The poet at work …

… New Statesman | Visions before midnight: the inimitable voice of Clive James. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… James was – and remains – far more than a clever boy laughing at muddied oafs. He is a scholar who has preferred wearing his scholarship lightly. His keynote as a pundit has been a certain enchantment with disenchantment, so the intense seriousness of his essays here, collected from various magazines, is always leavened by anecdotal self-mockery. Beyond that, more vitally – especially now, as he considers his terminal cancer – is the desire to understand and possess poems. James’s wish to articulate every last presentable perception, whether that be about Pound or Pope or Porter, constitutes the fierce under-drive of the book.