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Scruples

James Wood, 20 June 1996

The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 213 pp., £15.99, September 1995, 0 571 17562 7
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The Spirit Level 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 71 pp., £14.99, May 1996, 0 571 17760 3
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... and endure’.In fairness, Heaney is hardly the only poet to wring himself thus. In this century, William CarlosWilliams was also obsessed with howBeauty should make us paupers,should blind us, rob us – for itdoes not feed the sufferer.Equally, the world that Heaney has been enduring since the mid-Sixties has often ...

The Untreatable

Gavin Francis: The Spanish Flu, 25 January 2018

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World 
by Laura Spinney.
Jonathan Cape, 352 pp., £20, June 2017, 978 1 910702 37 6
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... hill tribes moulded figures out of flour and water, and waved them over the sick. In New Jersey William CarlosWilliams, working as a family physician, wrote: ‘We doctors were making up to sixty calls a day. Several of us were knocked out, one of the younger of us died, others caught the thing, and we hadn’t a ...

Nom de Boom

Ian Penman: Arthur Russell's Benediction, 15 August 2024

Travels over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life 
by Richard King.
Faber, 296 pp., £30, April, 978 0 571 37966 8
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... exerted on the apprentice songwriter Russell by poets such as Ginsberg, Robert Bly and Ezra Pound; William CarlosWilliams and Robert Creeley in particular inspired the ‘idea of using simple language to convey something very beautiful’. Russell also spoke about how he wanted his home-studio ‘echo system’ to ...

Snarly Glitters

August Kleinzahler: Roy Fisher, 20 April 2006

The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 
by Roy Fisher.
Bloodaxe, 400 pp., £12, June 2005, 1 85224 701 0
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... invited him to his home in Worcester. There, Fisher saw for the first time the work of the later William CarlosWilliams, Basil Bunting, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and others. ‘I’d never seen poetry used as these people were, in their various ways, using ...

Like a Manta Ray

Jenny Turner: The Entire History of Sex, 22 October 2015

The Argonauts 
by Maggie Nelson.
Graywolf, 143 pp., £23, May 2015, 978 1 55597 707 8
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... do no more than mark that wildness’s grave. Being by trade a poet of plain language – William CarlosWilliams would be another hero, also George Oppen, also Eileen Myles – Nelson finds her artistic focus drawn in two main directions. On the one hand, she crafts her words until she gets them to ...

Theory of Texts

Jerome McGann, 18 February 1988

Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts: The Panizzi Lectures 1985 
by D.F. McKenzie.
British Library, 80 pp., £10, December 1986, 0 7123 0085 6
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... Each appears here in a representative figure: the bibliographer Fredson Bowers and the interpreter William K. Wimsatt. McKenzie singles them out for tactical purposes – that is to say, in order to place each of them at the centre of his double-focused critique of the traditional theory of texts. ‘There is nothing outside of the text.’ That well-known ...

Outbreaks of Poets

Robert Crawford, 15 June 2023

The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture 
by Clare Bucknell.
Head of Zeus, 344 pp., £27.99, February, 978 1 80024 144 2
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... taste: oodles of Robert Herrick, but only one poem attributed to John Donne; seven poems by William Drummond, but just one by George Herbert; more than ninety men, but just five women (three of them Scots); far more poems by Wordsworth than by anybody else.Palgrave assembled his anthology while working in London as a civil servant at the Education ...

Roaring Boy

Adam Phillips: Hart Crane, 30 September 1999

The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane 
by Paul Mariani.
Norton, 492 pp., $35, April 1999, 0 393 04726 1
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O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane 
edited by Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber.
Four Walls Eight Windows, 562 pp., $35, July 1997, 0 941423 18 2
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... as Mariani shows, he could inspire extreme affection in people. But too soon they would feel, as William CarlosWilliams wrote, ‘uncomfortable’ with his ‘roaring boy, predatory reputation’. It seemed that nothing could contain him, except his poetry. So when the poetry stopped, in a very real sense he had ...
Djuna Barnes 
by Philip Herring.
Viking, 416 pp., £20, May 1996, 0 670 84969 3
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... composed a short poem for him: ‘Marcel, Marcel, I Love You Like Hell, Marcel.’) She disgusted William CarlosWilliams; she terrified Wallace Stevens. She wore cancelled postage stamps on her cheeks as beauty spots, and dressed in outfits one would think Barnes had invented had they not been confirmed by other ...

Diary

Eliot Weinberger: Next stop, Forbidden City, 23 June 2005

... kids you had But, most of all, its collage of vignettes – as though written by a hallucinated William CarlosWilliams – were meant to be self-erasing illusions in an illusory world. ‘In my poetry,’ Gu Cheng once wrote, ‘the city disappears and what appears instead is a piece of grazing land.’ In its ...

What is the burglar after?

T.J. Clark: Painting the Poem, 6 October 2022

... everything on poetry attaining to the condition (the concreteness) of the visual – I think of William CarlosWilliams – find that when it comes to writing about the images they admire most the task ends up destroying their parti pris. ‘No ideas but in things’ is the war cry. Bruegel is chef de file. But the ...

Imagine Tintin

Michael Hofmann: Basil Bunting, 9 January 2014

A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting 
by Richard Burton.
Infinite Ideas, 618 pp., £30, September 2013, 978 1 908984 18 0
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... most of the most outlandish things still lay ahead of him, and he was stuck in the Canary Islands, William CarlosWilliams 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 ...

What a Mother

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Marianne Moore and Her Mother, 3 December 2015

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore 
by Linda Leavell.
Farrar, Straus, 455 pp., $18, September 2014, 978 0 374 53494 3
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... on her fellow student Peggy James, Mary ‘courted’ her too (‘courted’ is Leavell’s word): William James’s daughter was very much ‘our kind’, and since Mary expected her family to live together always, she could only assume that Peggy would be joining the household – whether as Marianne’s partner or Warner’s was immaterial. But Marianne’s ...

Elegy for an Anarchist

George Woodcock, 19 January 1984

... enough to consider his debts to the Surrealists and the Objectivists, to Reverdy and Zukofsky, to William CarlosWilliams 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 ...

Qatrina and the Books

Amit Chaudhuri: What is Pakistani Writing?, 27 August 2009

The Wasted Vigil 
by Nadeem Aslam.
Faber, 436 pp., £7.99, June 2009, 978 0 571 23880 4
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... of the particular or the concrete as these things would have been understood by Ezra Pound or William CarlosWilliams; they have an occluded quality, or the opacity of calligraphy or inscription (‘that parchment-like face’). Civilisation, history and culture – the Buddha’s head; Benedikt’s severed head ...

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