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What is a conversation? And why should conversations matter to poetry? (1) ‘They found you out?’ ‘Not they’. ‘Well—after all– What know we of the secret of a man?” (2) ‘No more wine? Then we’ll push back chairs and talk. A final glass for me, though: cool, i’ faith!’ (3) ‘But do […]
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In 2020, I was struggling to negotiate my academic work (teaching remotely online and finishing the production process for a new book) while homeschooling three children and mourning the loss of a dear friend. Lockdown was challenging but I recognised my position as one of real privilege – I still had a job, my kids […]
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When Geoffrey Hill began his fourth lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2011, the audience members clearly expected a mischievous performance. In his first lecture, Hill had promised a future evaluation of contemporary British poetry, and in the subsequent oration he did not hold back, appraising creative writing as a neoliberal efflorescence of a […]
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Amanda Gorman, delivering her poem at the 2021 presidential inauguration. Photo credits: Thomas Hatzenbuhler, Architect of the Capitol. Sourced from Library of Congress Blog
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Friedrich Schiller’s little poem is one of the greatest works of German Classicism, the revival of Greek thought and literary forms centered in the Weimar that Goethe and Schiller made famous, but its theme of the death of beauty is no less Romantic, and we should not forget how important the Greeks were to the […]
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As an undergraduate in 1964 I took a seminar in the English Romantics (the six male poets then considered canonical) and was imprinted like a chick by the first poet we read, William Blake. I couldn’t get enough of Blake, who was fascinatingly different from me, a Unitarian trained in the sciences, but who was […]
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“To steal a Hint was never known, But what he writ was all his own.” – Verses on the Death of Dr Swift, D.S.P.D. Part way through his most famous self-elegy, Jonathan Swift delivers one of the greatest one-line gags in poetry: ‘what he writ was all his own’. The ostensibly proprietorial phrase was brazenly […]
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“To steal a Hint was never known,But what he writ was all his own.” Verses on the Death of Dr Swift, D.S.P.D. Part way through his most famous self-elegy, Jonathan Swift delivers one of the greatest one-line gags in poetry: ‘what he writ was all his own’. The ostensibly proprietorial phrase was brazenly lifted from […]
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