“... Vendler to distort major figures helps her discriminate among lesser planets. Her inclusion of Robert Hayden, for example, is bold and welcome. Moreover, her promise to present writers ‘whole’ has more chance of being fulfilled with subsidiary figures. When Eliot judged anthologies less just to major than minor poets, he was, as often, lending his ...”

“... sorts of American writers: the young Allen Ginsberg paid him homage and copied his style, while Robert Lowell, for example, looked to Williams for a freer, more democratic manner than his rivals could offer. Though he remains an acquired taste in Britain, Williams’s position in American poetry, at least, seems assured. That position rests, above all ...”

“... Dance. ‘A perfectly normal child became a mess of writhing limbs and uncontrollable grunts,’ Blake Gopnik writes. Recent scientific studies have shown ‘a correlation between rheumatic fever in children and adult psychiatric problems such as obsessive-compulsive behaviours and the severe body-image issues of what’s now called body dysmorphia – just ...”

“... of the Undivided Trinity leads to distortions in Art. Thus, in the Sayers scale of values, William Blake is a lop-sided believer in the Father – ‘wrestling with the huge cloudy cosmogonies and highly personal symbolisms of the Prophetic Books’. James Joyce, apparently, was ‘son-ridden’. Ghost-ridden writers have included Amanda Ross (a C.S. Lewis ...”

“... uncharitable interim biographies and Alan Franks, in the Times magazine of 31 March, talking of Blake Morrison’s South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present ...”

“... Vendler’s view of a poem can seem challenging or even perverse at first. She claims that William Blake’s ‘The Lamb’ has often been misread and is not as innocent as it sounds:   Little Lamb who made thee   Dost thou know who made theeGave thee life & bid thee feed.By the stream & o’er the meadIsn’t that just as simple as it comes? But Vendler ...”

“... taught at Berkeley, Heaney writes to Michael Longley: ‘stupid, illiterate, long-haired, hippie, Blake-ridden, Ginsberg-gullible, assholes (assholes or cunts, I hear you cry). Seriously though, it is an exhausting assignment with a lot of anxious and eager kids all wanting to hear they’re the greatest thing since, say, Charles Olson.’ This might be ...”

“... would often delay the shooting of a scene because he wanted to discuss every element in detail (Robert Redford, who played the Sundance Kid, just wanted to hurry up and finish). ‘Then what Paul would do with the scene would have no relationship to what we’d been talking about for the last half-hour.’ He put far more agony and effort into his ...”

“... day: twilight or midnight. The time of the full moon appears to be important to them. According to Robert Kirk, the 17th-century minister and author of The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, which recorded the spiritual beliefs of his parishioners in the Highlands, fairies changed their lodgings on the quarter days of the year. Kirk’s ...”

“... at night’. Those solitary hours of study were evident everywhere in The Darkening Ecliptic: Blake, Shakespeare, Freud, Pound, Lenin, Longfellow, Baudelaire, Mallarmé (of whose name his own is a not so earnest comic diminutive). Dylan Thomas, Marlowe, Rimbaud, Hart Crane, all had been absorbed with startling authority into the richly-layered texture of ...”

“... But he had a practitioner’s acquaintance with the English poetic tradition, and not only with Blake, whom he edited, and Spenser and Shakespeare, whom he greatly admired. (For example, seeking a stanza form suitable for his elegy on Robert Gregory, he silently adopted that used by Cowley three hundred years earlier in ...”

“... new attributions cohere with the older ones in ways that save the phenomena. To put the point in Robert Brandom’s Hegelian way: to understand the nature of an object is to be able to recapitulate the history of the concept of that object. That history, in turn, is simply the history of the uses of the various words used to describe the object. As Jonathan ...”

“... own son, John, who also became an adept fiddler, like his grandfather. Clare felt an affinity with Robert Burns, collected songs as Burns did, and during his asylum years wrote a number of songs in the Scottish vernacular. Clare says in his autobiography that both his parents were ‘illiterate to the last degree’. Concerned to dispel the myths, Bate points ...”

“... reviews; gathered some into collections; wrote introductions; edited and introduced a portable Blake, Emerson and Hawthorne; fathered two children; and in three memoirs told the story of his generation’s move from the margins to the centres of American life. The first of these, A Walker in the City, published in 1951, is about Brownsville – its ...”

“... poems, comic operas and humorous essays in the Ingletonian Raconteur. Revelling in the works of Blake, Ruskin and Samuel Palmer, he was inspired by the idea that ‘reality is a thing that has to be reinvented continually.’ With no family to confine him, he used school holidays to venture out. A ‘seasoned hitch-hiker’ by the age of 16, he visited the ...”