"Sustaining authentic emotional participation, as Jack Gilbert has in his life as a poet, is terrifying and hard, and is practically a lost art." Sarah Manguso • Poetry Foundation

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"John Betjeman makes most modern poets look either desperately amateurish or desperately professional." Hugo Williams • The Guardian

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"Realism is nothing like as naive as its many opponents charge." James Wood • Prospect

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"Material texts may not be necessary to maintain a literary career — 'texts of silence' will do as well; better, perhaps." Claire Harman • TLS

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"It is, as ever, in the music of his poetry that Geoffrey Hill resolves the tensions in his thought." Clive Wilmer • The New Statesman "In Geoffrey Hill, the English Baroque continues to enjoy its most spectacular flowering since the 17th century." Alan Marshall • The Sunday Telegraph

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ALSO: John Palattella on Anne Carson • Simon Armitage on Ted Hughes • Anthony Thwaite on the Movement • Roy Hattersley on Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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"Eavan Boland's poems creep forward cautiously, full-stop by full-stop, as though trying to hear the echo of their own footsteps." John Redmond • The Guardian

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"Maybe what is so frustrating about 'difficult' poetry is that it is an unwelcome reminder of the loss of poetry in our everyday lives." Charles Bernstein • Green Integer

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"Instead of being forever at the mercy of editors, reviewers, and my own highly undependable literary resources, I would realign myself with the forces of nature, make my living under the sun and the wind and the rain." James Lasdun • London Review of Books

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"I want the poem to want selflessness, but I want selflessness to have presence." Kathleen Peterson • GutCult

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"Wordsworth is an indispensable figure in the evolution of modern writing." Seamus Heaney • The Guardian

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"To read Charles Reznikoff's poems as contributions to an avant-garde formalist movement, as they have always been read, is to miss their true pathos and their deep appeal." Adam Kirsch • The New Republic

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"Wislawa Szymborska's clear-eyed surveillance of life is not disillusioned, because it seems never to have had illusions." David Mehegan • The Boston Globe

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"How awful it must be to wake up in the morning and remember that you are the poet laureate." Roy Hattersley • The Guardian

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"For all his careful posing as the homme moyen, Philip Larkin was a poet to the tips of his nerves." John Banville • New York Review of Books

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"Unfashionable things are much more complicated and intriguing phenomena than they might appear." Colin Burrow on Anthony Burgess • London Review of Books

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"Ange Mlinko's second book offers both the conjuring spirit's vigor and the realist trickster’s charm." Stephen Burt • The Believer

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"The constraints of form are spurs to the imagination: they are in fact the chief producers of imagination." George Szirtes • Poetry

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