Poetry
Charles Foster: ‘I need to be more of a badger’
Being a Beast is an impassioned and proselytising work of philosophy based on a spectacular approach to nature writing. That…
The confessions of Gerard Manley Hopkins
‘I am 12 miles from a lemon,’ lamented that bon vivant clergyman Sydney Smith on reaching one country posting. He…
How pop is Peter Blake?
Painters and sculptors are highly averse to being labelled. So much so that it seems fairly certain that, if asked,…
Rex Whistler: ‘a desolate sense of loneliness amidst so much fun’
When Hugh and Mirabel Cecil’s book In Search of Rex Whistler was published in 2012, the late Brian Sewell reviewed…
National Poetry Day's mistake: letting normal people do the reading
Imagine what Brennig Davies must have felt like just before 11 o’clock last Tuesday evening. The 15-year-old was about to…
An unauthorised, and unconvincing, biography of Ted Hughes
Craig Raine says that Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised biography of Ted Hughes gets it wrong on every level
David Jones: painter, poet and mystic
David Jones (1895–1974) was a remarkable figure: artist and poet, he was a great original in both disciplines. His was…
Cut-ups, hallucinations and Hermann Goering: the extraordinary life of Brion Gysin
Among my more bohemian friends in 1980s London, Brion Gysin was a name spoken with a certain awe. He was…
Late Night Woman’s Hour assumes that all women think about is dating, desire and drinking
Late Night Woman’s Hour has created a Twitter storm with its twice-weekly (Thursdays and Fridays) doses of ‘mischievous and unbridled…
‘Doorways to the unknown’: Clive James’s Latest Readings
In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks…
Jonathan Galassi’s fictional poet made me doubt my knowledge of American literature
Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old…
A new translation of the Iliad
‘Why do another translation of Homer?’ Richmond Lattimore asked in the foreword to his own great translation of the Iliad…
Helen Vendler is full of condescending waffle (and not just when she’s attacking me)
Is it possible to tell a good poem from a bad one? To put the question another way: are there…
Edward Thomas: the prolific hack (who wrote a book review every three days for 14 years) turned to poetry just in time
Edward Thomas was gloomy as Eeyore. In 1906 he complained to a friend that his writing ‘was suffering more &…
This radio programme almost made me like Piers Morgan
An extraordinary black-and-white photograph of a young black boy taken on the Isle of Wight by Julia Margaret Cameron in…
What’s On in South Devon gave me three choices: functioning psychotic preacher, bingo or a poetry evening
I’m such a constitutional lightweight lately that I’ve started looking on the website What’s On in South Devon for things…
There’s nothing wrong with getting into Thomas Tallis on the back of Fifty Shades of Grey
Great works of art may have a strange afterlife. Deracinated from the world that created them they are at the…
The Shading Out of Poetry by Deadline
Like old-time washerwomen floodwater is sousing trees and shrubs out on the drainage. Floating wrack dribbles seaward from their labour.…
Tom Eliot — a very practical cat. Did T.S. Eliot simply recycle every personal experience into poetry?
T.S. Eliot may have put much of his early life into his poetry, says Daniel Swift, but The Waste Land remains a marvellous mystery that defies explanation
The risks of being an Englishman on Burns Night
I’m rubbish at public speaking and detest it. Even the thought of reciting an English poem of my choice at…
On the Yeats trail in Galway
The Go Galway bus from Dublin sounds an unlikely pleasure, but it is both comfortable and punctual. There is free…
Sunday roasts and beaded bubbles: dining with the poets
In December 1817 Benjamin Robert Haydon — vivid diarist and painter of huge but inferior canvases of historic events —…
Why radio is a surprisingly good medium for talking about art
You might think it a fool’s errand to attempt programmes about art on the wireless. How can you talk about…
Wendy Cope on hating school, meeting Billy Graham and enduring Freudian analysis
A surprise! I took this book from its envelope expecting a fresh collection of Wendy Cope’s poems, and opened it…
We know that war is hell. But it doesn’t ever make us stop doing it
There’s a plausible theory — recently rehearsed in the BBC’s excellent two-part documentary The Lion’s Last Roar? — that our…
