[In the following essay, Auden regards Skelton's poetry as falling naturally into four divisions—imitations of “aureate” poetry of the fifteenth century; lyrics; poems in rhyme royal; and poems written in Skeltonics—and also finds that the drama Magnificence is interesting if overly long, concluding that Skelton was an accomplished entertainer rather than a visionary.]

To write an essay on a poet who has no biography, no message, philosophical or moral, who has neither created characters, nor expressed critical ideas about the literary art, who was comparatively uninfluenced by his predecessors, and who exerted no influence upon his successors, is not easy. Skelton's work offers no convenient critical pegs. Until Mr. Robert Graves drew attention to his work some years ago, he was virtually unknown outside University-honour students, and even now, though there have been two editions, in the last ten years, those of Mr. Hughes and Mr. Henderson, it is doubtful whether the number of his readers has very substantially increased. One has only to compare him with another modern discovery, Hopkins, to realise that he has remained a stock literary event rather than a vital influence.

My own interest dates from the day I heard a friend at Oxford, who had just bought the first Hughes edition, make two quotations:

Also the mad coot
With bald face to toot;

and

Till Euphrates that flood driveth
                                                            me into Ind,

and though I should not claim my own case as typical, yet I doubt if those to whom these lines make no appeal are likely to admire Skelton.

Though little that is authentic is known of Skelton's life, a fairly definite portrait emerges from his work: a conservative cleric with a stray sense of humour, devoted to the organisation to which he belonged and to the cultural tradition it represented, but critical of its abuses, possibly a scholar, but certainly neither an academic-dried boy or a fastidious highbrow; no more unprejudiced or well-informed about affairs outside his own province than the average modern reader of the newspapers, but shrewd enough within it, well read in the conventional good authors of his time, but by temperament more attracted to more popular and less respectable literature, a countryman in sensibility, not particularly vain, but liking to hold the floor, fond of feminine society, and with a quick and hostile eye for pompositas in all its forms.

Born in 1460, he probably took his degree at Cambridge in 1484, and was awarded a laureate degree by Cambridge, Oxford, and Louvain, which I suppose did not mean much more then than writing an essay prize on the Newdigate would to-day, became tutor to the future Henry VIII, was sufficiently well known socially to be mentioned by Erasmus and Caxton; took orders at the age of thirty-eight, became Rector of Diss, his probable birthplace, about 1500; began an open attack on Wolsey in 1519, and died in sanctuary at Westminster in 1529. Thus he was born just before Edward IV's accession, grew up during the Wars of the Roses, and died in the year of Wolsey's fall and the Reformation Parliament. In attempting to trace the relations between a poet's work and the age in which he lived, it is well to remember how arbitrary such deductions are. One is presented with a certain number of facts like a heap of pebbles, and the number of possible patterns which one can make from them are almost infinite. To prove the validity of the pattern one chooses, it would be necessary first to predict that if there were a poet in such and such a period he would have such and such poetical qualities, and then for the works of that poet to be discovered with just those qualities. The literary historian can do no more than suggest one out of many possible views.

Politically Skelton's period is one of important change. The Plantagenet line had split into two hostile branches, ending one in a lunatic and the other in a criminal. The barons turned their weapons upon each other and destroyed themselves; all the English Empire in France except Calais was gone; the feudal kind of representative government was discredited and the Church corrupt. The wealth of the country was beginning to accumulate in the hands of the trading classes, such as wool merchants, and to be concentrated in the cities of the traders. Traders want peace which gives them liberty to trade rather than political liberty, secular authority rather than a religious authority which challenges their right to usury and profit. They tend therefore to support an absolute monarchy, and unlike a feudal aristocracy with its international family loyalties, to be nationalist in sentiment. Absolute monarchies adopt real politik and though Machiavelli's Prince was not published till 1513, his principles were already European practice.

Skelton's political views are those of the average man of his time and class. A commoner, he had nothing to lose by the destruction of the old nobility; like the majority of his countrymen, he rejoices at royal weddings and national victories, and weeps at royal funerals and national defeats. With them also he criticises Henry VII's avarice.

Immensas sibi divitias cumulasse quid horres?

Like a good bourgeois he is horrified at the new fashions and worldliness at Henry VIII's court, but cannot attribute it to the monarch himself, only to his companions; and hates the arrogance and extravagance of Wolsey, who by social origin was no better than himself.

In religious matters he is naturally more intelligent and better informed. Though Wyclif died in 1384, his doctrines were not forgotten among the common people, and though Skelton did not live to see the English Reformation, before he was fifty Luther had pinned his protest to the church door at Wittenberg, and he lived through the period of criticism by the Intelligentsia (The Praises of Folly was written in 1503) which always precedes a mass political movement.

The society of Colet, Grocyn, Linacre, and More was an intellectual and international one, a society of scholars who, like all scholars, overestimated their capacity to control or direct events. Skelton's feelings towards them were mixed. Too honest not to see and indeed in Colin Clout unsparingly to attack the faults of the Church, he was like them and like the intelligent orthodox at any time, a reformer not a revolutionary, that is to say, he thought that the corruptions of the Church and its dogmatic system were in no way related; that you could by a “change of heart” cure the one without impairing the other; while the revolutionary, on the other hand, attributes the corruption directly to the dogmas, for which he proposes to substitute another set which he imagines to be fool-proof and devil-proof. Towards the extremists he was frightened and hostile.

And some have a smack
Of Luther's sack …
And some of them bark
Clatter and carp
Of that heresiarch
Called Wickleuista
The devilish dogmatista.

His difference from the early reformers was mainly temperamental. He was not in the least donnish and, moving perhaps in less rarefied circles, saw that the effect of their researches on the man in the street, like the effect on our own time, for example of Freud, was different from what they intended.

He has been unjustly accused of opposing the study of Greek; what he actually attacked was the effect produced by the impact of new ideas upon the average man, never in any age an edifying spectacle.

Let Parrot, I pray you, have liberty to prate
For aurea lingua greca ought to be magnified
If it were cond perfitely and after the rate
As lingua Latina, in school matter occupied
But our Grekis, their Greek so well have applied
That they cannot say in Greek, riding by the way,
“Ho, ostler, fetch my horse a bottel of hay.”

As a literary artist, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Skelton is an oddity, like Blake, who cannot be really fitted into literary history as an inevitable product of the late fifteenth century. There is every reason for the existence of Hawes or even Barclay as the moribund end of the Chaucerian tradition; it is comparatively easy to understand Elizabethan poetry as a fusion of the Italian Renaissance and native folk elements; but the vigour and character of Skelton's work remains unpredictable.

One may point out that the Narrenschiff influenced the Bouge of Court, that Skeltonics may be found in early literature like the Proverbs of Alfred,

Ac if pu him lest welde
          werende on worlde.
Lude as stille
          His owene wille,

or that the style of his Latin verses occurs in Goliardic poetry or Abelard.

Est in Rama
Vox audita
Rachel fluentes
Eiolantes
Super natos
Interfectos.

But that a writer should be found at that particular date who would not succumb to aureate diction, and without being a folk writer, should make this kind of rhythm the basis of work, would seem, if it had not occurred, exceedingly improbable.

Excluding Magnificence, Skelton's poetry falls naturally into four divisions: the imitations of the “aureate” poetry of Lydgate and similar fifteenth-century verses, such as the elegy on the Duke of Northumberland and the prayers to the Trinity; the lyrics; the poems in rhyme royal such as the Bouge of Court and Speke Parrot; and those like Elinor Rumming, Philip Sparrow, and Colin Clout, written in skeltonics.

Of the first class we may be thankful that it is so small. The attempt to gain for English verse the sonority of Latin by the use of a Latinised vocabulary was a failure in any hands except Milton's, and Skelton was no Milton. It was dull and smelt of the study, and Skelton seems to have realised this, and in his typically ironical way expressed his opinion.

For, as I to love have said
I am but a young maid
And cannot in effect
My style as yet direct
With English words elect. …
Chaucer that famous clerk
His terms were not dark
But pleasant, easy and plain
No word he wrote in vain.
Also John Lydgate
Writeth after a higher rate
It is diffuse to find
The sentence of his mind
Some men find a fault
And say he writeth too haut

(Philip Sparrow);

and in the Duke of Albany he rags the aureate vocabulary by giving the long words a line a piece:

Of his nobility
His magnanimity
His animosity
His frugality
His liberality
His affability, etc. etc.

As a writer of lyrics, on the other hand, had he chosen he could have ranked high enough. He can range from the barrack room “'Twas Xmas day in the workhouse” style of thing, to conventional religious poetry like the poem “Woefully arrayed” and the quite unfaked tenderness of the poem to Mistress Isabel Pennell, and always with an unfailing intuition of the right metrical form to employ in each case. Here is an example of his middle manner, Fancy's song about his hawk in Magnificence.

Lo this is
My fancy y wis
Now Christ it blesse!
It is, by Jesse.
A bird full sweet
For me full meet
She is furred for the heat
All to the feet:
Her browès bent
Her eyen glent
From Tyne to Trent
From Stroud to Kent. …
Barbed like a nun
For burning of the sun
Her feathers dun
Well favoured, bonne!

Skelton's use of Rhyme Royal is in some ways the best proof of his originality, because though employing a form used by all his predecessors and contemporaries and at a time when originality of expression was not demanded by the reading public, few stanzas of Skelton's could be confused with those of anyone else.

The most noticeable difference, attained partly by a greater number of patter or unaccented syllables (which relate it more to a teutonic accentual or sprung rhythm for verse) lies in the tempo of his poetry. Compare a stanza of Skelton's with one of Chaucer's:

Suddenly as he departed me fro
          Came pressing in on in a wonder array
Ere I was ware, behind me he said ‘BO’
          Then I, astoned of that sudden fray
Start all at once, I liked nothing his play
          For, if I had not quickly fled the touch
He had plucked out the nobles of my pouch.

(Skelton)

But o word, lordlings, herkeneth ere I go:
It were full hard to finde now a dayes
In all a town Griseldes three or two
For, if that they were put to such assayes,
The gold of hem hath no so bad aloyes
With brass, that though the coyne be fair at ye,
It would rather breste a-two than plye.

(Chaucer)

In Chaucer there is a far greater number of iambic feet, and the prevailing number of accents per line is five; in the Skelton it is four.

Indeed, the tempo of Skelton's verse is consistently quicker than that of any other English poet; only the author of Hudibras, and in recent times Vachel Lyndsay, come anywhere near him in this respect.

It seems to be a rough-and-ready generalisation that the more poetry concerns itself with subjective states, with the inner world of feeling, the slower it becomes, or in other words, that the verse of extrovert poets like Dryden is swift and that of introvert poets like Milton is slow, and that in those masters like Shakespeare who transcend these classifications, in the emotional crises which precede and follow the tragic act, the pace of the verse is retarded.

Thus the average pace of mediæval verse compared with that of later more self-conscious ages is greater, and no poetry is more “outer” than Skelton's.

His best poems, with the exception of Speke Parrot, are like triumphantly successful prize poems. The themes—the death of a girl's sparrow, a pub, Wolsey, have all the air of set subjects. They may be lucky choices, but one feels that others would have done almost equally well, not, as with Milton, that his themes were the only ones to which his genius would respond at that particular moment in his life; that, had they not occurred to him, he would have written nothing. They never read as personal experience, brooded upon, and transfigured.

Considering his date, this is largely to the good. Pre-Elizabethan verse, even Chaucer, when it deserts the outer world, and attempts the subjective, except in very simple emotional situations, as in the mystery plays, tends to sentiment and prosy moralising. Skelton avoids that, but at the same time his emotional range is limited. The world of “The soldier's pole is fallen” is not for him:

We are but dust
For die we must
It is general
To be mortal

is as near as he gets to the terrific. This is moralising, but the metre saves it from sententiousness.

The skeltonic is such a simple metre that it is surprising that fewer poets have used it. The natural unit of speech rhythm seems to be one of four accents, dividing into two half verses of two accents. If one tries to write ordinary conversation in verse, it will fall more naturally into this scheme than into any other. Most dramatic blank verse, for example, has four accents rather than five, and it is possible that our habit of prefacing nouns and adjectives by quite pointless adjectives and adverbs as in “the perfectly priceless” is dictated by our ear, by our need to group accents in pairs. Skelton is said to have spoken as he wrote, and his skeltonics have the natural ease of speech rhythm. It is the metre of many nursery rhymes.

Little Jack Horner
Sat in a corner;

or extemporised verse like the Clerihew:

Alfred de Musset
Used to call his cat pusset;

and study of the Woolworth song books will show its attraction to writers of jazz lyrics:

For life's a farce
Sitting on the grass.

No other English poet to my knowledge has this extempore quality, is less “would-be,” to use a happy phrase of D. H. Lawrence.

It makes much of his work, of course, quite unmemorable—it slips in at one ear and out at the other; but it is never false, and the lucky shots seem unique, of a kind which a more deliberate and self-conscious poet would never have thought of, or considered worthy of his singing robes:

Your head would have ached
To see her naked.

Though much of Skelton's work consists of attacks on people and things, he can scarcely be called a satirist. Satire is an art which can only flourish within a highly sophisticated culture. It aims at creating a new attitude towards the persons or institutions satirised, or at least at crystallising one previously vague and unconscious. It presupposes a society whose prejudices and loyalties are sufficiently diffuse to be destroyed by intellectual assault, or sufficiently economically and politically secure to laugh at its own follies, and to admit that there is something to be said on both sides.

In less secure epochs, such as Skelton's, when friend and foe are more clearly defined, the place of satire is taken by abuse, as it always is taken in personal contact. (If censorship prevents abuse, allegorical symbolism is employed, e.g. Speke Parrot.) If two people are having a quarrel, they do not stop to assess who is at fault or to convince the other of his error: they express their feelings of anger by calling each other names. Similarly, among friends, when we express our opinion of an enemy by saying “so and so is a closet” we assume that the reasons are known:

The Midwife put her hand on his thick skull
With the prophetic blessing, “Be thou dull,”

is too much emotion recollected in tranquillity to be the language of a quarrel. Abuse in general avoids intellectual tropes other than those of exaggeration which intensify the expression of one's feelings such as, “You're so narrow-minded your ears meet,” or the genealogical trees which bargees assign to one another.

Further, the effect on the victim is different. Abuse is an attack on the victim's personal honour, satire on his social self-esteem; it affects him not directly, but through his friends.

Skelton's work is abuse or flyting, not satire, and he is a master at it. Much flyting poetry, like Dunbar's and Skelton's own poems against Garnesche, suffer from the alliterative metre in which they were written, which makes them too verbal; the effect is lost on later generations, to whom the vocabulary is unfamiliar. The freedom and simplicity of the skeltonic was an ideal medium.

Dundas, drunken and drowsy
Scabbed, scurvy and lousy
Of unhappy generation
And most ungracious nation!
Dundas
That drunk ass
That rates and ranks
That prates and pranks
Of Huntly banks
Take this our thanks:—
Dundee, Dunbar
Walk, Scot,
Walk, sott
Rail not too far!

Later literary attempts at abuse, such as Browning's lines on Fitzgerald or Belloc's on a don, are too self-conscious and hearty. Blake is the only other poet known to me who has been equally successful.

You think Fuseli is not a great painter; I'm glad
This is one of the best compliments he ever had.

With his capacity for abuse Skelton combines a capacity for caricature. His age appears to have been one which has a penchant for the exaggerated and macabre, and he is no exception. His description of a character is as accurate in detail as one of Chaucer's, but as exaggerated as one of Dickens's. Compared with Chaucer he is more violent and dramatic; a favourite device of his is to interpolate the description with remarks by the character itself.

With that came Riot, rushing all at once
          A rusty gallant, to-ragged and to-rent
As on the board he whirled a pair of bones
          Quarter trey dews he clattered as he went
Now have at all, by Saint Thomas of Kent!
          And ever he threw and cast I wote n'ere what
          His hair was growen through out his hat. …
Counter he could O lux upon a pot,
          An ostrich feather of a capon's tail
He set up freshly upon his hat aloft:
          “What revel rout!” quod he, and gan to rail
          How oft he had hit Jenet on the tail,
Of Phillis featuous, and little pretty Kate
          How oft he had knocked at her clicket gate.

This has much more in common with the Gothic gargoyle than with the classicism of Chaucer; Elinor Rumming is one of the few poems comparable to Breughel or Rowlandson in painting. The effect is like looking at the human skin through a magnifying glass.

Then Margery Milkduck
Her kirtle she did uptuck
An inch above her knee
Her legs that ye might see
But they were sturdy and stubbed
Mighty pestles and clubbed
As fair and as white
As the foot of a kite
She was somewhat foul
Crooked-necked like an owl;
And yet she bought her fees,
A cantel of Essex cheese,
Was well a foot thick
Full of maggots quick:
It was huge and great
And mighty strong meat
For the devil to eat
It was tart and pungate.

All Skelton's work has this physical appeal. Other poets, such as Spenser and Swinburne, have been no more dependent upon ideas, but they have touched only one sense, the auditory. The Catherine-wheel motion of Skelton's verse is exciting in itself, but his language is never vaguely emotive. Indeed, it is deficient in overtones, but is always precise, both visually and tactually. He uses place-names, not scientifically like Dante, or musically like Milton, but as country proverbs use them, with natural vividness:

And Syllogisari was drowned at Sturbridge Fair.

Naturally enough the figures of classical mythology which appear in all mediæval work (just as the Sahara or Ohio appears in modern popular verses) occur in Skelton also, but he is never sorry to leave Lycaon or Etna for the Tilbury Ferry and the Plains of Salisbury. The same applies to the Latin quotations in Philip Sparrow; not only have they dramatic point, but being mainly quotations from the Psalter, they make no demands upon the erudition of his audience, any more than would “Abide with me” upon a modern reader.

Of Skelton's one excursion into dramatic form, Magnificence, not much need be said. It is interesting, because he is one of the few dramatists who have attempted, and with success, to differentiate his characters by making them speak in different metres, thus escaping the tendency of blank verse to make all the characters speak like the author; which obliged the Elizabethans to make their comic characters speak in prose; for the future of poetic comedy it may prove important. Its fault, a fatal one in drama, is its prolixity, but cut by at least two-thirds it might act very much better than one imagines.

Skelton's reputation has suffered in the past from his supposed indecency. This charge is no longer maintained, but there are other misunderstandings of poetry which still prevent appreciation of his work. On the one hand, there are those who read poetry for its message, for great thoughts which can be inscribed on Christmas calendars; on the other, there are admirers of “pure” poetry, which generally means emotive poetry with a minimum of objective reference. Skelton satisfies neither of these: he is too carefree for the one, and too interested in the outer world for the second.

If we accept, and I think we must, a distinction between the visionary and the entertainer, the first being one who extends our knowledge of, insight into, and power of control over human conduct and emotion, without whom our understanding would be so much the poorer, Skelton is definitely among the entertainers. He is not one of the indispensables, but among entertainers—and how few are the indispensables—he takes a high place. Nor is entertainment an unworthy art: it demands a higher standard of technique and a greater lack of self-regard than the average man is prepared to attempt. There have been, and are, many writers of excellent sensibility whose work is spoilt by a bogus vision which deprives it of the entertainment value which it would otherwise have had; in that kind of pride Skelton is entirely lacking.