In the Circumstances: About Poems and Poets

In the Circumstances is a study of the way people other than their authors contribute to poems. Discussing work by Wordsworth, Browning, Hardy, Pound, Eliot, Montale, Auden, Lowell, and Hill, the book explores how other people's lives and wider circumstances can influence the textual contexts of the poems and be felt within the works themselves. These circumstances emerge in such things as allusions to political events of the day, the inclusion of proper names and, above all, in the citation or absorption of the words of others. The book asks how the poets themselves worked these circumstances into the fabric of their poems, and what bearing this has on subsequent acts of revision and translation. These are current issues: for all those involved with poetry, as readers or writers, this book will provide pleasure and stimulus. After his first collection of poetry, Overdrawn Account (1980), Peter Robinson was described by Eric Griffiths in PN Review as `the finest poet of his generation'. His second volume This Other Life (1988) won the Cheltenham Prize. With Marcus Perrymen he has translated the complete poems of Vittorio Sereni, a selection of which appeared in 1990. A new book of his own poems is due in 1992.