Society
How exciting that new Labour should choose, as its top poet, a man who went in for nude sunbathing
Published 14 June 1999
Plastic madonnas, glow-in-the-dark crucifixes, technicolour posters of the Pope - they're all part of the Lourdes experience, a kitschy, Catholic consumerism that draws millions of pilgrims to the shrine in the Pyrenees. Religion reduced to a collection of crass trinkets.
Switch from southern France to south of the Thames, and a different shrine risks suffering the same fate. The Millennium Dome, new Labour's very own Lourdes, is set to level the poet, painter and visionary William Blake to a series of bungee jumpers, sword swallowers and acrobats. The mystical visions and haunting rhymes of the prophet who decried the dark side of the industrial revolution (dark satanic mills) and speculated about Christ's arrival in Britain ("did those feet in ancient times/walk upon England's mountains green?") will be turned into a special effects extravaganza of swings and trapezes.
Yet if the heart does bleed at this son et lumiere interpretation of an extraordinary artist, the choice of Blake as the poet of the Dome says something more revealing, and far more more exciting, about new Labour culture than the selection of Andrew Motion as Poet Laureate.
For a government given to caution and control, the appointment of the wild man of the 18th century as official new Labour muse hints at a free spirit in the sober crowd at the top. You might have thought, given the PM's penchant for populism, that Rudyard Kipling, despite his imperialism, was a shoo-in for bard of the Dome - his "If" was voted the nation's favourite poem last year. Alfred Lord Tennyson would have been viewed as too stuffy and prim, a bona fide member of the establishment (not to mention the doomed House of Lords). John Milton must have been a contender but his "no fun, please, I'm Puritan" attitude would have rubbed the new Britannia crowd up the wrong way.
So Blake it is. A bold move: the wild-eyed artist was unorthodox and unrestrained, prone to visitations (Milton, he once claimed, entered his body via the left foot) and exhibitionism (to the great consternation of his neighbours, the poet used to sunbathe naked with his wife in their garden). Not a model citizen, then. All the more exciting (and ultimately, reassuring) that he could earn bourgeois Blair's seal of approval. If it is impossible to imagine Tony and Cherie lying starkers on the lawn at No 10, no one could deny that the poet's work is in tune with the PM.
Here is a genius whose poems (and paintings) mixed vague Christianity with soft-toned socialism (sound familiar?): talk of eternity and salvation alternated with horror at the injustice inherent in brute capitalism. The verses are studded with God and nature, politics and work: a holistic approach to life that the Third Way architects would approve of. The Proverbs overflow with the kind of pithy homespun wisdom ("exuberance is beauty") that Alastair Campbell's sound-bites try to ape.
As for the vision behind the whole opus, its bold promises of a new Jerusalem engage and fascinate - though beyond the words of beauty and seductive energy, there is little coherence. The lulling rhymes and dazzling stanzas cannot mask how logic has been sacrificed to exaltation, and realism to romance. Here, too, we hear faint echoes of Blair's crowd-pleasing mood music: lots of vivid colour and some electrifying imaginative leaps that would provide a perfect backdrop for Dome acrobats and sword-swallowers but might not sustain the arduous day-to-day business of long-term politics.
Still, no matter how wacky his vision, it's wonderful to think of Blake, naked in the sun, penning verses that would inspire Blair with fervour to build a new world. Not even its kitschy Dome rendition can make us doubt that we need a bit of poetry in our lives - whether it be Blake's or Blair's.
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