WELLS, Robert

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Nationality: British. Born: Oxford, 17 August 1947. Education: King's College, Cambridge, 1965–68. Family: Married; one son and one daughter. Career: Forester in North Devon; teacher of English in Italy and Iran; English teacher, Leicester University, 1979–82. Address: c/o Carcanet Press, Fourth Floor, Conavon Court, 12–16 Blackfriars Street, Manchester M3 5BQ, England.

Publications

Poetry

Shade Mariners, with Dick Davis and Clive Wilmer. Cambridge, Gregory Spiro, 1970.

The Winter's Task. Manchester, Carcanet, 1977.

Selected Poems. Manchester, Carcanet, 1986.

Lusus. Manchester, Carcanet, 1999.

Other

Translator, The Georgics, by Virgil. Manchester, Carcanet, 1982.

Translator, The Idylls, by Theocritus. Manchester, Carcanet, 1988.

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Critical Study: "'Incidentals of Remoteness': Robert Wells and the Idea of Pastoral" by Rodney Edgecombe, in English Studies in Africa (Johannesburg, South Africa), 32(1), 1989.

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Robert Wells was first published in company with Dick Davis and Clive Wilmer in the booklet Shade Mariners, and his output since then certainly cannot be described as prolific. A selection of his work was included in two anthologies edited by Michael Schmidt—Ten English Poets (1976) and Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland (1983). In addition, there is a Selected Poems that includes poems from his critically well received earlier book, The Winter's Task, and also selections from his translations. Another volume, Lusus, was published in 1999.

Wells has chosen not to publish imitative juvenilia or otherwise to dazzle his readers with a showy, youthful brilliance. Instead, we find in his still-too-few poems a quiet yet confident ability to render a variety of feelings in words with precision and clarity. Wells does not adopt a persona in his work. He is a man whose attention is focused on a landscape or place outside himself and who renders that place as itself while simultaneously remaining aware of his own sensations in relation to it. This can be seen, for example, in the early "The Wind Blows," which succinctly expresses the small particulars of a sunny landscape through a subtle and delicate use of rhythm:

The wind blows. Winds blow the
Hill green and grey. Olives
Are alive with light. Fat grow the
Grapes green-misted with a mist that lives.

Wells is the contemplative artist. If this appears to set him apart from many active inventors of a contemporary idiom, it nonetheless allows him a distinctly recognizable style of his own, formally restrained yet unforced and natural in tone, as in "Shape of Air":

It has lighted on you, this shape of air.
I don't want you to know that it is there:
Not yours or mine, as by the gate you stand
That divides the mountain from the worked land

Wells's modest and decorous stylishness always remains true to his feeling for words and rhythms. His poems are often laconic and, at times, almost lapidary in their brevity. One such poem, "Not like the Fields," quoted here in full, uses understatement to express an unruly emotion and two types of nature:

His nature was mild like the fields.
It was the soft turf under his tread,
The alteration of weather.
But desire was in his nature too
And that was not like the fields.

If these poems have antecedents, then Edward Thomas has to be named. Wells is one of a line of English poets who never strain for effects, rhetorical or otherwise, and without whom we would be lacking some of our most authentic talents of the last half of the twentieth century, Norman Cameron, James Reeves, and Philip Larkin among them.

The distinctive flavor of Wells's poems is found in a mix of the rigor of epigram and a naturally meditative sensibility. He is a poet who takes us into his confidence and who, on a first reading, can appear vulnerable and, on a second, curiously impersonal. An example is "For Pasolini," addressed to the great Italian filmmaker, which is both personal in tone and yet extremely objective in content:

Vecchio ragazzo di Casarsa, dear protagonist,
Where shall we find the like of your intelligence?
The hunters who come here on Sunday with their
  dogs and guns
Are not enough to keep the forest paths open.
Two years untrodden, and bramble will cover the track,
The broom lean across.

The later poem "Richard Wilson in Wales," which takes another subject from art, provides us with insight into the work of the eighteenth-century painter of landscape:

His mind was a lake trapped in a mountain hollow,
A thin trickle spilling over stones to a river
That wound where in youth he tracked it, to Italy—
The fields where the Graces showed themselves
  and danced.
The mountain shuts out the view and dulls the water

But the clouds are touched with a remembered light.

Wells has translated both the Georgics of Virgil and the idylls of Theocritus with distinction. This should hardly come as a surprise, for his own poems, in their concise directness, have clearly learned from some of the elements of classical literature. In the introduction to his translation of the Georgics, highly praised by Peter Levi as "the best Virgil's Georgics since Dryden's," Wells unintentionally supplies us with an insight into his own passionate delight in Virgil and also what poetry can do in the world:

Virgil's clarity is not a clarity of surface—it has not that sharpness of edge and line that Ezra Pound has taught us to look for. To read Virgil is like looking down through very clear water; one is barely conscious of the surface, but the objects on the riverbed are made to shine. Bathed in his sensibility the world has a subdued brightness, like pebbles under water, all their colours enlivened. I have tried to render something of this.

Wells's translation of the idylls of Theocritus also is impressive and includes a memorable version of "The Lovesongs," simultaneously cool and passionate, as in the following song:

My right eye twitched for luck. Shall I see her now?
I shall settle myself against this pine as I sing.
She may take some notice; she isn't made of steel.

We should value Wells's poetry if we set any store by Thomas Hardy's phrase defining poetry as "closeness of phrase to vision," which is precisely what Wells aims for and, at times, achieves.

—Jonathan Barker