Seamus Perry

German​ scholars used to worry about something they called ‘Das Adam Smith Problem’. There seemed to be two of him: one was the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, awash with warm-hearted fellow feeling; the other, the hard-nosed realist of The Wealth of Nations, a work which seemed to describe a world governed by a heedless disregard for anyone other than oneself. These...

Romanticism​ bequeathed a good many things to the beleaguered modern imagination, one of the most provoking of which was the thought that it should get out more. That bit of advice proved all the more challenging because it contradicted the other basic idea which the Romantics left behind – namely, that what mattered was staying inside, wrapped in the private world of subjectivity and...

What​ became of his face? In his memorial address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image of Wystan … of course one with which you are all familiar: the famous poet with the face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines’. By the...

‘There was not much comedy in Shelley’s life,’ Thomas Peacock remarked in his memoir, a sad thing to say; but the striking contrast between The Triumph of Life and most of Shelley’s work makes you realise that buoyant spirits are not far off in much of it. People were always struck by how young he seemed, and when critics like Eliot or Leavis ticked him off for adolescence or immaturity, it was a backhanded way of responding to the idea of youthfulness that they detected stirring in the poems. His opposition to tyranny was principled, but it was also the reaction of a child whom the grown-ups are always getting at: he really needed tyrants in his life, as Peacock perceptively observed. His dismal father, Sir Timothy, was the archetype, succeeded by schoolmasters, Eldon the Lord Chancellor, Wordsworth, Jupiter, God.

He began to try, in the poems he wrote in the 1940s, to make the difficulty of communication the whole point, transmuting his defensive belligerence into an extraordinary private language – the elements of which appear the same as those of the language we all use, so that it has a tantalising sense of something familiar but on investigation is completely elusive. They are the sort of poems you call hard. I don’t really know what to do with them, so I start playing games, like ‘spot the verb’.