Poets are mad. To which tired statement we would usually find ourselves obliged to append ’as the received wisdom goes’; sadly, we can now dispense with that obligation, at least in part. The evidence that poets belong to the most mentally unstable of professions is now statistical as well as anecdotal...

Poets are mad. To which tired statement we would usually find ourselves obliged to append ’as the received wisdom goes’; sadly, we can now dispense with that obligation, at least in part. The evidence that poets belong to the most mentally unstable of professions is now statistical as well as anecdotal.* The systematic interrogation of one’s own unconscious is dangerous and perhaps foolhardy work; but poets have no alternative, if they are to access those darker corridors of the memory and imagination from which they might recover the true poem. The doors to these rooms often open more easily than they close, and the consequent leakage between the two worlds is poetry’s unique occupational hazard, like drummer’s tinnitus or miner’s emphysema. No surprise, then, that when it comes to that most delicately fraught of subjects - themselves - many poets are either legendarily reticent or evasive, both strategies deriving from a strongly and sensibly self-protective urge. So this booka guide to the work of almost all the major poets published in the UK in the last fifty years, written by the poets themselves-would have been impossible either to commission or to edit; it had to be got by surreptitious means.

Introduction 

Kingsley Amis

Simon Armitage

John Ash 

George Barker

James K. Baxter

John Betjeman

Eavan Boland 

Charles Boyle 

Edward Braithwaite

John Burnside 

Ciaran Carson

Charles Causley

Kate Clanchy 

Austin Clarke 

Billy Collins 

Wendy Cope 

Frances Cornford

Patrick Creagh

Fred D’Aguiar 

Donald Davie 

Peter Didsbury

Michael Donaghy

Maura Dooley

Mark Doty 

Carol Ann Duffy

Ian Duhig

Helen Dunmore

Douglas Dunn

Lawrence Durrell

T. S. Eliot 

D. J. Enright 

Gavin Ewart 

U. A. Fanthorpe

James Fenton

Roy Fuller 

John Glenday

W. S. Graham

Robert Graves

Geoffrey Grigson

Thorn Gunn

David Harsent

Seamus Heaney

John HeathStubbs

Anthony Hecht

W. N. Herbert

Rita Ann Higgins

Geoffrey Hill 

Michael Hofmann

Ted Hughes 

Kathleen Jamie

Alan Jenkins 

Elizabeth Jennings

P. J. Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh

X. J. Kennedy

Philip Larkin 

James Lasdun 

Peter Levi 

Christopher Logue

Michael Longley

George MacBeth

Norman MacCaig

Medbh McGuckian

Jamie McKendrick

Louis MacNeice

Barry MacSweeney

Sarah Maguire

Derek Mahon

Glyn Maxwell

W. S. Merwin

Christopher Middleton

John Montague 

Dom Moraes 

Blake Morrison 

Andrew Motion 

Edwin Muir

Paul Muldoon 

Les Murray

Norman Nicholson

Sean O’Brien 

Bernard O’Donoghue

Alice Oswald 

Ruth Padel

Tom Paulin 

Sylvia Hath 

Craig Raine 

Kathleen Raine 

Herbert Read 

Peter Reading 

Peter Redgrove

James Reeves 

Christopher Reid

Oliver Reynolds

Anne Ridler 

Maurice Riordan

Theodore Roethke

Anne Rouse 

Carol Rumens 

Vernon Scannell 

Anne Sexton 

Jo Shapcott 

Penelope Shuttle

Charles Simic 

Burns Singer 

Robin Skelton 

Ian Crichton Smith

Ken Smith 

Pauline Stainer 

Matthew Sweeney

R. S. Thomas 

Charles Tomlinson

Rosemary Tonks 

C. A. Trypanis 

John Wain 

Vernon Watkins 

Peter Whigam 

C. K. Williams 

Hugo Williams 

John Hartley Williams

Gerard Woodward

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