The Achievement of Randall Swingler

Abstract

Randall Swingler was a poet in a very English literary tradition. He was the last of the Georgian poets, writing lovingly about the English countryside long after the Modernist urbanisation of poetry. He believed that poetry was the voice of the people. And he was the inheritor and the bearer of a radical vision of England rooted in the English rural landscape and the common people. Standing in direct line of descent from Langland, Winstanley, Milton, Blake, Morris and Edward Thomas, he was a late poet of Old Dissent, combining a love of the English countryside with Christian fellowship and an English Puritan's hatred of privilege and power, property and money. For Randall Swingler, poetry had a moral and a political urgency, a responsibility to testify against cant and hypocrisy, and to bear witness to a Utopian vision of an open-shirted, classless Commonwealth which would one day liberate human living, loving and creativity. Swingler was perhaps the last writer of substance to be able to speak from within this native, egalitarian, pastoral tradition. But it was not an easy task, even in Swingler's lifetime, to hold on to such an uncompromising view of poetic life. His poetry brought him no material rewards, and little critical attention. Having given away his inheritance, he lived for most of his life on the edge of poverty, repudiating all the privileges of his class in order to live among the common people. He spent the Second World War in the ranks, refusing to apply for the commission which would have separated him from ordinary soldiers and the necessary horror of fighting. Because of his refusal to change his opinions when they became unfashionable, he was witch-hunted at the BBC, attacked by Orwell, and