Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin - Softcover

Poets 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 a hundred 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. Speaking with candor 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.

Alan Bennett has been one of England's 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, including six Tony Awards, both at the National Theatre, London, and on Broadway. Also at the National Theatre: The Habit of Art, People, and Cocktail Sticks. His collection of prose Untold Stories won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for autobiography. Recent works of fiction are The Uncommon Reader and Smut: Two Unseemly Stories.