Overt argument or evident intention are often, in this new criticism, less important than the critic’s own linguistic detective work - bias, after all, is always unconscious. The conventions around quotations have also changed: TS Eliot Prize-winning Hannah Sullivan’s enviably accomplished poetic oeuvre, for example, is said to hold a “obsessive superimposition of the past on the just-past-present” and a sinister “fantasy of an unchanging nation”, on the basis not of verse but of conflated extracts from an “essay” which transpires on closer inspection to be a short piece of journalism about a favourite park. Thus Parmar diagnoses Carol Ann Duffy with “lyric dread” - an end-of-empire anxiety - and the fear of “the influx of foreign bodies of all kinds” on the evidence, not of her oeuvre or even a collection of poems, but of an image of oilseed rape in a single poem. Wide assertions may balance on very slender, tweet-sized proofs.
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Now the word has shrunk to mean a single metaphor or even word. Once, the word ‘trope’ indicated a system of language and imagery traceable through a whole, lengthy text - a semantic field or underlying narrative shape. It is not surprising now, to come across terms such as Parmar’s “lyric violence” and “lyric dread”, nor her idea that mere poems, can have (unspecified) “real, even dangerous, consequences”.Īs it has become more relevant and exciting, literary criticism has also become more personal and shed some of its hefty academic conventions.
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Books such as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility have further popularised the activity of linguistic rooting in living humans, and all of this lends political relevance and prestige back to the parent activity of literary criticism. Literary criticism has long taught us to trace and name moral systems in texts through the identification of tropes and story, but now it has discovered a more important job in rooting that malignancy out. There’s been a shift in attitudes too: Parmar is surely right to say, as she does in her essay, that in the last few years many book-reading people have come to agree that our literary culture is actively malign, infected, as she puts it, with “a pervasive and unempathetic whiteness”. As our lives have shrunk over Covid, scrolling through the endless smorgasbord of quotes that is Twitter and analysing them become many people’s primary political activity. Academic essays like Parmar’s are cited on social media accounts and pinned to profiles like manifestos. It’s a large charge for a slim volume, but literary criticism is an ambitious medium these days. She warned that this book may morally infect the reader, and that to appreciate it is “to be beguiled by the benevolence of whiteness” and even enslaved, as the book “requires an ever-replenishing source of aspirational learners - not just these children, but all poets who are perceived as ‘striving'”. Remarkably, in 2020, Professor Sandeep Parmar’s state-of-the-nation 2020 essay on poetry and race, “Still Not a British Subject” chose this book by children, rather than any of the hundreds of anthologies and collections of poetry by adults published in the preceding few years, as its ultimate and most damned item. They predate by some time those against my memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, and are in many ways foundational to them. But the literary and theoretical charges against it are very serious.
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It is not as if there is a real world scandal or complaint from a young poet here - the reverse is true. It’s hard to believe that a little under four years later, its rights have been returned to me and its charities have repudiated it. There are famous names and warm critiques on the back.
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They tell you that they have all been paid and further profits are dedicated to charity. The tasteful end flaps give you the names of the children included in the anthology - for me a register of beloved students - and the information that all of them are first and second-generation migrants to the UK. It’s such an innocent-looking little paperback with its pretty gilt cover. Dozens of them - too many to store, but I felt I had to save them from pulping. The last copies of England, Poems from a School are piled up on my kitchen table along with heaps of all my other Picador books going back to 1996.