What a Mother

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Marianne Moore and Her Mother, 3 December 2015

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore 
by Linda Leavell.
Farrar, Straus, 455 pp., $18, September 2014, 978 0 374 53494 3
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... of Poetry, accepted five poems; in April 1915 two of her poems appeared in the Egoist, the paper Richard Aldington edited (‘I am so delighted to have them take me I shouldn’t mind if they charged me’); in August, HD invited her to come to London (she didn’t take up the invitation); and in October Alfred Kreymborg, the editor of Others, took five ...

We did and we didn’t

Seamus Perry: Are yez civilised?, 6 May 2021

On Seamus Heaney 
by R.F. Foster.
Princeton, 228 pp., £14.99, September 2020, 978 0 691 17437 2
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... which the book’s Irish reviewers weren’t slow to point out. In an enlightened spirit, Richard Murphy thought the point was that Ireland might be encouraged to shake off such atavism, the book freed ‘us from the myth by portraying it in its true archaic shape and colour, not disguising its brutality’. Other reviewers took the opposite ...

The Nominee

Andrew O’Hagan: With the Democrats, 19 August 2004

... Two sets of boots had flowers spilling over the tongues: L Cpl John Van Gyzen IV. 21. MA. Pt 1 Cl Gregory Huxley. 19. NY. The number of dead is mentioned on a board, but the figure ‘907’ is printed on a piece of paper that flutters in the breeze; every small gust allows you to see the number ‘906’ underneath. A heap of shoes stands by the path to ...

Hooted from the Stage

Susan Eilenberg: Living with Keats, 25 January 2024

Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph 
by Lucasta Miller.
Vintage, 357 pp., £12.99, April 2023, 978 1 5291 1090 6
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Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse 
by Anahid Nersessian.
Verso, 136 pp., £12.99, November 2022, 978 1 80429 034 7
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... doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. In a letter of 1818 to his friend Richard Woodhouse, Keats describes it like this:When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
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... and independence of mind. Out of that we get the poems of Yeats and the journals of Lady Gregory. Out of that, too, we get Sir William Wilde and his wife. ‘Of late years,’ Yeats wrote in The Trembling of the Veil (1922), ‘I have often explained Wilde to myself by his family history.’ Yeats recounted an old Dublin riddle: Question: ‘Why are ...