Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin - Hardcover

Alan Bennett

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571321097 ISBN 13: 9780571321094

Publisher: Faber & Faber Ltd and Profile Books Ltd, 2014

Synopsis

Writers like to elude their public, lead them a bit of a dance. They take them down untrodden paths, land them in unknown country where they have to ask for directions. In this personal anthology, Alan Bennett has chosen over seventy poems by six well-loved poets, discussing the writers and their verse in his customary conversational style through anecdote, shrewd appraisal and spare but telling biographical detail. Ranging from hidden treasures to famous poems, this is a collection for the beginner and the expert alike. Speaking with candour about his own reactions to the work, Alan Bennett creates profound and witty portraits of Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Philip Larkin, all the more enjoyable for being in his own particular voice. Anybody writing poetry in the thirties had somehow to come to terms with Auden. Auden, you see, had got a head start on the other poets. He'd got into the thirties first, like someone taking over the digs.

About this title

About the Author:

Alan Bennett has been one of our leading dramatists since Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s. His television series Talking Heads has become a modern-day classic. The History Boys won numerous awards both at the National Theatre, London, and on Broadway. Also at the NT: The Habit of Art, People and Cocktail Sticks. He received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay for The Madness of King George, and appeared with Dame Maggie Smith in a radio adaptation of his The Lady in the Van. His collection of prose Untold Stories won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for autobiography. Fiction includes The Uncommon Reader and Smut: Two Unseemly Stories. His most recent publication is Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin.

Review:

Praise for Alan Bennett

A prose stylist of disarming grace and sly humor . . . Surprising, funny, and deeply affecting.” Charles McGrath, The New York Times Book Review

One of the greatest living English writers.” David Thomson, The Nation

There is probably no other distinguished English man of letters more instantly likable than Bennett.” Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

Praise for Six Poets

Enjoyable, informative, entertaining . . . [An] absorbing anthology.” The Guardian (London)

Praise for Smut

Beautiful and filthy” Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian

Tender and comic . . . It is good, old-fashioned British humour with the lightest of subversive twists” Arifa Akbar, Independent (London)

Artfully entertaining . . . The stories have a dark, knowing shrewdness about erotic mischief, young and old . . . As always the writing is tonally perfect, laced with deadpan as well as bedpan comedy.” Simon Schama, Financial Times

Praise for The Uncommon Reader

Blends the comic and the poignant so smoothly it can only be by Bennett . . . His account of the Queen’s adventures often made me laugh out loud.” Jeremy McCarter, The New York Times Book Review

In conventional fairy tales, a humble being is transformed into a noble one, but in The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett’s comic fable about the forbidden pleasures of serious reading, the status-magic works in reverse . . . such is the power of the written word.” Walter Kirn, O, The Oprah Magazine

An exquisitely produced jewel of a book . . . a savagely Swiftian indignation against stupidity, philistinism, and arrogance in public places, and a passionate argument for the civilizing power of art.” Jane Shilling, The Times (London)

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber Ltd and Profile Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0571321097
• ISBN 13: 9780571321094
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 211