Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Introduction vii
4. The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet 1
5. Mind the Gap: Omission, Negation, and ‘A Final Revelation of Horrible Nothingness’ 27
6. On Lists 53
7. Access All Areas: Poetry and the Underworld 85
8. We Need to Talk About Robert: Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize in Literature 113
9. The Hawks and the Doves: Raptors and Rapture in the Poems of Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes 139
10. Like, Elizabeth Bishop 167
11. Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres 195
12. Damned if He Does and Damned if He Doesn’t? Dilemmas and Decisions in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 219
13. ‘Undisfigured by False or Vicious Ornaments’: Clarity and Obscurity in the Age of Formlessness 247
14. ‘When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer’ 277
15. CODA Ninety-five Theses: On the Principles and Practice of Poetry 303
16. Notes 337
17. Acknowledgements 359