Mark Ford

In August 1867, Thomas Carlyle published one of his most virulent diatribes against ‘swarmery’, by which he meant the trend towards democracy. The immediate inspiration for ‘Shooting Niagara: and After?’ was the threat of Disraeli’s Reform Act, which would double the number of adult males entitled to vote, and thus, as Carlyle saw it, unleash untold ‘new...

Born in 1914, Randall Jarrell belonged to the first generation of American poets who found a ready home in the country’s burgeoning university system. Of the great modernists of the previous era, only Robert Frost assumed the role of pedagogue to undergraduates, taking his first job at Amherst College in 1917. Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart...

Is the night Chilly and dark? The night is chilly But not dark. An all but full April moon Slides above barely visible clouds, and is greeted By a burst of hooting from an urban Tawny owl. On empty Brownfield sites they nest, and rear their young, and feed On vermin. Has Any Probing, saucer-eyed astronomer, even a modern Or French one, ever Grown genuinely accustomed ‘aux...

stretched out on the grass, and tried to relax. A delightful breeze stirred his beard but his ear-canals ached, and his tongue felt bloated. While there is blood in these veins, he mused, and I can hear the murmur of leaves, and sparrows sing, I will not despair. He half-dozed, and in a waking dream relived the despair

that had seized him during a stormy voyage from Alexandria to Athens....

after Lucretius

A snake, if a man’s spittle Falls upon it, will wriggle And writhe in frenzied contortions, and may even gnaw Itself to death; and there are certain Trees, should you ever drift off to sleep In their shade, you’d wake clutching your throbbing head as if an axe Had been buried there. The blossom, I’ve heard, of a type of rowan That flourishes in the mountains...