Matthew Bevis

‘Well: the poems were lying about, & I did not quite know what to do with them,’ Thomas Hardy wrote to Edmund Gosse shortly after the publication of his first collection, Wessex Poems (1898). ‘It is difficult,’ he went on, ‘to let people who think I have made a fresh start know that to indulge in rhymes was my original weakness, & the prose only an...

Like Byron, Auden would reinvent himself from abroad, and his move to the US in 1939 was in many respects a resistance to what was expected of him. Although he had become famous for capturing the mood of a generation – left-wing, class-conscious – he couldn’t rest easy in the generation of a single mood. ‘Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings,’ he observed in a note to The Double Man (1941), and such feelings come to the fore when he’s on the move.

‘The moonlight​ drips on the parlour floor;/I shall go mad if no one wipes it up.’ So began E.V. Knox’s parody in the August 1921 issue of Punch.

And the moon dripped upon the floor like thisTwo years ago. The floor looked just the same.There is something very terrible about a floor.

Who, if presented with this parody today, would be able to name the figure that inspired it?...

Charles​ Wright’s Oblivion Banjo – published in advance of his 85th birthday (Farrar, Straus, £20) – is somewhere between a Collected and Selected and begins with a homage to Ezra Pound:

Today is one of those daysOne swears is a prophecy:The air explicit and moist,As though filled with unanswered prayers

This sounds like the day everything started for Wright. After...

When i saw​ Kingdomland (Faber, £10.99) up in lights on its yellow-orange cover, the word conjured up visions of a travelling fairground, dodgily yet enticingly going to seed. Even after I learned that the term is an old name for Rachael Allen’s home county of Cornwall, I didn’t feel my first impressions were wholly misplaced. Kingdomland is Allen’s first collection...