So what was the problem? ‘Language-games’ were seen to be the preoccupation of ‘élitists’, trivial exercises alien to the nature of real poetry which dealt with the human spirit and expressed a concern for our fellow beings. The ideal for poetry expressed by Lehmann and Gray was a ‘humanist’ one. The less than ideal was a poetry which was ‘self-indulgent’, which loitered on the corner of Ashbery Avenue, talking in ‘hip’ jargon to its mates.

The editors assumed that we should write in a ‘common tongue’, in a mode which is ‘accessible’ and not deliberately ‘obscure’. This seems, on the surface anyway, a harmless enough idea. Their second assumption appeared to be that language is in itself a dangerous thing and that too much of an absorption in its working will mean that we can countenance anything. We may, for example, become unwitting accomplices to genocide if we are prepared to admit that words are not grounded in real things or feelings.

The notion of a ‘common’ language is not as easily unpacked as its lobbyists assume. I’ve noticed that ‘uneducated’ people will often grasp immediately something which the poetasters find needlessly obscure, simply because they may have fewer preconceptions about what poetry should be doing. (My father, who rarely read anything other than the tabloids, found no difficulty with the sometimes wilfully ‘difficult’ layout of my book, The Ash Range.)

Furthermore, the ‘common tongue’ ideologues are often enough guilty of using in their own work a glitzy, simile-ridden dialect which would seem light years away from what either Alexander Pope or George Orwell would have countenanced as plain speaking. It’s not clear just who is addicted to ornament and who isn’t when we try to look at writers apart from their supposed cliques.

Games, like languages, are human things. The pleasure of linguistic invention is, I would say, about as purely human as we can get. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s conversations with Norman Malcolm concern the play of language, yet to accuse Wittgenstein of not being serious is somehow to miss the point. The way young children repeat words may be a way of learning them, but it also focuses attention on the word itself and on the strangeness of its supposed relationship with a referent. (Wombat … gargle … abyss … nomenclature …  Aeroplane Jelly!) Words, however simple, can distance us from what they’re meant to do. It’s a bit like when you point at something you want a dog to notice and the dog looks at your finger.

The ‘humanists’ insist however that we should wear our hearts on our sleeves. And there was a period in the late 1960s, early 1970s in which it seemed necessary for poets to put themselves on the record (‘fuck the war’, ‘long live the proletarian struggle’). We are all moral agents certainly, but for poetry to be chosen as an ideal means of communication struck me then, and still strikes me, as a bizarre move.

And what, I wonder, would the ‘humanists’ make of the miscellanies we have been handed down of early English poetry? There are indeed ‘serious’ and ‘morally profound’ pieces within these collections, but there are also riddles, obscene jokes, the graffiti of the time – ‘language-games’ if ever there were any. All of these items were copied down without much sense of hierarchy by scribes who were often enough priests. I doubt that any modern descendant of Donne, Pope, or Coleridge would get a fair hearing from our current temple guardians either.

It begins to look as though those who want things to stay in their place, who want ‘the trains to run on time’, are the ones who make genocide possible. Swift’s most outrageous propositions (in ‘A Modest Proposal’) come through a ‘rational’ use of sentences and words which gently stretch the envelope of suggestion to breathtaking conclusions.

I’m not saying that we should all go off and write like James Gleeson or any of those 1930s surrealists (though even they can be fun sometimes – in fact their main problem seems to have been that they took the irrational too seriously). I’m suggesting that poetry is an area in which we ought to allow a little latitude. Especially these days when the whole notion of play (unless it involves crushing handshakes and large cheques) has been dropped from the agenda by the current crop of Benthamites. ‘A Modest Proposal’ would probably pass through most of our state Cabinets without a single query.