Charles Madge - Life As A Poet

Life As A Poet

Madge's development as a poet is amply revealed in his notebooks and in numerous files of verse dating from as early as 1920, when he had yet to reach double-figures. His Cambridge student days afforded the opportunity to establish connections with leading left-wing poets of the 1930s, although he left Magdalene College without a degree. Students of twentieth-century literature will find among his papers lively anecdotal information about key figures of the day, including W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and T. S. Eliot. Eliot was Madge's editor at Faber (the company published his poetry as The Disappearing Castle (1937) and The Father Found (1940)) and published some of his work in The Criterion; he even pulled strings to help Madge secure a 'real' job as a Daily Mirror reporter in 1935 (dispiriting work as it turned out, but good grounding for his burgeoning interest in sociology and the experience of 'the masses'). Nine of his poems appeared in The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936) and W. B. Yeats made further selections for The Oxford Book of Modern English Verse (1938) in which Madge appeared alongside Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and C. Day Lewis. Faber published two volumes of his poetry: The Disappearing Castle (1937) and The Father Found (1940). By the early 1940s, sociological work had become all-consuming, and it was not until retirement that Madge found renewed opportunity to write. His collected verse was eventually published as Of Love, Time and Places (Anvil, 1994).

Critical reaction to Madge's poetry is well documented throughout the Archive and ranges from informal correspondence (early praise from Rudyard Kipling and John Masefield) to transcriptions of ambivalent, yet often prescient, reviews in the press. The autobiography contains his own analysis of his poems and comments on their inspiration. Many autograph notebooks record the creative process. Among his non-sociological prose works are early short stories, an essay "Notes on the Technique of Poetry" (from the 1930s), and schoolboy essays on Blake and Milton. Published works present include Myth, Metaphor and the World Picture, a study of metaphor in literature, contrasted with its use in religious symbolism.