It’s because poetry is extremely hard to do well, and if you think that’s not the case, then you’ve either never tried it, or you’re utterly tone deaf to the crapness of your own efforts. Hmmm. Which, do you think, applies to Corbyn? This book grew out of regular conversations Len and I hold about poetry: the enjoyment we get from it and the opportunity it provides for escape and inspiration,” Corbyn said. “When putting it together, the hardest part was deciding what to leave out.” Unfortunately, the pair have just been given a prominent public platform to advertise their practical ignorance of the form by the New York-based publisher OR Books, in the shape of an edited anthology, Poetry for the Many, which is hauntingly “dedicated to all those suffering from miscarriages of justice. In particular … Julian Assange.” Mr Assange’s own contribution to the volume, “ The Ballad of Belmarsh Gaol”, shall not be cited here. How many members of the public think a woman can’t have a penis, for example? About 99 percent. And how many, like the leftists who took over Labour during Corbyn’s tenure, think they can? About 1 per cent. On every given issue under the sun, from trans rights, to mass immigration, to the armed forces, to BLM, the likes of Len and Jeremy actually represented the opinions of the metropolitan Few, not the normal Many.

A bonanza of poems for radical readers” – Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey’s POETRY FOR THE MANY reviewed in Morning Star (11/6/2023)

Apart from the short reprints of extracts from Yeats et al, which you can easily get elsewhere for free anyway, the entire content of this book is embarrassingly worthless, albeit admittedly quite funny. That said, if people of Corbyn and McCluskey’s mindset really want to spend their days either reading modern rubbish, or systematically misinterpreting actual worthwhile poetry of the past so that, say, John Donne’s “No man is an island, entire of itself” suddenly becomes a paean to collectivist Communism, that is their business. British people inhabit a free society (at least until the Labour Party are soon re-elected) and if this really makes them happy, why not? Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey collaborated to help achieve the biggest electoral success for socialism in recent British history. The two men share a passionate belief in a fairer, more equal Britain, encapsulated in Labour’s election slogan “For the many, not the few.” They are better known and understood on the political Left and among working-class communities, where their values and beliefs are represented more fairly. Both are revered and loved across those communities.

Jeremy and Len, the former leaders of the Labour Party and Unite the union, are well known to anyone in Britain with an interest in politics – and to many further afield as well. It’s fair to say that neither man fares well in the reporting of a mainstream media in thrall to vested interests. As a left-leaning Romanticist who also loves Douglas Adams, I feel like I should at least dip my toes into this pool, however muddied. First of all, the anthology looks fascinating, including reflections from Corbyn, McCluskey, and other contributors on what the selected poems mean to them, with an explicit desire to appeal to a working-class readership and to connect poetry reading to political activism. I look forward to it being reviewed in Romantic Textualities and elsewhere. Next, I want to close read the extract from the poem that Corbyn selected for his tweet, before comparing it with an example of Adams’‘Vogon poetry’. The Shelley extract reads:In reading Poetry for the Many, you will journey through a rich selection of their favourite verse, and hear from Jeremy and Len in their own words as they describe how they came across each poem and the impact it had on them. At the same time, they will encourage you, the reader, to embrace poetry and shake off any notion that it is not something to be read, written, or appreciated by working class people. I am not working class, but I have read a lot of poetry and even studied it at university, and let me tell you – there is no poet in me.