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“... We have all kinds of images of the modern poet, little mythologies made out of snatches of the life and work and reputation. The figure is hieratic and austere, like Mallarmé and Valéry, inward and intricate like Eliot and Pessoa, serenely eccentric like Marianne Moore, public and overflowing like Neruda and Pound. One of the strangest and most tantalising of these images is that of Yeats, both worldly and spiritualist, silly like us, as Auden said (sillier, some would say), and yet wonderfully hard-headed ...”

“... permeated English literary criticism and education like a syrupy drug ... ’ Yes, this is Tom Paulin speaking. Readers of the London Review will remember the review of a collection of essays on Geoffrey Hill in which he bitterly attacked the conservatism of English poetry and criticism. Indignant correspondents retorted that ...”

“... mainstream, main chance. Politically these are authorised versions. One of the entries, by Roger Woddis, sings of ‘The Church of Kenneth Baker’. If his church recalls the characterisation of the C of E as the Tory Party on its knees, it is Our Lady of Chequers upon whom the genuflecting is bent. Her Government’s victory with the Poll Tax ...”

“... seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Tony Harrison has made extensive use of Northern idioms. Tom Paulin has been busy raiding Ulster (and, I suspect, Scottish) dictionaries. Craig Raine has produced a manifesto, ‘Babylonish Dialects’, on dialect’s behalf. And several of the books under review here – by Scots, Welshmen and British West Indians ...”

“... in airports? In a review of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters, Heaney’s Field Day colleague Tom Paulin argued that ‘a poetics does operate when we read a letter,’ but that ‘the gifted correspondent has to appear negligent of effect.’ What successful letters show is ‘a rejection of rhetoric in the interests of brief, in-the-moment, authentic ...”