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 ...

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 ...

With solemnity, grace and a little defensiveness, this Grand Old Man of Letters reads, discusses and defends his choices. For all his well-known peevishness, he emerges as an ardent, engaged lover of ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A new bilingual collection of poems celebrating Wales' rivers gives Welsh and English "equal weight" to encourage poets to write in their first language. Fifty poets from Wales each write about ...