W. H. AUDEN

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) was a major English poet, probably the most important English-speaking poet born in the twentieth century. Noted especially for native lyrical gifts and highly developed technical expertise, he also displayed wide reading and acute intelligence in his poems. His life, about which a great deal of detail has come to light in the last two or three years, contains sharp contradictions. His early poems were praised for their political pertinency as well as their aesthetic modernity, and his later poems were condemned for their religious and political orthodoxy. Even when he had embraced certain kinds of religious orthodoxy, he continued to live what in many ways was an eccentrically bohemian life; but even in his most revolutionary, his most bohemian, or his least sober moments, he maintained a steady and highly productive work schedule, exemplifying if not always honoring the work ethic of the middle class. (Adapted from: Johnson, Richard. “W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden.” British Poets, 1914-1945, edited by Donald E. Stanford, Gale, 1983).

SEAMUS HEANEY

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was an Irish poet known for his regional themes and sensibilities. Much of his work reflects his upbringing in an atmosphere of deeply divided political and religious beliefs. He became widely recognized in the 1960s as a founding member of the “Northern School” of Irish letters and is acknowledged as one of the most popular and admired poets of modern times. Heaney has enjoyed critical acclaim since the publication of Death of a Naturalist, which was praised for the poet’s deft use of allusion and respect for things past. Heaney has been lauded for his use of the natural places of his youth to address the strife between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Critics have consistently observed Heaney’s use of language to evoke history and place. He gained widespread attention after his third and fourth books, and became a notable influence on other poets. (Adapted from: “Seamus Heaney.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 309, Gale, 2011).

Heaney, Seamus. “Trout.” The Listener, 4 Feb. 1965

Heaney, Seamus. “Two Poems by Seamus Heaney.” The Listener, 2 Nov. 1967

Heaney, Seamus. “Two Poems.” The Listener, 24 Apr. 1969

Heaney, Seamus. “A Winter’s Tale.” The Listener, 30 Oct. 1969

TED HUGHES

Named Poet Laureate of England in 1984, Ted Hughes (1930-1998) is a versatile poet who is perhaps best known for creating powerful poems that feature bold metaphors and resonant language, imagery, and speech rhythms. He often comments on the human condition through the use of myth and symbol, describing natural phenomena and animals in evocative language. Hughes contends that Western civilization has overvalued intellectual faculties, dividing humans both from their instinctual urges and from nature. He suggests that the poet can be a reunifying source by employing such creative energies as imagination and emotion, as well as rationalization, to probe the mysteries of nature and life. Ted Hughes is one of a very few contemporary British poets to have gained a significant reputation outside Britain. In the 1950s, Hughes’ poetry signalled a dramatic departure from the prevailing modes of the period. The stereotypical poem of the time was determined not to risk much: politely domestic in its subject matter, understated and mildly ironic in style. By contrast, Hughes marshalled a language of nearly Shakespearean resonance to explore themes which were mythical and elemental. (Adapted from: “Ted Hughes.” Contemporary Literary Criticism Select, Gale, 2008).

Hughes, Ted, and To be broadcast in ‘The Poet’s Voice’ on August 24. “The Road to Easington.” The Listener, 23 Aug. 1962

Hughes, Ted. “Nightfall.” The Listener, 21 July 1966

Hughes, Ted. “A Motorbike.” The Listener, 30 Nov. 1967

Hughes, Ted. “Cautionary Tale.” The Listener, 6 June 1968

PHILIP LARKIN

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) managed to capture a loyal, wide, and growing audience of readers. He has been acclaimed the “unofficial poet laureate” of England and the “laureate of the common man,” as a representative spokesman for the British sensibility since World War II. He emerged as the center, if not the starting point, of most critical debate over postwar British verse. He is the best known and most acclaimed—critically and popularly—of the figures who made up the so-called Movement in the early 1950s and as an avowed enemy of the literary modernism scorned by The Movement. His scant four collections of poems, written over thirty years, as well as the two novels he brought out shortly after the war, continue to go into new printings, hardcover and paperback, on both sides of the Atlantic. With his well-known reluctance to grant interviews, he insisted that, rather than meet his interviewers face-to-face, he be sent a series of questions, the first set of which he took five months in answering. The paradox of his consenting to the interview but on such a condition—his sense of a place on the literary map yet his refusal to be a public figure—accords with the combination of wariness and fascination toward all relationships, even the most private, seen throughout his poetry. (Adapted from: Martin, Bruce K. “Philip (Arthur) Larkin.” Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 1945-1960, edited by Vincent B. Sherry, Gale, 1984).

Larkin, Philip. “Three Poems.” The Listener, 21 July 1960

Larkin, Philip. “Dockery and Son.” The Listener, 11 Apr. 1963

Larkin, Philip. “The Explosion.” The Listener, 17 Aug. 1972

Larkin, Philip. “Cut grass.” The Listener, 5 Dec. 1985

DYLAN THOMAS

Dylan Thomas’s (194-1953) life, work, and stature among twentieth-century poets are all matters of controversy and speculation. Until recently, Thomas’s spectacular public life and personality, essentially distinct from the serious craftsman within, obscured the critical view of the body of work which the poet left behind. Not only Thomas’s life but even his poetry is dominated by the problem of the relation of inner and outer, of self and world. This problem remains the underlying theme of Thomas’s poetry in its three major phases: (1) the early juvenilia, the poems in the notebooks, and the post-notebook poems of 1934-1936; (2) the middle-phase poetry of the late 1930s to mid-1940s; and (3) the final poetry of the postwar years (1946-1953). Less centrally, the immediate themes of the poetry in the three periods evolve from an early obsession with a visionary, often demonic fusion of the processes of the body, especially intercourse and gestation, with the processes of nature and the cosmos, through a more directly personal encounter with the “exterior” challenges of marriage, fatherhood, and war, to a final period of imaginative recollection and dramatic evocation of a lost Wordsworthian childhood and a loving vision of nature and death as holy, sacramental, and good. (Adapted from: Middleton, David E. “Dylan (Marlais) Thomas.” British Poets, 1914-1945, edited by Donald E. Stanford, Gale, 1983).

Thomas, Dylan. “Poem in October.” The Listener, 24 Oct. 1934

Thomas, Dylan. “Poem in October.” The Listener, 14 Jan. 1954

Thomas, Dylan. “Poems from The Listener.” The Listener, 18 Jan. 1979

Thomas, Dylan. “Light.” The Listener, 19 Jan. 1989

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