Poetry

Science fiction is not the first thing one thinks of in connection with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, though the Nobel Prize for Literature has in fact been awarded for science fiction poetry — Harry Martinson’s Aniara was an epic about a spaceship. Then again, many English speakers probably don’t primarily associate Milosz with poetry either, but with The Captive Mind, his damning critique of the moral crisis of artists under authoritarian regimes. That book had, however, science fiction elements in its discussion of the ‘Murti-Bing pill’ — which reconciled the vanquished to their conquerors (lifted from Insatiability, a utopian novel by Stanislaw Witkiewicz, published in 1930) — and the

When Stravinsky visited David Jones in his cold Harrow bedsit, he came away saying, ‘I have been in the presence of a holy man.’ Other admirers included T.S. Eliot (his publisher) and the Queen Mother (who wrote asking if she could buy some of his work). Harold Bloom, Kenneth Clark and W.H. Auden were all not merely admirers, but passionate in their admiration. Auden thought Jones’s long Eucharistic poem ‘The Anathemata’ the ‘finest long poem written in English this century’. Yet Jones remained completely his own man, belonging to no ‘set’. He had very little money and has never, as far as one can tell, been part of the Eng.

On 21 December 1945, Ezra Pound was confined to St Elizabeths hospital in Washington DC. He had broadcast for Rome Radio from 29 January 1942 to July 1943. To avoid his almost certain conviction for treason (and the death penalty visited on William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw), the superintendent Winfred Overholser testified that Pound was insane and unfit to stand trial. Overholser connived with Julien Cornell, Pound’s lawyer. He elided the testimony of six psychiatrists, whose verdict was more equivocal. He concentrated instead on Pound’s brief, understandable breakdown after being kept in a cage at the Disciplinary Training Centre’s stockade in Pisa. A. David Moody in his exemplary three-volume life of

The ten pallbearers at Thomas Hardy’s funeral in Westminster Abbey on 16 January 1928 included Kipling, Barrie, Housman, Gosse, Galsworthy, Shaw and both the prime minister and leader of the oppposition. This distinguished gathering was not strictly necessary for the job at hand, because Hardy’s coffin merely contained his ashes — all that there was room for in Poets’ Corner. At exactly the same time in Dorset, at a smaller funeral, a casket containing Hardy’s unincinerated heart was being borne to its final resting place alongside his parents and his first wife in the churchyard at Stinsford. As Mark Ford observes, this macabre compromise between the nation’s and the author’s

What can be said in a word? A lot, if you are a poet. Poets annex familiar words and empower them. Sometimes a single word, as used by them, can provide a key to their whole work. Here are some examples. (In this game, I permit two words if one is a definite or indefinite article or a preposition.) Blake: ‘lamb’; Milton: ‘high’; Keats: ‘blushful’; Gray ‘in vain’; Cowper: ‘stricken’; Tennyson: ‘the deep’; Pope: ‘Man’ (not ‘man’); Housman: ‘lad’; Burns: ‘lass’; Herbert: ‘sweet’; Hardy: ‘darkling’; Larkin: ‘almost’; Betjeman (this a good suggestion by my wife): ‘Aldershot’. In the case of T.S. Eliot, I am torn between the too general ‘time’,

Shades of The Master and Margarita haunt Rabih Alameddine’s sixth book, in which Jacob, a Yemeni-born poet with a day job in IT, battles with drugs, insanity, visions of the Devil and a variety of Christian saints while trying to come to terms with the fallout from the Aids crisis. As that crisis wore on, ignored by the powers-that-be, Jacob’s lover and all of his closest friends died, leaving him with an apartment full of ashes and an eye-watering variety of instructions for their disposal. Yet, while echoes of Bulgakov’s masterpiece inform The Angel of History from first to last (there is even a cat named Behemoth), Alameddine has created

Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for literature. And quite right too. But many people seem discomfited by the news, as if the award might represent a token gesture by the Swedish Academy. It doesn’t. The award is serious and we should take it seriously. The protests seem to fall into two camps. The first camp argues that Dylan is a musician, not a poet, and that therefore the award, while being made to a great artist, is a category mistake. The second camp grants that Dylan can be considered a poet, but that his poetry does not merit being ranked alongside that of Yeats, Eliot, Pasternak, Brodsky, Tranströmer