Phillip Hobsbaum is famous for starting writers groups, but the one he started between leaving his London Group and his new one in Belfast is unheard of -- the one in Sheffield. He was there working on a PhD with William Empson. He did not bring on the Peter Porters, Seamus Heaneys, and Liz Lochheads there, but for those of us who belonged to it, it was vital.
Here I present a student’s-eye view life at Sheffield University in the early 60s, that John Haffenden’s describes in his magnificent biography of Empson. Here, though, you will read how Empson, Berry and Wilson Knight narrowly escape a mangled death in a rusty old Morris Minor, and see pictures of Christopher Bigsby and Sir Harry Kroto on Rag Day.
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| How they were seated in the Morris Minor... Narrow back seat: Wilson Knight and William Empson crushed into a very narrow doorless back seat, Janet Hill (in NF Simpson's Resounding Tinkle) is crammed between them. Front seats: Barry Fox, with Francis Berry in the passenger seat. |
Appeal for Information about Philip Hobsbaum as Teacher Directly or Indirectly
Philip Hobsbaum’s influence extended beyond the famous poets he is usually associated with.
I'd like make known more about his influence.
If you, a teacher, or friend, a pupil of a teacher,
were influenced in any way by Hobsbaum
would you mind sending me details I can post here.
The Slighting of Philip Hobsbaum
The Internet pundits underplay Philip Hobsbaum. Typically, “Hobsbaum is perhaps most famously known as the originator of several writing workshops in Cambridge, London, Belfast, and Glasgow” says the University of Texas website. “He later founded similar groups in Belfast and Glasgow, “ says the University of Victoria (BC) library. For the pundits, the groups he started were important because they influenced writers who became “famous”; Seamus Heaney and Liz Lochhead, for instance. The group he started at Sheffield University on his journey from London to Belfast in the early 60s is never mentioned, I suppose because none of us became famous or influential as poets. But for two years, Philip Hobsbaum, the joint editor and a contributor to A Group Anthology, was part of an open-ended group of unsophisticated undergraduates at an unfashionable university in the North. It is how he worked with us, so important in our development, if not in the world at large, that I want to discuss.
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| Clockwise from top left: Peter Redgrove, Peter Porter, Alan Johnbrown, and George Macbeth. We were none of these. |
Coming straight, as he did, from a group of poets that included Peter Porter, Peter Redgrove, George MacBeth, and Alan Brownjohn to one of a few young men and women of unclear talent, was remarkable. And I want to draw attention to this. He wasn’t looking for “fame.” For two years, before he got down to his research with William Empson, he spent every Sunday afternoon with us, in a huge living room in the huge Church of England Victorian chaplaincy, lent to him by the broadminded, ascetic chaplain, Graham Dowell.
I want to set the record straight about the breadth of Hobsbaum’s influence, to suggest that his influence on some Sheffield undergraduate students may be at least as important as his influence on Seamus Heaney and Liz Lochhead . At the very least, that what Hobsbaum did at Sheffield is an essential part of his life and importance and one that would not be known without blogs like this
A REQUEST TO ANYONE READING THIS: Please, if you were influenced by Philip Hobsbaum – especially if you are unheralded (like me) -- will you add to the discussion. Or if you were influenced by anyone who was influenced by his poetry magazines, writers groups, mentoring one on one, the place of poetry in your inner life etc.. (I notice that Liz Lochhead gave a talk about him as a mentor on BBC Three.)
Impressions after the Obituaries
Philip Hobsbaum lived in me as someone who was there, always alive and vital, and even after 40 years available to write to to get advice from. Just before his death I’d bought his book on metre on a visit to London and meant to tell him how interesting I’d found it. So when I discovered by chance, after getting back to Canada, that Hobsbaum had died I went cold. The jolt was sudden.
Acadia University library had just offered to buy books if we ordered them there and then, so I’d gone online to find some by writers I’d known. One was Philip Hobsbaum. As an undergraduate I couldn’t afford to buy his two books of poetry that appeared when he was in the group, so I thought I’d order them to bring my youth to life. And, I wanted a full picture of what he had written in the 40 years since we’d had contact. Suddenly and horribly, amongst his many books and articles, appeared his obituaries.
Only a few years older than me. I’d never have guessed. He was so different from us. And all that criticism he wrote. I’d come in contact with his critical comments only in passing, as he talked with us about my poetry or about Pauline Lester’s, Jim Hudson’s, Barry Callaghan’s, or Roger Ebbatson’s, or about Thomas Hardy’s, or his own. I knew him only as a poet and as an encourager of poets, with no side or snobbery, or special status. Certainly no elitism.
How famous he was! I had no sense that he would be. I remember when I thought he’d be doomed to nothing jobs. One Sunday afternoon in 1961 he came saying, before everyone arrived, he’d been turned down for a job somewhere – half-seriously wondering if Empson’s support had given his application the kiss of death (his words) – an observation I took so seriously that when five years later I applied for a job at a Canadian university and they suggested a recommendation from Empson would help me (I already had a letter from him saying he’d support me whenever I applied for anything) I was too frightened to ask for a formal reference. I did not get the job and became a schoolteacher in Canada for the next 30 years.
A REQUEST TO ANYONE READING THIS:
Does anyone have photos of the Philip Hobsbaum at Sheffield I could put here
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Hobsbaum reads: Sheffield University Arts Society, 1967
At this spot a photograph of Phillip in his thirties would be useful.
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In 1967 I returned to the university to do an honours degree. I restarted the Arts Society and asked Philip to come from Ireland where he was lecturer, to read his poetry. I thought his unusual topics, a hallmark of The Group, and easy way of talking about poetry when be a great success. But he had changed or saw his role as different from a few years before. He read confidently that evening in the new Arts Tower, as he always had, but there was no hint of diffidence. And his poems embarrassed us – I distinctly remember one - over 30 years later - ended with “Truth lies between your legs.” [Today – 16 April 2010 ]-- I discover it’s a a poem Philip Larkin acknowledges.
When he’d finished reading it, in a vacuum of silence, he announced that he’d been teaching long enough to know we were shocked and invited us to talk. But this was a public reading in 1967 and nobody wanted to deal with the poem openly – it was awkward enough talking about his poetry to the poet, let alone about this unlikely man lying between a woman’s legs. That meeting, so different from those of our writers’ group only a few years earlier, was not a success. His poems were not the ones I was used to hearing him read when we read our poems to each other from the tatty armchairs on Sunday afternoons in the Anglican Chaplaincy.
Later, when he sent his bill for expenses, he wrote to me personally asking for cash not cheque. His bank would seize the cheque and he’d never see the money. (I had never met poverty like this from a grown educated man. I never knew people could live so close to the line.)
The Sheffield Writers’ Group at the Anglican Chaplaincy, 1960
When I met him first in 1960 at Sheffield University I had arrived in the North feeling like Joe Lampton out of Room at the Top.
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| Barry Fox as John Lampton, with flies done up. |
Entering the North and alien territory for the first time, I saw myself as something of a hero with my newish cardboard suitcase in my lengthening arm. As I crossed the Peace Gardens from the railway station I asked a man for directions to Broomhill and my digs. Bluntly, not showing me any respect: “What are you thinking of? Your flies are undone” he sneered. Joe Lampton’s weren’t in the cover picture. I shrank into the ground.
This was before the Beatles, so “the North” was famously unfashionable, slightly comical. (George MacBeth’s poem “Sheffield” shows this – see Poetry from Sheffield 1, appearing later.) I was 18, knew nothing about university, life, people, poetry or scholarship. A week before meeting him I had sent in some poetry – the first I’d ever sent anywhere – to Poetry from Sheffield – a poorly gestetnered quarto magazine (the cover and contents will appear later) that, I found out, Philip Hobsbaum had started a month or two earlier– and they were accepted. And when at Arts Society meetings, later, people were invited to go to the poetry group, I took up the invitation and became proud to be a poet. And we went to the Writers’ Group, every Sunday afternoon until the Anglican Chaplaincy, where they took place, changed chaplains a couple of years later, meetings that Philip seemed to have arranged but would not chair, did not want to be the dominant voice of. This was decades before institutionalized “workshops.”
When I arrived at Sheffield University I was disappointed. At one end of my disappointment, students did not, as I hoped they would, spend their time talking earnestly about important things, and at the other everyone not in the first year seemed so like the big kids at my junior mixed school when I was na infant that I was awed and paralysed.
The “Writer’s Group” was a lifeline. The big lounge of the Anglican Chaplaincy (the chaplain, Graham Dowell, welcomed any organization to use it) was full of 10 or so big students sitting in big tatty chairs when I arrived that first Sunday afternoon.
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| Bust of Graham Dowell by Jemma Pearson. |
They had their poems on sheets of paper ready to read and discuss and looked very impressive. Philip tried hard to make sure there was no hierarchy and during the years of the Group explicitly reminded us he didn’t want to be the only talker. But inevitably by the end of the couple of hours, and increasingly over the months, it was clear whose opinions and views we wanted to hear. The atmosphere was serious calm and sensible. Philip saw so much to talk about in our poems and so much that was positive, with never a sense of straining to be kind. This was business. This was important to him and so to us. Sometimes Hannah, his wife, came. And she too would speak in the same firm cheerful positive voice, making perceptive comments “[Plums] Break easily in the hand,” she said about one of my poems. “That’s a good line.” “Yes, it is, isn’t it?” he said, agreeing, happy. They worked well together. (Their relationship appears to drive “Letter from a Friend” in Poetry from Sheffield 2, at the end.) Note: John Haffendon describes this period at Sheffield, writing of how Empson judged nothing worthy of the university poetry prize these years. He rejected my piece containing this lovely line that I'd come to believe was so good.
In a university that he saw as looking down on helping students outside the classroom, (See the TLS article, later) and looking down on staff who went out of their way to help them, he wanted to encourage people like us to develop as writers. I was never clear that Philip was not part of the establishment. He spoke with such confidence, of someone official, yet he clearly was outside both it and our world, a visitor living in another far richer world, but a visitor with a place of his own .) Sometimes only Barry Callaghan and I would be there, and Philip would question whether the Group should continue meeting. But it did.
And he would refer to people he used to talk poetry with in London. I found out they were “The Group” a deliberately anonymous name, intended to contrast with the well-known “Movement.” Members had no common aims ( he said) though I remember when Philip invited George Macbeth to the Arts Society MacBeth spoke of them finding a source of poetry in imagining dramatic incidents to write their poetry about, dramatic monologues.
We felt as if we knew them all, and we looked weekly to see if their poems had appeared in The Listener or Critical Quarterly or The Times Literary Supplement, feeling for them as for friends. (And George MacBeth spoke to us as friends though Edward Lucy Smith seemed aloof) Peter Redgrove sent us manuscripts to discuss in the group and to print in Poetry from Sheffield. Here we were at a university that England did not know about, yet we were at the centre of the literary world. I felt confident in its borrowed glory.
Taking poetry seriously I did not doubt. Yet as I look back now I see how remarkable it was that this man coming to a provincial university with all his experience and depth would take each poem and us seriously . We did not know why he was there, but here he was, a man of uncertain age talking seriously to us about our poems, (I had no idea Empson was famous – I was only there because the Dean- D. R. Cousins had written to say that although I could not do an Honours degrees I would be accepted for a general degree.)
We (the undergraduate members of the group) talked poetry in our spare time because of this.
He told us how remarkable it was that Martin Bell had taken up writing poetry. It wasn’t usual for an older man to write poetry. Novels were for older men to write. Hardy was the only writer he knew of who turned from novels to poetry. And when we mentioned poems we had just seen in The Listener he knew the poet and commented. Of one Irish poet playing with rhyme and words – “So he’s still writing is he? Oh yes, he’s run out of things to say.” How could anyone have the confidence to say that, I thought. He talked about Peter Porter but especially about Peter Redgrove, who sent us poetry to publish and talk about. Yet all the time his tone was that of one man talking to another. Just open discussion.
Francis Berry, Phillip Hobsbaum and the Group
From the start Barry Callaghan and I loved the poetry of Francis Berry. Here was a man who lived poetry. Who would unexpectedly intone long poems with mystery, chanting the words with eyes staring into another world, then at a student suddenly, nose to nose. Whose own poetry was physical, hard, and marvellous to hear. Pauline Lester invited him to come to the group one Sunday. We could discover more about him, get him to approve our writing, perhaps. Oh our arrogance. He could not come he said because his confessor would not allow him to enter an Anglican building.
I remember one day Philip coming to the group (he was always the first to arrive) saying he had been reading Berry’s poetry and was utterly amazed at his control of rhythm. The poetry had obviously taken him over in a way we’d never seen anything take him before. Callaghan and I already knew how great his poetry was (but not for such well-focussed reasons as the rhythm) so it was a bit of a surprise to see that it had taken Philip so long to notice the magnificence of his poetry. And then 20 years later Hobsbaum edited Berry’s collected poems and, based on what I see on the Internet, was still commenting on them years later. But it is out of print and no second-hand ones are available.
John Heffendon’s book on Empson has Hobsbaum criticising the Sheffield faculty for being stand offish about student writing. That reflects Hobsbaum’s unfashionable eagerness to help undergraduates write. From my experience, I can point out that although staff (faculty?) did not overtly take an interest in helping students write poems, they evidently kept in touch with what was happening.
One Thursday evening, after Wilson Knight had spoken to the Arts Society, Janet Hill (by then Fox) and I drove Berry, Empson and Knight back to the Berrys’ house for supper supplied by Nancy Berry. As they got out of our cramped 1949 Morris Minor, Francis Berry said to Wilson Knight: “Wilson, I’d like you to meet the poet Fox.” I glowed –and still do. Berry must have understood my very deep interest in writing poetry at that time. How he knew I have no idea.
That evening the world nearly lost three of its most creative minds, for the subframe of the car had rusted right through and the rear wheels were hanging on just to the body by a couple of rusty bolts. I learned this from a mechanic the next week, who told me it was so dangerous he wouldn’t even drive it on the road outside his garage.)
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| A refurbished 1949 Morris Minor, a rusted out version of which nearly eliminated three of the most creative minds of the the time |
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| How they were seated in the Morris Minor... Narrow back seat: Wilson Knight and William Empson crushed into a very narrow doorless back sat, Janet Hill (in NF Simpson's Resounding Tinkle) is crammed between them. Front seats: Barry Fox, with Francis Berry in the passenger seat. |
At sometime, when Philip must have been planning a book of poetry, presumably The Place’s Fault it was clear to me that it would contain poems he’d read to us but when it came out I remember feeling disappointed that it didn’t (How I knew it didn’t I’ve no idea – I couldn’t afford to buy it.) I had thought we were at the centre of his universe – but that’s the confidence he gave us- He never treated us anything less than his equals. I could not reciprocate; he was clearly my superior in confidence. I remember once he read a poem about a half-blind young boy being bullied at school. I didn’t like it. I suppose it was about Philip’s own schooldays, but he seemed so weak in the poem. I didn’t know he was half blind, or that anyone would ever treat him at whatever age, with anything less than respect. And his threatening sounded so empty unworthy of him. But I didn’t have the nerve to raise how I felt.
Another Sunday Philip came to Writers’ Group deeply disturbed, upset. This was unusual. He was always confident, open, focussed on other people. He declared that he’d discovered he was not liked. Callaghan and I felt awkward. Certainly some of our student colleagues found him a bit too self-confident but we had no idea he knew. We conferred and told him we hoped he didn’t think we weren’t in the group. “Bless your hearts, I never even thought of that. It’s the department.’ (Many years later a former member of the faculty agreed that Philip wasn’t liked –“Hobsbaum, is he the one who wrote a poem about his mouth”)
That was the first time I had any inkling that he saw us as younger than him.
Under New Management
I think writers’ Group lasted only two years with Philip as de facto chair. There was never a formal organization, it was just that he seemed to do everything. Towards the end of the next year a new Chaplain arrived, replacing Graham Dowell, who reorganized the Chaplaincy and needed the lounge, and Philip said he had to concentrate on his writing (we had no idea that was working on a PhD). To help ensure the Group would have a firm foundation, he wrote encouraging me to keep on to keep minutes and to deposit all the poems and minutes with the Library. If the Group didn’t survive, he wrote, it would not be the result of lack of effort on his part. The new Writer’s Group had me as chair and we used E3, Barry Callaghan’s and my room in Crewe Hall (a student residence) as the meeting place. Philip encouraged us to make it more formal than it had been, getting the English secretary to type and gestetner copies of the poems selected for a particular Sunday afternoon. (Rather as he seems to have done in Belfast.) He read his poems the first day- one was “Cat on my Head” –about being hung over. But it wasn’t the same. More like a show than a group. No one with the confidence to offer comments to get and to keep the discussion going. We were all so self conscious. Perched on tables and sitting on the floor at the feet of whoever was reading. Me not having the first idea of how to lead a discussion about poems. Nothing was spontaneous. There was none of the open easy cameraderie and give and take of our meetings in the Chaplaincy with Philip, who took the pressure off everyone so there was no falseness.
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| In helping to set up the new order, here Philip Hobsbaum scorns pundits. Remembering this term in this letter, I used it for a similar purpose at the start of this Hobsbaum log. Though I had heard the term, I had no idea what it meant, but I did feel very proud to have someone assume it was part of my lexicon. |
He read the seven poems on Sunday 20th January 1962 in E3 Crewe Hall. (The precision in dating the reading is the result of the innovations Philip suggested.) They were “Death of a Cup,” “Bulldog Drummond Fights Again,” “Cat on my Head,” “A Minor Poet, “This Small Hostility,” “Fellow Traveller.” I do not know if any of them have entered any of his collections.
Meeting Chris Bigsby
But not all students were interested in joining the group. One Friday afternoon as I was sitting in the new library (opened by TS Eliot, no less) writing my poems, a very impressive older student came up to me with a copy of Poetry in Sheffield in hand and asked if I was Barry J Fox. I nearly fainted with delight. For several days students I didn’t know had been stopping me to sign their copy of the magazine. That anyone, let alone a student from the year above me, would recognize me for who I had always wanted to be, a poet. I said “yes.” He opened the booklet at my poems for me to sign, I thought. “Do you call that poetry?” That stumped me. I wrote poems. I’d never thought of them as poetry. While I was trying to negotiate an answer he told me he’d introduced the poems into Professor Empson’s class and had dismissed them to everyone there.
This was Chris Bigsby (later, C W E Bigsby). Professor Empson hadn’t criticised Bigsby’s declaration, he said, so Bigsby assumed he’d agreed. (The following year we were in the same group providing a small sketch written by Bigsby as part of the initiation ceremony to join the Crewe Hall men’s residence. Later that year he had a spell of driving to and from Manchester trying to create a satirical programme for ITV. His aims were far higher than our group’s humble ones.)
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| Rag Day at Sheffield, 1961 Outside Wilson Peck’s and the Cinema House: Wearing straw hat and waistcoat, and steering the Mississippi Riverboat is “CB” (Chris Bigsby) . “BF” (with banjo) is Barry Fox. “BC” is Barry Callaghan (who used his musical interests later to collect old Sheffield songs. This may well be the first photograph of him performing in public.); “HK” is Harry Kroto (later Sir Harry Kroto, Nobel Prize winner, discoverer and namer of the Buckyball – the Carbon 60 molecule). Harry designed many of the covers of Arrows, the Sheffield University Arts magazine (see http://www.kroto.info/Graphics/Covers/index.html.) |
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Chris Bigsby, Harry Kroto, Barry Fox and Barry Callaghan Same boat, same people. Chris Bigsby allows the boat to steer itself as he modestly acknowledges applause from Sheffield’s crowded streets. |
1967
Four years later my wife agreed to pay fees and expenses for me to return to Sheffield to do an honours degree. This was unheard of at the time when 2% of the population went to university and if you got a place you automatically got a scholarship covering all expenses. But not for second first degrees, as this would be. Janet Hill gave up a promising acting career to pay for me by teaching primary children for five years. Empson and Berry accepted me and asked me to start up the Arts Society again. It had collapsed. I asked Philip, now at Belfast, if he would speak at an early meeting. He agreed. And that’s how I came across “truth lies between your legs.”
His Influence
I’ve just read Heather Clark on the Ulster Renaissance and discovered that Philip after getting his PhD in Sheffield, really was important in developing Belfast poetry. And she explains how.
Our group at Sheffield never produced renowned poets as far as I know. No wonder no one has been interested in us or even knew of the group. But that is where a group of enquiring undergraduates formed, that is where we met to discuss amongst ourselves the latest poets, our own poetry; where we were serious about ourselves and each other outside the lecture room.
You could say that we would have become what we became without Philip and the Group. I think though he brought us together and strengthened our sense of what we thought was important.
I learned to take writing seriously. Every Friday afternoon, knowing of Sunday’s meeting when I might or might not asked to read, I’d go to the library and make sure I wrote, and I pushed myself. And knowing there would be an audience that included Philip who could be dispassionately firm, I knew it had to have meat.
After Philip left the group, with just myself to satisfy, much of what I produced was thin and subjective. I did however get several poems on BBC’s Northern Drift,
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| BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio Sheffield, Western Daily Press, (Bristol) and Morning Telegraph (Sheffield), poems about life at the school where I taught – some of which were also part of .a poetry programme that Alan Plater put together and toured the Yorkshire theatres with. (I never cashed the cheque believing his signature was worth more than the money.) |
MISSING PICTURE?? Here should be a picture of Plater’s Ayborne cheque for 1 guinea (The BBC’s going rate was 1 guinea for each poem 16 lines or less and 2 guineas for longer poems.
And I wrote poems about what is now the past, the loads of kids on the backs of lorries with their mothers, off potato picking every day for a week with their mothers at the beginning of term. I sent work to George MacBeth and Howard Sergeant.and got reassuring replies.
Then I came to Canada to teach. Prodded by Dalhousie University’s Malcolm Ross and accepted by CBC’s Robert Weaver I got poems onto CBC Radio’s now-defunct Saturday evening “Anthology,” and then finding no one else who was interested I just gave up. But I did write poems in the classroom whenever I asked my senior high students to write, and I maintained in me a profound belief in the importance of poetry.
Later, I went on to study educational linguistics, and as I write, I became aware that my firm belief in the importance of poetry, (coming both from Philip Hobsbaum and Francis Berry) this helps me in my fight against the notion that transactional prose is the only worthwhile aspect of writing to teach to children and students (of all ages).
Partly as result of Philip’s, and Berry’s and the little French girl Minou Drouet’s influence, I encouraged my children from before they could write poems (see Eric documents EJ309761 and ED243103).
I started a poetry magazine for the school (unheard of then and there) insisting on close observation and concrete detail, and as head of department I expected all the staff to send in their pupils’ poems – again unheard of here. For several years I edited an annual poetry anthology for Nova Scotia students.
And now, aware of the vastness of functions we put writing to, I take the understanding that came from teaching people of all ages, to my university classroom. (Eric documents: Writing. Confidence, Illumination, and Purging: Three Effects of Exploratory Language. (EJ315044)
And Philip Hobsbaum was important to me in that he caused me to write this, about him and about me. And I hope, setting me up for a bout of more tough poetry, not to be published in Poetry in Sheffield, but left on the internet. Already I have borrowed Philip Hobsbaum’s and Francis Berry’s rhythms as I transfer the Medieval Guild Plays into contemporary English, (http://www.acadiau.ca/~bfox/), write about life in Hengrove, Bedminster (Bristol) during and just after World War II (http://www.acadiau.ca/~bfox/) and as I make poems about my rural, not rich at all, ingenious neighbours.
In fact as I write this I go back forty five years and think of the careful phrasing, concrete images, blunt assertions, which have governed all my private poetry and have been at the back of everything I have taught in the English classroom. All validated in the early 60s by writing with Philip Hobsbaum.
And as I teach poetry to first year Canadian university students, who have been taught that they must fit what they write into five paragraphs, and who are still being told that they mustn’t begin a sentence with “but” I am determined I will teach some of Philip Hobsbaum’s early poetry. But I probably won’t talk about where truth lies.
Philip Hobsbaum’s review of Sheffield Writing in The Times Literary Supplement
Following is an article from The Times Literary Supplement about writing at Sheffield University in 1960 and 1961. Philip Hobsbaum is clearly the informant for the “Special Correspondent” who wrote it. I also include images of the first two copies of Poetry from Sheffield, ones strongly influenced by Philip Hobsbaum, He was determined to have an impact with the magazine, and got Francis Berry, and friends George MacBeth, Peter Redgrove, and Peter Porter to contribute to early editions. I give the entire first two editions but for edition three I have attached poems only from people who were regular members of the Group.
Other pieces he wrote anonymously include reviews of Poetry from Sheffield for Darts, the student newspaper.
From “Hull, Leeds, and Sheffield”
In Sheffield the pattern of staff participation in student activities and encouragement (or discouragement) of creative writing is different again. There the staff seem on the whole friendly but distant: oh yes, there’s student writing, of course, but you will have to speak to this or that student really to find out about it. One or two names are mentioned, perhaps, and that is all. Even staff verdicts on the students themselves are oddly divergent: Professor Empson finds that at least they are independently, up here in the rebellious, north, seeming generally to feel that the main use of a university teacher is as someone to argue with. Others, however, complain that the students cling to them with disturbingly complete trust, and ask nothing better than to be handed lots of ready-made ideas from their teachers' minds to regurgitate when examinations come round.
The views of Mr. Philip Hobsbaum, a post-graduate researcher, and founder and spiritual director of the duplicated magazine Poetry from Sheffield, coincide very much with this latter reading of the situation. A man inclined to strong attitudes strongly expressed, Mr. Hobsbaum blames the staff roundly for their failure to encourage cultural activities or indeed have anything much to do with students at all:
There seems to be a clearcut division between the Union and the staff; and a postgraduate, distrusted by both sides, has to choose. As for the staff them- selves, those who try to fraternise with the students are liable to be ridiculed by their fellows and may even find their social standing among the staff or their chances of promotion impaired if they persist, on the principle that a man who hob-nobs too much with students isn't really the sort you could give a responsible job to.
Consequently, student writing and other cultural activities are left very much to the students, and here too leadership is sought; whenever a particular interest or group is said to be thriving, it seems to be because one person did something; so-and-so took over the Liberal Club; there are dynamic Anglican and Methodist University Chaplains; Mr. Hobsbaum thought a poetry magazine was possible when everyone said not and proved his point; Mr. Chris Knapper set about revitalizing the university's main existing magazine, Arrows, when it was in the doldrums for lack of material (" because there aren't any writers in Sheffield" being the reason usually given). Usually the one who has taken the lead has been a slightly older man, often a post-graduate student. These usually have more latitude in the organization of their time, though Mr. Knapper is a third-year under-graduate.
Once the lead has been given, support is forthcoming, sometimes from rather unexpected quarters. To begin with, there seems to be no real trouble about circulation for student publications: every university has its peculiarities, said someone, and Sheffield's is that its students buy things--the student paper, prints the largest number it can, and always sells out in a matter of hours; Arrows (quite glossily printed and a fair buy at l s.) does too: . and so, even, does Poetry from Sheffield, though duplicated and just increased in price from 3d. to 6d. More important. the material to publish is also available: a magazine editor has to go out and look for it, but it is there.
The writers come from all parts of the university, scientific as well as arts--indeed often scientific rather than artistic, since as Mr. Hobsbaum points out, the reputation of Sheffield is largely technical, and consequently the best all-round intelligences are likely to be found among the scientists, while the arts students are sometimes people who have failed to get in anywhere else. However this may be, the fact remains that the editor of Poetry from Sheffield and probable next chairman of -the Arts Society, Mr. Adrian Walker, is in fact an undergraduate engineer, and as many of the university writers seem to be drawn from scientists as from the arts side
Whether this state of affairs is responsible for the distinctive manner of the Sheffield poet it is impossible to say, but though Sheffield seems in general far less involved in politics than, say, Leeds, where left-wing politics dominates much of the student scene, the poetry' written in Sheffield js far more outward-looking, far more involved with the world of external realities about the poet, and far less confined to a narrow range of private emotions. This might; of course, be the result of an editorial line, but the editors of Poetry from Sheffield deny that they have any particular policy, and indeed suggest that the publication is a “compilation” rather than a magazine proper (" We print what we can get as often as the work received justifies it ").
Among the poets they have found those who at once claim attention are Mr. Walker himself and Mr. John Livermore, followed at a little distance by Mr. Barry J. Fox, whose work is more uneven but still interesting. There are also translations from modern Korean poets by a Korean student, Mr. Jong Gil 'Kim, which are often exquisite; but the most striking thing about these Sheffield poets is a tough, gritty, urban quality in their writing. Mr. Walker writes about sooty Sheffield scenes, railway journeys, neon signs in New York; Mr. Livermore has a taste for civilized irony in poems with titles like “Atheist in Old Age" and "War said the General ", and can also unflinchingly write a poem about such a completely high-thirties subject as a pylon; Mr. Fox is clearly angry about something, though what he is angry about does not always emerge quite so clearly.
They, unlike their Leeds contemporaries, would no doubt find New Lines rather sympathetic, but the influence from this quarter, if influence it is, seems to be less harmful than the complete unconcern for anything outside some-what febrile self-explorations which one suspects in many contributors to Poetry and Audience. Perhaps Sheffield is just lucky in one or two of its individual members, and perhaps no more general conclusion can be drawn; but it seems likely that the ability of these individuals to write muscular, well-articulated and economical verse will ensure that we hear more of them.
The Times Literary Supplement (234) April 14 1961
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