“... as ‘great poetry’. Ireland has lately produced almost a glut of distinguished poets, including Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Michael Longley. Yet their audience is relatively small. What’s different about Heaney? Fennell has several answers extraneous to poetry, but he ends up highlighting the academic agendas satisfied by his ...”

“... idiosyncratic and contradictory way, he chose to do both. His reputation has suffered as a result. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry was first published in 1972, and written in California, where Davie had taken up a professorship at Stanford. With the Grain reprints the Hardy book in its entirety, along with a number of essays, directly or obliquely ...”

“... historical prudence is welcome, because it may well be that hysteria – this ‘Proteus’ as Thomas Sydenham called it in the 17th century – is never anything other than what we say about it, and that hysterics adapt themselves to doctors’ expectations and theories, thereby confirming them. This was the position maintained, notably, by Hippolyte ...”

“... his drinking bouts. Under the prosecutor’s eye he can be made to look like a less amiable Dylan Thomas. The merit of the stories and poems called in to excuse or justify such a life has also been questioned. D.H. Lawrence called ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ an overdone and vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both ...”

“... Book of English Verse, published a hundred years ago, revised in 1939, and followed in 1972 by Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book; of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, a brashly devolutionary challenger to the Norton Anthology of English Literature’s supremacy in the American textbook market; and, in the last month of the last century, of the ...”

“... Loy, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and two essays on Robert Duncan. He reprints his review of Helen Vendler’s book of contemporary poetry (published by Harvard in the US and by Faber in Britain), ‘an obviously worthless book’, for him, because it narrows the ground of American poetry, excluding the two extremes of Charles Olson (‘the poet who ...”

“... he became friends with Geoffrey Keynes. In Oxford, and although he came down with a mere Second, Helen Gardner urged him to do a B.Litt. and write a dissertation on Yeats’s manuscripts. Stallworthy had no interest in writing a dissertation; he stayed on for a fourth year in Oxford only to try for a Blue. (My jealousy is out of control.) Gardner arranged to ...”

“... least. Critics unimpressed by the psychodrama of Eliot’s Christianity, such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, much prefer Yeats and Stevens. And as a glance at any anthology of 20th-century British poetry will show, the prewar voices most audible today belong to Auden and MacNeice. From the maudlin Tom and Viv to Peter Ackroyd’s unauthorised Life and ...”

“... the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], ...”

“... he knew his literary career wouldn’t have taken off but for the patronage of Shaw and Edward Thomas; he also knew some thought him overrated, a ‘nature poet’ who had earned that tag by sleeping under hedges rather than the quality of his verse: I hear men say: ‘This Davies has no depth, He writes of birds, of staring cows and sheep, And throws no ...”

“... a ridiculous European import. Most successful American painters – Grant Wood, Reginald Marsh, Thomas Hart Benton and Georgia O’Keeffe – were then producing Americana, adding a 20th-century image of the United States to the work of the great Hudson River School painters of the early 19th, or of Thomas Eakins and ...”

“... can never escape. Prufrock and Other Observations has several poems named after names – ‘Aunt Helen’, ‘Cousin Nancy’, ‘Mr Apollinax’. It depends on what you count as individual poems (are the 1930s ‘Landscapes’ five individual works?), but the titles of roughly half the poems Eliot chose to publish in book form during his lifetime contain ...”

“... with Mephistopheles that makes grammar-school wet dreams a reality in the form of a fling with Helen of Troy; but instead of achieving world domination, Faustus dwindles into a showman who whiles away the time before his damnation providing harmless entertainment for kings and emperors. Piers Gaveston, who similarly enchants a king by ‘Sweet ...”

“... upon silence and Aeneid VI.’ In Yeats’s ‘Long-Legged Fly’ mastery is possible – Caesar, Helen of Troy, Michelangelo – because the mind can accept its conditions by sequestering itself within them: Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence. As for Aeneid VI, I assume that Harrison has in mind Aeneas’s meeting at last ...”

“... a kind of northern Eden, from which he has been twice excluded. The book ends with the 14-year-old Thomas leaving his beloved valley for the city and school. In fact, history, politics, had finally intervened, making the presence of Polish nationals increasingly uncomfortable in an independent Lithuania quarrelling with Poland over Wilno. But the valley was ...”