If you saw a recent television programme about the pyramids, you may understand my mixed feelings about the volumes under review. They raise generous monuments to remarkable talents, but monuments can be overwhelming, especially on this scale.

Inside a pyramid, the mummy. Inside a Collected Poems - what? If editors are to dead poets what embalmers were to Egyptian queens, they presumably hope to preserve their divinities by wrapping what remains of them in layers of paper. In both cases questions arise as to what exactly is being preserved and whether the effort is worthwhile.

Many people would regard such questions as absurd when applied to Lowell and Hughes. Surely they are self-evidently Great Writers, modern equivalents to the God-Kings of antiquity? Perhaps. The decline of traditional religion over the last two centuries has resulted in the replacement of priests by Lowell: poets as spiritual