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Arts feature

The nightmare of making films about poets

Craig Raine on the challenges of translating poets’ lives and work to the screen

21 May 2022

9:00 AM

21 May 2022

9:00 AM

Television and film are popular mediums. Poetry has never been popular. This is Sam Weller’s father in Pickwick Papers, when he discovers his son writing a valentine, alarmed it might be poetry:

Poetry’s unnat’tral; no man ever talked poetry ’cept a beadle on boxin’ day, or Warren’s blackin’, or Rowland’s oil, or some o’ them low fellows; never let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.

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