Iris Murdoch Wanted The Beatles to 'Step Into Tennyson's Shoes'

While digging through the philosopher and novelist's trove of letters, researchers uncovered correspondence in which Murdoch suggested that The Beatles should be poets laureate. Via The Independent:

Iris Murdoch, the poet and Booker Prize-winning novelist was a secret fan of pop music who went to Rolling Stones concerts and believed the Beatles should have been appointed Poets Laureate, a cache of letters has revealed.

Murdoch was a prodigious correspondent, and more than 700 of her missives are published in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995. The book’s editors, Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, from the Iris Murdoch Archive Centre at Kingston University, told an audience at The Independent Bath Literature Festival last week that some of letters’ contents had made them “sit up”.

Two of the letters in which Murdoch talks about the Beatles are published in the book. In one, she writes: “I think the Beatles should be Poet Laureate.”

“That was a real surprise,” said Professor Horner. “Here’s this philosopher writing these complex novels and yet she was really interested in this popular culture.”

Murdoch’s devastation over the murder of John Lennon in 1980 was also articulated in her letters, and she had expressed her admiration for the Rolling Stones in a letter to the author Brigid Brophy.

Continue reading at The Independent.