Essays

London: MacGibbon & Kee,. Very Good/Very Good. 1970. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 0261631497 Dust jacket designed by Michael Jarvis, unclipped. Brown cloth with bright gilt titling on spine. No inscription. 191 pages clean and tight. 191 pages clean and tight. This is the first collection in book form of the criticism and essays of George Barker. He writes not only about his contemporaries - he is, after all, a contemporary of Spender, Auden, Day Lewis and MacNeice - but also about Shakespeare and Blake, Housman and Yeats. It was the latter who first spotted his youthful talent, when he included him in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Central to everything George Barker writes is his recognition that the poet's responsibility is ultimately to his muse, an act of faith he has demonstrated in his own life which has cost him dear in terms of recognition by the official poetasters. Barker's intellectual integrity is unsullied by commerce with literary journalism. In a series of apophthegms, under the heading of `Asterisks', he deals savagely with people and ideas in a manner that recalls Swift, as he does also with French culture, under the heading of ` Maximes'. In a grey age of mediocrity, Barker keeps alight a pure, gem-like flame. .