Evil characters make for good literature, they say, so we're looking for great bad things from you this month
There's nothing quite as attractive as a good villain, or so we're led to believe. After all, where would the drama be if every character in a story was a goodie? And it's not just true for narrative fiction; since poetry concerns itself with all of human life, poets frequently explore the nature of villainy in their works and present us with compelling studies of bad eggs of all descriptions.
In the Christian west, the ultimate villain has always been Satan, and as with most classic baddies, the depths of his depravity are all the greater because of the angelic height from which he has fallen. It is Milton's keen awareness of this psychological reality, and of his anti-hero's consuming motivation as summed up in the oft-quoted line "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n", that makes "Paradise Lost" the great poem of villainy that it is.
By way of stark contrast, Dante's Lucifer is an immobile and personality-less ogre, frozen in space and time. This Devil is all physiology and no psychology, a deformed embodiment of evil that is quite carefully placed outside the bounds of human understanding. It is a depiction that perhaps appeals less to the modern reader than Milton's does, but it is, in its own way, equally overpowering.
It's tempting to explain the differences between these two handlings of the ultimate Christian villain in terms of a medieval versus a modern understanding of the world. However, I'm not convinced that it's as simple as that. Chaucer was born a little more than 20 years after Dante's death and was clearly familiar with the Italian poet's work. However, his great portrait of a baddie, "The Pardoner's Tale", is rich in psychological realism as the protagonist, a professional hypocrite and conman who is a kind of human devil, reveals himself as a result of his pride in his own evil intelligence. It's a delineation of villainy that matches anything in Milton.
Another bad guy who made it into Dante's Hell was Bertran de Born, a 12th-century baron, troubadour and "stirrer up of strife" who enjoyed nothing more than causing conflict between his neighbours. Seven hundred years after his death, Ezra Pound set out to dig him up again in a poem called "Sestina: Altaforte". It's a spirited attempt at rehabilitation and Pound asks the reader to judge for themselves if it is successful. Parallels with Pound's own later career are disturbingly prescient.
"Sestina: Altaforte" was written at the beginning of a century that was replete with villains on the grand scale. Four years after its publication the second world war broke out and for poets like Siegfried Sassoon the baddies weren't always on the other side. In his poem "The General", the villainy lies not in bad intentions, but in ineptitude above and beyond the call of duty.
Bad as the General may have been, he was nothing compared with some of the politically-motivated villains to come. On one side of the divide you had Joseph Stalin, whose reading list for part of 1926 forms the basis for David Wojahn's poem "Stalin's Library Card". It's a reminder that evil is not some abstract entity, but a distinctly human behaviour, perpetrated by people who are, on one level, ordinary men and women with the kinds of interests you might meet more or less anywhere.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the political spectrum, the Nazi leaders wrapped themselves in a kind of pseudo-mystique derived from their notion of a "pure Aryan" mythology. This pretension is savagely satirised in "Dr Joseph Goebbels (22 April 1945)" by WD Snodgrass. It's a performance that Dante might have been proud of.
And so this month's Poster poems challenge is to write poems about villains. You might want to focus on the big names from history, or it may be that you have your own Bertran de Born you want to excoriate, the choice is yours. One way or the other, please share your poems here.
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