Byron

Even more off-topic than usual, but I thought I’d share here the fact that I’ve co-authored an article that is printed in the new edition of the Byron Journal. Here’s how it happened:

Did T.S. Eliot read Edna Ferber’s ‘Showboat’?

Edna Ferber’s novel Show Boat (1926) has a memorable description of the detritus after a storm on the Mississippi: Outside, the redundant rain added its unwelcome measure to the swollen and angry stream. In the ghostly gray dawn the grotesque wreckage of flood-time floated and whirled and jiggled by, seeming to bob a mad obeisance […]

The Kipling Boom, 1890

Researching (i.e. idly Googling) Kipling, I came across this rather good bit of verse printed in the San Francisco Examiner of 1890. It’s a reaction to the sudden and seemingly unstoppable vogue for the works of Kipling. The Examiner credits it to the Saturday Review, but since the references are mostly American, I don’t think […]

‘The Waste Land – A Biography of a Poem’

I’ve greatly enjoyed reading Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, even though it tells a story that has been told before – most notably in Robert Crawford’s very good biography, Young Eliot, which I read not so long ago. Well, good stories stand re-telling. What I appreciated most about Hollis’s book […]

The poetry of George Willis

Having become interested in the war poems of George Willis, I have now acquired a copy of his Any Soldier to his Son. I have also taken a look at his The Philosophy of Speech at the Internet Archive. The poetry book is a small but nicely made volume (publisher George Allen and Unwin), with […]

Twenties Novelists consider War Poets

I’ve just put online a paper I wrote a few years ago. It’s called ‘I too am a Murderer’: Representations of War Poets in Fictions of the 1920s. You can find it by clicking here. I first wrote it for the excellent Oxford centenary conference in 2014, where it was received quite well. I went […]

The 1921 Census

I’ve already posted about Evadne Price’s interesting appearance in the census, and will be adding a few more details about other writers in due course. I consulted the census at the Manchester Central Reference Library, a place dear to me since my BA student days, nearly sixty years ago. Apart from the National Archives at […]

Kipling does not mince his words

Ever since the sentimental film My Boy Jack, a myth has grown that his son’s death at Loos made Rudyard Kipling less warlike, more pacific. The evidence mostly points the other way. Kipling was tremendously affected by John’s death, of course, but in ways that made him even more committed to the war effort, more […]

A Kipling bargain

I can’t believe my luck. Some years ago, the Cambridge University Press published Thomas Pinney’s three-volume edition of Kipling’s collected poems. I blogged about the publication at the time, but the price of the set was £225 -beyond the budget of an ageing pensioner such as myself. A few weeks ago, loitering on Bookfinder.com, as […]

Charlotte Mew

This is just a note to say how much I am enjoying the new edition of Charlotte Mew’s Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Julia Copus, and recently published by Faber. The Mew poems that speak most to me are her dramatic monologues, often with a touch of dialect, and the poems about people whose […]