Aromatic Splinters

John Bayley

• The Poems of John Dryden: Vol. I, 1649-1681; Vol. II, 1682-1685 edited by Paul Hammond
  Longman, 551 pp, £75.00, February 1995, ISBN 0 582 49213 0

Poetry, it must be said, has become very finicky in our time. Housman thought it impossible to do, except that very occasionally it turned out to be there. Emily Dickinson would not have agreed with that at all. She threw herself into it, as if into a clear river on a hot day. The impression of relief and ecstasy in her first lines and couplets is remarkable, but she rarely keeps things up. She is in good company: Shakespeare when writing a sonnet also takes a perfect swallow dive, and scrambles out somehow in the final couplet as if its awkwardness amused him after the thoughtless pleasure of that first leap.