Anthony Simon Thwaite was born in Chester, Cheshire England, on June 23, 1930, and he received his primary education in Leeds, Sheffield. Between 1940 and 1944, he lived with his aunt and uncle, Nora and Frank Coe, in Fairfax, Virginia, because his own mother, fearing an invasion of Britain by the Nazis, wanted to keep him safely out of the line of fire of World War II.¹ In an early reflection on the experience of living in America, Thwait recounts having had his first exposures to American literature in the form of "rather large chunks of Longfellow."² Upon his return to England after the war's end, his education was continued at Kingswood School in Bath. In 1950, Thwaite was drafted into the British Army, and he saw part of his military service in Tripolitania, Libya (from June 1950 to July 1951). Returning again to England, he received his B. A. with honors from Christ Church, Oxford in 1955, followed by his M. A. in 1959. At Oxford, he met Ann Harrop, whom he married in 1955 and to whom he remains married to this day. Ann Thwaite has received a degree of fame as both a writer of children's literature and literary biography, and poetry as well, working together with her husband frequently to judge poetry contests and make the rounds of the lecture circles in academic settings. Anthony Thwaite, in the years 1955-1957, served as a visiting lecturer in English at Tokyo University, where he assembled his basic material for his first critical book, Essays on Contemporary English Poetry: Hopkins to the Present, published first in Japan in 1957. This book was subsequently revised and published in the U.S. and Britain as Contemporary English Poetry: An Introduction.³

The next eight years marked the emergence of Thwaite's first poetic phase with the publication of Home Truths in 1957 and The Owl in the Tree: Poems in 1963. During this period, Thwaite worked as a radio producer for the BBC in London. In his work in radio, Thwaite came in contact with many literary talents of his day in connection with a series of programs on BBC2 on contemporary English and American poetry. A particularly haunting reminiscence of Sylvia Plath, whom he met when she recorded a discussion and reading of her poems, is found in his essay, "I have never been so happy in my life."⁴ Thwaite shared with Louis MacNeice, whose office was across the hall from his, a rather peculiar though friendly relationship.⁵

Thwaite assumed the position of literary editor of The Listener between 1962 and 1965. He was drawn away from England again in 1965, when he accepted a teaching appointment at the University of Libya at Benghazi. It was to prove in many ways an unfortunate experience, although thoroughly inspiring — poetically. He found the students virtually unteachable. At the outbreak of the Israeli-Arab war in 1967, all foreigners were forcibly expelled from the country after being briefly held in internment camps. Nevertheless, in these two years, Thwaite began the second and most important phase of his writing, in which he realized his greatest poetic achievements: The Stones of Emptiness (1967), Inscriptions (1973), and New Confessions (1974). All contain direct expression of his experiences in North Africa and their profound impact on his poetic imagination.

After the return to England in 1967, Thwaite immersed himself in the artistic scene of London. He worked between 1968 and 1972 as literary editor of New Statesman. Then in March 1973, he assumed the co-editorship of Encounter (with Melvin J. Lasky), until 1985. During these years, Thwaite's verse appeared frequently in the Times Literary Supplement and began taking a new, noticeably lighter tone (a partial list of these poems is appended to this essay). Thwaite became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1978 and was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1990. He has written a number of volumes of criticism and travel, including a description of his experiences of Libya in The Deserts of Hesperides (1969). Thwaite also was a Director of publisher Andre Deutsch Ltd. He is a literary executor of the estate of Philip Larkin, for whom he produced Larkin at Sixty (1982), The Collected Poems (1988), and Selected Letters (1992). Some of Thwaite's recent poetry has appeared in the Web-based poetry magazine Wave. Thwaite's most recent book of poetry is Selected Poems 1956-1996. His latest work of literary editing is the revised and expanded Penguin Book of Japanese Verse (1998).

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Describing the poetic trends of the 1950s and 1960s, Thwaite set up three categories of English poets: Those associated with The Movement, those associated with The Group, and "a large number of intelligent and worthwhile but not notably individual poets who have no particular attachment to either of these admittedly undoctrinaire labellings."⁶ Thwaite would undoubtedly, with characteristic wry humor, place himself in the third category. Although he briefly worked on the fringe of The Group, basically he has been a "loner" for his entire poetic career. His early encounters with the much publicized workshop were not positive: "Though a friend and admirer of some of the participants, I was never an habitué: I think I was invited three times to read poems to The Group, and always emerged feeling as if piranha fish had given me a going-over."⁷ His first book of verse, Home Truths, appeared in the "uniform of the Movement, but this was an accident of timing rather than a conviction of style."⁸ In fact, Thwaite does have a good deal in common with other movement poets: concern for technical aspects of meter, form, and rhyme balanced a more easy, colloquial diction, a definitely anti-Romantic bias — "not much interested in suffering, and extremely impatient of poetic sensibility... sceptical, robust, ironic;⁹ and a careful humanist intellectualism, arising partly from the fact that nearly all of the poets involved were university lecturers in English Literature and established authors of literary criticism. Noticeably lacking in Thwaite, even in the early poems, is what Charles Tomlinson has called "the whiff of Little Englandism" in some of the Movement verse which he felt was "a symptom of that suffocation which has affected so much English art ever since the death of Byron."¹⁰

Thwaite seemed to recognize the limitation of native English material, and like Tomlinson, he sought to broaden the horizons of his poetry both geographically and historically. Unlike Tomlinson, and Thom Gunn and Donald Davie of the Movement, he did not turn America for new "images" or for explosive new verse forms in the manner of Pound and Williams. Viewed in terms of the poetic movements of the early 20th century, it may be metaphorically said that Thwaite was caressed in the fair salons of Modernism but never seduced by the siren song of Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, or any of the other extremist fashion trends of the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Rather, Thwaite pursued the more narrow, high road, maintaining fairly traditional formal patterns at the same time that he sought more expansive, as opposed to merely novel, subject matter. His decisions to live first in Japan and later in Libya reflect this personal quest, of seeking a wider world in his literary imagination. Of course, he could not have known in advance the impact of the adversity he would face in Benghazi, Libya, as a powerful activator and stimulus of his poetic expression.

Thwaite's direction, however, also represents a distinct preference in his own poetic vision. In scanning the body of his works, one is immediately struck by the predominance of archaeological and historical subject material.¹¹ Thwaite recounts having been given a Roman coin when he was a boy. The obsession with things of the past continued with him and runs throughout his poetry as a unifying thread. A particularly characteristic poem is "Leavings":

Under the raspberry canes I prod to light
Two Roman sherds, a glint of Roman glass,
A bit of bellarmine, some stoneware scraps...¹²

But the scraps and bits of pottery represent more than history's rejectamenta. In the leavings of civilizations, Thwaite discerns a common and ongoing process by which cultures are built up, flourish, decline. In the detritus of the archaeological dig, the lives of individual people, far removed in the past, are revealed and reconstructed by the scientific methods of today. But the process is truly a "living" continuum, in which the poet recognizes himself as both witness to and participant in the same process:

The little duchess, aged four hundred, stirs
To feel the instruments break through the lead.
Troy stands on nine layers of its filth
And I tread out another cigarette.¹³

Thwaite's obsession with archaeological relics as records of civilization emerges in an amazing variety of poems: "Blue-Dash Charger"¹⁵ describes a piece of English painted china of 1680; "The Stones of Emptiness"¹⁶ a circle of monolithic ruins; "Cleaning a Coin"¹⁷ the discovering of a tiny bronze Greek coin. Elsewhere, Thwaite contemplates with amusement the obsequious fat charlatan, "Ali ben Shufti," who makes a living selling his personal collection of looted sherds to scholars and tourists:

You will find my anonymous presence in the excavation reports
When you get to 'Finds Locally Purchased'. Without a B.A. —
And unable to read or write — I can date and price
Any of this rubbish...
As for the past, it means nothing to me but this:
A time when things were made to keep me alive.¹⁷

Ali ben Shufti's attitude toward this value of archaeological discovery, the knowledge gleaned from understanding the history of past generations, is purely mercenary indifference. He is the antithesis of the persona assumed by Thwaite as archaeological explorer. Shufti is nothing more than a looter of ancient artifacts for his own personal fortune. Yet, oddly enough, there is something strangely comic and sympathetic about Shufti's flawed character. In his ignorance, he is "staying alive" in the only ways he and his impoverished people have known for generations — by selling the cultural heritage of their own native lands. This drama, and the same dilemma of peoples living in lands that are historically rich in unexcavated archaeological artifacts, is played out almost ritually every year in issues of Archaeology and Biblical Archaeological Review magazines.¹⁸

Thwaite's interest in archaeological themes persists in such poems as "Digging in a Saxon Cemetery,"¹⁸ and is given vivid expression in the poem "Rescue Dig," which describes the frantic attempt by a group of excavators to unearth a site overnight because it is to be bulldozed by a construction contractor the next morning:

           You hold your breath
And work only by touch, nothing in sight
Except the irrelevant spots of distant stars
Poised far above your intent groping here.
Exasperated, suddenly sensing how
Absurd your concentration, your hand jars
The obstinate thing; earth falls in a damp shower;
You scrabble to save it, swearing, sweating. Now,
In the total dark,
You know it's eluded you, broken, reburied, lost,
That tomorrow the bulldozers will be back;
The thing still nameless, ageless; the chance missed.¹⁹

But these archaeological remnants which he describes do not stand by themselves; they serve as vehicles for the imagination of the poet into worlds of forgotten individuals, into the history of a place and time, an ethnos and a community, a civilization, a system of beliefs and ways of doing things long ago forgotten. In a process which, for lack of a better word, I will term "projection," Thwaite uses these objects of contemplation to amplify the cultures and lives surrounding them. Paul Smyth, the most perceptive contemporary reviewer of Thwaite's poetry, wrote of the volume, Inscriptions:

Frequently, he establishes and develops themes through imagery and metaphor drawn from archaeology, curatorship, and other enterprises concerned with finding and preserving art objects and the more mundane proofs of the human mind and heart. But, make no mistake, these poems are not "about" the past; subject and theme are not to be confused. The old artifacts stand for lives lived, and the speaking voice is distinctly of the present.²⁰

In the poem, "The Antiquarian" Thwaite frames the same problem, asking himself why he picks through the rubble,

           imagining
And work only by touch, nothing in sight
Some lost groat or cup-handle will tell me
More about life than I know already.

His answer to his own question is curiously subdued:

No value, then, in these subterranean doings,
No moral to point, for once. Except I have
Some cold thought hovering here, which recognizes
The damp earth fall, the broken dish, the bone
Labelled and dropped in a tray and made to fit
In a pattern I have not guessed at yet, and may never...²¹

That "cold thought" is what becomes amplified, magnified through the poet's imagination into a vivid image of a particular moment in the past which suddenly springs alive again and touches him in a flash of intensity. The meaning of the event may be cryptic, as in the account of an ancient chronicler in "Note on the Voyages":

Read it as allegory, fill in the interstices,
Check it against the maps: something happened,
Was lost, forgotten. And stares us in the face.²²

The poem "Entry," in which the narrator reads the notations of an eighteenth century verger who found a dead infant in the marsh behind his church, again exemplifies this process of projection. The speaker moves from his study of the "verger's tall/ Archaic writing" to the imagined scene that is vividly conjured:

           Your lunatic mother
Knelt in the rushes and squirmed in her brute pain,
Delivering you up to a damp punishing world
Where the ducks were better off, and the oziers wetly rustled
Sogged down in the marshland owned by Mr. Craft.

It's sense to suppose you lasted a few days
And were buried, gratis, in an unmarked hole at the edge
Of the churchyard, the verger being scrupulous
And not wanting your skinny christened bundle of bones
To lie in unhallowed ground.²³

The deep melancholy of the speaker-persona, as he addresses the infant, is reminiscent of Thomas Gray reflecting on the carved grave inscriptions in "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." Thwaite plays with the "naturalistic" vision of nature as an indifferent, blank force here, in much the same way as he described the "stars poised" in the poem quoted above, "Rescue Dig." Nature seems to be a blind, harsh, brute force, completely ignorant of and indifferent to human intelligence or suffering. Clearly, this is not the nature of Wordsworth and Longfellow, but more akin to that found in Thomas Hardy. In "Entry," the life which passed so fleetingly through this world seems to haunt the speaker-persona:

           Almost two hundred years
Since you briefly lay by the cold and placid river,
And nothing but nineteen words as memorial.

I hear you cry in the night at the garden's dark edge.²³

The impressions of coldness, darkness, and dampness hover in the speaker's mind, and he feels a subdued anguish for the lost potential of the child, the futility of a life not realized. Here too, the figure of the verger assumes a greater dimension. The quiet, unassuming man discovers the child's corpse and is "scrupulous" to do what little he can under the circumstances: give the body a name, bury it in "hallowed ground," and record the event in his ledger book. He is a figure like the speaker himself, with a "cold thought" that he is unable to fit into a pattern of meaning. Yet, he goes on with the ordinary business of writing down the passage of life in human records, with the solitary, vague hope that, at some time, some meaning in this life will be transmitted to another person. As Smyth says,

...the vivid presence of other times... elicits an unsentimental religious feeling both for the details of history and for the individual minds that create and comprehend their significance.²⁴

The child, whom the verger named Moses Ozier, may not have lived to become prime minister or poet laureate, but the meaning of his premature death continues to haunt the imagination of the speaker-persona. The almost iconic-ironic naming of the infant after the Hebrew prophet "Moses," and christening him with a last name "Ozier" after the swamp vegetation in which his body was found, doubles both religious and secular vehicles in an intensely compressed metaphor for the feelings of the poet-speaker. The ambiguity of the poem's context also amplifies the layering of meanings within meanings, for, although we don't truly know if this name is Thwaite's invention, we trust that he is describing a real artifact from a "found" source. Because Thwaite appears to be faithfully recording real events and voices, the sense that the ledger entry could be "true" makes it all the more powerful.

Another poem in which this process of "projection" operates masterfully is a tour-de-force entitled "Arabic Script." The poem, a small gem of multi-layered metaphor, deserves to be quoted in its entirety:

Like a spider through ink, someone says, mocking: see it
Blurred on the news-sheets or in neon lights
And it suggests an infinitely plastic, feminine
Syllabary, all the diacritical dots and dashes
Swimming together like a shoal of minnows,
Purposive yet wayward, a wavering measure
Danced over meaning, obscuring vowels and breath.
But at Sidi Kreibish, among the tombs,
Where skulls lodge in the cactus roots,
The pink claws breaking headstone, cornerstone,
Each fleshy tip thrusting to reach the light,
Each spine a hispid needle, you see the stern
Edge of the language, Kufic, like a scimitar
Curved in a lash, a flash of consonants
Such as swung out of Medina that day
On the long flog west, across ruins and flaccid colonials,
A swirl of black flags, white crescents, a language of swords.²⁵

Here, the observation of Arabic writing conjures up ultimately a vision of the vast, sprawling culture which spawned it, that violent spasm which "swung out of Medina" with Mohammed. Along the way, Thwaite's vivid imagery bites straight to the core of the Islamic interior cultural conflict, its self-contradictory nature. Associations with animalistic impulses ("Like a spider," "like a shoal of minnows," "The pink claws") make clear its primitive foundation. It is deceptive in its very form. By its curvaceous lineaments, the first impression is of "an infinitely plastic, feminine/ Syllabary" filled with diacritical punctuation which leads one to think it is nuanced and expressive. By the end, the true belief is exposed as raw and masculine, "breaking" and "thrusting," hard and painful, like needles of cactus. This language is both "stern" and weapon-like, being compared both with a "scimatar" and whip ("On the long flog west..."). It is composed of "black flags, white crescents" — not at all "infinitely plastic" or "feminine." Rather it is a language of war and it ravages "across ruins and flaccid colonials." Of Thwaite's technique, Paul Smyth writes, "intelligence moves outward, across centuries and geographical boundaries, seeking, describing, transforming."²⁶ The word sounds in Thwaite's poem themselves embody and represent the harsh sibilants and fricatives of the Arabic language. Beyond this is the almost casual apprehension that the shape of the language seems to mirror the cultural values of the entire Mohammedian people. As Islam converted half the known world by brute force, so also does its writing employ "a language of swords." The analogy is immediately obvious, and yet the intelligence, the perception of it by the poet is entirely original, and his translation of it into English verse is dazzlingly facilitated.

Another technique, of which Thwaite is especially fond, is a relatively traditional one in poetry: that of assuming a mask, or persona, and of presenting his thoughts or words in the form of a dramatic monologue, soliloquy, or in one case, a series of letters. Frequently the voice is that of the poet himself, as in "Qasida on the Track to Msus" or "Elsewhere." Both of these poems are puzzling, disturbing, and enigmatic. The speaker in each seems to be caught in a web of intangibles. "Qasida" presents the impressions of a man travelling toward the town of Msus, and for a mysterious reason which is not explained, he suddenly turns back after spending the night at an encampment by the roadside. The presumption may be that a military roadblock ahead has stopped the traffic flow of refugees and that the speaker is one of those stuck in the long queue overnight, and one of the many who ultimately are forced to turn back. The whole poem presents images of vague confusion:

           we slept there and lay
Hearing the wind, watching the rising moon
Above stars falling like snow through constellations
We could not name.

This vagueness is echoed in the closing lines:

                     Those
Who were not left behind rode, I suppose, south
To some name on the map I might just recognize
Or a day's ride beyond to a name I do not know.²⁷

It is possible Thwaite here recounts some experience of the evacuation of "colonials" from Libya in 1967. But whatever specifically has happened during the course of this transit is not explained. We hear only the speaker's strange statement after turning back: "And now I shall never reach Msus..." Whatever may have been there awaiting him we will never find out.

"Elsewhere" is a poem which "baffles the mind while seducing the heart, which never fully resolves and which yet remains mysteriously irresistible."²⁸ The first four triplets describe a variety of activities which are going on "elsewhere": trees lose their leaves, grass withers, birds cry, drivers speed along highways, children are born. But beginning at line 13, a strange turn occurs:

                     Elsewhere
You sit on a bed while across the corridor
A scream spirals and jerks, again, again,

Then spins down fast and settles into sobs.

Who exactly the second person ("you") is Thwaite does not make clear, but it is a figure distinct from the speaker-persona ("I") who emerges a few lines later. Neither is it apparent why the "you" chooses to ignore the screams coming from the room across the hall. The last ten lines intensify the problems of meaning:

And no elsewhere is here, within your head
Where nothing else is born, or grows, or dies.
Nothing is like this, where the world turns in

And shapes its own alarms, noises, signs,
Its small aggressions and its longer wars,
Its withering, its death. Outside, begins

Whatever shape I choose to give it all
(Clouds ribbed with light, signals I recognize)
But you sit silent, narrowly, in a world

So light I feel it brush my cheek, and fall.²⁹

The "you" of the poem "Elsewhere" leads a stifled, narrow existence, barely alive at all. This could be a description of a sanitorium or insane asylum. The world outside is a totally separate universe from that inner chamber of isolation. But a specific identification of "you" is impossible. Even though it is hinted that the person is in some way close to the "I" — perhaps a loved one or a child — still this remains ambiguous in the last lines, "a world/ So light I feel it brush my cheek..." suggesting that it is the "idea" of this person's isolation that touches him.

Most of Thwaite's other works are less enigmatic. In the poems in which the persona he assumes is an individual distinct from himself, there is nevertheless a fusion of his own personality into the voice of the speaker and a correspondence drawn in some affinity with the life of the subject. Frequently, Thwaite enjoys a kind of humorous self-mockery, particularly about his archaeological interest. Ali ben Shufti tells him,

                     you
Pay for the leavings... You take them away and put them on your shelves
And for fifty piastres I give you a past to belong to.³⁰

The persona to whom Shufti speaks is without a doubt one of the "flaccid colonials" of the last couplet in "Arabic Script."

Inscriptions presents two poems, "Augustine at Carthage" and "Retractions: Hippo,"³¹ in which the persona of St. Augustine is adopted. These monologues are expanded later in Thwaite's collection New Confessions, in which Augustine speaks for the entire sequence of fifty poems. This collection is somewhat outside the ambit of this essay and should be dealt with separately and as a whole.

The sequence of poems entitled "The Letters of Synesius"³² represents Thwaite's most successful and sustained use of a persona. The speaker in the "letters" is Synesius of Cyrene, a fifth century Bishop of the Greek Orthodox Church, centered at Constantinople. He is a curious and rather obscure figure to adopt as a character but no in-depth knowledge of particular aspects of the Bishop's life is required to understand and appreciate the sequence of poems. Thwaite includes a brief headnote to "The Letters of Synesius" which explains the setting, characters, and situation adequately. Synesius was consecrated Bishop of Ptolemais in his native upper Libya in 412 A.D.

As the "Letters" progress, it becomes apparent that Synesius is a Tiresius-like figure who wavers between past and present (similar to the way Eliot uses Tiresius in The Waste Land). At times he speaks of "Justinian's queen," or of the barbarian tribe, the Austuriani, who were harassing the fringes of the province in the early 400s. The barbarians are both immediately looming threat and heralds of future destiny. In other lines, Thwaite brings the scene into explicitly modern time:

                     Undergraduates
Are taught philosophy by Egyptians now,
And at Tocra a boy indicates with gestures
How wide is Gamal Nasser's world. (I, p. 38)

Or,

They sniff the high octane at Benina as the planes take off,
Watching the passengers who have an hour
Between London and Nairobi, the pale transients. (II, p. 40)

Thwaite begins each "Letter" with a line drawn from the real Epistles of the historical Synesius. He alludes to others whom Synesius knew in his own time, including Hesychius, Andronicus, Theophilus, and Aristippus, who also studied under Hypatia in Alexandria. The adoption of an historical figure as a persona is not unusual — Browning's and Tennyson's best dramatic monologues do precisely this, in the persons of sometimes quite obscure figures, also. A more recent example of the sustained use of a persona, one contemporary with Anthony Thwaite, is Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, in which the voice of the ancient English King Offa is assumed. What is unusual in "The Letters of Synesius" is the degree to which Thwaite attributes elements of his own personality to Synesius. This merging of personalities comes out in subtle ways. At one point, for example, Synesius cries out,

           The ephebes have trouble
In mastering the Christian calendar,
The Latin alphabet. Teach us, they cry,
And go on strike. (I, p. 38)

Thwaite describes a similar predicament of his own in his essay, "The Export Business."³³ He discusses the misplaced idea that English literature can be taught at foreign universities to students who not only do not have the "faintest grasp of English grammar," but also have no background in Western culture whatsoever — including a knowledge of the Bible, Greek or Roman mythology, or basic historical events. Thwaite tells of the horrors of trying to teach students who tell him that "poetry which does not rhyme is 'not nice,'" and that "it was the most natural thing in the world for Hamlet's mother to marry Claudius" (by Arab cultural norms, of course). The full force of the teacher's dilemma is presented in Letter V. The message is a conscious parody of T.S. Eliot's "Phlebas the Phoenician" passage from The Waste Land. This could without any doubt be one of those poems that Thwaite has been trying to make the Arab students understand:

                     Undergraduates, you
Who sit your final examinations, consider
Omar Mukhtar, old man on a horse,
Who died on the gallows tortured by his wounds.
'He would have been a ghaffir now', said one
Keen student with a sneer.
                     Omar rests now,
Thirty-three years after his death, his tomb
Built like a pink carbuncle at the edge
Of Bereniké... (V, pp. 44-45)

The picture is a startling union of past and present within the single allusion. Thwaite embodies his own personal situation as an English professor teaching at the University of Benghazi in Libya, trying to make poetry such as The Waste Land comprehensible to barely English-speaking Libyan students who are, by religious and cultural background and individual education, unequipped to grasp it, within the voice of the equally frustrated fifth century Bishop trying to teach Christianity to the people of the Libyan Pentapolis.

"The Letters of Synesius" refers to the five cities of the Libyan Pentapolis. Several of these go by more than one name. The reason for this is that Greeks and Romans gave their own names to the same places, and many retained their original native appellations as well. In some cases, all the variations appear in different parts of the "Letters." The five cities are:

• Apollonia (Marsa Susa)
• Berenice (Bereniké, today called Benghazi)
• Cyrene, also called Cyrenaica
• Teuchria (Tocra)
• Ptolemais, Tolemaide (Barce)

Several other Libyan locations are alluded to in The Stones of Emptiness. Thwaite mentions several towns, all along the northern coast of Libya:

• Leptis (now called Leptis Magna)
• Misurata
• Sirta (Sirté)
• Nawfaliyya
• Brega

Msus is slightly inland, and can be located at almost exactly a 90° angle drawn between Benghazi and Cyrene. Zelten is the site of a large oil field. The Sirtic Desert is a huge expanse of dead waste land stretching more than 400 miles between Brega and Tripoli. Benina is the airport located just outside Benghazi.

The twelve "letters" constitute a sequence of free-ranging and time-leaping meditations on North African civilization, and they mirror the historical Bishop Synesius's Epistles, 156 of which survive. The Bishop himself, in the Pentapolis reluctantly, feels ill-suited to his task. He would much rather be back on his estate about 20 miles outside Cyrene, or even more so in Alexandria, with his friend and teacher, the beautiful Hypatia — to whom a great many of the letters are addressed. The historical Bishop studied philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy under Hypatia in Alexandria between 390 and 395 A.D. Bishop Synesius was conscripted into his office somewhat involuntarily, at the request of the people of Ptolemais (Tolemaide), who felt that Synesius, as a native born Libyan, could more successfully minister to and manipulate the unruly people (Epistle 96). This is despite the fact that Synesius was married and had a large family, and in fact, was not even a Christian:

                     So I reluctantly
Accepted what they offered: Bishop with power
Over five crumbling cities, fortress-farms,
Immitigable desert. And they accepted
My wife ('better to marry than to burn'),
My doubts, my flinching from the sweat and blood
Of trinitarian dogma. Thus I stand,
                     ... armed
With episcopal power in a parish of termites. (VIII, pp. 50-51)

The real Bishop Synesius had serious doubts concerning his consecration as Bishop. In the historical Bishop's Epistle 44, dating from the second or third decade of the 400s, he complains about "evil men" who are "troubling our church" — "heretics, Eunomians, followers of the anti-Nicene doctrines of Arius." As the sequence of letters evolves, Synesius becomes more and more acutely aware of the futility of his job. He dislikes being away from the cultural heart of the empire, and he writes to his friends,

                     please try to send me
Whatever new books the sophists have published:
I have read the reviews in the six-month old journals
And feel a provincial. (VI, p. 46)

Synesius writes to his beloved teacher, Hypatia of Alexandria:

          remember the hush in the lecture-room
When you entered with your astrolabe
And began to enunciate truths?

                     Tonight at five
A conversation-lesson with the Praetor, whose Greek
Would not fill a sardine. Yes, I am peevish. (IX, p. 52)

One of the historical Bishop's Epistles reveal that Hypatia encouraged Synesius to make his own astrolabe for astronomical observations. A mere two years after the death of Synesius, Hypatia herself was murdered by a band of fanatic Christians, largely in savage retribution for her pagan teachings. But in the Libyan Pentapolis, the ever-imminent danger in the wandering horde of desert barbarians, the Austuriani, and their presence at the fringes of the cities, winds around the poems like a deadly snake:

See where they squat behind the escarpment,
Ignorant of metre, of faction and schism,
Destined by favourless Fortune to be the true
Heirs of the Kingdom. (VI, p. 47)

The raids of the barbarian tribes steadily increase in intensity and the inevitable end is known by all, in advance:

        Barca is forked with fire,
Ashes drift down on Tocra, Cyrene lies open
Like an enormous cave laid out for looting. (V, p. 44)

The barbarians' approach is foreshadowed in the harsh winds, the desert "ghibli" blowing from the south, driving the civilized men of the cities into the Mediterranean sea. When the end finally does come, Synesius believes the Apocalypse is coming down upon the city:

Dies irae is come. See the hole in heaven...
        These are the Kingdom's last
Days. (XII, p. 57)

Synesius has decided to remain behind and to wait for the Austuriani. His faith remains vague, but he feels somehow that his sacrifice will serve God. Thus he stands, clinging to the pillars of his church, and then,

        the muezzin calls his first
Exhortation, and the pillars fall.
Darkness is on the Jebel, tongues of flame
Bring ruin, not revelation. See how they lick
The rod of Aaron, Zelten's oily fires
Flaring against the night. The visions come.
The pilgrims have boarded, the pagans are at my throat. (XII, p. 57)

In fact, the first line of this passage, "the muezzin calls his first/ Exhortation," explicitly refers to the Islamic call to prayers, as well as to the shout of the barbarian leader to his troops to initiate the final invasion of Cyrene.

The end of the ancient Pentapolis seems to coincide with Thwaite's own experience of the abrupt end of the domination of Libya by British and American oil interests, beginning on June 5, 1967, at the outbreak of the Israeli-Arab war. During the weeks that followed this conflict, there were anti-imperialist demonstrations in Tripoli and Benghazi, despite the efforts of the government to suppress them:

Rumours of referendum, of abdication:
Denials of rumours, official circumlocutions:
Whispers in cafes, public demonstrations,
Restoration of order, and if necessary
The 2 a.m. visits, the executions.
I hear the same story twice, and pass on
A third version, atomised by now
To fragments with different names and places... (X, p. 53)

But by the middle of June, the streets were in turmoil, the people in total revolt. They were targeting foreigners in their midst for the blame. Thwaite did not escape until July.

        Equipped for Armageddon,
The alien cavalry rides off, but in the squares
Public loudspeakers broadcast messages
Of peace, stability, spontaneous joy... (X, p. 54)

The government of the old King Idris was crumbling, crippled by a parasitic bureaucracy. Within a year after Thwaite and the other foreigners were expelled, the fanatical Wannis Gaddafi had assumed control of the government, and he began a series of pograms designed to consolidate his power. He not only nationalized all the oil interests but he also wiped out the ancient monarchy that had been in "collusion with the Anglo-American Zionist Conspiracy." At the time these poems were written, Thwaite could not have known the ultimate outcome of the Libyan revolution.³⁴ Synesius's "oracle" accurately predicted what was to befall the "Kingdom" of Libya, but of course the oracle speaks in commonplaces and generalities that can and do apply to nearly all civilizations in all times:

What the oracle said was vapour swathing the rock,
And we could discern a finger writing in steam
As on a tiled wall the obscene words
Doing death to life in hints and half-promises.
'Libya shall perish by the wickedness of its leaders.' (X, p. 53)

This passage superbly mixes the strange imagery of mysteries and superstition with the satirical back-voice of an experienced historian. Thwaite's achievement in these poems is his masterful bringing together of elements of past and present into a coherent vision of North Africa and its relation to the rest of the world, and to history. In "Letter IV" Synesius provides a statement by which Thwaite's own historical vision may be assessed:

                     ... to suppose
Things better rather than different is a way
Of dying only, swivelled to the past.
It is easy for me to act the Jeremiah,
To juxtapose the anomalous, debased present
With the golden fragments of a golden age.

                     ... The old
Survives by demanding nothing: the new
Frets in its expectations. (IV, p. 43)

Thwaite's vision of the past is definitely not, like Eliot's, one of a lost golden age. It is rather a more realistic and accurate picture of how cultures are born, thrive, and then die, but basically do not change over the ages. In Eliot's education, his guidebook to the past was Frazier's The Golden Bough with all its flaws, misperceptions, and subtle prejudices. Thwaite's education, some 50 years later than Eliot's, is in keeping with the methods of modern science and archaeology, and far less tainted by the 19th Century theories of race, class, and culture of Eliot's generation. The very great difference between the two men, both of whom became gifted editors and academicians, is that Eliot's experience depended almost exclusively on books. Thwaite's poetry can have no Golden Bough as its key, because underlying the poetry of Anthony Thwaite is not merely his reading of many books but his own personal "field" experience of living life, sometimes in dirty and dangerous places.

Moreover, Thwaite studiously avoids the worst excesses of contemporary academic poetry: confessionalism, pedanticism, and politicization, which have infected and afflicted both British and American poetry for more than 50 years. Nowhere in any of Thwaite's poetry do we find a trace of wallowing self-immersion, boredom and regret, drunken reverie, or stoned mysticism (Plath, Hughes, Lowell, Berryman, Ginsberg, Ferlenghetti). Nowhere is there a trace of the deliberate obscurantism characteristic of so many academic writers (Pound, Zukovsky, Davenport). Finally, Thwaite's political viewpoint appears shiningly neutral and objective, in comparison with the polarized radicalism of the post-Ezra Pound school, and the apologists for T.S. Eliot, who seem completely blinded to both poets' stinking and uncharacteristically stupid antisemitism. The sad, painful reality, of course, is that most contemporary poetry has become a staggering, lurching, wheedling monstrosity, virtually unreadable and unread outside of academic circles. It has become a grist mill for countless theses and dissertations of English graduate students, whose paperworks also line the shelves and provide food for dust mites in academic libraries from Los Angeles, California to Edinburgh, Scotland. In such a flabby and oversaturated environment, it is no surprise that Anthony Thwaite has received scant fame for his extraordinary poetic talent.

Anthony Thwaite's exploration of the Archaeological Imagination, continues in New Confessions and A Portion for Foxes encompasses the rise of both Christian and Moslem civilizations in the vast expanse of desert in North Africa, and the domination of this region by imperialist interests and the intrigues of international politics. Thwaite also explores his own native English and European roots. The striking quality of these poems is that for all the expansiveness of theme, Thwaite never loses sight of the individual human being. As Paul Smyth stated, Thwaite's "evocation, at once, of the particular past and the particular present makes immediate our awareness of the process of history, of the human effort as something ever-ancient, ever-new."³⁵

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Annotatia

¹ Anthony Thwaite: extracts from the conversation with Peter Dale and Ian Hamilton, interview 12/11/2001.

² "The American Experience," Encounter, 48 (March 1977), p. 72.

³ Contemporary English Poetry: An Introduction. London: Heinemann, 1959; Chester Springs, Pennsylvania: Dufour, 1961; further revised and expanded in the third edition, London: Heinemann, 1964.

⁴ "I have never been so happy in my life." Encounter, 46 (June 1976), pp. 64-67.

⁵ Recounted in "Funeral Games," New Statesman, March 10, 1972, pp. 313-314.

⁶ Contemporary English Poetry: An Introduction, London: Heinemann, 1964, p. 143.

⁷ "Do Poets Tell the Truth? Autobiographical Excursions," Encounter, 45 (December 1973), p. 72.

⁸ Peter Porter, "Anthony Thwaite," in D. L. Kirkpatrick, ed., Contemporary Poets (New York: St. Martin's Press, and London: St. James Press, 1975), p. 1545.

⁹ Contemporary English Poetry: An Introduction, p. 143.

¹⁰ Charles Tomlinson, "Some American Poets: A Personal Record," Contemporary Literature, 18 (Summer 1977), p. 290.

¹¹ Thwaite himself is an amateur archaeologist, an interest which is reflected in an article, "The Chronology of the Bellarmine Jug," Conoisseur, 182 (April 1973), pp. 255-262, which is reprinted in its entirety today on the Web, with the web-publisher's stated notation that "This article is reprinted without permission from The Connoisseur Magazine."

¹² The Stones of Emptiness, pp. 1-2.

¹³ Ibid., pp. 6-7.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 20.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 22.

¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 28-29.

¹⁷ The articles and notes on looters in the pages of Archaeology and Biblical Archaeology Review tell an endless, and ongoing saga. Some of the more recent essays: "Plundering Iraq: Should Looted Antiquities Be Returned to Rogue States?" Archaeology Odyssey, 5:2 (March/April 2002), pp. 34-43, 56-57. "AIA: Senator Moynihan Supports Antiquities Collector as Payoff for Campaign Contributions," editorial in Archaeology Odyssey, 4:1 (January/February 2001), pp. 4, 62. "Publish Unprovenanced Artifacts: How Can You Not Look at this Stuff?" editorial in Archaeology Odyssey, 4:2 (March/April 2001), p. 4, 59, and "Richard L. Stroup and Matthew Brown, "How to Reduce Archaelological Looting: Open the Markets and Enlist the Collectors!" pp. 44-46. "Anatomy of a Forgery: 'Exposing Minoan Frauds,' 'Selling a Persian Princess,' and 'Faking African Art,' Archaeology, 54:1 (January/February 2001), pp. 24-36. "Plundering Afghanistan," and "Challenges in Pakistan," Archaeology, 55:2 (March/April 2002), pp. 18-21. "The Race to Save Afghan Culture: Rescuing Antiquities in Times of War," Archaeology, 55:3 (May/June 2002), pp.18-25. The list of articles on the subject of artifact looting is truly bottomless.

¹⁸ Times Literary Supplement, April 30, 1976, p. 504.

¹⁹ Encounter, 43 (July 1974), p. 30.

²⁰ Paul Smyth, "Less Tit than Tat," Poetry, 123 (December 1973) p. 168. The unflattering title refers entirely to the four other volumes of poetry covered in Smyth's review.

²¹ Inscriptions, pp. 3-4.

²² Ibid., pp. 5-6.

²³ Ibid., p. 28.

²⁴ Smyth, p. 168.

²⁵ The Stones of Emptiness, p. 24.

²⁶ Smyth, p. 168.

²⁷ The Stones of Emptiness, pp. 34-35.

²⁸ Smyth, p. 169.

²⁹ Inscriptions, p. 36.

³⁰ The Stones of Emptiness, p. 29.

³¹ Inscriptions, pp. 7-8 and 9. In New Confessions the poems appear on pp. 39-40 and 52 respectively.

³² The Stones of Emptiness, pp. 36-58.

³³ Times Literary Supplement, September 12, 1968, pp. 1009-1010.

³⁴ Summary of events of 1967-1968 in John Wright, Libya, (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), pp. 277-280.

³⁵ Smyth, p. 168.