Tag: Poetry
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Are we being educated here?
In one of the lectures he gave while Oxford Professor of Poetry – on ‘clarity and obscurity’ – the now Poet Laureate Simon Armitage recalled attending a poetry reading with a non-poet friend (all the lectures are available to listen to here). After the reading, the friend asks Armitage about…
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Making Nothing Happen
It was probably inevitable that the two most famous quotes about poetry’s purpose, Shelley’s ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ and W. H. Auden’s ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ would be so contradictory: poetry is a house with many rooms. David O’Hanlon-Alexandra’s ‘New Defences of Poetry’ project, now available…
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T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form
Review: T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, Anthony Julius, 1995 The great strength of Anthony Julius’s study of T. S. Eliot’s literary Jew-baiting is also, in a way, its weakness. Julius does not linger on the poet’s motivations, his influences, his reception or even his later work but instead…
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Poets Dropping from the Sky
I have a very admiring review of Peter Didsbury’s new collection A Fire Shared in the new issue of the (excellent) Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, which you can get here. When writing any kind of criticism, people often talk about poets like they drop from the sky, so I think…
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The Long Slide: Philip Larkin’s ‘High Windows’
Most writers dislike most of what they write most of the time but the savagery of Philip Larkin’s self-criticism still has the power to shock. In his workbook, the final three words of ‘High Windows‘ – ‘and is endless’ – are replaced by ‘and fucking piss’. This is not very…
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Boom, Boom: Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘View of the Capitol’
Elizabeth Bishop is (maybe) most famous for her poems of place: she spent much of her life living in South America and wrote collections called Questions of Travel and Geography III (there was no ‘I’ or ‘II’). ‘View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress’ was written while working…