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How We Met

How We Met contains a long sequence called ‘The William Ewart Gladstone Strip’ which draws to some extent on the research into cartoon and caricature which I carried out for my critical book Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction (2008), and which also contributed to my essay ‘(Post)- modernist Rhythms and Voices: Sitwell and Smith to Shapcott and Hill’, which appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), edited by Jane Dowson. It also involved research into Victorian history and culture. The central research was into the life of Gladstone and many of the poems are focused upon the Victorian prime minister’s character and political life, especially his dealings with Ireland and his work in ‘rescuing’ prostitutes. There are also poems on Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin, and the writing of the sequence involved extensive research into the life and works of such major figures and their contributions to the thought of their times.

The style and structure of the poem were influenced by extensive research into the poetic sequence, as written by poets such as Ted Hughes and Paul Muldoon, and into the construction of longer poems which circle around a metaphoric core – T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land and W.H.Auden’s The Orators being key examples.