Wordsworth was the first laureate of locomotives: in fact he railed
against them, and against the consequent opening up of the Lakes to
holiday hordes ('On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway'). His
dismay was echoed down the decades by disturbed ruralists, and yet the
train has become part of our psychic landscape: some of the best-loved
English poems - Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop', or Philip Larkin's 'Whitsun
Weddings' - have celebrated carriages, platforms and waiting rooms,
while locomotion has inspired some of the most characteristic poetry of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Stevenson, Hardy and MacNeice, Betjeman and
Auden (whose 'Night Mail' was written to accompany a 1930s GPO
documentary about the postal express from Euston to Glasgow). Co-edited
by two of our most distinguished poets, Train Songs offers a round
tour - from Wordsworth to Hugo Williams and beyond - starting from the
poetry of departures and brief encounters, but taking in the American
Blues, the troop trains of two world wars, and the addiction to speed
which characterised the European revolutions. Trains have carried the
freight of history from the Industrial Revolution onwards - the Armstice
in 1918 was signed in a railway carriage, the death camps were organized
around train timetables - and this new anthology shows how the train in
all its forms has exercised a unique hold upon our collective
unconscious.
