Tom Paulin

Tom Paulin is a poet and critic.

Holy Boldness: John Bunyan

Tom Paulin, 16 December 2004

According to E.P. Thompson, The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Rights of Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th.

Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of...

Diary: Trimble’s virtues

Tom Paulin, 7 October 2004

“Perhaps controversially, Godson says that the ties Kevin McNamara and Clare Short had to their Irish backgrounds did not touch Blair, who was ‘little affected’ by his Ulster Protestant ancestry . . . But it could be argued that Blair’s continual insistence that he is right because he knows he is trustworthy and straight-talking – the narcissistic void at the heart of his political personality – is recognisably Ulster Protestant, as anyone who has studied its distinctive cultural form, the sermon, will realise.”

In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies...

Poem: ‘The Road to Inver’

Tom Paulin, 25 September 2003

for Xon de Ros and Jamie McKendrick

I left a village called Tempo oh maybe an hour back and now I’m driving to Inver in an old beat-up gunked Toyota I’ve borrowed from a mate in Belfast (there was a poet down south who blessed all the new Toyotas in Ireland – everyone else was driving in circles but he came out with a firm line and drove it straight home)

cold as a hub cap...

Poem: ‘During the Countdown’

Tom Paulin, 20 February 2003

On the second day of the second month 2003 we were walking through Beeston – it looked that Sunday more like a wet Northern than a wet Midland town with big strange pollarded trees on both sides of its not wide not grand Imperial Road – every single limbless hacked cutback trunk was taller than the Victorian houses and each a kind of écorché displaced almost tarry with...

This book is a sequence or collection of poems and other things concerning events in Europe in the period between the Treaty of Versailles and, broadly speaking, the Battle of Britain. Some of...

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Shoe-Contemplative: Hazlitt

David Bromwich, 18 June 1998

How they keep trying to bury Hazlitt, and how he keeps coming back. T.S. Eliot said he was guilty of ‘crimes against taste’. David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research...

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Sevenyearson

Michael Hofmann, 22 September 1994

Everybody knows – Paul Muldoon said it on the radio recently – that writing poetry can only get harder the more you keep at it. Against that is the belief, or perhaps the...

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Paulin’s People

Edward Said, 9 April 1992

It is not very often that professional students of literature experience an invigorating shock of pleasure, surprise, illumination upon reading a work of criticism – perhaps because, like...

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Umpteens

Christopher Ricks, 22 November 1990

Adrian Room has garnered umpteen dedications, and some of them are of interest, but what is the point of unrolling them alphabetically as something purporting to be a dictionary? Abbott opens,...

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Public Works

David Norbrook, 5 June 1986

‘Arnold and Eliot ensured that the magic of monarchy and superstition permeated English literary criticism and education like a syrupy drug ... ’ Yes, this is Tom Paulin speaking....

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Local Heroes

John Horgan, 7 February 1985

In the 1840s, according to Theodore Hoppen’s densely-packed and illuminating study of Irish political realities, ‘bored’ British ministers ‘grappled with the tedious but...

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Making sense

Denis Donoghue, 4 October 1984

In ‘A Wave’, the title-poem of his new collection, John Ashbery says, among many other things: One idea is enough to organise a life and project it Into unusual but viable forms, but...

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Accessibility

Derek Mahon, 5 June 1980

It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I have taken the full measure, or anything like it, of Middleton’s Carminalenia, an intensely difficult collection about as far removed from...

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