By Roth Dikhter
Paine is well known as a writer. His Rights of Man is an incisive critique of monarchy and a passionate advocacy of republican democracy; his Age of Reason from a deist standpoint undermines religious orthodoxy. He is far less well known as a poet. This article seeks to place him in the tradition of English Radical Poetry and compare his work with some of his contemporaries and some of those who came after him.
In 2005 the Freethought History Research Group and the Thomas Paine Society took the bold step of republishing Miscellaneous Poems Of That Noble of Nature, Thomas Paine, which had first been published by James Watson around 1840. This is a collection of 16 poems of various quality, they deal with subjects ranging from love to the death of General Wolf, and his troubled relationship with George Washington. His best is the Liberty Tree, a song to be sung to the tune of The Gods Of The Greeks. Paine writes : ” But hear o ye swains Ctis a tale most profane)/How all the tyrannical powers/King, Commons and Lords, are uniting amain/To cut down this guardian of ours/From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms/Through the land let the sound of it flee/Let the far and the near all unite with a cheer/ In defence of our Liberty Tree”.*This pamphlet can still be had from either organization at £2 plus postage.
If English Radical Poetry can be said to have a beginning it is in the work of John Milton ( 1608-1674 ). He was a strong supporter of Cromwell and the Commonwealth and Cromwell’s Latin Secretary of Foreign Tongues. Apart from being a poet he was also a pamphleteer. In 1649 he wrote The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, ” It is lawful”, wrote Milton, “for any who have the power, to call to account a tyrant, or wicked king, and after due conviction, to depose and put him to death…” In 1660 he wrote The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. But the Establishment, fearing a revival of the revolutionary democratic ideas of the Levellers, had already decided to restore the Stuart monarchy. Milton withdrew from public life and went into hiding. He could have easily suffered the fate of Sir Henry Vane who was executed for regicide.
In 1667 Paradise Lost was published. This epic poem was written ostensibly from an orthodox Anglican viewpoint but Blake and Shelly felt Milton showed great sympathy for the devil who was seen as an archetypal rebel. Shelly wrote, “Milton stands alone in the age which he illumined.” Blake created illustrations for Paradise Lost and wrote Milton: A Poem.
William Blake ( 1757-1827 ) was an engraver and poet who was a friend of Shelly and Paine. It is said that it was he who alerted Paine that the authorities were seeking to arrest him on a charge of seditious libel. As it was, Paine was already en route to France having been elected a deputy to the National Convention. Unlike Paine, Blake was not an Enlightenment deist. He was a religious mystic influenced by Emmanuel Swedenborg. His views were not those of orthodox Christianity with its promise of heaven for the rich and hell for the sinful poor, but of a new millennium with sexual and racial equality and justice for all. “My business”, said Blake, “is to create Jerusalem.” In 1791 Blake wrote The French Revolution, A Poem in Seven Books. He is firmly on the side of the revolutionaries. In his Proverbs Of Hell, he wrote Prisons are built with stones of law, Brothels with Bricks of Religion, and “As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys”. Such views bring him near to the anti-clerical millenarian sects of the 17th century. For Blake, “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”.
In the ranks of the tigers of wrath was Percy Shelly (1792-1822). Born into a Whig family, he was expected to inherit the family baronetcy. He was educated at Eton where he read Paine and in 1810 went to Oxford University. He was expelled in 1811 for writing The Necessity Of Atheism. “If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the most evident and the clearest.” This led to a falling out with his father, and an often impoverished and nomadic life. Shelly became friends with William Godwin whose Political Justice is a precursor of Anarchism. Shelley eventually eloped with Godwin’s daughter Mary. Unlike Godwin, Shelley involved himself with the working people around him. In Wales he would often go out at night and have long conversations with the reservoir workers who were forced to grow their own food by moonlight in order to live.
In an England being rapidly changed by the industrial revolution, Shelly defined slavery thus: “Tis to let the ghost of Gold, Take from toil a thousand fold. More than e’er its substance could. In the tyrannies of old.” Freedom is, “food , clothes and fire and food for the trampled multitude.” He calls for words not deeds. He sent his poem, The Masque of Anarchy with its call to revolution, to his friend Leigh Hunt in 1819. But it was not published until 1831 amid growing demands for reform. Shelly died in a boating accident in Italy.
Shelly influenced a whole generation of Chartist poets and Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx lectured on his Socialism. Among these poets was John Bedford Lena. Leno was born in Uxbridge in 1826 and came to work in London. He was a Chartist, having founded Chartist branches in Uxbridge and Windsor, and a member of the First International. He met Marx several times and was friends with Deptford’s Red Republican George Hamey. In 1848 he was batoned in the face by the police during demonstrations on Clerkenwell Green.
When the Reform League to campaign for an extension of the male franchise was formed in 1865 he became a leading member. The League held some of the largest demonstrations, some of them ending in riots, the largest seen since Chartist times. The League qualified its demand for manhood suffrage with the term “registered and residential” thus excluding the unemployed and casual workers. After the Reform Act of 1867, the League’s leader Robert Applegrath literally sold out to the ruling class by taking Home Office bribes to mobilise the new enfranchised working class behind the Liberal Party. Leno became a Liberal election agent for the League’s former General Secretary, George Howell.
In 1867 Leno and other Reform League members were met by the French revolutionary Gustave Cluseret. Cluseret offered to start a revolution employing the services of 2,000 Fenian Irishmen. Leno declined which was just as well because the next day there was a full report of the meeting in The Times.
Leno was a prolific poet, The Woolwich Gazette called him the “poet of the poor”. Among his -best known works are King Labour, Judge Not A Man The Song Of The Spade and The Dreamer. Riddled with gout, he spent the last two years of his life in Uxbridge and died in 1894.
It is not known if William Morris (1834-1896) read either Milton or Paine, but his Kelmscott Press produced a magnificent edition of Shelley’s works and he admired John Leno. Morris was born into a prosperous middle class family and was originally destined for the church. His mother had visions of his becoming an archbishop. But after his education at Oxford University he opted for a career of creative design. A polymath he excelled at everything he did from stained glass windows and fabric and wallpaper design to poetry and painting.
The threat of war brought him into politics and eventually he crossed what he called the river of fire and became a socialist. Peeved with the dictatorial way H. M. Hyndman conducted the affairs of the Social Democratic Federation, together with Eleanor Marx, Belfort Bax and others he broke away and formed the Socialist League becoming editor of its paper the Commonweal.
For Morris the pioneer socialists, the few against the world today condemned as fools and dreamers would tomorrow be seen as the brave and wise. No mean poet, after the death of Lord Tennyson he was considered for the post of poet laureate. One wonders what he would have written about Queen Victoria, nicknamed by the radicals of the time Empress Brown. His best known socialist poem is the one he wrote for the funeral of Alfred Linnell who was killed during a Trafalgar Square demonstration. Its refrain of “Not one, not one, but thousands must they slay, but one and all if they would dusk the day” hurls defiance in the face of a murderous ruling class. There were many anarchists in the Socialist League and eventually they removed Morris from the editorship of Commonweal. He wrote his futuristic novel News From Nowhere, which gives a glimpse of what a socialistic society might be like and carried on working for a united socialist party in the Hammersmith Socialist Society until his death in 1896.
What unites all of these poets and countless more are some common themes: opposition to priestcraft and kingcraft, unorthodoxy or event overt atheism, a desire to improve the lot of working people either by radical reform or revolution and visions of a new and better world based on liberty, equality and fraternity.
The Freethought History Research Group, joint publisher of Paine’s poetry, continues this tradition and has recently published, Ca Ira: Poems to Shake the Walls of Church and State. It includes two poems by Terry Liddle, who is a Thomas Paine Society committee member. It can be had for £3.50 post free from the address above.