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“... which led to it, of a weak middle class, now has little to be said for it. This is not, as Lowell Field and John Higley point out in their brief and bluff tract, because it is unarguably true that representative democracy works on an agreed middle ground. As John Plamenatz insisted several years ago, representative democracy does not by itself ...”

“... afforded by the Roman Church – a Church to which Heaney, even in his twenties, continued to go for confession and which ‘permeated’ the whole life of his Northern Ireland childhood. Thanks to this Church, its doctrines and its rituals, Heaney’s sensibility was from the start centred in relation to what he calls a ‘feminine presence’. It was ...”

“... In April​ 1970, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick – both aged 53, married for 21 years – had just been on holiday together in Italy with their 13-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick and Harriet had come home to New York, where Hardwick taught at Barnard College; Lowell had gone to Oxford to take up a fellowship at All Souls ...”

“... rebirth.’ There aren’t many skeletons left in Hardwick’s closet. Since 1973, when Robert Lowell published The Dolphin, a series of sonnets based on Hardwick’s letters to him during the breakdown of their marriage, the story of her life has been bound up with, and contorted by, his overbearing presence. Cathy Curtis, author of the first biography of ...”

“... There is a tall who loves only him. She has sworn ‘Blue to you forever, Gray to the little rat, go to bed.’ I fink it’s bads all over.It ends: Henry and Mabel ought to but can’t. Childness let’s have us honey –‘It set the prosodic pattern,’ Berryman told the interviewer, Peter Stitt, who had been a student of his a few years earlier. The ...”

“... Brancusi), the new music (Satie, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Scriabin), the new literature (Amy Lowell, Stein, Pound, Eliot, Joyce), and was bold enough to give a graduation address in 1915 referring to most of these and insisting on ‘the unbroken chain of artistic development during the last hall-century’ which ‘disproved the theory that Modernism ...”

“... not fail him. Jarrell became critic, adviser and friend of the best poets in his own generation, Lowell and Berryman among them. ‘He was Randall Jarrell/ and wrote a-many books – he wrote well,’ run a couple of pretty bad lines in a Berryman ‘Dream Song’. Lowell also paid tribute to his friend’s passionately ...”

“... Robert Lowell​ has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs out my cheek;too much live hair.Not knowing the photo of Lowell, I go instead to the picture of Seamus Heaney on the front of the companion volume to this one, New Selected Poems 1966-87, painfully young, worried-looking, Noh-rice-flour-pale, against a dark brick wall ...”

“... second part of a two-part interview. Part 1: ‘You Muddy Fools’ I want to ask you about Robert Lowell: as an influence on your work, that is, and only then as what he later became – a ‘Life’, the subject of your first full-length biography. You did and do admire him greatly as a poet, yet in his poetic practice didn’t he trample all over the ...”

“... power to read, and to talk about his reading, with the excitement of a child. ‘Child Randall’, Lowell addresses him, inevitably, in the second of his sonnets for Jarrell, the one that restages his friend’s peculiar death (Jarrell was sideswiped by a car in the course of an evening walk): black-gloved, black-coated, you plod out stubbornly as if in ...”

“... get to Vorticism, with which Pound was hoping to render Imagism – now led by his arch-enemy Amy Lowell – passé, a question irresistibly presents itself. When a poet has made it his life’s work to change a period’s style, and pursues his aim by means of confrontation and relentless promotion of his own work and that of his coterie, does style really ...”

“... good Augustus ‘at the time of the false and lying gods’. Only after he has said this does he go on to explain what he did in life: ‘I was a poet, and I sang of that just son of Anchises who came from Troy after proud Ilium was burned.’ At this point Dante can contain himself no longer: Are you then that Virgil and that fountain Which pours forth so ...”

“... Hamilton came to biography late and triumphantly with his life of the dead but still warm Robert Lowell. Riding high, he went on to attempt an unauthorised life of the aged but very much alive J.D. Salinger and was comprehensively outfoxed by the second most reclusive man in American letters. Hamilton wrote up his experience as a rueful memoir, In Search of ...”

“... trusting and tasting. Both the first and this last poem in the book speak of ‘my tongue’.Field Work is alive with trust (how else would field work be possible?), and it could have been created only by an experienced poet secure in the grounded trust that he is trusted. Heaney is the most trusted poet of our ...”

“... sensed that he was reacting to sound rather than sight’) and ‘lynx-like momentum’ on the field. A little later on, he comes across Reagan working as a lifeguard at Lowell Park Beach and accumulates more elaborately detailed information about his physical build, his swimming stroke and his taste in books. At Eureka ...”