Notes In all references place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated. NOTE TO PREFACE 1. See Seamus Heaney, 'An Open Letter' (1983), repr. in Ireland's Field Day (1985) pp. 21-30; Tom Paulin, Ireland and the English Crisis (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1984) pp. 9-22; Douglas Dunn, 'Interview with Bernard O'Donoghue', Oxford Poetry, 11.2 (Spring 1985) 46-7, 49-50. NOTES TO CHAPTER 1: JAMES FENTON'S 'NARRATIVES': SOME REFLECTIONS ON POSTMODERNISM 1. Compare Paul Muldoon's fabulation in 'Immram', Why Brownlee Left (1980) pp. 38-47, and 'The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants', Quoof (1983) pp. 40-64. 2. Compare Muldoon's 'The Big House', Mules (1977) pp.15-16, which indulgently spins a yarn, exploiting with evident enjoyment the narrative cliches of Gothic fiction and the detective novel, only in its final qualificatory line, which contradicts line 10, to playfully dismiss itself as fabrication by drawing attention to the unreliability of its artifice. 3. See James Fenton, The Memory of War and Children in Exile: Poems 1968-1983 (Harmondsworth, 1983) pp. 92-3. Line references in individual poems are incorporated wherever possible into the text. Compare W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (1976) p.41. 4. See Fenton, Memory of War, pp. 81-4. Compare The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Edward Mendel­ son (1977) p.61 and Auden, Collected Poems, pp.414-15, 224-31. 5. English Auden, p. 148. 6. Fenton, Memory of War, pp. 30-7. 7. Ibid., pp.10-19. 8. Ibid., pp. 58-61. 9. Notice the characteristically sinister wordplay here on prussic acid. 10. See 'An Interview with James Fenton', Poetry Review, 72.2 Oune 1982) 21, and Fenton, Memory of War, pp. 44-6. 11. See 'An Interview with James Fenton', p.18. 12. Muldoon, Quoof p. 29. 13. Compare Seamus Heaney, North (1975) pp.49-50. 14. 'An Interview with James Fenton', p. 21. Fenton is presumably thinking of Clare's 'Remembrances': 209 210 Notes to pages 9-17 Inclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain It levelled every bush & tree & levelled every hill & hung the moles for traitors See John Clare, The Midsummer Cushion, ed. Anne Tibbie and R. K. R. Thornton (Ashington and Manchester, 1979) p. 370. 15. See Fenton, Memory of War, pp. 96-9. 16. Compare the discussion of exoticism apropos of Christopher Reid's poetry in Chapter 2, pp. 34-5 infra. 17. See English Auden, pp.130-5 and The Complete Poems of Keith Douglas, ed. Desmond Graham (Oxford, 1978) p. 79. 18. See Fenton, Memory of War, pp. 47-9. 19. Compare particularly 'Ses purs ongles tres haut dediant leur onyx' in Stephane Mallarme, CEuvres completes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris, 1945) pp. 68-9. 20. See Charles Jencks, 'Late-Modernism and Post-Modernism', Late­ Modern Architecture (1980) pp.10-30; The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 3rd edn (1981) passim. NOTES TO CHAPTER 2: THEATRE OF TROPE: CRAIG RAINE AND CHRISTOPHER REID The following abbreviations are used throughout this chapter: A Reid, Arcadia (Oxford, 1979) CP Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (1955) K Reid, Katerina Brae (1985) M Raine, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (Oxford, 1979) P Reid, Pea Soup (Oxford, 1982) R Raine, Rich (1984) T Raine, The Onion, Memory (Oxford, 1978) 1. James Fenton, 'Of the Martian School', New Statesman (20 Oct 1978) p. 520. Amongst vituperative attacks on the exclusiveness of the British poetry scene, Martin Booth's British Poetry 1964 to 1984 (1985) pp. 248-56, is the most outspoken. 2. Craig Raine quotes Wordsworth to this effect in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation, ed. John Haffenden (1981) p.182 and in 'Babylonish Dialects', Poetry Review, 74.2 Oune 1984) 31. 3. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings, ed. Louis A. Landa (Oxford, 1976) pp. 128, 143. 4. London Review of Books, 3, 24 July; 4, 18 Sept; 9 Oct, 20 Nov, 18 Dec 1986; 8 Jan 1987. 5. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems [hereafter CP] (1955) pp. 486, 64. 6. Jane Austen, Selected Letters 1796-1817, ed. R. W. Chapman (1955) p.189. Raine's more extensive apologia, apropos of John Donne, is 'Making Love with the Light On', Listener (5 April 1984) pp. 12-13. Notes to pages 18-36 211 7. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1982) p. 357. 8. Harold Pinter, Plays: One (1976) pp.14-15. 9. This Eliotic theme (as in the elegiac 'Burnt Norton') is also explored in 'Memory' (T, p. 25), which Raine depicts as 'the staircase we can never climb, I the ruined spiral of the silver birch, I dripping cob­ webs', confirming the Symbolist origins of his Martian interest in metaphor. 10. T. S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays (1969) pp.18-212. 11. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; repr. Harmondsworth, 1974) p.183. 12. Compare Wallace Stevens's 'Life is Motion' (CP, p. 83), with its celebration of 'the marriage I Of flesh and air'. 13. R, p. 22. The decorous formality perhaps owes something to Enobarbus' s famous encomium on Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, n.ii. 198-9. 14. M, p. 6. Dryden's great translation of De Rerum Natura, IV.1052-1287, is in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols (Oxford, 1958) I. 413-21. 15. John Haffenden, 'An Interview with Christopher Reid', Poetry Review, 72.3 (Sept 1982) 16; Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York, 1977) p. 179. Compare Stevens's equation of poetry with 'metaphor or metamorphosis' in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York, n.d.) pp.ll7-18. 16. The sequence 'Spleen' in Charles Baudelair~, CEuvres completes, ed. Claude Pichois, 2 vols (Paris, 1975-6) 1. 72-5, contrasts with 'Parfum exotique' (pp. 25-6), 'La Chevelure' (pp. 26-7), 'L'Invitation au voyage' (pp. 53-4), 'Chanson d'apres-midi' (pp. 59-60), 'Un hemis­ phere dans une chevelure' (pp. 300-1), 'L'Invitation au voyage' (pp. 301-3), 'Les Projets' (pp. 314-15) and 'Any where out of the world' (pp. 356-7). 17. Ibid., 1. 26. 18. Ibid., II. 334. Baudelaire is recasting a passage in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Poetic Principle', repr. in his Complete Works, ed. James A. Harrison, 17 vols (New York, 1902) XIV. 273-4. 19. 'Brise marine', in Stephane Mallarme, is CEuvres completes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris, 1945) p. 38; see also 'Les Fenetres' and 'L' Azur', ibid., pp. 32-3, 37-8. 20. Ezra Pound, Collected Shorter Poems, 2nd edn (1968) pp. 221, 220; cf. the full context of pp. 216-21. 21. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, 2nd edn (1950) p. 392. 22. I would, of course, not wish to assert that there was a single High Romantic ideology unassailed by criticism from within: Word­ sworth, for example, is the author of 'Peter Bell' as well as of The Prelude. Nevertheless I believe that one can usefully discriminate between the vatic pretensions which the major Romantics confirmed as a poetic tradition and Reid's ludic subversion of the High Romantic frame of reference that has continued to play such a dominant role in twentieth-century poetry. 212 Notes to pages 37-44 23. 'Endymion', IV.636-44, in The Poems oflohn Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (1970) pp.271-2. 24. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, ed. Graham Petrie (Harmondsworth, 1967) p.453. Compare Corporal Trim's flourish with his cane, ibid., p. 576. 25. Stevens, CP, p. 322. 26. The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (1977) pp.210-12. 27. Compare 'Morality and the Novel' in D. H. Lawrence, A Selection from Phoenix, ed. A. A. H. Inglis (Harmondsworth, 1971) p.177. 28. See Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811). 29. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; repr. Harmondsworth, 1971) pp. 455-63. 30. Compare, for example, Craig Raine, 'Good Manners', London Review of Books, 6.9 (17 May-6 June 1984) 9; Viewpoints, p. 179. Joyce supplied the epigraphs for M; R, pt 1 and p. 88; and T, pp. 5, 12. 31. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; repr. Harmondsworth, 1975) pp. 221, 217. 32. Lines 996-1014; text from Jonathan Wordsworth, William Word­ sworth: The Borders of Vision (Oxford, 1984) p. 414. M. H. Abrams traces the origins of 'the apocalyptic marriage' in Natural Supernatu­ ralism (New York, 1973) Ch.l. 33. Stephen's transposition of Flaubert is in Portrait, p. 215. 34. Compare, for example, Mr Y's stencilling of catkins with the catkin 'epaulettes' in 'The First Lesson' (R, p.109); his playful reference to 'snows' with the metaphor of 'state cocaine' in 'The Sylko Bandit' (R, pp. 88-9); his fascination with the drunk lexicon of dreams with the sleeping 'readers' of 'A Martian Sends A Postcard Home' (M, p.2). 35. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (1965) p.167. 36. Stevens, Opus Posthumous, p. 167. For some of the other contexts of 'poverty' see ibid., p.104, and CP, pp.299, 317, 320-1, 325-6, 477, 480, 495, 505, 510, 532-3. 37. London Review of Books, 6.17 (20 Sept-3 Oct 1984) 11. 38. Stevens, Opus Posthumous, p. 178; Necessary Angel, p. 31. Compare CP, p.167; Necessary Angel, pp. 27-31, 170-1; Opus Posthumous, pp. 158, 159. 39. Stevens, Necessary Angel, pp. 57-8. 40. Poetry Review, 74.2 Gune 1984) 30-3. 41. Stevens, Necessary Angel, p.