Tom Paulin is a poet and critic.
At 10 – let’s be specific – at 10 a.m. you’d be sitting in your deckchair filling pages with shorthand so I imagine a caption in the News Chronicle GBS TRAVELS P&O ‘I always work on holiday’ says the world’s most famous author ‘especially if some kind cruise liner pays me’
so there you are in a deckchair a kind of rational tautology...
A sound cento for the fiftieth anniversary of Radio Three
I married a tinker’s daughterin the town of Skibbereenbut at last one day she galloped awaywith me only shirt in a paper bagto the shores of Amerikay
Snug as a foot in a mocassin shoe – never the boot no never the boot I lay in Huck’s canoe one still night and heard men talking – clean every word they spoke on...
Looking at the University of Oxford’s Informal Guide to the English faculty’s lecture list for Trinity term 1996, I find that the Professor of Poetry, James Fenton, will give a lecture on 9 May entitled Eliot v. Julius. It would be improper of me to anticipate Fenton’s approach to Anthony Julius’s compelling study, but I would hope that he will not see fit to mount another repudiation of this brilliant, passionately concentrated ‘adversarial reading’ of Eliot’s work. I say ‘another repudiation’ advisedly, because Julius’s book was rejected by Oxford University Press on the grounds that it might prove ‘too controversial’. So much for scholarship, so much for free speech.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
‘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....
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...
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...
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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