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model of what poetry itself is – frontier work between death and life, old year and new, bread and body. This is an essential collection for all interested in the full, alarming power of poetry. It is a first-class orientation to Watkins’s very large corpus of work, and it also, in the aphorisms at the end, directs us towards an authoritative vision of poetic ambition and poetic humility alike. ‘A poet need have only one enemy: his reputation.’ Watkins’s reputation may be overdue for rethinking, but that would be of no great moment in his eyes. He would only ask that we listen with him as well as to him. +Rowan Cantuar x New Selected Poems
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Introduction Vernon Watkins was described by Henry Reed in 1945 as ‘the one poet of his generation who holds out unequivocal promise of greatness’.1 Nearly twenty years later, in 1964, Kathleen Raine made it clear that this promise had been fulfilled: I first heard the poetry of Vernon Watkins praised in the nineteen thirties, by Dylan Thomas, who then said that he was probably the finest poet then writing in Britain (unless Thomas himself). This was not an obvious judgement at the time… but it is clearly true at the time of writing… because Vernon Watkins has during the intervening years perfected himself in the poetic art as few of his contemporaries have done.2 At the time of his death, in 1967, Watkins was one of the clear candidates for Poet Laureate; the previous Laureate, John Masefield, had died on 12 May. Faber, where he was supported by T.S. Eliot, had published six volumes of Watkins’s poetry, to increasing acclaim, and had recently brought out his Selected Poems 1930–1960 (1967); they would shortly bring out his posthumous final collection, Fidelities, followed by a memorial volume, Vernon Watkins 1906–1967. This included tributes by Michael Hamburger, Ceri Richards and Hugo Williams; elegies by Marianne Moore and R.S. Thomas; an essay by Kathleen Raine, in which she described Watkins as ‘the greatest lyric poet of my generation’; and an essay by Philip Larkin, who wrote: ‘In Vernon’s presence poetry seemed like a living stream, in which one had only to dip the vessel of one’s devotion. He made it clear how one could, in fact “live by poetry”; it was a vocation, at once difficult as sainthood and easy as breathing.’ And yet, nearly forty years after his death, Vernon Watkins has disappeared almost completely from the commonly perceived map of twentieth-century poetry. This re-introduction of Watkins, as a poet, will also touch on some of the reasons for such a mysterious vanishing act. One reason is undoubtedly his own highly unusual attitude to fame and reputation. In countless remarks he reveals that he had xi

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model of what poetry itself is – frontier work between death and life, old year and new, bread and body.

This is an essential collection for all interested in the full, alarming power of poetry. It is a first-class orientation to Watkins’s very large corpus of work, and it also, in the aphorisms at the end, directs us towards an authoritative vision of poetic ambition and poetic humility alike. ‘A poet need have only one enemy: his reputation.’ Watkins’s reputation may be overdue for rethinking, but that would be of no great moment in his eyes. He would only ask that we listen with him as well as to him.

+Rowan Cantuar x

New Selected Poems

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