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The Progress of Poetry

Third-century BCE papyrus fragments of Sappho's "Tithonus" poem


"I saw a Gardener with a watering can

Sprinkling dejectedly the heads of men

Buried up to their necks in the wet clay."

—Christopher Caudwell (Christopher St. John Sprigg), “The Progress of Poetry”


Caudwell's Wikipedia page lists his occupations: "Journalist, author, machine gunner.”

He perished in Spain fighting Francisco Franco's Falangists,

in “the year of ’37,”

when what they call the Yezhovshchina

raged in the USSR,

Stalin wiping out his buddies the Old Bolsheviks one by one,

then going on, it seemed, for, could it be? everyone—681,692 executions,

okay, give or take a few.

Yezhov himself, top killer that year,

got his own Genickschuss too.*


Defending his post to shield the retreat of the British Battalion of the International Brigades in the Jarama River Valley

Caudwell, “a leftist poet of the comfortable classes,”† and member of the CPGB,‡

fought bravely to the death,

but should have saved his breath:


today, in 2O24, eighty-seven years on,

Franco and the Falangists are long gone;

it's the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE)

that rags Catalonia now, you see,

as Madrid all these many years has done

while in Russia, Stalin the Little spills blood.


The dejected Gardener still waters human heads stuck in the mud.

Poetry does not progress,

but streaks eternal, old and new,

assuaging, as it might hope to do,

clingy lichen’s sapient screams.

Its honeyed words soothe doggy Cerberus, pay for boatman Charon’s hire, and lobby Hell's King Rhadamanthus'

for royal mitigation.**

Immortal Sappho sings sweet as ever

behind the veils that language dreams

up, accessorizing taboo conversation.


* Genickschuss, a shot in the nape of the neck, the Stalinist preferred method of execution.

Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. Duncan Glen (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 90.

‡ Communist Party of Great Britain.

** Cf. Christopher Caudwell, “Classic Encounter,” in The Oxford Book of

Twentieth-Century English Verse, chosen by Philip Larkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), where his “The Progress of Poetry” can also be found.

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