So that after all the military histories, newspaper articles and grand memorials have been forgotten, the poets' lines come back to haunt us.
Certainly, taking an aesthetic view of the world is not as common now as it once was, and Davidson's turning over of the meanings of lesser-known poets' lines or his close examination of the brushstrokes of Whistler's nocturnes feels risky when publishing wants the big story that sells.
"Sensible people run from the crazy poet," one line read.
Crucially, they're fixed format, meaning that the poets' original line breaks are preserved.
But there's seldom any jetlag to this poet's lines.
His staging of "Early Plays" is reductive in the best possible way — the way a poet reduces lines to their essence, changing the world with an intonation.
The poor, persecuted Pendle witches are at last getting recognition in spades, with everything from a community quilt to a verses by the Poet Laureate lined up to mark the 400th anniversary of their execution.
Especially for a poet writing lines as formal and perfected as these, occurring earlier in the poem: "This morning the bells of St. Francis / compete with the caws of gulls / and the rumble and whistle of traffic".
Listen: I'm not one of those people who thinks that song lyrics are poetry (the conflation is pernicious to both traditions, excusing lazy readers who get their "poetry" via Spotify, while at the same time devaluing the role of actual, you know, music in music), but that's not to say that lyrics can't be poetic or a poet's lines musical.
This must be because you do not live here.Dimitris IoannouFairfax, VirginiaProse, indeedSIR – In your review of modern poetry books you say of a poet that "his line lengths are often dictated by speech movement—he breaks a line at the point where we would naturally pause for breath" ("For crying out loud", March 27th).
