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In a narrow pass

Derek Hirst, 19 November 1992

A Spark in the Ashes: The Pamphlets of John Warr 
edited by Stephen Sedley and Lawrence Kaplan.
Verso, 116 pp., £9.95, October 1992, 0 86091 599 9
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... works of a pre-socialist exponent of liberty, John Warr, who in the months around the execution of Charles I in January 1649 urged sweeping legal and political reforms. In Warr’s eyes, ‘liberty was the antithesis of power,’ not of property as Winstanley the Digger might have maintained: ‘it represented both the restraint of the mighty by the law and a ...

Weathering the storm

Robert Blake, 18 October 1984

Lord Liverpool: The Life and Political Career of Robert Banks Jenkinson, Second Earl of Liverpool 1770-1828 
by Norman Gash.
Weidenfeld, 265 pp., £16.95, August 1984, 0 297 78453 6
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... delivered, as if in response to an order, to Jenkinson at a dinner party given by a mutual friend, Charles Ellis. The covering note implied that the posters were already up in the streets. It was an appeal for Tight lads who would wish for a fair opportunity Of defying the Frenchmen with perfect impunity ... ’Tis the bold Colonel Jenkinson calls you to arm ...

Every three years

Blake Morrison, 3 March 1988

Fifty Poems 
by Ian Hamilton.
Faber, 51 pp., £4.95, January 1988, 0 571 14920 0
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A Various Art 
edited by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville.
Carcanet, 377 pp., £12.95, December 1987, 0 85635 698 0
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Between Leaps: Poems 1972-1985 
by Brad Leithauser.
Oxford, 81 pp., £5.95, September 1987, 0 19 282089 3
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Eldorado 
by William Scammell.
Peterloo, 71 pp., £4.50, October 1987, 0 905291 88 3
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Disbelief 
by John Ash.
Carcanet, 127 pp., £6.95, September 1987, 0 85635 695 6
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The Automatic Oracle 
by Peter Porter.
Oxford, 72 pp., £4.95, November 1987, 0 19 282088 5
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Voice-over 
by Norman MacCaig.
Chatto, 64 pp., £5.95, February 1988, 0 7011 3313 9
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... in his bonsai garden. They might, it’s true, find it a bit too well-tended. From Thom Gunn and Charles Tomlinson to (in their new collections) William Scammell and John Ash, English poets have thought of America as a place to hang loose, an adventure playground of the spirit. Eldorado moves Scammell beyond the erudite, edgy satirical mode which has been ...

Walking in high places

Michael Neve, 21 October 1982

The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of 18th-Century Science 
edited by G.S. Rousseau and R.S. Porter.
Cambridge, 500 pp., £25, November 1980, 9780521225991
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Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin 
by Thomas McFarland.
Princeton, 432 pp., £24.60, February 1981, 0 691 06437 7
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Poetry realised in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early 19th-Century Science 
by Trevor Levere.
Cambridge, 271 pp., £22.50, October 1981, 0 521 23920 6
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Coleridge 
by Richard Holmes.
Oxford, 102 pp., £1.25, March 1982, 0 19 287591 4
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Young Charles Lamb 1775-1802 
by Winifred Courtney.
Macmillan, 411 pp., £25, July 1982, 0 333 31534 0
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... the view of posterity. The most extraordinary of these acts of intellectual banditry remains Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, of 1830-1833, where Lyell argues that geology starts with himself. So, an Enlightenment which believed in materialism and progress, but which was a scientific non-event. Strange. The great merit of The Ferment of Knowledge ...

With Slip and Slapdash

Frank Kermode: Auden’s Prose, 7 February 2008

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Vol. III: Prose, 1949-55 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 779 pp., £29.95, December 2007, 978 0 691 13326 3
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... Pauline epigraph: ‘I had not known sin, but by the law.’ He always had gurus – Gerald Heard, Charles Williams, Georg Groddeck, Homer Lane. Some quietly faded away, but with a few he enjoyed an enduring sympathy: Forster and Virginia Woolf, for instance, and Eliot, with the respect due to the publisher of his first book of poems, but staying well short of ...

Martian Arts

Jonathan Raban, 23 July 1987

Home and Away 
by Steve Ellis.
Bloodaxe, 62 pp., £4.50, February 1987, 9781852240271
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The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper 
by Blake Morrison.
Chatto, 48 pp., £4.95, May 1987, 0 7011 3227 2
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The Frighteners 
by Sean O’Brien.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £4.50, February 1987, 9781852240134
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... Land, the Cantos, Williams’s Paterson and Bunting’s Briggflatts were Louis Zukofsky’s A, Charles Olson’s Maximus, Allen Ginsbert’s Howl, the substitution of ‘breath’ for metre and gossip for metaphor. Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, with their sedulous imitation of the faux-naif Modernism of e.e.cummings, were just as much part of the ...
What is Love? Richard Carlile’s Philosophy of Sex 
edited by M.L. Bush.
Verso, 214 pp., £19, September 1998, 1 85984 851 6
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... on our range of sexual satisfactions. At first glance, the enterprise looks promising. Didn’t Blake and Shelley believe in free love? Didn’t Coleridge and Southey plan to establish a liberationist commune in America? Didn’t Byron and Hazlitt write with startling candour about sex? On closer inspection, things are more tricky. Whatever their views on ...

Shuddering Organisms

Jonathan Coe, 12 May 1994

Betrayals 
by Charles Palliser.
Cape, 308 pp., £14.99, March 1994, 0 224 02919 3
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... Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx has been one of the more intriguing literary successes of recent years, and one which raises some interesting questions about the always fraught and problematic relationship between contemporary novelists and the reading public they like to imagine themselves serving. Briefly, the situation is this ...

Umbah-Umbah

Jerome McGann, 22 June 1989

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century 
by Greil Marcus.
Secker, 496 pp., £14.95, June 1989, 0 436 27338 1
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... Gray’s Leaving the 20th Century, Abiezer Coppe, Georges Bataille. Oddly, the name William Blake never passes the lips(tick) of this book. Marcus uses as well the reminiscences and recapitulations of various people who were swept up in the storms raised by these people: for example, Henri Lefebvre, Michele Bernstein, Richard Huelsenbeck, Malcolm ...

Going Electric

Patrick McGuinness: J.H. Prynne, 7 September 2000

Poems 
by J.H. Prynne.
Bloodaxe/Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre, 440 pp., £25, March 2000, 1 85224 491 7
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Pearls that Were 
by J.H. Prynne.
Equipage, 28 pp., £4, March 1999, 1 900968 95 9
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Triodes 
by J.H. Prynne.
Barque, 42 pp., £4, December 1999, 9781903488010
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Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 
edited by Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain.
Wesleyan, 280 pp., $45, March 1999, 0 8195 2241 4
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... book and enables us to identify two important early influences: Donald Davie and Charles Olson. The rest of his work has appeared from small presses and in little magazines. It has been regular and prolific: more than two dozen books or pamphlets to date, of which two – Pearls that Were and Triodes – appeared last year after the ...
A Word from the Loki 
by Maurice Riordan.
Faber, 64 pp., £6.99, January 1995, 0 571 17364 0
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After the Deafening 
by Gerard Woodward.
Chatto, 64 pp., £7.99, October 1994, 0 7011 6271 6
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The Ice-Pilot Speaks 
by Pauline Stainer.
Bloodaxe, 80 pp., £6.95, October 1994, 1 85224 298 1
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The Angel of History 
by Carolyn Forché.
Bloodaxe, 96 pp., £7.95, November 1994, 1 85224 307 4
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The Neighbour 
by Michael Collier.
Chicago, 74 pp., £15.95, January 1995, 0 226 11358 2
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Jubilation 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Oxford, 64 pp., £6.99, March 1995, 0 19 282451 1
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... to the success of Northern Irish poetry during the last twenty-five or thirty years. Ever since Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion gave the primacy of this work semi-official status in The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary British Poetry, the question has been what gives Northern Irish poets their edge. Many reasons have been advanced for the ...

You are not Cruikshank

David Bromwich: Gillray’s Mischief, 21 September 2023

James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire 
by Tim Clayton.
Yale, 400 pp., £50, November 2022, 978 1 913107 32 1
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Uproar! Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London 
by Alice Loxton.
Icon, 397 pp., £25, March, 978 1 78578 954 0
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Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps and Spectres 
by Joseph Monteyne.
Toronto, 301 pp., £49.99, June 2022, 978 1 4875 2774 7
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... is likely to tell the whole story. Hence Gillray’s serial return to certain characters – Charles Fox, Napoleon, George III, the Prince of Wales, Burke, Sheridan and Pitt. The motive, the posture, the degree of deplorable wheedling would shift even as the character stayed the same.An earlier biographer, Draper Hill, judged that Gillray had ‘lifted ...

Preventive Intercourse

Michael Mason, 22 October 1992

Predicaments of Love 
by Miriam Benn.
Pluto, 342 pp., £35, September 1992, 0 7453 0528 8
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Love in the Time of Victoria 
by Françoise Barret-Ducrocq, translated by John Howe.
Verso, 225 pp., £24.95, August 1992, 0 86091 325 2
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... Benn had tackled two generations of remarkable Drysdales and their partners: George, his brother Charles Robert, the latter’s mistress and intellectual colleague Alice Vickery, their son Charles Vickery Drysdale, and his wife Bessie. And when I saw the proofs I realised that she had indeed researched her subject ...

‘I love you, defiant witch!’

Michael Newton: Charles Williams, 8 September 2016

Charles Williams: The Third Inkling 
by Grevel Lindop.
Oxford, 493 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 0 19 928415 3
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... encounter, full of joy Unscheduled on the Giesen Plan, With, here, an addict of Tolkien, There, a Charles Williams fan.If Auden were on the circuit now, he’d still find plenty of Tolkien addicts, but he’d go a long way before stumbling on a Charles Williams fan. Charles Williams ...

Bard of Tropes

Jonathan Lamb: Thomas Chatterton, 20 September 2001

Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture 
by Nick Groom.
Palgrave, 300 pp., £55, September 1999, 0 333 72586 7
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... Chatterton could ‘do’ any poet from Chaucer to the recently dead Charles Churchill; and after his own death poets ‘did’ him. This stanza from ‘Bristowe Tragedie or the Dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin’, is a blend of the Spenserian antique and ballad poetry, a combination which uses phrases that are heard again in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: How dydd I know thatt ev’ry darte Thatt cutte the airie waie Mighte nott fynde a passage to my harte And close myne eyes for aie? ‘Half the poetry of the 18th century is probably written by him,’ a character says in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton ...

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