Collected Poems

Reviews / Votes

'Sandeep Parmar's edition of Hope Mirrlees' poetry is a testimony to modern scholarship and provides a missing piece of the British modernist jigsaw.'

Matthew Mitton, Women: A Cultural Review 'Paris is a modernist tour de force.'

It has been a rich year for poetry in the English-speaking world [...] Three [...] books, all related to poetry, stood out for me [...] Sandeep Parmar's editing and reclaiming of poet Hope Mirrlees's oeuvre in Collected Poems: Hope Mirrlees, spanning from Mirrlees's modernist tour de force Paris (1920), through to poems that are truly dreadful, if still interesting in context. Parmar is a highly skilled literary investigator who knows that a great poem necessarily relies on lesser poems if we want to understand its full import. Hope Mirrlees's 'lost masterpiece'.

Click here to read this review on the Guardian website.



'A swift, fleeting sense of the past is as near as I have ever got to a mystical experience,' wrote Hope Mirrlees in 'Listening in to the Past', an essay published in 1926. A little later she describes her interest in creating an 'aural kaleidoscope': 'disparate fragments of Cockney, Egyptian, Babylonian, Provencal, ever forming into new patterns for the ear'.

What this 'mystical experience' might feel like, and what the 'aural kaleidoscope' might look and sound like, can be seen in her long poem Paris, written in 1919 and published by Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1920. Woolf called it 'indecent, obscure, brilliant', and the poem describes (the word 'describes' is inadequate: it dynamically enacts, verbally and with an array of compelling visual and typographical effects) a day in post-first world war Paris.

Paris is the product of immersion: not just in Parisian high culture, but in a seamier, more disjointed and immediate kind of metropolitanism. Voices, machine noises and musical notes are caught in mid-air, shreds of advertising, brand names, logos, street signs and even the lettering on monuments, are conveyed in poetry that takes liberties not just with standard verse forms, but with linear writing itself.

It's the Paris of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, of cubism and surrealism, jazz culture and nightlife. It is a place of many pasts, with its ruins and its dead (there are several allusions to the war, and to the 1919 Paris peace conference), but also of multiple presents. Mirrlees writes from the point of view of the 'flaneuse': dreamlike, but retaining the broken edges of urban experience, the almost filmic shifts between slow-motion and speedy blur.

The poem could be disorientating, but it holds together because Mirrlees lets us enter the dream, reassuring us from the start that any disorientation is part of the experience and not a barrier to it. 'I wade knee-deep in dreams ... the dreams have reached my waist', she writes, and there is a sense of a poetic voice being both crowded out and submerged. At the same time, she notes everything with precision: she sees, reads, hears, smells, tastes and touches, and there's an exhilarating mix of sophistication and rawness in the writing. One minute we're in the Louvre, the next we're catching wafts from the Paris sewers:

It is pleasant to sit on the Grands

Boulevards -

They smell of

Cloacae

Hot indiarubber

Poudre de riz

Algerian tobacco

There's a lot of poetic product-placement going on (usually for food and drink - this is a city to ingest, not just look at) and Mirrlees enjoys the siren song of consumerism, the closeness of advertising to art, of publicity slogans to poetry. In the line 'The Scarlet Woman shouting BYRRH and deafening St John of Patmos', Mirrlees invokes a famous aperitif poster featuring a woman in a red dress beating a drum, and yokes it to the 'scarlet woman' of the Book of Revelation. As with TS Eliot and other modernists, myth and reality, past and present, are not separated but braided together. The modernist experience, as distinct perhaps from the merely modern one, is grounded in a recognition that our lives today are lived alongside, rather than merely 'after', our lives yesterday.

There is also a real engagement with lived reality: war, displacement, poverty, venereal disease, rural depopulation (Paris may be the world's artistic capital but it is also 'a huge homesick peasant'), and urban hardship. The poem plays on metaphors of surface and depth: the Metro, the sewers, the shady demi-monde on the one hand, the art works, monuments, galleries on the other. The most ferocious instance of this metaphor comes in the line 'Freud has dredged the river and, grinning horribly, / waves his garbage in a glare of electricity', where the unconscious is posited as modernity's own underworld, our own cloacae.

Despite this, the dominant feeling in the poem is of happy excess. There is no sense in Mirrlees, which we find in her friend Eliot, that modern life cheapens and dulls us. On the contrary, there is always more in one minute of modern life - 'Little funny things ceaselessly happening' - than there is space for in any book, symphony or canvas. Paris predates The Waste Land by two years, and though it is less achieved and resonant than Eliot's poem, it is, in an English context, just as experimental and unprecedented. It is also full of wit, freshness and clever bilingual punning - 'silence of the greve' for a workers' strike, 'an English padre tilt[ing] with the Moulin Rouge', it is a sort of cousin to The Waste Land, and perhaps even its optimistic antidote.

Mirrlees was born in Kent in 1887, and died in 1978. After Paris, she published no poetry for nearly 50 years, and her poems of the 60s bear no sign of her earlier radicalism, though many are impressively stringent in their thinking.

This edition includes several essays, an introduction by Sandeep Parmar, and a definitive commentary on Paris by Julia Briggs, who did more than anybody else to bring Mirrlees out of obscurity. It is a pleasure to see Briggs's careful, elegant advocacy of what she calls Mirrlees's 'lost modernist masterpiece' finally bear fruit in this fine edition.



Patrick McGuinness's Jilted City is published by Carcanet. In recent years, much work has been done in studies of the literary modernist movements to fete women writers such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy. Given this, it seems all the more remarkable to find that the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees, edited by Sandeep Parmar, is the first time the work of this writer, whose long poem, Paris, has been hailed as a masterpiece and compared favourably to The Wasteland, has been brought together. This proves that there is still work to be done in the field, and it is Parmar's hope that her collection will facilitate such work.

Mirrlees is not totally unknown; her novel Lud-in-the-Mist is something of a cult text of the fantasy genre. Not only does it remain in print, but Neil Gaiman lists it as 'a little golden miracle of a book'. Despite the status off this novel, it is no surprise that Mirrlees' other novels and poetry are unfamiliar, for the writer herself was resistant to re-issuing and critical attention in her lifetime. Lud-in-the-Mist was in fact only republished (and even broadcast on BBC Radio) without Mirrlees' knowledge; no-one knew she was still alive.

It is refreshing to discover Mirrlees' poetry through this collection. Parmar has compiled an excellent introduction which sets out the author's life, her crucial intellectual (and perhaps romantic) companionship with the academic Jane Harrison, her links to the Bloomsbury set, the Hogarth Press, the Parisian avant-garde, and explores what little contextual information can be gleaned from her reclusive later life. This informs Parmar's readings of the poetry, which has been restored with intellectual rigour from the Mirrlees papers.

The book contains poems that are even more contrasting than is usually the case in Collectededitions. The poems are, in fact, practically at right angles to each other. The work might be categorized as BJH (Before Jane Harrison) and AJH (After Jane Harrison), pre- and post-Catholicism, or blasphemous and reverent. They certainly couldn't be categorized as modernist and post-modernist, for while Paris, the long poem of the first section is most certainly modernist, the later work is formal, even antiquated in tone. The poems from the different decades even look completely different on the page; compare the immediate wild typographic spread of Paris:

THE CHILDREN EAT THE JEW.

PHOTO MIDGET

Heigh ho!

I wade knee-deep in dreams-

with the dense and ordered text of 'Et in Arcadia Ego' which is intellectually and spiritually allusive, and set out with a secure pattern of metre and rhyme:

I have no wish to eat forbidden fruit,

I did not gather roses when I might,

Now I am old and cold,

The years begin to turn on me and bite.

Of this collection, Paris probably deserves most attention as it is startling and, as Parmar states, 'if it was an experiment with form, brought on by the artistic and political climate of 1919 Paris, then the poem's genius is all the more extraordinary for it'. If the long poem does get the lion's share of attention, it reflects not only on our continuing taste for modernist texts, but also on our interest in situating texts within their wider context. The later poetry doesn't fit easily with other 1970s poetry, while Paris is a modernist exemplar, a 'psychogeographical flanerie', which one critic even suggests may have inspired The Waste Land. While it is tempting to make value judgements, Parmar gently reminds us that 'neither work should be taken as a more or less genuine representation of the poet's imagination'. This is why there is value in retrospectively reading the differing works of this interesting figure in completeness, for all its strange disparity. Principally known to the fantasy community for Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) is increasingly emerging as a considerable figure in twentieth-century British literature, somebody who was friendly with T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and yet pursued a line as an imaginative writer akin to that pursued by giants of modern fantasy such a J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. If her modernist experimentation links her to Eliot, and her lesbianism and defiance of bourgeois norms to Woolf, her conversion to Roman Catholicism and her sense of the liberating possibilities fantasy could offer to the humdrum colourlessness of the modern world link her to Tolkien. Indeed, if there is a female Tolkien, Mirrlees is it. (Naomi Mitchison, a significant novelist and crucial early reader of The Lord of the Rings, never wrote fantasy in quite the same sense).

It is no surprise to fin out that Mirrlees wrote poetry; after all, poetry was essential to the work of Inklings Lewis, Williams and Tolkien, even if in no case was it their major vehicle. It was not Mirrlees's major vehicle either - despite the accomplishment of Paris (1919), the one long poem known and published in her lifetime - but the poems offer sundry delights, at different times sounding religious, humorous, celebratory and elegiac notes. Sandeep Parmar has provided and extensive introduction as well as including several of Mirrlees's essays which flesh out the book and make it a useful compendium of information about Mirrlees that can serve as a general introduction to her as a literary figure as well as a compilation of all her published and previously unpublished poetry.

On the back cover of the book, Paris is compared to Eliot's Waste Land (printed three years late, also be the Woolfs' Hogarth Press), and indeed the reader, even without such a suggestion, makes the apposition immediately: the quotations from advertisements, the inclusion of snippets from urban soundscapes, briefly dramatized characters fumbling their way through the detritus of urban life, the hurtling contemporaneity of the busy city undergirded by many layer of allusion and reference:

The Louvre, the Ritz, the Palais-Royale, the Hotel De Ville.

Are light and frail

Plaster pavilions of pleasure

Set up to serve the ten days junketing

Of citizens in masks and dominoes

A la occasion du mariage de Monseigneur le Dauphin



Juxtaposed to 'Workmen in pale blue / Barrows of vegetables / Busy dogs' and 'The lost romance" penned by some Ovid, an unwilling thrall / in fairyland', these lines give some measure of the different ranges and tonalities of the poem. We are reminded by it that the catastrophist school of modern literary history, in which poetry by such as Eliot was deemed to be decisively different from what was before and around it, is wrong; that there was a far more graduated transition from Victorian into modern, and that 'native' British poets - i.e. those, unlike Eliot, actually born in Britain - played a role. Mirrlees takes steps like including musical scores and parsing out 'lily of the valley' one letter per line, even riskier that Eliot's. (Parmar suspects, but is not certain, that Eliot read the poem, though 'asHogarth author, he would surely have known of its existence'). Though it is not possible now to write a history of modern British poetry, like Herbert Palmer's Post Victorian Poetry composed in the 1930s, that dismisses Eliot entirely, Mirrlees's 'Paris' shows that there were other paths to qualities supposed distinctly Eliotic. Mirrlees, indeed, combined the religiosity associated with the later Eliot with the discordant cityscapes of the earlier work. She also, through her friendship (and probable love affair) with Jane Harrison, had a far more direct relationship with what Parmar terms 'ideas about ritual and religion' than Eliot did through his reading of Frazer.

Mirlees's poem is, though, for better or for worse, far more comprehensible than Eliot's. It is an unconventional portrait of Paris but the referent is clear; there is no real dispute over what it means. For all the intermittent grime and stench, it is highly celebratory of Paris, seeing it as a fantastic, enchanted city, with less bitterness and satire than Eliot found in London. And Mirrlees's poems from Moods and Tensions (1976) - published two years before Mirrlees dies - though far more conventionally lyrical than 'Paris,' are similarly direct, even often enigmatic. Take the last poem from Moods and Tensions, 'Jesus Wept':



My mother had a maid called Barbara,

And she was born under a tragic star,

But no one ever saw her shed a tear,

For she was crowned with love, as was Queen Guinevere.

For Love she drowned herself, and she was held accurst

To pray for her neither simple nor gentle durst,

And through the timeless years of poetry she slept

Unmourned and unannealed, but Jesus wept.

The archaic diction ('durst' and 'accurst' and the traditional, quasi-balladic meter and rhyme) join with the exaltation of the humble - a servant compared with queen Guinevere - and the sense of the world's non-recognition of the afflicted to render a scene both poignant and disturbing. Jesus is the one way out, the one entity who will take pity on Barbara and take stock of her need. But note that this Jesus cannot redeem, but only weeps; yes, referring to a famous line in the Bible, but in this case rendering him no more potent than a bystander.Yet, it is notable, with respect to parallels to the Inklings, how explicitly Jesus is brought in here, and how Jesus is seen as the solution to the dilemmas of the juxtaposition of the fantastic and the modern. A writer like Tolkien may do this tacitly, implicitly through his theories of sub-creation. But Jesus never comes into a Tolkien text as a deus ex machina as he does in this Mirrlees poem (even though, in only weeping, he is more or a deus absconitus).

Yet in 'Heaven is Not Fairyland', Mirrlees makes clear the importance of fantasy in her religious vision. The poem, the reader soon realises, disagrees with its title. Whereas we might think she is going to caution us not to equate 'the gingerbread houses' and 'tales come true' of Fairyland with the 'Pure Act' of God, Mirrlees finds the idea of pure act noisome, the tangibility of Fairyland preferable, saying of a more abstract, disembodied God, ' How can we stand it'. One is reminded here of Geoffrey Hill's sequence ' Funeral Music' where heaven as 'a palace blazing / With perpetual silence as with torches' is found equally inadequate. In 'A Meditation On Donatello's Annunciation in the Church of Santa Croce, Florence,' Mirrlees goes further and seems to see Mary as the only compassionate element in the Christ-drama; she speaks of the confrontation between 'an odious father and a graceless son' in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov but in the context of the Annunciation we think of another Father and Son. By playing with the sonic similarity between 'Donatello' and 'Madonna,' Mirrlees sees painter and mother as coequal engenderers of the salvation represented by Christ, in a way that significantly wrests the story from partriarchal moorings:

Madonna tell, Madonna tell, O

Donna tell the Catholic-nurtured Donatello

He must have seen St. Gabriel.

The slight over-explicitness of 'Catholic-nurtured' (even though it buttresses the maternal theme) is indicative of Mirrlees's' main flaw as a poet: an excessive discursivity, lacking, for instance the canorous density of the best of Tolkien's lyrics. Like Tolkien, though, she was sensitive to the power of pure sound in poetry, an insight enhanced by the work she did with Harrison on Greek - and Russian-language verse. In 'A Portrait of the Second Eye, Painted in Pompeian Red,' Mirrlees writes another Marian poem, picturing Mary and a woman from Pompeii offered the choice of a suffering divine or a deathly bacchanal; Mary makes the right choice, but the poem is made dramatic by the palpable evocation of darkness and negation. Tolkien, as can be seen in Letter 152 and 320, admitted a Mariological agenda in his writing (albeit far more tacitly), which can be seen as another bond between Mirrlees and Tolkien.

The previously uncollected poems also offer many riches. 'The Moon-Maid' mixes fantastic and Christian imagery with that of the Aesthetic Movement, comparing 'her once sung by Baudelaire' to 'a child that was reared by Faery hands'. As in her fantasy fiction, Faery is seen as a surprise that can pierce the carapace of bourgeois complacency: 'The Faerie Changelings' speaks to the rebelliousness and riskiness of fairies, in this case embodying an ambiguous 'joy that by God is banned'. Mirrlees, in 'Some talk of Alexander and some sing Monty's praise,' is utterly immune to the patriotic rhetoric of the Second World War, seeing the war as leading to the dissolution of 'male prestige'; this sceptical though not pacifist attitude towards the war's outcome, and also a notable tone of anti-Americanism, for instance in its reference to Roosevelt and 'Roosefeld', link it to Tolkien's letter 77: 'O God! O Montreal! O Minnesota! O Michigan!' The last poem in the book, ' Dusk,' seems to see the Angel of Dusk and the Lady of Dreams as antitheses. But the Angel ends up being benign, power saving consciousness from a vale of tears.

The essays are also notable. 'Bedside Books' (1928), perhaps too cosily twee in its readerly intimacy, nonetheless charms. 'Gothic Dreams' (also 1928) interestingly spotlights the Catholic sources of the Gothic, the link between Gothic and fantasy as both an index of modernity in innovation and a protest of modernity in its deliberate reinstatement of motifs of the past, particularly medieval ones. In a 1926 essay on the Russian writer Alexei Remizov, Mirrlees discusses this now neglected writer in edifying and vivid terms; if Mirrlees is correct that at the time she wrote he was considered 'the greatest living writer' of Russia, this did not remain the consensus, although the Soviet trauma diverted the course of Russian literature dramatically. The 'magnifying and golden atmosphere' of Remizov's stories is well evoked by Mirrlees, and provides a link between the trading of great Russian writing and modern British fantasy, between, as it were, Tolstoy and Tolkien. 'Listening in to the Past' (1936) centers on the time of Mary Queen of Scots - not in any narrative but on its own terms. History is seen as stories, the past as a muse-like source of inspiration. 'The Religion of Women' (1927) postulates that women are more nostalgic than men, care more about the past: 'It is love that makes men unhappy, and time that makes women so'. This is a provocative generalisation, but there are too many particular instances that contradict it: sticking with examples already brought up, the Eliot who wrote 'footfalls echo in the memory' was thinking as much about Time as Love, and Tolkien's Elves, afflicted by nostalgia for the days of their grandeur, are mainly male, Galadriel being one of the less past-centred (though it could be because she is trying to atone). But women have as many individual motives as men do, and Mirrlees's argument is best appreciated in light of her own attempts to reconcile feminism and Catholicism, and why, for her, traditionalism was emancipatory in gender terms.

Though this book necessarily does not emphasise Mirrlees's fantastic prose, most familiar to readers of Mythlore, Parmar does a good job, in his introduction and notes, of giving an overview and connecting Lud-in-the-Mist with what we have here. This volume gives a sense of Mirrlees's range and ambition, which will further add to our sense of her as an important figure in modern fantasy writing.