Piety . . . can easily shade into sentimentality - it is a conservative, communal habit of mind which can be resistant to social change. (p.47)

Can an anthology of political verse omit Ezra Pound and not explain his absence? Evidently so: Pound's publishers have issued The Faber Book of Political Verse (£8.95 pb.) edited by Tom Paulin. Craig Raine, Paulin's commissioning editor, 'provoked . . . the polemical introduction'. What was the provocation? Who knows: this is one side of a vehement argument. Dialogue might have served better - not to neutralize but clarify Paulin's grievances and advocacies. What sort of an introduction might he have written had he been left to himself? A publisher who chooses an editor should stand well clear until the device is primed.

Why was Paulin chosen? Because he is a 'political poet'. Politics seem to license him to use ideological or temperamental predispositions to evade the perennial questions such an anthology should raise. His politics are not clear to me, especially after his book of essays Ireland and the English Crisis and his expressed fascination with the language and stance of Ian Paisley. But he has Ulster antecedents and other vivid markings.

An Oxford Anthology seeks to be as authoritative as it can; the anthologist is invisible or, if visible, does not guard the gate but holds open the door. Oxford anthologies strive to become canonical. Philip Larkin in his Oxford book took pains not to be the Larkin familiar from reviews and poems. This Faber book pursues a contrary course, the editor elected in order that he be polemical, gratify himself, settle scores. It makes good copy. 'This highly stimulating anthology' . . . the stimulation is in the introduction, and not of the kind or quality promised in the blurb.

Paulin opens his 37-page manifesto with a range of stated and unstated premises. He addresses us collectively. Poetry is something we are taught - generally by people who know what they are doing and are undoubtedly of the devil's party. They instruct us in ideologically deliberate ways which set out to establish a distance between literary works and historical and literary context. Our teachers are Manicheans for whom 'Art stands as freedom, while politics is a degrading bondage'. Paulin alludes to 'an influential school of literary criticism - appropriately, it dominates literary studies in the United States' which asserts 'that the political and historical content of literature must be dismissed as "extrinsic irrelevance".'

I was educated in the United States and never met a school of criticism quite like this; nor does any school 'dominate literary studies' across that continent, however firm a hold some groups may have in specific institutions. Those of us with American antecedents endure a drubbing in this book, for Paulin hates America - American manners, society and politics, and (judging from his selection of poems) quite a range of American poetry. There is only a 'meagre' tradition of political verse in the United States. Whitman, Pound, Williams, Sandburg, Cummings, Frost, Olson, Lowell, Rich (to mingle a few larger and lesser) hardly count. 'The United States contains untold millions of blockishly reactionary people . . .'. Blues singers are 'the most authentic American political poets and their work challenges the more comfortable writers' traditions'.

More interesting than his commonplace ignorance of America and its literature is his insistence on the academy, on teaching and learning, and on the concept of orthodoxies, as the context of poetry today. His view of education is hard to grasp. Eliot, he says, thought of education as 'one of those activities through which culture realizes itself'. Paulin believes that 'it will take upon itself the reformation and direction of culture'. Difficult terms - for those who regard education as an engagement between specific pupils and teachers in a variety of unique circumstances. But here we must be prepared for generalizations. The 'major cultural hegemony in these islands' is the 'aristocratic, hierarchical, conservative tradition' which he traces no further back than Arnold and Eliot, and even this far without illumination.

'Students of English literature have for several generations now been encouraged to believe that ...' Paulin's student is a spiritless person, endowed with an alarmingly rasa tabula disfigured at will by conservative teachers wedded to a single, unaltering view of tradition. Transmission of poetry to this student (I miss Yeats's fisherman) is no longer, if it ever was, a direct process. Between producer and consumer stand institutions, mediators, interpreters and misinterpreters. Paulin makes little of the manufacturers of books, journals or the popular media; yet those who share his political views (and some who do not) locate in these areas some of the distortions of reading habits and freedoms. Paulin's perspectives are more narrowly academic.

That closed, academic world certainly weighs on modern poetry. But not, perhaps, in the way Paulin has experienced it in Nottingham where he teaches, or at Hull and Oxford where he studied. Some poets and readers have yet to be herded into classrooms for conditioning. And those who have would not necessarily or inevitably accept his description of the ideological determinisms at work there.

Paulin's allusion to Manicheism is part of a ready rhetoric of the pulpit which he deploys throughout his introduction. Yet the rhetoric has a strictly secular application. 'In the end,' he says, 'we accede to a political position by an act of faith.' Useless to declare that this is precisely how some of us, at any rate, do not accede to a political position. For politics and ideology are synonymous to Paulin. By Manichean he alludes to qualities which inhere in beliefs contrary to his own which are, he would say, integrative and progressive.

There's nothing heretical about him: his type is familiar on every campus. What distinguishes him (an important distinction) is that he actually likes poetry. But he is sufficiently a puritan to punish himself and us for this passion, and to justify himself in terms which not only devalue crucial aesthetic considerations, but pretend to root themselves in a political purity inimical to what - I gather from his poems - are some of his fundamental imaginative sympathies. 'The Garden of Self-Delight' is not a poem about Utopia: it is about Eden. His poems rarely sing; this one does, though he declares his perspective (a little portentously) as being 'from a bruised/shore that is dark blue/and cold and rigorous'. Cold certainly. But the rigours are emotional, not philosophical.

Before all the icons of the syllabus are thrown down, Paulin makes clear that certain images are 'sacred' (he cannot go a single paragraph without a fix of religious language). Eliot's 'smear' and 'subversion' of Milton was 'a major act of cultural desecration'. Eliot was not enthusiastic about Milton, to be sure; was it not proper that he should say so, and explain why? Clearly not: a poet is a priest; if he doubts he should keep his counsel. For Paulin it is wrong that Arnold and Eliot should 'adopt an attitude' to Milton 'curiously puritan and personal'. He assumes them to be like him, academics taking up stances in a lecture hall. Perhaps as readers they did not adopt attitudes but trusted their judgement, judgement at least as informed, at least as conditioned, as his own. I do not dispute Paulin's valuation of Milton. But I learn more from Arnold's and Eliot's criticism of Milton than from Paulin's hagiography. It is absurd to declare that Eliot and Arnold have made it possible for Milton to be 'respectfully avoided'. On the contrary, they have - like Johnson before them - restored him to the living canon by their criticism. Those who love his work understand their love the better.

If as critic you insist on historical context as a necessary key to understanding a work - and I can see no reason not to - then you ought to develop a degree of historical tact; not merely the mastery of an authorized version of events, or of unsung commonfolk's lives, but of those elements critics such as Walter Benjamin tease out so brilliantly, so lovingly: a sense of context is a sense of place, of the closeness and chanciness of events, the tenuousness of allegiances, the material circumstances of the writer, the implements of his craft; a sense of social register, of the distance between etymology and common speech, of the otherness of other times and cultures, even when we share their language. For Paulin the past does not clarify the present: the present distorts the past.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his choice of translated material and in his own versions of André Chenier. The tendency is to give us ill-fitting modern dress - not that a contemporary idiom should be shunned by a translator, but that in choosing among contemporary idioms he should choose appropriately. Paulin is a populist of the kind who believes that vulgarity of expression characterizes common speech. His Chenier, as George Steiner commented in the Times Literary Supplement, is gratuitously coarsened, to the extent that Chenier vanishes in Paulin's preferred idiom.

When he compares John Cooper Clarke and Linton Kwesi Johnson to early radical popular poets, he shows not only a lack of historical perspective but a lack of proportion and literary discrimination. The juxtaposition of two contemporary radicalisms so differently rooted is unhelpful and misleading and the parallel is false in terms of the relations of the poets (and their language) to their communities at large. The 'deep libertarian instincts' he identifies here arc not what first impress the reader.

Shakespeare, we are assured, was a 'closet republican'. Paulin is not struck by the inappropriateness of the words chosen, nor by the fatuity of the provocation he offers. In Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House' he at one point hears 'a rich camp accent - Kenneth Williams dressed as a bishop'. Almost every term there is wrong. When Paulin declares that 'literary history is almost a lost art' (one might have preferred the word 'discipline' to 'art'), we take the point. 'MacDiarmid', he writes, 'points to that tedious moralism which is such a dominant force in English literary criticism and which is so careless of formal beauty.' MacDiarmid might have had something of the sort to complain of here.

Paulin makes some fascinating points - about 'that aggressive feeling of cultural inferiority which still afflicts the loyalist imagination', for instance; and later about 'the idea of balanced judgement' which to the radical perspective is 'bound to appear comically irrelevant'. He praises Heaney in terms which in this context sound disingenuous if not patronizing: 'To oppose the historic legitimacy of that state [Ulster] and at the same time refuse the simplicities of traditional nationalism is to initiate certain imaginative positives and offer a gracious and civil trust'. Paulin's exceptions here are always stronger than his rules. If he comes to realise this, will he allow a change in the rules?

The fault in Paulin's view of how poems contain their politics is in his trusting literalism. A poem can be 'committed', as he desiderates, and still communicate another truth from the one the poet intends. Blake put Milton in the Devil's party. That is one reading of Paradise Lost, in some ways illuminating. History elucidates poems in two ways: there is the historical world in which the poet lived among the forgotten particulars of his household and the lost and remembered events of his nation's life; and there is the history of the reception of his poem in his own and subsequent times - the patristics of criticism and responsive scholarship - which enhance or encumber the poem, but are part of it, part of our reception of it. Paulin is a fundamentalist: he wants the primitive church without its accretions. He feels equal to the literary and nakedly historical challenge of a poem. He arrogates to himself a Puritan license: 'The puritan reads the Bible in a directly personal manner . . .'. He can declare that Paradise Lost is 'the greatest poem in the English language' - but we 'must not insidiously allegorize' it. In short, we must deprive it of elements in its generic nature, its history, its intention. I dislike the word must in criticism, especially when it cajoles me into wrong reading, against the grain of the poem.

I tend to the Anglican view: poems, like liturgies, have a history before them and a history after them. When it suits him, Paulin can agree with me, because (though he resists much criticism) he insists that in reading Blake's 'The Tiger' we 'must draw on David Erdmann's compelling historical interpretation'. If we must, we must; and I feel less bad about reading Arnold's and Eliot's and Empson's reflections when I am reading Milton because they will tell me something about the language, form, shape and meaning of the poem. And I will read Johnson, too.

One cannot quarrel with Paulin's estimate of the situation of some poets outside the Western democracies. But when he says that 'a liberal belief in the separation of the public from the private life is not possible' in the illiberal societies, I pause. What did Mandelstam do when he heard of Gumilev's death? What did Miklos Radnoti do in his Eclogues? What did Janos Pilinsky do in his religious poems and Zbigniew Herbert in his historical ones? Each discovered liberty, private witness, in the face of historical fact. Each insisted, imaginatively, on this witness. They did so not polemically, not to give an example, but out of a necessity which, judging from the poems, was aesthetic in its deepest sense. If we read such work as protest, we should first read it as poetry. A poet in a totalitarian society can be a witness to suffering, to political ideals, to religious resolve; he can also exist in the corners of liberty in which the natural world, the erotic experience, or simple fraternity, survive. History can make those poems political, but not in the sense Paulin means.

I do not subscribe to the notion that totalitarian regimes reduce poets to a single or even a similar condition. The quality of isolation, distinct in each society, each language and tradition, multiplies differences. The aesthetic and non-political (not anti-political) modes become vehicles of witness and sanity in themselves. It is possible for poets to survive and write well without coming into conflict with the authorities; or even having made terms with them. It is we who assume all valid witness to be political and oppositionist, who collectivize their vision and turn them into 'the "conscience" of his or her society'. We enact, in categorizing them, the very dialectic their work eludes. This is a damaging romanticism. Paulin seeks to draw an historical distinction; he overlooks an aesthetic one. If he pursued his polemic further in this direction he would have to engage, and agree with, some of the analysis of Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky, writers I imagine he would, beyond a certain point, find rebarbative.

'Politics, after all, is often relentlessly second-rate in style, language and personality,' he writes on the thirty-fourth page of his introduction. Yet he is fascinated by politics. It seems more real, more vital, than the world of poetry. For him, poetry must borrow some of its vigour, excitement, immediacy, even if the consequences to style, language and personality are relentlessly second-rate. Politics is more fun than aesthetic and political theory. Paulin does not hold ideas rigorously enough to make us take them seriously. What one cannot deny is the energy of his resentments - against America, against England, against the syllabus, against the institutions that pay his board and lodging and the traditions that inform his language. In this book he seeks to answer back, to become an authority himself, an authority mandated by angels, free to speak with the big gestures of the pulpit. Like old warriors who were vested with the heroism of the heroes they slew, he swings his sword at his straw-doll foes.

He invents traditions (identifying some with national borders and geists, a strategy which strikes me as reactionary). He omits plainly patriotic verse: verse of Civil War is political, verse of waged war apparently not so unless it criticizes war. There are few surprises in the inclusions, many in the omissions. It would seem that our century has made 'political poetry' peculiarly its own. The book has its roots firmly in this century, and in the British language. The gestures towards foreign writers are unconvincing. The absence of Pound and the questions he raises - questions of form, register, history, ideology - is an index of Tom Paulin's seriousness in a book whose imprint will give it more currency than it merits. It is an opportunity sadly wasted.
MNS