Fit and Few
Donald Davie, 3 May 1984
The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry
by David Trotter.
Macmillan, 272 pp., £20, March 1984,0 333 30632 5 Show More
by David Trotter.
Macmillan, 272 pp., £20, March 1984,
“... those poems that will find many readers from those that will find only few. At the risk of echoing Kingsley Amis (whom Trotter, in general very tolerant, justly pillories at one point), ‘a useful rough rule says’ that poems of pathos will find readers, poems of anti-pathos won’t. Geoffrey Hill’s fine ‘Mystery of the Charity of Charles ... ”