Eliot – I Gotta Use Words When I Talk to You
Virginia Woolf to T. S. Eliot: ‘We’re not as good as Keats.’ T. S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf: ‘Oh yes, we are….
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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…
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…
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…
Milton – Paradise Lost
It’s a long poem. ‘No man ever wished Paradise Lost were longer’, according to Dr Johnson. However, to ‘justify the ways of…
Larkin – The Poems
‘He is the only sophisticated poet today who requires no sophisticated response from the reader,’ John Bayley wrote in 1983. Twenty-three years…
Browning – The Company He Kept…
‘Within his work lies the mystery which belongs to the complex and within his life the much greater mystery which belongs to…