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“... what in vulgar language is nonprofessional or simply human. More than sixty years ago T.S. Eliot uttered his classic dictum barring amateurs: ‘we must consider poetry primarily as poetry and not another thing.’ When in the Sixties and Seventies Barthes, Derrida and others declared the poem to be an autonomous system of verbal signs, they were ...”

“... transfiguration of it. Quite unwittingly Adrian is offering a sophisticated analogue of what T.S. Eliot had to say about Ulysses: that the novel as a form could no longer model its order on a world which had lost all sense of order. No wonder Mann was so taken by the connection. But where Joyce, according to Eliot, answered ...”

“... Ricks, whose previous books include Milton’s Grand Style, Keats and Embarrassment, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice and Beckett’s Dying Words. Dylan’s Visions of Sin is the culmination of at least three decades’ critical engagement with the songs of Bob Dylan (he first wrote about them in the Listener in June 1972, a decade after Dylan released his ...”

“... in Lawrence that Nottinghamshire negative, ‘Nay’, appears), repeating, joking. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot said, was humourless. Actually, the appeal of his voice lies partly in its comedy. This is less obvious in the longer novels than in the stories, novellas, travel writing and poems, forms to which Kinkead-Weekes gives full and overdue ...”

“... I don’t know. I come from work, dead tired. The Guardian is taking all out of me – writing tosh. What price salted fish and things of that sort. Actually that is my assignment for tomorrow! It hurts. Now keep your chin up, and far more important: keep yourself out of mischief.   Love from Ma and all, Pa. So in his liberated and intelligent ...”

“... assault on Bentham and a PR job on behalf of Coleridge. For all his later disagreements with T.S. Eliot – in whom the faithful William Walsh sees, disparagingly, a French or American taste compared with Leavis’s native English one – Leavis did not define the great English literary tradition very differently. But ...”

“... apparently vulgar obviousness, which again seems unusually calculated, as if inserted as a dare to test how confident the reader is about his or her response. One short poem from 1930 gives a flavour of the general effect. The poem is called ‘Beyond’, and it is reprinted here in its entirety. Pain is impossible to describe Pain is the impossibility of ...”

“... of ‘individuality’. ‘The poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past,’ T.S. Eliot wrote in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, published in the Egoist in 1919. ‘The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ There’s no direct evidence that Parry read the essay – even if ...”

“... and Co opened in 1919. In the window were editions of Shakespeare (of course), Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and copies of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (Monnier’s favourite English-language book). On the walls were photographs of Oscar Wilde, drawings by William Blake and examples of Walt Whitman’s early writings. Émigré writers and ...”

“... prioritise the needs of fiction over what might seem more normal sorts of human obligation: T.S. Eliot strikingly said of James’s criticism that it ‘preyed not upon ideas, but upon living beings’. At the same time, Tóibín’s affection for James is palpable: his haplessness and social awkwardness are treated indulgently, he is frequently seen to be a ...”

“... the best text. Not without errors and awkwardness, Noble and Hogg have performed the helpful task of fitting line-by-line glosses beside the poems (even the word ‘wee’ is explained), but they are not consistent about such things as sources for texts or quotations, or about differentiating Burns’s notes from their own. They have spliced an academic ...”

“... known were their unfriendly depictions of Levantine Greeks and, in particular, Jews. Unlike T.S. Eliot, however, Georges Remi, aka Hergé, was very certain of his nationality. He was, according to Pierre Assouline, ‘the personification of Belgium’, and it’s true that he created, in Tintin, one of the few national emblems his squabbling country can ...”

“... private income and some reviewing. He was not short of friends, including some as grand as T.S. Eliot, who admired Empson as well as finding him funny (‘dirtier and more distrait than ever … most refreshing to see him’). But the war was coming on; myopia left him unfit for military service, and so, almost inevitably, he found himself in mid-1940 ...”

“... of subjects: verse techniques, the difficulty of finding servants, staying with Max Beerbohm, the Test series, his first meeting with Thomas Hardy, the shortcomings of his wife/son/daughter-in-law, his neglect by the critics – this last a recurring theme. ‘They don’t understand what a talent I have for light verse.’ He had no pudeur about expressing ...”

“... in commonplace pleasures – though without sanctimony. ‘The trivial round, the common task,’ Belinda repeats from Keble’s hymn ‘New Every Morning Is the Love’, ‘did it furnish quite all we needed to ask?’Pym’s fiction is decidedly parochial. The Anglican parish is usually the social setting, though trips to Mowbray’s bookshop for ...”