Mass illuminations: Jennings, Madge, Rimbaud and the 'popular' prose poem

Abstract

The importance of the Mass-Observation social research project to postwar British literature can be traced to the founding involvement of two poets, Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge. Their experimentation with the possibility of a prose-based poetry in the mid-thirties has already been linked to the example of Surrealism. Here it is argued that they were also strongly influenced by Rimbaud's Une saison en enfer (1873) and Illuminations (1872-74). Madge's prose poem 'Bourgeois News' uses textual collage to create a Marxist critique of contemporary English culture, which strikingly anticipates the work of more recent British prose poets such as Rod Mengham and Tony Lopez. In conclusion, archival evidence is used to support the hypothesis that Madge composed an anoymous news article, influenced by his reading of Rimbaud, as an illustration of his belief that newspapers contained the potential for a revolutionary new form of 'popular poetry'.