Peter Washington
A Trinity In Verse
Collected Poems
By Ted Hughes, Paul Keegan (ed)
Faber & Faber 1333pp £40 order from our bookshop
Collected Poems
By Robert Lowell, Frank Bidart, David Gewanter (edd)
Faber & Faber 1186pp £40 order from our bookshop
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
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There is a difference between a doctor who writes medical treatises and a doctor who writes absurdist fiction. Do we want our heart surgeon to be an anti-realist?'
Joanna Kavenna peruses Iain Bamforth's 'Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trust-me-philosopher
How did Uwe Johnson, the German writer who was friends with Hannah Arendt and Max Frisch, end up living out his days in the town of Sheerness, Kent?
https://literaryreview.co.uk/estuary-german
You only have a week left to take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/