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“... or later. Forty-two years onand you’ve got no farther! But after that again,where else would you go? Iceland, maybe? Maybe the Dordogne?’And then the parting shot. ‘In my own daythe odd one came here on the hunt for women.’Not to be outdone by Kavanagh’s friendliness of tone and generosity of spirit, Joyce recommends:‘You lose more of yourself than ...”

“... which come to him) by happy accident, which means rarely. The lack of a pragmatic, Johnsonian go-get-’em approach to the making of poems is at one with the surprising vulnerability which the ones that do get written disclose. The rough worldliness that characterises Hamilton’s critical prose is nowhere to be found in his poetry, which, having no means ...”

“... and critics came and went. Literature was a vocation in those days, not a profession. For Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz and Randall Jarrell, disciples of those exemplary teacher-critics John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, criticism was an essential component of a literary career. And for the critics, the obverse was true: Lionel Trilling wrote ...”

“... earn the right to the luxury of practising his art’. Heaney represents in similar fashion Robert Lowell’s year in prison as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Lowell was ‘earning his poetic rights by service in the unpoetic world of jail’. Elsewhere, Heaney asks: ‘What right has poetry to its ...”

“... are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia may not be the Isle of Man, but legs matter ...”

“... Marshland: she was obviously paying attention to the work of Stanley Kunitz, as well as of Robert Lowell. Formally, too, this early work – thick, stacked diction and taut, chewy syntax – is unlike the plain style that follows: Under cerulean, amid her backyard’s knobby rhubarb squats My cousin to giggle with her baby, pat His bald top. From a window I ...”

“... have the maximum impact?’ The question is naive: a youth fleeing the collapse of his hopes might go – often does go – far away. I make the point only because Meyers argues that he, rather than Thompson, gives the ‘real (rather than ostensible) reasons why Frost left Dartmouth and why he went to the Dismal ...”

“... that a book of this sort, like the Mississippi itself, has a tendency to sprawl shapelessly and go on too long. In this, the reviewers were entirely correct. The Old Glory that Raban dreamed of writing, the book he hoped ‘would be haphazard and full of randomness’, would indeed have been as slow and sprawling as they said. That, presumably, is why he ...”

“... as slick as it would ever be, and the set-pieces – involving, for instance, ‘the dunny man’, go-karts and blood-curdling injuries to his penis – don’t serve joke-killing notice that humour is about to occur. At the same time, the feelings swirling round his parents – his father died in a plane crash while being repatriated from a Japanese POW camp ...”

“... Scale is uncertain. ‘This might be nature – twenty stories high,’ to borrow from Robert Lowell: We two, one cell here, lie gazing into the ether’s crystal ball, sky and a sky, and sky, and sky, till death – Well – death and the void may be part of it. City parks by night do have something sepulchral about them. The little white blobs of the ...”

“... football. He will be missed more than we can say.Where shall we begin? How far back do you want to go?Why don’t we go back to the Battle of Bannockburn?No, not that far. Your schooling. Your birthplace.King’s Lynn. I was born in Norfolk.Were both your parents Scottish?Yes.And your father was an engineer?Yes. A civil ...”

“... the wine-dark Aegean. One of the strengths of Amy Clampitt’s new book is its awareness of this field of force, this imaginative map ingrained with irony. Starting from a description of a Greek statue in Berlin, it moves towards the               middle of the earth, yearned- for stepmotherland of Hölderlin and Goethe that is Hellas, and ...”

“... pastoral allegorises a distinct mode of consciousness: that of a mind which never lets things go. ‘Bogland’ is as much an ode to national character as ‘Rule Britannia’, its winning and wholly characteristic self-deprecation stemming from Heaney’s awareness that he is reworking a cliché about Irishness. As Oliver MacDonagh put it, quoting Lloyd ...”

“... the arguments about cultural identity, language, gender and inclusiveness stirred up by the 1991 Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which covered 1500 years of work in Latin, Norman French, Gaelic and English. Les Murray’s New Oxford Book of Australian Verse and Anthology of Australian Religious Poetry included traditional work translated from ...”

“... all those immaculate photos in the Sunday Supplements, and the effective paragraphs from the field with their details chilling or bizarre. Perhaps it could not and should not do so? Poetry cannot sever itself entirely from the most oppressive literary manifestations of its time, but it must use them with its own sort of detachment (as Larkin used ...”