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“... Alun Lewis is usually remembered as a war poet or, more precisely, as a soldier poet. ‘All Day It Has Rained’ is familiar to those who know nothing else about its author and to some who don’t usually read poetry. Ian Hamilton edited a selection of Lewis’s work, and there is a good biography by John Pikoulis ...”

“... imports. The poetry section is still weirder: Larkin one can understand, from Hamilton; also Alun Lewis, Roy Fuller, Frost and Graves. But Wilbur and Merrill, Heaney and Motion? I’m not surprised there’s little evidence of attachment to their work, just oblique dismay. For any sort of poetic credo, you have to go back to the poems, or the essays ...”

“... time. During or just after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame or both, some not: but then, not now, was their moment. Was Connolly himself any good as a writer? The question means little because the point of Connolly turned out to be Connolly not ...”

“... All day​ it has rained,’ goes a poem written by Alun Lewis in 1941, while he was stationed with the Royal Engineers in Hampshire, ready for war but not yet called to action. It’s a poem about being bored and being grateful for the boredom since worse is to come. ‘We talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome ...”

“... Hugh Walpole’ – or better still, Keith Douglas (‘the best serving poet in Egypt’), Alun Lewis (‘the best of the Welsh war poets’), Edwin Muir (‘the best of the Scots poets’). Alan Ross, by the way, is lauded as ‘the supreme recorder of the convoys’. This is literary history done over as pubchatter, almost cynically ...”

“... poem on first name terms with tradition: ‘Will Blake’, ‘Kit Smart’, ‘Bert Brecht’, ‘Alun’ (Lewis), ‘Gerard’ (Hopkins) – and my favourite, ‘old Malc’, the composer Malcolm Arnold. (Did anyone call him that in his own lifetime?) Sometimes you have a clue: ‘Who say “cordiality responsible for such ...”

“... and it’s true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his ...”

“... that made him seem a bit déclassé. Bergonzi discusses Bloomsbury or Bennett, Wells or Wyndham Lewis, Davie or Fredric Jameson, in the same informed, unassertive tone; the most memorable essay is actually an attack on Terry Eagleton, but the manner remains moderate even as the shafts go home. Bergonzi has obviously made a bourgeois submission to what is ...”

“... before?Not a biographer. I’d written studies, including a biographical thing about the poet Alun Lewis years earlier.I remember that: it was the preface of the collection of his stories and poems you edited.Yes, it’s quite a long piece. It took ages and involved the conventional sort of research, going to see his widow and so on. I’d done that ...”