PORTER, Peter (Neville Frederick)

---

Nationality: Australian. Born: Brisbane, Queensland, 16 February 1929. Education: Church of England Grammar School, Brisbane; Toowoomba Grammar School. Family: Married 1) Jannice Henry in 1961 (died 1974), two daughters; 2) Christine Berg in 1991. Career: Journalist in Brisbane, 1947–48; moved to England in 1951; worked as a clerk and bookseller, and advertising writer for 10 years. Since 1968 freelance writer. Compton Lecturer in Poetry, University of Hull, Yorkshire, 1970–71; visiting lecturer in English, University of Reading, Berkshire, autumn 1972, University of Sydney, 1975, and University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales, 1977; writer-in-residence, Melbourne University, 1983, and University of Western Australia Nedlands, 1987. Awards: Cholmondeley award, 1976; Society of Authors traveling scholarship, 1980; Duff Cooper prize, 1984; Whitbread prize, 1988; Gold Medal, for Australian literature, 1990. D.Litt.: Melbourne University. Address: 42 Cleveland Square, London W2, England.

Publications

Poetry

Once Bitten, Twice Bitten. London, Scorpion Press, 1961.

Penguin Modern Poets 2, with Kingsley Amis and Dom Moraes. London, Penguin, 1962.

Poems, Ancient and Modern. Lowest oft, Suffolk, Scorpion Press, and New York, Walker, 1964.

Words without Music. Oxford, Sycamore Press, 1968.

Solemn Adultery at Breakfast Creek: An Australian Ballad, music by Michael Jessett. Richmond, Surrey, Keepsake Press, 1968.

A Porter Folio: New Poems. Lowest oft, Suffolk, Scorpion Press, 1969.

The Last of England. London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1970.

Epigrams by Martial. London, Poem-of-the-Month Club, 1971.

After Martial. London, Oxford University Press, 1972.

Preaching to the Converted. London, Oxford University Press, 1972.

Jonah, illustrated by Arthur Boyd. London, Secker and Warburg, 1973.

A Share of the Market. Belfast, Ulsterman, 1973.

Peter Porter Reads from His Own Work (includes recording). Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 1974.

The Lady and the Unicorn, illustrated by Arthur Boyd. London, Secker and Warburg, 1975.

Living in a Calm Country. London, Oxford University Press, 1975.

Les Trés Riches Heures. Richmond, Surrey, Keepsake Press, 1978.

The Cost of Seriousness. London, Oxford University Press, 1978.

English Subtitles. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1981.

The Animal Programme. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1982.

Collected Poems. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983.

Fast Forward. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984.

Narcissus, illustrated by Arthur Boyd. London, Secker and Warburg, 1984.

The Run of Your Father's Library. London, Albion Press, 1984.

Machines. Hitchin, Hertfordshire, Mandeville Press, 1986.

The Automatic Oracle. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987.

Mars, illustrated by Arthur Boyd. London, Deutsch, 1988.

Possible Worlds. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989.

A Porter Selected. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989.

The Chair of Babel. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992.

Millennial Fables. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994.

Collected Poems. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Plays

Radio Plays: The Siege of Munster, 1971; The Children's Crusade, 1973; All He Brought Back from the Dream, 1978.

Other

Roloff Beny in Italy, with Anthony Thwaite. London, Thames and Hudson, and New York, Harper, 1974.

The Shape of Poetry and the Shape of Music. Hobart, University of Tasmania, 1980.

Sydney. New York and London, Time Life, 1980.

Editor, A Choice of Pope's Verse. London, Faber, 1971.

Editor, New Poems, 1971–72. London, Hutchinson, 1972.

Editor, with Anthony Thwaite, The English Poets: From Chaucer to Edward Thomas. London, Secker and Warburg, 1974.

Editor, with Charles Osborne, New Poetry 1. London, Arts Council, 1975.

Editor, Poetry Supplement. London, Poetry Book Society, 1980.

Editor, Thomas Hardy. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981.

Editor, with Howard Sergeant, The Gregory Awards Anthology 1980. London, Secker and Warburg, 1981.

Editor, The Faber Book of Modern Verse, 4th edition. London, Faber, 1982.

Editor, Christina Rossetti. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986.

Editor, William Blake. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986.

Editor, William Shakespeare. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986.

Editor, Complete Poems by Martin Bell. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1988; Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1989.

Editor, John Donne. London, Aurum Press, 1988.

Editor, Lord Byron. London, Aurum Press, 1989; as Byron, New York, Crown, 1989.

Editor, with Musaemura Zimunya and Kofi Anyidoho, The Fate of Vultures: New Poetry of Africa. London, Heinemann, 1989.

Editor, William Butler Yeats: The Last Romantic. London, Aurum Press, 1990.

Editor, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. London, Aurum Press, 1992.

Editor, Robert Burns. London, Aurum Press, 1992.

Editor, Robert Browning. London, Aurum Press, 1993.

Editor, Coleridge. London, Aurum Press, 1994.

Editor, with A.S. Byatt, New Writing 6. London, Vintage, 1997.

Editor, The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse. Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Translator of poetry, Michelangelo: Life, Letters, and Poetry, edited by George Bull. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987.

*

Bibliography: Peter Porter: A Bibliography 1954–1986 by John R. Kaiser, London, Mansell, 1989.

Manuscript Collections: Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York, Buffalo; University of Indiana, Bloomington; British Library, London; University of Reading, Berkshire; Australian National Library, Canberra.

Critical Studies: By Clive James, in The Review 24 (Oxford); by Roger Garfitt, in British Poetry since 1960, edited by Michael Schmidt and Grevel Lindop, Oxford, Carcanet, 1972; Spirit in Exile by Bruce Bennett, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1991; Peter Porter by Peter Steele, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1992; interview with John Kinsella, in Westerly (Australia), 40(3), spring 1995; in In Other Words: Interviews with Australian Poets by Barbara Williams, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1998.

*  *  *

By 1973 Peter Porter was already acclaimed. Nevertheless, he welcomed the opportunity to select two of his poems for inclusion in a compendium edited by James Gibson, Let the Poet Choose. "I feel, perhaps over-sensitively," Porter remarked, "that I am often misrepresented in anthologies." One of the pieces he chose, "The Great Poet Comes Here in Winter," may be found in his second collection, Poems, Ancient and Modern. This book, however, like its even more energetic predecessor, Once Bitten, Twice Bitten, was known for many years only to the cognoscenti. The two books, together with A Porter Folio, were first issued by a courageous backstreet publishing firm, Scorpion Press, with limited print runs and inadequate distribution. The books were difficult to acquire, and they seem to have made little difference to the reading public's awareness of Porter and his work.

This is a pity since, without necessarily disparaging the later titles that came out under the aegis of the Oxford University Press, the first two volumes are probably the best. Once Bitten, Twice Bitten, in particular, is not so much an initial volume as a retrospective collection. Porter was thirty-two when it was published in 1961, and he had been writing copiously since the mid-1950s. There are fifty-seven pages here and fifty-three poems, most of them very good indeed. Yet comparatively few of the poems escaped into anthologies. Though the volume was included, fortunately without alteration, in the Collected Poems of 1983, the critics already were far better acquainted with the later works than with the earlier.

The modest yellow dust jacket of the first Scorpion publication contrasts with the claims of its anonymous blurb writer: "This is the authentic voice of our time … austere, ironic, socially committed. No poet has tackled issues so central to the problems of modern living since the young Auden." With hindsight the writer could have gone even further to say, for example, that Porter was not only a satirist but also a rhetorician. With his fine ear for music he is in line not only with the young Auden but also with the Dryden of Mac Flecknoe and the Pope of "The Epistle to Burlington":

They can never trespass enough
Against us, who use their surly right
Of making the world hateful...

At the present time, after the pseudorepublics of the Eastern bloc have exposed their internal economies, this statement from the 1950s seems not only mordant but also enhanced. It is art that is the solace for "thirty years' unhappiness on end":

The injustice of delight! All that is made
Makes this ventriloquist's serenade—
Words to sing, beautiful impermanence...

How, Porter asks, can we possibly deserve Bach and Mozart?

...There is a practice of music which befriends
The ear—useless, impartial as rain on desert—And
conjures the listener for a time to be happy,
Making from this love of limits what he can,
Saddled with Eden's gift, living in the reins
Of music's huge light irresponsibility.

Yet this poem, "Walking Home on St Cecilia's Day," is not to be found in the anthologies. John Lucas, a genuine admirer of Porter's work, nevertheless thought that no modern poet could be compared with Solzhenitsyn or Heinrich Böll. He, and critics like him, should learn by heart this glorious poem, together with "The Historians Call Up Pain," "A Christmas Recalled," "Mr. Roberts," "A Moral Tale Has a Moral End," and "Who Gets the Pope's Nose," all from Once Bitten, Twice Bitten.

Because of the limited distribution of this volume and of its most immediate successors, however, critical comment has tended to center on "The Workers," "The Widow's Story," "Applause for Death" (The Last of England); "The Old Enemy," "Fossil Gathering," "The Tomb of Scarlatti" (Preaching to the Converted); and "All the Difference in the World," "The Werther Level," "At Lake Massaciuccoli," "The Unfortunate Isles," and "Landscape with Orpheus" (English Subtitles). These are genuine poems that would have made anyone's reputation. They are not, however, Porter at his best.

Still less so are the real anthology poems, one or two of which may be found in almost any school compendium. Most familiar is "Your Attention Please," a trick poem about World War III, originally broadcast in the tones of a BBC news reader: "The Polar DEW has just warned that / A nuclear rocket strike of / At least one thousand megatons / Has been launched by the enemy / Directly at our major cities …" The shock effect diminishes on successive rereadings. This, and a number of not dissimilar poems, were probably set in motion by being included in Porter's section of Penguin Modern Poets 2. The poet is greater, however, than his admirers seem to recognize.

The trouble with the anthology aspect of Porter's work is that it approximates to some of the smart journalism that, from time to time, he satirizes. Throughout his career Porter has shown an increasing tendency to join up with that which he initially derogated. One can see this as early as "The World of Simon Raven" (1963): "Nanny's facing Nigel with stained sheets." By the time The Last of England was produced, the habit seemed to be ingrained: "His critical triumphs are recorded / In the ten books Leavis lauded." It is with no surprise that we find Fast Forward (1984) dedicated to Clive James, a media person who might well have served as a model for one of the satirical portraits in the earlier books.

As Anthony Thwaite remarked in Poetry Today, however, Porter has also emerged in the semblance of an elegiac poet. This is seen preeminently in the collection The Cost of Seriousness. Thwaite refers, as one of many examples, to Porter's "Exequy," written about his wife, who died tragically and young. Porter came to his subject by way of an original poem by Henry King. But the twentieth-century poet writes tetrameters that are less like those of King than like those of the Auden of The Double Man: "The rooms and days we wandered through / Shrink in my mind to one—there you / Lie quite absorbed by peace—the calm / Which life could not provide is balm / In death …" Auden also mediates between Porter and his putative originals in the younger poet's imitation of Marvell ("Who Needs It," 1987) and George Herbert ("A Chagall Postcard," 1989): "From earth to sky the cry ascends, / What breaks will threaten where it mends, / Proud lovers end as pallid friends, / These feed on those."

Indeed, Auden and Porter are very similar. A poem such as "Europe" could well have been written by either: "Breathe honey looking south, the mined land over; / Tamed temples take the flash of rain / Buckets up to their gone gods, their many / Children born stinging like the horsefly …" This is, in fact, by Porter. The main difference between the poets is that Porter almost totally lacks Auden's vein of lyricism. There is no equivalent in Porter to "Oh what is that sound that so thrills the ear" or "Our hunting fathers." In comparison to Porter as a master rhetorician, however, even the Auden of "The Shield of Achilles" seems insubstantial. Porter triumphs in what Auden only essayed, the invocation of history. From the angry standpoint of the later 1950s, Porter looks back over six centuries and puritanically envies the certainties of a past with far worse torments than those of his own present. This is from "The Historians Call Up Pain:"

We cannot know what John of Leyden felt
Under the Bishop's tongs—we can only
Walk in temperate London, our educated city,
Wishing to cry as freely as they did who died
In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness
And our regret with which to build an eschatology.

This is an impressive display of rhetoric. With a degree of critical perception, Frank Kermode quoted the passage as an epigraph for his book Sense of an Ending. As the second millennium closed, it was in the work of Porter, if anywhere, that there was heard the echo of a grand style.

Porter's later books, however, tend to echo this echo. The verse is never less than deliberated, in the best sense of the word. This is, nevertheless, the voice of an elder statesman. Revisiting Italy, he is tormented by thoughts of his dead wife ("Bad Dreams in Venice"). The talk with his friends is of death and of those who have died ("The Blond Arm of Coincidence"). It is the poets who wrote in their old age and about old age, Hardy, Yeats and Stevens, who tend to be invoked. Gone is any feeling of "losing a troubled innocence." Rather than the intellectual energy of the earlier years, the reviewers of Millennial Fables tend to praise the author's literary cunning. They point not to social commitment and authenticity but, as with Robert Nye, to "literary accomplishment of a high order."

Yet there is still an alert sense of danger behind the high rhetoric. With more appropriateness than most, Porter is able to quote Isaiah: "The wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses." Rest assured, the dragon is not dead. The title poem of Porter's 1997 collection, Dragons in Their Pleasant Palaces, declares, "eyes in / the Bible Lands dilate at searing jets / and burning rigs are pillars raised by night …" We do not escape the pillar of fire by night, but it does not necessarily lead us to a promised land. What one can hope for is a peaceful end. Porter has lived to see some of his most talented contemporaries—George MacBeth, Jon Silkin, Ted Hughes—die. In "The Deaths of Poets" he views dissolution with that most honorable of modern stances, stoicism: "Fountains wait, unblocked / of rubbish, cypresses stand to, / and someone's coming with moist hair to bring / you to the house you've always hoped to live in." Why write then? In an extraordinary poem whereby John Ford is made to answer T.S. Eliot, the poet who wrote an essay about that Jacobean playwright three hundred years later, Porter says, "The paradox is poetry, a sort of / versified cascade not requiring metaphor."

A "versified cascade not requiring metaphor" is certainly a good description of the later verse. It may be felt that the early promise of genius has not been wholly fulfilled. Perhaps the essential Porter is the work of an angry young man of the 1950s. Yet taken as a whole, this is a massive and comprehensive oeuvre. The later verse, grave as it often is, shows that there is a positive as well as a negative side to existence. The boys may still be howling, as in the earlier pieces, to take the girls to bed. But travel, reading, and meditation serve to remind the poet of what he celebrated in the early poem "Walking Home on St Cecilia's Day," perhaps the best ever written about music: "the injustice of delight."

—Philip Hobsbaum