The Bedford Prophetess

 

Today, I learn, is Bedfordshire Day. Who knew there was such a thing? Radio 3 was making the most of it this morning, with various Bedfordshire-linked musicians and, of course, settings of Bedford's own John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. I've visited Bedford several times over the years, on one occasion to visit what is surely one of the strangest museums in England – or at least one telling the strangest story. I recently discovered, 'among my papers', something I wrote about that museum for a magazine, who in the end didn't want it. So here it is...

[The Panacea Museum is at 9 Newnham Road, Bedford – very near the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, with its Edward Bawden graphics and William Burges furniture.]

'War, disease, crime and banditry, distress of nations and perplexity will increase until the Bishops open Joanna Southcott's box.' Some of us – most of us, I guess – are old enough to remember when announcements to this effect appeared regularly in the national press. (Actually, you don’t need to be that old; the campaign to ‘open Joanna Southcott’s box’ lasted into the 1990s.) But what was it all about? Who was Joanna Southcott, what was in that box of hers, and who wanted it opened?
 The story begins in the years of war and revolution around the turn of the 19th century, and leads all the way to… well, to Bedford, of all places, at the time of the First World War. England in the 1790s was experiencing a spate of self-proclaimed prophets claiming to have urgent news from God about an imminent millennium and what must be done to save mankind. Joanna Southcott was one of these, but she began as a follower of another, Richard Brothers, a retired seaman who liked to be known as ‘God Almighty’s Nephew’ (or, by way of variety, ‘Revealed Prince of the Hebrews’ or ‘Slain Lamb of Revelations’). Brothers’ prophecies caused a sensation in the early 1790s, but he set the date for the millennium too early. It came and went, and so did Brothers (ultimately into a lunatic asylum) – but Joanna Southcott, who was receiving her own messages from God, continued what he had started.
 One of Brothers’ claims was that he was the ‘Shiloh’ mentioned in Genesis, the new messiah who would gather the people of Israel – who, for Brothers, included the lost tribe known as the English – at the millennium, lead them to Jerusalem and set up a new world order. Joanna Southcott didn’t go quite that far; her ultimate mission, she believed, was to give birth to this messiah, Shiloh. Southcott was a Devon woman, a former domestic servant, who in her portrait looks more like a jolly farmer’s wife than a prophetess, but her barely comprehensible prophetic writings won her a devoted following of thousands, high and low, in London and beyond.
The Southcott cult reached a pitch of frenzy when Joanna declared that she was the ‘Bride of Revelations’, the ‘woman clothed with the sun’, and that she – although a virgin in her sixties – was now pregnant with Shiloh. While the satirical cartoonists of the time had a field day, six eminent doctors who examined her declared that she was indeed pregnant (so much for medical expertise), and her followers set her up in a grand London house and prepared for the great day. But alas, Joanna Southcott, far from giving birth, died of some kind of dropsy, and was discovered – surprise – never to have been pregnant at all.
  However, she left what was to prove a strangely enduring legacy – a trunk-sized, sealed box of prophecies, which, if opened in the presence of 24 bishops of the Church of England, would, she declared, initiate an era of eternal peace, love and harmony under the new messiah. Southcott also left behind a core of believers, but Joanna and her box faded into the background as other prophets emerged, in England and America, with their own ideas about the always imminent millennium.
  Then, a century after Southcott’s death, something extraordinary happened. In Bedford. Mabel Barltrop, a clergyman’s widow, began receiving visions and messages from (as she believed) God, who communicated with her through automatic writing. She became fascinated by Joanna Southcott’s prophecies, and found a sympathetic audience among Southcott’s rump of followers, who were happy to accept the ‘revelation’ that Mrs Barltrop was in fact the expected messiah, Shiloh, in person. They also believed her to be the eighth and last prophet of ‘the Visitation’, the prophetic tradition that had begun with Richard Brothers. Mrs B therefore styled herself ‘Octavia’.
  The community of followers, mostly women, that ‘Octavia’ formed around her in Bedford took the name of the Panacea Society, and it soon proved remarkably successful. As well as 70 members living in and around a ‘campus’ of large Victorian houses centred on Albany Road, there were up to two thousand in other parts of the English-speaking world as the Society grew and its influence spread through the 1920s and 1930s. The Bedford community lived quietly and drew little attention to themselves, but they pursued their two aims vigorously and in a thoroughly businesslike manner. These were to sell their cure-all ‘panaceas’ – little squares of linen dipped in water on which the prophetess Octavia had breathed (130,000 sold worldwide, many cures claimed) – and, yes, to campaign relentlessly, though leaflets, advertisements and petitions, to get those 24 bishops to open Joanna Southcott’s box. Adverts appeared everywhere – not only in the press but on billboards, hoardings and the sides of buses – and many thousands signed petitions calling for the opening of the box.
  The society continued to thrive even after Octavia’s death in 1934, but it gradually faded away over the post-war decades, finally being dissolved in 2012. However, that was not the end of the story: the society’s considerable assets were used to found a charitable trust – and to turn the Society’s ‘campus’ into a most fascinating museum, which tells the story of the Visitation tradition and the Panacea Society lucidly and objectively. There are informative displays on such unlikely phenomena as the House of David baseball team, formed of extravagantly bearded members of the Michigan-based Israelite House of David (which also had a successful basketball team, an orchestra and even a big band). The museum is a quite extraordinary place, with many rooms preserved as they were, everything in readiness for the visit of the 24 bishops and the opening of the box. There are some extraordinary artefacts, including the very fancy cradle made for Joanna Southcott’s divine child, and even the baby clothes that he was to wear. The buildings are ranged around a pleasant, peaceful garden (the Panaceans believed Bedford was the site of the Garden of Eden – a wonderful flight of fancy). In the garden are the chapel where the Panaceans worshipped, the Wireless Room where they relaxed and listened to the radio, a weeping ash tree that they believed to be ‘Yggdrasil’, the tree at the centre of the world – and, stuffed and mounted in a cage, Octavia’s pet jackdaw, Sir Jack Daw.
  As for Joanna Southcott’s box, that stands in the panelled room prepared for its ceremonial opening – but it’s not the real box, only a facsimile. There seem always to have been a number of replica boxes in circulation, just to confuse the sceptics (the psychic researcher Harry Price X-rayed one of them in the 1920s and found it contained only a horse pistol, a dice box, a purse and various odds and ends). Where is the real box? No one knows – or at least that’s the official answer. Wherever it is, there is no clamour now for it to be opened. The handful of remaining Southcottians in England are mostly in their nineties. It seems the curious prophetic tradition that led to the Bedford prophetess and the Panacea Society is finally at an end. However, it has a fine memorial in the Panacea Society Museum. And of course it’s never too late to open that box.  

'His books were read but ridiculed'

 I watched another episode of The Sea of Faith last night – number four (not yet on the BBC iPlayer but available, with blurry visuals, on YouTube). This one focused on two very different thinkers – Marx and Kierkegaard: 'compare and contrast' indeed. As with Freud, I wondered if Marx would be quite so prominent if the series were made today: back in 1984 I guess it was still possible to think that societies built on Marxist foundations might thrive – no longer, obviously. The half of the programme devoted to Kierkegaard was very much more rewarding, and Cupitt expounded the great Dane's ideas on Christianity quite lucidly, helped by an actor (Colin Jeavons) doing a good job of impersonating Kierkegaard. 
  Cupitt, I noticed, chose to pronounce 'Kierkegaard' with a silent 'd'. This triggered memories of Malcolm Muggeridge (last glimpsed here suggesting an 'orgy' to Kingsley Amis) screwing up his features hideously as he wrestled with the name, finally bringing out, in a long agonised drawl, something like 'Kierke-yaaaaaaaawd'. Whatever the challenges posed by his name, Kierkegaard was something of a hero to the late period, spiritual Muggeridge, who wrote this about him:  
'Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, he pitted the individual human soul made in the image of a God who was concerned about the fate of every living creature. In contrast with the notion of salvation through power, he held out the hope of salvation through suffering. The Cross against the ballot box or clenched fist; the solitary pilgrim against the slogan-shouting mob; the crucified Christ against the demagogue-dictators promising a kingdom of heaven on earth, whether achieved through endlessly expanding wealth and material well-being, or through the ever greater concentration of power and its ever more ruthless exercise.'
  For a useful summing-up, elegantly expressed, we could turn to the American poet Dana Gioia. Here is his 'Homage to Soren Kierkegaard '–

Work out your own salvation
with fear and trembling.
                            —St Paul

I was already an old man when I was born.

Small with a curved back, he dragged his leg when walking

the streets of Copenhagen. 'Little Kierkegaard,'

they called him. Some meant it kindly. The more one suffers

the more one acquires a sense of the comic.

His hair rose in waves six inches above his head.

Save me, O God, from ever becoming sure.

What good is faith if it is not irrational?

 

Christianity requires a conviction of sin.

As a boy tending sheep on the frozen heath,

his starving father cursed God for his cruelty.

His fortunes changed. He grew rich and married well.

His father knew these blessings were God's punishment.

All would be stripped away. His beautiful wife died,

then five of his children. Crippled Soren survived.

The self-consuming sickness unto death is despair.

 

What the age needs is not a genius but a martyr.

Soren fell in love, proposed, then broke the engagement.

No one, he thought, could bear his presence daily.

My sorrow is my castle. His books were read

but ridiculed. Cartoons mocked his deformities,

His private journals fill seven thousand pages.

You could read them all, he claimed, and still not know him.

He who explains this riddle explains my life.

 

When everyone is Christian, Christianity

does not exist. The crowd is untruth. Remember

we stand alone before God in fear and trembling.

At forty-two he collapsed on his daily walk.

Dying he seemed radiant. His skin had become

almost transparent. He refused communion

from the established church. His grave has no headstone.

Now with God's help I shall at last become myself.

Kempff Again

 The first time I put up a Wilhelm Kempff post – this one – it attracted more readers than anything in years. So, as it's Kempff's birthday today (born 1895), I'm putting up an other beautiful specimen of his playing – his own transcription of the Siciliano from Bach's Flute Sonata, BWV1031:

Kempff wrote a number of Bach transcriptions, one of which features on Vikingur Olafsson'sgreat Bach album. It's a transcription of the Chorale Prelude 'Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g'mein', and it's a pretty astonishing performance. Indeed, Olafsson was even accused of overdubbing the chorale theme – which he somehow manages to play with his thumb, all his fingers being, er, otherwise engaged...

The Sea of Faith

 BBC4 – which, for much of the time, is the only BBC channel worth watching – no longer has a budget for making new programmes. This apparent deprivation has also been something of a blessing, leaving the channel free to delve in the vast BBC archive of classic (or at least worth another look) programmes from happier times. Lately we've had the brilliant prison sitcom Porridge (razor-sharp scripts, perfect lead performance from Ronnie Barker); that most amiable of panel games, Call My Bluff; the unbelievably erudite (by contemporary standards) music quiz Face the Music; Simon Schama's finest work, Landscape and Memory; and now – The Sea of Faith, Don Cupitt's epic series, now 40 years old, on the history of Christian belief, which popularised the idea of 'non-realist' faith, and even led to the launch of a 'Sea of Faith' network of like-minded Christians. Such thinking was at the time highly controversial, and Cupitt found himself under attack from believers and atheists alike. He also found himself famous – to the point where he had to wear dark glasses in the street to avoid being buttonholed by passersby every few yards. Cupitt, now 90 but clearly in full possession of his marbles, recalls this strange notoriety in a short introduction to the series. He says he greatly enjoyed making The Sea of Faith, which was genuinely what so many series today claim to be – a journey of exploration – but gave the impression that he has since journeyed far beyond its theology, into realms of ever greater uncertainty, though he remains, like Wittgenstein, 'incurably religious by temperament' (like many of us). 
Watching The Sea of Faith today – I've so far seen the first two parts – I was struck, of course, by how much more serious, incisive and spacious it is than anything that would get made today, and I found, to my surprise, that I had remembered quite a lot of it. One feature stands out, and marks it as a product of its time – the amount of attention Cupitt pays to Freud, a figure who was held in much higher esteem 40 years ago than he is today. But it's a wonderful series, well worth watching again, and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of it. 

Name That Writer

 Here's a question that I think would flummox everyone in any literary quiz: 
Whose first novel begins with this sentence? 

'In this dream where he was weightless and unalive, where he was a pervading mist of consciousness that seethed and trembled in a vast stretch of dark, there was at first no feeling, only a dim sort of apperception, eyeless, brainless and remote, whose singular ability was to differentiate between himself and the darkness.'

Give up? Well, here's a clue, or rather more than a clue. This same writer's third novel begins like this: 

'William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same university, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his course... Stoner's colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.'

Yes, it's John Williams, whose masterpiece Stoner, after being barely noticed for years, broke through and became a massive hit somewhere around 2010 (45 years after it was published). I've read Stoner at least twice, and written about it (e.g. here), but had never come across a book about Stoner until a blog friend warmly recommended one to me – William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life by Steve Almond. This recommendation was then equally warmly withdrawn, but by then I'd picked up a copy of the book, so, intrigued, I started in to read it. 
I soon discovered both why my friend had recommended it, and why he had so dramatically changed his mind. Almond's book begins as an interesting, often incisive, if sometimes overheated study of Williams's book, written in the light of Almond's amazed discovery of it when he was fresh from a 'creative writing' course and so steeped in 'show, don't tell' dogma that he could scarcely believe his eyes when he read that opening paragraph of Stoner. So far, so good, but as the book goes on, Almond himself, who is clearly a rather tiresome, self-advertising type, elbows his way to centre stage. He, his life story, his marital history, his political views (anti-Trump, you'll be astounded to learn  – clearly this is a man who doesn't mind going out on a limb) become the subject, rather than Stoner. This is a shame, because embedded in this book is the germ of a much better, and shorter, one – perhaps a long essay. It's a pity Almond was so fascinated by himself that he couldn't keep his gaze (which is often acute) focused on Stoner. I gave up well before the end. 

James and the Great Masticator

 There is a lot of talk these days, in the kind of places where these things are discussed, of the health benefits of thorough and lengthy chewing of food. Haven't we been here before, I thought, as I came across something on this theme... We have indeed, and after a little brain-racking the word came back to me – 'Fletcherism'. This was one of the great health fads of the golden age of health fads around the turn of the twentieth century, and one of the most successful. The brainchild of Horace Fletcher – artist, writer, businessman, opera house manager (in New Orleans), art dealer (in San Francisco) – Fletcherism taught that the key to health and strength, weight loss, happiness and long life was to chew every mouthful of food so thoroughly that it was reduced to a tasteless pulp, more liquid than solid; only then was it safe to swallow the stuff. It seemed to do the trick for Horace himself, restoring him to vigorous health after he went into a decline in his middle age. The Great Masticator was a brilliant self-publicist and a forceful personality, and he made a fortune from his theory, buying various homes around the world, one of them a Venetian palazzo, where he lived some of the time with his artist wife and entertained his celebrity disciples. Alas, in the end he took his theory too far, in effect starving himself to death, and dying of bronchitis at the age of 69. 
  Among his followers were various literary men, including Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair – and Henry James (along with his brother William). In January 1904 Henry wrote to William: 'I continue to found my life on Fletcher. He is immense – thanks to which I am getting much less so.' With Henry, the infatuation didn't last, and by 1909, he seemed to be abandoning the Great Masticator (at least, that appears to be the sense of this tangled passage from a letter of that date): 
'There are other things, or mainly one other — which I might sum up as being at last, again, definitely & unmistakably, the finally proved cul-de-sac or defeat of literal Fletcherism — might so sum up if I could go at all into the difficult & obscure subject by letter. I can’t do so — though I will return to it on some future writing, & after more results from my of late — that is these last 3 months’ very trying experience — which has abated since queer lights (on too prolonged Fletcherism) have more & more distinctly & relievingly come to me. But meanwhile communicate nothing distressful to poor dear H.F. if he is in America — his malady of motion, a perfect St. Vitus’s Dance of the déplacement-mania, make me never know where he is. I am worrying out my salvation — very interesting work & prospects, I think, much aiding — & “going into” the whole fearsome history intelligibly this way is an effort from which I recoil.'
   Others remained faithful to Fletcherism – including, of all people, Franz Kafka. He was so thorough a masticator that, according to food historian Margaret Barnett, his father hid behind his newspaper at mealtimes 'to avoid watching the writer Fletcherise'. 

Stirring Stuff

 The new issue of 'the real reader's quarterly', Slightly Foxed, is out, and, as ever, it's full of good stuff, including pieces on Jane Welsh Carlyle's letters, Updike's Couples, Lucky Jim, Edward Gorey and Georges Simenon. There's also this, by me, in which I look back to a time when people would read, memorise and happily recite the kind of 'good bad' verse that stirred the blood...

Bernie Taupin and I have one thing (and only one, I suspect) in common. Catching an interview with him on the radio recently, I discovered that the man who wrote the words for all those Elton John hits was, like me, reared on recitations of stirring narrative verse, mostly from the Victorian age.
In his case, it was his mother and maternal grandfather who had quantities of the stuff by heart and would recite it at the drop of a hat; in my case, it was my father, and his preferred time of day for poetry was the morning, often while he was shaving. To this day, I cannot hear or read Newbolt’s ‘Vitai Lampada’ (‘There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight – Ten to make and the match to win…’) or Macaulay’s ‘Horatius’ (‘Lars Porsena of Clusium by the nine gods he swore…’) or Tennyson’s ‘A Ballad of the Fleet’ (‘At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay, And a pinnace, like a fluttered bird, came flying from far away…’) without being transported back to the chilly bathroom of an Edwardian house in Ealing, where my father is lathering his face with shaving soap and reciting from memory his favourite poetry.
 Part of his delight in such verse was no doubt that it reconnected him with his post-Edwardian boyhood and his charmed schooldays. He surely enjoyed ¬– who wouldn’t? – the strong rhythms and rhymes that are a feature of so much narrative verse, and he relished expressions of patriotic sentiment, courage under fire, morally upright behaviour, the excitement of action, a fight in a good cause – all themes that were already unfashionable when he was a young man, not that he would have cared.
There was one anthology that was so important to him that he bought a copy to keep him company when he was serving in Palestine during the war. I still have that copy, inscribed with his name, regiment and number, and carrying the label of the Modern Library & Stationery Store, Jaffa & Haifa. The anthology is Lyra Heroica: A Book of Verse for Boys, edited by William Ernest Henley, the peg-legged poet whose wooden leg and overpowering presence partly inspired his friend Robert Louis Stevenson’s creation of Long John Silver. The epigraph, from Scott, on the title page gives some idea of the tone: ‘Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife, To all the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name.’ Stirring stuff indeed.
In his short preface, Henley reaffirms that his selection is aimed at boys, and that it represents only ‘the simpler sentiments, and the more elemental emotions’. And yet, reading it now, it seems to me that, for all its emphasis on stirring narrative, it actually makes a useful introduction to a far wider field of English poetry, from Shakespeare and Drayton (both on Agincourt) to Henley himself, represented by three works, including his most enduring, ‘Invictus’ (‘Out of the night that covers me, Black at the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul…’). Along the way there is much that is quieter and more inward-looking than might be expected: George Herbert’s beautiful ‘Memento Mori’ (‘Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright – The bridal of the earth and sky – The dew shall weep thy fall tonight, For thou must die…’), Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, Samuel Johnson’s lines on the death of Dr Robert Levet (‘Condemn’d to Hope’s delusive mine, As on we toil from day to day…’). Henley even includes Marvell’s Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, a poem that cleverly subverts the very triumph it appears to celebrate. Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ appears under the heading ‘The Beauty of Terror’ – Henley likes to add his own titles, to point a moral: Keats’s great sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ is headed, bizarrely, ‘To the Adventurous’.
 John Greenleaf Whittier’s ‘Barbara Frietchie’, a favourite of my father’s, is here (‘“Shoot, if you must, this old grey head, But spare your country’s flag,” she said …’), as is another favourite, Francis Hastings Doyle’s ‘The Private of the Buffs’ (‘Last night, among his fellow roughs, He jested, quaffed and swore; A drunken private of the Buffs, Who never looked before…’). Others that made a big impression on the boyhood me include Byron’s thrilling ‘Sennacherib’ (‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold…’) and ‘The Isles of Greece’ (‘where burning Sappho loved and sung’). Surprisingly absent are Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and Kipling’s ‘If’, but they were in my father’s repertoire anyway, as was (on a good day) the whole of Chesterton’s ‘Lepanto’, which he probably took from another anthology we had on our shelves, the more straightforwardly literary A Book of Narrative Verse, an Oxford World’s Classic dating from 1930. ‘Lepanto’, a gorgeously coloured account of the great naval confrontation between the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire, stirred me more than almost anything I heard in my boyhood. Who could resist the opening lines? ‘White founts falling in the Courts of the sun, And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; There is laughter like fountains in that face of all men feared, It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard, It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips, For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships…’).
I never managed to learn the whole thing myself, but back in those days, when I still had a retentive memory, I did commit some quite long poems to memory – inspired, of course, by my father’s impromptu recitations. Though sadly I can no longer retain any great quantity of verse, I still believe that learning ‘by heart’ is an excellent way of really getting to know a poem, to know it, as it were, from the inside – and the same goes for reading aloud. The musicality of a poem, how it sounds when read out loud as well as in the head, is essential to its nature, and both learning by heart and reading aloud can open up a poem to us more effectively than just reading it on the page. And yet it seems that both are now largely things of the past.
 In the Introduction to The Faber Popular Reciter (1978), Kingsley Amis, its editor, strikes an elegiac note: ‘When I was a schoolboy before the Second World War,’ he writes, ‘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 … Most of that, together with much else, has gone.’ Despite its name, his anthology is, Amis insists, for reading aloud – sharing a poem with like-minded friends (or harmlessly showing off), and quoting rather than reciting. He recognises that much popular verse is ‘good bad verse’, but, as Orwell wrote, ‘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.’
 Amis’s anthology, which includes some hymns and songs, is, in its less overtly sinew-stiffening way, every bit as stirring as Lyra Heroica (and it does include ‘If’ and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’). It represents the poetry that lingered in the mind of a man raised at a certain time, a time when learning by heart and recitation were standard ways of engaging with poetry, and when poetry – the ‘good bad poetry’ of popular verse, hymns and songs – was everywhere, in a way it no longer is. If all that was already gone in 1978, how much more so is it now.
However, there are occasional signs that something survives. Kipling’s ‘If’ clearly lives on, coming top in a nationwide poll of favourite poems in 1995 (with Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shallot’ and Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’ a rather surprising second and third). I suspect it would come top again if the poll was repeated. In 2009 the film Invictus told how the imprisoned Nelson Mandela read Henley’s poem of that name on a scrap of paper and drew strength from it. This inspired various politicians, including our own Gordon Brown, to claim that they too had been inspired by the poem, and when Prince Harry founded his games for disabled veterans in 2014, he christened them the Invictus Games.
Perhaps, paraphrasing Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, we could say that, though much is taken, much abides… However, there is no denying that the poetry-infused world recalled by Kingsley Amis has, sadly, long gone. Those of us who caught the tail end of it, like me and Bernie Taupin, are surely the better for having been exposed at an early age to all that stirring verse, recited with gusto. In my case, it laid the foundations for a lifelong love of poetry – even if, alas, it didn’t make a millionaire songwriter of me.