99. (William Empson)

Whatever else its relationship to genre, wit is a particular way of coping with the world’s fragility, its tendency to … More

89. (Andrew Marvell)

When T.S. Eliot, in his essay on Andrew Marvell, offered his incomparably confusing characterization of “wit,” what was he onto? … More

84. (William Wordsworth)

If the project of the humanities is the recovery of the past, then a part of that recovery must be … More

82. (Philip Larkin)

After reading Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall,” a friend half-recalled Paul Fussell’s opinion that verse in a trochaic meter could never be … More

73. (John Keats)

The preference for the Keats of the letters to the Keats of the poems is more than the outcome of … More

59. (William Wordsworth)

Late in his life, in a letter to an inquiring William Rowan Hamilton, Wordsworth stressed the “innumerable minutiae” upon which … More

56. (Stevie Smith)

“Her poems speak with the authority of sadness,” wrote Larkin, who might be said to aspire to the same in … More

50. (Bob Dylan)

The necessary disclaimer: Dylan is not a poet, for though his intelligent care for words is continuous with that of … More

49. (Walter Savage Landor)

Walter Savage Landor is the forgotten Romantic, both because he is rarely read and because the tradition in which his … More

47. (Andrew Marvell)

Even Christopher Ricks, whose criticism is chary in its courtship of the political, feels that Marvell, in one of the … More