Peter Porter

This sensationWe say is the nationActing its destiny.How like is itTo the smaller act which here we see,The incomplete Devil paying a visit? We know it is our Fate to lack power —Is this our excuseThat we are very smallAmong demagogues whose job is to chooseThe Few’s good or the Good of All? Perhaps at homeThought might roamIn rhyme’s paradigmFrom native spiteIn bed or drawing room to Real TimeDownloaded to us day and night. Should then we askTo whom the task?There have been, we know,Unflinching soulsWho’ve travelled far as thought can go:Why is the world dying between the Poles?

It is reasonable to assume that this is the first instalment of Robert Hughes’s autobiography. After 400 pages he takes us to his appointment as Time Magazine’s chief art critic in 1970, so The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore and Goya lie in the future. Some might think that his choice of title gives a hostage to fortune. Australians are notoriously members of the Quiz Kid Fraternity — Clive James, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and the rest of us who have much smaller claims to fame. But Hughes plays fair throughout: he modifies his assured assertions on art and society with humiliating instances of his ignorance, over- confidence and poor judgment. His renunciations are epiphanies in reverse. Memories of writing for Richard Neville’s Oz are pure mea culpa.

fuga, fugas — music now, not backat school where Harry Roberts flashed his gown,a toga to berate a class as slackas Rome became; we’d been meant to be English Augustans, but were soon brought downto being worthy only of a fewemotive Saxon nouns and verbs: the sea had brought our Fathers to a sanded shore,packed tight with iron sermons on The Poor —but still the dictionary had work to do:peregrinus, wanderers in needof some Virgilian outcome — might this bookhave shown how Europe’s words could safely bleedon strands Aeneas left to Captain Cook?

This volume of several pounds weight and over 600 pages duration is an undeniably serious estimation of the last 250 years of European and American literature. The word panoptic might have been coined for Bayley: if not the monarch, he is at least the master of all he surveys. His readers had better be almost as universal, since his critical method is to assume that with so much known his duty is to adorn the facts with a few paradoxical interpretations. This works well at review length as the need for concentration keeps him on the high wire. He is the reviewer’s reviewer, and for a minor figure in the same trade to cavil must smack of ingratitude or envy. Nevertheless, it should be done.

Amid the enmities of contemporary letters, it’s salutary to recognise that for most of us allegiances go farther back, and are just as partisan. Neill Powell’s excellent evaluation of Crabbe delights me not just because Crabbe has always been one of my favourite poets but because this study of a writer usually held to be unrepresentative of his time calls into question received literary history. Powell demonstrates that Crabbe’s best poetry, couched almost invariably in heroic couplets, is as tinged with Romanticism as Wordsworth’s or Coleridge’s. Where, to my mind, it is superior is in its avoidance of the limp diction and wayward syntax of almost all Romantics, apart from Keats and the best bits of Byron.