A Midsummer Afternoon’s Dream
To be published by Liberalis Books 2027
ISBN: 978-1-80695-131-4 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-80695-132-1 (e-book)
The back cover says
What Fools! is the third in Nicholas Hagger’s Fools trilogy of mock-heroic satirical poems in the tradition of Dryden and Pope. In Fools’ Paradise he presented in rhyming heroic couplets the UK’s attempt to leave the EU under Prime Minister Theresa May in terms of the voyage of Sebastian Brandt’s 1494 Ship of Fools heading with a mutinous crew for the illusory paradise of Narragonia. In Fools’ Gold he presented in heroic blank verse UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s unkept promises that won the 2019 General Election and removed the UK from the EU.
In What Fools!, subtitled A Midsummer Afternoon’s Dream, Hagger focuses in heroic blank verse on the split in the West between the US and EU caused by President Trump’s decapitation of the leadership in Iran that led to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and the rising price of oil. Hagger, sitting drowsily in his garden within Henry VIII’s Fairmead deer park, is approached by Puck (who lives there, and who Shakespeare had saying “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”) and is transported to long-past, recent and present events involving Hormuz, Trump, the Angels and Muses and God of the One (whose human forms include Zeus), who reacts to Hagger’s plan for a World State that will unite the West and East. In this satire Hagger holds the world leaders to account for their impact on world culture, as T.S. Eliot requested poets to do in 1944. The events described happen after the end of, and act as a coda to, Hagger’s two prose works, The Declining West and a Multipolar New World Order and Swerving a Third World War.
NICHOLAS HAGGER is a poet, man of letters, cultural historian and philosopher. He has lectured at universities in Iraq, Libya and Japan, where he was a Professor of English Literature. He has now written 68 books. These include a substantial, prolific literary output, spanning 70 years, of 2,551 poems (including 421 classical odes and 567 sonnets), two poetic epics, three mock-heroic poems, five verse plays, three masques and 1,425 stories; two travelogues; and innovatory works in literature, history and philosophy. His archive of papers and manuscripts is held as a Special Collection in the Albert Sloman Library at the University of Essex. In 2016 he was awarded the Gusi Peace Prize for Literature, and in 2019 the BRICS silver medal for ‘Vision for Future’.
