By Terry Liddle
The Foots and The Poets, Derek Summers (ed.). London, Jarndyce, 2010, Paperback, 123 pages; ISBN 978-1-900718-75-2.
Plato wanted poetry banned in his republic. Like many totalitarian reactionaries he saw poetry as essentially subversive. This book shows the relationship between poetry and three generations of a family which if not subversive were at the very least politically radical.
The first subject is Isaac Foot, the son of a Plymouth carpenter who qualified as a solicitor and became the Liberal MP for Bodmin. An avid reader, he collected 70,000 books. He also admired the Civil War parliamentary Oliver Cromwell and his Latin Secretary, the blind poet John Milton. He founded the Cromwell Association and kept a commonplace book full of quotations from Milton. The book contains several of Milton’s works in poetry and prose although sadly not his poem in praise of the executed regicide Sir Henry Vane. In his biography of his father, written with Alison Highet, Michael records Isaac’s love of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy and R.L. Stevenson.
The youngest of Isaac’s children was the late Michael Foot MP for Plymouth Devonport and then Ebbw Vale, editor of Tribune and leader of the Labour Party in the 1980s. Michael converted from Liberalism to Socialism when he saw poverty and unemployment in Liverpool where he worked as a shipping clerk. Michael was not only the biographer of Aneurin Bevan but also studies of Byron and Jonathan Swift.
Another source of inspiration was the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx’s cousin. Heine was not only a poet but also a political philosopher. In his On The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, published in 1834. He maintained that the German philosophical revolution, which culminated in the work of Hegel, was the prelude to a political democratic revolution. Included in the selection of Heine’s writings in the book is his poem / Don’t Believe In Heaven. ” I don’t believe in the devil,/ In Hell or its counterpart:/ I believe in your eyes only/And in your devilish heart.” There is also his celebration of a Luddite-style uprising by the weavers of Silesia.
Michael was also interested in more recent poets, Among them was Adrian Mitchell. When proposed for the position of Poet Laureate, he wrote a poem on why he wanted the monarchy abolished. Mitchell first read his poem To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam) at an anti-war rally in 1964 and revised it to include subsequent conflicts. Other modern poets who interested Michael included Tony Harrison, Derek Walcott and U. A. Fanthorpe, “Her poetry is one of the delights of the age,” said Michael.
Michael had an interest in the radical essayist William Hazlitt and in the poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s sonnet to Milton and his sonnet to Toussaint L’Ouverture, the former slave who overthrew the rule of the French slave owners in Haiti, are included in the book. Wordsworth may seem a strange choice. He at first supported the French revolution, “But Europe at that time was filled with joy/France standing on the top of golden hours/And human nature seeming born again”, but later became reactionary. Some would call him a class traitor.
The last Foot is Paul, Michael’s nephew, one of the more intelligent and attractive members of the Socialist Workers’ Party. He was another convert from Liberalism to Socialism, Socialism, not of the social-democratic, but of the Trotskyist kind. At public school he met Richard Ingrams, editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, and wrote for it for several years. For 14 years he wrote for the Daily Mirror and later edited the SWP’s paper Socialist Worker.
Paul’s hero was the romantic poet Percy Shelly, an atheist who was seen as a precursor of Socialism. Paul wrote two books on Shelly and a number of pamphlets including work on the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the miners’ leader A. J. Cook. The book includes selections from Shelly’s Masque of Anarchy which was inspired by the events in St. Peter’s Field in Manchester. Thousands of radical reformers gathered to listen to Henry Hunt only to be cut down by the sabres of the yeomanry. It calls for resistance by the oppressed and exploited: “Shake your chains to earth like dew/Which in sleep had fallen on you/ Ye are many, they are few.”
The book contains a useful biography of source books and further reading.
There are those who disparage poetry, who dismiss it a so much romantic waffle, but as this book shows it can excite and inspire the struggles which still need to be fought.