Jon Stallworthy is the author of several books of poems, one of which is A Familiar Tree, and of a biography of Wilfred Owen. He is Anderson Professor of English at Cornell University.
For Ramsay Howie
in memory of Bill Howie, 1892-1915 and Peggy Howie. 1908-1980
Another time, another place. Glossy as a conker in its cushioned case.
Lift and tighten the horsehair bow, shuttle rosin to and fro.
Hold the note there, that first note jubilant from the fiddle’s throat.
I
She remembered the singing. No...
‘Why should the parent of one or two legitimate poems make a public display of the illegitimate offspring of his apprentice years?’ Jon Stallworthy asks in the afterword to Singing...
Why did Louis MacNeice have to wait thirty years for a biography? He died comparatively young – aged 55 – and was outlived by almost everyone he knew: wives, girlfriends, classmates,...
Henry Reed was a sad man but a funny man, and his poems are funny or sad – often, as in the celebrated ‘Lessons of the War’, both at once. I first met him in 1965, in the office...
The Great War was the war of the great war poets. Was ‘the war to end all wars’ also the war to end all war poetry? The best part of Jon Stallworthy’s introduction to his Oxford...
The poet Blok once wrote about the ‘gloomy roll-call’ in Russian history of tyrants and executioners, ‘and opposite them a single bright name – Pushkin’. Quite true....
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.