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“... In our just deserts it’s hard to do a well, Assay the soil, dig, drill, and lay it down; That’s why the villain loves the villanelle. The enamoured self is soft and needs a shell Though mentors and tormentors seem to frown; Because it’s hard, you want to do it well. Sportsmen and travellers are inclined to tell The scores and challenges that didn’t get them down; Not why the villain loves the villanelle ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... Transition began and of course it meant a great deal to everybody,’ Gertrude Stein wrote in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her story of ‘how two americans happened to be at the heart of an art movement of which the outside world at the time knew nothing’. The two Americans she had in mind, as so often, were Gertrude Stein and Alice B ...”

“... In a letter of May 1919 Hardy told his friend Sir George Douglas he hadn’t been doing much, ‘mainly destroying old papers’. ‘How they raise ghosts,’ he added. He was still at it in September when he complained of the ‘dismal work’ of destroying papers that were of ‘absolutely no use for any purpose God or man’s’. Such remarks must sound particularly dismal to Hardy’s modern editors and biographers ...”

“... so confidently, we know too. It hardly matters that in his delightful and learned introduction Hugh Haughton fails to make the obvious distinction between nonsense poetry and special sense poetry. His spaciously ecumenical anthology includes both, and in so doing gives a variety of different glimpses and different pleasures. It so happens that the ...”

“... concept of national loyalty, it is possible to read much of his verse as a protest against what Hugh Haughton terms ‘the indignity of King Log’. Haughton argues that Hill seems to yearn ‘for real authority and real title, the kind of transcendence embodied in a language of kingship derived from the past and ...”

“... Pound’s Selected Letters, mistakenly translated the date as 24 December. His error was noted by Hugh Kenner in 1973, but his correction escaped Valerie Eliot’s attention, and she repeated the mistaken date in the first edition of 1988. Only now is the letter finally assigned to 24 January 1922. Corrections to the dates of subsequent letters are also duly ...”

“... are sufficiently edged with particularity to work against too banal a contemptus mundi: what Hugh Haughton has called ‘fraught anachronism’ in Hill’s texts may function, not to indicate that human nature is always the same and always nasty, but to break down a blandly continuous notion of historical process and progress. In the second poem of ...”

“... I think,’ T.S. Eliot wrote in February 1923, ‘it will take me a year or two to throw off The Waste Land and settle down and get at something better which is tormenting me by its elusiveness in my brain.’ The something better was probably the never finished ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, since ‘The Hollow Men’, the only other poem he worked on between 1923 and 1925, must surely have been less elusive ...”

“... lessons and high sentiments and lyric poetry. His nonsense upskittled rules and regulations; as Hugh Haughton says in an exhilarating Introduction to The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry, writers like Carroll ‘implicitly brought into question the earnestness of being important, and the importance of being earnest’. The Red Queen wanted things to have ...”

“... replies: ‘I can bite anything I want.’ In his​ excellent Penguin edition of the Alice books, Hugh Haughton suggests that nonsense allowed Carroll to explore but also to deflect his attention from the dangerous world of his feelings. Indeed, if Alice isn’t simply Carroll’s heroine, but also his spokesperson or his accomplice, then the question of ...”

“... name. Other people were also interested in the name: ‘T.S. Eliot – it’s a Scottish name,’ Hugh MacDiarmid writes in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, and Eliot grew tolerantly fed up with Scots who told him this. The day after April Fools’ Day in 1936 he had ‘to interview’ (the term he used for professional encounters) ‘an elderly Scottish ...”