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“... Scotland to express his admiration. Now Carlyle met and disapproved of Lamb, Godwin, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review and Charles Buller were old friends, and Irving too, though Irving – now a popular preacher absorbed in miracle cures and speaking in tongues (‘hoo-ing and ha-ing’) – was making Carlyle increasingly ...”

“... a chance of active cultural participation, operating across time as well as across space. When William Cowper (who was related to two poets in this volume) contrasts the wicked Voltaire (publishing and public) with the virtuous country dame, ‘she never heard of half a mile from home’, he really wishes that women and the virtuous poor remain icons of ...”

“... enough to consider his debts to the Surrealists and the Objectivists, to Reverdy and Zukofsky, to William Carlos Williams and W.B. Yeats, and later on to the very Chinese and Japanese and Ancient Greek writers he translated, it is his actual poetry in its autonomous being, with its reflective clarity and its magically deceptive appearance of simplicity, that ...”

“... have to cool down. But at the time it was marvellous to have been young, says McNeill, echoing Wordsworth. Hutchins was the man for the moment, or a moment. His personal defects were considerable. Hutchins took up educational or moral causes without the necessary attention to detail. He was impatient and often high-handed. His famous wit was used to injure ...”

“... for a few hours in the library after the birth of her first child in order to read her beloved Wordsworth, even as a bodily inertia akin to Freud’s death instinct inexorably pulls her towards the nature morte of the novel’s title. ‘Rocks and stones and trees; I like the earth,’ Stephanie says in a later episode – her allusion to ...”

“... Victoria and Albert on their way to Burghley House, near Stamford. The great public poet, Wordsworth, who was also in Northampton, was another spectator. Succeeding Southey, he had been appointed Poet Laureate the previous year. Clare, afflicted by memories of poems, folk songs, books of the Bible, reports in newspapers, was everybody. His boundaries ...”

“... perhaps, these biographers often dress up speculations of their own as fact: that the young Wordsworth operated as a government spy, for instance, that Byron was a ruthless paedophile, or that Claire Clairmont in 1816 confessed that she had conceived a child by Shelley which he helped her to abort. For a variety of reasons, the life of Mary Shelley ...”

“... within a system of prosody that makes the movement of syntax more palpable, until words become (as Wordsworth called them) things, and the mouth is fed with sounds that are richly onomatopoeic. There may be deeper energies. The spread of information technology was supposed to end the Gutenberg era, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. We hang onto the ...”

“... is a caricature of the version of Romanticism represented most notably by Arnold’s defence of Wordsworth as the poet of feeling – as though he struggled to be behind the times. And as though he didn’t want his poems scrutinised in the way he might scrutinise a text: that is, for plausibility, the coherence of its logic. But when one is being true to ...”

“... most of the most outlandish things still lay ahead of him, and he was stuck in the Canary Islands, William Carlos Williams wrote: ‘Bunting is living the life, I don’t know how sufficiently to praise him for it. But it can’t be very comfortable to exist that way. I feel uneasy not to be sending him his year’s rent and to be backing at the same time a ...”

“... of younger English poets who had heard rumours of Black Mountain College, read their Pound and William Carlos Williams, cannibalised Donald Allen’s influential anthology, The New American Poetry (1960), but never experienced a prime specimen of this fascinating otherness. Where Dorn was exceptional, as Prynne points out, in a conversation recorded at a ...”

“... he said, ‘than I did from any professor.’ The Creeley of those years modelled his verse on William Carlos Williams, his sensibility on recent jazz (he listened to Charlie Parker while composing) and his fiction on D.H. Lawrence, ‘my own mentor, finally the only one I can have’. Creeley later claimed that he picked up his sense of line from the ...”

“... relics. Lamb’s books caught their roving eyes. After he left England and settled in New York, William Evans Burton stored his splendid collection in his house on Hudson Street; he found Keese’s auctions as exciting as the theatre. He was among the bidders on the Saturday night when Keese sold Lamb’s Chaucer, which he bought for $25.Together with his ...”

“... have these three nights sat up with him from the apprehension of his dying,’ he wrote to William Haslam two days before the end. ‘Dr Clark has prepared me for it – but I shall be but little able to bear it – even this my horrible situation I cannot bear to cease by the loss of him.’Severn meant no harm in packaging those five months with ...”

“... In Cakes and Ale (1930), William Somerset Maugham has Willie Ashenden – his narrator and stand-in – explain that, in reputation-building terms, ‘longevity is genius.’ He comes out with this idea while discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety ...”