Earlier this week there was a Guardian interview with Simon Armitage, the Poet Laureate, where he was asked ten chaotic questions as part of Australian Poetry Month. Question seven was about his favourite book, or a book he re-reads over and over. He said Ted Hughes’ Poetry in the Making, a sort of introductory guide for schoolchildren on how to write poetry. It’s pretty good, it’s from the 60s – you can read it online for free at the Internet Archive. I’d just recently finished Lupercal, Hughes’ second book of poetry, which I picked up alongside Mary Oliver’s A Thousand Mornings – anyway, I was in that sort of mood, so I went off and sought it out. And it’s good! It’s less a style guide – it’s more about why we write poetry, how you can trick your monkey brain into getting on with it. It’s one person’s view on the sort of mental resources and the task of the poet – what do we draw on when we write poetry? What’s our goal? Why are we doing this? It’s very much Hughes’ view on things – it’s idiosyncratic, it’s particular to the poet – but still useful. Hughes writes “I think of poems as a sort of animal.” He writes that writing poetry is like hunting: “the poem is a new species of creature, a new specimen of the life outside your own.” He also includes a bunch of practical advice about how to trick yourself into writing (“artificial limits create a crisis, which rouses the brain’s resources”). All good stuff.

As part of the book, Hughes includes a selection of poems that illustrate the different topics under discussion. He quotes Christopher Smart’s 18th century poem, ‘For I will consider my cat Jeoffrey‘, which includes the immortal line “For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.” There’s a couple dozen poems in the collection, but that one stood out, because it’s also the basis of a poem in the Mary Oliver collection I was reading. In the poem ‘For I Will Consider My Dog Percy’, Oliver reworks ‘Jeoffrey’ into a reflection on her own pet – a dog, instead of a cat, but still drawing on Smart’s structure and style. It interweaves lines from Smart’s poem with Oliver’s own, italicising to indicate what’s been borrowed. “For he is of the tribe of Tiger” becomes “For he was of the tribe of Wolf.” Percy has died, so Oliver’s poem is more of a commemoration, moving Smart’s writing into the past tense. She keeps the line about gravity and waggery, and adds her own reflections:

“For when he slept he snored only a little.”

“For he took his medicines without argument.”

“For he loved me.”

Really this is a very mundane happening. It’s one of those funny little coincidences that, the more you reflect, seems perfectly obvious. Two poets both talk about the same poem, and by chance I read them both in the same week. Happens all the time. A few weeks back I read Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, and then a biography of Cromwell, where the author, J.C. Davis, went through the reception of Cromwell throughout history – actually a really fascinating way of looking at a person. For the section on the nineteenth century, Davis talked about the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, who painted a couple scenes of Cromwell (Cromwell on his Farm in 1874 and Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois in 1877). Ford Madox Brown, of course, was the grandfather of Ford Madox Ford, who I’d just been reading before. It’s an obvious point, but I want to hammer it home: The Good Soldier didn’t pop out of the void. Some guy wrote it, and that guy had a granddad who did his own thing too. These are real people with histories, embedded in the fabric of the world.

Ford actually reflects on his famous grandfather (and the Pre-Raphaelites more broadly) during a lecture in the 1920s*, where he writes that they got kinda weird when they were reading poetry. “And the most horrible changes came over these normally nice people. They had, all, always, on these occasions the aspects and voices, not only of awful High Priests before Drawing Room altars – but they held their heads at unnatural angles and appeared to be suffering the tortures of agonised souls.” These otherwise very nice people (Ford Madox Brown is described as “the best man I ever knew”) read poetry like they’re performing an exorcism. It’s – again, not really earth-shattering, as an anecdote, but I do find it satisfying. You read a book by some guy and then his granddad is in a biography of Cromwell. Someone reworks a poem and then somebody else uses the original in a handbook for teaching poetry. This culture of interconnectedness – of literary and artistic tradition – it’s something that video games still struggle with. We get easter eggs – in the 2016 DOOM you can play levels from the original game. Some games name-check other titles: Hollow Knight references Dark Souls and Berserk. Sure, whatever. That’s all still relatively rudimentary. There’s nothing as sophisticated as Mary Oliver reinterpreting Smart’s poem. We see some evidence of a culture of interconnectedness developing in modding communities, or in political games that make reference to real-world events. For me in Australia, it’s sort of shocking to see games like Scotty Goes to Centrelink, about the then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison having to go on welfare after getting thrown out of office. The fact that it’s about something happening in the world – rather than elves and space stations – it just lands different. Often games are focused on escapism, on going somewhere else for a while. Bang bang, zoom zoom. They don’t always have a strong sense of tradition, of their place in video game culture – or in culture more broadly.

In The Forgotten City, each era of society is built on top of the one that came before. The Roman community is built on the remnants of Egypt, which in turn is built on Sumeria. Each age takes from the previous one, reinterpreting its myths, laying claim to its stories. In each instance, the change is accompanied by a catastrophic forgetting. Characters fail to keep hold of the things that came before. It’s all still connected, but people aren’t sure how.

*Published as ‘Notes for a Lecture on Vers Libre’, collected in Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford.