Yeats – A Pity Beyond All Telling
‘If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world we can better discover that destiny from the words…
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Dickinson – Heavenly Hurt
When she died in 1886 at the age of fifty-six, Emily Dickinson, the New England spinster daughter of Emily Norcross Dickinson and Edward Dickinson,…
Kipling – The Poems
First to Kipling and the women, of whom, in his personal life, there were virtually none. He married his wife Carrie, Caroline…
Rossetti – Upstairs, Downstairs…
‘Downstairs I laugh, I sport and jest with all; / But in my solitary room above / I turn my face in…
Bishop – She came. She saw. She changed the view.
‘Everything has written under it – I have seen it.’ Randall Jarrall is right. However, what Elizabeth Bishop saw was never quite what…
Auden – Truth Out of Time
‘One Sunday afternoon in March 1922, a school friend casually asked me if I wrote poetry. I, who had never written a…
Plath – The Woman is Perfected
At the time of her death in 1963, aged thirty, Sylvia Plath had published just one collection of poetry, to muted response,…
Frost – The Poet of Terror
On 26 March 1959 a dinner was held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to honour, on his eighty-fifth birthday, Robert…
Dickinson – The Poems
Emily Dickinson wrote short. Short does not mean sweet. Short does not mean easy. Just in case you think you can wing…
Kipling – Word Warrior
The English, he believed, were slow to hate. If they need a masterclass, Kipling’s their man. Seamus Heaney famously uses his pen…