Charleston Festival - Tom Paulin and John Fuller

Since agreeing to write about a Charleston event this week, in which poets Tom Paulin and John Fuller will be discussing W H Auden and Louis MacNiece, I’ve been thinking about Tom Paulin. He was one of my English lecturers at Nottingham University, and although we found his passionately-delivered lectures somewhat baffling, and would lay bets as to how long it would take him to mention Irish Nationalism (which he invariably did), he was rather fanciable. Admittedly he was the only straight male under 50, but he had a romantic, slightly shabby charm. I also indirectly met my partner through him because at the end of my final year, a group of students wanted to stage Paulin’s play The Riot Act (a modern version of Antigone set in Northern Ireland) and Rob was delegated to ask me to be in it. When he was my tutor, Paulin used to regularly write ‘too stroppy and polemical’ on my essays, which seems rich coming from a man whose media career (appearances on the Late Review in particular) has been based around being a polemicist.
John Fuller is also a distinguished poet and writer, who has written a book on Auden. Auden and MacNeice were close friends and collaborators, and both sharply politically aware. Auden was English and gay, MacNeice Irish and ‘a lover of Donegal and women’. MacNeice’s poetry has been called ‘a reaction against darkness’ and a new generation of Northern Irish poets such as Paul Muldoon acknowledge him as a major influence. EC