Robert Crawford

The family, stuff of novelists as different as Rose Macaulay and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S. Eliot’s parents, a religious poet and a businessman, produced between them a businessman-religious poet, and meant an enormous amount to him. Yet they scarcely figure in his poetry, while his criticism, obsessed with issues of inheritance, usually suggests that the kind of tradition that matters comes from books, not parents. Often Modernist poets seem embarrassed by Mum and Dad: Ezra Pound’s father, Homer, is displaced by his son’s epic poem. Pound is his own hero, lonely and supermannish. One has to turn to his biography to realise how much MacDiarmid’s family sustained him as he wrote such superb poems of isolation as ‘On a Raised Beach’. In Auden too, family can appear as weakness. Heredity, in various aspects of Modernist culture from Freud to eugenics, is a source of worry that becomes, eventually, a Nazi obsession.

Silence parked there like a limousine; We had no garage and we had no car.

Dad polished shoes, boiled kettles for hot-water bottles, And mother made pancakes, casseroles, lentil soup

On her New World cooker, its blue and cream Obsolete before I was born.

I was a late, only child, campaigning For 33 rpm records.

Dad brought food parcels from City Bakeries In crisp brown paper, tightly bound...

Middle-managers drowned while whitewater-rafting Will be promoted posthumously.

How can you expect to succeed in accounts If you’re scared of the bobsleigh? Jackie,

When you’ve finished the MD’s filing And watered his plants, just open a window,

Slip into your lycra shorts And abseil down to my office.

I was in our works canteen when a call Came over the tannoy to watch him endorse the new car. As he bent and touched it, he said, ‘This product will save your area For another decade; it will be loved Equally by US management And families whom its air-cooled rear engine Will power to school. I’m saying this That you may take a pride in your work.’ Nervous execs whooshed him away...