In the Châtelet
Jeremy Harding, 20 April 1995
François Villon: Complete Poems
edited by Barbara Sargent-Bauer.
Toronto, 346 pp., £42, January 1995,0 8020 2946 9 Show More
edited by Barbara Sargent-Bauer.
Toronto, 346 pp., £42, January 1995,
Basil Bunting: Complete Poems
edited by Richard Caddel.
Oxford, 226 pp., £10.99, September 1994,0 19 282282 9 Show More
edited by Richard Caddel.
Oxford, 226 pp., £10.99, September 1994,
“... Le lesserez la, le povre Villon?’ – Will you leave poor Villon here? – the poet asks in an appeal from Meung-sur-Loire, near Orléans, where he was detained at the Bishop’s pleasure, probably in 1461. ‘Epistre a ses amis’ reads now, in the light of so much scholarship, translation, loose-clad homage and general ventriloquism on the part of a wide and posthumous circle of acquaintance from Swinburne to Lowell and beyond, like a request to be left in peace – Villon is something of a cottage industry and the generator has been whirring fairly constantly beside the mallow patch ... ”