Lucifer at Hampstead
21st November 2009
John Cowper Powys evidently retained some affection for his
“monstrous epic poem on ‘The Death of God’” written in 1905. In
Autobiography, he writes, “It was an extremely imitative
poem, but since it was after all, a narration, I was compelled
to be more original in it than I had ever been before in my
verses”. (pp 358-359) In Autobiography, Powys states
that the poem was uncompleted, but he allowed it to be published
in 1955, and its final lines, in which Satan asserts the
creative power of the individual against the tyranny of fate,
would also have served the mature Powys as a point of arrival.
I myself
Am fate.
[…] Chance and my own
Will have begot this day. My will alone
Shall gender what this prosperous day conceives.
Although written when the author was thirty-three, the tone of
Lucifer is of adolescent rebellion: it seethes with
philosophical, poetical, and moral discontents. In later life,
Powys liked to recall that this indictment of the Israelite God
and his insipid saints was written in the cathedral close at
Norwich.
Powys was evidently in search of a narrative form that would
house a cosmic and mythological drama. God, St. Paul, and St
Augustine are there, alongside a whole array of classical
deities, and the Buddha. But Powys cannot consistently inhabit
this elevated sphere with comfort: there is slippage from high
allegory into memorable scenes of urban, industrial desolation,
and the red flag is hoisted. The picaresque journeys round the
multiverse – the word is already present – anticipate nothing so
much as the fantastic narratives of Powys’s final years
The verse is sonorous organ music, a vigorous 19th
century pastiche. “Milton and Keats and Tennyson and Matthew
Arnold, those four poets, and those four poets alone, seem to
have been my masters and inspirers,” Powys later recalled. There
is indeed a lot of Paradise Lost, Hyperion, and
the Scholar Gypsy, and far too much Dover Beach.
Powys’s mature prose style is often a mulch of composted
quotation from the literature of the past, and in Lucifer
we see him only beginning to digest his romantic enthusiasms.
Lucifer
offers plenty to talk about. Powys described it as “the only
poem of my own that I feel any temptation to pray that posterity
may read.” Posterity is us, and we plan to read and discuss
Lucifer at Hampstead on 21st November.
JWH
From The Powys Society Newsletter, No 68, November 2009
Of
related interest:
Lucifer, Keats and Paganism
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