A. S. J. Tessimond (1902–1962) is, at least in critical terms, one of the great "also-rans" of twentieth-century English poetry. His work began to appear in the 1920s, although his first breakthrough came with his inclusion in Michael Roberts's two anthologies, New Signatures (1932) and New Country (1933), for the Woolfs' Hogarth Press, which helped launch the careers of W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis and Stephen Spender. But Tessimond's poetry never sat easily with that of his more politically engaged contemporaries and it is entirely typical of him that he chose not to include either of his two most Audenesque poems from these anthologies – "La Marche Des Machines" and "Steel April" – in his own first collection The Walls of Glass (1934). In fact he was so uncompromisingly self-critical that only two more volumes appeared in his lifetime – Voices in a Giant City (1947) and Selection (1958), and it fell to his friend and literary executor, Hubert Nicholson, to collect and reissue his work in three posthumous editions. The first of these, Not Love Perhaps (1978), recently republished by Faber, appeared in response to the interest generated by a radio programme about him called Portrait of a Romantic, and was reviewed so enthusiastically by Bernard Levin in The Times that Nicholson followed it, two years later, with a second collection, Morning Meeting, and finally, in 1984, with a Collected.

Like his fellow poet Gavin Ewart, Tessimond worked as an advertising copywriter, which is why "Attack on the Ad-Man" did not appear until almost two months after his death in May 1962. Its savagely ironic couplets recall Swift and Pope, although he could also write in tenderly lyrical and wryly humorous vein. Fittingly enough, the edition of the TLS in which this poem appeared – July 6, 1962 – also carried a review by G. S. Fraser of The Gate, C. Day Lewis's most recent offering. Fraser complained that we look or listen in vain for Day-Lewis's "intimate, informal personality . . . his non-public appearance voice". It may be, he concludes, "that when we knock on the final inner door of the most secret chamber, there is nobody at home". Whatever the reasons for A. S. J. Tessimond's relative obscurity, this is not a charge that could ever be brought against him.

Attack on the Ad-Man

This trumpeter of nothingness, employed
To keep our reason dull and null and void,
This man of wind and froth and flux will sell
The wares of any who reward him well.
Praising whatever he is paid to praise,
He hunts for ever-newer, smarter ways
To make the gilt seem gold; the shoddy silk;
To cheat us legally; to bluff and bilk
By methods which no jury can prevent
Because the law’s not broken, only bent.

This mind for hire, this mental prostitute
Can tell the half-lie hardest to refute;
Knows how to hide an inconvenient fact
And when to leave a doubtful claim unbacked;
Manipulates the truth but not too much,
And, if his patter needs the Human Touch,
Skilfully artless, artfully naïve,
Wears his convenient heart upon his sleeve.

He uses words that once were strong and fine,
Primal as sun and moon and bread and wine,
True, honourable, honoured, clear and clean,
And leaves them shabby, worn, diminished, mean.
He takes ideas and trains them to engage
In the long little wars big combines wage.
He keeps his logic loose, his feelings flimsy;
Turns eloquence to cant and wit to whimsy;
Trims language till it fits his client’s pattern
And style’s a glossy tart or limping slattern.

He studies our defences, finds the cracks
And, where the wall is weak or warn, attacks.
He finds the fear that’s deep, the wound that’s tender,
And, mastered, outmanoeuvred, we surrender.
We who have tried to choose accept his choice
And tired succumb to his untiring voice.
The dripping tap makes even granite soften.
We trust the brand-name we have heard so often
And join the queue of sheep that flock to buy:
We fools who know our folly, you and I.

A. S. J. TESSIMOND (1962)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "Our Father" by Stephen Knight, click here.

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