Poets, Statues, and the Stories We Tell: On the Volatility of Memory

 “I am a lantern— My head a moon of Japanese paper.” — Sylvia Plath ,'Fever 103'

In those early months of 2020, in those COVID times when the world often shrank to the size of a laptop screen and friendship was conducted in little squares on Zoom, I was part of a small college group which found itself talking about everything and anything literary or culturally. 

Someone would recommend a documentary; someone else would watch it that evening; someone would suggest a poem; or a novel; someone would suggest a video of a dance performance; by the next call after each and any of these ideas, we were all deep into it.

On one occasion the subject of Sylvia Plath came up, with a reading of Ted Hughes’ ‘Night Ride on Ariel’. I made some notes afterwards:

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Ted Hughes' Night Ride on Ariel (Jun 16th 2020)

I suppose as one who has looked into the fortunes of some famously troubled women in my time ( Vivienne Eliot, Sophie Brzeska, Judee Sill, even Ida Nettleship back in the day) I should also have looked more deeply into the life of Sylvia Plath, and especially through her poetry. I have no idea why I have only scraped the surface of who she was. I know the broad outline of her story of course, and the "Monday" - 11 Feb 1963 (harshest of winters, not a great time to be in other than meteorological desperation). I even spent time downloading and listening and keeping lots of her poems, read by her, at the time I discovered I had a new sister.

So I am miles behind anyone who knows her story fully and has thought about it through the prism of The Birthday Letters. I suppose when the book was published I baulked at the furore it seemed to engender. Even much later, I believe, people were hacking off the name on Ted Hughes' memorial in Dartmoor sometime after his death. ( More memorial desecration....).

I do know about her horse Ariel. And I think I get the point of her poem, which Hughes' references in his. Her fantasy ride  into the  creative Sun finds in Hughes' counterpoint response poem, a ride into the everlasting night. That is the simple basic framework isn't it? The rest would take reams of words! Anyone up for that?

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Later, one of the group sent this message: “You may already have seen this, but we watched an excellent documentary about Ted Hughes on iPlayer…” And so we watched it — Hughes’s face in still photographs, Plath’s voice in recordings, the long shadow of their marriage, the tragedies that followed. 

I remember a mental double-take  when Frieda Hughes said, almost offhandedly, that her father had been “vulnerable to women.” I joked in reply: ‘Did I hear the words “Ted was vulnerable to women”? Now there is a title for a thesis. Was Ted Hughes vulnerable to women?” Discuss’. But I probably won’t'. But beneath the humour was something else: a reminder of the shifting perspectives of individuals in any life story.

It was Simon Armitage’s point in the documentary — that biography matters as one way of entering the imaginative world of the poet. Eliot scholarship, for example, for all Eliot’s protests, has moved in the same direction. 

And so the documentary, and our conversation about it, was helpful. Amongst all else we were reminded of Plath’s poem 'Ariel' and how it describes an uncontrolled horseback ride that becomes a symbol for emotional release and personal change.

Hughes’s answer is a ride into the everlasting night — two visions of the same moment. A shared life split into incompatible narratives. A trail of desperation and tragedy, as one of our group put it, left in Hughes’s wake.

And then the further sadnesses: Frieda's brother Nicholas Hughes was a  renowned expert in stream ecology and behaviour of species like trout and salmon.Frieda remembered him with affection and his achievements with pride. His life ended early and in shadow, a fact unmentioned in the programme.  

It was a little later that I realised how closely the perspectives of the documentary mirrored aspects of other conversations we were having at the that time — about Churchill, about Edward Colston, about the toppling of statues. Our conversations seemed to converge on the selectivity and the volatility of memory. 

And so, in those few days, I found myself checking Colston’s Wikipedia page almost daily. On 17 June 2020, at 10:49, a new line appeared: that his philanthropy had been directed only toward causes aligned with his political and religious views. The moderators were busy; the footnotes bristled with warnings — ‘unreliable source’, ‘failed verification’. A few days earlier, none of this had been there. Here were scrambled attempts to fix the meaning of a man whose legacy was built on both charity and the slave trade.

I wrote these notes:

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Edward Colston (Jun 17th 2020)

I looked up Colston a few days ago on  various sources including Wikipedia. I am still looking forward to learning more about the 1895 debate about the raising of a statue to him in his native Bristol, over 170 years after his death. But meantime I see that the latest update to the Edward Colston Wikipedia entry was made ( as I write this  June 17 2020) today at 10.49. Something new is this:

"He was promoted as a local benefactor in his native city of Bristol[1][unreliable source] in part due to having donated money to charities which supported people aligned with his political and religious views.[1][unreliable source][2][failed verification][3]:7-10"

Thus the Wikipedia moderators are kept busy. Someone is saying that Colston's philanthropy was directed only to causes dear to him. Is this true? Only a few days ago, the entry made no such differentiation about his philanthropy. One can go slightly barmy if we follow these things too closely.

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Yet the volatility of that Wikipedia page felt familiar. It echoed the instability I felt in the Plath–Hughes story: the way narratives yield to pressure, the way memory shifts when the present demands a new accounting of the past. Literary biography, civic controversy — both revealed how fragile our stories become when they are forced into the light. 

The pandemic seemed to magnify this effect. It stripped away the illusion of normality, and so also of memory . Everything was provisional, subject to revision, open to reinterpretation.

And so, looking back, I was mindful in those days, how we were being drawn repeatedly to contested figures — people whose lives resist simple moral categorisation, whose stories have been misread, weaponised, or oversimplified. A troubled woman whose voice has been distorted. A poet whose memorial was defaced. A philanthropist whose statue was toppled.  Churchill, whose legacy was being re-examined in the heat of public protest.

 Each of them became, in their own way, a site of struggle: between competing narratives, competing moral frameworks, competing visions of what the past should mean.

And perhaps that is why those fragments from 2020 still feel connected, despite their differences. They belong to a moment when the past began to be rewritten in real time — by poets, by historians, by activists, by anonymous editors tapping at keyboards in locked-down houses. 

Those times were unsettling, sometimes exhausting, occasionally absurd. In that suspended season, we saw the fractures, the revisions, the contested edges of memory — the places where the narrative is still alive, still shifting, still capable of surprise. 

 “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — Faulkner

Eliot’s Wartime Poetry and the Hidden Labour of Four Quartets

 

The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume X: 1942-44 
edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden.
Faber, 1080 pp., £60, July 2025, 978 0 571 39649 8

A summary  of The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume X: 1942–44 in the London Review of Books  

If Eliot’s wartime letters reveal anything consistently, it is the extent to which he lived behind carefully constructed forms of order — routines, masks, correspondences — all designed to keep the inner life from spilling into the outer one. This makes it all the more striking that the years 1940–42, years of disruption and displacement, were also the years in which the last three of the Four Quartets took shape. Yet the letters themselves tell us almost nothing about how these poems were made. They record the intention to write, the occasional admission of labour, and the retrospective announcement of completion, but the act of composition remains hidden. The poems seem to have been written elsewhere, in a private chamber of the mind, and only afterwards carried out into the daylight of correspondence.

With the exception of Little Gidding, the Quartets appear in the letters as sudden, concentrated bursts of creation. The case of The Dry Salvages is typical. On 10 December 1940 Eliot mentions to Hayward that he has been “working this morning at a poem to follow E. Coker”; then silence. Three weeks later he informs another correspondent that the poem is finished and that he now contemplates a fourth to complete the sequence. The intervening struggle — if there was one — leaves no trace. The poem simply arrives, as if composed behind a closed door, in a single sustained exhalation. Little Gidding alone shows signs of prolonged labour, the poem Eliot jokingly called “Spittle‑Skidding” as he submitted it to Hayward’s scrutiny and revised it more extensively than the others.

There is, however, a further reason why these volumes add so little to our understanding of the poems’ formation. For decades after Eliot’s death, Valerie Eliot guarded the unpublished material with jealous care, granting access only to a very few. Among them was Helen Gardner, whose long friendship with Valerie and deep admiration for Eliot’s poetry gave her unparalleled freedom to examine the Hayward papers. Her The Composition of “Four Quartets” (1978) remains the definitive account of the poems’ evolution, mapping the exchanges between Eliot and his first readers with meticulous clarity. The editors of the present volumes acknowledge as much: the publication of the letters in full confirms, rather than revises, the picture Gardner had already drawn.

What emerges most strongly from these years is the reminder that Eliot was, by temperament and circumstance, an occasional poet. Long stretches of the correspondence show him absorbed in publishing, criticism, religious work, and the daily obligations of wartime London. Poetry arrives only intermittently, in rare, intense periods of concentration. The serenity of the Quartets — their poise, their stillness, their sense of time gathered and redeemed — is hard‑won. It is the stillness of a man who wrote only when the inner pressure became irresistible, carving out moments of contemplative clarity from a life otherwise dominated by duty, noise, and the need to keep the self under control.

In this sense, the letters do not diminish the mystery of the Quartets; they deepen it. They show us the surface of Eliot’s days — the committees, the manuscripts, the travel, the polite refusals — and leave us to imagine the hidden chamber where the poems were made. The contrast is instructive. The Quartets emerge not from a life of monastic withdrawal but from a life crowded with obligations, interruptions, and masks. Their quietness is not the quietness of ease but the quietness of a man who had to fight for silence, and who found in that silence the only language adequate to the spiritual pressures of his age.

Summarised June 27th 2026

The Fan, the Diagram, and the Early Days of Web Search

Thirty‑five degrees of heat in West Oxfordshire is enough to make even the most stoic of us look for any way at all to keep cool. So I ended up in the garden studio, hunting for an old electric fan I knew was tucked away somewhere.

I found it quickly enough. And as soon as I picked it up, I remembered where it had come from, twenty‑odd years ago. On the centre badge was a logo I hadn’t thought about for years: Overture.

My Overture Sponsored Fan

The name once meant something. Overture powered a huge share of the sponsored links on the early web — a company right at the centre of the first wave of Search Engine Marketing, and one that had sent me, and others in the field, this fan as a promotional gift.

Now, with this relic blowing warm air at me, the past felt unexpectedly close. The fan still worked. The company did not. And somewhere in the back of my mind, in heat‑induced nostalgia, a memory surfaced of a diagram — a map of how search engines once related to one another, before the web settled into the shape we now take for granted.

That rediscovery sent me back into my cloud archive. And there it was: an image file from 2004, a tangle of arrows and logos showing the hidden plumbing of early search. A reminder that the web search was once built around a federation, not an empire.

This is it:

Search Engine Relationships 2024 - Click/Tap to Enlarge

Why the diagram looked like this

Today we’re used to the idea that a search engine is a single, unified thing: one company, one index, one set of results. But in the early 2000s, it simply didn’t work like that.

Most companies calling themselves “search engines” didn’t actually crawl the web. Building a full index was expensive and technically demanding. So many licensed results from someone else. Some mixed those licensed results with their own small index. Others layered paid listings on top. And almost all of them relied on partnerships to fill the gaps.

It was a patchwork — but a functional one. A kind of cooperative competition. Everyone needed everyone else, and the boundaries between “search engine,” “portal,” “directory,” and “advertising network” were far more porous than they are now.

That’s the world the diagram captures.

How the diagram works

The diagram itself is straightforward once you know what you’re looking at.

At the top are the big names of the time: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, AltaVista, AOL. Each sits in its own box, but none of them stands alone. Arrows run between them, showing who supplied results to whom:

• Google powering AOL’s search results

• Overture supplying paid listings to Yahoo

• Teoma feeding Ask Jeeves

• MSN still relying on partners while building its own crawler

The arrows show the actual flow of data — who depended on whose index, whose ads, whose directory listings.

Below that, the diagram widens into the “verticals”: travel, cars, shopping, insurance, property, finance, business, technology. These were early attempts to organise web search into categories. Each vertical lists the major UK sites of the time — lastminute.com, Auto Trader, Ciao!, Norwich Union, PC Pro — many of which licensed search or directory data from the engines above.

Taken together, the whole thing looks like a wiring diagram. And in a sense, that’s exactly what it is: the wiring of early web search, before consolidation simplified the picture into something far more monolithic.

Looking back, the most striking thing about this 2004 diagram is how provisional everything feels. None of the relationships were fixed. Most of the companies were still experimenting. And the whole structure depended on assumptions that didn’t survive the decade.

Three big developments reshaped the landscape.

1. Crawling the web became cheaper

More companies could build their own indexes. Partnerships became less necessary.

2. Google’s model proved overwhelmingly effective

Cleaner interface, faster index, scalable business model. Portals stopped trying to compete.

3. Advertising consolidated

Overture’s pay‑per‑click model was clever, but Google’s integrated approach was simpler and more profitable. The old PPC networks faded.

Put those shifts together, and the old ecosystem simply couldn’t hold. The arrows on the diagram stopped making sense. One by one, the portals either adopted Google wholesale or faded from relevance.

Finding that old fan — and then this old diagram — was a reminder of how different search on the web once was.

The modern landscape is simpler, and in many ways more efficient. But simplicity has its own cost. Today, Google dominates both the search index and the paid advertising that sits alongside it. And of course AI driven results, a whole other story. Bing is there, and it matters, but the balance is nothing like the distributed ecosystem shown in that 2004 diagram.

Ah well -  perhaps that’s why the rediscovery of a dusty fan on a hot afternoon felt oddly significant. It wasn’t just a piece of early‑2000s junk. It was a small, working fragment of a world that has since disappeared.