FACTOID #151: The five countries with the highest coffee consumption are also the five countries whose citizens trust one another the most. Coincidence? Probably.
Charles Madge (1912-1996), was an English poet and journalist, now most remembered as one of the founders of Mass_Observation. He was educated at Winchester College, and Magdalene College, Cambridge (where he left without a degree). Faber and Faber published his poetry as The Disappearing Castle (1937) and The Father Found (1940). He had been a literary figure since his early twenties, becoming a friend of David Gascoyne; like Gascoyne he was generally classed as a surrealist poet. He worked for a spell as a reporter for the Daily Mirror. By the end of the 1930s he was more involved in Mass-Observation surveys and their writing-up, socialist realism (in theory), and communism.
He married in 1938 the poet Kathleen Raine (previously married to Hugh Sykes Davies); and then in 1942 Inez Spender (previously married to Stephen Spender). He married Evelyn Brown in 1984.
Book
Grids, perspectival space, and rules of deduction: Of Love, Time, and Places; Selected Poems (1994) Anvil.
Madge wrote in the early 1930s of his desire to be caught up in the irresistible current of the new, which he saw both in the dynamism of America and the even more irresistible dynamism of Russia, which, he wrote in 1936, America shadowed.
Madges poetry travels between the two perspectives signified in his Philosophic Poem, of workaday things and a white rising planet: the world of historical, human time, in which the pain of choice and change is pressing and a natural or elemental time in which change is so generalised as to be numbly self-annulling.
Madge, who had been in at the beginning the most insistent in his promises that Mass Observation would be the agency of a new and definitive form of mass consciousness, soon found an opportunity of mitigating his claims.
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