Half-remembered poems

Like many people, I didn’t really enjoy poetry at school. In the light of this admission, it may seem a little odd that I have just written a book called I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. . .and other poems you half-remember from school, but this is a book that I hope will remind readers just how enjoyable poetry can be.

I work for Michael O’Mara Books, and we felt poetry would be an ideal subject for our series of nostalgic educational books. We all know some poetry, often more thaN we think, and we usually have a few hazy ideas about the poets we have picked up along the way.

As soon as we started discussing the contents, everyone began talking animatedly over each other: “Well, you have to have The Tyger” “Who was the one that was a bit too close to his sister?”

“What’s the one about gathering rosebuds?” “Can you put in Jabberwocky?” When the whole room has an opinion, you know you have a good idea on your hands.

Poetry peppers our language and culture, and we often absorb it unconsciously. Anyone reading this thinking that they don’t know any poetry should ask themselves whether these phrases ring a bell: ‘laugh, and the world laughs with you’, ‘far from the madding crowd’, ‘the darling buds of May’, ‘Twas the night before Christmas’ or ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat went to sea’? Even my other half proved, rather surprisingly, to be familiar with Shelley’s Ozymandias — because one of the characters in the computer game Civilisation growls ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair’, with appropriate menace.

Fashions change in schooling as in everything else, and the poems my parents read and, more frequently in those days, learnt by heart, are not the same ones that were taught to me. The poetry that we know depends on our teachers’ whims, our parents’ tastes, how sensitive and/or miserable we were as teenagers, our age and even our gender – I discovered that girls often read about The Lady of Shallot, while boys were fed the more macho Charge of the Light Brigade, for example. It can also depend on where you were brought up, and I noticed as I researched the poets just how many of them had Oxfordshire links.

Take John Masefield, whose Cargoes and Sea-Fever are much-loved. Although he took the slightly unusual step of running away from sea and was a martyr to sea-sickness, he lived on Boars Hill, near Oxford, and rented a cottage to fellow poet Robert Graves.

Many of the nation’s greatest poets studied at Oxford, from Sir Philip Sidney to W H Auden. It was in Oxford that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey cooked up their ill-fated scheme to found an artists’ colony in Pennsylvania. Like many of the projects Coleridge embarked on — including his famous poem Kubla Khan — the plot was left unfinished.

Shelley embraced the student life with gusto. Reports tell us he grew his hair, read much and slept little, a schedule which will seem familiar to current students (though perhaps with less reading, dare I suggest?) Despite all that reading, he was eventually expelled for writing a pamphlet advocating atheism.

We know that Matthew Arnold — who would go on to become a distinguished critic and find time to write the stunning Dover Beach — also made merry as an undergraduate and was known as a dandy, much like Oscar Wilde some years later. John Betjeman took his teddy with him, giving his fellow student Evelyn Waugh a bright idea for Brideshead Revisited.

It was Charles Dodgson, the mild-mannered, stammering mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, who wrote the Alice books, with their fondly remembered nonsense poetry, under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll.

He had more luck in his application than Hilaire Belloc, who was furious to have been refused a fellowship at Balliol College, a slight that he put down to prejudice against his Catholicism. The panel could hardly have been unaware of his religious loyalties, as he produced his own statue of the Virgin Mary and placed it on the desk for the duration of the interview.

I’ve had a whale of a time finding out about the stories behind the nation’s best-loved poems, and revisiting the poems themselves, and I hope that readers will be inspired to remind themselves of their own favourite poems, too.

l Ana Sampson is head of publicity and marketing at Michael O’Mara Books, and reviews books each month for Joel Hammer on BBC Radio Oxford.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud ... and other poems you half-remember from school is published by Michael O’Mara Books at £9.99.