ontents C Preface ix Acknowledgments xv 1. essays on older poets Dryden Rules 3 Milton according to Fish 31 Johnson’s Lives 43 Possibilities for Wordsworth 55 Anyone for Tennyson? 65 Epistolary Tennyson: The Art of Suspension 75 Hardy’s Poetry of Old Age 95 Housman in His Letters 116
2. reviewing twentieth-century poets The Modernist Generation Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, by Helen Vendler 129 Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life, by Scott Donaldson 133 Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays 136 The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen 141 Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, an Oral Biography by Peter Brazeau 146 Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose 151 Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations 155 Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work, Volume 1, The Young Genius, 1885–1920, by A. David Moody 159
vii T. S. Eliot: The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, edited by Ronald Schuchard 163 Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters 169
The Middle Generation Young Betjeman; John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love; Betjeman: The Bonus of Laughter, by Bevis Hillier 174 William Empson, Volume 1, Among the Mandarins, by John HaVenden 184 Selected Letters of William Empson, edited by John HaVenden 188 Auden, by Richard Davenport-Hines 192 Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden, edited by Stephen Burt with Hannah Brooks-Motl 197 Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters 201 The Poetry of Randall Jarrell 215 Robert Lowell: Collected Poems, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter 236 Robert Lowell: Collected Prose, edited by Robert Giroux 241 The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton 245 Philip Larkin: R.I.P. 249 Philip Larkin: Collected Poems, edited by Anthony Thwaite 253 Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, by Andrew Motion 258 Richard Wilbur: Collected Poems, 1943–2004 263 Donald Hall: White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946–2006 267
3. three critics of poets and poetry
Eliot’s Mischievous Prose 273 Hugh Kenner’s Achievement 292 Donald Davie, the Movement, and Modernism 310
Index 331
viii Contents