T.S.Eliot
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Is John Keats a natural poet?
‘If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.’ John Keats, Hampstead Feb 27th 1818, Letter to John Taylor. Keats wrote this ‘axiom’ in a letter to his friend John Taylor when he was 22. Are we to read this as a notion of genius — that great…
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An afterthought on the T.S. Eliot Prize readings
Snapping up a ticket offered to me by my more organised pal Robin Houghton, I was lucky enough to get to hear the work of the ten shortlisted poets for this year’s T.S. Eliot awards in the capacious Royal Festival Hall. Fab seats we had too, being in row D, only slightly marred by the screen-lit…
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How I stopped being a genius
Let me tell you that until the age of 29 I was a tortured genius.To help other people understand this, I lived in a squalid bedsit. I was also permanently unhealthy in that way typical of geniuses, and I spent my nights barking my tortured, misunderstood poetry into the smoky fug of doggerel-filled rooms. Don’t…
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Coleridge and Dejection
Re-reading T.S.Eliot’s the Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, specifically his essay about Wordsworth and Coleridge. Here Eliot makes a memorable assessment of Coleridge. …for a few years he (Coleridge) had been visited by the Muse (I know of no poet to whom this hackneyed metaphor is better applicable) and thenceforth was a…
Peter Kenny: a writer's notebook 