One of the good things about Larkin is that he still has you firmly by the hand as you cross the finishing-line, whereas reading Auden is like doing a parachute-drop: for a while the view is wonderful, but then you end up on your back in the middle of a ploughed field and in the wrong county.

I have no doubt that in heaven the angels will regard the blessed as a necessary evil.

The Channel is a slipper-bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom.

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwel…

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

At the heart of many of Stevens's poems are harsh and unpalatable experiences revealed only gradually through his intense stylization.

If poetry is like an orgasm, an academic can be likened to someone who studies the passion-stains on the bedsheets.