PN Review at Fifty

Whenever I think back to the earliest days of PN Review, or Poetry Nation Review as it was first styled, my mind is clouded by a kind of anxiety that now seems comical but was a real fantasy at the time. I had always thought of myself and my work as ‘of the left’, and though I was a dilatory activist I had no doubts as to where my loyalties lay, while I was much less sure which vanguard was likely to lead the people into the silo of peace and justice. The more zealous of my political acquaintance indulged my dubious commitment, though they would have preferred my poetry to have a more proletkult timbre.

Michael Schmidt was clearly of a very different stripe – far from a Marxist, he could not even be described as marxisant. His co-editors included C.B. Cox who had been driven rightwards by the enrages he had encountered at Berkeley, Donald Davie whose credentials were rumoured to have proved less than revolutionary at Essex, and C.H Sisson who had the temerity to use the word Tory.

What could come of publishing in such a magazine? I was quite well-read in the political history of the twentieth century and so my anxieties went something like this. Sometime after the revolution some commissar in need of something to do would review the contents of now defunct magazines such as PNR and notice that ‘poets’, once thought namby-pamby but harmless, had appeared in this iniquitous counter-revolutionary journal. I would be asked to account for myself by one of my zealous old acquaintances in a dark chamber ...