C.K. Stead

C.K. Stead is New Zealand’s poet laureate.

Letter

Eliot v. Mansfield

3 March 2011

Jason Harding suggests that T.S. Eliot’s distrust of Katherine Mansfield had to do with a perception of Mansfield’s dislike of his wife, Vivien (Letters, 31 March). There are no grounds for this in the letters; and very clear grounds for an apprehension springing from the fact that his patron Lady Rothermere found the first issue of the Criterion ‘dull’ at a time when she was repeatedly telling...
Letter

tarry easty

30 November 2000

Roy Foster (LRB, 30 November 2000) writes of Rapallo: ‘though there are plaques on all the apartments that housed the resident luminaries, nothing adorns 12 via Marsala, where the embarrassing Pound held court and praised Mussolini.’ If you approach 12 via Marsala from the seafront you go through a marble archway on which Pound’s residence there is recorded and several lines from one of the late...
Letter

Drysdale

24 September 1992

In my review of Thomas Keneally’s novel, Woman of an Inland Sea (LRB, 24 September), I wrote Dobell when I meant Drysdale.
Letter

Old Believers

26 October 1989

In the note accompanying Stephen Spender’s article (LRB, 26 October) you mention that he has been remembering a book called What I believe which included pieces by Einstein and Freud. It seems to me likely that the book he has in mind is one I have had on my shelves, and looked back at frequently, since 1952, called I believe, with the subtitle ‘The Personal Philosophies of 23 Eminent Men and Women...
Letter

Modernisms

22 May 1986

SIR: Frank Kermode’s letter (Letters, 3 July) is no more a reply to mine than his review was a review of my book, Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement. The first half of the book works its way through to a detailed study of the composition of The Waste Land, including the Pound-Eliot collaboration. The second half moves towards an analysis of how the Pisan Cantos works as a poem, and how...

Apocalyptic Opacity

Frank Kermode, 24 September 1992

The title sounds apocalyptic, but all it means on the face of it is that this novel is set in New Zealand now. Doubtless it could be interpreted as having other implications, and there is some...

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Spivsville

Jonathan Bate, 27 July 1989

In Book Two of Disraeli’s Sybil, or The Two Nations the hero meets two strangers in the ruins of an abbey. One of them claims that the monasteries represented the only authentic communities...

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Liza Jarrett’s Hard Life

Paul Driver, 4 December 1986

Of the five new novels grouped here, only one, I think, breathes something of that ‘air of reality (solidity of specification)’ which seemed to Henry James ‘the supreme virtue...

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Modernisms

Frank Kermode, 22 May 1986

The advantages and disadvantages of modernity have long been canvassed, so that you could say the topic is ancient. Pancirolli wrote a very popular book on it in the 16th century, and it was...

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Signora Zabaggy

Michael Rose, 2 August 1984

Let’s begin with ‘Let’s begin with the tea towel.’ Thus Professor Curl Skidmore, narrator of C.K. Stead’s All Visitors Ashore, announcing his presence in a text...

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