Andrew Motion

The poet and composer Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) is a classic but nevertheless shocking example of literary neglect. Although he brought out two respectfully received collections of war poetry during his lifetime, the idiosyncrasies of his style have prevented him from being widely recognised as the equal of his greatest contemporaries. His history of mental illness has further destabilised the reception of his work, not just by encouraging people to think of him as crazy, but by compounding practical difficulties surrounding its publication. In the 1980s Michael Hurd wrote a somewhat sketchy biography, and P.J. Kavanagh edited an expanded, but still partial, sample of his work.

By the time Philip Larkin died in 1985, he’d long since achieved national treasure status: his poems were critically admired as well as widely read; his reticence (‘the Hermit of Hull’) was a matter of affectionate respect; and his cantankerous published remarks about ‘difficulties with girls’, children, left-wing politics, and ‘abroad’ were generally embraced as proof of valiant individualism — or possibly a grouchy kind of joke.

Clinton Heylin is the eminence grise of Bob Dylan scholars: co-founder of Wanted Man (the magazine dedicated to studying Dylan’s life and work), long-time editor of its quarterly magazine the Telegraph, compiler of Stolen Moments: The Ultimate Dylan Reference Book and also the author of Behind the Shades, which, when first published in 1991, was rightly praised as the most reliable account of Dylan’s life and career up to that point. Dylan has accomplished a great deal since then, including becoming a Nobel Laureate, so it’s not surprising that Heylin should want to bring his account up to date, especially since a large new collection of Dylan material has recently been deposited in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa.

Max Porter’s first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), got a lot of credit for finding original ways to talk about two of the oldest subjects under the sun: human love and human death. It’s hero is a young father writing a book about Ted Hughes, whose distress at the death of his wife, and whose efforts to look after their two children, are shaped by the appearance in his life of Hughes’s celebrated figure of the Crow, a real/metaphorical creature who is on the one hand disgusting, violent, abusive, anarchic and gloating, and on the other bracingly vigorous, unkillable and transformative. The bird’s dynamism blows apart familiar structures of narrative and prevents any one point of view from achieving a steady control.

On 13 September 1964, at the age of 42, Philip Larkin began writing to his mother Eva (his ‘very dear old creature’) by taking stock: Once again I am sitting in my bedroom in a patch of sunlight, embarking on my weekly task of ‘writing home’. I suppose I have been doing this now for 24 years! on and off, you know: well, I am happy to be able to do so, and I only hope my effusions are of some interest to you on all the different Monday mornings when they have arrived. A great deal of what is characteristic about Letters Home is evident here.

‘I have a very poor opinion of other people’s opinion of me — though I am fairly happy in my own conceit — and always surprised to find that anyone likes my work or character.’ This admission by Robert Graves — made to his then friend Siegfried Sassoon in the mid-1920s — goes to the heart of his character as a man and a poet. It projects a powerful mixture of defiance and neediness, which in his personal life produced a series of highly disruptive assertions and reversals, and in his writing life an equally striking set of commitments and walkings-back. Jean Moorcroft Wilson, who has previously published fluent biographies of Sassoon and Edward Thomas, is a reliable guide to all these contortions.

In Deaths of the Poets two living examples of the species, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, retail the closing moments of close on 30 poetical lives, ranging from Thomas Chatterton to Robert Frost, Lord Byron to Rosemary Tonks, John Clare to Thom Gunn. Why? Because they feel the influence on ‘our’ generation (Farley was born in 1965 and Symmons Roberts in 1963) of the ‘confessional’ American poets, several of whom cast a solemn glamour over their calling by killing themselves — John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton.

When Virgil died at Brindisium in 19 bc, on his way back to Rome from Greece, he left the Aeneid unfinished. When Seamus Heaney died in Dublin in 2013, his translation of Book VI was also unfinished, but like the whole of the original, his 1,222 lines were found to be in a publishable condition (‘final’, he wrote on the last draft, which allows for it not being ‘complete’). The coincidence is touching. So too is the fact that this book is concerned with news from the afterlife. Aeneas descends into the underworld to visit his father, Anchises, and receives there a history lesson that leads beyond the founding of Rome to the glories and struggles that lie in the future. Heaney’s version is also a kind of gift from beyond the grave.