Poetry
Flaubert, snow, poverty, rhythm … the random musings of Anne Carson
It is thrillingly difficult to keep one’s balance in Carson’s topsy-turvy world as she meditates on a wide range of subjects in poetry, pictures and prose
The real problem with ChatGPT is that it can never make a joke
When Andy Stanton commands the AI program to tell him a story about a blue whale with a tiny penis, the result, as it unfolds, drives him a bit insane
An obituarist’s search for the soul
Snatches of memoir, poetry and observation from a writer whose main preoccupation is recording the lives of others
The changing face of Ireland
A dead poet’s dangerous aura continues to haunt his daughter and 23-year old granddaughter in this story of an unhappy family set in rapidly changing Ireland
Tangled threads
The painted-over figure of Baudelaire’s muse eventually emerging from Courbet’s great canvas provides one of many haunting images in this complex novel
The illiterate poet who produced the world’s greatest epic
With its carefully calibrated sense of time, the Iliad is clearly the work of a single man and not a ‘rolling snowball’ of different contributions, argues Robin Lane Fox
The making of a poet: Wilfred Owen’s ‘autobiography’ in letters
How, between 1911 and 1917, Owen became the dazzling poet we know and love is the story told in Jane Potter’s new edition of his selected letters
The lonely passions of Emily Hale and Mary Trevelyan
Tom Williams describes how two women’s hopes of marrying T.S. Eliot came to nothing
In the footsteps of the Romantic poets
Shelley, walking as a boy through his ‘starlight wood’, looking for ghosts and filled with ‘hopes of high talk with…
A poet finds home in a patch of nettles
Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…
The sad, extraordinary life of Basil Bunting
Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out…
Hearing Percy Bysshe Shelley read aloud was a revelation
Last week I heard the actor Julian Sands give a virtuoso performance of work by Percy Bysshe Shelley to mark…
‘That little venal borough’: a poet’s jaundiced view of Aldeburgh
‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England,’ E.M. Forster declared in a radio broadcast in May 1941, but…
Letters: Who’s responsible for Putin’s rise if not Russians?
Russian misrule Sir: Your editorial (‘Sanction Schroder’, 21 May) laments that western sanctions may be harming ordinary Russians, given that…
Is T.S. Eliot’s great aura fading?
Cracks are beginning to appear in T.S. Eliot’s once unassailable reputation, says Philip Hensher
Quietly devastating: Benediction reviewed
Terence Davies’s Benediction is a biopic of the first world war poet Siegfried Sassoon told with great feeling and tenderness.…
The nightmare of making films about poets
Craig Raine on the challenges of translating poets’ lives and work to the screen
A pure original: the inventive genius of John Donne
John Donne sounds like nobody else, and his poems invite us to feel that we might know him, says Daniel Swift
Bono's 'poem' was an insult to the craft of verse
‘Poet’, said Robert Frost, ‘is a praise-word’. So it is. That explains in part the unabashed delight with which Colm…
This be the curse: Philip Larkin’s big problem
Philip Larkin’s big problem
The making of a poet: Mother’s Boy, by Patrick Gale, reviewed
Charles Causley was a poet’s poet. Both Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin considered him the finest candidate for the laureateship,…
The delicate business of writing poetry
Living, as Clive James put it, under a life sentence, and having refused chemotherapy, I find I respond to the…
The National has become the graveyard of talent: Manor, at the Lyttelton, reviewed
Somewhere in the wilds of England a stately home is collapsing. Rising floodwaters threaten the foundations. Storms break over the…
How we rediscovered the charms of haiku
They got me through the past year