By Mursi Saad El-Din It seems that poetry is receiving a boost in England. English poets have always been popular -- I cannot conceive of an English course in any country that does not teach the Romantic and the metaphysical poets. In Egypt there is an annual English poetry reading competition among students of language schools and I was once a member of the jury. The standards of the reciters was impressive, and English poetry -- all poetry for that matter -- lends itself to vocal presentation. Recently people began to claim that poetry had all but died. Poetry books began to be squeezed into tiny corners of bookshops and on the shelves one tended to find only the most sensational poets -- writers like Hughes, Heaney, Plath and co. According to Bryan Appleyard, one of my favourite literary critics, "a poetry-free generation was emerging, illiterate and utterly unaware of the inheritance they had so ruthlessly been denied." Poetry became subject to all kind of deconstruction. The magic of poetry was being codified. It was facing the same fate as the English language, a subject for laboratories where vowels and consonants are constantly measured. Really disappointing was the reluctance of publishers to publish poetry collections. This led some poets to publish their poems and bear the cost as the small presses that had in an earlier age supported poetry folded. Now there is new hope for poetry. A start, described by some critics as a revolution, is being taken by the BBC. In 1996 Daisy Goodwin, a BBC producer, organised a poll to find out the favourite poems of listeners and viewers. She then produced an anthology, The Nation's Favourite Poems, which sold over one million copies. That sale, unequalled by any book of poetry, showed that poetry, far from being in its death throes, was alive and kicking. Goodwin then produced the thematic anthologies Poems to Save Your Life and Poems to Keep you Sane. Now, according to Appleyard in The Sunday Times, she is to present five half-hour programmes on BBC2 on the theme "Essential Poems". The programme started on 14 February. The poems, read by actors, included Marvell, Donne, Shelley and Burns. Most people do not read poetry and, in Appleyard's words "they don't know why they should." Poetry, he goes on to say, "has to be insinuated into their lives as, somehow, relevant". Appleyard believes that education has a lot to do with the neglect of poetry. The idea of great books "was undermined by a wave of literary theory that, inspired by French structuralism, denied their pre-eminence and worshipped the "text as a system of cultural meaning". The text, goes on Appleyard, "might be a poem, but it could equally be instructions on a bottle of shampoo". To go back to the poetry programmes. In the Independent James Thynne described the programmes as "putting old friends in new settings". The aim of the programme is to "reawaken the nation's appetite for poetry". To do this Goodwin has packaged familiar poems as "lavishly filmed mini-dramas with modern settings designed to give the old favourites a fresh slant". Commenting on her programmes, Daisy Goodwin remarks: "There's always been a hunger for poetry but the middle market -- the sort of people who used to buy Palgrave's Golden Treasury -- have been ignored by publishers and editors. I must say that I was introduced to English poetry through the Golden Treasury, which I still treasure in my library and which I pick up when I feel the need for meditation." Goodwin is enthusiastic about presenting poetry on television. "I was wondering" she says, "why we had never found a way of doing poems on television. Poetry is always represented through the history and the biography of poets rather than the pure wonderfulness of the poems themselves. Then in a flash, I thought if we could put actors in modern dress, it can work."
