The Excellent Versatility of the Minor Poet

The Excellent Versatility of the Minor Poet

Michael Wood’s “The Excellent Versatility of the Minor Poet” follows Fletewode Garth, a lonely, motherless boy raised beside the beech woods of Beechenfield by his gentle, book-loving vicar father. Left free to wander, dream, and absorb the life of the woods, Fletewode develops an intense sensitivity to nature and a longing to express its spiritual power in rhythmic language. His father recognizes that he is unlike other children and gives him the freedom and literary education to cultivate his gift. When Fletewode is twenty, his father dies, leaving him only £100 and no practical means of livelihood beyond his poetic genius. A prosperous relative offers him a city clerkship, but Fletewode refuses, convinced that writing is the one thing he can do well. He goes to London with manuscripts and books, yet after a year nobody has noticed his mystical, melodious verse. His savings nearly vanish, partly because he has helped poorer neighbours, and hunger, anxiety, and the city’s ugliness begin to damage both his health and his creative powers. Desperate, he seeks help from Scottie, a successful composer of popular comic, patriotic, and dance songs. Scottie, remembering his own hardships, feeds Fletewode and offers him work writing topical song lyrics. Fletewode first produces a country ballad, but Scottie says he needs something suitable for the vulgar music-hall world of the Rag Bag. Although Fletewode quickly grasps how to create sharper and more effective coarse jingles, he initially refuses, feeling that such work would profane his gift. Starvation and despair finally overcome him: he writes comic verses, accepts payment, and is told this is his true commercial line. When he tries to revise the verses, however, the sounds and visions of his childhood beech wood return with overwhelming force. He experiences again the mysterious presence that has always called him toward a higher purpose. He tears up the song, returns Scottie’s money, and declares that he cannot keep himself alive by forcing his mind to produce work it was not made to do. He resolves instead to work with his hands and wait for the proper hour. Soon afterward, Fletewode is found dead of heart failure in a bluebell patch beneath beech trees on the estate of a well-to-do literary man known as a minor poet. Beside him lies a bundle containing his manuscripts. The minor poet sees their extraordinary beauty, melody, and mystical force, though he does not understand their thought. At the inquest he conceals their significance, pays for the unknown dead man’s funeral, and publishes the poems as his own in three beautiful volumes. The books bring the minor poet acclaim for a new versatility, though critics warn him against mysticism. Four powerful readers—a writer of romance, a preacher, a musician, and a scientist—are deeply affected by the poems, and through them Fletewode’s ideas influence the world. The tale concludes by asking what share the ambitious plagiarist should receive when the harvest of such stolen work is gathered.

By Michael Wood · First published 1979 · Genre: Literary Fiction, Tragedy, Psychological Fiction · 5,087 words

First lines

Petals of wild cherry blossom were flying on a soft rush of wind that swept through the beech wood. Little bright sheathlets lay, brown and shining, at the feet of the smooth silver-green boles of the trees. The leaves, not yet rid of the silky soft fringes of their babyhood, fluttered like little flags, and glowed like green flame; they were not yet thick enough to hide the misty blue sky, laced with feathery cloudlets. Light seemed to flow from the little leaves――the light of life, the life of spring-time. The "Fire of God" was aflame in the wood world; a green mist of colour was aglow in the very air that pulsed between the beech-tree boles. In every dell the bracken sprang up straightly, uncurling its brown heads to spread abroad the branches of its later summer greenery. The first blue-bells were there too, covering the ground with tender blue mist, and filling the air with an ecstasy of perfume that smote the senses with the pain that attends the inexpressible and almost intangible; for the soul of all joy, of all sweetness, whether of perfume, sight, or sound, is ever hidden away in the heart of things, whereof all that can be smelt, or seen, or heard, does but torment us with a deeper, eternally elusive longing.

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Edwardian England · London · English countryside · beech woods · pastoral fiction · literary fiction · tragic short story · poet protagonist · artistic vocation · minor poet · literary plagiarism · poverty and hunger

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The Excellent Versatility of the Minor Poet is listed on Textopian as a short story by Michael Wood, dated 1979 CE.

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