Seamus Heaney has always doubted poetry – not as a philosopher might doubt reality, but as a rich man might doubt money. He feels not scepticism, but guilt. He thanks poetry for existing but...
Answer truthfully from your own heart: 1. Rewrite The Waste Land using only English words of one syllable. 2. Rearrange the entire Bible into two columns, one headed KNOWLEDGE, the other WISDOM....
In all of ancient literature there’s nothing quite like the Satyricon, a fragmentary autobiography of one Encolpius, who appears and disappears according to the hazards of textual survival....
The time is almost past when writers copiously provided the curious, concerned as much with process as with product, with drafts showing corrections by one or more hands and interestingly...
It was as a poet that Fred D’ Aguiar first won recognition, with his 1985 collection Mama Dot, set in the Guyanese village where the English-born D’ Aguiar was sent to be educated....
There may be only two writers, currently at work in America, who can bring themselves, unblushing, to use the phrase ‘drinky poo’. Two Wodehousian renegades. One drops the words, like...
Day after day in the course of October 1907, Rilke returned to the two rooms at the Salon d’Automne devoted to Cézanne’s memory. The letters he wrote to his wife describe his...
George Moore, ‘daring’ novelist and absentee landlord, sage and humbug of Ebury Street, seemed born to be insulted. ‘An over-ripe gooseberry, a great big intoxicated baby, a...
‘You can leave Bill, but Bill never leaves you,’ one young Microsoft refugee in Douglas Coupland’s microserfs muses on hearing that the chairman has got married on the Hawaiian...
The Scandal of Pleasure has all a good teacher’s virtues: enthusiasm, a contagious love of books and learning, and the ability to hold up three or four dissonant ideas for tender inspection...
Paul Celan was born in 1920 as Paul Antschel, to German-speaking Jewish parents in Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina: ‘a posthumously born Kakanier,’ he once said of himself...
A word to come lies in a little night where ash is falling. The word can’t be this ‘coffin’, lying in its candour, in its cinders. Inside, the poet’s too lazy in his death...
The first thing the literary world noticed about Dale Peck was his youth. Now 28, he produced the harrowing Martin and John (attractively published in Britain as Fucking Martin) at 25. Why do we...
A theory becomes ‘classical’ when it is thought to have been understood, which is to say left behind or constructively challenged. Where a theory is forceful enough, there is,...
Near the edge of town where the graveyard opens out under white sky, a girl stands on a wide porch, looking at the cottonwood trees, her fingers intertwined behind her head. A boy on a ship reads...
Staggering ashore, on Prospero’s island, Making a landfall, in Twelfth Night, Illyria, or the coast of Ireland – Caught, I would be indicted, So, as usual, the disguise Before...
Looking at the University of Oxford’s Informal Guide to the English faculty’s lecture list for Trinity term 1996, I find that the Professor of Poetry, James Fenton, will give a...
In her iconographic poem ‘Bleeding’ (1970), the American poet May Swenson presents a dialogue between a knife and a cut: Stop bleeding said the knife. I would if I could said the...