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“... craters, enigmatic wreckage from some temporal or spatial elsewhere. But it would also do for J.H. Prynne’s poems, which contain lines like these, in ‘Star Damage at Home’, from the 1969 collection The White Stones:                               ... That some star not included in the middle heavens should pine in earth, not ...”

“... and a man spits dangerously over the head of the baby he’s wheeling. Money in Sunshine For J.H. Prynne Jeremy, marvellously tight in your word orders, your lines never run on endlessly like this huge rectangular high-riser; though, if the sky’s blue, it sharpens into a classic. A pigeon flights along precipices, past shrubs at balcony levels. Peregrine ...”

“... It is the fate​ of some artists,’ John Ashbery once remarked, ‘and perhaps the best ones, to pass from unacceptability to acceptance without an intervening period of appreciation.’ For a long time – more than forty years in fact – there seemed no danger that this fate would befall J.H. Prynne: take him or leave him, it didn’t seem possible that he’d ever be acceptable ...”

“... tribute to Woolf I had come across on this side of the pond (a response to Fade Out) was by J.H. Prynne – to whom Frank Zappa is dedicated and who, according to the author blurb, supervised Watson at Gonville and Caius. (Mr Prynne, I’m told, doesn’t have much use for fiction: Patrick White excepted.) Poetry was ...”

“... who rather enjoy it.’ Twenty-five, thirty years after the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of ...”

“... into the economic, for example – with which power operates, obscure as they seem to simplify. Prynne’s delight in disorder is not an aesthetic caprice but is motivated by a rigorous attention to particularity: 1. Steroid metaphrast 2. Hyper-bonding of the insect 3. 6% memory, etc any other rubbish is mere political rhapsody, the gallant lyricism ...”

“... Laudanum, Kenelme Sexnoth Pope, H.N. (Helga Nevvadotoomuch, c/o Lord Godmanchester (Gumster), The John Peelcroft Hadmanchester Podgoets, Night Slide Clubb, P.O. Box 1AA, BBC-wise, W.1, and others. The translations were just as elastic as these cartoon-rubber composites. In the Robert Lowell version actually used by the Sunday Times, ‘Spleen’ opens: I’m ...”

“... goes more smoothly. We are given the necessary information about the likes of Hockney, Ted Hughes, John Berger, Germaine Greer and Noam Chomsky. Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (‘a logical enough outcome’) are briskly explained, Barthes, Lacan and Derrida rush by, Foucault and Althüsser get a rather breathless mention as part of the ‘post-modern ...”

“... Forrest-Thomson tried to mix literary theory with Wittgenstein and some of the poetics of J.H. Prynne. She died young, and her poetry promised more than she had time to deliver. The ‘Unfinished Poems’, Morgan’s fragmented elegies to her, published in The New Divan (1977), are some of his most remarkable and moving poems. Like the ...”

“... gaze behind the quasi-ironic aviator shades of a street-smart dealer in language. When J.H. Prynne dedicates his own single-volume gathering, Poems, to his friend and correspondent, he makes some play between the living spirit and the slick specs that were the signature of the poet’s transit through the noise of the white world: ‘For Edward ...”

“... in a book which has room not only for Larkin, Betjeman, Auden and Housman but for Bunting, J.H. Prynne and Roy Fisher, and which takes time to confront the impact (‘in languages other than their own’) of Pasternak and Pound. With Davie, such words as ‘provincial’, ‘insular’, ‘tradition’ fight back against the pejorative connotations they ...”

“... him, and the authors of these seem politically ‘progressive’ to him. This is why he likes J.H. Prynne’s verse, but not Larkin’s, and why he writes enthusiastically about Rushdie but treats A Dance to the Music of Time as if it were just a handbook of toff sociology. He has opinions about artworks; but they are never aesthetic ones. He rarely treats ...”

“... about riding-masters, and therefore is afflicted by rentier-guilt. (‘Recurrent as malaria,’ John Lehmann wrote in 1955, ‘a bout of rentier-guilt laid me low.’) Because Auden’s ideal or preferred or postulated reader has this socio-political identity, he is particularly easy to recognise; Trotter’s ingenuity and sensitivity are more taxed when ...”

“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... they play no significant part in this history, then what are we to make of the omissions of J.H. Prynne and Roy Fisher, heroes of Davie’s earlier study of the contemporary, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973)? In a book whose title claims centrality for Bunting, a writer who signally amalgamated Wordsworthian English Romanticism and ...”