Is there a more charming literary companion than Al Alvarez? In this extended series of lectures he examines the writer’s creative method, or ‘voice’, as he metaphorically terms it. His own voice comes through loud and clear, a seasoned, colloquial, authoritative and highly polished channel for his telling insights and throwaway erudition.
He flits with ease across the centuries. On one page he is in the 1920s, breathing new life into antique disputes about free verse and quoting Pound’s advice to Modernist poets ‘to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome’. On the next page he is deep in the 17th century, uncovering this starkly evocative line, ‘my naked, thinking heart’, from Donne’s poem ‘The Blossom’. This paradoxical phrase, he argues, is the corner-stone of Donne’s technique. The poet’s miraculous simplicity of expression is achieved because the beat of his heart and the pulse of his mind seem to be one and the same process.
Alvarez knows exactly how to keep his students in an ideal state of contemplation, equally relaxed and alert.
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