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“... corn from out the ditch. ‘Though on the other hand, perhaps one should join something (I hear Craig Raine is canvassing for Kinnock now). Some evenings in my rooms a kind of mandrake silence gets to me … God, how quietly they take what’s being done to them!’ ‘Outside it’s wick, I know – but the academy how goes it there?’ ‘C’est ...”

“... sees England as a crowded and shabbily decent third-world country, and she shares with Reid and Craig Raine a splendidly Mediterranean sense of joy. Where Larkin and Motion are the troubled elegists of a vanished world power, these writers inhabit the liberated atmosphere of light-filled studios. They are flâneurs in an English market that resembles ...”

“... poetry. The War of Paulin’s Ear shows no signs of dying down. He is locked in public combat with Craig Raine, who commissioned this anthology of political verse. Well, this quarrel will doubtless do no harm to the book’s sales. But what is all the fuss about? On a restrictive definition, the anthologist of political verse has the same kind of aims as ...”

“... the same paperback with Manya Harari’s translation of Pasternak’s Essay in Autobiography. As Craig Raine points out in a witty and penetrating Foreword, this Essay underwent a considerable gestation and metamorphosis, and was intended originally as an introduction, in 1956 or thereabouts, to a complete edition of Pasternak’s poems. But in November ...”

“... to her excellent – indeed seminal and unprecedented – anthology of Ulster prose,* Patricia Craig remarks that for her collection Northern Ireland is to be regarded as ‘a geographical rather than a political entity; it consists of seven counties, not the partitioned six or the historic nine. Donegal seems to be inescapably part of the ...”

“... Perhaps rhyme has much to answer for as well. I have been surprised to find myself agreeing with Craig Raine in the recent correspondence in the LRB over Milton’s advertisement to Paradise Lost: rhyme would have detracted from the seriousness of that poem. In this century rhyme has to be approached with great caution when writing anything other than ...”

“... as though it were being seen for the first time. Several reviewers noted the connection with Craig Raine’s poem ‘A Martian sends a postcard home’, and provided the information that Martin Amis has been associated with the poets Craig Raine and Christopher Reid and promoted their work when he was ...”

“... women. Elliot’s casual, meandering tone chillingly suggests the tedium of this mini-Holocaust. Craig Raine’s 1953 is a very free and ingenious version of Racine’s Andromaque. Raine transposes the play to the imaginary aftermath of a World War Two won by the Germans and their allies. Pyrrhus becomes Vittorio, the ...”

“... and is only spuriously ‘kept alive’ these days by the careerist machinations of people like Craig Raine and Andrew Motion. Kenner is not writing specifically for an Australian audience but he is writing for an ignorant, or uninformed, readership which will be able to savour his liveliness of style without worrying too much about his ...”

“... even as it fails to convince. ‘Looking at Tower Blocks’ is an exercise in the manner of Craig Raine, who, one is reminded, does this kind of thing best. Raine also overshadows the work of Simon Rae, perhaps the least distinct of these poets in individual style: the actual machinery is efficient, but seems ...”

“... kinds of professional rejection: ‘I was not even shortlisted for the Warwick chair’; ‘Craig Raine turned down the proposed book eventually’; a study of Hughes is rejected by Reid for being ‘disconcertingly ventriloqual’. ‘The very success of my repeated efforts to get inside Hughes’s works began to tell against me,’ Sagar ...”

“... particular leaves come rioting out of my mouth. It is the terrain of (on the safer side) Kathleen Raine and (on the dangerous edge) of Sylvia Plath. But to stay there too long risks stasis or psychosis. And the archetypal identification may bring communion, not so much with self-transcending propulsions and patterns, as with monstrous self-projections that ...”

“... category, the salon of the half-admitted, who appear in one book but not the other. Kathleen Raine and Ruth Pitter cannot be found in O’Brien, but Elma Mitchell and Martin Bell cannot be found in Armitage and Crawford. Elma Mitchell’s ‘Thoughts after Ruskin’ is a revelation, and to put her in is to do exactly the sort of thing anthologies are ...”

“... Enright (‘a champion of ordinary existence against the whimsies of the over-educated’) and Craig Raine (‘thank goodness, a far cry from The Waste Land, and the indictment of earthly existence as foul and absurd, which has been a sacred tenet of Modernism’). Plain men cannot write plain prose in the manner of Orwell or Carey: to do it you must ...”

“... the power to express love, in poetry, has been most cruelly answered.Reviewing Seamus Heaney and Craig Raine in these columns (1 November 1984), Paul Muldoon insisted that Heaney’s real strength lay in the short lyric (innocently singling out for special praise ‘Widgeon’ – a poem dedicated to and ventriloquised upon Muldoon himself), and he ...”