This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
“Poems,” says Catherine Clarke at the end of the first chapter of this new book, “can be unreliable witnesses to the past.” Undeterred by this potential unreliability, she presents us with a selection of 25 poems, each accompanied by a commentary, as a means of giving an overarching account of England’s history.
She begins with the 7th century bard Caedmon (quoted by the Venerable Bede even before England’s emergence as a nation) and concludes with verses on cricket grounds by the Yorkshire poet Zaffar Kunial published in 2022. Each poem and commentary offers “an immersive exploration of a specific point in time”.
“Poetry is a slippery, ambiguous, disconcerting, exasperating … place to look for history,” observes Clarke, but it is also “revealing”. This is because, in her words, poems are like “wormholes” that “have the power to open a direct portal between us and moments in the past”. They “aren’t just a bridge to the events of history, but into the experiences, emotions and imaginations of those people living and breathing through it”.
As Clarke wishes to use poems primarily as windows into the past, she has given preference to those which “work best as time machines”. Her choice has also been influenced by a desire to include “diverse voices” and to move beyond a “‘great men and battles” version of history”. She hopes thereby not only to win over “poetry sceptics” but also to call the reader to “radical empathy across time”.
She has certainly produced a selection of verse that is fresh, original and rather different from more conventional anthologies. The canonical authors are present — Chaucer, the Pearl Poet, Thomas Wyatt, Shakespeare, Dryden, Tennyson, Auden — but sit alongside lesser-known work, for example Crumble Hall, a comic evocation of a mouldering country house by the 18th century kitchen maid Mary Leapor; or the 1660 Bum-fodder, or, Waste-paper, Proper to Wipe the Nation’s RUMP with, or Your Own, a satirical broadside ballad on the Rump Parliament attributed to the London attorney Alexander Brome.
Clarke writes with erudition, clarity and enthusiasm, all of which are sustained across this wide variety of material. She is as much as a master of the work of earlier ages in Latin, Old or Middle English, as she is of contemporary material. The best chapters succeed as evocations and explorations of particular periods of history and the lives of their authors and subjects. In these troubled times we are apt to forget earlier moments of national peril and disturbance, and a number of the texts chosen remind us of other ages where we have been collectively through the fire.
Quis michi det fontem — quid enim potius — lacrimarum?
Vt lacrimer patrie gesta nefanda mee?
“Who will give me a fountain of tears (for what is better?)/ So that I may weep for the wicked deeds of my country?” laments the 12th century chronicler Henry of Huntingdon over the three decades of civil war between the Empress Matilda and Stephen of Blois. Clarke compares this poem with the shell-shocked comment of the Peterborough Chronicle: “I am neither able, nor wish to, tell all the horrors, nor all the tortures that they did to the wretched men in this land … that lasted nineteen winters whilst Stephen was king, and it always became worse and worse.” Sometimes poetry speaks when the prose writers must fall silent.
Indeed, regardless of any understanding this book might offer about English identity, it leaves one in no doubt about the capacity of poetry to empower the marginalised. “The Ballad of Anne Askew”, a protestant martyr who was tortured and burned at the stake in 1546 for refusing to recant heretical views about the Eucharist, expresses her defiance through the expression of her profound biblical learning:
Like as the armed knight
Appointed to the field,
With this world will I fight
And Faith shall be my shield
She begins her poem, echoing St Paul’s call in the Epistle to the Ephesians to “put on the full armour of God”, before moving to versified quotations of the gospels. Secure in this faith and scriptural knowledge, she was able to stand against the bishops interrogating her.
Likewise, Phillis Wheatley, an African slave in Massachusetts who was taught the Latin and Greek Classics as well as Biblical scripture, drew on her knowledge for a collection of verse that was published in London shortly before she visited in 1773. “Should you, my lord, whilst you peruse my song,/Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung” she boldly writes to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in an appeal for the independence of the American colonies. Elsewhere, she likens herself to the Roman playwright Terence, likewise of African slave descent.
There are times when the commentary somewhat misfires through the ungainly intrusion of critical theory. For example, Clarke argues Wheatley’s statement “Whence flow these wishes for the common good,/ By feeling hearts alone best understood” reconfigures “eighteenth-century debates about freedom in terms of … lived experience and emotion” and her “own life story grants her the licence to speak; her own emotion and feeling qualify her as the authentic, indisputable authority on questions of freedom”.
This seems like an uncomfortable attempt to shoehorn in the voguish contemporary idea of “lived experience”, playing down the importance of Wheatley’s talent, literary knowledge and Christian conviction.
Similarly, much space is given to the idea, now debunked, that Chaucer may have been a rapist. This was based on the ambiguous Latin word “raptus” in 14th century legal records, once thought to indicate Chaucer had abducted a serving woman, Cecily Chaumpaigne. Further research in 2022 showed the case was really about Chaucer illegally poaching her to work in his service, and that there was no evidence of sexual assault or coercion. Yet Clarke does not dismiss the insinuation, and the space she gives to it would have been better spent in a discussion of what Chaucer’s other female characters tell us of his era.
We are also repeatedly told of a violence inherent in ideologies of Englishness, but what these might be, whether they are worse than other national ideologies, is left unexamined.
Indeed, whilst Clarke is a powerful evangelist for the poetry, it is difficult to derive a coherent proposition about English identity from this work. “Setting these 25 poems in their own historical moments allows us to see something of how the nation has dreamed itself into existence,” says Clarke. But is English identity really something so insubstantial that it can be dreamed into existence by poets, or lightly reimagined in the face of contemporary tempests?
