Well, it was a total failure and I came home early, my tail between my legs and feeling very sorry for myself and more unwell than I have felt for ages, having written just 10,000 words.

The proximate reason was a spate of quite serious family illnesses, affecting every one of the human Gees as well as Heidi the dog. The guilt drove me to check out early. Oh yes, that, and coming down with a fever myself, which, when you are on your own, even in the nicest of places, is a miserable experience. I was homesick. And I was lonely.

But there’s more to it than that, and if I ever suggest going on a writer’s retreat again, please shoot me.

The location itself couldn’t have been more charming, neither my hosts more accommodating. And that was the trouble, really – it was all too easy.

When you are presented with days and days in which you can do nothing but write, and nothing is there to distract you from writing, you are gripped by an existential terror that you’ll never write enough, so you try to cram in as much as possible, neglecting such things as eating and sleeping, and keeping very odd hours (graduate students will be familiar with this affliction). This is unlikely to do anything for the quality of the writing, and results in a kind of mania. The inevitable result is a kind of depressive burnout in which you just want to shove the whole lot in the bin as so much vanity.

When I have done this kind of thing before, it’s always been like a 9-5: I’ve gone somewhere for the day to write – an office, or a library – but I start from the reality and society of home, and come home again in the evening. Being the kind of person who finds it very hard to discipline myself, I need that kind of discipline imposed, from outside. Maybe that’s why I tend to do most of my writing in somewhat adverse conditions, such as on trains, in which writing is limited by time and battery life. It’s the grit in the oyster that makes the pearl.

The only thing that stopped me from going completely round the bend was the book I took with me, The Oxford Book of English Verse (2nd edn, 1939). One can always find fault with anthologies for the things they don’t include, and my complaints relate to the beginning and the end.

The collection starts with the 13th-century lyric sumer is icumen in (you know, the one with the farting ungulates), so we’re pitched into early Middle English. There’s no Old English at all – no Wanderer, no Voyager, no selection from Beowulf. And the Middle English itself suffers from the lack of any Gawain and the Green Knight let alone Pearl or Sir Orfeo. There is too little Langland (just eighteen lines from Piers the Plowman_) and only one tiny poem from Lydgate (_Vox ultima crucis) which includes these thought-provoking lines:

Thynke howe short tyme thou hast abyden here.
Thy place is bygged above the sterres clere,
Noon erthly palys wrought in so statly wyse.

The omissions at the other end are more curious. There is Hilaire Belloc (a couple of serious poems, not a patch on his Cautionary Verses for Children) but no T. S. Eliot; there is Lord Alfred Douglas but no Oscar Wilde. There’s no Thomas Hardy, either, which is odd. Most of Hardy’s poems are pretty workaday, but there are a couple that should make it into the national canon. One notices curious gaps in the selections from poets that are included. For Tennyson, for example, why The Lotos-Eaters but not The Charge of the Light-Brigade? For Robert Browning, why The Laboratory (some proto-LabLit, this, if rather gruesome) but not the thrilling How They Brought The Good News From Ghent To Aix?

One can always find reasons (or excuses) for non-inclusion. The anthologist, Arthur Quiller-Couch, would have been of the ‘English Literature’ persuasion, and would therefore have not included Old English on principle, let alone some of the more obscure Middle English (whatever else it is, Gawain is very hard work in the original). One wonders what an anthology by Tolkien would have looked like – there would probably have been nothing more recent than Shakespeare.

And the end of the anthology could only ever have been a crabbed thing, given that the 1st edition stopped in 1900 and it was a much older A. Q.-C. who came to compile the second, closing the entries at Armistice Day, 1918. “I shrank, of course, from making the book unwieldy,”, he wrote in his Preface to the Second Edition, “but in fact also I felt my judgement insecure amid post-war poetry”.

All that aside, I discovered lots of gems I’d never read before, and many more I’d only skimmed. Two stand out – Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard:

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.

and from much more recent date, Ernest Dowson’s curiously titled Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae (no, don’t ask me, look it up) whose stanzas always conclude

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! In my fashion.

but which also contain many phrases quoted elsewhere, such as ‘the night is thine’, and ‘gone with the wind’.

Perhaps the date of its compilation (1939, remember) has given this, the second edition, a mournful, elegiac quality. “Be it allowed that these present times are dark,” says A. Q.-C., “Yet what are our poets of use – what are they for – if they cannot hearten the crew with auspices of daylight?” Yet there is very little humor here. That’s not to say that the selection isn’t occasionally playful. Here’s an an anonymous Elizabethan madrigal:

My love in her attire doth show her wit,
It doth so well become her;
For every season she hath dressings fit,
For Winter, Spring and Summer.
No beauty she doth miss
When all her robes are on:
But Beauty’s self she is
When all her robes are gone.

Happily the anthology goes over big on Keats, and includes To Autumn, which is unarguably the finest poem ever written in English, or, I’d contend, in any language, at all, ever. Anyone who isn’t moved to tears by

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies

hardly rates as sentient. But no anthology can include everything by one’s favorite poets, and there is favorite Keats poem that didn’t make it into this anthology. That’s To Mrs Reynolds’s Cat, an hommage to an aged mog, whose last two lines go like this:

Still is that fur as soft as when the lists
In youth thou enter’dst on glass-bottled wall.

Now, it’s easy to see why this poem didn’t make A. Q.-C.‘s final cut. As a poem, it’s unwieldy and prone to archaism. But what Keats does, effortlessly, is use just a few words to evoke an entire scene, and such is conveyed for me, very powerfully, by these last two lines. In general, the quality of Keats’ poetry tends to vary in inverse proportion to its length. And if Keats can do it in just a few words, what’s the point of my even bothering to write 10,000 words, let alone 50,000? Or 250,000? Makes you think, doesn’t it? And to subvert what Tom Lehrer said about Mozart, when Keats was my age, he’d been dead for 20 years…