Jacob Bronowski is still best known for the great BBC documentary series The Ascent of Man in 1973. He was a well-known writer and broadcaster but he also wrote verse for half a century from the late 1920s to the 1970s, from his student days at Cambridge to his mid-sixties, including the 107 poems collected in this new edition.
Bronowski was born into a Polish Jewish family in Lodz in 1908. The Bronowskis moved to Saxony in 1911 and moved on to the East End in 1920. In 1927 he went to Cambridge and this is when he started writing poetry. At Cambridge he got to know the future actor Michael Redgrave, another famous broadcaster, Alistair Cooke, and William Empson, one of the great literary critics of the mid-20th century. In Paris he met Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. He went on to receive a PhD in mathematics and after the war became an extraordinary polymath, working in Britain and then at La Jolla in California.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this new book of poems is how little there is about his Jewishness or about his early experience of exile and migration.
Instead, it falls into two parts. The early poems, from the 1920s to the mid-1930s are full of learned classical, literary and historical references, from Artemis, Pericles and Aphrodite to the great battle of Tannenberg and the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
But the most powerful poems start in the mid-1930s with a very different preoccupation with the modern, a sudden new language of gangsters (“the gangster with the sawed-off gun”) and bookies, and an exciting political turn, particularly prompted by The Spanish Civil War. Starting with his poems Guadalajara and The Death of Garcia Lorca in the late 1930s, Bronowski starts writing about bombers and war, terror and ruins.
The poems become more personal with references to the great Spanish poet Lorca, the German refugee playwright Ernst Toller who committed suicide in a New York hotel, the Austrian journalist and satirist Karl Kraus, and an angry attack on Pope Pius XI, criticising his concordats with Hitler and Mussolini.
The book ends with Bronowski’s post-war poems, which have a very different, less political mood, especially his Christmas Card poems, illustrated by his wife, Rita, written between 1939 and his sadly premature death in 1974. This book is a fine tribute to one of the great Jewish immigrants of the 20th century.
Jacob Bronowski: Selected Poems
Edited by Simon Rennie
Palgrave MacMillan
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