Graceful Monuments to the Obvious

 For reasons of research (mostly), I've been looking at a 1978 volume, edited by Kingsley Amis – The Faber Popular Reciter, an anthology of 'all the poems you've really enjoyed and which you can never remember properly' (to quote the back jacket). Amis's introduction is, as you'd expect, a fine, punchy little essay, one that strikes something of an elegiac note: he knows he is writing in the last days of a once vigorous tradition. 'When I was a schoolboy before the Second World War,' he begins, 'the majority of the poems in this book were too well known to be worth reprinting. If they were not in one anthology, they were in a couple of others; they were learned by heart and recited in class, or performed as turns at grown-up gatherings; they were sung in church or chapel or on other public occasions [Amis's anthology is unusual in containing a scattering of hymns and songs]... Most of that, together with much else, has gone.' Nowadays 'any adult who commits a poem to memory does so for personal satisfaction; if he utters it in company he does so to share it with like-minded friends (or as a harmless means of showing off), and as one who quotes, not one who recites.' Despite its title, Amis's anthology is not intended for recitation as such, but rather for reading aloud – not as a performance but as a way of 'finding out more about a piece of writing and so enjoying it more'. This is perhaps the best reason to read poetry aloud, and to at least attempt to learn it by heart. Reading aloud broadens out our experience of a poem from something on the page to something more intimately, more physically known, on the pulses, as you might say. 
  What Amis offers is an anthology of popular (or once popular) poetry that lends itself particularly well to reading aloud, by virtue of strong rhythm and rhyme, clarity of expression and some stirring or inspiriting quality. He recognises that Orwell was perhaps right to judge most such verse as 'good bad poetry', but Orwell added that 'A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form ... some emotion which nearly every human being can share.' As Johnson said of Gray's Elegy, ' The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.' And what can be wrong with that?  
  Thomas Gray's great elegy features, quite rightly, in the Popular Reciter. And so too does a much later poem of the same (almost) name, G.K. Chesterton's 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard', a short, angry poem, written in the aftermath of the First World War, and ending on a bitter note to which, in these times, many a bosom might still return an echo – 

The men that worked for England

They have their graves at home:

And birds and bees of England

About the cross can roam.

 

But they that fought for England,

Following a falling star,

Alas, alas for England

They have their graves afar.

 

And they that rule in England,


In stately conclave met,


Alas, alas for England


They have no graves as yet.