I have been moving books between one house and another, doing a quinquennial cull to donate to libraries. In flux, I can’t make a firm census of the poetry books I cannot bear to do without, but there ...

Bloom made his critical reputation with a book called The Anxiety of Influence, where he argued that poetry proceeds on the misreadings by strong poets of their predecessors. In this massive anthology ...

Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative. Figuration is a departure from the literal, and the form of a great poem itself can be a ...

As usual, The Best Poems is an odd collection. About fifty per cent of it is the blending of high-minded sentiment and low-rating technical capacity which adds up to complete mediocrity in poetry. But ...

Close to two centuries after his death, the mystical poetry of William Blake continues to be studied and cherished as one of the most distinctive voices in the English language. Born on 28 November ...

The publication of Vladimir Nabokov's Selected Poems is a major literary event. The great, grand and much missed novelist (Lolita, Pale Fire) was "first a poet," as the book's editor Thomas Karshan ...

Reading Sappho is radiant and frustrating, like being smiled upon by a goddess who is missing some teeth. Frustrating because her poems survive in quotations and fragments, snippets of often ...