A project. Something like a Book of Prefaces, but not Alasdair Gray's one. I'd expected a delightful, quirky pick of the second-hand book shops, MacNab's Theory hoisted into fame along with its less sinister peers. (MacNab's Theory was the title of a book published two centuries ago by a member of the Faculty of Advocates, and it explained Everything. Its frontispiece was a portrait of the baleful MacNab. It cost £18, which I could not muster.) I had imagined an anthology of every gentle-readerism from Maccabees - a postface, that, but so what - to Muldoon's Collected, and I was sorely disappointed in this reactionary, school-dinner rehash of the great tradition. From MacDiarmid to Morgan so much had been done to bring Scottish writing out from under imperial English lit, and here we were again.

There is a revealing book on Charles de Foucauld : Explorateur du Maroc, Ermite du Sahara, by René Bazin de l'Académie Française (Paris, 1924). Foucauld, a former soldier and not so much explorer as government spy, founded a particularly ascetic religious order which didn't acquire any full-time members till after his death. He was killed by Bedouins allied to the Germans, in Tamanrasset in 1916. In 1914, he wrote '… j'espère que du grand mal qu'est la guerre sortira un grand bien pour les âmes - bien en France, où cette vision de mort inspirera des pensées graves, et où l'accomplissement du devoir dans les plus grands sacrifices élèvera les âmes, les purifiera, les rapprochera de Celui qui est le Bien incréé, les rendra plus propres à percevoir la vérité et plus forts pour vivre en s'y conformant ; bien pour nos alliés qui, en se rapprochant de nous, se rapprochent du catholicisme, et dont les âmes, comme les nôtres, se purifient par le sacrifice… " (p.431).

Foucauld was a monstrously impressive man, in the tradition that runs from Joan of Arc almost to Simone Weil, an avatar of that chilling French strain of Catholicism. But the secular version of such thinking is, if anything, even more macabre. Look at this piece written by William Carlos Williams in summer 1941 :

AN EXULTATION

England, confess your sins ! toward the poor,
upon the body of my grandmother. Let the agents
of destruction purify you with bombs, cleanse
you of the profits of your iniquities to the last
agony of relinquishment.
She didn't lie ! Neither shall you, if
day by day you learn through abnegation
as she did, to send up thanks to those who
rain fire upon you.
Thanks ! thanks to a just and kind heaven
for this light that comes as a blasting fire
destroying the rottenness of your slums as well
as your most noble and historic edifices, never
to be replaces !
If ! You will survive if - you accept it with
thanks when, like her, excoriated by devils
you will have preserved in the end, as she did,
a purity - to be that never as yet known
leader and regenerator of nations, even of those
rotten to the core, who by a sovereignty
they cannot comprehend
have worked this cleansing mystery upon you.
(Collected Poems, ed. C. MacGowan, New Directions, New York, 1988), vol II, p.42).

Sixty years and some months later, that has a certain resonance. Here's the anthology : a Little Grey Book of politician poets, from Mao Ze Dong to Hitler - he must have dabbled in verse - to Radovan Karadzic, 'the warrior poet', as I believe the Times dubbed him once. The big names would sell it and the little grey men of letters in parliament would swell its ranks.

On second thoughts, if the goal is not to make money from the anthology but to protect civil society, then it would be much better, much much better, to catch these men and women after they have started writing verse but before they hear the calling to public service. The ideal would be to fund poetry magazines not through the Arts Council but on a massive scale, through the Home Office and perhaps the Ministry of Defence - though the ultimate source of funding need not be publicised. There would be thousands of magazines and spin-off slim tomes throughout the United Kingdom, and indeed elsewhere in the world. In that way, they would damage nothing more than a few trees in Norway and, when it all migrated to the web - not even trees. All the bad vibes would go into bad verse, and none of those bards would ever order the destruction of defenceless civilians.