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“... Although​ during his lifetime F.T. Prince (1912-2003) acquired a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s possible influences on their early work ...”

“... Knowing and Judging’. Poetry, he wrote, is ‘a rite of worship or homage, and to be fit homage, this rite must be beautiful ... it is from the sacred encounters of his imagination that a poet’s impulse to write a poem arises.’ The Elizabeth Bishop who likened knowledge to water, ‘dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free’, would probably ...”

“... dies the early death of romance – en poète, as the poet Burns put it with reference to his own fate – and his end is enveloped in the consequences of his supposing that he has lit upon some Chatterton manuscripts. Charles is touchingly done – a frail unpublished poet kept going by his wife and son (the wife is called Vivien, presumably by ...”

“... traditionally eat bitter bread, but the narrator is more concerned to reflect than to rail against fate. The poem has something of Ovid’s sadness in the Epistolae ex ponto, except that Johnston is not being sorry just for himself. He is bent on understanding misunderstanding – the tragedy of incomprehension which has brought Japan to war against the ...”

“... the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.’ It was Alfred Jarry, the prince of iconoclasts, who first suggested to Marinetti how much a well-aimed punch or slap could achieve. His 1896 play Ubu Roi, with its famous opening neologism – ‘Merdre’ – had caused the kind of scandal that long poems about the sea and the ...”