Patrick McGuinness

It’s not why Rimbaud left that mystifies, though this new year the Place Ducale sports ice rink, carousel, and a waffel-stand from nearby Belgium. It’s why he kept returning. On ne part pas: he answered it himself, ‘we never leave.’ After Harar,

he thought his home town was a desert by other means, and everywhere he walked he walked on sand; sinking and finding his...

In​ The Waste Land, a ‘young man carbuncular’ makes a play for ‘the typist home at teatime’:

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference.

Anyone who wants the typist’s side of this brief, bleak encounter might find a version of it in Rosemary Tonks’s...

I spent​ my childhood in a small post-industrial town called Bouillon, in southern Belgium, that became more and more post-industrial as I grew up. That hyphen between the ‘post’ and the ‘industrial’ looks abrupt and short; it wasn’t. It was a slow thinning of the thread, a long unmooring during which the habits and reflexes of work remained as the work...

When male poets​ have dramatic, bohemian or tragic lives, it is a triumph of consistency; when they have boring ones, it is a triumph of manly compartmentalisation. The rules are different for women: their tragedy and bohemianism must occlude their writing (while also keeping it marketable), and any gift they display for normality – or, worse, happiness – must be proof of the...

Joan Murray​ died of a heart defect in 1942, at the age of 24. Her first book, Poems, was published five years later, after her manuscript won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, which was judged by Auden. Murray had been his student at the New School in 1940 and, not caring for any of the manuscripts he had been sent, he asked her mother if he could publish her work instead. She agreed, but not...