Tom Paulin

The Road to Sligo

Tom Paulin, 17 May 1984

Perhaps all verse translation must begin and end with a version of the Aeneid, or with an essentially Virgilian concept of art’s relation to society? In these islands, the first translator of Virgil was Gavin Douglas, whose Eneados was completed in 1513. Although my Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature appropriates Douglas as the earliest translator of the classics ‘into English’, his version was of course written in Scots and is an ennobling monument to Scotland’s separate cultural identity. For Douglas, Virgil is a holy, original and perfect figure, a divine lawgiver who inspires his readers with the pure form and essence of culture. He is end and beginning, both cedar tree and ‘A per se’. And as James Kinsley suggests, Virgil’s best translators acquire something of his luminous stature: ‘the ancient author becomes culturally effective, and the translator a “noble collateral” with him.’

Oscar and Constance

Tom Paulin, 17 November 1983

In the spring of 1882, Oscar Wilde travelled to a huge mining town in the Rocky Mountains called Leadville, where he lectured the miners on the ‘secret of Botticelli’. A fortnight later, he gave a lecture at the State University of Nebraska. Afterwards the students took him out to the State penitentiary where he saw:

Letter

From Plato to Nato

7 July 1983

SIR: This is going over an old battleground, but Christopher Norris is wrong (LRB, 7 July) in asserting that those who are hostile to Widdowson’s Re-Reading English conceive of English as some earnest force for ‘creative and cultural good’. If English is an academic subject – as History and Art History clearly are – then it is an academic subject, with all the limitations and the strengths...

Poem: ‘Yes, The Maternity Unit’

Tom Paulin, 5 May 1983

In a middling hour, Wednesday’s raw afternoon of kitchen buildings and a green pitch, my autopod smooths along a metalled slant between beds of tame juniper.

A geometry of poplars sifts in the wind, their tight theorem almost surprised as it fences ten flat...

Letter

‘Nothing Sacred’

3 March 1983

Tom Paulin writes: I believe absolutely in what I wrote – that Carter, Reid and Raine share a new English sensibility. It is no secret that Raine is my poetry editor at Faber, but that does not mean that I share, say, his admiration of Betjeman’s kitsch Englishness. Mr Smith calls me ‘dishonest’ – let him explain why or oil his pistols.

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Reports from the Not Too Distant Canon

Frank Kermode, 23 May 2002

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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....

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...

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...

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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