Maurice Bowra - Poetry

Poetry

Bowra had learnt the value of poetry during his experiences of the First World War, and Cyril Connolly wrote that, "He saw human life as a tragedy in which great poets were the heroes who fought back and tried to give life a meaning". Bowra was an important champion of Boris Pasternak, lecturing on his work and nominating him repeatedly for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Though he was a friend and supporter of poets, and was respected as a critic, Bowra was never able to fulfil his wish to be accepted as a serious poet himself. His own output consisted of "sharp satires, in verse, on his friends (and sharper still on his enemies)". His friend and literary executor, John Sparrow, once commented that Bowra had cut himself off from posterity, "as his prose was unreadable and his verse was unprintable." This was set half-right by the publication in 2005 of New Bats in Old Belfries, a collection of satires on friends and enemies written between the 1920s and 1960s. (Two poems on Patrick Leigh Fermor were omitted in deference to their subject's wishes, but were published after his death in 2011.) Here is his parody of John Betjeman, who had become choked with emotion on being presented the Duff Cooper Prize comprising a cheque for £150 and a copy of Duff Cooper's memoirs bound in leather, by Princess Margaret on 18 December 1958:

Green with lust and sick with shyness,
Let me lick your lacquered toes.
Gosh, oh gosh, your Royal Highness,
Put your finger up my nose,
Pin my teeth upon your dress,
Plant my head with watercress.
Only you can make me happy.
Tuck me tight beneath your arm.
Wrap me in a woollen nappy;
Let me wet it till it's warm.
In a plush and plated pram
Wheel me round St James's, Ma'am.
Let your sleek and soft galoshes
Slide and slither on my skin.
Swaddle me in mackintoshes
Till I lose my sense of sin.
Lightly plant your plimsolled heel
Where my privy parts congeal.

The judges on that occasion had been Lord David Cecil, Harold Nicolson and Bowra himself as chairman. Duff Cooper's widow Lady Diana Cooper observed that "Poor Betch was crying and too moved to find an apology for words." (Philip Ziegler, Diana Cooper: The Biography of Lady Diana Cooper, Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1981, p. 310.)

The Telegraph, echoing poet Cecil Day Lewis on the man himself, warned that the book, like strychnine, was best taken in small doses.