Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Michael H. Markel

Critical Essay by Michael H. Markel

SOURCE: "Hilaire Belloc's Uncollected Political Verse," in English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Vol. 32, No. 2, 1989, pp. 143-56.

In the following essay, Markel surveys the style and themes of Belloc's unpublished political poetry, maintaining that he "succeeded in transforming contemporary political intrigue and corruption into sharp-edged satires. "

W. N. Roughead begins his preface to the 1970 revised edition of Hilaire Belloc's Complete Verse, "This book contains what I believe to be the whole of Belloc's poetry." However, Belloc published some thirty additional poems, most of which are political satires, that he himself did not include in any of his verse collections and that Roughead apparently did not know existed. Most of the verses date from 1911-1913, when he was devoting the bulk of his energies to muckraking journalism. These political poems are, on the whole, technically sophisticated yet aesthetically flawed. Several, however, most notably those in which Belloc invokes himself as a comic character, are first-rate. The uncollected verse shows the considerable extent to which Belloc succeeded in transforming contemporary political intrigue and corruption into sharp-edged satires.

Several of the uncollected poems are nonpolitical lyrics and light verse that might have fit comfortably in one or another of Belloc's collections. "Stop-Short," for instance, is a characteristic meditation on mortality:

Belloc also wrote four "epigramophones" for the journal Gramophone, the following being one example:

The owners of the Gramophone rejoice
To hear it likened to the human voice.
The owners of the Human Voice disown
Its least resemblance to the Gramophone.

Then there is "A Modernist Ballade," a clever parody of free verse, in which...
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