Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin: An Anthology by Alan Bennett

Description

'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.' Alan Bennett's selection of English verse by his favourite poets, accompanied by his own enlivening commentary. In this personal anthology, Alan Bennett has chosen more than a hundred poems by six well-loved poets, discussing the writers and their verse in his customary conversational style through anecdote, shrewd WC appraisal and spare but telling biographical detail. 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, which are 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 other poets. He'd got into his thirties first, like someonetaking over the digs.'

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.