Royal Academy Poem by Frank Avon

It was not the Academy
that was his academy:
its spacious new building,
its Greek and Roman casts,
its live nude models,
the more sensuous medium of oil;
certainly not the ten-minute lectures
of Sir Joshua Reynolds, its president,
on 'general beauty'
and 'general truth'
('To Generalize is to be
an Idiot. To Particularize
is the Alone Distinction of Merit') :

not even the patient tutelage
of the ill-fated James Barry,
devoted to the arts
as historical and national,
who ultimately had to live
on bread and apples;

probably not even
riots in the streets
nor the burning of Newgate;
finally not any of these.

His academy
was his colleagues,
those sons of London
a little club of shared interests:
a love of the Gothick,
interest in Ossian & Chatterton,
an earnest spirituality and
sensitivity toward the sacred,
and a streak of political radicalism
(Stothard and Flaxman,
Cumberland and Sharp,
maybe Gillray or Rowlandson)

and his work -
his academy was his work
as engraver, journeyman,
with metal plates
and his 'iron pen, '
hatching and cross-hatching,
hard work,
dirty, demanding, ill-paid:
'I have taught pale artifice
to spread his nets upon the morning /
My heavens are brass
my earth is iron....'

His academy was his iron.