Fire or flood?
How did the Flood of floods come about? According to Hughes' irresistible re-telling of Ovid's tales, Jove quietly considered the...
Learning by heart
Listening time: 10 minutes.Â
It's been playing on my mind, the fact that recently I haven't learned any...
Roughing out poems
Hand-written notes and journals have a magic to them. Durrell is a favourite poet and his house in Greece was as...
Taut-cheeked genii
When first reading some of the world's meatiest epic poems in translation, I concluded that in general those by poets...
Luminously-peopled air
I don't quite know what 'luminously-peopled air' means - perhaps that the air was full of the sounds of luminous...
How to hide a poem (II)
Listening time: under 5 minutes.  This disturbing quotation is striking on several levels.  By the Hungarian poet György Faludy concerning...
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
A beloved possession, this book was given to me by my mother for Christmas 1969, when I was six. You...
Rook-delighting heaven
Yeats looks up and is thrown by the sight of a wintry sky, suddenly overcome by an inpouring rush of...
Like the last of his life
Harold Bloom's comment on Hart Crane (1899-1932) is all the more poignant knowing that Crane considered some of his major...
Lapping the summits
What an image! The original deluge raising water levels so high that they lap over the summits...
Of perfumed poems
Of abundant overflow
What causes creativity to spring forth? I like Seamus Heaney's idea that it is not so much reactive as a...
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