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“... comparison with the English poet gives no idea of Magowan’s poetry, nor does this at the end of Robert Peters’s Introduction: ‘I am reminded, finally, of that stunning moment in Alfred Tennyson’s neglected masterpiece “Maud”, where his hero, confronting madness, meditates on the fragility of the human brain, seen via the image of a seashell. Like ...”

“... Prague and Paris. The general effect, however invidious comparisons may be, is of a mixture of Browning, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Robert Lowell, with something of Whitman’s breezy effect of easing himself in poetry’s words. If that sounds bizarre – well, she is in many ways a bizarre writer. Her ways with rhythm ...”

“... poem has its history, too. It is now not only our poem, but the poem of Keats, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats, Eliot, Auden. Only Robert Graves and Laura Riding saw through it; but to return with them to the Shakespeare of Donne and Marvell is to abolish the Shakespeare of Keats and Yeats. Malone’s edition, of ...”

“... Another early poem begins: ‘The pieces of my voice have been thrown/away I said.’ Whitman and Browning, two of Ammons’s first loves, hover in the margins here. For a moment, the opening line seems like an affluent, profligate, Whitmanesque throwing of voice across land and sea – before the utterance is restaged, caught up in the coils of syntax and ...”

“... and reformers – Cavell is there, and so are Queens Victoria and Alexandra, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Angela Burdett-Coutts. St Joan’s International Alliance, a Catholic body that was founded by suffragettes and is recognised today by both the Vatican and the UN, celebrated its centenary in 2011, and still distinguishes itself by its progressive ...”

“... there is a serious risk of substituting crabbed obscurity for an enigmatic richness of expression. Robert Browning’s 1877 version of Agamemnon is arguably more difficult to understand than the Greek:Not gently-grieving, not just doling outThe drops of expiation – no, nor tears distilled –Shall he we know of bring the hard aboutTo soft – that ...”

“... loud and persistent attack. A skim through the running titles to the 1979 edition says it all: Browning Bunyan Burke Burns Butler Byron … and seventy pages of quotations from Shakespeare – though not, of course, any of the scurrilous apocryphal stuff like Manningham’s story about his sexual conquests. Later editions of the Oxford Dictionary belatedly ...”

“... not worth living because of the existence of Carlyle, of Mr Ruskin, of Mr Holman Hunt, of Mr Browning, or of the gentleman who built the Crystal Palace.’ Life was not worth living because he knew, and everyone else knew, that he did not have it in him to build the next Crystal Palace. His response to this impossible demand was to develop an ‘almost ...”

“... Patrick Rooney, died in his family’s flat there in August 1969, after the army fired a Browning machine gun at the block during a gun battle. There was an army post on top of the tower and an army barracks just up the road in the old mill at Albert Street. Soon after the McConvilles moved in, the army conducted a house to house search for ...”

“... to the little hills which divided the river from the Vale of White Horse. The grass was browning last week and the haws on the thorns ripening. Few wild flowers remained in flower, knapweed, scabious, codlins-and-cream, with here and there an ancient meadowsweet and a tattered St John’s wort; for the amateur botanist an uninteresting time. Alan ...”

“... The​ Soft Machine drummer, Robert Wyatt, his Cockney tenor cracking with fervour, once sang:I’m nearly five foot seven tallI like to smoke and drink and ballI’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pamand every day I like an egg and some teabut most of all I like to talk about me.The American poet Wallace Stevens liked his tea – he took to it in connoisseurship and prudence, ‘imported tea’ every afternoon, ‘with some little tea wafers’, partly in order to ease himself off martinis (Elsie, his ‘Pam’, disapproved of his drinking) – but otherwise everything is different ...”

“... had more old-fashioned tastes; and the writers they admired tended not to be the same as those – Browning, Yeats, James – she would pick out. She had no time for Edwardian sentiment and shied away from the prevailing pieties. When, a few years on, Mary complained of a lack in her daughter’s work of the ‘stinging greatness of truth and high ...”

“... report on his waistcoats – James’s Puritanism always had its limits); and after some years Browning moved in across the road. To celebrate his settling-in, James even bought himself – though the event is not recorded in these Letters – his first dog, Tosca, named from Sardou’s, not Puccini’s heroine, the latter not yet having seen the light of ...”

“... Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, with a good deal of auto-canonising. Robert Lowell, almost by default it seemed, was ceded pride of place, the ‘most important American poet now at work’. Lowell and Randall Jarrell, roommates at Kenyon College in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent Berryman too, were big on rating and ...”

“... feed – are in league with stolen, fleeting pleasures. Smith is the poet of ‘bold drops’. Robert Lowell was enthusiastic about her writing because it was ‘so unlike the usual poem trying so hard to be a poem’. In her essay ‘Simply Living’, she refers to ‘the pleasures of simplicity’ in order to make a fine distinction. ‘Enjoyment lurks ...”