Fine remains of a formidable poet and nice guy.
But she is an acute and perceptive thinker about poetry, an imaginative editor who is breathing new life into The New Republic, and a formidable poet.
We're a day late for the centenary of Robert Conquest, who revealed the extent of Stalin's atrocities in his landmark 1968 book, The Great Terror, in addition to being a formidable poet.
At a post-screening Q&A with the writer Andrew Davies and actor Tom Hollander, who plays Thomas, one man said: "I have only known Thomas as a formidable poet.
W. S. Merwin, a formidable American poet who for more than 60 years labored under a formidable poetic yoke: the imperative of using language — an inescapably concrete presence on the printed page — to conjure absence, silence and nothingness, died on Friday at his home near Haiku-Pauwela, Hawaii. Haiku-Pauwela, Hawaii
All the hallmarks of this formidable tone poet are on show: the murmurs of internal monologue that take the place of conversation, the reverence for green thoughts, the hopeless lurches into action, the bizarre physical sensibility that registers every flicker of sunlight but shies away, as if for fear of bruising, from any breath of sex.
In 1925 he entered the University of Oxford Christ Churchh), where he established a formidable reputation as poet and sage, having a strong influence on such other literary intellectuals as C. Day Lewis (named poet laureate in 1968), Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, who printed by hand the first collection of Auden's poems in 1928.
Over the decades it evolved with the literary climate, publishing Robert Graves, T. S. Eliot, Anthony Hecht, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas, Eudora Welty and other formidable writers and poets of the 20th century.
Some of the work is specifically religious, as in a 13th- or 14th-century painting of the formidable Japanese Buddhist poet-saint Kukai, known as Kobo Daishi, who wears a monk's robe and holds tantric instruments, and in a colossal polychrome stucco head of a crowned bodhisattva, protectively flanked by painted screens.
His sturdy volume of collected poems, "Some Jazz a While," was published in 1999 and confirmed his status as a poet of formidable gifts and influence.
But One Thousand Nights and Counting shows that, at his best, Maxwell is a poet of formidable technical gifts who revels in the sheer power of storytelling.
