Search Results

“... here is his ambition to write a new kind of English poem with what he described in his poem to Christopher Isherwood as a ‘strict and adult pen’. Elaborating on this, in his introduction to The Auden Generation, Samuel Hynes characterises the sought-after new art as follows: ‘Auden was urging a kind of writing that would be ...”

“... early years of the 20th century, a poetically-minded young man from the Scottish borders called Christopher Murray Grieve walked to Ecclefechan, the birthplace of Thomas Carlyle. It wasn’t a long way, but his trek was a gesture of hero-worship to one of the greatest Scotsmen and largest egos of the previous century. He toured Carlyle’s house and, as ...”

“... Anglo-Irish writers, whose ability to use the English language brilliantly masks an unease’ (Christopher Murray). On the one hand, there is something narrow about the requirement to produce unease as a passport to national identity and, on the other, it seems a poor reading of Incognita and the plays to represent them as serene and secure. The final ...”

“... Thomas, he was an eager perpetrator of New Romanticism. Watkins was at Repton and Cambridge with Christopher Isherwood, and makes a cameo appearance as the gullible Percival in Lions and Shadows. Nevertheless, he had little in common with the Auden generation or with Cambridge. His last eighteen months at school were, in retrospect, an idyll, but the course ...”

“... of ‘an important affinity’ between Marvell and the ‘gifted group of Ulster poets: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon’ – poets surely very unlike the Member of Parliament for Hull. He asserts that ‘many of these are creatively grateful to Marvell,’ and then suggests, even more extravagantly, that ‘it is likely that ...”

“... and innovative as that of any previous period.’ A shared perception of Bellow, Pynchon, Orton, Heaney, Fowles and Vonnegut as men of the moment or at least of the decade gives a common tone to the critiques of Bradbury and his team, and the slim volumes of the ‘Contemporary Writers’ series interact as the chapters of the Pelican Guide fail to do. But ...”

“... of Scotland’) and enjoyed the feeling of leaving certain readers out in the cold. (Seamus Heaney expresses a similar tribal exultation in his place-name poem ‘Broagh’ over ‘that last gh the strangers found difficult to manage’.) The attraction of dialect for poets is that it conceals as well as lays open: the private or parochial is smuggled ...”

“... to the torch of ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’. Paulin has learnt, probably from Seamus Heaney, how to put his sense of immediate provocation under the protection of natural and epic grandeurs. I’m surprised that the rhetorical procedure – which is just as questionable as Yeats’s – hasn’t been much reflected on. People plagued with ...”

“... yet another fine poet. (I’m taking it for granted that most people have a high opinion of Heaney, Longley, Muldoon etc.) Poetry-watchers will already be familiar with Paulin’s first collection, A State of Justice (1977). The Strange Museum marks, as they say, an interesting development. The poems here are less self-contained, more resonant and ...”

“... approach of Guy de Mallac and others, worthy as their pioneering studies have been. But Christopher Barnes’s ‘Literary Biography’, of which this solid work is the first of two volumes, will certainly become the standard and indispensable guide for students not only of the poet but of his age and literary milieu. The popular Western image of ...”

“... distinguishes between the cruel comedy of the former and the innocent humour of the latter, Christopher Hitchens quotes the unbeatable opening sentence of Waugh’s short story ‘Mr Loveday’s Little Outing’: ‘“You will not find your father greatly changed,” remarked Lady Moping as the car turned into the gates of the County Asylum.’ This is ...”

“... era, this kind of shoe – and its regional name – migrated south. In the New Yorker recently Christopher Glazek discussed the way hoodies became ‘elite’ and it’s a general vector of fashion that it plunders the slums for its styles, just as it’s a fashion photographer’s cliché to shoot, in graffiti-spattered rust-belt ruins, luxuries that ...”

“... a man who doesn’t want the child his wife is pregnant with, was published here last year in Christopher Middleton’s translation.* More recently, PN Review published Gert Hofmann’s ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, a short story translated by his son, about the return of a poet to his father’s house: the son begs the father for ...”

“... printed at the end. These show him at work, in reviews at least, on Lowell, Auden, Plath, Heaney, Ashbery and many more. He made his name as a specialist on Swift, where his monumental biography, completed in 1983, has told us more than any previous source about the man, his works and the age, to draw on a subtitle Victorian in its confident ...”

“... are otherwise uninterpretable. If we start presuming that, inter alia, Douglas Dunn, Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, Anne Stevenson, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and James Fenton are absent because Davie thinks they play no significant part in this history, then what are we to make of the omissions of J.H. Prynne and Roy Fisher, heroes of Davie’s earlier ...”