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“... It included a short, boisterous preface by Pound. Reviewing it for Poetry in 1934, William Carlos Williams called it a blueprint for ‘a new construction’, undertaken with an ‘irreducible minimum’ of means. The icy charm of those poems, 31 in all, one per page, along with their brevity and occasionally their flat refusal to make sense, asked much of ...”

“... up the dots, finds himself meagrely rewarded with an abstract design. In The Followed Man Thomas Williams does, as part of his enterprise, tell a complete, even a lavish story. Luke Carr, a writer, whose wife and children have recently died in an air crash, is summoned to New York to prepare a magazine article about a building disaster that has killed 20 ...”

“... 1640 to 1648 – on 20 April 1653 effectively ended the republican Commonwealth established after Charles I’s execution in 1649. It remains one of the most memorable and terrifying scenes in English history. Eight months later, Cromwell became Lord Protector. Under the Instrument of Government, devised mostly by John Lambert, his mercurial but talented ...”

“... receptive to both, but immune to the enervating forces of each. Other Traditions, a series of Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1989-90, is the poet’s most recent answer to the conundrum, and suggests that it is possible for an individual to consort with a tradition without becoming locked in an oedipal struggle or a fatal ...”

“... They also characterise ‘some works of English literature’, such as Godwin’s Caleb Williams and The Tempest, ‘which spring up periodically through the mainstream’ of English literary history. These are politic concessions, but they beg the main question: why should the general pattern of thought which such works exhibit go by the name ...”

“... with Black Mountain College – Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. Of all these it was Charles Olson who engaged most directly and continuously with the implications of Pound’s poetics. The Maximus Poems can he read as a massive attempt to heal what Olson saw as the fatal ...”

“... it was painted in Spanish Town, the colony’s capital; and that it showed a man called Francis Williams, about whom Long had written a whole chapter in his celebrated History of Jamaica (1774). Not only that, he says, but when Long was writing that chapter, he had this painting in front of him and was describing it. The dealer, Jack Spink, is delighted to ...”

“... the new maps that could only be made by sending men beyond the edges of the old maps. Glyn Williams’s Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage is an engrossing account of four centuries of exploration, as expedition after expedition tried to negotiate a course through the vast, multitudinous, close-set and ice-locked archipelago to the ...”

“... admonition (especially the last sentence) is what I try to hold in mind when I give my sense of Charles Tomlinson’s poetry. Those who have been aghast at the churlish reviews of Tomlinson’s Poetry and Metamorphosis – Charles Martindale, who protested at Tom Paulin’s review in the LRB, and Richard Swigg who many ...”

“... they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile simplicity is all,’ wrote Julian Symons.What no one in the symposium ...”

“... who also shot Polanski’s The Pianist, as well as Taylor Hackford’s glossy biography of Ray Charles. This is important, because the movie is mostly about the way it looks. It’s meant to be a political thriller – based on Robert Harris’s novel The Ghost (the film has that title in the UK) – but it feels as if the writer went home halfway ...”

“... little, or perhaps it’s the other way round. Elsewhere Auden quotes from one of his touchstones, Charles Williams, who writes of overwhelming yet undefinable moments, those in which ‘a hand lighting a cigarette is the explanation of everything; a foot stepping from the train is the rock of all existence.’ From the start, the Auden effect was an odd ...”

“... increase over two years.’ Crawl-mania would warrant a chapter to itself in any new edition of Charles Mackay’s Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Daredevil feats of kamikaze diving would often precede demonstrations of the new stroke: Deakin mentions that ‘Jack Overhill’s son, also Jack, used to perform 50-foot ...”

“... Charles Tomlinson has a poem called ‘Class’ about the Midland pronunciation of the first letter of the alphabet. In the last chapter of Some Americans, the poet tells how for a short time he was Percy Lubbock’s secretary at a villa near Lerici. In ‘Class’, he says he tried to pronounce the ‘ah’ of received English, but couldn’t and, because ‘I too visibly shredded his fineness,’ was released from the post ...”

“... In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes ...”