“... 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 ...”

“... from Brides of Reason (1955). As in Davie’s ‘Dream Forest’, Pushkin is taken as a model, a poet Who recognised no checks Yet brooked them all – a mind Molten and thereby fluent, Unforced, easily strict. In this didactic poem the speaker is professional, drawing his comparisons with rehearsed casualness: In the matter of Pushkin, Emily Brontë Is ...”

“... omits the work of more recent Miltonists. On Spenser, the characteristic brief, Is he a living poet? yields, predictably, the answer no. Occasionally Robson seems to hanker briefly after post-Leavisite explanations for some of the curious things Spenser does. Perhaps valuable clues are hidden in other arts, or in arcane learning, iconography or ...”

“... I can heal these father’s wounds: your family has fed no grave, all your people are alive. Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray My friend the poet, Matthew Sweeney, is certain he is dying. This is a conviction he has held without remission, since 1952 when he first saw the light, in its grey Irish version, in ...”

“... Roffman​ ’s superb biography of John Ashbery’s early life concludes with a photograph of the poet striding towards the camera. He is a tallish, handsome young man. The photograph was taken in the autumn of 1955 when he was 28, shortly after he arrived in Montpellier to begin his Fulbright Fellowship. He looks to have the world at his feet. Earlier that ...”

“... to the rebel songs, a paradigmatic encounter recurs. Up on a hill, or down by the glenside, the poet meets a woman who celebrates Ireland’s pastand speaks of national redemption. This emblematic figure, often glimpsed in a vision or ‘aisling’, can be a glamorous maiden awaiting her Stuart prince, but she also appears as the ‘poor old woman’ of the ...”

“... If we are allowed ‘Trying to talk with a man’, everything vehement, and lesbian, from the poet’s last decade has been suppressed. All this matters because compilation is expensive when there are royalties to pay. Volumes like the Faber Book can’t appear often, and those that establish themselves must modify taste, or betray it. Innocent browsers ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... Fleece. Boswell’s Johnson, the great hero of letters, enlists the boy in an endorsement of the poet’s power and a pagan search for a prize which has biblical (or Miltonic) resonance: the natural human desire for knowledge, so powerful that anyone would give what he had to obtain it. The aftermath of the Greenwich trip exemplifies some of Johnson’s ...”

“... in the second of these stanzas, there is a hint of the ‘Epistle to Arbuthnot’, in which a poet who had blethered in verse as a child, ‘lisp’d in numbers’, is bothered by poets who are poor, miserable and mad, who amount to nothing. For the purposes of wit, the Habbie Simpson stanza form, used in ‘The Vision’, is a vehicle which can on ...”

“... Johnson. ‘I’m like a baby in the dark,’ he explained to Henry Treece, an Apocalyptic poet who wrote the first critical book about him, and with whom Thomas had a long and revealing correspondence. Being infantile was useful as a would-be disarming way of acknowledging his worldly incompetence: ‘These apologies, we both know, are child’s play ...”

“... Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since Martin’s, Bate’s should finally disprove Dickens’s dismissal of it ...”

“... was left ‘badly torn’. They called the baby Gavin after Gavin Douglas, the Scottish medieval poet and translator of the Aeneid, but neither of them was suited to parenting. Willa’s relationship with her own mother was difficult and she avoided contact with her handicapped brother. As a new parent, she kept a journal in which with ...”

“... in the title of Larkin at Sixty, 20 essays in celebration by friends and acquaintances of the poet. Many of the contributors are writers themselves. Kingsley Amis’s reminiscences of a 40-year-friendship have an effortless interest which is met at more intensity in his own best novels; Gavin Ewart’s affectionate ode is almost ideally deft; Alan ...”

“... sends the wrong message to, as it were, a pre-intimidated readership, but it does catch what Seamus Heaney, a friend of his last years, called ‘the fish-dart of your eyes’. What I like about the edition is presumably what more austere critics will take against: its frayed edges, its incorporation of stray materials, the personal touch on the elbow ...”