Maxwell’s opening declaration of non-specialisation presumably relates to the belief that poetry has become unduly difficult, ruined for ordinary readers by academics, teachers, or poets themselves. Maxwell is not, however, ‘merely’ a populist. He doesn’t champion rap, song, or poetry slams as the ‘true’ forms of contemporary poetry. Rather, he is concerned with poetry that could be described as ‘literary’, dispatching song lyrics from the realm of poetry by emphasising their non-literary condition. A song lyric written down, claims Maxwell, ‘dies in the whiteness’ of the page.

Maxwell’s position regarding this issue is more complex than it looks, since (for all his talk of the page, silence, and whiteness) Maxwell is himself a writer of poetry for voices and performance. His poems are often dramatic monologues, and he has published eleven verse plays and two libretti. Not surprisingly, then, On Poetry emphasises voice, human presence, and dramatic verse. Song may have been banished, but its sense of address, dramatic situation, and vocal expression remain very much present.

The emphasis on voice sometimes appears in surprising ways, such as the story of the first audio recording of poetry (on wax cylinder) in 1889. The poem was Robert Browning’s ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’,
recited by its author. As Maxwell relates, Browning forgets the words of his own poem, saying ‘I’m terribly sorry but I can’t remember me own verses, but one thing I shall remember all me life is this astonishing … [unclear] … by your wonderful invention! Robert Browning! Bravo bravo bravo! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Bravo!’ Maxwell loves ‘how he shouts his own name’. What I find appealing about the anecdote is how poetry momentarily fails Browning; how the sheer thrill of the moment overcomes his attempts to recite his own ‘verses’. What is telling about the recording, then, is how it reminds us, as Maxwell points out, that ‘Poets were real, walked around, sat down, shouted’.

So On Poetry is a book by a poet that deals in the real problems that poets face, whether now or in an earlier age. One of the problems contemporary poets face is, of course, finding an audience. Maxwell doesn’t overtly say so, but he implies that if poets want an audience they need to remember the power of story. As such, On Poetry surreptitiously but forcefully returns narrative to poetry, even as it seems to be talking mostly about lyric poetry. This is significant because conventional literary history relates that when Sir Walter Scott, the most significant writer of his time, gave up writing narrative verse for novels, the game was up for poetry. After thousands of years in which narratives and dramatic works were presented in verse, prose took over, and lyric poetry became the pre-eminent, and increasingly marginalised, poetic mode.

On Poetry doesn’t really argue with this literary history, but it conspicuously focuses on the narrative potential of lyric poetry. (Maxwell, a verse playwright, also includes a chapter on dramatic verse). Among the numerous canonical poems Maxwell quotes from and discusses in On Poetry, the majority are either actual verse narratives (such as Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’) or lyrics that imply a dramatic situation (such as Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’) or lyrics that are compressed stories (such as Edward Thomas’s ‘Old Man’).

Maxwell himself is a superb storyteller. On Poetry is full of micro-narratives: dreams, anecdotes (such as the one about Browning), histories, and pseudo-histories. Amid these is a discontinuous narrative concerning ‘Glyn Maxwell’ and his four fictional students: Bella, Mimi, Wayne, and Ollie. These characters, sources of great comic power, feature in the final chapter (in verse) that ties everything together in an extraordinary tour de force. As this last chapter reminds us, Maxwell’s own poems are often stories, but his stories always exhibit the Ancient Mariner’s ‘strange power of speech’. His poems habitually marry the strange, defamiliarising voice of lyric poetry to story (as seen in his astonishing ‘Letters to Edward Thomas’). This is, as Maxwell would himself admit, true to the art of poetry. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, after all, first appeared in a collection oxymoronically called Lyrical Ballads (that is, narrative lyrics).

For Maxwell, then, narrative exists to be put in the service of creativity, that transformative force the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott called ‘play’. And On Poetry is all about play. Maxwell relates an encounter between W.H. Auden, at the time a school teacher, and a pupil who wanted to be a poet: ‘Auden asked why, and the boy said he had a lot to say. Auden wrinkled a brow that would one day be impossible to wrinkle further, and said he’d rather the boy said he just loved playing with words.’

On Poetry is a vital work for anyone interested in poetry because it plays with words routinely, especially the playing we call ‘jokes’. In its playfulness, On Poetry illustrates how lacking in creativity (ironically) most‘how to’ books on creative writing are. It also shows how dull ‘critical’ works on the subject can be. (I am thinking especially of Terry Eagleton’s disappointing How to Read a Poem, 2007.)

Maxwell is too sophisticated to offer writing exercises that don’t seem like anything other than games. One involves taking nine blank pages and pretending various things about each page. (‘That every mark on the third page makes you remember more. On the fourth, less, like dementia’.) One involves breaking a class into two groups, one of which can only use the vowels a and e, and the other only use i, o, and u.(And yes, Maxwell has heard of Oulipo). None of these exercises is as oracular as the suggestions for creativity found in Brian Eno’s and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies (like ‘Breathe more deeply’), but they all have the smell of real practice about them, paradoxically useful because they are so playful. Maxwell’s greatest lessons, though, are often the apparently smallest. In one exercise, for instance, we see that deleting ‘I was’ from the beginning of a line, and changing ‘field’ to ‘fields’, in a poem by one of the fictional students makes all the difference.

On Poetry has moments of dogmatism and crankiness (including two odd paragraphs complaining about ‘the postmodernists’). It can be provocative and sometimes apparently blind to the political elements of the poetry it quotes. But it also emphasises the human, contingent uncertainty of writing poetry; it relies on stories and jokes and voice; and it is full of creative energy. It can teach an enormous amount for anyone wanting to learn. In that sense, then, it is indeed ‘a book for anyone’.