“More than any other contemporary British playwright, Tom Stoppard populates his plays -- from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to The Invention of Love (his portrait of the poet and scholar A. E. Housman) -- with characters from life and literature. But one cannot always tell the difference between those who are real and those who are imaginary.” RealPlayCharacterLiteratureDifferencesPoetBritishInventionContemporaryScholarImaginaryTomsPortraitsPlaywrightRosencrantz And Guildenstern Author:Mel Gussow
“In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.” PoetBritishNervousUncomfortableDestructivePreferenceAvoidanceInner LifePresent TimeGentility Book:The Savage God: A Study of Suicide Source: The Savage God: A Study of Suicide
“Pound was silly, bumptious, extravagantly generous, annoying, exhibitionistic; Eliot was sensible, cautious, retiring, soothing, shy. Though Pound wrote some brilliant passages, on the whole he was a failure as a poet (sometimes even in his own estimation); Eliot went from success to success and is still quoted--and misquoted--by thousands of people who have never read him. Both men were expatriates by choice, but Eliot renounced his American citizenship and did his best to become assimilated with his fellow British subjects, while Pound always remained an American in exile.” PeopleMenStillsSometimesWholeChoicesSubjectsPoetFellowsBritishBrilliantSillyGenerousShyPoundsPassagesRetiringAnnoyingSensibleCitizenshipExileCautiousSoothingEstimationEliotExpatriatesAmerican Citizenship Author:T.S. Mathews
“My biggest poetic influences are probably 20th-century British and Irish poets. So I suppose I'm always listening for the music I associate with that poetry, the telling images, the brevity. I want to hear it in my own work as well as in the poetry I read. However, I think I'm generally more forgiving of other poets than myself.” ThinkingWantWellsMy OwnInfluenceCenturyPoetListeningForgivingBritishPoeticAssociates20th CenturyBrevity Author:David Starkey
“I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.” ThinkingWayWritingImportantTogetherMovingReadingStylePoetBritishPoundsPriestsAssuranceModernismAnthologyPhilipMoving AwayEliotHartCranes Author:Billy Collins