“... the moderation of Isaac Watts and Thomas Hardy as at least as interesting as the wildness of Christopher Smart and W.B. Yeats. I’m not sure how moderate Hardy was – an amiable re-opening of this question was the subject of the postcard from Stanford – but Watts does sound like the unanxious Calvinist, the man who has made his peace with the ...”

“... a larger selection by James Wright and Robert Bly in 1961; and Hamburger’s sometime collaborator Christopher Middleton edited another in the much missed Cape Editions in 1968. Yet these did not gain Trakl the attention he deserves. It is odd that an English sensibility so well attuned to Sylvia Plath’s intensities never quite managed to rise to Trakl; the ...”

“... The author of the Noctes was John Wilson, who constructed dialogues between his own alter ego (‘Christopher North’) and that of Hogg (‘the Shepherd’). The Shepherd gets the best lines – better, some have suggested, than anything Hogg ever wrote – but he is also made to look a ‘boozing buffoon’. He says things like, ‘Hoots, man – I dinna ...”

“... portraits of the king. For A.F. Pollard, writing a hundred years ago, Henry was a Land of Hope and Glory monarch, who by some divine intuition foresaw his country’s destiny and laid its foundations. ‘It was the king, and the king alone, who kept England on the course he had mapped out.’ For Geoffrey Elton, by contrast, writing in the third ...”

“... to swim municipally? Tomorrow we leave as the house is now sold, putting me in mind of Francis Hope’s poem about the holidays we had in rented villas back in the 1970s: Goodbye to the Villa Piranha Prepare the journey North, Smothering feet in unfamiliar socks. Sweeping the bathroom free of sand, collecting Small change of little worth. Make one last ...”

“... beStill the indomitable Irishry.Yeats died on 28 January 1939. Two days earlier, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had arrived in New York. When Auden heard of Yeats’s death, he sought to ascertain what time of the day or night he had died. He was planning a poem. What preoccupied him most in 1939 was guilt that his gift for poetry was serving ...”

“... only his name but his age as well. Larkin at Sixty can’t therefore do anything but make a reader hope for just that: a Portrait of the Artist. There are, it is true, a handful of pleasantly occasional photographs, and what seems in reproduction a surprisingly bad drawing of the poet, but the text may foil anyone whose ‘Larkin’ is the author of the three ...”

“... was.’ Such apocalyptic language attached itself to Henry in 1610-12, not least in the hope expressed to the Prince in 1611 by Samson Lennard, who had fought with Sidney at Zutphen, that he might ‘live to march over the Alps, and to trail a pike before the walls of Rome, under your highness’ standard’. In the same way, Greville’s belief ...”

“... and I believe it to be, in the end, false. The response of the young was less critical. Christopher Isherwood went as an undergraduate to Richards’s lectures and hailed him as ‘the prophet we have been waiting for ... To us, he was infinitely more than a brilliantly new literary critic; he was our guide, our evangelist, who revealed to us, in a ...”

“... in the critical population has produced. So it seems, at any rate, to my generation. Recently Christopher Norris has been meditating, with his usual tact, the resemblances and differences between the Empson of The Structure of Complex Words and the Paul de Man of Allegories of Reading – a sign, perhaps, that the most neglected (and most theoretical) of ...”

“... which Auden himself posed in his delightful short poem ‘Orpheus’: ‘What does the song hope for?’ ‘To be bewildered and happy/Or most of all the knowledge of life?’ Auden’s own unsatisfactory resolution of a similar crux, his famous revision of ‘or’ to ‘and’ in the line ‘We must love one another or die,’ may suggest a quick ...”

“... solemn music as to approach the clerihew, something about which Hill makes a knowing joke: ‘Sir Christopher Wren, in or around the year seventeen ten, went to dine with some men, memorially, with a view to re-edifying the clerihew.’ Wren went to dine with some men in a clerihew by E.C. Bentley, the inventor of the form: ‘He said, “if anyone calls/Say ...”

“... only way to make sense of Prince, but to try and make sense of him without it is a truly forlorn hope. Yet, to my knowledge, the only critic who ever tackled the subject head on is the writer Carol Cooper, an African American woman who had also worked in the music industry. In an astute piece for the Face in June 1983 (it includes a wholly imaginary Q&A with ...”

“... Oxford doctor Humphrey Havard, and a Dominican priest, Gervase Mathew. Tolkien inducted his son Christopher, later a lecturer in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English at Oxford, and the editor of his father’s copious Nachlass. His enduring achievement was to draw the maps for The Lord of the Rings. Then there was the ever present ‘Warnie’ – Lewis’s ...”

“... Byron was its first and finest creation. His wife and daughter could not escape fame, they could hope only to avoid notoriety. Annabella’s attempts to preserve her reputation and other people’s attempts to salvage Byron’s have left a pall of smoke from burning letters and diaries, further obscuring the facts that remain. Seymour carries off a delicate ...”