Hobsbaum, Philip (Dennis)

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HOBSBAUM, Philip (Dennis)


Nationality: British. Born: London, 29 June 1932. Education: Belle Vue Grammar School, Bradford, Yorkshire; Downing College, Cambridge, 1952–55, B.A. 1955, M.A. 1961; Royal Academy of Music, London, licentiate 1956; University of Sheffield, 1959–62, Ph.D. 1968. Family: Married 1) Hannah Kelly in 1957 (marriage dissolved 1968); 2) Rosemary Singleton in 1976. Career: Lecturer in English, Queen's University, Belfast, 1962–66. Lecturer, 1966–72, senior lecturer, 1972–79, and reader, 1979–85, and since 1985 Titular Professor of English, University of Glasgow. Professional research fellow, 1997. Editor, Delta, Cambridge, 1954–55; co-editor, Poetry from Sheffield, 1959–61. Address: 10 Oran Drive, Glasgow G20 6AF, United Kingdom.

Publications

Poetry

The Place's Fault and Other Poems. London, Macmillan, and New York, St. Martin's Press, 1964.

Snapshots. Belfast, Festival, 1965.

In Retreat and Other Poems. London, Macmillan, 1966; Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1968.

Coming Out Fighting. London, Macmillan, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1969.

Some Lovely Glorious Nothing. Frensham, Surrey, Sceptre Press, 1969.

Women and Animals. London. Macmillan, 1972.

Plays

Radio Plays: Children in the Woods, 1974; Round the Square, music by Nick Bicât, 1976.

Other

A Theory of Communication: A Study of Value in Literature. London, Macmillan, 1970; as Theory of Criticism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1970.

A Reader's Guide to Charles Dickens. London, Thames and Hudson, 1972; New York, Farrar Straus, 1973.

Tradition and Experiment in English Poetry. London, Macmillan, and Totowa, New Jersey, Rowman and Littlefield, 1979.

A Reader's Guide to D.H. Lawrence. London, Thames and Hudson, 1981.

Essentials of Literary Criticism. London, Thames and Hudson, 1983.

A Reader's Guide to Robert Lowell. London, Thames and Hudson, 1988.

Metre, Rhythm, and Verse Form. London and New York, Routledge, 1996.

Metre, Rhythm, and Verse Form, London, Routledtge, 1996.

Editor, with Edward Lucie-Smith, A Group Anthology. London, Oxford University Press, 1963.

Editor, Ten Elizabethan Poets. London, Longman, 1969.

Editor, William Wordsworth: Selected Poetry and Prose. London, Routledge, 1989.

Editor, with Puddy Lyons and Jim McGhee, Channels of Communication, Glasgow, University of Glasgow, 1992.

*

Manuscript Collection: University of Texas, Austin.

Critical Studies: Reviews by P.N. Furbank, in The Listener (London), May 1964, and by G.S. Fraser, in The New York Review of Books, 1964; The Modern Writer and His World by G.S. Fraser, London, Deutsch, 1964, New York, Praeger, 1965; British Poetrysince 1960 edited by Michael Schmidt and Grevel Lindop, Oxford, Carcanet, 1972; The Group edited by Ian Fletcher and John Pilling, Reading, University of Reading Library, 1974; "The Belfast Group" edited by Frank Ormsby, in Honest Ulsterman (Belfast), November-December 1976; special feature in "The Belfast Group," in Honest Ulsterman, Spring 1994.

Philip Hobsbaum comments:

I have been associated, as founder of the Group in 1955, with Lucie-Smith, MacBeth, Porter, Bell, and Redgrove. But I must emphasize that this is a process of teaching creative writing, not a movement in verse. Other groups were started in Belfast in 1963 and in Glasgow in 1967. In recent years I have divided my time between writing a history of English poetry and a series of pieces, some of which have been broadcast, that I call "Poems for Several Voices." I hope to collect these, and eventually to get down on paper a sequence of poems that has been long in my mind concerning autumnal and twilight themes. It is to be called "North Kelvin."

*  *  *

Critics and criticism have exercised an enormous influence on the creative work of Philip Hobsbaum, and some might maintain that the impact has not always been supportive of his initial poetic impulse. At Cambridge he worked under F.R. Leavis, edited the magazine Delta, and founded the so-called Group, a number of poets who met regularly, first in Cambridge and later in London, for the purpose of critically examining one another's efforts. In 1959 Hobsbaum went to Sheffield University to do research under William Empson, and his first volume, The Place's Fault, contains the poems written while he was there. These works were the first after a silence of several years, and "Testimony" celebrates the return of his poetic gifts, using the analogy of Sarah's conception of a child in her period of barrenness—"Should I not rejoice /After these barren years being given a voice?"

If the title of his book and the epigraph from Philip Larkin ("waking at the fumes /And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed …") acknowledge his debt to Larkin and if there is a similarity in tone, Hobsbaum, unlike Larkin (who tends to observe human behavior as if from a safe distance), is not afraid to commit himself to active participation. Indeed, most of his poems are about this involvement and its effects. In the title poem he says,

   We left (it was a temporary halt)
   The knots of ragged kids, the wired-off beach,
   Faces behind the blinds. I'll not return;
   There's nothing there I haven't had to learn,
   And I've learned nothing that I'd care to teach—
   Except that I know it was the place's fault.

But more often than not Hobsbaum is concerned with his own faults rather than those of the place or situation, and he is so anxious to be frank about himself, "warts and all," that he tends to lay undue emphasis upon physical defects in his wry, self-deprecating manner. He throws ridicule upon his fatness, his shortsightedness, and his decaying teeth (as in "A Journey round the Inside of My Mouth"). At times he can be very impressive, as in "Household Gods," "Old Flame," and "Testimony," and even in his weakest poems he retains a craftsmanlike control over his materials. In the long "Man without God," his most ambitious poem, he attempts to trace the development of his religious doubts from the superstitious rites of childhood to the intellectual questionings of maturity, but what comes across with greatest force is not so much his doubt in God as the strength of his belief in the invincibility of life.

A phrase from Larkin—"Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home"—provides the keynote to In Retreat. Hobsbaum's loneliness (one suspects that he would be lonely anywhere) and the threat of losing his eyesight lend a plangent tone to the volume. Yet if there is a certain amount of self-pity, there is something effectively human and communicative, for in the present situation do not most poets experience this sense of exile and this groping in the half-light for certainties? Much of his writing is mock serious, of course. He mocks himself as he remembers falling down the pub stairs (due to his defective sight) or acting like "a balding, stout morose invigilator," and there is a satirical touch in his "Interview with the Professor." But apart from such poems as "The Rock Pool" and "For a Young Nun," the best things in the collection, and those that indicate a new development for Hobsbaum, are the fine monologues on Chopin and Newman, in which, turning his attention away from himself, he has a more balanced perspective and can define more clearly the predicaments of others.

In Coming Out Fighting Hobsbaum concentrates largely upon the personal situation. Linked together, the poems describe a married man's unsatisfactory love affair with a younger girl, his pain and disillusionment, the breakup of his marriage, and his reflections upon the girl's own marriage later. Despite the energy, humor, and immediacy of the poems, he seems able to write better when he can stand at a distance from the experience recorded, as in "The Ice Skaters":

                  You
   Venture to catch them up, reach out, and
   Find yourself struggling in dirty water. Call,
 
 
   Ice in your mouth, spluttering blindly, down,
   Down into the mud, entangling with weed you go.
   Their laughter tinkles prettily over the ice.

Coming Out Fighting sets the scene for Women and Animals, which studies "the nightmare of a divorce."

—Howard Sergeant

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