Acknowledgements

After we’d finished our last book together, Edgelands, we decided to start work on this one; although like that project, the work had already begun, long before we could see Deaths of the Poets. The majority of these pilgrimages were made together, writing and recording and discussing as we travelled. But some of these journeys were made before we began to conceive of this book. A few, indeed, were made long before we met. We have chosen to describe these earlier journeys using the same ‘we’ form as the rest of the book. And that ‘we’ is always true, because we made none of these journeys alone. We’re grateful to those partners, friends, producers and family members who shared these pilgrimages and put up with our fascinations; we realized that – like many of our contemporaries – we have long been haunted by the deaths of poets, always trying to discern the variegated connections between the manner of a life ending and the value of the work.

As well as the archives, libraries, special collections and institutions mentioned elsewhere, we’re indebted to many other individuals and organizations, over several years, and we wanted to mention all those who went out of their way so that we could keep returning to the path.

Many thanks to the staff of Bonhams Auction House, London; to Professor Seamus Perry, who allowed us to think we might be set fair starting out from Thomas Chatterton; to Dr Carol Jacobi, curator, and the staff of Tate Britain; to the poet Daisy Fried, who shared her time and enthusiasms with us on several walks around New York City, then reprised the role and indulged one of our own enthusiasms for Rocky in Philadelphia; to the poet George Green (and the poet Billy Collins for putting us on to him), knowledgeable leader of the most definitive literary tour of lower Manhattan; to the staff of the Library Hotel, New York; to Richard Thomas, organizer of the Dylan Weekend at Laugharne, Wales; and, over the water, to the organizers of the Dún Laoghaire Festival in Ireland; in Minneapolis, to the poets Steve Healey, Dobby Gibson and Peter Campion for showing us the Twin Cities; back in Bristol, to Andrew Kelly, who runs the Festival of Ideas, and gave us a chance to search for Savage and Chatterton and the Ancient Mariner in that city; to Michael Doble for his knowledge of Chatterton’s Bristol and to the staff of Bristol Central Library; to the poet Jo Shapcott for helping us look again at Sylvia Plath in Primrose Hill and Stevie Smith in Palmers Green; in Athens, to the staff of the British Embassy, especially Katerina Korompli and Ambassador John Kittmer, for allowing a viewing of their Byron portrait at such short notice; in Messolonghi, to Rosa Flourou and all at the Messolonghi Byron Society; to the poet August Kleinzahler for useful tips on Thom Gunn and San Francisco; in Hull, to the poet Sean O’Brien, who led us through the landscape of Larkin and his own childhood; to Professor Stephen Regan for his keenness for all things Larkin, and the story of meeting the Librarian; to Miriam Porter, who allowed us into Larkin’s house, and her home, in a show of great generosity; to Richard Heseltine, University Librarian, and his staff at the Brynmor Jones Library, the University of Hull; to Simon Wilson at the Hull History Centre; in Boston, we’re grateful to the poet and critic Stephen Burt for late breakfast/early lunch and talk near Harvard; at the Lewis Wharf Quayside apartments, to Michael the Building Manager, and his tip for Legal Seafood; in Devon, to Mair Bosworth who did the driving and a boundary walk around Stevie Smith’s places under Dartmoor; in Palmers Green, to Lisa and Kevin, who very kindly allowed a look around their flat, once Stevie’s house; to Siobhan Maguire at BBC Bristol, for helping us track down elusive MacNeician sound files; in Normandy, we were taken on a tour of Keith Douglas’s last days with Stéphane Jacquet, Curator of the Museum of the Battle of Tilly-sur-Seulles, and we wouldn’t have got far without his knowledge on the ground; at BBC Salford, to Geoff Bird for an eventful few days spent with one of us in New York, looking for Frank O’ Hara’s Lunch Poems; on Long Island, to the staff of Sip n’ Twirl at Fire Island Pines, who made us both very welcome; back in London, to Vivian Wright and Jonathan Barker, our wonderful hosts during a walking tour of David Jones’s Harrow; to Julian May at the BBC, for travelling to the Somme for the first time with one of us, in the footsteps of Wilfred Owen, and to the late Dominic Hibberd; in Paterson, New Jersey, to Professor Steve Hahn from William Paterson University; to Della Rowland and Rod Leith, for their enthusiasm and insights into William Carlos Williams; and to Daphne Williams Fox for her great hospitality and for making so much of our work on her grandfather possible; we’re grateful to the poet and critic Jeremy Hooker for being with one of us at the longhouse of R. S. Thomas, and to Dr Jeremy Noel-Tod; to all the staff at the Emily Dickinson Homestead at Amherst, Massachusetts; in Bournemouth, to the publisher Neil Astley for opening our eyes to Rosemary Tonks: he has given us a great deal towards this book; we’re also grateful to Nigel Still and Lisa Stillman at Stephen Noble Estate Agents, and Duncan Ross, who let us look around Rosemary’s house; to the poet Anne Stevenson, who talked to us about Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; in Hartford, Connecticut, to the wife of the Dean of Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral and her son, gracious after we came cold-calling; to Brian Richards of the New York Yankees Museum in New York, who taught us baseball; we thank St Andrew’s Healthcare in Northampton, and in particular the Archive Manager Bobbie Judd, who shared her knowledge of John Clare; the poet Ian Duhig was a brilliant guide in Leeds, and also a mover and shaker in ‘Riley’s Light: an appreciation of the poetry of John Riley’ at the University of Leeds, where we’re also grateful to Helen Mort, Andrew McMillan and Professor John Whale; to Antony Ramm at the Local and Family History Archive, Leeds Library; in Austria on the trail of W. H. Auden, we were lucky to meet Dr Helmut Neundlinger: he, his colleague Katharina Strasser at the Centre for Museums Collection Management, Danube University Krems, and the Documentation Centre for Literature in Lower Austria couldn’t have been more helpful; to the staff of the österreichische Mediathek who allowed us to travel back in time to 1973, and to Dr Manfred Müller and Ursula Ebel at the Austrian Society for Literature; we’re also grateful to the staff of the Beethoven Saal at the Palais Palffy; in Kirchstetten, to Maria Rollenitz, who arranged us access to the Audenhaus; we had the good fortune to meet the German-language poet E. A. Richter, who told us his story and brought Auden and Chester’s world at Kirchstetten to life; to the Mayor of Kirchstetten, Paul Horsak, who took us in his car to see Auden’s car, and gave us the heartiest of welcomes; we’d also like to offer our thanks to the author and historian Michael O’Sullivan: Michael was due to travel from Budapest to give us a tour of Auden in Austria, but was prevented from doing so when international train services between Budapest and Vienna were suspended due to the migrant crisis; but his goodwill and suggestions made much of our Auden journey plausible.

We wanted to say a particular thank you to Kate Donahue in Minneapolis, for inviting us into her home and agreeing to talk about her husband John Berryman with a couple of English poets. The example of her generosity at an early stage in this project was galvanizing.

Making all these meetings and journeys happen took some serious logistics. Carole Romaya booked many flights and hotels, and generally made sure we got to the gig. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Caroline Hawkridge. Caroline took our barely formed plans and lists of names and transformed them into itineraries. She told us who had what and where. She got us though the doors. She checked what we were writing.

Our agents David Godwin, Anna Webber and Peter Straus have made the whole two-author-shuffle thing easy once again. At Jonathan Cape our editor Robin Robertson, together with Clare Bullock and Ceri Maxwell Hughes, gave us everything we needed, and then some. Also, thanks to Ian Pindar for his copy-editing of the manuscript. Any errors or faults escaped into the text are down to the other guy.

This book received support from the Society of Authors thanks to an Authors’ Foundation Award in 2012, for which we’re both enormously grateful.

In particular, Paul Farley would like to thank: the Society of Authors (again) for the award of a Travelling Scholarship in 2009, the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the E. M. Forster Award the same year, and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Fund at Lancaster University. An early version of the half-chapter on Wilfred Owen was published in the Independent (10 November 2006), as ‘Journey to the Trenches’. Along with those BBC producers already mentioned, I want to thank Tim Dee and Emma Harding for their company and forbearance while on the road. I’m deeply grateful for the hospitality and encouragement of many people, including Adam Sutherland and Karen Guthrie at Grizedale Arts/Lawson Park, my students Matt Haw and Karen Lockney, the poet Julian Turner; and I also wanted to remember two friends, Michael Donaghy and Robert Woof. Finally, warm and constant thanks to Carole.

Michael Symmons Roberts would like to thank: the Humanities Research Centre at Manchester Metropolitan University, the commissioners of BBC Radio 2, 3 and 4, and BBC2 and BBC4 television, for sowing the seeds of some of these chapters; and in particular Sebastian Barfield, Faith Lawrence, Susan Roberts, Sharon Sephton and Matt Thomas for their company and forbearance on various travels. Also the editors, including those of the Guardian, Telegraph and Tablet, where some of these ideas were first explored. At MMU I’m indebted to Jess Edwards and Berthold Schoene for their interest in, and support for, the making of this book. I’m grateful for the conversation and insights of many friends and colleagues, but especially the poet Jean Sprackland and producer Geoff Bird. As ever, my last words of gratitude must go to Ruth, Joe, Paddy and Griff, for all the talk of poets – dead and living – they have had to live with over many years.

Afterword

We rise from the Underground to find Euston Station busy. This great concrete retail-fringed shed is the north-westerner’s gateway in and out of the capital, as old as we are now, built in the International Style that had once seemed so shining and new. Many of the faces in the crowd don’t only look like they’d rather be somewhere else, they are; our handheld devices are turning us all into phantoms, occupying but barely sharing the same concourse we cross. Maybe technology has just made it easier nowadays to see how we’ve always moved through the city. Ezra Pound managed to get a signal a century ago on the Paris metro:

Many of our journeys have ended up here, waiting in the seated area of the AMT Coffee Lounge, between Platform 14 and Left Luggage, before saying our farewells and splitting up for our final legs homeward. Our travels are nearly over, but we’ve decided there’s one more place to visit, so close by it’s the shortest of detours on foot. We exit the station into daylight, and remember that this is the last day of winter according to the weather forecasters, and the February leap day. The city feels a little lighter on its feet in the pale sun, unburdened somehow. Spring seems to be lifting the lid on the world. Although walking out of Euston often produces this effect.

*

Three days before his death in the Holborn garret, Thomas Chatterton fell into an open grave in St Pancras Churchyard. He’d been so absorbed in reading the epitaphs that he’d wandered from the path, missed his footing and stumbled into the earth; the poet had to be helped out by a friend, who remarked how he was happy to help in the resurrection of genius.

It’s a good story, but might only be so much speculative Chatterton chat, an ominous anecdote based on a lost letter to the poet’s mother, embellished by his earliest biographers, redeveloped and built upon during the young poet’s rise to posthumous fame. Though if Chatterton had ended up in the ground at St Pancras, he wouldn’t have remained there for long. Another poet would have seen to that.

We’ve tended to avoid graves and last resting places on our journeys to the sites where poets left this world. As we’ve discovered, the places we associate with writers and artists can be manifold, and a lot of ground hallowed. There might be a birth site, one or many ‘life sites’, a place of death and a grave. We wanted to visit war graves and record those visits. The scholar Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us that the Latin sepulcrum comes from sepelire, meaning ‘to bury’, but within which lies buried an Indo-European root that means ‘to render honour’.² The dead recovered from the battlefield are interred in a larger symbolic structure that links their sacrifice with our identity and sense of nationhood.

But we’ve been wary of turning this book into a necropolis, too much of what David Jones described as a Cook’s Tour to the Devastated Areas, or a Boot Hill of the lyrical dead.³ We’ve walked up the fractious Euston Road, turning left after the British Library, and found ourselves in the calm of St Pancras Churchyard, not for a poet’s grave but for a tree.

It’s a mature ash, whose base has been surrounded by a flinty wheel of worn gravestones. Dozens of them, as if they have uprooted themselves and been drawn towards the gravity of the living tree, gnomons that have deserted their sundials and flocked to its roots and bole, which over time have grown around them, enfolded them, absorbed them, a writhing dance between the mineral and the organic. The tree seems buoyed up by the gravestones, borne aloft on the mound of them, a warden ash from northern folklore. Yggdrasil fed by the buried Fleet River. A poet made this.

*

About a year ago, on a hazy spring morning, we’d stood outside the Palazzo Guiccioli in Ravenna, where Byron lived as cavalier servente with his lover Teresa and her elderly husband. The building was covered in tarpaulins. Following extensive restoration, it is hoped that this will become one of Ravenna’s great tourist attractions, a multi-media Byron museum and literary centre. But no matter how remarkable the restored Palazzo may be, it can only aspire to be the city’s runner-up poetic shrine.

A five-minute walk to the south-east and you find yourself standing at the end of a side road, staring up at a tall, narrow white stone monument with an open door. Above the door are three words: DANTIS POETAE SEPULCRUM. Four or five tourists is enough to fill the small tomb with chatter and camera flashes. You wait for them to leave, then step inside, taken aback by the sudden drop in light and temperature.

A single lamp burns in this place, but it makes a powerful difference. The low flicker of the flame lends it a votive silence, a sense of sacred space. On the wall opposite the doorway, you can just make out a marble carving of the greatest of all poets, fingers on lips, deep in thought, poring over one book open at a lectern, his right hand to his side, marking his place in another. Other books lie scattered across the table in front of him, and a single bottle of ink. Here is the poet at work, it wants us to believe. Here he is putting in the hours that produced the Divine Comedy. Below the carving, a marble sarcophagus holds Dante’s bones. If any poet has achieved immortality, it is this one. Yet even he had to achieve it through his work, rather than the preferred option – in Woody Allen’s words – of achieving it by ‘not dying’.

Dante has not always been left to rest in peace. Two centuries after his death, the Pope tried to arrange the transfer of his bones back to his beloved Florence, but Ravenna’s monks were having none of it and hid them for another three centuries, until they turned up again in 1865.⁴ The bones were placed in this sarcophagus, where they have remained ever since. Well, mostly remained. They were removed again between 1944 and 1945 and buried in the garden next door to protect them from war damage. This temporary haven is now marked with a heap of earth like a termite mound, covered in ivy. A sign beside the temple informs visitors who may be spooked by counting chimes that the bell in the tower will ring thirteen times each dusk, in honour of the 8th Canto of the Purgatorio: ‘ … to hear, far off, the evening bell / that seems to mourn the dying of the day’.

A footnote bubbles to the surface. Some seventy miles north of Ravenna, Dante’s compatriot and near contemporary Petrarch has been similarly unsettled in the long home of the grave. After loving and losing his Laura, after the spring source of the River Sorgue and the limestone hills of Vaucluse, the poet died back in his native Italy in 1374. After being interred at the cathedral at Arquà Padua, Petrarch’s remains were moved to a permanent tomb in the town six years later, and for over six hundred years all was dusty silence, though in 1630 a drunken friar broke into the grave, looking for relics to sell, and disturbed the bones. In 2003 a team of forensic scientists were given permission to carry out genetic analysis of Petrarch’s remains, and opened the grave in what since 1870 has been called Arquà Petrarca.⁵ They examined mitochondrial DNA from a tooth and a rib and discovered that each belonged to different individuals, one male and one female. A sentimental (if also slightly macabre) thought arises: what if Petrarch had somehow been posthumously reunited with his Laura? But no: radiocarbon analysis revealed the skull to be two centuries older than the bone sample. This is more an episode of CSI: Poetry than a pilgrimage, and brings to mind Jacques Cousteau’s descent into the pool and cavern at Vaucluse. We wondered, as we have done so many times on our travels, what sources in the physical world ever have to tell us about poems that find a home in the heart and on the living tongue.

As you step back into the sunlight at Ravenna, you can’t help but wonder where Dante is now. You can be pretty confident where his bones are, but where is he? Is he in some circle of his own painstakingly mapped out afterlife, passing eternity with liars or illicit lovers or lost souls? Or has he got a free pass to the Empyrean with his Beatrice, granted safe passage due to the enduring beauty of his work?

*

One year on. Spring is returning to the northern hemisphere. St Pancras Churchyard still feels threadbare, but the bulbs are raising their shoots like green letter-openers; the sun is warm on our backs. This is our final act of pilgrimage, though it breaks step with much of what’s gone before. We’ve not come here seeking the grave or death of a poet, but the work of a poet, perhaps even the place where a poet began.

St Pancras Churchyard lies in the hinterlands of the three great stations – Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross – where the lines into London from the north converge and thicken into broad estuaries of rails. Victorian modernity and expansion sometimes disturbed consecrated ground where generations lay buried, and here, where the Midland Railway Company approached its new terminus, it found the dead of St Pancras Churchyard directly in its path. The architects Sir Arthur William Blomfield and Sons were assigned by the Bishop of London with the task of removing the bones from the earth, and in the late summer and autumn of 1866 Blomfield delegated the work to his assistant, the twenty-six-year-old Thomas Hardy.

Hardy wasn’t a published poet or novelist yet, but these early years in London were important, formative ones, and he had begun writing stories and poems, some of which would finally see the light of day thirty years later when his first collection appeared. It’s tempting to imagine how the young poet’s dismal overseeing, working by the light of flare-lamps as the evenings drew in, must have left many deeply engrained feelings and images. Hardy’s oeuvre would contain more graves than most. We think of the confused rabble of ‘human jam’ from ‘The Levelled Churchyard’, Drummer Hodge thrown ‘uncoffined’ into a hole in the African veldt, the green blades and daisies on the mound of ‘Rain on a Grave’, the separate mounds of ‘In Death Divided’, the skeletal speakers of ‘Channel Firing’ disturbed by the racket of the living …

And on a mound here in the churchyard today we find the ash tree memorial Hardy made and left to grow, built from the stones of the dismantled graveyard. The poet himself would end up in Westminster Abbey many years later, though his heart – like a king or knight’s from the Middle Ages – was removed and buried separately in Wessex earth. There was a rumour that Hardy’s heart, kept in a biscuit tin following its removal, was set upon by the cat of the local doctor. We hear the thud of Chatterton falling face down into the opened grave again. Some poets’ disappearances and deaths attract stories and fables, just as this tree has drawn an entire graveyard to its bosom.

*

The chances of a poem surviving its maker aren’t great. The chances of a poem surviving any greater length of time are bleak. After we’ve burned in time’s wind tunnel and the oxygen that makes complex life possible has used up our cells, a poem’s best chance might be to stick and inhere in the collective memory of a culture, the fabric of its language, though over generations this resilience is impossible to predict, and the odds are massively stacked against it happening.

Maybe this is part of the appeal. You’re almost certainly doomed to failure, if a longevity measured in centuries rather than decades is your yardstick. What a game to get into. Have we really thought this through? And immortality, like nostalgia, isn’t quite what it used to be. Ever since Horace told us he’d finished a monument more lasting than bronze, poets have tried to future-proof their work, to colonize the ages to come, to speak across what Larkin called the ‘lengths and breadths of time’ to readers unborn, to live for ever.⁶ The poet might not live to see it – like Sylvia Plath – or might live to witness the completion of their monument – like Robert Frost – while plenty more – like John Clare – might die having watched the foundations going in, only to see the weeds and roots obscuring and undermining and weakening it. Without proper upkeep, without diligent caretakers, the whole thing might end up cleared away and backfilled.

Much as a poem is a made thing, it isn’t simply a structure, and this monument is as much an agreement of the soft tissues – the brains and the tongues – of a people over time, a meeting place, an open secret. But poets themselves have sometimes taken a longer view. ‘There’s no posterity to write for,’ Peter Reading once wrote.⁷ ‘I’m writing now for mutated arthropods.’ Today it’s hard to escape the knowledge that, as a species, the chances are we won’t be in business for much longer. The planet grows warmer. Yggdrasil suffers dieback. As children of the Cold War, who grew up afraid of the Bomb in their beds at night, we both recognize how we live in an age where the idea of posterity itself has been eroded and discredited. But whether the world ends in fire or in ice, there are even longer prospects. The Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon takes things several degrees further by looking back to the Classical world and Horace, but also Heraclitus, who famously told us nobody steps into the same river twice:

And that will have been poetry, about as long-lived as a bristlecone pine; those final few inches of dirty snow in a core sample drawn up from the sheet ice. Maybe we should be grateful to find any readers where we live, here and now, closer to home.

*

Spending so much time on the trail of dead poets has had its unpredictable side effects. We’ve been walking along the rim of a crater called The Past, or through an odd doll’s house of linked interiors.

By the time we get back to Euston, we’re discussing the actual location of the long-demolished Euston Arch, the Rough Rock, soot-blackened, Doric propylaeum that had stood at the entrance to the old station for over a century, before being knocked down to make way for the new one in the early Sixties. Even John Betjeman couldn’t save it, although the neighbouring St Pancras Station might not be standing today if it wasn’t for the future Poet Laureate. We reckon the Arch would have stood somewhere here, near the centre of what’s now the main concourse. An amputee pigeon struggles on the shiny tiles, searching for crumbs a long way from daylight.

*

Euston, for any north-westerner, is a portal. You board in the north, and you alight in the south five degrees warmer. At the tail-end of the nineteenth century a young Lancastrian made the trip to launch his career as a poet, and was swallowed whole. Francis Thompson’s fall from medical student in Manchester to homeless junkie in London was precipitous. One night he bought a fatal draught of laudanum and withdrew to a rubbish tip at the back of Covent Garden market, determined to end it all. He was barely halfway down the bottle when he felt a restraining hand on his. Looking up, he saw the ghost of Thomas Chatterton, forbidding him to drink the rest. When the marvellous boy tells you to stop, you stop. Within a day Thompson’s luck turned, with a letter from the influential Wilfred Meynell praising his poems, and the rest is literary history.

Thompson has been on our radar since childhood, a famous poet born in Preston. Except he was only really famous for ‘The Hound of Heaven’, and all we could remember of that was how doggedly the hound pursued him. We knew the drama of his story, his geographical and metaphorical descent, but we didn’t know then that he was rescued from the brink of suicide by the shade of Thomas Chatterton.

Telling this tale to a friend in 1907, the poet was asked how he knew it was the legendary wunderkind who saved him. ‘I recognized him from the picture,’ Thompson replied. Chatterton is one of those rare figures who, as the historian Richard Holmes puts it, ‘seems at times to have taken command of certain areas of the psychic landscape’.⁹ Here he was still vivid in the opium visions of Francis Thompson, a relay transmitter pushing the poète maudit myth across from the nineteenth to the twentieth century where it was picked up by a green and carefree bard in Swansea.

*

Time is out of joint, because we’ve been spending too much time in the long view, like our own ghosts. ‘There’s some reason why you guys are doing this …’– Kate Donahue’s words come back to us. But somewhere between the tree and the arch, we’ve decided we want to head home now, back to our lives. In a way, we’ve only been doing what poets have always done, paying our respects in the final haunts of writers important to us, but among all the epitaphs and grave goods, it’s easy to fall into a hole.

This long view opens out backwards and forwards. The future returns no echoes. Our voices barely carry. Poetry doesn’t have a definite destination; we can’t even be sure of the next calling points on the journey. Any poet today might hope to have some small part to play in the direction it will take, but for all we know the poems that readers in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries will value and admire (assuming there are any) are being written in those blind spots in our midst that are not regarded as poetry places. Some mute inglorious programmer using Python script.

So, what of our central question: is it true that great poems come at a heavy – perhaps ultimately fatal – price? Looking back, we can see how poetry likes squaring up to the big safe themes – which turn out not to be very safe, because, in the absence of love or death or raw nature, the poet might go looking for a heightened state, taking risks that imperil them emotionally or physically in order to spark a poem. The poetic exceptionalist will point to patterns of depressive introspection. Even those poets who keep up appearances and give the impression of leading routine and orthodox lives seem to harbour unrulier, disruptive energies, a poltergeist behind closed doors and beyond public view.

But isn’t this part of a wider artistic affliction? There are plenty of painters, composers, playwrights and musicians who have taken such risks. The non-exceptionalist view looks at things the other way, the big cultural narrative that began with Chatterton, was reified by Keats and exported in scores of ways into the faraway century that followed. Looked at this way, there is nothing particularly ‘doomed’ about poets; if anything, those poets who lived on a screeching edge that we picked up in our youth were assuming a role, doing what the world expected of them.

If we’re honest, this is where our own ‘we’ starts to split. At the end of this odyssey, one of us would say the myth of the doomed poet is simply that – a myth we need to debunk – while the other thinks there’s an unquiet spirit in many poets that means the myth still holds.

Our trains are announced. One thing is absolutely certain. When we get home, we are both going to have a little bonfire in our back gardens.

*

Places like this are where poems tend to begin or stir: while in transit, in motion. We both have workplaces a few hours to the north, but while there is no lectern or ink to be found, those places can feel as inert as Dante’s tomb-study. It suddenly seems laughable to call either – a shed in the garden and a box room – studies. Both are more like shrines to vanity, or at best places where we can hide and stall, get things finished or at least make them presentable. But if this is true for us, what of all the places we’ve visited over the last few years? If poems begin in the wind, while driving along or staring vacantly through the window of a train, what kind of sources do the living look for in the haunts of dead poets?

Time to return to the poems, which have their own lives to lead and will make their own ways in the world to come. That we are all going to die, that a poem can happen anywhere, the most unlikely spot, and inscribe its shape despite our awful foreknowledge, means it’s also time to admit it will definitely happen to us – though hopefully not before we hand this in – and to leave behind the plural pronoun, the shelter of the average rate we’ve been travelling at, to run for our separate trains after saying our goodbyes as Michael and as Paul.

BY THE SAME AUTHORS

PAUL FARLEY

POETRY

The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You

The Ice Age

Tramp in Flames

The Atlantic Tunnel: Selected Poems

Field Recordings: BBC Poems 1998–2008

The Dark Film

NON-FICTION

Distant Voices, Still Lives

AS EDITOR

John Clare (Poet to Poet)

MICHAEL SYMMONS ROBERTS

POETRY

Soft Keys

Raising Sparks

Burning Babylon

Corpus

The Half Healed

Drysalter

Selected Poems

FICTION

Patrick’s Alphabet

Breath

About the Authors

Both poets are familiar broadcasters and have worked extensively in radio and television. Farley has won the Whitbread Poetry Award and two Forward Prizes and Roberts has won the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry prize. They are Professors of Poetry at Lancaster and Manchester Metropolitan Universities. Their book, Edgelands, a non-fiction journey into England’s overlooked wilderness, was published in 2011 and received the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award and the Foyles Best Book of Ideas Award and was serialised as Radio 4’s Book of the Week.

About the Book

From Chatterton’s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats’ death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood; from Dylan Thomas’s eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath’s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen or John Berryman’s leap from a bridge onto the frozen Mississippi, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work.

The post-Romantic myth of the dissolute drunken poet – exemplified by Thomas and made iconic by his death in New York – has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive. Is this just a myth, or is there some essential truth behind it: that great poems only come when a poet’s life is pushed right to an emotional knife-edge of acceptability, safety, security? What is the price of poetry?

In this book, two contemporary poets undertake a series of journeys – across Britain, America and Europe – to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, honouring inspirational writers, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth. The result is a book that is, in turn, enlightening and provocative, eye-wateringly funny and powerfully moving.

A Portable Shrine

Standing in front of Chatterton – commonly known as The Death of Chatterton – in Tate Britain is enough to make a poet sick.¹ It’s one of the defining images of nineteenth-century painting, a Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece. We are examining it with Tate curator Dr Carol Jacobi, who explains how Henry Wallis painted pure white on to the canvas first, instead of the conventional dull wash. He then worked over it, so the finished canvas looks back-lit, transfigured. She takes us through the details, the painstaking pencil work on the boy’s alabaster skin, the torn shreds of his abandoned poems on the floor by his lifeless right hand, the ghost of a London dawn skyline through the open casement window, the empty arsenic phial on the floor beside his bed.

Like many a famous painting, movie star or revisited childhood haunt, Chatterton is smaller in the flesh than you expect. But the flesh is what gets you. The artist Henry Wallis was a young man himself – in his mid-twenties – when he hit upon the suicide of a beautiful young poet as the subject of his next painting. It is full of the virtuosic confidence of a young artist trying to make his mark, and it has been read as a critique of society’s treatment of artists. But as you stare into the painting, you can’t take your eyes off the skin’s pallor, the cascade of auburn hair. If this is a polemic about undervalued artists, then it’s a strange one. It seems to glory in this sacrificial figure, this secular pieta. There is a death-lust to it, a lustre and a lavish attention. A line from Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr Faustus at the foot of the frame underlines the point: ‘Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, / And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough.’

But what makes this painting exceptional is more than its morbid sick-sweetness. After all, anyone who spends time in galleries will have taken in their share of Victorian mortality-porn. Wallis’s depiction of Chatterton’s death is not just ravishing but culpable. If the myth of the doomed poet starts anywhere, it starts here, with what Ruskin called this ‘faultless and wonderful’ painting.²

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The poet Thomas Chatterton died not once but twice. Or rather, not once but repeatedly. His first death took place on 24 August 1770 in a garret in Brook Street, Holborn, London. After turning down his landlady’s offers of dinner the night before, he was found stretched out on a pallet bed with an empty phial of poison lying alongside him. He was not yet eighteen. His literary reputation amounted to very little, despite his prodigious output – almost 700 pages written under noms de plume – and was overshadowed by his scandalous reputation as a faker of medieval verse. He was interred quietly in the backyard burial plot of a Holborn workhouse.

The son of a Bristol teacher, Chatterton was brought up in a schoolhouse across the road from St Mary Redcliffe Church. The house remains, preserved on what feels like a traffic island on Redcliffe Way, a busy commuter strip in Bristol’s central business district not far from Temple Meads Station. It is a modest, four-square Georgian home, lime-rendered and newly re-roofed. It has been Grade 2 listed for its historical importance, but the same cannot be said of the school. A large wall protrudes from the house with elegant windows, a remnant of the grander buildings of the school itself. But the wall is all that’s left. Where children once lined up at desks, commuters line up in queues, minds on the day ahead, eyes glazed at a sight of such daily familiarity. Why did the road-builders leave the school wall? We conclude it must have been a structural necessity, because it looks odd, a taster of a more impressive building tagged on to a tiny house, as if they amputated the wrong bit.

There are plans to turn Chatterton’s birthplace into a café and visitor centre, but when we arrive it is locked and empty. Morning rush hour, and the schoolhouse is dwarfed and beaten by the city around it. Among the towering hotels and office blocks it looks like a Wendy house. It’s hard to imagine the shy kid who lived here, passing tranquil hours in the muniments room high above the north porch of the church across the road, teaching himself to write in a convincing medieval style.

When he claimed to have discovered ancient verses by a fifteenth-century monk called Thomas Rowley, Chatterton’s skills as a teenage forger conned many of the great and good, including (for a while) the celebrated antiquarian Horace Walpole. Eager to capitalize on his luck, Chatterton moved to London and began selling squibs and polemics to journals under fantastic pen names like Harry Wildfire, Decimus and Flirtilla.³

The phoney monk Rowley was exposed when Walpole’s friend the poet Thomas Gray – of Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard fame – read the poems and fingered them as fakes. But Chatterton battled on, scratching out a Grub Street living with his pen, until his body was discovered in that garret room at the age of seventeen years and nine months.

It’s a sorry tale, seen from any angle. From a literary perspective, what did we lose? Chatterton’s mastery (in his mid-teens) of verse forms and his ear for a lyric line suggest a prodigious talent. What would he have written had he lived into his twenties? Even Keats – famously young when he died – had seven more years than Chatterton to leave us a body of work. There are loyal adherents to his literary worth, those who argue that the Romantics would have come to nothing without him, but it’s safer to say that here was a genius snuffed out before it could flower. From a human perspective, it’s an even bleaker – and more familiar – story. A teenage boy leaves a provincial city in search of experience, money and fame, and without the care of family and friends ends up dying alone in a shabby bedsit.

We wander over to the church, where a café in the crypt is opening up for the day. We sit with a coffee and contemplate the strange posthumous life of this remarkable boy-poet. Lots of people we talk to in Bristol have heard of him. Some of them know where his family house is. But barely anyone can quote a line from his verse. And that’s not just the case in Bristol. Gather a group of contemporary poets and literary critics in a room (actually, don’t …) and very few of them could quote from Chatterton’s work either. Some may know of him as a famous forger, others as a forerunner of the Romantic poets, but more will know him from him his blue britches and Pre-Raphaelite locks. For most of us, Thomas Chatterton has become the young man in Wallis’s painting.

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In the years following his death, the literary world continued largely to ignore Chatterton, save the odd skirmish about the authenticity of various manuscripts. But the myth was already being seeded. By the late 1700s the poet on his garret deathbed had gained a niche – but growing – following among engravers and printmakers, some of whom pressed rewind to the moments just before his death. In John Flaxman’s 1790 Chatterton receives the Bowl of Poison from the Spirit of Despair, the beautiful boy (looking rather like a beautiful girl) reaches out to drink from a bowl being offered by the grotesque spectre of Despair, who appears to be a cross between a cage-fighter and the Grim Reaper. In 1783 a romantic mock-ruin was built on an estate in Bath, in honour of the figure Wordsworth called ‘The marvellous Boy, / The sleepless Soul that perished in its pride’, which bore the inscription ‘Unfortunate Boy … Thy Fame Shall Never Die.’ There were even Chatterton handkerchiefs available in red and blue, depicting the tortured poet in his garret. But the merchandise of death was not what gave the myth its next big push. That was down to the poets.

By the start of the nineteenth century he was cropping up in poems by Wordsworth, Shelley and Rossetti, and most notably in Coleridge’s ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’, in which the living poet calls upon his dead hero to help him achieve such purity of will: ‘Grant me, like thee, the lyre to sound, / Like thee, with fire divine to glow.’⁴ The pure and broken boy was an irresistibly perfect icon of devotion to the muse, even in the face of poverty and obscurity, even if it cost him his life.

These replays of Chatterton’s death in the poems of celebrated living poets began to make him famous. In the decades after, he became an exemplary romantic figure, an embodiment of what these living poets half-feared and half-believed, that to be a true poet means to push your life to the very brink of ruin and death, and ultimately beyond.

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Its name may not be up there with the Mona Lisa, but everyone knows the image. It’s been reproduced on countless postcards, mocked up for films and books, even recently refashioned as a Babyshambles album cover, with Pete Doherty claiming Chatterton as one of his heroes.⁵ We walk along the walls packed with Tate Britain’s nineteenth-century treasures, but we keep being drawn back to Henry Wallis’s painting of The Death of Chatterton.

The original, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856, is strikingly more vivid than its many reproductions. The scene is so simple, so elegantly set. In front of the window, on a bare and dirty bed lies the glamorous, young, dead poet. The blue of his britches looks as radiant as the Marian blue in Christian iconography, and his sullied white shirt is open to the navel to reveal his pale chest. His head tilts off the edge of the bed to face us, as his hair cascades towards a wooden trunk, open on the floor, surrounded by the shreds of torn-up verse. His hair is the darkest, richest red, for which we have to thank not just the painter but the young model, the novelist George Meredith. Sadly, George’s vivid locks were not enough to stop his wife eloping with Wallis three years later.

An open window of the attic room behind the corpse shows the skyline of the city that turned its back on Chatterton. The painted poet is sexualized, feminized, romanticized. But there is a sacred element here, too. This is the poet as a sacrificial figure, a vicarious victim who gave himself in the cause of his art.

Wallis’s painting was copied, exhibited and toured the British Isles. Among its many admirers were the new urban working class, for whom exhibitions of art were staged by philanthropists eager to offer moral and aesthetic improvement, and to show off their cultural and economic power. Exhibitions like the colossal Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in the summer of 1857 extended the audience for painting far beyond the London coterie.⁶ In five months Manchester’s extravaganza attracted 1.3 million visitors. To put the idea of this painting on tour into some kind of context: throughout 2014 the Manchester Arena sold just over a million tickets, for shows featuring the likes of Beyoncé, Kylie Minogue and Katy Perry.⁷ And they had dry ice. Wallis’s painting tapped into the Victorian public’s fascination with death, and for many of the new urban working class this was their first encounter with what a poet might actually be like – sensitive, tormented, counter-cultural, bohemian. Oh, and dead.

It didn’t come out of nowhere. It seemed to fit the stories of other poets, notably John Keats, whose line ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’ was written above the exhibition’s entrance. Keats had died in 1821 and, like Chatterton, he died young, poor, sick and broken by his sacrificial dedication to poetry.

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‘I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn.⁸ He is the purest writer in the English Language,’ Keats wrote in a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds in the early autumn of 1819. In Rome, we walk down from where we are staying off the Piazza del Popolo to the old foreigners’ quarter, the Piazza di Spagna. Italy has been lashed with an autumn storm this week, and earlier we’d walked along the banks of a swollen and muddy Tiber, watching snarls of trees and branches racing through the bridge arches. To the north of the country, roads are washed out; tourists are wearing swimming costumes in St Mark’s Square. Here in Rome, the sewers are backing up.

But the storm has passed, and the tourists are fully-clothed in the Piazza at the foot of the Spanish Steps. And there is the Keats-Shelley House, right beside the Scalinata. Inside, the whole place, with its dark wood paneling and bookshelves, its chairs lining the sides of rooms with old display cases, feels burnished, still, richly textured with age. If it’s possible for a museum to feel autumnal, then this one does. As we’ll discover, museums to poets don’t always behave in this way. The rooms here contain many manuscripts and drawings, including a portrait of the tubercular Keats on his deathbed by his devoted friend Joseph Severn, drawn here in 1821, towards the end of four long months. The pair had sailed south from London on the advice of Keats’s doctor. The young poet knew what was happening inside him. Having been apprenticed as a surgeon, he called for a candle to inspect what he had coughed up. ‘I know the colour of that blood; – it is arterial blood; – I cannot be deceived in that colour; – that drop of blood is my death-warrant; – I must die.’⁹

In another room there is a life mask of Keats made five years before he died here. We can’t help but compare it to Severn’s portrait: the drawn features in the latter, the hair sticking to the poet’s brow. There is plenty of actual hair here, too, Keats’s included. Exchanging locks of hair was common during the early nineteenth century. There is an alabaster urn said to contain a fragment of Shelley’s jaw.

And here is the room in which Keats died, small but high ceilinged, shuttered off from the glare of a Roman day. It’s the bed that punctures the routine air of looking around at exhibits. Even though we know it’s not the original bed that Keats lay dying in – everything was burned to prevent infection – it catches us off guard. It might be something to do with its scale: it feels slightly miniaturized, a walnut boat bed for a boy. His death mask tilts upwards in its case. We look to the ceiling he would have known intimately: plasterwork flowers on a pale blue background, seen from a bed like this. The deathbed turns the whole room into a kind of death mask. Standing next to it, there’s an underlying impression of every bedside we’ve ever visited to wait for a fever to break, to say goodbye to somebody, or to beg somebody to hang on, or to let go. Later, out on the house’s terrace, we’ll talk about how a sickbed becomes a deathbed, and at what shaded moment as the day and hour drew closer would Keats have realized he wasn’t leaving that room. That bed.

Keats was an admirer of Chatterton and saw him as a kindred spirit, dedicating his Endymion ‘to the memory of Thomas Chatterton’. In particular, Keats loved ‘Ælla’, perhaps the best of the Rowley poems, and he liked to recite its best-known stanza on love and loss:

Once you get beyond the cod-medieval spelling, it’s not hard to see – or rather, to hear – why Keats was so captivated by Chatterton. Considering those lines were written by a boy of fifteen or sixteen, the lyric music and elegiac tone are remarkable and memorable. But Keats was also drawn to the purity, as if