Neil Corcoran

Neil Corcoran lectures in English at Sheffield University. His books include a study of David Jones and Seamus Heaney.

Letter

An Anxiety of Its Own

19 November 2020

Tobias Gregory writes that Harold Bloom sees Shakespeare as ‘the poet who transcended all anxiety of influence’ (LRB, 19 November). It’s worth recalling that the first edition of The Anxiety of Influence pays scant attention to Shakespeare, understanding literary history from Homer to Shakespeare as a form of prelapsarian ‘generous’ influence. Anxiety was then, for Bloom, a post-Enlightenment...
Letter

Correction

8 October 2014

Mary-Kay Wilmers ascribes to Karl Miller the opinion that comparing Graves with Wordsworth or Rilke is ‘comparing a rearrangement of the room with a subsidence of continents’ (LRB, 9 October). In fact this was Randall Jarrell’s view in The Third Book of Criticism, where he is offering it as a qualification of his very high estimate of Graves. Such a motive has always seemed to me the only reason...
Letter

Reckless

28 September 1989

Having written about David Jones and Seamus Heaney, I of course think poets have the right to send readers to dictionaries (Letters, 26 October 1989, 23 November 1989, 7 December 1989). But readers must feel the journey is worthwhile, not merely as an element in self-improvement but as an aid to critical appreciation. Jones’s dictionary diction always, in my view, enforces a sense of his punctilio...

Hand and Foot: Seamus Heaney

John Kerrigan, 27 May 1999

When Seamus Heaney left Belfast in 1972, to work as a freelance writer in the relative safety of the Republic, Northern Ireland was a war zone. Internment and Bloody Sunday had recruited so many...

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