Poetry

Edward Lear liked to tell the story of how he was once sitting in a railway carriage with two women who were reading aloud to children from his Book of Nonsense. When a male passenger confidently asserted that ‘There is no such person as Edward Lear’, the writer was obliged to prove his own existence as ‘the painter & author’ (in that order) by showing the passengers his name on his hat, handkerchief and visiting card. In an extraordinary drawing of this event, Lear depicted himself and the two women realistically, but the doubting man is a cartoonish figure straight out of one of his limericks. Lear’s two worlds of

In May 1956, three months after meeting Ted Hughes, one before they will marry, Sylvia Plath writes to her mother Aurelia about the talented man she has fallen in love with: ‘He will start some portraits of me! A combination of both witch and ghost, perhaps.’ Because of Hughes’s editing and writing of her work, a combination of witch and ghost is precisely how we know her, and he strongly encouraged the idea that the version of Plath he offered was the ‘real one’, a core of personality born in an inevitably fatal struggle narrated through the Ariel poems. Ariel, in his view, was her only true work. ‘All her

Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality wryly depicts Goethe preparing for immortality — neatly laying out his life in Dichtung und Warheit and arranging for Johann Eckermann to record his conversation. He is, says Kundera, designing a handsome smoking jacket, posing for posterity. He wants to look his best. Then along comes the young Bettina von Arnim, a platonic flirtation from his past, with an alternative, memorably ridiculous version, ostensibly admiring, in which Goethe’s wife Christiane is portrayed as ‘the crazy, fat sausage’. There is immortal egg on the facings of that smoking jacket. In the case of Czesław Miłosz, we have a variant on this paradigm. He wanted, as it were,

Molly Brodak, a fair, young Polish-American born in Michigan, is a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Iowa: that hotbed of academic creative writing! Her poems, published in A Little Middle of the Night, are intensely private, pointillist compositions of unconnected images. Now, teaching at Emory University in Atlanta, she has written her first book of prose, which is entirely different, an intimate communication in clear language of shocking candour. Without any evident self-pity, it is as frankly accusative and confessional as an ideal patient’s revelations on a psychiatric couch. Molly analyses her family and herself, evidently achieving understanding, perhaps even forgiveness, of some excruciating emotional entanglements. She presents a

This is one of the most remarkable, hilarious, jaw-droppingly candid and affecting memoirs I have read for some time — not since, perhaps, Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or Rupert Thomson’s This Party’s Got to Stop. Patricia Lockwood is a poet — dubbed ‘The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas’ — who, after unexpected and costly medical bills, was forced to move, with her husband, back to her parents’ home. Her mother is more than mildly neurotic, fretting over things like children jumping out of windows in imitation of Superman. Her father is a bad player of the electric guitar, an enthusiast for guns and hunting, a veteran

In this week’s Books Podcast, I meet the poet Murray Lachlan Young. In the 1990s, Murray became notorious: the first and only poet in history to get a million-pound contract with a record label. Naturally, those living in the standard-issue garrets developed some envy issues. As he promotes his collected work, How Freakin’ Zeitgeist Are You?, Murray talks in detail for the first time about the wild and eventually traumatising ride that took him from obscurity, via the main stage on Glastonbury, to obscurity again — before he picked up the pieces and returned to the stage. He also shares a somewhat disrespectful poem about a former editor of this

When Stravinsky visited David Jones in his cold Harrow bedsit, he came away saying, ‘I have been in the presence of a holy man.’ Other admirers included T.S. Eliot (his publisher) and the Queen Mother (who wrote asking if she could buy some of his work). Harold Bloom, Kenneth Clark and W.H. Auden were all not merely admirers, but passionate in their admiration. Auden thought Jones’s long Eucharistic poem ‘The Anathemata’ the ‘finest long poem written in English this century’. Yet Jones remained completely his own man, belonging to no ‘set’. He had very little money and has never, as far as one can tell, been part of the Eng.

On 21 December 1945, Ezra Pound was confined to St Elizabeths hospital in Washington DC. He had broadcast for Rome Radio from 29 January 1942 to July 1943. To avoid his almost certain conviction for treason (and the death penalty visited on William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw), the superintendent Winfred Overholser testified that Pound was insane and unfit to stand trial. Overholser connived with Julien Cornell, Pound’s lawyer. He elided the testimony of six psychiatrists, whose verdict was more equivocal. He concentrated instead on Pound’s brief, understandable breakdown after being kept in a cage at the Disciplinary Training Centre’s stockade in Pisa. A. David Moody in his exemplary three-volume life of