Randall Jarrell had a knack for criticism that makes you want to go read the poem.
Likewise, Francis-Noël Thomas‘s article Moving and Memorable
on the newest edition of Larkin sends me out to reacquire a volume, hopefully one of the original books.
quoting Larkin:
It was Eliot who gave the modernist poetic movement its charter in the sentence, “Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult,” and it was Betjeman who was to bypass the whole light industry of critical exegesis that had grown up round this fatal phrase by demonstrating that a direct relation with the reading public could be established by anyone able to be moving and memorable.
Thomas and Mark Turner co-authored one of my all time favorite books: Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose; second edition recently published.
