“... informed and highly readable on Tennyson’s modern standing; on the strengths and limitations of Robert Frost; and on critics (Yvor Winters especially, but also Eliot and Richards) whose quirks he sets off against their more authoritative judgments. Here he writes with an assurance that values are relative but arguable, that criticism, as he puts ...”

“... history of the universe for ever, whatever the nature of time, and that this is vastly important. Robert Frost comes a long way with Johnston, but is, in the end, even more strict: ‘There is no future life to defer to. I see all salvation limited to here and now.’ It makes the heart sink most strangely to consider those who do nothing but good in ...”

“... life of someone they are liable to end up disliking intensely. Lawrence Thompson was selected by Robert Frost to be his official biographer: after literally living with his subject, the biographer found the poet to be very far from admirable; and the work he produced bore clear evidence of this shift in sentiment. I spent more years than I like to ...”

“... of syntax and the personification of abstract ideas (another of Wordsworth’s special hates). Robert Mack, properly enough, sets out to be Gray’s advocate and though not all his vindications of individual poems are persuasive, his biography does add an important consideration to our understanding of Gray’s poetic values, and therefore of his high ...”

“... right: yearning, and its bafflement, is far more present than dejection, and there are echoes of Robert Frost in the ways his conversational prosiness rises to its own kind of lyricism. But, poetry and prose taken together, he does now seem very much of his period, standing for a kind of Reithian ideal of poetry that would inform, educate and ...”

“... are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright) as well as on 12 women writers. Toni Morrison (‘a child of Faulkner’) is given shorter shrift than she deserves and told off for being ideological, but some of these chapters – particularly the one on James Baldwin’s prophetic ...”

“... Lester Winter, a ‘polished, worldly, well-groomed’ young man who introduced him to the work of Robert Frost and Edna St Vincent Millay. Winter planned to become a dentist but had artistic aspirations too, and liked disparaging his family as avaricious philistines (his father was a successful dry-goods merchant). He valued Roth’s immigrant ...”

“... spangles of diamonds, / a sparkling cover for earth’) to the carnivalesque Scots of Robert Fergusson, who hymns ‘Caller Oysters’ and harangues ‘the Principal and professors of the university of St Andrews, on their superb treat to Dr. Samuel Johnson’. When Fergusson rounds on his former teachers he subjects their Scotophobic guest to a ...”

“... poets in these pages – the stellar cast includes Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola ...”

“... and Johnny” than to Tristan and Iseult,’ Spiegelman says, ‘but March had been a protégé of Robert Frost’s at Amherst, and knew his way around villanelles as well as around speakeasies.’ Frost’s name is a good clue, since The Wild Party’s best known lines echo, in a bleak, jazz-inflected register, one of ...”

“... A Frost Fair That old cliché: it seemed that time had stopped; and people we thought we knew came quietly out of the cold to meet us. Some of us thought it had something to do with the sun, and some, with how the planets were aligned, but later, when the river froze for miles, we took our first crazed steps into an air we’d never breathed till then, our strange companions smiling, as we pitched our tents and stalls, happy to see the flags and bunting, as if yellow was a thing they’d never seen before – and red, and green – as if, for them, the world was always white: snow on their lips and hands and a shine in their eyes that made us think of children like ourselves watching a magic lantern in the dark and falling, through slide after slide, into understanding ...”

“... frame could only take place after the foundation work was completed. The late cold spell brought frost, and frost was the bane of labourers who had to break through the foot or so of frozen ground to excavate the foundation and prevent frost heave before sinking elm piles and filling the ...”

“... lift each other in a tentative balance, was advanced both in Heaney’s contribution to Homage to Robert Frost (which he published in 1997 with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) and in such poems as ‘Weighing In’ and ‘The Swing’ (an Ulster version of Frost’s ‘Birches’) in The Spirit Level (1996), the most ...”

“... vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell intimated when he said that the two poets who meant most to him were Pound and Hardy. This might seem an unlikely double-act, yet more than half a century earlier Pound had suggested that Hardy be included in an anthology of Imagist poetry, and had ...”

“... weeks, of something that felt like democracy. I was a student when I first heard about the London frost fairs and, to begin with, I filed this pleasing idea in the central chambers of my imagery, along with Avercamp and van Goyen and the stories of polar exploration I had gathered as a child. By then, I had become a secret devotee of snow: my favourite poem ...”