As we keel our ships towards some landscape that looks a little like Brexit – a land of milk, honey, Jerusalem artichokes and potential post-capitalist dystopia – it becomes pertinent to revisit arch-Brexiteers like Enoch Powell. One of the original opponents of the EEC and staunchly anti-mass immigration, Powell nonetheless had many conceptions which would make him an extremely uncomfortable reader of the modern Daily Mail. A long-serving MP and cabinet member, Powell nonetheless railed against exactly the sort of political rhetoric used by the Brexit campaign and the general quality of political language. An article called ‘The Language of Politics’ written in a magazine dedicated to serious Linguistic exploration (!) (and collected in Reflections of A Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell [Bellew Publishing, 1991]) has Powell fuming against the disintegration of etymology and metaphor as used by all contemporaneous Labour and Conservative politicians. Analysing a 1940 speech by Aneurin Bevin, he states the following:
The most marked feature of the language is the quantity of metaphor eroded to the point of cliché.
He compares this with a speech by William Gladstone – an unnatural hero for a Tory – whose speech he pinpoints as being rich in genuine metaphor and periphrases rather than the deconstructed pseudo-English of the day. If Powell had problems with Bevin’s metaphor, what kind of problems would he have had with the English employed by Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage? Similarly, Powell held many political positions which accorded with Mahatma Gandhi or the Glasgow Catholic Worker rather than the Tories and Brexitters of today. Powell was revolutionary in his anti-nuclear stance as well as his unreservedly anti-corporal punishment and anti-death penalty stance, which he propounded in the 1970s when there was severe popular opposition to these ideas (Farage, Johnson et al are rather keen to cling on to these policies in a manner presumably unrelated to their garnering of popular support.) Powell constantly reiterated the idea that hanging is not an effective deterrent and that nobody’s life has ever been saved by it. In a similar way, Powell claimed in a Defence debate in 1970 – when it was highly controversial to do so – that “the whole theory of the tactical nuclear weapon, or the tactical use of nuclear weapons, is an unmitigated absurdity.” Powell was not a ‘pacifist’ per se but he had enough practical sense to know that the very idea of nuclear weapons was a logical fallacy – that nothing is preferable to the threat of mass destruction, and that this threat was not necessary.
As well as a Classical scholar who became a Professor in Cambridge at the age of 25, Powell is also something that neither Farage nor Boris Johnson, nor any modern Daily Mail columnist, can ever be conceived of being: a poet. As someone who spoke very capably more than ten languages – including French, German, Russian and Welsh (his interest in Welsh reflecting a genuine interest in linguistic plurality within the United Kingdom) – Powell’s poetry is suffused with myth and ‘collective consciousness’ as well as philosophy and poetry from around the world. It is strictly metrical and anti-free verse: by modern standards, it is far too rigid to be applauded. Yet Powell achieves some remarkable effects in his poetry. The only copy of his stuff I’ve been able to get hold of is the 1951 collection Dancer’s End; and, The Wedding Gift, which Liverpool Central Library happened to have in their stock. In the collection, there are some very good poems. Powell wrote the poems in the collection either during his military service in World War II or just after it: indeed, one extremely good defence of his poetry is that he is trying to process his involvement in the war through the lens of order and control (I probably forgot to mention that he was Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, where his knowledge of Russian was useful but where he also acquired Portuguese and read poetry in that tongue.) Here is one of the poems in the collection:
I dreamt I saw with waking eyes the scene
So often in imagination wrought,
The flame-wall in the night at Alamein
Before the attack. And I was glad, and thought
“My sorrow and despair was after all
Some evil dream. It still is not too late,
My friends who passed before me through that wall
Not lost, nor I for ever separate
From them condemned to live. I break to-night
As they did through the fire, and so again.”
Knowing and known, shall pass into their sight
But then I woke, and recollection came
That I for ever and alone remain
On this side of the separating flame.
Powell writes a sonnet about the Battle of El-Alemein, a 1942 battle with heavy Allied casualties, reflecting the familiar sentiment of the living that they must continue to do so despite the fact that so many of their dear ones have entered the Kingdom of Death. He reflects that he still does not fully believe the battle took place. It is difficult to imagine bereavement on such a large scale, and Powell does so skilfully, writing a rigid sonnet to try to get a lid on the absurd events but letting even the rhyme scheme of the sonnet occasionally slip from his grasp. For example, the sonnet ends with a rhyming triplet conveying the sheer monotony and cruel fate of being compelled to live – certainly a rather irritating thing. It ends up being rather moving to read it in Liverpool Central Library, in a city up-risen from the complete devastation inflicted on it in World War II.
Check out the other poems in the collection, or try to find Powell’s Collected Poems, which is a larger collection. One thing certainly becomes abundantly clear: Powell is so much more than his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. I personally am vehemently against all the sentiments expressed in this 1968 speech, but I believe that Powell is misrepresented and falsely valorised by many of the right-wingers of today, who should more fully investigate his life and politics. Russell Brand referring to Nigel Farage as a ‘pound shop Enoch Powell’ was untrue: Farage doesn’t even begin to have the nuanced thinking that Powell had.
Squidditas 