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“... He was a poet of a lost world. A hundred years ago, there were still Greek communities along the coast of the Mediterranean, in Asia Minor and in South-East Europe that have since dispersed or died out. I know a little about them since part of my family, on my mother’s side, are descendants of Greek merchants who were permitted to settle in Belgrade by the Ottomans in the late 18th century; they prospered, became wealthy and over time intermarried with Serbs and lost their ethnic distinctness ...”

“... can, on the actual material of the vital inheritance that unites us and divides us.’ The Gaelic poet he commemorates is Padraigin Haicead (1600-1654), and he provides a translation of a tribute from Haicead to a harper which might serve as an epigraph for the whole volume: Blessings on your head in a glowing heap for ever, beloved, as you grip the great ...”

“... oblivion: not too linear Nor yet too puffed and remote. Travelling not too hopefully, for such a poet, is better than arriving. Sense, however arduously made, is always trivial, and vulgar in thinking itself superior:                                                 Isn’t this ‘sense’ – This little of ...”

“... for Enright, ‘vulnerable to even the least malignant of ironists’, whereas for others of us (Seamus Heaney, for one, who recently incorporated the poem – in Robert Pinsky’s superb translation – into a fervent lecture on poetry and political witness), ‘Incantation’ is a poem to freeze the spittled irony upon the lips of even the most malignant ...”

“... Larkin’s literary executors, wrote a scholarly and comprehensive authorised biography of the poet, whom he had known well; it was subtitled ‘A Writer’s Life’. Motion informed his readers that some important ingredients of Larkin’s life were still unavailable, especially most of the letters written to Monica Jones, a lecturer at the University of ...”

“... digging in can be quickened by listening to other tongues, yet it is almost unknown for a poet to settle in a language – as distinct from an accent – learned after childhood. Only a few remarkable people have written with distinction in a language that was not their first. Native language matters more than native place. Robert Frost was a ...”

“... as a language we possess ‘more deeply and sonorously than most of the English themselves’, as Seamus Heaney said of Derek Walcott. One language has gone, and that means that the one we use now could fade too, slip and fail, as Mrs Rooney in Beckett’s All That Fall points out to Mr Rooney when he says ‘sometimes one would think you were struggling with ...”

“... complained, while to his colleague Gerald Howarth it was a case of ‘another probable Bolshie poet seeking to impose his frustrations on the rest of us’. Just as Harrison’s English teacher wouldn’t allow him to impose his low-life Yorkshire accent on Keats, so right-wing newspapers and Conservative MPs wanted to prevent him from upsetting viewers ...”

“... thy name is Samuel Johnson’), where the Doctor delivers infallible negatives on the poet’s work – what else should a Scot expect? – and the fine satire ‘A Poem in Praise of the British’, where the tatters of Empire drift through the dreams of ‘old pederasts on the Brighton promenade’.Barbarians (1979) marked two significant and ...”

“... Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of Doctor Criminale, we must suppose – reads from his upcoming work, ‘whose ending he seems not to know’. The publisher’s blurb laconically informs us that Bradbury lives in Norwich and ...”

“... the anthologies littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie. In the 1980s, the American poet David Antin charged that ‘anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed ...”

“... of Scotland’) and enjoyed the feeling of leaving certain readers out in the cold. (Seamus Heaney expresses a similar tribal exultation in his place-name poem ‘Broagh’ over ‘that last gh the strangers found difficult to manage’.) The attraction of dialect for poets is that it conceals as well as lays open: the private or parochial is ...”

“... who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices.’ But as a poet Thomas was a significant puzzle to Larkin. ‘I think there is no man in England now who can "stick words into us like pins” … like he can,’ he wrote to Amis in 1948, ‘but he doesn’t use his words to any advantage. I think a man ought to use good ...”

“... about being this Lowell. Only in the home of democracy, probably, could the personality of the poet as aristocrat be asserted today in this fashion. It is an irony which strikes deeper with each rereading, and the realisation of it comes each time to seem more important to the status and success of the poems. It is the regal touch. Life Studies are Lowell ...”

“... it. Call it stone-ice.’ His down-to-earth friend Cavegirl Judy says: ‘Don’t be such a darn poet, Bill, let’s call it bronze and be done with it.’) Human language consequently came to be seen as having been expanded by metaphor. In The New Science of 1725, Vico argued that the main figures of speech (which he reduced to ...”