'Simply because I have no seniors...'

 Here is another poem from the Listener anthology. In it, Gavin Ewart – whom I've written about before, e.g. here and here – looks forward, with tongue very firmly in cheek, to a future in which he is a grand old man of English poetry, a national treasure and object of literary pilgrimage, like Tennyson and Hardy, both of whom he cleverly parodies in the course of the poem ...

2001 – The Tennyson/Hardy Poem

When I am old and long turned grey
And enjoy the aura of being eighty,
I may see the dawn of that critical day
When my lightest verse will seem quite weighty.
I shall live somewhere far away,
Where the illiterate birds are nesting.
To the pilgrim admirers my wife will say:
  Ewart is resting.

Instead of the heedless sensual play
And the youthful eyes of love and brightness
I shall see critics who kneel and pray
In homage – I shan't dispute their rightness –
And Supplements keen to seem okay
Will flatter me with fulsome pieces.
Scholars will put it another way:
  Ewart's a thesis.

When the aching back and the bleary eye
And the dimness and the rational drinking,
The cold unease of the earth and sky,
Leave me no pleasure except thinking,
I shall be warmed (but what will be 'I'?)
With the awe inspired by what's Jurassic,
And people will say, before I die:
  Ewart's a classic.

Soon comes the day when the stream runs dry
And the boat runs back as the tide is turning,
The voice once strong no more than a sigh
By the hearth where the fire is scarcely burning.
Stiff in my chair like a children's guy,
Simply because I have no seniors
The literati will raise the cry: 
  Ewart's a genius!

In the event, Ewart didn't quite make it to eighty, dying in 1995 at the age of 79. In his obituary, Anthony Thwaite described him as 'one of the oddest poetic phenomena of his time'.  Which I suppose he was, but also one of the most cheering.