Edmund Spenser (1552–99) may well have been the most influential and innovative poet who ever wrote in English. Just after Spenser published The Shepheardes Calender in 1579, Sir Philip Sidney, reflecting gloomily on the dearth of English poetry in the 1580s, thought that only the work of Chaucer, the lyrics of the Earl of Surrey, A Mirror for Magistrates and Spenser’s poem were worth reading. Sidney was exaggerating for polemical effect, of course. But in an astonishing publishing career of seventeen years Spenser transformed the range, nature and potential of English letters. He produced three new versions of the pastoral (The Calender, Colin Clouts come home againe, Virgils Gnat); published letters with a friend, Gabriel Harvey (Three Proper, and wittie, familiar Letters); a beast fable (Mother Hubberds Tale); a sequence of secular and sacred hymns (The Fowre Hymns); a sonnet sequence and other collections of sonnets (The Amoretti, Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, The Ruins of Rome, The Visions of Petrarch); a dream-vision (The Ruines of Time); elegies (Daphnäda, Astrophel); an epyllion or little epic (Muiopotmos); a lament (Teares of the Muses); a marriage hymn (The Epithalamion); an epideictic poem (Prothalamion); a collection of Complaints; and a new form of epic romance, The Faerie Queene. Ben Jonson famously commented to William Drummond that Spenser ‘in affecting the Ancients, writ no Language’, a comment which gives us an idea of what a dominant anomaly he seemed to his contemporaries, and that we should see him as a forcefully experimental poet eager to transform the landscape of English poetry. It is more than a little ironic, then, that Spenser has most frequently been regarded as a conservative figure, a slavish adherent of the Queen’s court, or as Karl Marx rather more colourfully put it, ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet’.

‘Flinging itself at the last / Limits of self-expression’: these lines from ‘Opera’, one of the early poems by T. S. Eliot in the notebook eventually published as Inventions of the March Hare, convey a barbed attitude towards self-expression that was to be the hallmark of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. At the time ‘still a fairly recent compound’, as the notebook’s editor Christopher Ricks remarks, ‘self-expression’ often occurs in scare quotes in Eliot’s prose. It is related to but not the same as ‘introspection’, the title Eliot gave to a short early prose-poem, also in the notebook, in which ‘the mind’ is observed ‘six feet deep in a cistern’ along with ‘a brown snake with a tri-angular head’ that has ‘swallowed his tail [and] was struggling like two fists interlocked’. The prose-poem wants to find a way to depict the actions of the mind, to objectify the subjective, while ‘self-expression’ claims no such objectivity. Fascination with and resistance to introspection intertwine in the prose-poem’s appalled imagery of internal struggle.

Hence one way to read Eliot’s ‘Impersonal theory of poetry’ is as defensive armoury against the demanding imperatives of introspection and its attendant terrors. The defensiveness is in such statements as the oft-quoted ‘the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality’. And one can detect in the early poetry that attitude being worked towards and worked out. The poetry invariably reveals a metapoetic awareness of itself as artistic medium, often involving the trope of stage or screen for the objectification of emotion, with attendant manoeuvres for distancing the self, such as sliding between first, second and third person pronouns, so that the self is both participant in and observer of experience.

The romance genre

Romance, the most influential genre of imaginative writing in the Middle Ages, at once looks back to the tradition of epic poetry and forward to the genre of the novel. While prose romances developed in the thirteenth century, poetry was the traditional mode of romance, and there exists an immensely diverse collection of verse narratives. The earliest French romances retold classical epics while reflecting new cultural interest in chivalry, courtliness and the individual: thus the focus of the twelfth-century Roman d’Eneas was the love of Dido and Aeneas. Thebes, Troy and the exploits of Alexander offered popular story matter, and romance writers took up earlier twelfth-century chansons de geste to treat the heroes of French history. A more courtly type of romance also developed, which drew on the ‘matter of Britain’, Celtic folk material, and in particular, on legends of King Arthur and the Round Table. In the later twelfth century, the lais of Marie de France, written in sophisticated Anglo-Norman octosyllabic couplets for a highly refined audience and treating intense moments of rarefied emotion, were balanced by the extended and complex verse narratives of Chrétien de Troyes, which developed the pattern of quest and adventure in the context of the knight-hero’s journey to self-realisation. These and the many French romances of the thirteenth century, along with a sophisticated tradition of lyric poetry, provided the substance of courtly entertainment in England, and in the fourteenth century French poets such as Froissart, Machaut and Deschamps shaped an international court culture in which poetry played a prominent role.

In Yeats’s largely autobiographical novelette John Sherman, his eponymous hero, displaced in London, walking along the bank of the Thames, realises that the evocative scenery of an English landscape is alien to him. London, Sherman feels, could not be possessed by a young Irishman who finds himself gazing at the scene ‘with foreign eyes’ and the reason for this sense of alienation is that London could not be possessed because ‘everything in London was owned by too many to be owned by anyone’. John Sherman, written in 1888 when Yeats was twenty-three, was an attempt to come to terms with his divided self – his Anglo-Irish identity. William Murphy perceived that the novella was based primarily on Yeats himself, who ‘poured all my grievances against this melancholy London’ where Yeats was living with his artist father.

The loss of individuality in the metropolis brought about a twinge of nostalgia for Ireland, for the serenity of the Irish countryside. A wooden ball floating on a little water jet in a shop window in the Strand and the sound of dripping water suggested to Yeats the sound of a cataract with a long Gaelic name. This in turn evoked an old daydream about a lake where he had once gone blackberry picking – in actual fact the Lake of Innisfree, which occasioned one of Yeats’s finest early lyrical poems. The assertive first line, ‘I will arise and go now’, is a remote resonance of the prodigal son’s decision, in dejection, to leave a foreign land and return to the comfort of his father’s house, and contrasts with the relaxed, musical modulations of the rest of the poem.

More than thirty years ago, in his lecture ‘Englands of the Mind’, Seamus Heaney broached the subject of specifically ‘English’ poetry in relation to Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill: ‘All three are hoarders and shorers of what they take to be the real England.’ In Heaney’s reading these poets all brought to a head contrasting strains of a plural, contested, national identity. Since then, the entity of the United Kingdom has taken steps in the direction of increasing devolution, with regional parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The poetry of these three regions has often alluded to its cultural, and sometimes asserted its linguistic, distinctiveness. Inevitably, what this difference defined itself against was England (and English), and a supposed cultural hegemony, and yet whatever characterised ‘English’ poetry remained undefined, certainly unanthologised. Within the so-called Scottish Renaissance, figures such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Iain Crichton Smith, Norman McCaig, Edwin Morgan, the Gaelic poet Sorley MacClean and later Douglas Dunn, showed how vigorous and various this independence could be. The last forty or so years have seen the emergence of two remarkable generations of poets from Northern Ireland – the first including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley, and the second, Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin and Ciaran Carson. Whatever the forces that brought such a number of talented poets there to the fore, from the early 1970s onwards, the impact on British poetry has been momentous.

In the 1982 anthology, The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, the effect was startling – so much over there and so little here! Though had Heaney’s triumvirate been included, comparison might have seemed more balanced. In speaking of an extended ‘imaginative franchise’ and ‘the ludic’ elements shared by their poets, the anthologists were bravely trying to bridge a chasm. On the English side of this divide were, among others, the ‘Martian’ poets Craig Raine and Christopher Reid (so-called after Raine’s poem ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’).

It is widely believed that Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge was one of those rare books which was a significant publishing event in itself and which also changed the course of English poetry. Penguin Books have reinforced this general belief by issuing the 1798 edition in the same series as Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and Yeats’s The Tower. Another recent reprint adopts a similar perspective and insists on the volume’s innovative and radical credentials by prefacing the introduction with two strongly expressed quotations: first an apparently unqualified endorsement by an unidentified critic in The Guardian: ‘[it] must have come on like punk rock to a public groaning under the weight of over-cooked Augustanisms’; and, secondly, a description from the Courier Mail: ‘a grenade hurled against the Establishment’. Yet a third publisher compromises the latest edition of a judicious, scholarly and carefully balanced book by printing on its cover, without explanation or apparent reservation, exactly the same passage from The Guardian.

While all three publishers are justified in recognising the special force of Lyrical Ballads (which in its way was a great deal more innovative and revolutionary than any of its companions in the Penguin list), the implications of such apparently unqualified endorsements could easily be deceptive. To begin with, the collection’s title was a great deal less daring and original than most readers assume.

‘Still life’

‘In poetry’, Matthew Arnold announced in 1880, ‘the spirit of our race will find … its consolation and stay.’ It is a reassuring idea, but as Arnold had already pointed out in the Preface to his 1853 Poems, the hope that poetry would provide a cultural ‘stay’ (a device for supporting or steadying a structure) was all too often hampered in the period by writing which seemed to be suffering from a different form of ‘stay’: ‘a stoppage, arrest, or suspension of action; a check, set-back’. Consider W. H. Mallock’s pamphlet Every Man His Own Poet: Or, The Inspired Singer’s Recipe Book (1872), which offered tongue-in-cheek advice on ‘How To Write A Poem Like Mr Tennyson’. To produce an epic like Idylls of the King, for example, take ‘one blameless prig’, add ‘a beautiful wife’ and ‘one married goodly man’, tie them together in a bundle ‘with a link or two of Destiny’, and surround them by ‘a large number of men and women of the nineteenth century, in fairy-ball costume, flavoured with a great many possible vices, and a few impossible virtues’.

Geoffrey Hill is widely regarded as the greatest English poet of the period 1950 to the present (many would say the greatest English-language poet). This claim rests on a unique range of qualities: the seriousness and intensity of his poetry; its intellectual depth and sensuous vividness; its melding of high thought, evocative description and wry humour; its profound engagement with many of the traditions of English poetry (as well as aspects of European and American poetry); its combination (over nearly sixty years and twelve major volumes) of formal experiment and creative development with continuity of ethical and aesthetic principles. His essays, though less frequently admired and less influential than his poetry, are of a depth, scope and originality to place them in the company of those critical writings of great poets, such as Coleridge and Eliot, which can inform our reading of their poetry, but also of all poetry, by the interaction they exhibit between creative and critical thought. But, above all, Hill’s reputation rests on the sheer power of his words. He achieves effects of sublime beauty, of agonising sorrow, of tragic indignation, of complex abstract thought, even of self-mockery, bitterness, reproach, unmatched by any other poet of our age. There are some readers and critics who dislike Hill’s poetry, for what they take to be his political or aesthetic stance, or because they regard his poetry as excessively mannered or misanthropic, but his mastery of technique is hard to deny; and, for Hill, technique and ethics are one.

A crucial aspect of Hill’s importance as a poet is his seriousness. This does not mean lack of humour: a strong comic vein is a submerged presence in the early work and very evident in the later. Nor does it mean portentousness or self-importance, though these are hostile misreadings to which his seriousness may be liable. Rather it means that Hill regards the poet’s responsibility to and for language as a matter of ethical and political import, and regards the poet as, in this sense, not a leader or legislator (he rebukes Pound for this delusion in ‘Our Word is our Bond’), but as exemplary (a key word in Hill’s ethics).

The early Tudor poets John Skelton (c.1460–1529), Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1503–42) and Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–47) span a period of dramatic historical, social and cultural change. Skelton began his career in the service of Henry VII just after the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and Surrey lost his head for treason days before the death of Henry VIII. Under these two centralising Tudor monarchs, policy, prosperity and the increasing influence of humanism caused major social changes. England became a significant European power, and, after Skelton’s death, broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. The work of all three poets is marked by a sense of significant cultural change and the need to develop new poetic forms and voices. Above all, each poet’s work is shaped by his uneasy relationship to a dominant, often tyrannical royal court.

The careers of the three poets were very different. Skelton seems to have risen through his academic and rhetorical abilities, recognised in the academic title of laureate, to an early position as tutor to the infant Henry VIII. In 1503, however, he was pensioned off to the rectory of Diss in Norfolk, and spent much of the rest of his life trying, largely unsuccessfully, to regain an official post at court as poet and propagandist for the King. Without a ready-made courtly audience, he made use of the new technology of printing. Wyatt was a courtier and diplomat who eschewed print publication, circulating his verse among an elite readership in manuscript. Twice imprisoned by Henry VIII, he also served as the King’s ambassador at foreign courts. Surrey was an aristocrat, the eldest son of the Duke of Norfolk, fatally conscious of his ancestry and its traditional privileges, but open, after a year spent at the dazzling court of France, to new Renaissance forms and models.

When Voltaire asked Pope why Milton had not written in rhyme, Pope replied, ‘Because he could not’. The arrogance seems striking, but Dryden, who, like Pope himself, revered Paradise Lost, also thought Milton ‘plainly’ wrote it in blank verse because ‘Rhyme was not his Talent’. The official French assumption that the twelve-syllable alexandrine couplet was the appropriate measure for serious poems was mirrored by the status, for Dryden’s or Pope’s generation, of its English cultural analogue, the pentameter couplet. Pope ‘translated’ or ‘versify’d’ Chaucer or Donne, almost in the spirit in which Voltaire translated Shakespeare and Milton into rhymed alexandrines. Samuel Wesley wrote in 1700 that Chaucer’s ‘lines’ were ‘rough and unequal’ for ‘our Augustan days’. Pope believed that he was bringing to these unpolished English writers (who themselves wrote in couplets) some of the structural symmetry and ‘correctness’ which he considered the achievement of a politer age, and to which Milton sourly attributed a possibly Frenchified trendiness. There were no French poets among those Milton praised for ‘Heroic Verse without Rime’, who included ‘some both Italian and Spanish Poets of prime note’, along with classical masters.

Both the alexandrine and the English heroic couplet are medieval forms, the former named after the twelfth-century Roman d’Alexandre (which it predates) and the latter much used by Chaucer. They were, however, seen as having been through an analogous process of refinement (which Boileau described as ‘Just Weight and Measure’, easy grace of diction, clarity, order and no enjambment), as the poetic currency of a ‘polite’ culture.

Writing one of his characteristically bubbling letters to William Mowbray Baillie in July 1864, Gerard Manley Hopkins told him that, ‘I have now a more rational hope than before of doing something – in poetry and painting. About the first I have said all there is to say in a letter; about the latter I have no more room to speak, but when next I see you I have great things to tell. I have been introduced to Miss and Miss Christina Rossetti. I met them and Holman Hunt and George Macdonald and Peter Cun[n]ingham and Jenny Lind at the Gurneys’.’ Clearly Christina was something of a celebrity and the undergraduate Hopkins was at the height of his ambitions of belonging to the artistic avant-garde as he knew of it in London. He had, he told Baillie, ‘nearly finished an answer to Miss Rossetti’s Convent Threshold, to be called A voice from the world, or something like that, with which I am at present in the fatal condition of satisfaction’. Rossetti’s ‘Convent Threshold’ is not an account of demure spiritual yearnings but depicts the turmoil of a woman caught between forbidden love and a petrifying fear of damnation, a fear of the sort engendered at Christ Church, Albany Street where Christina worshipped; critics have pointed to Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ as a literary precedent. Hopkins’s ‘answer’ reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of his immature verse. The initial paragraph contains vibrant natural description, including the extended metaphor of cuckoos calling, with the precise observation that the call varies between five notes and seven and that it can be heard earlier in some years than in others, but Hopkins had not the range of human experience to convey with conviction the pain of losing a lover.

The shorter poems of John Milton (1608–74) exhibit an extraordinary range of genres and topics. He took up genre after genre – verse letters, love elegies, hymns, odes, psalm translations, songs, epitaphs, funeral elegies, sonnets of many kinds, an entertainment, a masque and more. But his major poems transform those genres, opening them to new possibilities. Several early poems and prose works explore his anxieties and aspirations as a poet, providing the basis for the most complete self-portrait of the author as a young man before the nineteenth century. In a poem to his father he proclaimed more forcefully than had any English poet before him, that poetry was his vocation and at the core of his self-definition: ‘it is my lot to have been born a poet’. What that might mean he spelled out in 1642: worthy poetry is the product of inspiration, supplemented by intense study and broad experience; and its Horatian purpose, to teach and delight, should also involve being ‘doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation’.

In 1645 he published Poems of Mr John Milton, collecting most of his poetry from the previous twenty years or so. The volume is in two parts with separate title pages: a vernacular book of mostly English and a few Italian poems, and a classical book with mostly Latin and a few Greek poems. The poems are arranged chiefly by genre and (in the Poemata, by verse form), though with some attention to chronology. Only four had been previously published: an epitaph for Shakespeare, anonymously, in the Second Folio of his plays (1632); the Mask known commonly as Comus, also anonymous (1637); Lycidas, bearing only his initials, in a memorial collection (1638); and Epitaphium Damonis, printed anonymously and privately, probably in 1640.

The clandestine marriage and elopement of Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett (1806–61) with Robert Browning (1812–89) – hereafter for convenience EBB and RB – has mated them for ever in the popular imagination. They go together here for that reason, and also because one strong force behind their artistic development, not to mention marital compatibility, was the stake each held in the cultural formation of evangelical dissent that did so much to create the modern world. This was the insurgent interest that in the crisis of early Victorian Reform assumed control of the long-standing Anglican state and made it over, in modern non-sectarian terms, between the founding of the University of London (1826) and the Great Exhibition (1851). The dissenting ascendancy represented a convergence of commercial, engineering, banking and legal concerns to which both the Barrett and the Browning family belonged; and its Whiggish patriotism meant business. In the name of a newly self-conscious middle class, Reform MPs enacted measures enfranchising Britons to worship without penalty outside the Established Church and to sell their goods and labour on the laissez-faire principles of contractual individualism. Reviving the suspended momentum of revolutionary zeal from the latter eighteenth century, they aimed to extirpate slavery, prostitution and child labour, to reshape national education and to loosen the privileged bond between Church and state by combating the prejudices on which both ancient bulwarks rested. To these aims both Brownings made their poetry, in the largest sense, an accessory.

When Arthur Henry Hallam introduced the poetry of his friend Tennyson to the Victorian reading public in 1831, he introduced him as a poet of ‘sensation’ in the school of Keats and Shelley as opposed to ‘reflection’ in the school of Wordsworth. In introducing Tennyson as a poet who does not suffer his mind ‘to be occupied during its creation by any other predominant motive than the desire of beauty’, Hallam was perhaps premature in heralding the advent of a genuinely aesthetic school of British poetry, but he seems almost prophetically to have introduced the later generation of great Victorian poets of what Walter Pater called the ‘“aesthetic” poetry’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne and William Morris. Pater introduced the term ‘aesthetic poetry’ in his review of Morris’s The Earthly Paradise in 1868, but he dated the origin of such poetry to Morris’s earlier volume, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), and he defined it as a poetry ‘tormented and awry with passion, like the body of Guenevere defending herself from the charge of adultery’, poetry characterised by ‘the strange suggestion of a deliberate choice between Christ and a rival lover’. Pater was primarily interested in the way in which these poets, like the poets of the late Middle Ages, expressed the ‘composite experiences of all the ages’ as transmitted in art and incorporated in the body and mind of the poet. His use of the term ‘aesthetic’ was undoubtedly intended to suggest the intellectual apprehension of past artistic achievements, but it also very explicitly and aptly returns to the root meaning of ‘aesthetic’ in sensation and the body.

When the Restoration of Charles II in May 1660 crushed Milton’s political hopes – pursued for twenty years in polemic tracts and service to the English Republic – he did not, as is sometimes supposed, abandon his Reformist ideals for a purely spiritual or aesthetic ‘paradise within’. Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes are superlative artistic achievements addressed to the ages, but as well, they undertake a strenuous project of educating readers in the virtues, values and attitudes that make a people worthy of liberty, exercising them in rigorous judgment, imaginative apprehension and choice. They also encourage Milton’s countrymen to think again and think better about the ideological and polemic controversies of the English Civil War and its aftermath. Milton’s example of artistic excellence coupled with Reformist political engagement was a profound influence on the Romantic poets – Blake, the young Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley – prompting Wordsworth’s apostrophe, ‘Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour: / England hath need of thee.’

Milton poured into his last three poems all that he had learned and thought and experienced about life, love, artistic creativity, religious faith, work, history, politics, man and woman, God and nature, liberty and tyranny, monarchy and republicanism, learning and wisdom. Also, some of the heterodox theological doctrines he worked out in his De Doctrina Christiana (a Latin manifesto still in preparation while he was composing his last poems) brought distinct literary benefits.

Old English poetry is a somewhat improbable recent success story, in an era when formal study of classical literature and even the study of modern languages have been in decline in England. The most prominent success was Seamus Heaney’s verse translation of Beowulf in 1999, a volume which won prizes in competition not only with other poetry books but with books in all literary categories. Important as the positive reception of Heaney’s marvellous translation was, it was not a sole cause of the new popularity of Old English poetry. His book was also a confirmation of the popularity of this poetry with English poets dating back to the Victorian period and strengthening amongst Modernist poets in the earlier twentieth century. Heaney’s predecessors here include Longfellow, Hopkins, Auden, Pound and Edwin Morgan. Some Old English poems, such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer and Wulf and Eadwacer are amongst the most widely translated items in the twentieth century. There have been a number of attempts to identify what quality it was that commended these poems so much to the modern taste, in particular to that of the Modernists; a recurrent phrase is ‘the power of the half-stated’. Auden’s enthusiasm is much quoted: ‘I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish … Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.’ In the main part of this essay I want to concentrate on what Auden might mean by ‘influences’, trying to describe what qualities in Old English poetry were found useful and expressive for writers in English of later periods.

What Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and Thomas have most in common is being ‘chained to a historical event, and an abnormal one at that’. Chained both by their times, and by their reception. The seeming inevitability of their association, and of their relationship to literary Modernism, has much to do with how the Great War has been memorialised in English culture, and in particular with the role literature has acquired as a vehicle for the relaying of historical experience. Poetry’s part in the popular and educational reproduction of what Ted Hughes called ‘our number one national ghost’ is exceptional, and has some striking consequences. One is the distortion of the historical record by unrepresentative voices, another, the identification of war poetry as the acme of modern poetry. Rosenberg, Sassoon and Owen have all been ‘novelised’ in recent years, the most apt homage a culture increasingly hostile to the discourses of printed verse can afford.

Reading these wartime writers as poets can put us at odds with assumptions put into circulation by the category of war poet, with all its political and ideological freight. In fact, to read more critically depends on reading more historically, with a less sentimental investment in the production of national history, to which Great War poetry has been conscripted. Of all the contexts we require in this respect, the most important – concerning evolving attitudes to war in prospect, actuality and memory – is the most elusive. Such attitudes are refracted by our own orientations to war as pageant or scourge, crusade or shambles.

The 1930s, construed for the purpose of this chapter as running from 1928 (when Auden’s Poems were privately printed by Stephen Spender) to 1939 (the beginning of the Second World War and the date of Auden’s departure for America), is an era in which fiercely individualist lyric voices emerge from and often in opposition to the complexity-laden bequests of Romantic, Victorian, Symbolist and Modernist poetry. These voices often inflect themselves through the process of responding to ‘history’, to use the period’s domineeringly central term. This chapter will explore the work of three major poets of the 1930s, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, and it will also, towards the close of the section on Auden, touch on the poetic achievement of C. Day Lewis.

W. H. Auden’s early poems crackle with an urgency that can seem admonitory, even sinister. Their very acoustics are remarkable: curt, cold, intense, speaking from the heart’s injuries as well as to the head’s impulse to diagnose. Stephen Spender writes in evocative terms of ‘terse syllables enclosed within a music like the wind in a deserted shaft’. ‘Syllables’ are indeed ‘enclosed within’ the poetry’s ‘music’. Lines spring enigmatically and unforgettably into life, seeming to describe a landscape that is also a place we might meet in our dreams or nightmares. Poems can come across as pages torn from the screenplay of a chilling thriller: ‘They ignored his wires. / The bridges were unbuilt and trouble coming’, at the close of the octave of the unrhymed sonnet ‘Control of the passes’ is an example, the assonantally clustered ‘trouble coming’ looming with menace out of and fulfilling the incipient threat imparted to the short-vowelled sounds in ‘ignored’, ‘bridges’, and ‘unbuilt’.