Peter Levi, who died in 2000, was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 1984. Until 1977 he was a Jesuit priest. He was a classicist whose writing includes three uncategorizable books - on modern Greece, Afghanistan, and the English landscape - as well as translations, critical and scholarly works, and a thriller. But he was first and foremost a poet.
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Reviews
'Almost every page of this book is illuminated by flashes of perception, shrewd judgements and precise spotlighting of things that one believes and had always wanted to say as well as he does' - Eric Mathieson, Ambit '...there is a rare generosity of spirit throughout the book, a generosity which arises naturally from Levi's love and respect for poets' words which have gripped his attention. Such consistent critical empiricism refuses the blinkers of ready-made poetics and received critical opinion... As a counterforce to the (alas, ever-present) deadweight of academic theory which feeds on its own dull substance, Peter Levi's mercurial essay should be added to all lists of essential reading' - Alan Young, PN Review