Search Results

“... at a new version of Thomas since the excellent Collected Poems 1934-53 by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud in 1988. That edition was based on the canon of works Thomas established in the Collected Poems 1934-52, which gathered, as he said in a prefatory note, ‘most of the poems I have written, and all, up to the present year, that I wish to ...”

“... Reading the Memoir gives tantalisingly little enlightenment as to how such tortured works as Maud or In Memoriam came to be. But Hallam Tennyson is the source for almost all the illustrative anecdotes and biographical narrative which subsequent writers are obliged to use. There will always be, it seems, areas of impenetrable obscurity. ‘Of Tennyson’s ...”

“... Elsie Tyler, who is alive, naive, confident of body, staunch of nature, and educable of mind. Ralph Linderman, who found the wallet, and Jack Sutherland, who lost it, vie for her, though neither as a lover exactly: Ralph, to set her apart from the city predators, there in her coffee-bar and in her shared rooms; Jack, to ...”

“... now teaching at the University of Minnesota and the couple spend a holiday in California, visiting Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and his wife, Jane, wealthy idealists seeking to set up a utopian community. The dialogue here strikes a number of false notes, with ‘trial’ used as a verb (a piece of organisational jargon not cited by the OED before 1981) and an ...”

“... figures who played one role move into another. It is in the very last chapter, after the death of Ralph Touchett, when Isabel embraces her aunt: She went to her aunt and put her arm around her; and Mrs Touchett, who as a general thing neither invited nor enjoyed caresses, submitted for a moment to this one, rising, as might be, to take it. But she was stiff ...”

“... it is not only in deadly earnest but soberly true. Compared, say, to the hero of Tennyson’s ‘Maud’, Meredith’s spokesman is fully aware not only of the complexity of his amatory situation but of his absolute need to rhetoricise it, in order to make the complexity itself stand out in bold relief, and be melodramatically visible. Posturing is needed to ...”

“... Thomas Carlyle, along with transcendental idealist philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Carlyle was Tyndall’s supporter at his wedding in 1876, Tyndall a pallbearer at Carlyle’s funeral in 1881.) To labour towards higher knowledge wasn’t exactly self-denial in this conception, for the prize was to be a hero, a great ...”