“... selection of the poet’s oeuvre. Formally, Wordsworth’s life has been written for our time by Mary Moorman, in her detailed two-volume biography (1957 and 1967). But her effort has over the last twenty years been paralleled and supplemented by Jonathan Wordsworth, who operates in an area between textual scholarship and literary biography, using the ...”

“... a woman to try to enter the patriarchal literary tradition. Emily Dickinson cowering in her room, Mary Shelley trying to work between pregnancies, Kate Chopin hounded out of print, Harriet Beecher Stowe writing with one hand while holding a baby with the other: these women tell the story that the feminists are trying to tell. But Cather? If anything, she ...”

“... verse the same Biblical punning is more heavy-handed, as in the jingle about ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Mary Jane’ of the Salvation Army, who ‘tumbled off the platform in the station/And was cut in little pieces by the train’. Mary Jane, the train is through yer:         Hallelujah. Hallelujah! We will gather up ...”

“... in his bath-robe pocket. Then he walked back into the house, entered the bedroom of his old nanny, Mary, still holding the shotgun, and ordered her to make one of the lemon meringue pies she used to bake him as a child. Moore imagines the scene, with Mary at the stove, her father at the kitchen table: She would have pared ...”

“... of their judgments. He is at the same time the lonely outsider commemorated by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and (more cannily) Wordsworth. David Fairer maintains that their Wertherisation of Chatterton’s alleged suicide concentrated the Romantic poets’ minds on their own social isolation, on the necessary dissidence of the poet’s task and the short time ...”

“... to argue how far these ‘translations’ established his reputation or led to misrecognitions. Mary Lago’s Imperfect Encounter (1972) is one gate-of-entry into these problems of mismatch between the expectations of Western Orientalism and of Eastern Occidentalism, both of which Tagore confounded. Edward John Thompson (1886-1946) was then an educational ...”

“... to his French translator that he had never spent much time in Shropshire), John Clare, A.A. Milne, Shelley, Blake, Eliot (Macavity, not Prufrock) and – thanks to Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes’s Rattle Bag, and Geoffrey Grigson’s anthology Unrespectable Verse – a swarm of lesser-known poets.Among these has been Charles Causley, whose hard-bitten classic ...”

“... visitors are mostly invalids. Death is the resident.”’ The Taylors became friends with Percy Shelley, the poet’s only surviving son, who had built Boscombe Manor, a grand pile with pillared porticoes that stood not far from the beach. Shelley kept his father’s dried heart in a box. It was said to have been plucked ...”

“... impossible to pin tears down.’ Dixon directs the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. Keats might have thought this rather like a Department for Unweaving the Rainbow. Dixon is no dry-eyed Dryasdust. He confesses that he himself is liable to weep at operas and soap operas, at the triumphs and disasters of Wimbledon and ...”

“... intellectual tact is such/That it seems to feel truth, as one’s fingers do touch,’ while Mary Russell Mitford wrote of his theatre reviews: ‘I could not help reading them altogether; though so much of Hazlitt is rather dangerous to one’s taste, rather like dining on sweetmeats and supping on pickles. So poignant is he, and so rich, everything ...”

“... with the non-human energies’ as a key to Meredith, which makes him something like the Shelley of ‘Mont Blanc’ or ‘Ode to the West Wind’, except that a mountain or a wind in Shelley is always more than just a mountain or a wind – it is an embodiment of Power, the spirit of revolution, a dream of ...”

“... them, and for that reason his apostasy was the most distressing. It’s hard to imagine Percy Shelley taking the trouble to write a poem to fluent, facile Southey or even brilliant, underachieving Coleridge (Mary Shelley’s claim that ‘O! there are spirits of the air’ is about him is very doubtful). But ...”

“... cells, so tragically tidy, but with books in them. In one I found a translation of Dante, and a Shelley. Strange and beautiful it seemed to me that the sorrow of a single Florentine in exile should, hundreds of years afterwards, lighten the sorrow of some common prisoner in a modern gaol, and one murderer with melancholy eyes – to be hung they told me in ...”

“... Coleridge and George Combe.’ Later Edward read her a passage from an essay on the imagination by Shelley; after lunch (‘plucked pigeons laid on a bed of beef steak and baked in puff pastry’) they went out for a walk and stopped ‘a good while’ by a swing – ‘Mr L sent me very high; Mrs L looking on.’ Mrs L was then called away and Edward and ...”

“... being woken to the rightness of their hyperbole when I found them misquoted in Paul Foot’s Red Shelley, where they become, even in ‘corrected’ editions, Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive And to be young was very heaven. Gone is the intoxicated youthful illogic, by which even ‘bliss’ can be trumped. That ‘And’ as we turn into the new ...”