I intend to found a quarterly journal, concerned principally with English poetry. It’s not something I’ve every wanted to do with my life, however, I have been forced into it by the circumstances of my own life, and the higher culture of this country today.
It is as well to face the culture of this country head on, and explain how it looks to me, at the start, and to speak plainly. Afterwards, when I set about composing the quarterly journal for myself and by myself, I can do so having set out the fundamental things. It is possible to relax and get to work, once the plan and the intent have been expressed. So let me explain why a journal is necessary, and how I see the situation we are all in.
First, poetry. Poetry is something, and it does something. What it does is, give pleasure and provides education; poetry is only read because it is enjoyable to do so and because it offers hopes of improvement. The reason I need to set up a journal where I select and print poems is, that this basic principle of enjoyment and instinctive has been forgotten in other journals, and in our culture at large. The country has no place for poetry because for two or three decades, the dominant style is obscure and aggressively bad.
Second, what poetry is. It is the words uttered when a king is made, in the Welsh tradition. It is the celebration of battle and of crushing enemies. It is a nationalistic activity par excellence. It is created with words, naturally, and words which have the quality of giving pleasure, and of forming a nationalistic, primed sort of character. The poetry is a national activity of hearing and elevating certain words and poems to a rank above others. It is intolerant, elitist, and it is not confused by any ideology. It is not confused by any mucking about with words. What I mean by that is, that it appeals to the natural man, to what is completely natural to people born in a specific nation, regardless of their beliefs and how they have been propagandised. It is to that extent anti-religious, and anti-philosophical, and anti-political.
Third, the general culture of Great Britain, by which I mean mostly England, and the Welsh, Scots and Irish who use English and generally admit themselves into an English way of life. The culture of this country has become suicidal. Mass immigration is one symptom. Another is the complete irrelevance of active poetry to our nation. Another is the herd belief in the European Union, rather than in England, as our future and current homeland. There are lesser indications of national suicide, such as the way in which Prime Ministers do not deal with foreign countries in the national interest, but rather join and follow them; the decline of manufacturing; or the ideal of unemployment rather than work; the decline of the armed forces, and so on. But suicide is the proper word for what is going on in our country and our nation.
Poetry is nationalistic, as I have said; and it has to do with life, not suicide. The default situation of a man is that he has a family, and a history, a civic life. His civic life consists in dealing with other people who he believes are like himself, and who are closely and distantly related to him. In England, it has been the role of poetry to explain and put into words this mute relationship of living people to one another, and to their property and their land, to nature.
There is a great deal about being alive, or just being, which is not scientifically understood. Nothing is really understood in the way that science boasts that it is, about existence. Poetry and to a similar extent, philosophy therefore lay out the way in which people should, by choice and consent, understand what and who they are. Culture is something people have chosen, as a nation, to do. It is how they behave over the long and short term.
It is therefore completely predictable, that when a nation starts to die, that its poetry also goes the same way. I will not here go into details about who I think currently writes what is published as poetry. I have read some journals, and many surveys, and what there is going on is very little, and all of it unpleasant. It is usually actually international – where international poetry is an oxymoron.
Whether our national suicide has brought about the actual economic decline of the West, the actual military humiliation of the West, the invasion of foreign cultures in outrageous forms into our countries, or whether our national suicide was not a matter of choice but simply the time for the West to die – in a kind of old age – I don’t claim to know. But for my part, I’m not taking part in it, and I intend to do something about it for what remains of my life.
I’m nearly fifty years of age. For most of my life, I’ve been a student. I’ve read poetry and philosophy, particularly since the age of seventeen or so, not for pleasure, but in order to learn. When I read the English and European poets, and when I studied philosophy and metaphysics, I did so in order to take on my inheritance. It was hard work, painful and unrewarding, insofar as recognition for this work went unpaid. The commendation for it from others I received in the form of a PhD. But apart from that, there was no reward.
The reason I say this is, that the other function of poetry and philosophy, is that they are the repositories of our past, our ancestral knowledge. When you read, say, Milton, you are in the company of people who quarrelled and fought the civil war. When you study Greek history, you are joining thousands of your ancestors. The study of Plato or Kant brings you to the bedrock ideas underlying how we have created our country and become a nation. That’s how I saw it. I studied for so many years because I wanted to be educated to the highest possible level.
A poetry journal is the place where I can stop being a student, and do my part in the long process of handing on the same to children and learners, so that they can do as I have done.
There is a battle for words and mind going on in the world at the moment. The European Union, the gigantic power of the state against the family and the individual, the inertia of materialistically driven bureaucracies which lie when they say that they are democratic – these are dangers, no doubt. But I’m uninterested in the specifics. Where poetry matters, is in the proper use of words. I have given a description of what poetry is, above: it is enjoyable to read, and it is also nationalistic and has a role in tradition: a country without poetry is no longer a country. But what it is functionally is, the correct use of words, the highest most refined form of words, the most elite and honest use of words, the most virtuous use. The use of words to express the emotional relation of a man to his life in his nation.
I suppose that words in poetry are usually thought of as expressing emotions, which is why we enjoy reading them. We are brought into the presence of emotions, without having to go through the passion of feeling them as a result of actual trauma. And if there is any dominant characteristic of England in its death throes, it is this: the universal application of words in the reverse or degenerate upside down version of their true meaning. So, man is woman, the foreigner must stay in your country, lockdown is freedom, a war in which no one fights, kindness is euthanasia, mothers are encouraged to kill their children, and so on. There are serious and extremely widespread problems with the way language is used in England and the West. So I do expect to banned, ignored, or cancelled eventually; censorship becomes necessary where lies have usurped the citadel of power. After all, in this country today, people get cancelled so that people can be free to think, speak and feel. But I don’t think of any of these potential troubles, which I might face now, are a big deal, since there is worse to come. At the moment words are being ruined, and in future there will be actual ruin.
My periodical will be national; and it will not tolerate atheism or indifference to God; the indifference to God is also typical of our country and our language. The indifference to God, or what is worse, the perverted worship of the Church in England, is what has permitted our country and our countrymen to allow the suicide to take place. It is a principle: you will not commit murder, and our country is being murdered. The lack of interest in our national property is another sin. We hire it out to foreigners, we let them take our inheritance, in direct contravention of the rule, that you will not steal. We steal from our ancestors, and give to the invader. We steal from our children, so as to let foreign children thrive. We sell our country on international markets, in the name of wealth and happiness. I do intend to understand and to let Christian theology dominate my work. Not even principally because of the Decalogue, but because of the relationship which an individual must have with his own self, as described in Christian theology. It is a principle: just as there is no sacred right to life, of protection of others, where there is no command from God to respect life; just so, there is no individual self, and no life, without the example and commands of Christ. And the individual soul and its freedom in a nation is the most fundamental principle of our inheritance from our predecessors.
The journal will be quarterly. I would expect it to consist of a great deal of poetry, but at least half of it will be reviews, and essays on poetry and literature. It will also hold a position, a last bastion position, on British political activity and policy. I will invite submissions, but only after a couple of editions. There must be a couple of editions before submissions are allowed, in obedience to the principle that writers should know what they are getting involved in before they let their own work be associated with it.
Poetry will be harshly rejected by me, the editorial board, in most cases. Essays which agree with editorial policy will probably be accepted. Distribution will be to subscribers, and to universities and libraries. We should not aim to please the multitude, but rather what is left of the elite, and the upper class. One of the few possible means of saving our country, it is my belief, is in the proper recognition of the class system. And if there is none, then there is no country. England, and the other nations, only have a culture when there is hierarchy, and where extreme merit is rewarded. This is what forces people to do good work. Where this applies to poetry is obvious; where the impersonal state has decided and given judgement on what is good, which is the case at the present time, there has been terrible work, and a decline of our culture.
The state must finally be reduced, in favour of the family, property owning, exclusion, rank, and freedom of action. On a personal note, the realisation that there is no class system, and no means of discerning high from low, and no reward for excellence, no class of the mass which looks after itself and has an identity, has been probably the most dispiriting and most enduring cause of despair for me. It is so for any true artist. Poetry needs something to praise, and there is nothing which can be praised in a materialistic and undistinguished undifferentiated people in a socialist land.
I am calling the journal ‘The Meditator’; it should be published around October 1st, 2025. It will be published by means of print on demand, and priced accordingly. Initial editions will probably be free to read, as internet copies, with hard copies on demand, at cost price.
It will be called ‘The Meditator’ because prayerful meditation, in stillness, is the activity which allows God to speak to us, and where we are taught the virtues and the right path, by the Holy Spirit and grace. How nation, God, and individual freedom and responsibility are all of them necessary at the same time, can be explained inside the magazine. All the most important decisions, the most important events of history and being take place in the quiet of meditation, before they break out in the actual world, as a shadow of the original conception. The unique and living self revealed to us when we are close to God in a nation at peace is the deepest meaning of existence.
I’ll do everything myself at first. This manifesto will serve as the Editorial on the first pages.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Sir,
I take issue with your editorial bias, and would like you to mend your ways. Throughout, you have said, implied, and indicated that you believe, that ‘liberalism’ has ruined England. But you have not taken seriously the thesis of Ezra Pound, despite having discussed his poetry at eye-watering and coma inducing length. The power structure which dominates England, as well as France and Germany, is better understood as the ‘money-lending’ oligarchy, as Pound said, and as is clear. I think you should look into this. It is 101 level basic knowledge. It explains why the Russian $300 bn can’t be taken from the European banks, despite that being an obvious thing for us to do. The money-lending oligarchy is international, and has no interest in nation states, populations, or anything besides the power which is to be found in gathering money, and extending its influence and its type of rule and regulation, which explains a lot, in my view, like how the first visit these people make when they become party leader, is to the City of London, and how ‘the markets’ decide who gets to be in charge. People are usually surprised to reflect, that their supposed government never takes the chance to print their own dollars and pounds, but they always borrow them from private banking companies, at interest which the populations are on the hook for. Can you look into this, please?
Sincerely, Glandular Fever, Middlesex.
Sir,
I was concerned about your dismissive references to Covid 19 and our national lockdown. I regret subscribing to your magazine now. I was sixty-nine years old back then, and it was already hard enough getting to see my parents; I have arthritis. Both of them went through the two years of lockdown confined to their care homes, and only because people like you didn’t do as you were told and totally lock down, which was the only way we could save lives at the time. People like you make me sick!
Yours, etc., Salmon Pate, Ilford
NEWS AND NOTES
Nothing to report.
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