‘Now I Climb Alone’

Michael O’Neill focuses on a strain of poetry that runs from Thomas Hardy through Edward Thomas to Stephen Spender. The three poets emphasise, often with an integrity that borders on obstinacy, the unignorable fact of subjectivity. These are poets who do not resort to Modernist uses of personae or quasi-mythic dissimulation. In them, different voices do not melt into Tiresias, or play occult games with daimons, or dwell cryptically among the ruins of literary tradition. Their poetry speaks typically of what the writer feels, even when that feeling is at odds with a culture’s more modish values.