J.R.R. Tolkien the poet in search of lost time.

Second Act, Brideshead, and little hints of Edward Lear.

Second Act review

I’m delighted that Second Act was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. Bee Rowlatt called it a “pick-me-up” and said “the overall impression is one of energy and optimism.”

Samuel Arbesman in the Wall Street Journal called it a “wide-ranging celebration of late bloomers.” Tyler Cowen said it is“one of the best books about talent.” And Josh on Goodreads said it was “enjoyably British” because “the life profiles are not showy or masculine types; but newspaper CEOs, late-life adventurers, fast-food entrepreneurs and dictionary creators.”

If you know a potential late bloomer, Second Act makes a good Christmas present!

Amazon USA | UK | Canada | Australia

Bookshop.org

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Brideshead podcast

I had a splendid conversation with Celeste Marcus at Liberties about Brideshead Revisited, a book we both love.

And don’t miss my essay about Coriolanus in Liberties: it covers political ideology, characterisation, and Shakespeare’s grain hoarding.

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Tolkien in search of lost time

I reviewed the new three-volume Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien in the latest edition of Prospect. What struck me most was how strongly the theme of lost time came across.

From Shakespeare’s sonnets and Donne’s songs (“Tell me where all past times are”) to Wordsworth and Eliot (“All time is unredeemable”), poets have gone in search of lost time. It was this theme—one of the great sorrows of human life—that struck the young JRR Tolkien in Lichfield during the First World War, and which became the making of him as a young poet. He recollected the moment, in a letter written 50 years later.

I said, outside Lichfield Cathedral, to a friend of my youth — long since dead of gas-gangrene (God rest his soul: I grieve still) — ‘Why is that cloud so beautiful?’ He said: ‘Because you have begun to write poetry, John Ronald.’ He was wrong. It was because Death was near, and all was intolerably fair, lost ere grasped. That was why I began to write poetry.

Tolkien is not often a great poet, but he is a surprising one, and I found myself surprised at how contemporary he sometimes sounded, despite his obvious idiosyncrasies and his supposed immersion in the medieval at the expense of the modern.

What struck me most from the first volume (of three) of the Collected Poems was just how much Tolkien was a poet of his times. The editors deny this, pointing to the idiosyncratic nature of his verse, and they are surely right about that. But if you gave some of these poems as a close reading exercise, it wouldn’t be too hard to devise that the poet was born the year Tennyson died (1892) and was an undergraduate in the days of Rupert Brooke and John Masefield. Here he is, in 1911, sounding, at times, almost as if he were anticipating the young Betjeman:

In a pale saffron sweetness
Shadows o’er the city flow:
Bluely dark its spires and mansions
Grimly loom against the glow.

The poem continues very much in that vein, about “Earth’s endless birth and doom”. But Tolkien was never going to be a writer who merely lamented lost time, rather he would become one who tried to recreate it. The same poem ends:

But beyond the golden yearning
of that evensong of flame
Stretch eternities of splendour
Ardent ages without name.

Even in his school days, Tolkien was sounding the note of eternal splendour that he worked for in his novels.

While the book is, for my taste, overlong and complicated, it is full of interest. And if you stick with it, Tolkien keeps surprising you.

Still, this Collected Poems is a significant achievement, and the editors are to be praised for their work. The book’s value is largely as a storehouse of knowledge about Tolkien’s development and career. Sometimes the footnotes are more interesting than the verses. I did not want to read the various drafts of the Kalevala allegory, but the discussion of Finnish metre and parallel sounds was illuminating. The earlier drafts can be a delight, though more often they could have been handled with judicious use of appendices, endnotes and the like. I found that I preferred the earlier draft of “The Man in the Moon”, and was disappointed to discover the Edward Lear-esque tone of “a Yarmouth boat found him far afloat” dulled in revision to a mere “fisherman’s boat”. A little hint of Lear appears elsewhere, too, such as:

O the hoot! O the hoot
Of his jolly little flute!
O the hoot of Tinfang Warble!

Do read the whole thing.