Criticsisms to Post-1945 Poetry

Zoe Trudeaux

Fern Hill "is a nostalgic and wistful poem about his childhood days on his aunt and uncle's dairy farm"

"the passage of time creates the desire to be young once more"

The tone of the poem "shifts according to the seasons" which mirrors the theme of the passing of time

Sarah Lewis

Thomas uses the poem as a means "to relay his inner thoughts and feelings"

"the pure beauty of his words shine through"

"Thomas is an artist, his paintbox his words and his palette his paper"

As he recalls his childhood there is a "dramatic sense of loss, his childhood is firmly in the past."

John Welford

Philip Larkin had a "complex and flawed personality"

Andrew Motion

"huge hymn to Old England the poem insists on the need for continuity while implying such a thing is unlikely to be granted"

"what begins in a hymn ends in a prayer"

Fritz-Wilhelm Neumann

"Larkin's favourite pattern of poetic self-fashioning was withdrawal, isolation and self-deprecation

Christopher Giofreda

Church Going "takes us along a cynic's journey to religious appreciation"

Rory Watson

his poems will "never go out of style because they're engaged with thye world as it is, and full of amusing metaphors"

Bruce Muro

MacCaig's poems are "timeless in their own way."

Dylan Thomas

"I do not mind from where the images of a poem are dragged up; drag them up, if you like, from the nethermost sea of the hidden self; but, before they reach the paper, they must go through all the rational processes of the intellect."

"An image must be born and die in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, desturctions, contradictions...Out of the inevitable conflict of images...I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem."

Oswyn Murray

“Harrison's poetry has always been public poetry, immediately accessible and directed at an audience rather than at the solitary reader. His chief weakness as a poet, that he lacks the ability to speak in a private voice, is in the theatre his greatest strength. …”

Bruce Woodcock

“In his poetic invective, it's as if Harrison feels the need to give as good as he gets, to show himself both a proven poet and still one of the lads. It is from this kind of tension that the edge of his work often derives.”