Helen Vendler

Twenty​ years ago, Andrew Motion, one of Philip Larkin’s literary executors, wrote a scholarly and comprehensive authorised biography of the poet, whom he had known well; it was subtitled ‘A Writer’s Life’. Motion informed his readers that some important ingredients of Larkin’s life were still unavailable, especially most of the letters written to Monica Jones,...

Hopkins felt himself called to praise ‘All things counter, original, spare, strange’. He himself embodied – in every community in which he lived, beginning with his family – each of these adjectives: he was (especially to the Irish) ‘counter, original, spare, strange’; and if common taste ran to the monotony of uniformity, he would prize, even if he was alone in prizing them, ‘dappled things’. Like some other early poems, ‘Pied Beauty’ – intended to be a poem about the reconciliation of the Many in the One – skirted danger.

But I feel a deeper falsity to Dante and his mentality in certain observations by Griffiths about both the poem and the world from which it issued. Some of them stem from a wish to bring Dante into contemporary intellectual trendiness, some from a patronising attitude towards religion and its accoutrements. Trendiness: ‘The Commedia has some title to be considered the first masterpiece by a postcolonial writer, for most Europeans were once Roman subjects’; and ‘some readers may find it helpful to compare the “now you see it, now you don’t” oscillations of the poem with Derrida’s employment of concepts sous rature’; and ‘the Commedia is a foray into self-consciously “virtual reality”.’ On religion: after the invention of printing, ‘it became easier to feel that you had “finished” the Bible as you might finish an Agatha Christie, and correspondingly easier to think of the sacred writings as like a . . . spiritual “miracle diet” with a defined set of unambiguous recommendations and vetoes.’

The new volume of poems by my Harvard colleague Jorie Graham, in its US edition, bears on its jacket a detail from Vermeer’s The Astronomer, showing the hand of the astronomer as it touches, almost affectionately, the zodiacal globe it is about to spin. Although the star-gazer cannot make physical contact with his remote field of vision, the caressing way his finger lies on the surface...

Suppose, having been betrayed – ‘hooked/then thrown back’ – you decide to let your instant reflex, a desire for revenge, cool off overnight; then suppose you wake up the next morning and your anger takes on a no less pervasive, if different, configuration. Is this how you might be feeling?

even after dawn

has tightened still further the angle between reflex and use,...