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“... in versi is the book with a capital ‘b’, or libro with a capital ‘l’, which this great poet, as personally modest as he was vocationally proud, always looked forward to in trepidation and worked towards with confidence. Unless, which seems unlikely, Montale wrote a hill of material in the very year of his death, there is not much that escapes its ...”

“... fact and phrase, a discrepancy which Humphries, linguistically more sensitive than any Australian poet before him, was the first to spot. Laughter at his discovery was immediate, but honour came slowly. The man who makes people laugh is rarely given quick credit, even in those fully-developed countries which realise that serious writing can take a comic ...”

“... before he grabbed you And held you helpless, or the Kray who stabbed you. The other big event is Poet Sue, A scribbling Cambridge undergraduette, Who as the French once went mad for Minou Is cried up as the greatest talent yet By dons who should have better things to do, You might think, than to stand there getting wet Drooling about the girl’s supreme ...”

“... for others to bestow it. Not even Oscar Wilde assumed the name, Who called himself both genius and poet. That he was self-appointed to his fame – A true wit wouldn’t hint it, much less crow it. Poor knackered Nicky thinks he’s Alan Coren: He’s just a wee laird with a twitching sporran. And yet it’s wise to give conceit expression – Within the ...”

“... turn out to be the only man in England who doesn’t chuckle his way through the second volume of Clive James’s memoirs – Falling towards England: Unreliable Memoirs, Part Two.3 When James arrived in England in the early Sixties, he had no money, nowhere to live and not very much to wear, apart from a white nylon ...”

“... Thanks to Clive Wilmer among others, an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, photographs and printed material bearing on Pound’s interests in ‘the visual arts’ was mounted for the Cambridge Poetry Festival on 14 June, and could be seen in Cambridge’s not sufficiently renowned Kettle’s Yard Gallery until 4 August; it will now be at the Tate from 11 September to 10 November ...”

“... was ‘incredulous’. To Monteith, the idea that Larkin might have been influenced by a foreign poet was ‘ludicrous’. ‘He had fallen,’ Raine comments, ‘for the propaganda – Larkin’s bluff, insular, faux-xenophobic self-caricature.’ Compound terms using ‘self-’ often raise questions about agency and responsibility. When we speak of ...”

“... subject which Larkin himself seems to have thoroughly approved of, and quotes in a letter, was by Clive James in his collection The Metropolitan Critic. ‘Just now and again James says something really penetrating: “originality is not an ingredient of poetry, it is poetry” – I’ve been feeling that for ...”

“... free table before queues started. Dinner 8.30 chez Jean-Claude and Annick. Other guest a young poet, Jacques Lèvre, whom Jean-Claude thinks very promising. Showed me four poems of his in a review: the first and last reminded me at once of Follain, who it turned out Jean-Claude had never read. Shy, unassuming and friendly, Lèvre reminded me of one or two ...”

“... in the title of Larkin at Sixty, 20 essays in celebration by friends and acquaintances of the poet. Many of the contributors are writers themselves. Kingsley Amis’s reminiscences of a 40-year-friendship have an effortless interest which is met at more intensity in his own best novels; Gavin Ewart’s affectionate ode is almost ideally deft; Alan ...”

“... Larkin’s literary executors, wrote a scholarly and comprehensive authorised biography of the poet, whom he had known well; it was subtitled ‘A Writer’s Life’. Motion informed his readers that some important ingredients of Larkin’s life were still unavailable, especially most of the letters written to Monica Jones, a lecturer at the University of ...”

“... at issue was the way Auden’s mind showed itself tugged in quite different directions. No modern poet could begin to rival him, especially in his later phase, for an idiom of Horatian poise, a sustained mode of civility within which his generous and undeluded intelligence could celebrate what Heaney called ‘the human achievements of art’. But this same ...”

“... no doubt, is a satirical listing of received ideas and foolish language. It also signals that the poet knows that his story, so freely mythologised in his own poem, has in fact become all things to all men. But the ironies are gleefully paraded, with that over-insistent pleasure in the idiomatic phrase which sometimes comes over expert but non-native speakers ...”

“... white witch of the Palais Royal, most earthy of oracles’) and in pieces on Updike, Balzac, Henry James, written with an authority and perception based on lifelong intimacy. He applied the same seriousness with which he encouraged new writers to reviving the careers of older ones – such as Jean Rhys – and restoring writers consigned by accident or ...”

“... reflective of the diverse poetries of the last twenty or so years. His brief introductions to each poet are also bibliographically useful, critically independent and sometimes funny (he describes C.H. Sisson as ‘an acquired taste’ who seems ‘inclined to warn off many who might acquire it’). Neither book rewrites the history of postwar poetry, and each ...”