Matthew Sperling
Preening their Feathers
Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal
By Lucy McDiarmid
Oxford University Press 212pp £20
In January 1914, six poets drove from London to Sussex to eat an afternoon meal with a seventh, much older poet. Two of the six, W B Yeats and Ezra Pound, are among the truly great poets of the age, though at the time they were yet to write most of their major works. The other four are barely remembered today. The man they visited, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, has his place in history as a very colourful late Victorian: a Sussex landowner of literary inclinations who chose the active life and became known as an Arabist, anti-imperialist, bullfighter, horse-breeder and husband to Lord Byron’s granddaughter. He was also a seducer famous for his good looks – the sort of faintly absurd figure with whom Lytton Strachey could have played havoc in Eminent Victorians. As a poet, Blunt’s achievement now seems negligible, but the purpose of the meal was for the younger men to honour his work. The poets ate roast peacock and roast beef. Speeches were made and they drove back to London at around 5pm.
This may not seem like the most promising material for a scholarly book of just over two hundred pages. But for Lucy McDiarmid the ‘peacock dinner’ is the hinge on which hangs a story running across almost seventy years. It started in 1882, when Blunt became the lover of Augusta,
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘The Second World War was won in Oxford. Discuss.’
@RankinNick gives the question his best shot.
Nicholas Rankin - We Shall Fight in the Buttery
Nicholas Rankin: We Shall Fight in the Buttery - Oxford’s War 1939–1945 by Ashley Jackson
literaryreview.co.uk
For the first time, all of Sylvia Plath’s surviving prose, a massive body of stories, articles, reviews and letters, has been gathered together in a single volume.
@FionaRSampson sifts it for evidence of how the young Sylvia became Sylvia Plath.
Fiona Sampson - Changed in a Minute
Fiona Sampson: Changed in a Minute - The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath by Peter K Steinberg (ed)
literaryreview.co.uk
The ruling class has lost its sprezzatura.
On porky rolodexes and the persistence of elite reproduction, for the @Lit_Review: