导语

  

    Poets are mad. To which tired statement we would usually find ourselves obliged to append ’as the received wisdom goes’; sadly, we can now dispense with that obligation, at least in part. The evidence that poets belong to the most mentally unstable of professions is now statistical as well as anecdotal...

内容提要

  

    Poets are mad. To which tired statement we would usually find ourselves obliged to append ’as the received wisdom goes’; sadly, we can now dispense with that obligation, at least in part. The evidence that poets belong to the most mentally unstable of professions is now statistical as well as anecdotal.* The systematic interrogation of one’s own unconscious is dangerous and perhaps foolhardy work; but poets have no alternative, if they are to access those darker corridors of the memory and imagination from which they might recover the true poem. The doors to these rooms often open more easily than they close, and the consequent leakage between the two worlds is poetry’s unique occupational hazard, like drummer’s tinnitus or miner’s emphysema. No surprise, then, that when it comes to that most delicately fraught of subjects - themselves - many poets are either legendarily reticent or evasive, both strategies deriving from a strongly and sensibly self-protective urge. So this booka guide to the work of almost all the major poets published in the UK in the last fifty years, written by the poets themselves-would have been impossible either to commission or to edit; it had to be got by surreptitious means.

Introduction  
Kingsley Amis
Simon Armitage
John Ash  
George Barker
James K. Baxter
John Betjeman
Eavan Boland  
Charles Boyle  
Edward Braithwaite
John Burnside  
Ciaran Carson
Charles Causley
Kate Clanchy  
Austin Clarke  
Billy Collins  
Wendy Cope  
Frances Cornford
Patrick Creagh
Fred D’Aguiar  
Donald Davie  
Peter Didsbury
Michael Donaghy
Maura Dooley
Mark Doty  
Carol Ann Duffy
Ian Duhig
Helen Dunmore
Douglas Dunn
Lawrence Durrell
T. S. Eliot  
D. J. Enright  
Gavin Ewart  
U. A. Fanthorpe
James Fenton
Roy Fuller  
John Glenday
W. S. Graham
Robert Graves
Geoffrey Grigson
Thorn Gunn
David Harsent
Seamus Heaney
John HeathStubbs
Anthony Hecht
W. N. Herbert
Rita Ann Higgins
Geoffrey Hill  
Michael Hofmann
Ted Hughes  
Kathleen Jamie
Alan Jenkins  
Elizabeth Jennings
P. J. Kavanagh
Patrick Kavanagh
X. J. Kennedy
Philip Larkin  
James Lasdun  
Peter Levi  
Christopher Logue
Michael Longley
George MacBeth
Norman MacCaig
Medbh McGuckian
Jamie McKendrick
Louis MacNeice
Barry MacSweeney
Sarah Maguire
Derek Mahon
Glyn Maxwell
W. S. Merwin
Christopher Middleton
John Montague  
Dom Moraes  
Blake Morrison  
Andrew Motion  
Edwin Muir
Paul Muldoon  
Les Murray
Norman Nicholson
Sean O’Brien  
Bernard O’Donoghue
Alice Oswald  
Ruth Padel
Tom Paulin  
Sylvia Hath  
Craig Raine  
Kathleen Raine  
Herbert Read  
Peter Reading  
Peter Redgrove
James Reeves  
Christopher Reid
Oliver Reynolds
Anne Ridler  
Maurice Riordan
Theodore Roethke
Anne Rouse  
Carol Rumens  
Vernon Scannell  
Anne Sexton  
Jo Shapcott  
Penelope Shuttle
Charles Simic  
Burns Singer  
Robin Skelton  
Ian Crichton Smith
Ken Smith  
Pauline Stainer  
Matthew Sweeney
R. S. Thomas  
Charles Tomlinson
Rosemary Tonks  
C. A. Trypanis  
John Wain  
Vernon Watkins  
Peter Whigam  
C. K. Williams  
Hugo Williams  
John Hartley Williams
Gerard Woodward
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