A quiet rebellion

Poet Elizabeth Barton, third placed in this year’s Shelley Memorial Poetry Prize, shares some of the inspiration behind her prize-winning poem, and explores the nature of the artistic imagination.

When I came across my daughter’s earliest drawings, I was surprised by the surreal nature of her imagination. She drew with an artist’s obsession — circles, umbrellas, stars. Her pictures were daring, experimental. Home was bright orange with a pointy purple roof and crazily tilting windows. Behind every pane, there was a smiley face. Monster butterflies in rainbow colours hovered overhead. The sun had a pig’s snout.

Compared with her early art, my daughter’s school drawings were muted in their use of colour, the buildings symmetrical, the windows empty. I pondered on the budding, joyful artist she had once been. Was this realism, this taming of her wild imagination, just a natural stage of her artistic development, or a consequence of her education?

I began writing a poem in which I imagined a girl drawing a winged horse. So absorbed is she in her magical creation, that she is oblivious to the school bell and ignores her teacher’s instructions. I have taught students like the one in the poem — independent thinkers who struggle to fit in at school, dreamers who escape into fantasy because they find reality too painful. 

Like the girl in the poem, Shelley was unhappy for much of his school career. He was bullied both at his prep school and at Eton. In his brilliant biography of Shelley, ‘The Pursuit’, Richard Holmes describes how the young poet survived two miserable years at Syon House by drawing upon ‘his imaginary world of monsters and demons and apparitions.’ His other ‘resource’ was his ‘absolutely ungovernable temper’ — a trait, suggests Holmes, that he inherited from his eccentric grandfather. In the poem, the girl’s rebellion is an act of ‘quiet defiance’, a refusal to obey orders, to conform to a system that prioritises testing over creativity and genuine learning. The girls I taught were more likely to repress their rage, turning their anger in on themselves. Secretly, the teacher empathises with the girl but ‘the mask/of authority’ remains firmly on.

Children are natural rebels — they question, they resist, they fly into a rage when they perceive they are being treated unfairly. I believe many of our greatest artists and writers, Shelley included, are people who never lost sight of that inner child, with their wide-eyed curiosity and their longing for a better world.

Picasso once said, ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.’ A first step to addressing this problem would be an education system that cherishes that playful, childhood state; a system that helps to develop children’s imaginations rather than inhibiting them; that encourages them to challenge, to experiment, to dare to make mistakes. If school were really like this, imagine how many more young people, like Pegasus, would find their wings and soar.

Elizabeth Barton

Elizabeth Barton’s pamphlet If Grief Was a Bird is published by Agenda Editions.