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“... are pieces on A.E. Housman, Yvor Winters, David Ferry, plagiarism, metaphor and ‘Loneliness and Poetry’. Ricks has a fine ear, as he knows, and is happiest when demonstrating the unique resources and powers of poetry. His method is essentially evaluative, and it depends on precise examination. Milton’s Adam ...”

“... sat there among us as if he too were just beginning.’ When I first became interested in poetry, in the mid-1970s, the poets I came across were the ones everybody was reading, all published by Faber: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell and, of course, Heaney. It seems extraordinary, now, that my father had known several of ...”

“... that art, like science, demands total concentration on the object of attention’ – his poetry was all about paying attention, in his case to the smallest, most fleeting details in the world at hand. The world in nearly all of O’Brien’s city poetry is Manhattan: the Upper West Side during his years at ...”

“... would be her due and half his pay. The experience of trench warfare did not shock Rosenberg into poetry or make him see more clearly. The war may have accelerated his poetic development as much as it cramped its production, but it did not fundamentally change its course. Like that of his longer lived contemporary David Jones (born five years after ...”

“... Interview Why do you write poetry? Petals, aardvarks, goulash – there is no end to it. I’m sorry . . . ? I, too, am sorry. I am sorry for Petula Misericordia, her unrequited love for Dan Splendid, the mishap with the steam traction engine, for the question that comes next. Obviously poetry is a passion to you? By no means ...”

“... Thomas knew all too well the exaggerations of rhetoric that dominated turn-of-the-century English poetry, and which generated both his and Frost’s quiet revolution, and the more aggressive one masterminded by Eliot and Pound. In his lifetime Thomas published only a handful of poems, which came out under the pseudonym of Edward Eastaway in An Annual of New ...”

“... Paul Muldoon excluded himself from Contemporary Irish Poetry, his 1986 Faber anthology, but he included a poem by Seamus Heaney that was dedicated to him. We don’t of course know why the poem was dedicated to him, or indeed whether it is in any sense about him. It is a suggestive poem about what the living can get from the dead: Widgeon For Paul Muldoon It had been badly shot ...”

“... If women’s writing were taken into account, would it change the way we read and judge the poetry of an era long assumed to be magisterially Augustan and masculine? In her passionate and wide-ranging study of 18th-century women’s poetry, Paula Backscheider quotes Isobel Armstrong’s framing of such questions in a ...”

“... alone’. His brother’s death haunted Ashbery for the rest of his life, finding its way into the poetry, obliquely or disguised, which was the way Ashbery treated personal or emotional material. Seamus Heaney, who mistrusted and disliked Ashbery’s poetry, wrote of it rather caustically as ‘a centrally heated daydream ...”

“... Neither of them, sensibly, thinks that an imperfect or monstrous life makes much difference to the poetry. But if poetry remains its own best defence, then what is to be gained by reminding us of the tangle out of which it was salvaged? If, as Karl Kraus suggested, ‘a poem is good until one knows who wrote it,’ is it not ...”

“... 1919, Robert Graves was a demobilised war veteran, a new father and the author of four volumes of poetry. At this moment came ‘the first poem I wrote as myself’, as his autobiography describes ‘Rocky Acres’. After surviving years of front-line bombardment, a shell splinter through his right lung and the postwar influenza epidemic, Graves had returned ...”

“... A few years back, Don Paterson was warning everyone that contemporary British poetry was under threat. Not from the usual enemies, philistines in government or chain bookshops, but from two groups of poets: populists and elitists. According to his 2004 anthology, New British Poetry, populists are well-intentioned souls who bring poetry to factories, schools or prisons, ‘via some patronising mediation, some strategy intended to make it “easier”: a visit from a performance poet, or a themed workshop, or a poster campaign with the dumbest, shortest poem the committee can find, set in 50-point bold ...”

“... occupant.’ A fortnight before his death in 1963, he sent a message from his hospital bed to the Poetry Society of America: ‘I may wobble when I’m sitting up but I never waver.’ These declarations of independence sound reassuringly like the Frost of the anthologies, the author of ‘guidebooks for the spirit of individualism’, as Robert Faggen puts ...”

“... disasters, personal misfortunes and punishing forays into spiritualism. Her first book was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and among those who admired her work were Cyril Connolly and Al Alvarez. Edward Lucie-Smith included her in British Poetry since 1945 (1970) and Larkin put her in his Oxford Book of ...”

“... his prosperous-looking figure in its well-cut suit stood out amid the squalor of Tambimuttu’s Poetry London offices. But in 1948 it all began to collapse. Priscilla left him, taking their daughter with her, and the small income from his parents that had subsidised the poetry was stopped. ...”