Fantastic post. Really gets at what makes Logue so good. I was very into him at one point, years ago, and even tried to write something Logue-inspired, but for Campanella's City of the Sun (you can imagine how well that worked, ha ha). This makes me want to revisit him.
Much appreciated, honestly it's a blind spot for me too -- if more of it were like Logue, it wouldn't be! There's a whole group of loosely associated British artists of the day that haven't quite gotten their due I think. I suppose bc a lot of them were in theatre and radio. I would kill for a good book on the 1950s-70s BBC/Royal Shakespeare Company/National Theatre world including people like Peter Brook, Kenneth Tynan, Peter Hall, Logue, Harrison Birtwistle. So much of it is intriguing bc it survives only as a memory or in shaky 16mm film or half a radio broadcast etc. It would be better than yet another book on Bloomsbury or something.
I forgot to include in the post Alan Howard of the RSC reading War Music, he absolutely slays. Another tremendous talent who did most of his work on the stage, you can see him in the old Playing Shakespeare documentary on youtube too -- totally captivating.
Months late to this, but this essay is a wonderful precis of what makes War Music great. That line about it being as close to knowing what it was like to experience Shakespeare--I've felt similarly about the poem, and just how extraordinarily *inspired*, i.e., alive, it is. Relatedly, your point about the wild vitality of the language is spot on--War Music's verbal energy seems to gain the kind of vast, impersonal, bringing-everything-in, almost inhuman power of voice that we associate with things like prophecy--Milton, maybe, but really more like Homer or the best books of the Bible (Job, Ecc, Psalms, etc), while at the same time being a lot more playful than the Bible (or another way of putting it: it's a lot more like Jonah than Job).
But even with that impersonal force, the poem's voice keeps up a strong human component. The tautness of its lines call to mind that of Emerson's sentences, and the wit and the anachronisms and various registers evoke everything from Eliot to voices on stage at the theater to people in a bar--what Sir Thomas Browne calls that "taverne musick, which makes one man merry, another mad" and in which "there is something in it of Divinity more than the eare discovers." So much of the poem is always coming back, and like Shakespeare, the world daily seems to call for a reference--for years now, the "he who is forever talking about enemies is himself the enemy!" line has been a constant.
Whatever his conceits about himself, Logue was keenly aware of the dim prospects for a poet looking at history and thinking about their work's chances. I think in an interview or his prose somewhere he calls a classic a work that survives the fall of its civilization and/or language--a test the Greeks and Romans have endured, he pointed out, but which not even Shakespeare has been subjected to yet.
Also, re your comment on the art of 1950s-1970s, have you read Logue's memoir Prince Charming? It's excellent in its own right, a moving book full of memorable scenes and great prose, and should be more widely read for those things alone. But it also has the advantage of vividly depicting many of the people you mention and the scene they were part of. It's not as comprehensive as the book you wished existed but a good substitute!
Thank you, it makes my day when people are as blown away by it as I was. It does feel like something so elemental and ancient but also something that could only have been written after Eliot.
I haven't read Prince Charming but I'd very much like to. I'll bump it up the list. I heard something about a biography of him in the works a while ago, but not sure what's happening with that.
If anyone reading this happens to be a wealthy benefactor and wants to install me in London for a year or two, I think I could do a good job writing the book on that scene.
I feel similarly, maybe even to the point of immoderate enthusiasm, when I come across other Logue readers in the wild. War Music does seem to have reached the broader culture of literary readers in a way that many contemporary poems (and especially recent long poems) do not. I actually don't think I've ever met someone who, whether they read poetry regularly or not, and whether they had already read WM on their own or because I encouraged them to, didn't think it an incredible work. And yet still, I wish it had more readers, wish it had a place in our culture like some of the most highly regarded novels.
I agree re Eliot--definitely couldn't have been written without him. I think there's something to thinking of Modernism as spanning the whole 20th century (and even reaching into the 21st) rather than being seen off by post-modernism or whatever we're in now, with Eliot a main initiator and Logue as an example of its "late" period, with War Music in particular being an example of late Modernist epic, maybe the last.
Fantastic post. Really gets at what makes Logue so good. I was very into him at one point, years ago, and even tried to write something Logue-inspired, but for Campanella's City of the Sun (you can imagine how well that worked, ha ha). This makes me want to revisit him.
Great analysis. Contemporary (well, close enough) poetry is a real blind spot of mine, but Logue seems fascinating, I’ll be checking this out!
Much appreciated, honestly it's a blind spot for me too -- if more of it were like Logue, it wouldn't be! There's a whole group of loosely associated British artists of the day that haven't quite gotten their due I think. I suppose bc a lot of them were in theatre and radio. I would kill for a good book on the 1950s-70s BBC/Royal Shakespeare Company/National Theatre world including people like Peter Brook, Kenneth Tynan, Peter Hall, Logue, Harrison Birtwistle. So much of it is intriguing bc it survives only as a memory or in shaky 16mm film or half a radio broadcast etc. It would be better than yet another book on Bloomsbury or something.
I forgot to include in the post Alan Howard of the RSC reading War Music, he absolutely slays. Another tremendous talent who did most of his work on the stage, you can see him in the old Playing Shakespeare documentary on youtube too -- totally captivating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCSCiHKBLHY
Months late to this, but this essay is a wonderful precis of what makes War Music great. That line about it being as close to knowing what it was like to experience Shakespeare--I've felt similarly about the poem, and just how extraordinarily *inspired*, i.e., alive, it is. Relatedly, your point about the wild vitality of the language is spot on--War Music's verbal energy seems to gain the kind of vast, impersonal, bringing-everything-in, almost inhuman power of voice that we associate with things like prophecy--Milton, maybe, but really more like Homer or the best books of the Bible (Job, Ecc, Psalms, etc), while at the same time being a lot more playful than the Bible (or another way of putting it: it's a lot more like Jonah than Job).
But even with that impersonal force, the poem's voice keeps up a strong human component. The tautness of its lines call to mind that of Emerson's sentences, and the wit and the anachronisms and various registers evoke everything from Eliot to voices on stage at the theater to people in a bar--what Sir Thomas Browne calls that "taverne musick, which makes one man merry, another mad" and in which "there is something in it of Divinity more than the eare discovers." So much of the poem is always coming back, and like Shakespeare, the world daily seems to call for a reference--for years now, the "he who is forever talking about enemies is himself the enemy!" line has been a constant.
Whatever his conceits about himself, Logue was keenly aware of the dim prospects for a poet looking at history and thinking about their work's chances. I think in an interview or his prose somewhere he calls a classic a work that survives the fall of its civilization and/or language--a test the Greeks and Romans have endured, he pointed out, but which not even Shakespeare has been subjected to yet.
Also, re your comment on the art of 1950s-1970s, have you read Logue's memoir Prince Charming? It's excellent in its own right, a moving book full of memorable scenes and great prose, and should be more widely read for those things alone. But it also has the advantage of vividly depicting many of the people you mention and the scene they were part of. It's not as comprehensive as the book you wished existed but a good substitute!
Thank you, it makes my day when people are as blown away by it as I was. It does feel like something so elemental and ancient but also something that could only have been written after Eliot.
I haven't read Prince Charming but I'd very much like to. I'll bump it up the list. I heard something about a biography of him in the works a while ago, but not sure what's happening with that.
If anyone reading this happens to be a wealthy benefactor and wants to install me in London for a year or two, I think I could do a good job writing the book on that scene.
I feel similarly, maybe even to the point of immoderate enthusiasm, when I come across other Logue readers in the wild. War Music does seem to have reached the broader culture of literary readers in a way that many contemporary poems (and especially recent long poems) do not. I actually don't think I've ever met someone who, whether they read poetry regularly or not, and whether they had already read WM on their own or because I encouraged them to, didn't think it an incredible work. And yet still, I wish it had more readers, wish it had a place in our culture like some of the most highly regarded novels.
I agree re Eliot--definitely couldn't have been written without him. I think there's something to thinking of Modernism as spanning the whole 20th century (and even reaching into the 21st) rather than being seen off by post-modernism or whatever we're in now, with Eliot a main initiator and Logue as an example of its "late" period, with War Music in particular being an example of late Modernist epic, maybe the last.
Definitely read Prince Charming!
I just ordered it, will hopefully get around to it soon.
Nice!