“... Anybody​ want to Hear R. Frost on Anything?’ the poet asked Louis Untermeyer in 1916. Frost was 42 years old and believed he had an impressive list of lectures ‘in stock’. One of them was the ‘True Story of My Life’. It would begin with early signs of temerity and talent – ‘Stealing pigs from the stockyards in San Francisco. Learn to whistle at five’ – before moving on to bigger things: ‘“North of Boston” ...”

“... Well: the poems were lying about, & I did not quite know what to do with them,’ Thomas Hardy wrote to Edmund Gosse shortly after the publication of his first collection, Wessex Poems (1898). ‘It is difficult,’ he went on, ‘to let people who think I have made a fresh start know that to indulge in rhymes was my original weakness, & the prose only an afterthought ...”

“... for half a day just doing whatever it is that poets do when they sit on stones. His ‘good friend Matthew’ asks what exactly that might be, and Wordsworth’s reply, if you read it sceptically, isn’t much of a reply at all: The eye – it cannot choose but see; We cannot bid the ear be still; Our bodies feel, where’er they be, Against, or with our ...”

“... Marilyn Butler​ , whose Peacock Displayed was published in 1979, wasn’t the first to connect Peacock’s name with the showy wit of his satires. It started with Shelley, his friend and patron, who joked in 1820 about ‘the Pavonian Psyche’ (pavo: peacock), as though Peacock himself had the kind of name that he specialised in giving to his characters ...”

“... play games, and in Wordsworth’s Fun, a book recently reviewed in the LRB (4 July, 2019), Matthew Bevis persuasively suggests that Wordsworth had a sense of humour that has escaped almost all of his readers. He can’t not have noticed how easily his name falls apart into separate words or phrases: will, I am, words, worth. And even if he ...”

“... write, read or publish literary criticism, and commit crime. It certainly helps explain why Bevis Hillier has written an enormous biography of a dead English minor poet. John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love is the second volume of Hillier’s proposed trilogy and covers, roughly, the years 1933-58, the period when Betjeman, as Larkin put it, ‘became ...”