While far from being the most ambitious and successful poem in The Whitsun Weddings, “Broadcast” seems to me in many ways among the most essentially Larkinesque of Philip Larkin’s poems, and at the same time the most uncharacteristically romantic.

Philip Larkin’s 1964 volume, The Whitsun Weddings, contains two poems describing train-journeys. One of them is the volume’s title-poem and is one of the most famous (and best-loved) poems in English since the Second World War; it has been said that with this work he brought a whole new English landscape into poetry. The other poem, entitled “Here,” is not quite so well-known but gives an equally powerful description of the English landscape—and perhaps a rather more unsettling one. It describes the reverse-journey to the one depicted in “The Whitsun Weddings,” from London to Larkin’s home-town, Hull—and beyond. It is, indeed, the “beyond” that is so peculiarly powerful and unsettling a factor in this poem.Although it opens the volume, we know from Anthony Thwaite’s chronological [...]

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,And live alone in the bee-loud glade.And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,And evening full of the linnet’s wings.I will arise and go now, for always night and dayI hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,I hear it in the deep heart’s core.1.As much as any poet who ever lived, Yeats appears to have made a rule out [...]

As Reviewed By: John Drexel“The Sunlight on the Garden” by Louis MacNeiceThe sunlight on the gardenHardens and grows cold,We cannot cage the minuteWithin its nets of gold;When all is toldWe cannot beg for pardon.Our freedom as free lancesAdvances towards its end;The earth compels, upon itSonnets and birds descend;And soon, my friend,We shall have no time for dances.The sky was good for flyingDefying the church bellsAnd every evil ironSiren and what it tells:The earth compels,We are dying, Egypt, dyingAnd not expecting pardon,Hardened in heart anew,But glad to have sat underThunder and rain with you,And grateful tooFor sunlight on the garden.[private]Reviewing Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems in 1976, Seamus Heaney touched on “the whole question of poetry for the eye versus poetry for the ear.” One might be [...]

As Reviewed By: David YezziThere is an anecdote, too good not to be true, recounted by William Jay Smith, about a soused Hart Crane sidling up to the poet Witter Bynner in Mexico City and hissing, “Witter Bynner, you’re going to have a bitter winter.” Crane’s poem “Passage” refers to a “too well known biography,” and anyone familiar with his poems knows his star-crossed life as well. Both make clear that Crane had bitter seasons of his own.[private]One particularly disappointing autumn came in 1925. When the few meager leads he had on advertising jobs fell through (he was perennially hard-up for cash), Crane decided to sell to magazines some of the poems he had written that summer. Malcolm Cowley describes the composition of the poem [...]

As Reviewed by: Paul LakeDonald Davie’s In the Stopping Train appeared in 1977, the year I was accepted into Stanford University’s writing program, where he taught. When the offer of a fellowship arrived, I had only the foggiest notion of who Donald Davie was and not one inkling of the nature of his poetry. Nevertheless, I abandoned my plan to study writing at Syracuse under W. D. Snodgrass and set about reading all of Davie’s poetry and criticism—a process that continued throughout the next year alongside my regular studies.When I arrived in Palo Alto and met him for the first time, Donald was fifty-five, only a few months older than I am now. There I was, a twenty-seven year old provincial American, coming to Stanford [...]

Note: “The Slow Pacific Swell” may be found in many volumes of Winters’s work, including Collected Poems (1960); The Poetry of Yvor Winters (1978); and The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters (1999). In her introduction to one of two recent editions of Yvor Winters’ selected poems, Helen Pinkerton Trimpi offers “To the Holy Spirit” as Winters’ most mature poetic achievement. Its formal rigor, loosened only slightly by a craftsman who has mastered the laws of his art and may therefore alter them without violation, is undeniable and astounding. Although Winters would have felt ambivalent about the comparison, the poem shares much with W.B. Yeats’s mid-career masterpiece, “Easter 1916.” In both, a form of trimeter (Winters’ is iambic while Yeats’s is roughly accentual) grounds irregular but unmistakable [...]