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Singing School: The Making of a Poet

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Ration your reading of Jon Stallworthy's Singing School. Savor each page. It is a banquet of beautifully written narrative, dialogue, criticism, anecdote, and poetry of a nearly idyllic life. If you're looking for the sensational or quirky, this is not for you. We are charmed with Stallworthy stories of heritage (his "ancestral electricity") from a bright, resourceful and talented family. Otherwise unavailable are portraits of accomplished figures such as Geoffrey Keynes, friend of Rupert Brooke. Others--musicians David Lloyd-Jones, Dudley Moore, Richard Sorabji are burnished briefly, as is poet W.H. Auden. Exacting tutor Maurice Bowra, advisor for Stallworthy's thesis on Yeats, is zestfully evoked in conversation and narration, as is Georgie Yeats, wife of the great Irish poet. Singing School is an enchanting voyage not only about growing up temporally, but intellectually and artistically. It is sprinkled with fine photographs of family, friends, places (some with amusing titles, as of a headmaster: "Joc: the Dragon in his den") and engravings from old poetry books. Family friends and associates are painted in luminous glimpses, such as young Jon's riding instructor, colorful Miss Lavender, who "looked like a witch and spoke like an Oxford don." Throughout his advancing education--"from technicolor to monochrome" as he entered Rugby--we not only read works that influenced Stallworthy's poetical sensibilities (Betjeman, Arnold, Brooke, Thomas, Blake, Yeats, and always documented), but also we are advised by this accomplished critic about their merit. Stallworthy's initiation into writing poetry is amusingly told as a punishment for tardiness at Rugby. Later he was to add award-winning poetry at Magdalen College, Oxford, capturing the prestigious Newdigate Prize in 1958 with "The Earthly Paradise." With each award, Stallworthy blankets his laurels in humility and gratitude. He shifts hats: one moment vibrating under the creative poet's thinking cap, the next coolly lifting his eyebrow under the tall silk of the exacting critic. When he articulates regret about his works, he ensures that we are instructed at the same time about the specific problem. He is as scrupulous an analyst with himself as he has been in his many essays on other poets which have established him as a critic of the first rank. Military service in the Royal West African Frontier Force in Nigeria is rich in character sketches, lively with metaphor. His "Public Performance" chapter about Magdalen days is fertile with the emerging poet's close reading of texts, skillfully explaining his analyses. He makes it interesting by weaving criticism into conversations with fellow students, tutors, and travelling companions in France, Spain, Greece, and the United States as an English-Speaking Union Fellow. The final chapter, "Irish Manuscripts," escorts us through the challenge of writing his thesis (reluctantly undertaken) on Yeats. We accompany the intent scholar as he struggles with Yeats's incorrigible handwriting, as he passes Georgie Yeats's competency test, as he works with her at her kitchen table, and as he is rewarded by her at the majestic Shelbourne Hotel. The few women of importance in Stallworthy's early years are enlivened by poetic imagination. Jacqueline, met at a Breton family summer vacation when Stallworthy was 15, inspired a two-page poem with "the metrics of a night in which pedestrian iambic pentameters had no place." In Nigeria, Hazel Munro, several years older than the young soldier, was spotted as an image in a white blouse. Hazel inspired Stallworthy's entrant for the 1956 Newdigate, "The Deserted Altar." We know much less of Jill Waldock. Perhaps it is fitting for the poet to protect his relationship with his future wife. But all women are shown in their relationship to his developing poetry. Through all these engrossing chapters, Stallworthy weaves his language spell with humor and love. More than an autobiography, Singing School is indeed instruction for us as well, as we learn how this incisive mind, from the beginning, hears and creates the music of words. And so we hear more acutely. As we watch him recount his roles as son, soldier, sportsman, student, friend, we see how an immense talent, however humble, can take our ordinary world and transform it into poetry. This experiment in relating "poetic apprenticeship" from the accomplished editor, critic, poet, and biographer of Wilfred Owen and Louis MacNeice demonstrates all these skills; it is a delight.