And who better to follow Belloc than Chesterton… (thanks to Vikram Doctor for the suggestion)

Another poet who has been conspicuous by his absence. Chesterton is slightly better known for his prose, including many highly acclaimed works of criticism, and the magnificent Father Brown stories, which rank among the all time classics of detective fiction. However, his poetry is well worthy of notice, being almost uniformly excellent (no easy feat, even for the better poets), and almost always enjoyable. Like most of my favourite poets, Chesterton displays a rare mastery of versification - the rhythms of speech blending smoothly and easily into the rhythms of the poem, with not a syllable out of place.

As for today’s poem, it’s probably the best known of his poems, and my favourite for several reasons. Firstly, as I have mentioned before, I’m predisposed to like poems about roads, and this is an excellent example, with the easy flowing rhythm and the alliteration reinforce the image of the rolling, rambling road. The language is an intriguing blend of the informal
- almost colloquial - and the high poetic. The mood likewise ranges from humorous¹ to thoughtful, and in the end, serious. But it is not necessary to analyse the poem in order to enjoy it - simply read it, not quite aloud, but shaping your lips over the syllables, and let the verses wash over you as you follow, with Chesterton, the rolling English road.

Notes

baggonet: obs. or vulgar form of bayonet

Kensal Green: A famous English cemetery - see http://www.xs4all.nl/~androom/dead/kensal.htm

Interestingly, there’s a pub called Paradise, or in full Paradise, by way of Kensal Green (that being the nearest Tube stop). Almost certainly post-facto, but it made me laugh.

Biography

Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith)

   b. May 29, 1874, London
   d. June 14, 1936, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, Eng. English critic
   and author of verse, essays, novels, and short stories, known also for
   his exuberant personality and rotund figure.

Chesterton was educated at St. Paul’s School and later studied art at the Slade School and literature at University College, London. His writings to 1910 were of three kinds. First, his social criticism, largely in his voluminous journalism, was gathered in The Defendant (1901), Twelve Types (1902), and Heretics (1905). In it he expressed strongly pro-Boer views in the South African War. Politically, he began as a Liberal but after a brief radical period became, with his Christian and medievalist friend Hilaire Belloc, a Distributist, favouring the distribution of land. This phase of his thinking is exemplified by What’s Wrong with the World (1910).

His second preoccupation was literary criticism. Robert Browning (1903) was followed by Charles Dickens (1906) and Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (1911), prefaces to the individual novels, which are among his finest contributions to criticism. His George Bernard Shaw (1909) and The Victorian Age in Literature (1913) together with William Blake (1910) and the later monographs William Cobbett (1925) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1927) have a spontaneity that places them above the works of many academic critics.

Chesterton’s third major concern was theology and religious argument. He was converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1922. Although he had written on Christianity earlier, as in his book Orthodoxy (1909), his conversion added edge to his controversial writing, notably The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926), his writings in G.K.’s Weekly, and Avowals and Denials (1934). Other works arising from his conversion were St. Francis of Assisi (1923), the essay in historical theology The Everlasting Man (1925), and St. Thomas Aquinas (1933).

In his verse Chesterton was a master of ballad forms, as shown in the stirring “Lepanto” (1911). When it was not uproariously comic, his verse was frankly partisan and didactic. His essays developed his shrewd, paradoxical irreverence to its ultimate point of real seriousness. He is seen at his happiest in such essays as “On Running After One’s Hat” (1908) and “A Defence of Nonsense” (1901), in which he says that nonsense and faith are “the two supreme symbolic assertions of truth” and “to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook.”

Many readers value Chesterton’s fiction most highly. The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), a romance of civil war in suburban London, was followed by the loosely knit collection of short stories, The Club of Queer Trades (1905), and the popular allegorical novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). But the most successful association of fiction with social judgment is in Chesterton’s series on the priest-sleuth Father Brown: The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), followed by The Wisdom . . . (1914), The Incredulity . . . (1926), The Secret . . . (1927), and The Scandal of Father Brown (1935). Chesterton’s friendships were with men as diverse as H.G. Wells, Shaw, Belloc, and Max Beerbohm. His Autobiography was published in 1936.

– EB