Poetry
Poet as predator
Craig Raine says that Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised biography of Ted Hughes gets it wrong on every level
Lines of beauty
David Jones (1895–1974) was a remarkable figure: artist and poet, he was a great original in both disciplines. His was…
Indiscreet astronaut
Among my more bohemian friends in 1980s London, Brion Gysin was a name spoken with a certain awe. He was…
Loose women
Late Night Woman’s Hour has created a Twitter storm with its twice-weekly (Thursdays and Fridays) doses of ‘mischievous and unbridled…
These I have loved
In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks…
Idolising Ida
Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old…
Poetic injustice
‘Why do another translation of Homer?’ Richmond Lattimore asked in the foreword to his own great translation of the Iliad…
Reducing poetry to a science
Is it possible to tell a good poem from a bad one? To put the question another way: are there…
‘What will they do when I am gone?’
Edward Thomas was gloomy as Eeyore. In 1906 he complained to a friend that his writing ‘was suffering more &…
Home and away
An extraordinary black-and-white photograph of a young black boy taken on the Isle of Wight by Julia Margaret Cameron in…
Low life
I’m such a constitutional lightweight lately that I’ve started looking on the website What’s On in South Devon for things…
Glad to be Grey
Great works of art may have a strange afterlife. Deracinated from the world that created them they are at the…
The Shading Out of Poetry by Deadline
Like old-time washerwomen floodwater is sousing trees and shrubs out on the drainage. Floating wrack dribbles seaward from their labour.…
The making of a famous serious poet
T.S. Eliot may have put much of his early life into his poetry, says Daniel Swift, but The Waste Land remains a marvellous mystery that defies explanation
Low life
I’m rubbish at public speaking and detest it. Even the thought of reciting an English poem of my choice at…
Galway
The Go Galway bus from Dublin sounds an unlikely pleasure, but it is both comfortable and punctual. There is free…
Dead poets’ society
In December 1817 Benjamin Robert Haydon — vivid diarist and painter of huge but inferior canvases of historic events —…
Still life
You might think it a fool’s errand to attempt programmes about art on the wireless. How can you talk about…
The making of a poet
A surprise! I took this book from its envelope expecting a fresh collection of Wendy Cope’s poems, and opened it…
On war and remembrance
There’s a plausible theory — recently rehearsed in the BBC’s excellent two-part documentary The Lion’s Last Roar? — that our…
Talking himself into madness
‘There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?/ They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,…
A long goodbye
Clive James on poetry, civilisation and the critical benefits of facing leukaemia
Poet, priest and life-enhancer
Hilaire Belloc was once being discussed on some television programme. One of the panellists was Peter Levi. The other critics…
The paradigm of a poet
We needn’t apologise for Philip Larkin any longer, says Peter J. Conradi. His place is unmistakeably among the greats
Doing the Woburn Walk
The Bloomsbury of the title refers to the place, not the group. The group didn’t have a poet. ‘I would…
