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“... the intention is different. She never rejected first-person experience as a basis of her lyrics; Robert Lowell’s Notebook poems were an early influence (‘When Lowell relaxed into the sonnet form, he gave us a new kind of poetry notebook,’ she once wrote). In light of this, her poems’ fragmentary brevity suggests a kind of exploded sonnet, and they ...”

“... organising a student strike; travels through Holland with the Non-Combatant Corps; working as a shepherd with a dog called Finn MacCool; and the destruction of all his paintings at the end of the 1950s. This was followed by a stay on Rousay in Orkney, an island promoted to Finlay’s paradise lost when he was forced to trade it for a psychiatric hospital on ...”

“... Thomas Hardy once told Robert Graves how he had gone to the Oxford English Dictionary to confirm the existence of a dialect word he proposed to use in a poem, and came to a standstill because the only authority quoted for it was his own Under the Greenwood Tree. This is an acute case of our dependence on dictionaries, and illustrates the commonest reason for resorting to them ...”

“... articulates in a long and fine soliloquy his need not to be king, but a ‘homely swain’, a shepherd, free to inhabit in peace a natural world with meaning and order in it – a version of pastoral. That this is not mere evasion but a possible form of rectitude is suggested by the entry of two half-symbolic figures embodying civil war, a ‘son that ...”

“... movie, which is full of stock English types, one of them lazily played by the American sex-object, Robert Redford. He should have taken lessons in the British accent from the hard-working Marlon Brando. Firmly hooked to the movie, this elaborate Century edition of Out of Africa is packed with illustrations which will appeal to nostalgic movie-weepers but have ...”

“... ego Tityrus is about to sing of kings and battles when Apollo tweaks his ear and tells him that a shepherd ought to feed up his sheep to be fat but keep his poems spare. Virgil here is adapting a famous passage written just over two centuries earlier by the Alexandrian poet Callimachus, the Ezra Pound of his day. Callimachus, too, says that at the beginning ...”

“... Blyth’s banalities, are at odds with this discordant factor, and only Sir Frederick Ashton and Robert Tear express an independent disenchantment, the former in something close to bitchiness, the latter in a more technical way: Tear was banished after choosing to sing Dov in The Knot Garden rather than Lechmere in Owen Wingrave, and there can surely be no ...”

“... to be their best and most enduring. Fulcrum also published two important early collections by Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg’s Ankor Wat and, most significantly, two volumes by Lorine Niedecker, North Central and My Life by Water, and George Oppen’s Collected Poetry. Of British poets, apart from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy ...”

“... by Mark Thornton Burnett’s edition of the plays for Everyman in 1999, and Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey’s for Penguin in 2003; the first Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe appeared last month (edited by Patrick Cheney).* Even without the bloodshed and intrigue that the fatal stab wound in Deptford supplies, the biographers’ Marlowe is ...”

“... great resemblance between his own, open-ended journey and the intrusions of earlier strangers: of Robert Moffat, Livingstone and various envoys of the London Missionary Society, who thrived on scruples; of Cecil Rhodes, and an assortment of English and Boer traders, who did without them; of the Voortrekkers, who left the Cape in sombre spirits and travelled ...”

“... at the end of ‘Report on Experience’ was sincere. Blunden and Sassoon were furious when Robert Graves published in 1929 Goodbye to All That. Blunden’s comments are of great significance, and deserve to be taken seriously as evidence of what men who loathed the war, and had been through a great deal of it, actually felt and continued to feel. Very ...”

“... to Elizabeth’s accession, when there was a magnificent school of church musicians – Fayrfax, Shepherd, Tallis, Taverner and many other more minor figures. These were never given their due when, in the aftermath of the Oxford Movement, interest in the ‘pure’ church music of the 16th century was revived, and the main reason was surely that they were ...”

“... So irregular, appealing and – if one may say – so pitiable a figure is the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) that he comfortably resists summary description. Even his biographer, Robert Mächler, begins by warning himself, via a feisty sentence of his subject’s: ‘No one is entitled to behave towards me as if they knew me ...”

“... but even more a Dudley, grandson of the ill-fated Duke of Northumberland and nephew of his sons Robert, Elizabeth’s Earl of Leicester, and Ambrose, Earl of Warwick. Ambrose was childless and, for as many years as Queen Elizabeth neither married Robert nor released him to marry anyone else, he was the presumed heir of ...”

“... and of reconstructions-from-afar is evoked in the novel’s epigraph from the famously unsettled Robert Louis Stevenson: The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, From Halkerside, from topmost Allmuir, Or steep Caerketton; dreaming gaze again.                         Songs of Travel This is the nature of the voyage for the Scots on ...”