"The Dinky Toys of Retrospect": the Poetry of John Whitworth

The essay examines the use that John Whitworth makes of proper names in his poetry. While he may owe something to John Betjeman and to the tradition of the Clerihew, he in fact achieves a wide range of different effects with this device, ranging from nostalgic evocation to absurdist comedy, from narrative immediacy to comic horror, from political satire to literary parody. The essay concludes by focusing on Whitworth’s poetry about childhood and the relations between different generations, showing how the blend of different registers of language often reflects the crossings and combinations of different points of view in his poetry – points of view that depend crucially on temporal locations, as he flits between the generations, between past and present, between immediate observation and memory.