This is a fascinating window giving on the private thoughts of one of the great American writers of the twentieth century. It follows on Carcanet's publication of "Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments", edited by...

Margaret Tait (1918-1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. In "documentary", she wrote, real things "lose their reality... and there's no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens". If film, for Tait,...

Alexander (Sandy) Goehr is a leading British composer and teacher. Born into a Jewish musical family in Berlin in 1932 (his father a composer and conductor, pupil of Arnold Schoenberg; his mother a trained pianist from the Moscow Conservatory) he arr...

To mark the bicentenary of Walt Whitman's death, Carcanet publishesa distillation from Horace Traubel's conversations with the great American poet. Whitman speaks from the heart, an old man whochanged the course of American poetry and, by extension,...

Each of Carcanet's fifty years is marked by an exchange of lettersbetween an author and the editor. The aim is to reveal a half century'shistory of publishing and one small, ambitious press's contribution, thenature of editing, the author/editor rela...

Born in 1915 in Cambridge, England, Rupert John Cornford was a committed communist who fought in defence of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War and was killed in uncertain circumstances at Lopera, near Cordoba in 1936. Though his life was tragically...

One of the central figures of twentieth-century Scottish literature, Edwin Morgan was a prolific letter-writer. His correspondence, like his poetry, is wide-ranging, full of generosity and enthusiasm, and above all a testament to his lifelong commitm...

"The true haunts of the poetic powers", Arthur Hugh Clough wrote to his friend Matthew Arnold, "are no more upon Pindus or Parnassus but in the blank and desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of the midnight city, where Guilt is, and wild T...

"Incorrigibly Plural" celebrates the diversity and vitality of Louis MacNeice's writing. Poets and critics illuminate the work of a writer whose achievement and influence is increasingly recognised as central to modern poetry in English. Contribution...

June 1978: Frederic Raphael is in a studio for the dubbing of his television play "Something's Wrong", and a routine moment is captured by his wry alertness to vanities and foibles. "Ifs and Buts" continues the sharply stylish extracts from the journ...