“... kind Marinetti and the Futurists had in mind. Neither does it have the fine-tuned punchiness of Auden’s ‘Night Mail’, a masterclass in how to make reliability both comforting and somehow gripping. One of the reasons for the dynamism of the Auden poem is the driving verbs that power the lines along; Cunard’s poem ...”

“... and Easter-Day, probably written under persuasion from his wife, managed to teach W.H. Auden the sparkling metric of his New Year Letter (sometimes wrongly described as ‘Augustan octosyllabics’); and the over-long, over-dense rather boring Fifine at the Fair, one of the late narrative poems, in some extraordinary way strikes notes that make it ...”

“... you and I can get together any time.’ After meeting Madame Chiang and her husband when he and Auden were visiting China to report on the war with Japan, Christopher Isherwood wrote that she can become at will the cultivated, Westernised woman with a knowledge of literature and art; the technical expert, discussing aeroplane engines and machine-guns; the ...”

“... itself Supertramp in homage to his autobiography. But present-day readers seem to feel much as Auden did, when he took up Davies for a few weeks as a schoolboy, ‘without finding what I really wanted’. The copy of Later Days I looked at in the London Library (most of his works now being out of print) is full of exasperated marginalia ...”

“... Reid and others. Certainly the romantic rhetoric that is second nature to Larkin, as to Auden, Yeats and Eliot, has no place in their poetic repertoire. It once seemed so ‘natural’, but beside their literariness and air of non-communication it now seems impossibly old-fashioned. It is difficult, of course, to be positive about these ...”

“... bohemians, English literary modernism didn’t weather all that well. With the arrival of Auden, Isherwood, Orwell and others, realism was soon back in the saddle, and it is this history that accounts in part for the marginalising of the movement that is so striking in Taylor’s study. Extraordinarily, he seems to think that Ronald Firbank was a ...”

“... too. It is now not only our poem, but the poem of Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats, Eliot, Auden. Only Robert Graves and Laura Riding saw through it; but to return with them to the Shakespeare of Donne and Marvell is to abolish the Shakespeare of Keats and Yeats. Malone’s edition, of course, had a more problematic consequence for Shakespeare: it had ...”