“... which led to this smack, whose sharp report not only unloosed the avalanche in which the poet Osip Mandelstam perished but also prepared the volcanic action which would begin thirty years later when his widow Nadezhda Mandelstam sat down to write her memoirs. In 1932, Alexei Tolstoi had presided over a ‘comrades’ court’ set up by the ...”

“... part to Ariel and the truth/meaning part to Prospero and proposing that every poem, indeed every poet, embodies a dialogue between them. Ariel stands for poetry’s enchantment, our need to be bewitched: ‘We want a poem to be beautiful, that is to say, a verbal earthly paradise, a timeless world of pure play which gives us delight precisely because of its ...”

“... heroism – in Islington. What might be floated is the notion that Ackroyd is the only Cambridge poet, the only person published by Ferry Press, to go public, to chance life in the front line. To be comfortable with the Braggs and the A.N. Wilsons. The role or mask of the poet, as hermit of language, was never a ...”

“... of the opening. We are told of her mother’s death, of the break-up of her marriage to the poet George MacBeth, of the obsessively repeated train-journeys in Italy with her infant son which were her way of fending off (or having) a nervous breakdown, and of her incipient relationship with the painter Robbie Scott-Duff (whose painting of her is on the ...”

“... All poets, she said, belong to one or the other of these categories, and it becomes clear that the poet with history – her examples are Goethe and Pushkin – is there for contrast, that her aim is to talk about, even justify, the existence of the poet without history. The poet with ...”

“... I am concerned casts a shadow over even the most illustrious name.’ Although the unillustrious poet privately acknowledged her debt to the review, she noted Larkin’s unease, ‘hence his shifting around a bit and coming out with the old charge of fausse-naïveté!’ Reviewing her again ten years later, just after her death in 1971 at the age of ...”

“... to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his account of R.S. Thomas as ‘primarily a religious poet, tormented by a sense of God’s absence, and berating his parishioners for using refrigerators, washing machines, and other modern evils’, or of air-headedness in his remark that Mrs Yeats’s ability to hear spirit voices represented for her husband ‘a ...”

“... to seize power for new voices in literature ... Since there were no clear protocols for a national poet, Yeats and Whitman were compelled to charm an audience into being by the very tone of their own voices, assuming a people in order to prove that they were really there. Whitman’s and Emerson’s efforts to invent America are regularly placed beside the ...”

“... of his life.As he grew​ older, McGahern did not become more tolerant of other writers. Of the poet John Montague, he wrote: ‘I see him and his work increasingly as a very frail, and sincere, fraud.’ In 1975, he wrote to Seamus Heaney about being ‘caught’ on a train by the ...”

“... already left Oxford and gone off to London, where they shared a flat. Michael, a young American poet, was a big influence on me at that time. Very few members of the committee were around in Oxford, although the thing was based in Oxford.How did you come by Colin Falck?Colin was brought in by Michael. He was a celebrated figure in Oxford, having, I don’t ...”

“... from Literature. Eliot, in ‘To Criticise the Critic’, explains that ‘just as the modern poet who influenced me was not Baudelaire but Jules Laforgue, so the dramatic poets were Marlowe and Webster and Tourneur and Middleton and Ford, not Shakespeare. A poet of the supreme greatness of Shakespeare can hardly ...”

“... returning student’s aspirations, and act as the catalyst of that self-discovery described by Seamus Heaney in The Redress of Poetry when he writes, ‘we go to poetry to be forwarded within ourselves’; literature, Heaney says, gives ‘an experience that is like foreknowledge of certain things which we already seem to be remembering’. I think we ...”

“... such future honours into account, the group included several knights, two Nobel laureates, two poet laureates, three regius professors, two masters of Cambridge colleges, as well as holders of the Order of Merit and other honours. Whether or not bringing together such a group of literary worthies seems the most obviously efficient way of producing usable ...”

“... tracks they leave behind).The Abbotsford thought of Karl as their Nachwuchs – the next young poet. But he went south to Cambridge, to Downing College and the throne of F.R. Leavis, and became eventually and primarily a critic and editor. There was an opinion that Leavis had strangled a promising nightingale. Certainly Karl’s first important critical ...”

“... and it assumes that the metropoles determine the way Standard English or French is spoken. Seamus Heaney, whose own voice had a marvellous music that became famous through the resonant recordings he made, thought about this throughout his work of criticism, and especially in an essay in Finders Keepers, in which he explores a phrase from his native ...”