My poem is called ‘Farewell to Theophrastus’. Theophrastus, a fifth-century BCE Greek, was not of the quality of Socrates or Aristotle, but a sort of collector of notions and categories, who today would be a big name on the Internet. To assist readers to understand the writers of his time, he compiled tables of characters, types of dramatis personae. These he assembled under a set of headings, a catalogue of stock personalities, almost the ingredients of a literary cookbook. Later, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and their contemporaries followed suit by conceiving of ‘Humours’. There is an uncomfortable parallel today in the laminating practices of literary theory – a fondness for the higher pigeonholing. Theophrastus’s serious or tragic characters are lost: we have only his comic ones, though we might prefer to judge them grotesque, absurd or venal rather than comic. As Louis MacNeice wrote, Ancient Greece strikes us today as ‘all so very different and all so long ago’. Take the Nine Muses, we just don’t understand how the Greeks broke up the musical, dramatic and lyrical arts into such specialities. We can recognise Thalia, Muse of Satire, and the bleaker, joking Uranus, Muse of Astronomy – but where do we go with Melpomene, Erato, Polyhymnia, Eurterpe, and the rest? Theophrastus’s divisions seem equally arbitrary. Working from the Penguin Theophrastus, I tried to record the personalities and to some extent the careers of characteristic types I’d encountered in advertising. I assigned people to Theophrastus’s arbitrary divisions – modern personalities who seemed metamorphoses of his original subheadings.

Here is one, The Inventor of News:

has finished talking
and the glassy silence is mottled
with his unchaste stories: it was
Sir Gilbert took his secretary to the coast, Lord Moron
was cut down throttled by his braces,
nine-tenths of unconscious choosers
fancy pink

and then Overdoing It, followed by Petty Ambition:

Overdoing It’s lost a carnation but has
two rosebuds in his right lapel;
he offers the table the name of an hotel
in Amalfi and spends a minute on his knees
retrieving the Chairman’s pen top.

Petty Ambition knows that new photographer,
not, most definitely not, an East End boy
on the way up, absolutely Middle Class
and a genius; he’s surprised to hear
the name McLuhan but is certainly orthodox
on Dichter

and now Love of Evil:

(he) knows the world is shrinking, he hates those latitudinarians, his friends,
he’s for napalm and White Mercenaries
and has invented a pack of playing cards
of murdered girls from Mrs Crippen to Sharon Tate.

Then Demoralised Man:

they send
Demoralised Man to empty the ash trays
while a secretary knits outside. He refills
a neighbour’s pen nib to nib
from his own; he speaks only one sentence
but contrives to give the impression
he’s suggested an improper approach
to a rival’s client.

Finally, the Chairman of the Agency who stands for Ironical Man:

he’s reading Pliny in the car
and is sure we need more hard-headed
realists in business if only he doesn’t
have to have dinner with them. He’s interested
in his wife’s adultery – she has enough money
to run away, but he knows, she won’t.
Coldness is catching, he smiles on death,
his one unanswerable friend.

This may seem a funny way to start an essay on biography, especially as the detail comes from the 1960s. Still, it has a purpose. Poetry is an art of summing-up. It has to be more concise than prose, but its intention is to portray real persons, to tell their stories and locate them in the worlds they so frequently personify.

We tend to think of poetry as descriptive, pastoral, lyrical or rhetorical – above all, as lapidary, concerned with its own means, with language at unconsciousness’s most intrinsic borders. But it would get nowhere without its human subjects, the material of social life, material closer to home than trees, cataracts or sublimities of Nature. My Theophrastic poems are squibs, but are also pointers to my theme – that the lives of men and women, their biographies and autobiographies, may be sought readily in the huge Commissariat of Poetry. Here, as much as in prose studies, may be found those comprehensive accounts of what happened to chosen – where and when they revealed most sharply the creatures they were. Verse is just as able as prose to reveal what letters were written, what records kept and what memories evoked.

My title, of course, derives from Hamlet. After being accosted and upbraided by a desperate Hamlet, Ophelia, in tears, is desolate that such a person could fall so far from grace. In describing her misery, she gives the most succinct portrait of Hamlet anywhere in the play:

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown;
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye, tongue, sword,
The expectation and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most dejected and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason
Like sweet bells jangled out of time, and harsh;
That unmatched form and stature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me
T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see.

The concentration in this passage is on seeing and watching. We watch each other through life, and we are watched. Biography is a process of condensed and continual watching. The whole of Hamlet might be likened to a perpetual watch kept on the main character of the action. Shakespeare is writing a biography of Hamlet the Prince by marshalling all those whose special function is to keep an eye on him. Which may account for the often-expressed worry that the Prince himself seems not truly part of the action – that he is acted on and not an originator of action – that he is ‘The Observed of all Observers’ – and a dusty and biased lot they are. Perhaps all biographers must permit themselves to be self-effacing since they have elected to present one person to the world, but without being properly inside that person. To be even more extravagant, I suggest that King Lear is a kind of biography of a diseased monarch; this time the story is presented by a set of truth-telling jokers, ranging from the Fool and mad Edgar to the guilty railings of Gloucester. The concise poet and the more fulsome biographer have in common the need to suppress their own personalities and live through their subject. In Sonnet 111, Shakespeare describes his authorial method: ‘thence my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.’

If poetry doesn’t concern itself with the full documentation demanded of orthodox biography, it nevertheless is aware of how individual fate is enfolded in larger human movement. It becomes biography by other means. I began this essay with semi-caricatures, typology, perhaps, more than individual portraiture. With Ophelia and Hamlet, I have passed to a further stage of consciousness. The egotist (Hamlet) is categorised by his victim (Ophelia). What he says about himself in the course of the play, his famous soliloquies, is illuminated by what various special others say about him. It is worth pointing out that even in modern biographies – of statesmen, actors, and pop stars – the most telling points are usually recorded by people who knew the subjects, rather than by any confessional matter which the biographer has collected.

Poetry, I dare to say, is the biography of species. Gilgamesh watches the death-worm come out of Enkidu’s nose; Augustine asks God to make him chaste (but not yet); John Donne ceases to write poetry but has himself painted in his shroud; St Just, sentenced to the guillotine, speaks only one sentence; Pauline Viardot invites Turgenev into her household for a lifetime’s ménage à trios; Emily Dickinson resolves to observe the world of Amherst without coming downstairs; Wittgenstein, on his deathbed, says he he’s led a happy life. These are the things that make poets biographers: all have been written about in verse. If armorial, such things are also human and direct. Before raiding Browning, the most conscious of poet-biographers, and moving on to modem poetry in the US, Australia and Britain I shall attempt to say something about that huge obstacle to biography, Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Do they tell a story or are they Jottings in his exercise book, where he practised the eloquence he poured into his other works? Because they aren’t really eloquent in themselves. Apart from the clumsy form of three quatrains and a clinching couplet – so much feebler than the Petrarchan division into six and eight, with assorted rhymes and no couplet – they are poorly scanned, are dubiously argued, and spoiled time and time again by their end-couplets. Also, Shakespeare is an indifferent rhymer. I’m not being sacrilegious – these sonnets contain some of his greatest writing, but they are far from perfect poems. Who was Mr W.H.? When were they written? Who is the Dark Lady? Who is the Rival Poet or who are the several rival poets? I’d be here all night wrangling with such problems.

Instead, let me recommend the Arden edition of the Sonnets newly edited by Katherine Duncan Jones, whose explication is the finest I have read. She believes that they are the product of Shakespeare’s returning to pure poetry when the theatres closed due to plague etc. and that they were a tooling up to bring him back in the estimation of fine judges, something he had learned early on with Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Therefore, though they may well have been written over many years, they were edited for the Press in 1609, and, far from being stolen by Thorpe the Printer, were carefully prepared by Shakespeare himself.

Duncan Jones identifies Mr W.H. with William Hubert, the earl of Pembroke, George Herbert’s uncle, and sees him as a better candidate for the young man urged to marry and propagate his line than the usually nominated earl of Southampton. What makes me call them some of the greatest autobiographical writing in any literature doesn’t spring from any of these mysteries. Rather, they are almost unbearably dark nights of the soul, in which the poet pours out his frustrated love for one man, and his horror of his sexual engagement with one woman. Though he modelled them to some extent on seemly predecessors, such as Sydney’s Astrophel and Stella, they amount to a rough-edged Book of Nightmares.

You might ask why, if he wanted to re-earn his reputation as a smooth and rather sweet poet, a reputation that had taken knocks in his professional world of the theatre, Shakespeare didn’t smooth them over more. The answer takes one to the heart of autobiography as a form: the autobiographer has no real control over his writing if he is to be truthful. Eventually, in the great examples of the genre, it is truth that moulds itself into a formal discipline. Simply, what honestly is recorded becomes a form in itself. It is fair to regard the Sonnets as a cross between Sigmund Freud and Sylvia Plath. If you forget for a moment that you are reading the greatest writer who ever lived, then you might think that you are tangling with a mass of case history. Dante couldn’t have done it; Petrarch wouldn’t, even John Donne is too careful. Here is autobiography minus courtroom and police evidence, Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, Tamara in Titus Andronicus, Regan, Goneril – all might be his Dark Lady. But she might be Ann Hathaway too, or the poet himself might be Macbeth. To write about yourself is to be at home to the whole world, even to be its inventor.

Next I want to consider that other sonneteer – John Donne. His Holy Sonnets are as turbulent as Shakespeare’s and just as personal. But Shakespeare wrangles with human love and Donne with God. Each is ambitious and egotistical, Donne is the better poet here, but Shakespeare the more truthful man. There is no self-adorning way to compose your autobiography than to pit yourself against God, and indulge in self-laceration. The historical facts of Donne’s case are less heroic. He had disgraced himself by marrying against the wishes of certain great people. He languished in Mitcham in south London, hating his banishment from court. He wrote polemics in Latin against the Jesuits for James I, although he came from Catholic Recusant stock. He wanted above everything to be a courtier and to follow a secular career. The king was determined that he should be a cleric and opposed any career for him other than the church. These sonnets were written in his wretched isolation while he hoped for royal favour. The king won the battle and Donne was ordained.

After this, he preferred baroque sermons to poetry, and showed off as the inflammatory Dean of St Paul’s. The Holy Sonnets are Donne’s via crucis: he carries the cross of his worldliness, and has finally to offer it to God. When I read these poems, I am conscious always of their tremendous anger-not with the king or his fortune, but with God. These are the poems St Paul might have written if he hadn’t been struck down on the road to Damascus. Donne was never given such a sign, so he dwindled into a preacher when he might have stayed a poet. Surely these sonnets can be read as the autobiography of a man disappointed by the world and reluctantly made into a churchman. Their ferocious Counter Reformation rhetoric is meant to convince himself. ‘Batter my heart, three-personed God,’ he cries, but who would be so doctrinal if he were full of love of his divinity. Like poor Gerard Manley Hopkins, Donne knew that language, which can earn you rewards on earth, can seem dead-sea fruit if, against its will, it is forced to serve a superior authority.

The eighteenth century is perhaps the least biographical century until you reflect that Alexander Pope caricatured the grandees of his day; Jonathan Swift recorded the servants and prostitutes of Covent Garden with the same ruthless wit he used on kings and priests. Oliver Goldsmith and George Crabbe painted portraits of the helpless poor of the many parishes threatened by enclosure and industrialisation. Both turned the lower tones of life into carnivals of wit. Crabbe, especially, might be called with justice a poetic Jane Austen – they were contemporaries. Crabbe too can claim one of the great breakthroughs of poetic method. He wrote of himself and his frustration by recording the countryside and the debased manners of the town. His poem The Village is a sort of paysage moralisé: his depression invades the land, so that the depleted fields, the squirming weeds, the infelicitous panorama become states of mind. Years before Ruskin invented the term, Crabbe’s poetry is full of pathetic fallacy. I would also suggest that a poem such as his ‘The Lover’s Journey’ is a forerunner of today’s meticulous memoir of low hopes and frustrated aspirations. Anton Chekhov, William Trevor, Frank O’Connor all write stories of blighted hopes, and everyday manuscripts of hard starts in life tumble into publisher’s offices – but Crabbe was there first. He is the biographer of low spirits, the cautious and careful recorder of the wisdom of not exceeding your modest expectations. His poetry is highly formal but it is as stuffed with the daily detail of living as any modern biographer’s laying out of the terrain of his subject’s beginnings.

So far I have read only a few lines of poetry. I think any talk about the art should include as much of the real thing as possible. And I want to introduce the present day, even if out of chronological order. In the middle of one of the finest and longest biographies every written, that of Alexander Pope by Maynard Mack, an American professor of literature, there is a poem by the contemporary poet James Wright that is a heartfelt gloss on the teaching of poetry. Wright had been at one of those large-scale conferences on the eighteenth century, which are frequent occurrences in the US, and sent the following poem to a fellow-academic who had attended, as an accompaniment to a volume of Swift’s works.

I promised once if l got hold of
This book I’d send it on to you.
These are the songs that Roethke told of,
The curious music loved by few.
I think of lanes in Laracor
Where Brinsley MacNamara wrote
His lovely elegy, before
The Yahoos got the Dean by rote.

Only, when Swift-men are all gone
Back to their chosen fields by train
And the drunk Chairman snores alone,
Swift is alive in secret, Wayne:
Singing for Stella’s happiest day,
Charming a charming man, John Gay,
And greeting, now their bones are lost,
Pope’s beautiful, electric ghost.

Here are some songs he lived in, kept
Secret from almost everyone
And laid away, while Stella slept,
Before he slept, and died, alone.
Gently, listen, the great shade passes,
Magnificent, who still can bear,
Beyond the range of horses’ asses,
Nobilities, light, light and air.

Wayne was the recipient of the gift, and the other Americans are fellow-poets and academics. I know of no more tender yet satirical justification of academic study of past poetry; no finer vindication of the writing of biographies of great artists. In Mack’s biography, we get dazzlingly close to such luminaries as Pope and Swift, while, in tum, Wright’s poem becomes a gloss on a gloss, a further expedition into biographical elaboration – a sort of Notes and Queries entry in the posthumous lives of great men. Poetry can prove an excellent vehicle for criticism: in the same way, it may work in the margins of biography. When we comment on a person in a poem, we may be helping to add to the way his or her story may be told.

It was after reading Maynard Mack’s biography of Pope, and after having made a selection of his verse for a popular Faber series, that I too wrote a marginal entry on Pope. Poet on poet is a good idea, even if the later writer risks seeming presumptuous. I took as my starting point something written by Christopher Smart in his Jubilate Agna, a sort of mad diary he kept in Bedlam. Thus, already by 1759, Smart was commenting on the recently dead Pope. Pope designed a famous garden by the Thames at Twickenham, and Smart, in a passage about flowers, wrote: ‘For flowers can see and Pope’s carnations knew him.’ This gave me my title and the poem, which follows, is really a comment on a comment on a biography.

But they knew they were on duty, replacing
the Rose of Sharon and lilies of the field
for a gardener who never put a foot wrong.

It was their duty to rhyme in colour,
to repeat their reds and pinks and shield
the English rose with their Italianate chiming.

He had such a way with the symmetry
of petals, he could make a flower yield
an epic from its one-day siege. His rows

of blooms had their grotesques but they
took the place of music. They bowed, they kneeled,
they curtseyed, and so stood up for prosody.

No wonder Smart learned from their expansive
hearts that they loved the ordered, the well-heeled
and ornate, the little poet with the giant stride.

Each gossipy morning he sniffed their centres
and they saw him: the lines of Paradise revealed.
God make gardeners better nomenclators.

The poem becomes a Theophrastian biography of Alexander Pope – witness the references to his diminutive stature, the perfection of his poetry (‘he never put a foot wrong’), his sense of order in gardening and social life, his humour and satire, and, finally, his absorption in the Classic with his translations of Homer. The last line is again from Smart. Both poets pre-echo the great naturalists who culminated in Linnaeus, the prototype botanical nomenclator.

I suppose that, for many people, the supreme autobiographer in verse is William Wordsworth, the poet who declared the child the father of the man. The Prelude, although a discursive poem, is also a psychological portrait of someone who believed his relations with Nature were more intense than with people. His method is the opposite of Crabbe’s: he does not impose himself on the natural world but takes from it the dayspring, to use a Kipling word, of his existence.

Close reading of The Prelude produces a surprise. Wordsworth writes at considerable length and with sharp accuracy on matters of civic order and social organisation, of books and education, of imagination and fantasy, as intensely as he does pf pantheism or the natural world. As in his several sonnets on political themes, he is interested in men’s lives and in the customs of many countries. if the famous phrase ‘the egotistical sublime’ means anything, it stands for the ability of a ruminative mind to incorporate various strands of life outside itself, and not just autobiographical authority. To offer a possible redress of accepted opinion, I have isolated three short passages from the poem that show Wordsworth as a fuller and more down-to-earth personality than he is often taken to be. The first is from the ‘Residence at Cambridge’ section of The Prelude. He describes himself as a just-arrived undergraduate, reading lazily in lazy books. And goes on:

Imagination slept,
And yet not utterly. I could not print
Ground where the grass had yielded to the steps
Of generations of illustrious men,
Unmoved. I could not always lightly pass
Through the same gateways, sleep where they had slept,
Wake where they waked, range that enclosure old,
That garden of great intellects, undisturbed.
Place also by the side of this dark sense
Of nobler feeling, that those spiritual men,
Even the great Newton’s own ethereal self,
Seemed humbled in these precincts, thence to be
The more beloved; invested here with tasks
Of life’s plain business, as a daily garb;
Dictators at the plough, a change that left
All genuine admiration unimpaired.

Not many people have taken up their universities’ challenge so seriously. Wordsworth maintained such seriousness throughout his life; never so worriedly as when he was caught up in the later days of the Terror in France. First, he was excited by the dawn of revolution, something Browning castigated him for abandoning. It was indeed a very heaven to be young and in Paris in those days:

In both her clamorous halls,
The National Synod and the Jacobins,
I saw the Revolutionary Power
Toss like a ship at anchor, racked by storms;
The Arcades I traversed, in the Palace huge
Of Tavern, Brothel, Gaming-House, and Shop,
I stared and listened, with a stranger’s ears,
To Hawkers and Haranguers, hubub wild!
And hissing Factionists with ardent eyes,
In knots or pair, or single ant-like swarms
Of builders and subverters, every face
That hope or apprehension could put on

Wordsworth in the brothel is a powerful corrective to our vision of him as a secular saint. The final disillusionment came shortly afterwards:

To Paris I returned … But that night
When on my bed I lay, I was most moved
And felt most deeply in what world I was.
With unextinguished taper I kept watch,
Reading at intervals; the fear gone by
Pressed on me almost like a fear to come.
I thought of those September Massacres,
Divided from me a little month,
And felt and touched them, a substantial dread:
The rest was conjured up from tragic fictions,
And mournful calendars of true history,
Remembrances and dim admonishments.
The horse is taught his mange, and the wind
Of heaven wheels round and treads in his own steps;
Year follows year, the tide returns again,
Day follows day, all things have second birth;
The earthquake is not satisfied at once.

One evolutionary whose life ended on the guillotine was St Just. He was surely one of the most remarkable political innovators of all time. Like Robespierre a provincial lawyer, he embodied the extreme lengths men would go to embed morality in public life. A handsome, self-contained, well-dressed figure, he was an utterly uncompromising believer in the enforcement of civic virtue. To that end, all compromise and compassion would have to be abandoned. Eventually, after helping to execute many of his own party who had lapsed from their principles, he too was condemned to execution. At the age of twenty-six, he said only one sentence and faced the guillotine imperviously. His last sentence is included in the next poem I shall quote. This is Robert Lowell’s unrhymed sonnet entitled ‘Saint-Just, 1767- 1793’. It is a representative example of what has become a popular form in recent years: biography as a thumbnail sketch. In fourteen lines, Lowell sums up the career of a chilly rationalist, one who was prepared to die for his convictions and to send others to their deaths for the same reason.

Saint-Just: his name seems stolen from the Missal …
His chamois coat, the dandy’s vast cravat
knotted with pretentious negligence;
He carried his head like the Holy Sacrament.
He thought only the laconic fit to rule
the austerity of his hideous cardboard Sparta.
‘I must move with the stone footsteps of the sun –
Faction plagues the course of revolution,
As reptiles follow the dry bed of a torrent.
I am young and therefore close to nature.
Happiness is a new idea in Europe;
We bronzed liberty with the guillotine.
I’m still twenty, I’ve done badly, I’ll do better’.
He did, the scaffold. (‘Je sais où je vais.’)

In a sense, this is Theophrastus again. Shakespeare raided Plutarch for the exemplary lives of his great men and women – Antony and Cleopatra is Plutarch versified. Lowell’s poem seems written to demonstrate the principle that the young W.H. Auden set out in a sonnet of his in the early 1930s. ln it be offers a ground plan to writers who would make their works of art from the details of life stories. It offers a formula that many poets have followed and that Auden himself expanded in some of his own concertina’d biographical poems. Among the most remarkable are summings-up: ‘Arthur Rimbaud’, ‘A.E. Housman’, ‘Edward Lear’, ‘Voltaire at Femey’, ‘Herman Melville’, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’, ‘Montaigne’, ‘At the Grave of Henry James’, and ‘Posthumous Letter to Gilbert White’. Each of these poems is an expansion of the insight that Auden reveals in that early sonnet. Although, later in life, he declared biography an irrelevant intrusion and swore never to write an autobiography, his whole practice is based on selecting the crucial moments in the lives of people and civilisations and on forcing home their psychological truth. Here is that influential sonnet, titled in its later recensions, Who’s Who:

A shilling life will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day:
Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,
Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea:
Some of the last researchers even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.

With all his honours on, he sighed for one
Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;
Did little jobs about the house with skill
And nothing else; could whistle, would sit still
Or potter round the garden; answered some
Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.

Now to the king of biographical poets, Robert Browning. All along, I have deliberately mixed up modern writers with those from the past. But here I remind you that Ezra Pound asserted that Browning was the inventor of modern poetry. This may seem odd when you consider how intensely Victorian Browning is. So many of his rigorous self-asserters appear to be eminent Victorians while being decked out in the costumes, manners and diction of medieval and Renaissance worthies. What makes Browning modem is his determination to make poetry concern itself with all relevant life, and not just seek what may be fertile ground for lyricism. Browning’s extended confession of a shyster paraphysical quack Mr Sludge the Medium is well named since he never failed to include the necessary sludge of daily existence. In his poems, he expected readers to find the lyric grace of poetry within the un-exalted facts of the quotidian. To a large degree, Browning reclaimed for poetry the whole scale of things, defying tendency of his time to seek only lyrical afflatus, as in that characteristic anthology The Golden Treasury.

It is necessary to dispute the widespread idea that the dramatic monologue in Browning’s hand is little more than a speech or soliloquy from a phantom play, a highlight of a darkened nimbus. Browning’s handling of the form belies the very term used to categorise it – it is usually dramatic, but not always a monologue. The number of voices in a Browning poem can be legion. Apart from identifiable persons, he employs an editorial self who partakes of a God’s eye view. Fra Lippo Lippi will tell you about his life and the life of Florence around him. Bishop Blougram will go further and betray himself by attempting justification of his duplicities. The Duke in ‘My Last Duchess’ indicts himself while complaining about his wife, but also puts Ferrara on the moral map. ‘Caliban upon Setebos’ takes off from Shakespeare’s rebellious animus, and disputes with believers and atheists of the Victorian heyday. He is imagining the God who made a mess of imagining him. Andrea del Sarto, gloomily reflecting on Michelangelo and Raphael, may be Browning up against Tennyson, and his flighty wife may be Elizabeth Barrett.

My view of Browning’s poetry especially in his collection Men and Women (1855), is that no other poet has used biographies of people, famous or little known with such conviction. He makes panoramas of humanity almost as workers in stained glass choose modules to fit together to provide their overall pattern.

I have been hinting that biography and autobiography come to the same when you examine them carefully. The more Browning seems to be inhabiting the persons of his characters, the more you become aware of Browning himself. He writes his autobiography from the dream cast of persons who live in his poems. He is also a pioneer of a poetic form that has been much imitated among modem poets -the mystery poem, part allegory, part myth. The most prominent of these in his output is ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, but the one I shall concentrate on is ‘How It Strike a Contemporary’. This mysterious poem appears to be composed in the speaking voice of someone who was a boy in a Spanish town who observed a denizen, an official figure, a Corregidor perhaps, whose reports to the king of Spain were the secret history of its population. We are given a description of him – an intimation of his arcane power – and told how people presumed he must have lived in secret opulence behind an outwardly modest house. This may be an allegory of the power of the artist, someone reporting on the true history of his time but remaining unknown and unacknowledged by his contemporaries. ‘Unacknowledged Legislator’. ‘The Wound and the Bow’: these near-clichés come to mind. But Browning is more original than that. He is suggesting that all appearance is a mystery, all stories are partial, and any biography is no more, in the end, a biopsy. I have filleted the poem for short passages: they show Browning at his most evocative and yet portentous.

You saw go up and down Valladolid,
A man of mark, to know next time you saw,
His very serviceable suit of black
Was courtly once and conscientious still

He walked and tapped the pavement with his cane,
Scenting the world, looking it full in the face,
An old dog, bald and blindish, at his heels.

He took such cognizance of men and things,
If any beat a horse, you felt he saw;
If any cursed a woman, he took note;
Yet stared at nobody – you stared at him

The town’s true master, if the town but knew!

And back into your mind, the man’s look came

Had he to do with A’s surprising fate?
When altogether old B disappeared
And young C got his mistress – was it our friend,
His letter to the King that did it all?
What paid the bloodless man for so much pain?

I found no truth in one report at least
That if you tracked him to his home, down lanes

You found he ate his supper in his room
Blazing with lights, four Titians on the wall
And twenty naked girls to change his plate!
Poor man, he lived another kind of life
In that new stucco’d third house by the bridge,
Fresh painted, rather smart than otherwise.
The whole street might o’erlook him as he sat,
Leg crossing leg, one foot on the dog’s back,
Playing a decent cribbage with the maid.

I’d like now, yet had haply been afraid,
to have just looked, when this man came to die,
And seen who lined the clean grey garret-sides
And stood about the neat low truckle-bed

Here had been, mark, the general-in-chief,
Through a whole campaign of the world’s life and death,

In his old coat and up to his knees in mud,
Smoked like a herring, dining on a crust,
and now the day was won, relieved at once!
No further show or need of that old coat,
You are sure for one thing! Bless us, all the while
How sprucely we are dressed out, you and I!
A second, and the angels alter that.

This final line strikes me as one of the most savage in our literature. All hierarchies end in dissolution. But while the life of observers lasts, the record of humanity will be governed by a lexicon of absolutes. As Bach sang – ‘Wachet und bettet’, watch and pray. We owe it to our master-observers, like Browning, to keep ourselves forever vigilant.

I shall end as I began, with one of my own poems – this time a pleasantly short one. My father, who was not a great reader, introduced me to a writer I have ever afterwards loved – Henry Rider Haggard, who himself has been the subject of several biographies. I’m glad my father recommended the novel Nada the Lily rather than She or King Solomon’s Mines. It became for me the apotheosis of doomed romantic love, just as much as anything in the more respectable wings of English Literature. It tells the story of the beautiful Nada who is loved by the great Zulu warrior Umslopogaas, and is part of the household of Mopo the witch doctor and adviser to the conquering Zulu king, Chaka. From Nada, I went on to several of Haggard’s other novels, including Allan Quatermain, which records the death of Umslopogaas, who has lost Nada and everything he loved before the novel begins. Also to Moon of Israel which lit my interest in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt. Yes, these are not great works and the British Empire was a mistake, especially in Africa. But when I recently visited a small parish church in Norfolk, I was surprised to find a stained-glass window honouring the career of Rider Haggard. It was decorated with many scenes from his African stories. Out of it I made a sonnet, which I called, straightforwardly ‘The Rider Haggard Window, St Mary’s Ditchingham’.

Time which eats the stories of our lives
Preserves a cruel freshness here to show
How energetic certainty contrives
To tell us what we think we almost know:
The warlike God of England will bestow
At least in retrospect on loyal wives
A school apotheosis, dirge of knives,
With dying, quick in life, in glass made slow.

A dubious transfer this, as history cools,
An ancient trespass but a change of rules.
The world was opening which today is closed,
And where the mind went, destiny would tread
With God and Science noisily opposed.
And story-telling garlanding the dead.

It is these garlands spread over the dead that biographers and poets alike offer to the reading public.

This is an edited version of the National Biography Award Annual Lecture, which Peter Porter delivered at the State Libraries of New South Wales and of Victoria in October 2004.