Sunday roasts and beaded bubbles: dining with the poets

In December 1817 Benjamin Robert Haydon — vivid diarist and painter of huge but inferior canvases of historic events — held a Sunday luncheon to which he invited John Keats, Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth. Nearly a century later, in January 1914, seven poets and Lord Osborne de Vere Beauclerk met in Sussex to eat roast peacock at another Sunday lunch. Six of the poets (Yeats, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, Sturge Moore, Frank Flint and Victor Plarr) came from London to honour the seventh, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, at his manor house. Hilaire Belloc joined them for tea afterwards, and sang a ballad about cuckoldry. Robert Bridges and John Masefield declined their invitations.

In 1817 Haydon was displaying his huge picture, ‘Christ’s Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem’, for which Keats, Lamb and Wordsworth had posed as ‘extras’. He had laboured for three years on the painting, which he would take another three years to complete. It loomed over the luncheon table in his studio, and now hangs in a seminary in suburban Cincinnati. Haydon’s copious booze excited a rowdy, cheerful dispute about the conflict between mathematical reason and artistic imagination. Keats decried Isaac Newton as a fellow who had ‘destroyed all the poetry of a rainbow by reducing it to a prism’.

Stanley Plumly, the Poet Laureate of Maryland, has used Haydon and his guests as the launch-pad for his own ruminations on the mainsprings, ambitions and insecurities of poets and painters. It is low-cholesterol fare compared with the delectable, richly buttered concoction published 14 years ago by Penelope Hughes-Hallett on the same subject with an almost identical title. Sometimes Plumly achieves a poetic precision of image, but there is an annoying archness about his use of the present and future tenses to describe past events.