The very welcome arrival of Bernard O’Donoghue’s latest collection The Anchorage made me reflect on the power of simplicity in lyric poetry and the different forms this might take. My enjoyment of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Jeffrey Wainwright, and Angela Leighton, for example, might be said to derive from an admiration for the different ways in which all three poets engage with lyric clarity alongside intellectual rigour. This variety in poetic simplicity is something which has occupied me since I was a student at Leeds back in the 1970s where on a number of occasions I was introduced to John Milton’s famous dictum, expressed in his tract ‘On Education’ (1644), that poetry should be ‘more simple, sensuous, and passionate than prose’.

Milton’s statement was frequently endorsed by a number of poets in the years that followed, including two closely associated with the University of Leeds – Geoffrey Hill and Tony Harrison. But from the example of these two poets I also had to engage with a countervailing proposition: that in its expression poetry might also have to bear the weight or imprint of the burden of history. In Harrison’s case, it seemed that the very ‘point’ of his use of strong obvious form was a measure of his poetry’s historical self-consciousness.

The most compelling articulation of this idea in Harrison’s writing I found in his introduction to his translations of the fourth-century pagan poet Palladas who was railing against the advent of Christendom. As Harrison puts it in his preface to the translations: ‘[Palladas] must ...