Search Results

“... moss and earth, and find a stone-paved floor, the hazel bushes growing up through it. I want it to be a fort or an ancient lookout, in line with the crannog, the tiny island fort, in the estuary below, but the fact it’s not circular, the way it’s set into the lee of the hill, makes me think it must be an old stone ...”

“... were going to the fair. This is one of Beckett’s common modes, the comic spirit which the actor Jack McGowran, for example, could seize upon and exploit with such brilliance. Our rueful narrator muses to himself, intrigued and obsessed by the rigours of things, loving lists, locked into the mind’s peculiar capacity to ...”

“... first at home, then in England at a preparatory school, at Malvern (for one term only), and by a private tutor. So to Oxford. It was 1917. Lewis had volunteered, and he was in effect an officer cadet, soon in ‘barracks’ at Keble. He returned to Oxford after a brief spell on the Western front, where he was wounded, and at Oxford he stayed until 1954 ...”

“... The longer answer is that ‘in the early chapters of their autobiographies, Coleridge, Hardy, Yeats, Sassoon, Graves, Day Lewis, Spender and MacNeice have a good deal to say about the external circumstances of their family lives, but little about their internal or “writerly” lives.’ That is true, though some of these poets have left us evidence of ...”

“... F.S.L. Lyons, who first undertook this large-scale biography of Yeats, died in 1983, and after some vicissitudes the task devolved on Roy Foster, the professor of Irish history at Oxford. He has had access to Lyons’s notes and transcripts, invaluable to a successor confronted, as he says, with ‘a vast and unfamiliar subject ...”

“... In​ the fourth novel in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead sequence, the eponymous Jack spends a long night alone with his thoughts. ‘After a while,’ he observes, ‘light will reveal itself in a very dark room, not quite as a mist, as something more particulate, as if the slightest breath had lifted the finest dust into the stillest air ...”

“... and what they survey is the speaker of the main text. But they also suggest that Thady’s may be the better method – the fairy lore, it turns out, has a shrewdly pragmatic set of functions hidden within its rituals. Edgeworth remarks in one note that fairy-mounds often had riches of one kind or another concealed in them and the stories forbidding ...”

“... of a great house and a leafless tree. The Old Man declares that the house is still inhabited, by the ghost of his mother, heir to the estate, who brought destruction on it when she married his low-born, wastrel father. A light comes on in a shattered window. It is the spirit of the mother, condemned to relive in remorse, over and over again, her ...”

“... echoes the famous anti-Home Rule poster with its caption, ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right,’ while referring specifically to the critical reception of the ‘Field Day’ pamphlets (nine to date), which deal with questions – thorny questions – of identity and cultural heritage in Ireland. Edna Longley, McCormack says, ‘has been the ...”

“... rhymed and metred sonnets, culminating in a stunning version of the Ronsard sonnet that defeated Yeats: When you are old and lost in memory you might, seized by a sentimental fit, take down this book and blow the dust off it recalling: ‘Bosley was quite keen on me.’ What on earth were they looking for – Ted Hughes ...”

“... Recently I was teaching a poem by Yeats that has always reminded me of a stretched sonnet. ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’ has an octave of 20 lines and a sestet of 12 lines, but as Yeats was not interested in the sonnet form (he wrote only one sonnet), the comparison is probably subjective ...”

“... heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen began in a small and intensely lucid voice. At some point Jack Kerouac began shouting ‘GO’ in cadence as Allen read it. In spite of all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before – we had gone beyond a point of no return – and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. Ginsberg himself was ...”

“... the curious, concerned as much with process as with product, with drafts showing corrections by one or more hands and interestingly rejected alternative readings. Poems are still drafted, of course, and corrections are made, but they won’t show up in computer files, where all traces of a poem’s trajectory from conception to birth can ...”

“... We are told by the editors that some 30,000 letters of Marianne Moore survive, many of them extremely long, and that she sometimes wrote fifty letters a day. When she was young and not famous her family saved her letters; later on people kept some because she had become rather famous, and then a great many because she had become very famous ...”

“... It is the setting for Synge’s great drama The Playboy of the Western World, and has come to be associated with all that the Celtic Tiger was busy putting behind it: priestcraft, mythology, the Celtic Revival, folk wisdom, romantic nationalism, dancing at the crossroads, an English language replete with the rhythms of Irish. Synge, as it happens, was ...”