Gavin Ewart

Gavin Ewart’s first collection, Poems and Songs, appeared in 1939; his next, Londoners, didn’t appear until 1964. More than a dozen followed before his death in 1995.

Letter

The Objecting Ewart

4 September 1980

SIR: I was very pleased to be so favourably commented on by John Bayley in his review of The Collected Ewart 1933-1980 (LRB, 4 September). If I now write to correct one or two misconceptions, this is because I honour his piece as criticism and not just off-the-cuff reviewing. First, in the poem ‘It’s hard to dislike Ewart’ the speaker is the reviewer, not myself. He acts and speaks like a prep-school...

Beach Poets

Blake Morrison, 16 September 1982

A more sophisticated version of Larkin’s cry ‘Foreign poetry? No!’ is the belief that the poetry of certain parts of the world (Eastern Europe, for example) is intrinsically...

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Poetry and Soda

Barbara Everett, 5 February 1981

Anthologies are coming from the publishers with the speed of Verey lights from a sinking ship. What could he better: six hundred pages of other men’s flowers, offering relief from what...

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Inside Out

John Bayley, 4 September 1980

Towards the end of Gavin Ewart’s delightful and comfortable volume there is a poem called ‘It’s hard to dislike Ewart’. Too true, as Clive James or Peter Porter might say,...

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