Tom Cook
@TomCook24
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poet critic person · typographer @FaberBooks · contributor @theTLS · PhD @ShakesInstitute
Oxford
Joined May 2012
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W. H. Auden’s six functions of literary criticism. Has he missed anything?
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If you met someone who insisted they hated poetry, what poem would you read to them to change their mind?
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Compare and contrast this poem with ‘The Mower’ by Philip Larkin (15 marks)
Laugh-along line-breaks with RS Thomas (see for yourself which one).
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Very rare to see this level of tailoring nowadays, even on a Nobel Laureate. So let's talk about some of the reasons why it's great. 🧵 (1/37)
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You're free to tell me why this isn't the best Shakespeare sonnet, but you will be wrong
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Happy Best-Poem-Donne-Ever-Wrote Day to all who celebrate, ‘since this | Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is’
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The Man With Night Sweats, one of the great poetry collections of the late 20th century, is back in print next month. Gunn’s AIDS poems are just extraordinary:
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The metrical stumble at ‘never’ is sheer perfection. I’ve been reading this poem for years now and am still in complete awe of it.
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Louis MacNeice’s beautiful poem ‘Train to Dublin’ (1934): ‘I give you the incidental things which pass | Outward through space exactly as each was’
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I reviewed
@Stanley_Wells
’s latest book, What Was Shakespeare Really Like?, for this week’s issue of
@TheTLS
– a solid (re)introduction to Shakespeare’s creativity and political world, but quite wrong when it comes to the sonnets:
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Early modern literature is ridiculous sometimes: *Ben Jonson*, as published by a man called… *John Benson*.
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What a poem: Thom Gunn’s haunting ‘Epitaph for Anton Schmidt’, a Nazi soldier who refused ‘to mistake the men he saw, | As others did, for gods or vermin’
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Greatly looking forward to speaking at the Shakespeare and the Sea conference at
@RMGreenwich
this week.
I’m going to be talking about T. S. Eliot’s readings of Pericles, his extraordinary poem ‘Marina’, and the play’s uncomfortable authorship:
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This is a beautiful documentary – exactly what the BBC does best: it’s a love letter to poetry, a hymn to nature (especially birdlife), and a portrait of a marriage all at once. More of this sort of thing, please.
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This lovely sonnet, first published in 1822, is one of very few moments at which Wordsworth referred directly to his mother, Ann, who died suddenly when he was just seven years old – ‘How fluttered then thy anxious heart for me’:
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Desperately tempted to make an anonymous account for the circulation of early modernist academic gossip, solely so I can call it The Bitch of Edmondton.
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Petition to bring back endless books simply called ‘Shakespeare’ in which interesting authors write whatever the hell they feel like with no connection between the chapters
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Oisín’s 11
Need Cillian Murphy, Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal in an Irish heist Oceans 11 type film immediately
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I once asked Geoffrey Hill if he’d like to attend the T. S. Eliot session of a poetry group I ran at the time. He asked when it would take place, and I said early the following year. He hissed across the desk, ‘Well. You can send me the invitation. But I may be DEAD by then.’
Tell me the strangest interaction you've had with a
literary celebrity
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Here’s another surprising Wordsworth poem, and a sample page from my edition. (Look: running dates of composition in the header! Nice.)
This is, from Exclesiastical Sketches (1822), is a sort of ‘Church Going’ in reverse, compacted into sonnet form.
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Now that the digital ink has digitally dried, I’m pleased to say I’m joining the great labour that is The Year’s Work in English Studies.
So, if you noticed (or indeed published) anything on Shakespeare’s tragedies in 2021 you think I should know about, let me know!
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Geoffrey Hill’s single review on RateMyProfessor is exactly what you’d expect
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Milton’s seventh sonnet, a poem of age anxiety on turning… twenty-four: ‘my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th’
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Twitter, I'm back! Not much has changed, except I'm now (finally) doing a PhD
@ShakesInstitute
on Shakespeare's poetic development, supervised by
@_erinsullivan_
and
@robert_stagg
. Lovely to see you all again.
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This is miserable news. The Internet Archive is an invaluable resource, especially for people who don’t have the *massive privilege* of university library access.
1/3 As most of you know, we are currently facing a lawsuit brought by 4 corporate publishers who want to stop the Internet Archive from lending books.
#EmpoweringLibraries
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Gawd, this is just one of the best poems *ever* written. The more you read it, the more there is to read.
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This feels like a perfect metaphor for the UK in 2023. Beloved and ancient thing destroyed for the sake of it. It didn’t make anyone any money, so nothing will be done about it. Everyone will forget within a week.
We are shocked and desperately saddened to learn that the famous Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian's Wall has been felled overnight, in what appears to be an act of vandalism.
We know just how much this iconic tree is loved locally, nationally and by everyone who has visited.
We are
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@mthr_jo
As a typesetter: can confirm. The idea that it’s all ‘just there’ and you can move even quite basic text between formats without effort is a classic sign someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
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Delighted to find there’s nothing in my university’s terms and conditions actually requiring a thesis to be submitted in double-spaced 12-point Times New Roman/Calibri.
Prepare for a STYLISH AND HARMONIOUS reading experience, examiners.
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I have reached a stage of conference-paper writing at which I now think I know better than John Milton.
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This is your annual reminder of Robert Lowell tickling John Berryman
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The one and only
@CamilleRalphs_
launching her extraordinary new
@GuillemotPress
pamphlets (along with her extraordinary new tattoo)! Buy the boxed set here before it’s gone:
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Every time I write something new about Shakespeare's poetry, I realize just how fucking *good* nearly all of it is. Anywhere you look – even in Titus Andronicus – there is *something* fabulous happening in the texture of the verse. And it makes me love/hate him even more. Gah.
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My piece for this week’s
@TheTLS
on Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, and the trouble with ‘context’:
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I have officially Hit the Wall: I don’t know what poetry is, I can’t remember who Shakespeare was; I am going to the Lake District now. ⛰
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New Oxford Shakespeare Critical Reference Edition, New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion, New Oxford Shakespeare Modern Critical Edition
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A mockumentary series in which I, dressed as A. E. Housman circa 1933, go around inspecting various objects and asking the camera, 'But is it *poetry*?'
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What’s wrong with Times New Roman? Well, nothing – except that it’s designed for newspaper sizes and looks worse and worse the larger you set it.
Shown and described here by Stanley Morison (later editor of
@theTLS
), who lead its development:
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T. S. Eliot literally left his first wife, Vivien *Haigh-Wood*, and moved in with a man called John *Hayward*
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Here’s something: a superb *late* Wordsworth poem, hidden away in Poetical Works (1846).
As radical as anything he wrote in 1798, and as beautiful as anything from 1802. Wordsworth definitely lost it as he got older; but occasionally, just sometimes, he seriously found it again.
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I've had the most sublime couple of days with the good people of the
@ShakesInstitute
. What a special place it is.
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Poem in which Ben Jonson says that getting home from the pub after a large one is a far greater Odyssey than any acclaimed walking/dancing tour.
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It's perfect late-autumn in Oxford today, my thesis is finally progressing, I've written new poems, my Wordsworth text is nearly finished, and I'm about to go for a walk. Please can someone alert me as soon as they know what the catch is…
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One of the many things I love about this poem is you can read it both on St Lucy’s Day *and* on the shortest day
Happy Best-Poem-Donne-Ever-Wrote Day to all who celebrate, ‘since this | Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is’
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Good morning to everyone apart from George Puttenham and his sodding diagrams.
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The highly specific bliss of finding a rare first edition secondhand for less than £5.
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Something I’ve been contemplating for a while: if I did a fairly in-depth ‘how to improve your Word/Pages typography in less than half an hour’ thread, would people would find that useful?
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Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for
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Yeats having absolutely no chill whatsoever. Definitely the behaviour of a normal active man.
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Me, walking away from people’s bullshit and towards an ice-cold pint.
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Thinking about the time I decided to read the complete works of Shakespeare for a laugh and then ended up doing a PhD on the guy. Life, eh?
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Every single time I forget the danger of London bookshops.
Yes, yes I do want two random volumes of the complete works of Yeats, with no hope of finding the other seven.
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@StJohnsOx
Thank God! Please, please, please keep it music-free, it was one of the only pubs in Oxford where I could hear people indoors 😭
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Has any academic ever stormed off In Our Time live on air?
‘IT’S NOT AS SIMPLE AS THAT, MELVYN!!!’
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I’m amazed by how angry I’ve become in the space of a week. I knew I was a dour republican, and that I’m sick of this cruel, unending excuse for a government, but the sight of these bloated turds parading up and down in splendour as thousands starve has turned me into the Hulk.
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‘TO CHRIST OUR LORD’
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Very sorry to read of
@AmbitMagazine
’s going.
Back in the day they published some early poems of mine, written in memory of a beloved history teacher, Jim Melican.
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Matthew Arnold’s sonnet to Shakespeare, first published in The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems (1849): ‘Self-school’d, self-scann’d, self-honour’d, self-secure’
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Discuss the relation of each poem to the so-called mower poems of Andrew Marvell (10 marks)
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I am delighted to announce my first inadvertent-sunburn-on-a-cloudy-English-spring-day of the year.
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@RebeccaMenmuir
Do you know the Lingua Latina books by Hans Ørberg? Extremely easy to work through in small sections, entirely in Latin, no tedious writing out
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We will soon have a Shakespeare bookcase. I don't mean that I happen to have filled an existing one with some Shakespeare books: I've had to buy a new, dedicated, looming bookcase FOR OUR BEDROOM in an attempt to save our home from Shakespeare Mountain. Nice one, Bill.
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I have written a small poem. Later I will go out on my bike to drink beer in the cold sun with a friend.
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Despite repeated warnings from my partner, I am once again learning the hard way that corduroy is not a summer fabric.
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Passed the centennary memorial to ‘perhaps the most loved name in English literature’, Charles Lamb, today; ‘Lamb, the frolic and the gentle’, Wordsworth called him.
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You try thinking of ten different synonyms for ‘poison’.
Our latest episode on magic features a reading of ‘The Nine Herbs Charm’, which is in Old English. Many thanks to
@TomCook24
for his translation of the extract.
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It took me far longer than it should have to spot that Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Prodigal’ is actually a double sonnet – a form she picks up from her old fave George Herbert. (And a good entry for
@robert_stagg
’s
#PrettyRooms
series?)
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Isolation has given me plenty of time to pursue my favourite Twitter activity: muting people who thrive on misery and cynicism 😈😈😈
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This is fun: Apple’s first, short-lived logo, drawn by Ronald Wayne in 1976 and complete with… 19th-century poetry.
It depicts Isaac Newton under his famous apple-tree, and the caption is taken from Wordsworth’s description (in the 1850 text of The Prelude) of Newton’s statue.
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@starwars
@DisneyPlus
Oh cool, will there be a bit where they show the last vestiges of a decent story being fed into a trash compactor? 🤩
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