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“... A Savage Dream I had a savage dream of destinations: A ten-foot fence, barbed, and on the wire Bones and the rags of prisoners. I had This dream, and woke in the cool English air. For My Father I learn the dead wear shoes. Their beards cast a last shadow. Kissing your face, I’m troubled by the roughness As when you came to tuck me up, Brushed my cheek with yours And tip-toed out ...”

“... them either, and yet they are right in thinking that childhood reminiscences make seductive books. Michael Schmidt was brought up in Mexico, and in his ‘not strictly autobiographical novel’, The Colonist, he turns with brilliant and painful concentration to his early years. No doubt he was in search of himself, and the making of what he now is – a ...”

“... also, since none of the poets under scrutiny was still alive at the time of Johnson’s writing. Michael Schmidt’s lives of the Poets is not at all like Johnson’s. Indeed, it is by no means certain that Schmidt has taken the trouble to investigate the famous works of his precursor. He seems to think that ...”

“... answers to its own implied questions. It is a work of strange, muted power and intelligence. Michael Schmidt doesn’t make entry to The Dresden Gate easy. For quite some time I was totally confused about how the various characters related one to another. And I never understood why these people with Spanish names in an unspecified South or Central ...”

“... Luther’s verse in order to make it intend (bestimmen) the future’. The first paragraphs of Michael Schmidt’s chapter on Pindar crisply delineate the difference between Pindar and the Pindarisers, which Hamilton may seem to blur. He also maintains that Pindar, though obscure for those who do not recognise his allusions (some alarmingly easy ...”

“... and finally, in 1977, as Professor of English at Exeter. He died in 1985, at the age of 56. As Michael Schmidt remarks in his preface, posthumous publication often has an air of piety about it. Not in this case. The pieces in The True Paradise have been sparely and efficiently edited by Salgado’s widow, Fenella Copplestone, who has had the excellent ...”

“... Jennings, who died two years ago, wrote too many poems. She was careless about her output, sending Michael Schmidt, her editor at Carcanet, ‘sacks’ of manuscript work to sift through and make into a collection. Even he seems occasionally to have lost track. His sympathetic and shrewd introduction records that her own favourite among her poems was ...”

“... trial. But his name comes in handily because it has been coupled with MacCaig’s. This was by Michael Schmidt, who pointed out that the sort of figurative writing associated with Raine, patented as ‘ludic’, had been practised by MacCaig from long ago. What Schmidt had in mind must have been something like ...”

“... seeming to assume that this knowledge will be common to all cultivated people. In the case of Arno Schmidt I am tempted towards no such subterfuges, partly because my ignorance of the man and his work, prior to my reading of Evening Edged in Gold, was total, partly because I imagine numerous other potential British readers will be in a similar position. Any ...”

“... A mystique of language for its own sake is the power source and the danger of Modernism. Michael Schmidt’s five American poets avoid (the best of their work avoids) both abstractions. The language has a life of its own and a life in relation to a recognisable real world, as in James McMichael’s ‘Compline’: Gudique is the chastening. She ...”

“... which has been endlessly discussed already? The need for these pieces is not exactly pressing: but Michael Schmidt, as those who have read him in PN Review will agree, is an extremely sensitive and discriminating critic of poetry, and surprisingly often within these rather forbidding limits he manages to say something fresh and valuable. On what for me ...”

“... career. Since his retirement from the Civil Service, publications have come more frequently. Michael Schmidt, his colleague on PN Review, has promoted his work; and Donald Davie, in one of those hot flushes that make his criticism so unpredictable and exciting, has declared Sisson’s ‘The Usk’ to be ‘one of the great poems of our ...”

“... sort of poetry that Fenton writes, and that is also written, in their various ways, by Fuller, by Michael Hofmann, Tom Paulin, Christopher 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 ...”

“... poetry list, its very successful co-operation with the Arts Council and the dynamic leadership of Michael Schmidt. Fortnight’s Anger has a melodramatic outline. The hero, Ken Fortnight (a law student), returns to the deathbed of his mother. He has a showdown with his father, the ‘Colonel’, and a reunion with his schizophrenic younger ...”

“... scene to Geneva, for reasons which I understand’; and the publisher of this book itself, Michael Schmidt of the Carcanet Press and of PN Review (of which Davie is an editor), is Davie’s double-goer off in the opposite direction (‘American by conditioning, but Mexican by citizenship and an English resident by preference’). Davie repeatedly ...”