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“... has been on the defensive. The first move was to prefer to Gittings’s biography a later one by Michael Millgate, which is said to be (I haven’t read it) more temperate and more boring, at all events more compassionate. A second rearguard action is mounted by Peter J. Casagrande (he’s American, and thanks the General Research Fund of the University of ...”

“... in consciousness who have got to know the hard way where the limits of their theories lie. Donald Davie’s new sequence of poems, ‘Three for Water-Music’ (which fills the first third of his Carcanet paperback), refers not only to pleasant 18th-century entertainments by water, but to something like Yeats’s ‘words for music, perhaps’: or like ...”

“... Michael Frayn hasn’t published a novel for 16 years, but it’s immediately clear from his new one that he hasn’t lost the trick of it. After so long a lay-off some self-consciousness might have been expected, but Frayn has turned this potential liability to advantage by making it an essential part of his subject ...”

“... volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume added the name of Thom Gunn. Insofar as there has ever been agreement on the matter, the Movement has been taken to consist of these nine writers. They ...”

“... is because there is in the British literary climate something of that ‘philistinism’ Donald Davie says was characteristic of the Movement: ‘We would not entertain for a moment the idea that poetry could be, in some degree, or from some points of view, a self-justifying activity.’ Why should it be that, insofar as it’s possible to abstract ‘the ...”

“... is the 20th-century sensibility; hers is, charmingly but irrelevantly, stalled with, perhaps, Michael Drayton. In that once again, I dare say, the consensus is with ...”

“... art is quite another matter: altogether more ambitious and probing. Out of D.S. Chambers and Michael Baxandall and some Italian scholars Robinson measures up Pound’s ideas about the right relation between artist and patron against what we know of how patronage in fact worked in the ducal fiefs of Renaissance Italy; and when he deals with the closeness ...”

“... 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 ‘Running Bull’: All his weight’s ...”

“... Basil Bunting, and who else? In a tight spot Wall-ace Stevens appealed to the famous line from ‘Michael’, ‘And never lifted up a single stone’ (drawing from it unwarrantable inferences, as Robinson points out): but Stevens’s admirers know they are on safer ground if they appeal to Coleridge or Keats, Blake Or Emerson. It takes some nerve, in ...”

“... of those poets who make the writing of poetry into the subject of the poems they write,’ Donald Davie noted with some scepticism. ‘The commonsense view is that this drastically limits the importance and interest of what they write; and I think this is true.’ But Graham could conceive nothing more important or interesting:To be always alone is ...”

“... than the paratactic. In a later phase of the Modernist endeavour this would be recognised, so that Michael Edwards (Of Making Many Books, 1990) can say of Charles Tomlinson – in my view, quite rightly: ‘Tomlinson’s syntax is what makes his poems, linguistically, what they are ... in the poetry of our century, Tomlinson enacts the revenge of ...”

“... versions were hawked in vain round the University Presses of North America: it was left to Michael Schmidt and Peter Jones of the relatively unfunded Carcanet Press to recognise the moral and cultural responsibility. In fact, I find my sympathy goes out to Drummond very easily indeed. I must declare an interest, for I was associated with Virginia de ...”

“... to wonder whether it is the original author (in the following case, Harriet Monroe) or the editor (Michael Grant) or you yourself who must be getting giddy: ‘While stating nothing, it suggests everything that is in his rapidly moving mind, in a series of shifting scenes which fade in and out of each other like the cinema. The form, with its play of ...”

“... strangely, considering his origins in the neo-Augustan ‘Movement’ of the Fifties) Donald Davie, who kept the subject respectable, the interest alive. Michael Alexander suggests that ‘indifference and bafflement are today more common than hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work ...”

“... he was up to the job, did he think the job was up to much? His later work is full of what Donald Davie, thinking of Larkin, called ‘diminished expectations’. ‘No world/wears as well as it should,’ Auden writes. Love is ‘far too/Tattered a word’ to describe a casual but agreeable affair. Minor ailments warn against ‘the flashy errands’ of ...”