Philip Larkin: The Poet-Critic by David Wheatley

E-mail this site to a friend.

'Poet-critic': a tricky one to define. A poet who writes criticism or a critic who writes poetry? The phrase denotes something simultaneously less and more than the single being who could dispense with that prickly hyphen. Molière's Monsieur Jourdain was pleasantly surprised to learn that everything that is not poetry is prose; judged by this generous standard, most if not all poets could apply for summary reclassification as poet-critics. After all, who has not dabbled in his or her time? Craig Raine has compared light verse to self-abuse ('it may not be the real thing, but it has its own peculiar satisfactions'), and most writers extend the same tolerance to the occasional bout of reviewing. But does it make them poet-critics? Something else self-abuse and reviewing have in common is how much of it we're prepared to do in our youth before (we'd like to think) growing up to something more real and satisfying. But there will always be those who come down with the critical equivalent of Portnoy's complaint: no matter how adolescent or embarrassing it looks, they can't stop, and keep doing it into middle age and beyond. And eventually, in isolated cases, the slow years of this solitary vice sire a book of dusted-down clippings, reheated reviews and microwaved articles. Welcome to the world of the poet-critic.
     As this anti-procreative metaphor is meant to suggest, the evolutionary odds are stacked against poet-critics. The prickliness of that hyphen is no accident: poet-critics are difficult to corral into schools and movements, unless of their own devising, wanting it all and on their own terms. The rarity of the breed and the double-headed nature of the calling make them more incorrigibly plural among themselves than mono-professional poets or critics: sometimes quite literally among themselves, as in the agonized, self-divided case of Matthew Arnold. Ideally the two activities should complement each other, but it rarely works out that way. Prose is to poetry as walking is to dancing, Paul Valéry proposed, but being Nijinsky or Baryshnikov doesn't always mean you're cut out for a thirty-mile hike in the rain. There are poets, very fine ones, who can no more produce critical prose than they can frescoes or string quartets. Conversely there are those who save for their prose the genius they fail to get into their poems, the usual example being Randall Jarrell. Then there are those who are great readers rather than great critics: Borges, for instance. Or those like Coleridge who are the genuine article but can't shake off the guilt attaching to not writing poems all the time. Ted Hughes convinced himself that the cancer that killed him was a punishment for having bunked off bardic duty to write Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Poet-critic: there is a temptation to read the hyphen as a subtraction sign, as if every brainwave of the latter robbed the world of the former's next villanelle or sestina. In her hopeful way Elizabeth Bishop 'always felt that I've written poetry more by not writing it than writing it'. Is there another profession where abstention confers such virtue? 'I've always felt I've done more acting by not getting any work than by being on stage'--no, it doesn't translate.
     In his introduction to Behind the Lines, his recent collection of 'pieces on writing and pictures', Michael Hofmann celebrates the 'hot' and 'improvisational' art of literary journalism, the 'flashes and inscriptions, swift, provisional, personal responses' that the arrival of a slim volume in the post can produce. Hofmann's reviews began to appear at the same time as his first poems, which was also the time he abandoned a PhD on Robert Lowell, deciding he was 'not a distance merchant, but a sprinter, a bend runner'. Poet-critics vary in their preferred distances, and trying to decide where rapid-response journalism ends and a leisurely essay begins can be a sensitive task. Cynthia Ozick has lamented the eclipse of the essay in favour of the 'article'--'that shabby, team-driven, ugly, truncated, undeveloped, speedy, breezy, cheap, impatient thing'. To identify 'article' here exclusively with the popular prints and 'essay' with the unpopular academic ones would be a dire misunderstanding; those who consider academic prose a rest-home for sensitive souls haven't picked up many academic quarterlies recently, it is safe to assume.
     No, the difference lies somewhere else. To some, the requiredness of 'required writing' is all-important: Derek Mahon made a point of rejecting Selected Prose as a title for the book that became Journalism. Writers may claw their way up from the breathless review to the essay in time, but the memory of clammy-palmed scrambles for copy is something the poet-critic does well not to forget. The knowledge that you are 'writing to the moment' brings its own adrenalin rush, as you sketch in frail but immutable water paints rather than slow but easily covered-up oils. The occasion has chosen you rather than you choosing the occasion. It is your first time: you will be eager to please, keen not to gush, sheepish about confessing dislike. Or maybe not so sheepish: sitting down to write, you may experience a sudden rush of insight into Philip Larkin's thoughts on buying Christmas presents, that annual 'conversion of one's indifference to others into active hatred'. You're not compelled to hand out presents, of course: 'never praise; praise dates you', Cyril Connolly recommended; the critic 'stands behind the ticket-queue of fame, banging his rivals on the head as they bend low before the guichet. When he has laid out enough he becomes an authority, which is more than they will.' Or an Uncle Vanya, he might have added, honoured and empty-headed. At least Uncle Vanya had his university chair. Unlucky elderly reviewers become not belaurelled professors but beleaguered stylites, perched ever more precariously above the young rivals who will topple them into oblivion.
     In old age W.S. Graham thought of himself as occupying the 'Chair of Professor of Silence', having toppled off the pillar of renown so calamitously that his publisher Faber and Faber assumed he was dead. 'Professor of Silence' provides Dennis O'Driscoll with the title for an affectionate homage to Graham in Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams, a selection from two decades of literary journalism by one of Ireland's most readable poet-critics. Over the years O'Driscoll has unfailingly passed the 'I'll buy it' test: if a magazine has something by Dennis in it, I'll buy it, regardless of the rest of its contents. Had I been buying magazines in the late 1970s, these would have included Hibernia, where his first reviews appeared and where he began the proselytizing for world poetry that has since taken his own reviews all round the world. O'Driscoll has always been a pioneer: the first to review Les Murray in Europe, the apostle of all things Eastern European in Krino in the '80s (around the time when my literacy was setting in), and still pressing American discoveries on us today (Stephen Dobyns, Mark Halliday). Discoveries--or rediscoveries--can come from closer to home, too. When O'Driscoll taught for a term in University College Dublin he characteristically chose as his subject neglected writers, and if Padraic Fallon, to take only one example, has now received something like his due Dennis's long-standing advocacy has played a large part. Another recipient of the same treatment is Valentin Iremonger, O'Driscoll's essay on whom contains the answer to a party-piece teaser I've seen him try out more than once. Iremonger's poem 'This Houre Her Vigill' is 'denied perfection' by a single word. Which one? Answer on page 109.
     For all its marvellous range there are some small blanks on the canvas in Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams. Although there can scarcely be an Irish poet who has not encountered or corresponded with O'Driscoll, he has always done his noble best to swerve out of view when asked to review anyone personally known to him. So let me come clean immediately: by O'Driscoll's own criteria I am in no position to review this book and don't think I can anyway, properly speaking. I first met Dennis in Read's on Nassau Street in Dublin, scrutinizing its acres of newsprint and magazine covers with a practised eye. Brian Coffey had just died and I struck up a conversation by asking if he'd seen such and such an obituary--a little like asking the Archbishop if he'd said his prayers that morning, I now realize. To other customers the shop was a dispensary of the morning paper or a packet of cigarettes; to Dennis it was a research library. Dennis has written a poem about his letterbox, and I have often thought of the forests of periodicals it has swallowed over the years to feed his 'Pickings and Choosings' column. Dennis is the Ulysses of the quotation business, pursuing his quarry like a sinking star over horizons most of us never even sight. Who else would have thought to look in the Farmer's Gazette for a reaction to Seamus Heaney's Nobel Prize win? And sure enough there it was: 'Bellaghy Celebrates as Farmer's Son Wins Top Literary Award'. He has quoted Alan Bennett's suggestion that, just as abandoned cars sometimes have notices slapped on them reading 'Police Aware', beauty spots or 'some particularly touching vagrant' could have an equivalent reading 'Poet Aware'. Maybe the unread poetry books and magazines piled high in shops could have a 'Dennis Aware' sticker. As for trying to find something he hasn't already seen or read before you, forget about it: a friend-who-shall-remain-nameless has tried casually dropping the name of a non-existent poet in conversation with him, only for Dennis to fall on the unknown name like a chameleon's tongue on a passing horsefly: Who?
     I don't know whether Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams has attracted a banner headline in the Tipperary Star yet, but if not it should have. The book begins with a marvellous slice of autobiography, 'Circling the Square: A Thurles Prospect', which goes some way to explaining Dennis's ability to move between worlds as easily as he does. As a schoolboy he wrote to the then-unNobeled Samuel Beckett, perhaps to bear the good news to the struggling playwright that his Waiting for Godot was being revived in the local Premier Hall. Another letter, to Enid Blyton, received a reply which has surely tided him over any moments of self-doubt in the intervening years: 'Perhaps one day you will write a book--what a thrill that would be for you--and how proud you would feel when you saw your very own book in the public library!' Vona Groarke has written that she 'can think of no Irish poet who talks of growing up in a family where poetry mattered a whit', and Dennis too appears to have been a self-starter, remembering the first book he ever borrowed from Thurles library, A Child's Garden of Verse, and remembering it well enough to quote a quatrain. Later, when his fellow Christian Brothers boys celebrated the end of their Leaving Cert by tipping their books into the Suir (Spenser's 'gentle' Suir), Dennis 'felt like a man at a hanging, afraid to provoke the crowd by admitting to being a friend of the accused'. Attempts to fit in with his GAA-mad brothers miscarried when his thrashing around with a hurley revealed him to be 'more Christy Mahon than Christy Ring'. Teenage misfit status beckoned. Was there a world beyond Kickham Park and the New Cinema? A shocking intimation of it came when a passing English tourist stopped to ask directions to a place called 'thurls', rather than the 'turrless' of Tipperary demotic. Stumped, Dennis denied all knowledge of the place, only grasping his misunderstanding as the tourist disappeared down the road.
     Dennis waited until the age of sixteen to disappear down the road and become a civil servant in Dublin, but despite long years at his George's Street desk he is anything but a sedentary writer. In a short piece for the Poetry Book Society Bulletin in 1999 he aligned himself with the Back of the Envelope School--those who do their composing 'on the hoof'. The article itself, he points out, was being written in a hotel where he was then writer 'in residence', as the bonded notepaper he was using informed him. In the hotel of Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams there are many rooms, arranged on the five storeys of 'Autobiographies', 'On Writing', 'Irishry', 'US and UK' and 'Europa (North and East)'. More than most poet-critics Dennis keeps to the poetic straight and narrow, devoting his epilogue to the artist Christian Boltanski but keeping well away from the cabbage patches of fiction and the cinema into which Michael Hofmann likes to roam. One unfrequented patch into which he does wander is the aphorism, striking the genuine Lichtenbergian note in 'Obiter Poetica': 'Poetry is music set to words', and 'Revisions are like fairy-tale wishes. You make one, then you have to make another to undo the first.' Some poet-critics don't need revisions to blot their copybooks, however. 'Pen Pals: Insider Trading in Poetry Futures' (first published in Thumbscrew) is a hilarious exposé of the venality of po biz. Pending the introduction of a worldwide moratorium on pre-publication blurbs, that scrofula of the book trade, Dennis proposes allocating poets an 'integrity rating of 100 points':

from which 15 points would be deducted for every blurb written and 20 points forfeited every time they review a close friend or colleague or nominate them for an award; a 20-point penalty would also apply to reviews prompted by vengeance, expectation of reciprocal benefit or the desire merely to be controversial. Poets whose ratings fell below 70 would be disqualified from reviewing until they had undergone honesty counselling from a poet-critic such as Lachlan Mackinnon or had learned passages of Randall Jarrell's criticism by heart. Community service, such as tending Geoffrey Grigson's grave or painting Ian Hamilton's fence, would be accepted in partial reparation.

To which it is necessary to add only the sad update of Ian Hamilton, poet-critic-editor triple whammy sans pareil of the past few decades, also having a grave in need of tending as of December 2001. 'Who turned the page? When I went out / Last night, his Life was left wide-open', he wrote in 'Biography', the last poem in his slimly weighty Sixty Poems: 'Now look at him. Who turned the page?'
     After 'Pen Pals' Dennis gets down to individual authors. There are the old favourites like Heaney, Hass, Larkin, Graham, Szymborska, Peter Reading and George Mackay Brown. Kinsella and Milosz get two pieces each and Holub three. There are survey pieces such as 'A Map of Contemporary Irish Poetry' and 'Foreign Relations: Irish and International Poetry'. And for anyone I have misled into thinking Dennis is an all-affirming enthusiast, there is 'Adam Zagajewski: Mysticism for Beginners'. The proportion of negative to positive in the book as a whole is small, it must be said ('Obiter Poetica' again: 'Reviewers want, if at all possible, to supply happy endings…'), but this says more about what Dennis has chosen to reprint than about his capacity for forthrightness, when forthrightness is required. As a meditation on Christian Boltanski's 'Lost Property', the book's last piece is also implicitly about the essay form, and how uncomfortably hedged in it is by oblivion as it goes about its efforts to commemorate and preserve. But all is not lost, and having Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams makes it that much easier to catch up with this most 'on the hoof' of writers. The fact that not one of his legendary Hibernia reviews made the cut reminds me how much more catching up there is still to be done. When I catch up with Dennis himself these days we frequently cross the road from his office to the Globe café, and over the years I've often seen him through its window engaged in animated conversation outside. Every day some of the best literary conversation to be had in Dublin must take place to the accompaniment of passing buses and juggernauts on College Green, Dame Street and George's Street. Most of what goes into newspapers and journals is little better than the sound of that bus going past, in the long run. Dennis's is the unraised steady voice carrying on in spite of it, audible then, audible now. How many points is that off my integrity rating?
     Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams contains an appreciative reading of the 'British poet' Michael Hofmann. 'Not British', Hofmann insists in the introduction to Behind the Lines, and he means it. It's a polyglot thing, deep down. Compared with the smorgasbord of Hofmann's contents page the average Anglophone critic's has all the exoticism of a 'Breakfast served all day' sign in the window of a motorway cafeteria. Larkin, for instance, was not one to get overexcited at the thought of the latest Johnny Foreigner presented for his approval. His Movement contemporary Donald Davie could gather a fat tome of his pieces on Eastern European poetry, Slavic Excursions, but faced with Davie's translation of a long poem by Mickiewicz, Larkin confesses to 'bewilderment' as to why anyone would want to read such a work, let alone translate it: 'Personally I am always sorry when poets desert their private agonies to rehash others' literature.' America too was foreign, all too often. In a Manchester Guardian piece of 1959, when Larkin was still taking his chances on the potluck of the round-up review, he musters a sort of crushed enthusiasm--'a lightness and almost flippant humour…attention to feeling'--for that year's flash US import, Life Studies, but recovers sufficiently in the next paragraph to trample on Homage to Mistress Bradstreet ('coldly rhetorical poetry with insufficient literary distinction to atone for a lack of communicated feeling'). It's an obvious limitation of Larkin's, if not a fatal one.
     The poetically correct, by contrast, can't get enough literature in translation. Or can we? The same Donald Davie was often to be found in his last years tilting at the 'translation police' and the notion of Eastern European poets as somehow intrinsically 'translatable' in a way he found insulting both to them and to us. Words like 'con-job' and 'careerists' were bandied about, as O'Driscoll reminds us in 'Seeing Red: The Poetry of Survival'. A prodigious translator himself, Hofmann issues a depressing reminder of the state of foreign literature in the English-language marketplace in his review of Péter Nádas's A Book of Memories. For a piece about a book he couldn't put down soon enough ('Had I not been reviewing it, there is no stage at which I would not have stopped reading A Book of Memories') it's a compelling performance, vicious and viscous saeva indignatio dripping off the page. The badness of the novel wouldn't matter against a background of 'engagement with other languages and literatures', but 'It's the fact that there is no such background, and that this book isn't merely bad but rotten while being called not merely good but great, that makes it worth writing about. It deforms a void.'
     Hofmann has fairly exalted ideas of what constitutes the echt cosmopolitan. Rilke's credentials might look solid enough, but writing in French and Russian as well as German while crisscrossing the continent 'does not make one a European'. The core of Behind the Lines is its engagement with what Hofmann calls the Late Modern: the mid-century American poets, the German and Europeans from a little before that, fauve and expressionist painters, with England somewhere 'at the edge of my circle'. His introduction is titled 'From A to B, Freestyle'. The quickest way between these points has traditionally been as the crow flies, but Hofmann is much more the magpie, down to his stippled, piebald vocabulary, twitching with German tags. Also magpie-like is the hoard of coruscating quotations he has amassed over the years, deployed to great effect here ('Quoting is very much to the point'). He does it in his poems too. If name-dropping other poets is a risky business, how much riskier is name-dropping critics? Yet Hofmann somehow contrives to get away with it. In 'Epithanaton', from Approximately Nowhere, Hofmann greets--if that's the word--the sight of his dead father's face with this: 'Russian, bearded, still more sharpness about the nose / as the Russian (Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, ask Steiner) writes'. Hardly the moment for scholarly quodlibets, you would have thought. Perhaps it's a family trait, an example of the 'curious, obsessive, cruel and mechanical mind digging around in a soft and disordered world' he finds in Gert Hofmann's novel Our Conquest.
     Hofmann junior's obsessive curiosity begins with the Americans: Stevens, Seidel, Jarrell, Berryman, Lowell, Kees, Bishop, O'Hara and Williams. He is less enthusiastic on Jarrell than might be expected, pushing the standard 'genius into his criticism, talent into his poetry' diagnosis down the queue behind a more serious charge, that 'what was important to Jarrell was books…Books were the ultimate reality, and the ultimate good.' It's a peculiar accusation from this most bookish of poets, but something in Hofmann rejects Jarrell's excessively good behaviour as a poet, his 'sweetness' and 'softness', in favour of the 'frightful abysses of sadness, cruelty and despair' to be found in another of those euphoniously named '50s poets, Weldon Kees. One of Hofmann's staunchest American admirers, poet-critic Stephen Burt, would have something to say about that; his case for the defence, Randall Jarrell and His Age, appears imminently. As for Lowell, whom Hofmann loves this side of idolatry, he is 'unconfident' in his opinions and possesses 'not a fraction of [Jarrell's] gifts' as a critic.
     Moving on to the Germans, Hofmann burrows into Rilke, Brecht, Trakl and Benn with a will. He is more hands-on than O'Driscoll, poking and tweaking at poems he quotes like a horse-dealer checking a stallion's teeth. The test case of Paul Celan brings him back to the question of translation. He deeply resents translations of Celan that 'just slide the words and punctuation across the page', losing everything in the process and leaving the reader no better off than before, so much so that 'there is even a case for saying there is no point in translating him at all'. Those who want to persist can always sit down with a dictionary and 'look up every single word'. One translator, John Felstiner, succeeds in finding a magical loophole when he gradually retranslates the refrain of Celan's Todesfuge back into German in the course of the English version, until it comes out in the poem's last couplet as 'dein goldenes Haar Margarete / dein aschenes Haar Shulamith'. A Möbius strip running from German to English back to German again: Borges's Don Quixote-translating Pierre Menard couldn't have done it better. Hofmann approves: 'the only possible translation'.
     Then there are the Slavs. Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva are 'beyond question the most gifted group of poets of the century'. Hofmann resists the temptation to salute Bohumil Hrabal's exuberant wit with the adjective 'Hrabalaisian', but calls his Too Loud a Solitude 'one of the great books of the century'. Auden's giggling description of Rilke as the 'greatest lesbian poet since Sappho' is quoted, but not his (apocryphal?) tribute to Joseph Brodsky, after hearing him read in English, as obviously a great poet 'in Russian'. Brodsky the self-translator was forever in the wars (and still is), but in Hofmann he has always had a loyal defender and champion. Brodsky found inspiration in Rome, and Hofmann follows him to Italy to praise Montale in Jeremy Reed's 1990 translation. Reading Nádas Hofmann found himself venting his frustration in obscene marginalia, so I feel duty-bound to confess to having defaced my copy of Reed's translations in similar fashion; for Hofmann they have 'more poetic labour and feeling applied to [them] than any other English versions I have seen'. Hofmann has persuaded me to give Reed's Montale another chance. I can't give a second chance to Max Beckmann, Friedrich Dürrenmatt or Wolfgang Koeppen, for the simple reason that I haven't read them yet, which left me feeling rather foolish reading about them here. But someone who can turn three words--'tja, dieses Boulder' ('Boulder, eh?')--into 'the Odyssey in a sigh', as Hofmann says Beckmann does, has to be worth reading.
     One difference between O'Driscoll and Hofmann is what we might call the Nádas factor. When he's being negative, O'Driscoll is firm but tactful; Hofmann, when he wants to, can summon not just a splinter of ice in his heart but a whole machete's worth. Someone else who gets it in the neck is his fellow Faber author George Konrad, whose 'dickhead sentences' in A Feast in the Garden add up to 'an absolutely dire novel, misconceived, opportunistic, inflated, poorly written, cynical and floundering'. Another Faber author and Hofmann's former editor, Craig Raine, is the first person to be thanked in the introduction here but the least likely person to want to return the compliment after Hofmann's review of his Collected Poems (not reprinted here), helpfully flagged as 'Raine Raine Go Away' when it appeared in the Observer. But if you had to choose someone to give you a going over, really to wipe the floor with you, you couldn't do better than Hofmann. Is that a recommendation or not? I'm not sure. This definitely is: like Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams, Behind the Lines is as enjoyable as a critical book can be.
     Not all English critics subscribe to Larkin's much-touted suspicion of 'abroad', nor did Larkin himself, for that matter, if you read him carefully; his confession to Ian Hamilton that 'Actually, I like the Beat Poets' is only one of many surprises in Further Requirements, the recent collection of his reviews and other disjecta, a follow-up to Required Writing. D. J. Enright was a Movement man in his day, but the breadth of his horizons has never been in doubt. The overlap between his latest collection of essays, Signs & Wonders, and Further Requirements amounts to a single name: Stevie Smith. Signs & Wonders is an object lesson in humanism, best read in conjunction with Enright's two commonplace books, Interplay and Play Resumed. In the first he reminds us of Coleridge's problems with critics: their claims to the 'guardianship of the Muses', he thought, were 'analogous to the physical qualities which adapt their oriental brethren for the superintendence of the Harem', and, better still, 'Thus it is said, that St Nepomuc was installed the guardian of bridges, because he had fallen over one, and sunk out of sight.' Enright is a great bridge-builder to German writing. Aimez-vous Brahms? Françoise Sagan asked. 'Aimez-vous Goethe?' asks Enright, anticipating the negative response that prompts the essay's subtitle: 'an Enquiry into English Attitudes of Non-liking towards German Literature'. Like Hofmann he has his say on Musil, Brecht and Celan, but also on Goethe, Heine, the Manns, Werfel, Hesse, Heym, Canetti and Grass, not to mention Svevo, Milosz and a delightful chapter on 'Japanese Women Diarists'. As a critic Enright leans heavily to the essayist rather than sharpshooter end of the scale, with a large proportion of the pieces in Signs & Wonders comfortably above ten thousand words. He is also utterly lacking in the 'Nádas factor'. Perhaps he got it out of his system during his long years as an editor with Oxford University Press, writing rejection slips. As he remembers in Interplay: 'Down in Reception a disappointed poet collapses in tears. A secretary takes him a cup of tea. You hide in the lavatory.'
     The Australian poet-critic Peter Porter has played the gadfly to English sensibilities long enough to qualify for the question Enright once asked Michael Donaghy in a lift: 'So, when will you be going home?' Not any time soon, to judge from the English enthusiasms of Saving from the Wreck, a collection of lectures and radio talks, taking in Pope, Rochester, Smart, Crabbe and Browning, as well as Stevens and Ashbery. Larkin's old sparring partner Donald Davie too has been posthumously busy of late. Read Two Ways Out of Whitman: American Essays in memory of this most wintrily warm-hearted of poet-critics, and in memory too of one of the book's heroes, Ed Dorn. And finally, this reviewer is a weeping loser at seeing a copy of Seamus Heaney's Finders Keepers too late to consider it in detail here. Heaney has written of the spell cast on him as a young reader by T. S. Eliot's old Penguin Selected Prose, and he follows its format in trimming a good number of the reprinted pieces from Preoccupations, The Government of the Tongue and The Redress of Poetry down to more digestible excerpts. These are topped off with material from The Place of Writing, previously available only in the US, and uncollected appreciations of, among others, Burns, Joyce, Brodsky and Milosz. Appreciations are what Heaney does best: why should he, at this stage, go out of his way to put the boot in? One partial exception is the essay on Larkin and Yeats from The Redress of Poetry, reprinted here in its entirety. Larkin is pulled up sharply for putting the boot in himself, into Heaney's belief in art as a death-defying, transformative power for good. But can art--can criticism--really live up to that sort of billing? In Larkin's words, 'Ah, solving that question / Brings the priest and the doctor / In their long coats / Running over the fields'.
     Those last two paragraphs were an example of the round-up shoehorn, in case you hadn't noticed. Let me plead excess rather than lack of scruple in my defence: I originally planned to limit myself to O'Driscoll and Hofmann but didn't want to leave the others out. Since I've got to talking about my working methods, let me end with some practical poet-critical (poetic-critical?) suggestions of my own. Don't return to the scene of the crime without good reason if you've already trashed someone once. It makes you look petty. Larkin's two jobs on Auden in Required Writing and Further Requirements bury the poet only to dig up him up again for further abuse, though some latitude must be allowed in cases of love affairs gone sour (remember Hazlitt on Coleridge). Don't just pick on easy targets. Jarrell, for all his reputation as a bruiser, throws many of his heaviest punches at bantamweights, the great exception being his own contribution to the 'god that failed' file on Auden. Be robust even with, especially with, those you love: to Hofmann, early Frank O'Hara is 'practically unreadable…nowadays you need a machete to read it'. And this is someone who loves O'Hara. Don't set yourself up as High Culture's last line of defence, like Elias Canetti, George Steiner or Harold Bloom. It's pompous: you don't want to sound like Tubbs from The League of Gentlemen shouting 'Don't touch the things!' whenever someone tries a Marxist or postcolonial reading of the 'precious things' of the culture shop. Show us how broad-minded you are: if you're a Marxist, quote Matthew Arnold approvingly now and then, and if you're an Arnoldian, throw in a bit of Brecht or Lukács every so often. It all helps to keep the reader guessing. Avoid obviousness. Hate sects and sectaries: find one of the worst issues of Scrutiny and remind yourself what it's like when criticism turns into a flea circus on the top dog's back. Don't review writers by the number of prizes they've won, what university they went to or where they've been published--it makes your subtext stick out like a shirttail you've forgotten to tuck inside your pants. And don't unload your Arts Council/literary Dublin/London conspiracy theories on us. They may well be true, but face it: you are a crank, your bleats of 'poor me' clearly audible over the grinding of your teeth.
     Know how to turn a phrase and drop an anecdote. Take lessons in it from Hofmann: Under the Volcano 'eats light like a black hole', Bertolt Brecht arrived 'fully formed from an unholy union between Kipling and Rimbaud, with Villon standing at the crib', and Joseph Brodsky was born in the now-vanished city of 'Theningrad'. Georg Trakl, melancholy man, 'once threatened to kill himself unless he were given credit by a sweet-shop owner'. Remember Nabokov's butterflies, Larkin's jazz, Benjamin's postcards: have a side interest to keep you fresh for the other thing. Know when to let go. If you do get the call to collect your journalistic scribbles (and how few are called, never mind chosen), make the waste-paper basket the volume's midwife. 600-word pieces for the papers are reviews, but only rarely criticism too. Hofmann pulls off a notable stunt in Behind the Lines: the acknowledgements don't say so, but a few of the very short pieces in the book began life in the schmoozy surroundings of 'Books of the Year' roundups. Rather him than me.
     Know when to let yourself be carried away. 'It is fascinating, at once slow and witty!' Hofmann tells us of Frederick Seidel, the exclamation mark fascinating: at once unexpected and fully earned! Know how to quote. 'Quotation is armour and ambiguity and irony all at once--turtles are great quoters', Jarrell said. And like turtles' shells, quotations give good protective covering too. Always ask for a proof. Look after 'the inessentials that are everything' (Hofmann again) since, as Con Houlihan said, 'a man capable of misplacing an apostrophe is capable of anything.' An unknown sub-editor amends O'Driscoll on Larkin the 'anthologist' to Larkin the 'anthropologist'. 'By their misprints shall ye know them', said Karl Kraus (subject of a fine essay by Enright in Signs & Wonders), and how right he was. No one who has published any journalism can be without a mental store of typographical chips on his shoulder, all of them splinters of the true cross. Is there still time for me to correct my translation of the Irish teach an phobail as 'pub' rather than 'church', my attribution of a play called The Black Tower to Louis MacNeice (the play being The Dark Tower, and Black Tower a cheap German wine), my quoting the last words of Larkin's 'The Card-Players' as 'the secret, bestial place' rather than 'the secret, bestial peace'? No there isn't. Terry Eagleton uncharitably described his Cambridge tutor as someone who, presented with a text containing the secret of the universe, 'would have noticed only a misplaced semi-colon'. To someone correcting a proof the secret of the universe can wait: that misplaced semi-colon really is more urgent. And about your own work: do not have opinions about it and never write about it, not unless you can be as brilliantly dismissive as Gottfried Benn:

So now these collected works are published, one volume, two hundred pages, how paltry, one would have to be ashamed of it if one were still alive. I would be amazed if anyone were to read it; I feel quite remote from them, I throw them over my shoulder like Deucalion and his stones; maybe their distortions will turn into human beings, but whatever happens, I don't care for them.

What else? In his obituary for Ian Hamilton, Karl Miller remembers a young ingénu declining a drink in the Pillars of Hercules on the grounds that he didn't 'like' booze. 'None of us likes it', Hamilton snapped back. 'None of us likes it': it could be any poet-critic's motto, reminding him or her that there always other more important things to be doing than all this tittle-tattle. Sitting down and writing some poems, for instance.

[Editor's Note: This essay originally appeared in the Dublin Review.]