ABSTRACT
Bayley (b. 1925) is Warton Professor of English Literature, and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College, the University of Oxford. His books include ‘Tolstoy and the Novel’ (1966), ‘The Uses of Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature’ (1976), ‘An Essay on Hardy’ (1978), and ‘The Romantic Survival: A Study in Poetic Evolution’ (1957), which puts forward a most persuasive case for appreciating the essential romanticism of Auden, a writer for whom poetry as ‘escape art’, contraption or ‘robust game’, is essentially disconnected from the phenomenology of real life or poetry as ‘Parable art’.
