Return to the barbarian beer drinkers of Oxford

I’ve just returned from five weeks in Italy. It’s not that I’m particularly rich or leisured, just that my wife’s Italian and there’s no work for me in Oxford in August. She stayed out there with our baby son for another week.

Needless to say I spent the first evening or so in a couple of pubs in town, relishing a little bit of unrestrained beer drinking, no longer under the watchful eye of my mother-in-law.

Behind my seat in one of those pubs, under a biography of Edmund Blunden and a Complete Works of Shakespeare I’d once abandoned at the end of a summer school, I chanced upon a book about the economics of beer.

In there I learned that “the Romans generally drank only wine, and generally despised beer and its drinkers, whom they referred to as ‘barbarians’ and ‘uncivilised’ people”.

Nothing’s really changed that much in Italy, I reflected, texting a colleague to help me enjoy my escape from the tyranny of viniculture and triumphant return to the barbarian beer drinkers of Oxford.

When my friend replied to say he couldn’t make it, I downloaded to my smartphone the American poet John Berryman’s novel, Recovery.

Why would I do a thing like that? My only excuse is that I’ve been invited to give a lecture on ‘Berryman’s Mischief’ in Dublin at the beginning of October.

The title is not even my own, but given rather mischievously, I now see, by another academic cohort.

I don’t think I’ve ever managed to make my way through quite all of Berryman’s poetic masterpiece, The Dream Songs, although I did once publish a short essay on the first song. Perhaps that makes me almost an expert. But I certainly wouldn’t recommend attempting to read Recovery if you’re enjoying a beer.

I felt increasingly like a barbarian as I churned my way through what has been described as Berryman’s work of “underrated tremendous delirium”.

In fact, he committed suicide very soon after finishing the novel, defeated by his alcoholism and despair. Not a great pub book, then.

I am grimly looking forward to tackling The Dream Songs again over the next week or so, before my family arrives back, but without the aid of alcohol. I am sure that there will be enough of that at the conference in Dublin and I should get the paper half right first to enjoy it all properly.

It’s the centenary of Berryman’s birth this year as well as that of the First World War. A strange connection I have been pondering this week, having also begun to teach a course on that war’s literature.

What is the function of poetry? I asked my students this solemnly as we read together poems that I rather dislike by Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen.

My conviction is that academics have become so entangled in theory and history, a labyrinth of research, that most of them miss poetry’s function today.

But I still wonder whether W. B. Yeats was right not to include Owen in his 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse because “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry”?

Do we poets “have no gift to set a statesman right”?

Edward Clarke tutors English literature at the Department for Continuing Education, Oxford University, and on the visiting programme at St Catherine’s College.