Following that lecture, a group

of friends gathered at a nearby pub, and it was there

that Lucy Smith was shown a copy of the just published student publication Interest,

featuring three of Heinies workshop poems. He was scheduled

to read at the group meeting the next night, but Lucy Smith had to return

to London and missed that session. Looking back on the history, this history,

though, from a distance of some years, the poet Michael Longley would recall that it was

only the second or third group meeting that he Langly had attended.

Other than Langley’s brief mention, no record survives of that group discussion. However,

Hobsbawm did make several alterations to Heaney’s point writer and

teacher on his copy of the group sheet changes that Hainey would adopt when

the point was published in the Irish Times a couple of months later. That

three stanza poem offers a lesson in how to live and how to write.

It celebrates in characteristic caney fashion, simple virtues of humility

and honesty and the lessons that, quote, the humble master has to teach

his pupils in how to look with love and how to celebrate

each joy they meet hobs bombs copy of Heaney’s grip sheet

reveals his revision of Heaney’s lines and his breaking of the pattern of rhyme. At the start

of the third stanza, Haney had written a week’s chapter in the tale

where 30 boys drive towards the gale of living. Hobsbawm recast the lines.

More prosaically, a week’s A chapter in the story where 30 boys

imperceptibly grow into men. It’s a good example of what Longley would

later refer to as hobs bombs preference for unwritten prickle

utterance. Hainey no doubt had in mind

in this poem writer and teacher, his own young pupils

and his own vocational dilemma at the time. That is how to fuze his roles as

both writer or creative writer and as as teacher. But Hobsbawm

would certainly have read into the poem something of his Hobsbawm Zone mentoring relationship

with the younger group members. The poem concludes The pupils are his masterpiece.

The pupils are as masterpiece back in London. Lucy Smith

wrote Hobsbawm to share good news. I had a call

from Francis Hope just now, indicating that my approach to the New Statesman on

behalf of Heaney has paid off. The only trouble is I believe Haiti’s

already printed the very poems they want to use in that little magazine. I was shown in the pub

on Monday night. Lucy Smith did not have Heinies address, so Karl Miller,

who was literary editor of the New Statesman at the time, wrote to Hainey

Care of Hobsbawm. Dear Mr. Heaney, Edward Lucy

Smith has shown me poems by you, and I’m anxious to publish if possible. Some in

particular digging. I realize that you may be committed elsewhere, but I hope

not. And I would be very glad if you would let me know as soon as you can what the position is.

Just as the attacks on the London group in the letters column of The Spectator were beginning to

subside. Three of Heinies workshop poems appeared in the December

on the page, taking up the bulk of of that large format magazine

and squeezed below it. Two shorter poems Storm on the Island and Scaffolding. It was

a generous allocation of space, and it marked for the first time Heaney’s introduction

to London’s wider literary community. Hobsbawm

noted with some envy, quote, Even Ted Hughes never

got three poems in one issue. Digging

was a fitting debut, one of Heaney’s most beloved poems. It pays

tribute to and memorializes the poet’s father and grandfather,

while at the same time signaling his own break from those familial and rural

traditions. Between my finger and my thumb, the

squat pen rest snug as a gun under my window,

a clean rasping sound when the spade sinks into gravelly ground. My father

digging. I looked down to his straining rump among the flower beds been

slow, comes up 20 years away, stooping and rhythm through

potato drills where he was digging the coarse boot nestled on the log,

the shaft against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall

tops buried the bright edge, deep to scatter new potatoes that we picked,

loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle

a spade just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf

in a day than any other man on toners bog. One side carried him milk and a

bottle corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up to drink

it, then fell to right away, nicking and slicing neatly heaving

swords over his shoulder, going down and down for the good turf, digging

the cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and SLAPP of soggy peat. The kirt

cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head. But I’ve no

spade to follow men like them between my finger and my thumb. The squat pen

rest. I’ll dig with it. Something of the

father’s craft of work well done persist

in the new lives. The poems suggest and will guide the poet in his new work,

its companion poem that appeared on the same page scaffolding. It, too, evokes

the inherent dignity of the laborers work and as in digging draws from those

associations lessons for the present day. We may let the scaffolds

fall, Haney writes in that poem, confident that we have built our wall

while Heaney’s stock was rising. Lucy Smith continued to be preoccupied

with the hostility is still being directed at himself. Hobsbawm and the London

group more broadly, and a new attack came when Ian Hamilton

reviewed Lucy Smith’s most recent collection that came out that same month.

Hamilton called Lucy Smith a publicist. He was working at the Notley Advertising

Agency at the time, but Hamilton also used the occasion to take a swipe

at the London group. More broadly, reading Lucy Smith’s poems, he

wrote, one is persistently troubled by the vision of one of those grindingly

solemn seminars. Individual poetic vision, in other words, had

been replaced, he suggested, by a kind of corporate thought epitomized, in his words,

by the BBC, the Arts Council poetry panel and the Lockwood

Memorial Library, a reference to the fact that SUNY Buffalo was actively buying

poets papers at that time. Lucy Smith was stung

by this latest assault, and as he did at such times, he shared his frustration with Hobsbawm.

I’m in fact, becoming very concerned about this aspect of the whole controversy

about the group, the way in which it seems to prejudice the poet’s chances of getting

anything like an unbiased review. I think it’s a matter which we will have to be.

Excuse me, a matter which will have to be looked at squarely. I mean, whether the group, by

becoming such a storm center, has lost its usefulness or whether the

disadvantages it offers to those who come now outweigh the advantages. Lucy

Smith canceled the regularly scheduled London group meeting later that week

and instead wrote to the members of the group asking them to consider two questions.

In view of the fact that the group has now become an extremely heated public issue, has its

usefulness come to an end? Alternatively, if its usefulness

has not come to an end, do the disadvantages of continuing outweigh the advantages?

He wrote. As I see it, the crux of the matter is that a known association with

the group now makes it very difficult for a poet to receive an unprejudiced reception from

reviewers. Those poets already labeled as group poets.

In my view, a meaningless term either through their inclusion in a group anthology

or for other reasons, will probably still find their work discussed in a group

context instead of entirely on its own merits. Hobsbawm

felt that his friend had shown too much of his own feelings in his letter, and she

and he should not have expressed his private doubts. So publicly,

my own feeling, he wrote, is that you should have trained a successor to take over the group

in the last couple of years. He was concerned that the group had become a distraction

to his friends own writing and emphasized the worry is that your own poetry

might suffer as a consequence. And it was in this context

of these attacks on the London group that Hobsbawm suggested his friend

take a break from the chairmanship and name a successor, adding,

I do this more or less automatically my successor here. And quite

possibly in the Queen’s English department will be Seamus Heaney. Thank you all very

much.