Tom Paulin

Above: Tom Paulin on Newsnight Review some weeks back (apologies for the quality of the picture which was taken with my mobile phone from the television screen). Tom Paulin used to be an habitué of Newsnight Review, appearing with Germaine Greer and Tony Parsons. Although all three have separately appeared on Newsnight Review over the last months, they have not done so together.

Tom Paulin appeared on the Today Programme earlier this week, talking about poetry. Although he is a controversial commentator, his views always make you think. He is a lecturer at Oxford and author of (among many other works) Thomas Hardy, the Poetry of Perception.



I am currently working my way through Paulin’s The Invasion Handbook, part of a multi-volume epic history poem on the Second World War. Comparisons have been made with TS Eliot (and there are Eliot references in the poem/s). I have to read poetry very slowly, so this book could take me a couple of months to get through.



The Second World War did not produce as much poetry as the Great War (I’m afraid I despise WH Auden, especially his bloody clocks). Probably this was because the First World War marked the end of romantic culture (in it's thousand-year continuum) whereas the Twenties marked the beginning of a new "modern" culture. And someone needs to analyse the industrialisation of poetry (through mass media, politicisation and the influence of propaganda).

Romanticism continued, but it was no longer mainstream. In second hand bookshops you sometimes come across sections of old poetry books, by forgotten authors, selling for 20p or 30p each. I usually end up buying a couple as they are often well produced and the writing is fine.

I don’t know much about Theodore Nicholl. A Google search only reveals that he was born in 1902, died in 1973 and wrote six volumes of poetry - five before the war and The Immortal Ease in 1948. I wonder why he stopped writing poetry?



Although I don’t know anything about his life I am sure Theodore Nicholl was an RAF pilot during the war. The writing is too accurate to be entirely fiction. He is obviously writing from the heart.