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“... admirers have ranged from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, from Robert Frost to W.H. Auden, from Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or phrases such as ‘dim lands of ...”

“... unfamiliar and unexpected by the poet, which reveals itself in the most characteristic poems of Edward Thomas, is wholly absent from the world of his poetry. So is the sense of easing himself, in the expression of grief or pleasure, which is natural to Hardy. No word could be less suitable for these Lowell effects than ‘confessional’, which ...”

“... is the opposite of the homely expertise in country matters of Hardy, or the more pointed one of Edward Thomas. The disinclination to be specific, in terms of the world of real things, gives its own sort of bleak originality to the world of Davie’s poetry – a world very much more extensive than this aspect of it would seem to indicate. The most ...”

“... whose celebrations are confined to the regional and local past: back to John Clare or back to Edward Thomas, back to Ivor Gurney: to some inch or other that is for ever England. Karlin is not a Little Englander. His working principle seems rather to be: I’m sure you’ll find many poems here to enjoy, especially if you don’t demand that each of ...”

“... This will all seem familiar to aficionados of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall: in the following reign, Thomas Cromwell was the apotheosis (or nadir) of these ‘new men’. As Steven Gunn argues in his new book, a work of characteristic meticulousness, not only did these men encapsulate the mood, workings and functioning of Henry VII’s disorientating ...”

“... the flower of past kings; the form of future kings; a merciful king; the peace of his peoples; Edward III, completing the jubilee of his reign; an unconquered leopard; victorious in battle like a Maccabee . . . he ruled mighty in arms; now in heaven let him be a king. So (in translation) run the verses around the tomb of ...”

“... wonderful eye for accuracy and honesty, which has put into his anthology the very best things of Edward Thomas (‘It rains’, ‘Tall Nettles’, ‘Women he liked’), has also suggested its most unusual items: Yeats’s ‘The Song of the Wandering Aengus’ on a page facing Roger Woddis’s imitation of it in his verses on the Birmingham pub ...”

“... dirty socks, Woodbines – the mood is ominous. The poem ends with a reference to the death of Edward Thomas. Lewis himself was killed in 1944.Sarah Moss’s new novel is set in a lochside cabin park in the Trossachs. The poem behind its title is William Watson’s ‘The Ballad of Semmerwater’, about a city lost beneath a lake. But Lewis’s poem ...”

“... in 1902 into a relatively prosperous middle-class family; his father was a bank inspector. Like Thomas Lovell Beddoes, an earlier oddball of British poetry, he was sent to Charterhouse School; he can’t have enjoyed it much, for when he was 16 he ran away to London, naively hoping to establish himself as a journalist. This bid for independence lasted all ...”

“... daughter Bettina to ‘go away for a moment, and keep the others out’. But the others come in: Edward Baltram, who is Harry Cuno’s stepson; Stuart Cuno, Harry’s elder son by a previous marriage; Ilona Baltram, Bettina’s sister; and lastly, Jesse Baltram himself. The climax of this scene, which is itself the great comic dénouement of The Good ...”

“... curiously, only 21 are included here) have been compared by Robert Nye to the poems written by Thomas Hardy after the death of his wife, and by Jonathan Raban to In Memoriam. The subject is a precarious one for poetry, and Dunn has not always succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls. Poems like ‘Dining’ and ‘Arrangements’ are dangerously direct; Dunn’s ...”

“... Could Henry VIII have friends? The pertinent anecdote is well known: he walked affectionately with Thomas More, an arm around his neck, but More told his son-in-law: ‘If my head would win him a castle in France … it would not fail to go.’ Charles Brandon fought in showy campaigns to recover those bits of France Henry thought he owned, so he must have ...”

“... ended yet. On the contrary, the poetic scene is full of people who believe that by writing like Edward Thomas, on the one hand, or William Carlos Williams, on the other, they can recover or reconstitute innocence in their medium. And even a senior poet like Norman MacCaig, who is too old a hand to chase such a will of the wisp, has nevertheless over ...”

“... savings to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen. And Ransome took to most people; he was not choosy. In fact, he was inclined to instant and lasting hero ...”

“... of their genius, as the non-combatants Picasso or T.S. Eliot were to do. In a very different way Edward Thomas, who found his true voice in the war but independently of the fighting, would probably have kept it, and been a real presence in post-poetry: yet speculation has an element of post hoc propter hoc. More typical is the way in which each country ...”