February 8 was Enoch Powell’s death day, God rest him. I observed it by reading his Collected Poems, a stately little volume published in 1990. The poems, too, are stately little things: perfect, self-contained aesthetic objects, completely dispassionate, as Eliot would have it. My favourite, ‘Brynhild’s lament’, begins:
Siegfried, Siegfried, soon to die, Siegfried, ever born again, Born again to die again Forever…
When I was at the University of Sydney I half-jokingly started a petition to have a statue of Powell erected in the Quadrangle.
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