I dunno, Jamie. Since there were only three or four poets one
could read—and one of them was Wordsworth!—it wasn’t so hard to make it onto the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
(Of course, I exaggerate. Cambridge prompted me to read all sorts of poets I probably wouldn’t have otherwise encountered. But the evangelical purity of certain acolytes included a rigorous exclusionary rhetoric, and it was always pretty momentous
when someone new made it through that particular strait gate)
The blurb I pasted is for Motion’s new Selected due out from Ecco Press (now owned by Harper Collins, I guess).
Best,
Jeremy
“I vividly recall being told in long-ago Cambridge days which poets I should not under any circumstances read.”
- Ah to make it onto that list! That would be a trophy to boast of.
P.S. Who’s are those English Elegies, Jeremy?
