“... would lose all flavour. We know about the Victorian neglect of Pope, the 20th-century discovery of Donne, the ups and downs and ups of Tennyson. Perhaps we should cultivate a degree of scepticism as regards literary fashions, rather than confirming or fostering them and adding to the natural impetus of change and innovation; it is continuance that needs ...”

“... lyric poetry in the period. Even Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, all of them monuments of Elizabethan verse, were initially conceived as coterie literature: the poet was writing for an audience he knew. Donne refused to allow his lyric poetry to be published in ...”

“... to do without ‘misogynist satire, self-congratulation, smut’. He has left these to the other John, whose anthology is bold, noisy, rude, aggressive and full of itself, all of which things love can be, too, given half a chance. Neither editor is taking any chances, though. Fuller’s book, which has a long and elegant introductory essay, is an ...”

“... Benlowes was a devotee of the far-fetched conceit, in the by now degenerate tradition of Donne, perhaps with some input from the smoother baroque concettismo of Marino and his followers. (On the evidence of some of his delightful earlier poems I had privately awarded Craig Raine an honorary position in the company of the marinisti.) Marino produced ...”

“... sought to re-appropriate texts rediscovered and liberated during the Twenties. Thus, the poetry of Donne, which had been considered ‘defiant, though evasively so, against the authorities of both Church and State’, was now being reclaimed for orthodoxy. Donne, T.S. Eliot maintained, was no sceptic. Empson saw the ...”

“... In 1978 Terry Eagleton wrote an essay on John Bayley in the New Left Review. It is a ritual excoriation of that most tactful of ‘liberal humanist’ critics, punctuated with predictable sneers about ‘a view of life from the Oxford senior common room window’ and how Bayley’s criticism prizes a liberal disorder that depends on a conservative order ‘within which the gentleman may wear his art and opinions lightly ...”

“... has now disappeared to be replaced by another, this time by the succeeding general editors, John Barnard and Paul Hammond. They claim fidelity to Bateson except where he has come to seem fallible. For instance, he insisted on modernising spelling and punctuation; but why modernise Browning, and why meddle with Marvell’s punctuation, which is important ...”

“... No man is an island; unless, Donne might have added, he becomes a whale: ‘Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were.’ But even if the whole feels the loss of a part, the part may not feel the loss of the whole ...”

“... with a hand on his penis, as in Veronese’s Holy Family with St Barbara and the Infant St John in the Uffizi, and in at least twenty other paintings of the Cinquecento – ‘a gesture unknown to devotional art before or since’, and later deplored. Steinberg has a long and brilliant excursus on bowdlerism, the practice of eliminating or toning down ...”

“... in his Ciuile Conuersation (1586), simply part of his master; and ‘to be no part of any body’, John Donne wanly observed – having failed to secure a place to which he had ‘submitted himself’ – was ‘to be nothing’. By the same token, the public identity of a lord was dependent on his retinue of servants, whose principal function was to ...”

“... turning on a pound of flesh.The pound of flesh brings us in sight of that ‘Tunne of Man’, Sir John Falstaff. I’ve been arguing that, throughout Shakespeare’s developing power of characterisation, the physical has a special place: from Crab the dog to Richard Crookback, then to Bottom, then to the magnificently delineated yet isolated Shylock, and ...”

“... and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in suburban comfort. Graves lived from 1919 to 1921 in Dingle Cottage at the bottom of Masefield’s garden. I walk my dog past the cottage quite often. It’s set down in a marshy hollow which has a faint air of primal ...”

“... terms of Anglican tradition. There is nothing Elizabethan about them, nothing of the sharpness of Donne or the mysterious sweetness of Herbert. He does not think in his poems, as they did or seemed to do; he does not even ruminate, as Philip Larkin so impressively does in his poem ‘Church Going’. But why should he? His faith is in the ongoing power of ...”

“... close of World War II. He attended Harvard, where he began a close friendship with his classmate, John Ashbery. After a year (1950-51) in Michigan writing and translating poetry, he moved to New York, where he rejoined his Harvard friends and their friends – among them the poets Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social ...”

“... The iterative wit of the phantom bibliography is at work in the best-known early English example: John Donne’s Catalogus librorum aulicorum incomparabilium et non vendibilium, or The Courtier’s Library of Rare Books Not for Sale. Unpublished until 1650, Donne wrote the text between about 1603 and 1611, and it ...”