Poetry

Is it possible to tell a good poem from a bad one? To put the question another way: are there objective, even scientific, standards for evaluating literature? Helen Vendler has no doubts. Her spiky new collection of essays begins with the insistence that it is possible to prove how one poem is ‘superior’ to another, and ‘those who suppose there are no criteria for such judgments merely expose their own incapacity’. That’s a bold claim, but in her hands, literary criticism is a science, and anyone who disagrees with her judgments is put sharply in their place. I should know: my observation, in a book I recently edited, that the

Yesterday was a strange day on Twitter. For most of it, a living poet was trending. Unfortunately for Craig Raine, the poet in question, he was trending because a poem of his entitled ‘Gatwick’ had appeared in the LRB and Twitter didn’t like it. Most comments ranged from amused contempt to, well, just plain old contempt. But it wasn’t only angry feminists, as Lara Prendergast suggested yesterday, who leapt into action. Indeed, I saw much more ridicule than anger. Many of us were merely enjoying mocking what is by no means a good poem. Which is the point, really. Certainly there is no shortage of bad poetry in the world.

I don’t know much about poetry, but I know this: whoever Craig Raine’s poem is about, she will be chuffed. When you are 22, you are, probably, nobody. Not many 22 year olds are somebody. So to be immortalised in a poem that’s been published in the LRB will be pleasing. It may even be the defining moment in her life. No doubt some hack is currently trying to track down this girl. The doorstepping will begin. She met a poet at the airport and he wrote about her. Of course, she may not wish to tell this to the hack but: being immortalised in art, playing the muse, is many a young girl’s wish.

Edward Thomas was gloomy as Eeyore. In 1906 he complained to a friend that his writing ‘was suffering more & more from a silly but unavoidable nervous interest in the children’s movement in and out of the house’. The following year, he noted, I have no ‘interests’ at all, and marriage, he said, is ‘continually encrusting the soul’. To be fair, his life was a torment — depression, worrying about and writing for money, a miserable marriage — and perhaps most cruel of all he was denied the comfort we have, as later readers, of knowing that it will all turn out all right in the end. His was a

Why increase the number of suicides? Better to increase the output of ink! wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1926 in response to the death of a fellow poet. Four years later, aged 36, he shot himself. What drove the successful author, popular with the public and recognised by officialdom, to suicide? Bengt Jangfeldt provides some clues to this question in his detailed, source-rich biography. Mayakovsky came to poetry as a Futurist, co-authoring the 1912 manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which granted poets the right ‘to feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time’. That the new era demanded a new language was a principle

This month sees the Swiss alpine resort of Davos play host to the annual World Economic Forum summit, but it also marks the centenary of the death of one of England’s greatest Edwardian poets. The worship of Mammon and the ascent of Parnassus are traditionally not easy bedfellows, but the two are linked by the Swiss town. It was here that this now little known poet succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of thirty. James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) deserves far greater acclaim and public recognition for his poetic accomplishments. A prodigious linguist, fluent in French, German, Italian, Spanish and modern Greek, he read Classics at Oxford and took a further

In December 1817 Benjamin Robert Haydon — vivid diarist and painter of huge but inferior canvases of historic events — held a Sunday luncheon to which he invited John Keats, Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth. Nearly a century later, in January 1914, seven poets and Lord Osborne de Vere Beauclerk met in Sussex to eat roast peacock at another Sunday lunch. Six of the poets (Yeats, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, Sturge Moore, Frank Flint and Victor Plarr) came from London to honour the seventh, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, at his manor house. Hilaire Belloc joined them for tea afterwards, and sang a ballad about cuckoldry. Robert Bridges and John Masefield declined

Sheridan Morley was an old enemy of mine, so I was thrilled to see him brilliantly denounced and called to account by Jonathan Croall in his first-class book about writing a book, In Search of Gielgud: A Biographer’s Tale (Herbert Adler Publishing, £10.95). Morley is called an ‘arrogant, self-important and spectacularly lazy hack’, whose work was ‘sycophantic and severely lacking in depth’. One almost feels sorry for the old boy. Staying with the theatrical theme, Covering Shakespeare by David Weston (Oberon Books, £14.99) is a highly recommended rollicking account of being a jobbing actor. ‘I always thought I’d do Bottom one day,’ says Weston, who was Ian McKellen’s understudy as Lear, ‘but it was