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No Accident

Zachary Leader: Gore Vidal’s Golden Age, 21 June 2001

The Golden Age: A Novel 
by Gore Vidal.
Little, Brown, 467 pp., £17.99, October 2000, 0 316 85409 3
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... the manuscript ‘The Golden Age: 1945-1950’. Peter chuckles at the title, recalling something Randall Jarrell had written: ‘how, in the most glorious of golden ages, there would always be someone complaining about how yellow everything looked’. In the coda, Peter and his creator return to this question (they have been brought together to tape a ...

I adore your moustache

James Wolcott: Styron’s Letters, 24 January 2013

Selected Letters of William Styron 
edited by Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin.
Random House, 643 pp., £24.99, December 2012, 978 1 4000 6806 7
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... much. All the while, host Bill Styron looking a bit subdued as usual these days; we talked about Randall Jarrell’s possible suicide, Bill’s own depression. And I talked to him about William James’s own breakdown and his resuscitation through faith. What in hell am I doing with all these theatre types? Alfred Kazin’s journals, 26 December 1986 ...

Everything is good news

Seamus Perry: Dylan Thomas’s Moment, 20 November 2014

The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The New Centenary Edition 
edited by John Goodby.
Weidenfeld, 416 pp., £20, October 2014, 978 0 297 86569 8
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Under Milk Wood: The Definitive Edition 
edited by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud.
Phoenix, 208 pp., £7.99, May 2014, 978 1 78022 724 5
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Collected Stories 
by Dylan Thomas.
Phoenix, 384 pp., £8.99, May 2014, 978 1 78022 730 6
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A Dylan Thomas Treasury: Poems, Stories and Broadcasts 
Phoenix, 186 pp., £7.99, May 2014, 978 1 78022 726 9Show More
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... notes, whether the divergences are slips or hard-won new readings. Every edition is, to adapt what Randall Jarrell once said of the novel, a work of some length which has something wrong with it, but you do want to know what Thomas wrote. He was not a good proofreader himself. One of his oversights enjoys a mild celebrity: ‘Once in this wine the summer ...

Cool Vertigo

Matthew Bevis: Auden Country, 2 March 2023

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Poems, Vol. I: 1927-39 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 848 pp., £48, August 2022, 978 0 691 21929 5
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The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Poems, Vol. II: 1940-73 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 1120 pp., £48, August 2022, 978 0 691 21930 1
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... essays, lectures and reviews are often brilliant, their deus ex machina quality cuts both ways; as Randall Jarrell noted, readers of his prose are continually exclaiming ‘Now I see!’ and also ‘You’ve traded your soul to the devil for nineteen million generalisations.’ God as well as the devil probably has something to do with it. After his ...

A Dream in the Presence of Reason

Clive James, 15 October 1981

L’opera in versi 
by Eugenio Montale, edited by Rosanna Bettarini and Gianfranco Contini.
Einaudi, 1225 pp., £26.15
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Xenia and Motets 
by Eugenio Montale, translated by Kate Hughes.
Agenda, 45 pp., £3, December 1980, 0 902400 25 8
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The Man I Pretend to Be: The Colloquies and Selected Poems of Guido Gozzano 
edited by Michael Palma.
Princeton, 254 pp., £9.30, July 1981, 0 691 06467 9
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... heritage and combine it with what he has learned as a working artist. If you can imagine a Randall Jarrell less worried about the place of the superior mind in a democracy, you will gather something of Montale’s capacity to talk about art in general without being carried away by general ideas. He had an unerring ear for the dogmatic no matter ...

Adjusting the Mechanism

Colin Burrow: Robert Graves, 11 October 2018

Robert Graves: From a Great War Poet to ‘Goodbye to All That’, 1895-1929 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 461 pp., £25, August 2018, 978 1 4729 2914 3
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The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose 
by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge.
Seven Stories, 613 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 1 60980 733 7
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... him back to the mundane world in which cliché is cliché and overstatement is overstatement. Randall Jarrell once said that Graves was divided between ‘the logic-chopping regimental explainer’ and the poet who is ‘Baby, Lover, Victim howling in dreadful longing for the Mother, who bears, possesses and destroys’. Graves needed the ...

A feather! A very feather upon the face!

Amit Chaudhuri: India before Kipling, 6 January 2000

The Unforgiving Minute 
by Harry Ricketts.
Chatto, 434 pp., £25, January 1999, 0 7011 3744 4
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... and often deranged racial supremacist came from the more perceptive critics of a former colony: Randall Jarrell and Edmund Wilson, the title of whose essay, ‘The Kipling Nobody Reads’, tells its own story. Perhaps his ghost has done penance enough; time seems to have pardoned him for writing well and to have forgiven him his views. Ricketts’s ...

Some Names for Robert Lowell

Karl Miller, 19 May 1983

Robert Lowell: A Biography 
by Ian Hamilton.
Faber, 527 pp., £12.50, May 1983, 0 571 13045 3
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... and experience, indifference and exposure, in relation to the planet’s events, ideas and people. Randall Jarrell – valued by Lowell for his ability to see the man in the poem – spoke early on of Lowell’s lack of interest in people, and we need not think that the good poems about his parents, wives and children, and about historical ...

We must think!

Jenny Turner: Hannah Arendt’s Islands, 4 November 2021

Hannah Arendt 
by Samantha Rose Hill.
Reaktion, 232 pp., £11.99, August 2021, 978 1 78914 379 9
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... Constance could see that, in some real sense, the Rosenbaums’ lives were over,’ the poet Randall Jarrell – a close friend and frequent Englisher – wrote in his novel Pictures from an Institution (1954), in which Constance is taken to be an authorial stand-in, with Gottfried and Irene Rosenbaum as Blücher and Arendt. ‘His automatic ...

Follow-the-Leader

Colm Tóibín: Bishop v. Lowell, 14 May 2009

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell 
edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton.
Faber, 875 pp., £40, November 2008, 978 0 571 24308 2
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... another for almost thirty years, Lowell wrote to her: ‘I see us still when we first met, both at Randall [Jarrell]’s and then for a couple of years later. I see you as rather tall, long brown-haired and thirty I guess and I don’t know what.’ Bishop replied, once more seeking accuracy from him and a sharper sense of ...

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