Faber & Faber

A. S .J. Tessimond is a poet perhaps better known for his 'anthology pieces' than for complete volumes and yet this probably means that he has a wider popular following than his publication history suggests. What readers seem to respond to is his scrupulous lucidity of meaning and fastidious concern for form - fine qualities, both, and yet, one has to admit, ones of which, in a serious poet, we are probably inclined to be slightly suspicious. And it is perhaps this that made him the slightly marginal figure he seems always to have been - especially in the heady days of Auden, Eliot and Pound. He appears to have lived through the movement that cultivated 'difficulty' without ever - seriously - trying to cultivate it himself. This is what endears him, now, to listeners to 'Poetry Please': it is not necessarily what recommends you to the literary establishment.
 
And yet, what fascinates me is that he was taken seriously by men of real literary judgment throughout his long career. Michael Roberts (who edited The Faber Book of Modern Verse) included him in his groundbreaking collections New Signatures and New Country, published by the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press, which helped launch the careers of Auden, Day Lewis and Stephen Spender: John Lehmann (brother of novelist Rosamond), who also worked for the Woolfs, published him in Penguin New Writing in the 40s and again in the London Magazine in the 50s.

His work was also published by, amongst many others, The Blue Moon Press, who published D. H.  Lawrence's early verse, the Chicago-based magazine Poetry, which published and advanced the careers of William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot, and transition (sic) which published excerpts from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. And, while keeping impressive Modernist company, his work continued to appear in more traditional neo-Georgian publications as well. An impressive balancing act, by any standards!
 
At the same time, one cannot ignore the occasional, almost embarrassing drop in poetic pressure, although I think Tessimond himself was aware of this. His friend and literary executor, Hubert Nicholson, speaks of how fiercely self-critical he was, which perhaps accounts for why so much of the material in the 1986 Collected Poems had to be dredged from back numbers of the 'little magazines' of the 20s and 30s - which might have been where Tessimond had decided to leave them. But I don't think he was always the best judge of his own work, either: typically, he decided not to collect either of his most 'Audenesque' poems from New Signatures and New Country - ‘La Marche des Machines’ and ‘Steel April’ respectively - during his lifetime. Or perhaps he was simply unwilling to jump on bandwagons - the poetry had to come first. ‘England 1939’, for example is, for my money, a far more devastating piece of neo-Augustan satire than Betjeman’s ‘Slough’, although he never felt compelled to repeat it.
 
In the end, it was probably this protean versatility, as well as the suspicions of 'lightness', that prevented him from really breaking through. He seems never to have been prepared to nail his colours to a single mast. In the words of one reviewer, although he has 'individual attitudes' he does not have 'a highly individual voice'. Nicholson makes the same complaint when he speaks of him never really developing as a poet. And yet Tessimond himself recognized this as well. In a poem called 'Apologia' he speaks of his 'wholly unsystematic' life and of sitting 'at the feet of many Gamaliels' - too busy learning from others' voices to develop his own. And yet if his lack of self-confidence was acute, so too was his ear for rhythm and rhyme. His modesty may have stood in the way of real greatness, but he seems to have known - and accepted - that it was the ground for his best work.
 
Maybe what he really needed was a good editor whereas in fact he didn’t even have an agent. He was certainly no literary strategist. But to have Dame Maggie Smith read one of your poems ('Heaven' in 'Morning Meeting') at the funeral of Bernard Levin perhaps shows how much can be achieved without either!

I think one who knew him should have the last word. George Rostrevor Hamilton wrote, in his obituary, of Tessimond’s 'exquisite feeling for words, meticulous but, like himself, without affectation'. Exquisite, meticulous, unaffected - it is not hard to see why he is still so admired. And, with Faber, he’s back on the literary map. I’m sure he, and Hubert Nicholson, would be as delighted as we should all be by this. May the reputation of this quietly impressive poet grow as it deserves to.