Selected Poems 1933-1993

Gavin Ewart

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780571286959
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

'The most remarkable phenomenon of the English poetic scene during the last ten years or so has been the advent, or perhaps I should say the irruption, of Gavin Ewart' wrote Philip Larkin. Larkin was one among many poets and critics who admired Gavin Ewart's work; Stephen Spender, Anthony Thwaite and Peter Porter were also fans.

Influenced by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, but especially by W. H. Auden, Ewart was a prolific poet and his verse reflected a bawdy wit and an irrepressible sense of humour. He was largely known for his irreverence to sexual convention and is the second most prolific contributor to Making Love to Marilyn Monroe: The Faber Book of Blue Verse .

The poems in the Selected Poems were chosen by Ewart before his death in 1995 and were published for the first time in 1996. They are a selection of the best work from a writer of poetry for both adults and children who had a long and productive career.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• The Song
• Table of Contents
• On the Author’s Photograph
• Audenesque for an Initiation
• Public School
• ‘He thought of being in a single room’
• The English Wife
• Cambridge
• Miss Twye
• John Betjeman’s Brighton
• Home
• Sonnet, 1940
• When a Beau Goes In
• Hymn to Proust
• Spring Song
• After Heine
• Huckstep
• Tennysonian Reflections at Barnes Bridge
• Chelsea in Winter
• Serious Matters
• Striptease
• Wanting Out
• Short Time
• The Middle Years
• A Christmas Message
• The Law Allows Cruel Experiments on Friendly Animals
• Crossing the Bar
• War-time
• The Dildo
• The Masturbon
• Office Friendships
• Pi-Dog and Wish-Cat
• June 1966
• The Statements
• Lifelines
• The Great Lines
• Hands
• Classical Disasters
• Lines of History
• The Headlines
• Arithmetic
• The Pseudo-Demetrius
• Abelam
• People Will Say We’re in Love
• Victorian
• The Select Party
• The Sentimental Education
• 2001: The Tennyson/Hardy Poem
• Sonnet: The Only Emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream
• Sonnet: The Last Things
• Hurried Love
• Memory Man
• The Larkin Automatic Car Wash
• Experience Hotel
• Trafalgar Day, 1972
• Fiction: The House Party
• Fiction: A Message
• Consoler Toujours
• To the Slow Drum
• The Hut
• Charles Augustus Milverton
• Professor Otto Lidenbrock to Wystan Hugh Auden
• Incident, Second World War
• Ending
• Poets
• Yorkshiremen in Pub Gardens
• Yeats and Shakespeare
• Swarm Over, Death!
• The One-time Three-Quarter Remembers the Past
• The Second Coming
• A Personal Footnote
• To Lord Byron
• Sonnet: Carson McCullers
• The Gentle Sex (1974)
• ‘The Lion griefs loped from the shade And on our; knees their muzzles laid, And Death put down his book’
• Home Truths
• Oh, Darling!
• The Thirties Love Lyric
• A Wee Sang for St Andrew’s Day
• The Immense Advantage
• ‘It’s Hard to Dislike Ewart’
• The Semantic Limerick According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1933)
• The Semantic Limerick According to Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (Edition of 1765)
• Sonnet: Brief Encounter
• Sonnet: At the Villa Madeira
• Sonnet: Afterwards
• Exits
• Sestina: The Literary Gathering
• Every Doggerel has its Day
• Cowardice
• Love Song
• Afrokill
• Back
• A Contemporary Film of Lancasters in Action
• A 14-Year-Old Convalescent Cat in the Winter
• Conversation Piece
• The Death of W. S. Gilbert at Harrow Weald
• The Late Eighties
• On First Looking into Michael Grant’s Cities of Vesuvius
• The Moment
• Pian dei Giullari
• ‘And Female Smells in Shuttered Rooms’
• Sonnet: The Greedy Man Considers Nuclear War
• Jubilate Matteo
• The Meeting
• A Ballad of the Good Lord Baden-Powell
• Burlesque: Auden in the Forties
• They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek
• Crucifixion
• A Pindaric Ode on the Occasion of the Third Test Match Between England and Australia, Played at Headingley, –16–21 July, 1981
• A Bit Of A Ballad
• Singable
• Aros Castle
• The Good Companions
• Robert Graves
• I.M. Anthony Blunt
• Into History
• The Falklands, 1982
• Sonnet: Pepys in 1660
• Sonnet: Supernatural Beings
• A Pilgrimage
• Rugger Song: The Balls of the Beaver
• Love in a Valley
• Ms. Found in a Victorian Church
• A McGonagall-type Triolet on the Full Revoltingness of Commercial Fast Food
• The Inventor of Franglais?
• The Importance of Being Earnest
• Happiness is Girl-Shaped
• Rush That Bear!
• A Ballad Re-Creation of a Fifties Incident at Barnes Bridge
• A Godly Undertaking
• The Song of the Old Soldier
• ‘The Sun’ Also Rises
• The Owl Writes a Detective Story
• Little Ones
• The Sadness of Cricket
• Tribes
• Lovers In Pairs
• Incoming Calls
• Putney OAPs in 1985
• All Souls
• The Daytime Mugging in the High Street
• The Garrotting
• The Poets’ Revolt
• ‘Sex in the Soapsuds’
• Sally
• A Wee Laberlethin For the Lads Wi’ the Lallans
• Kingsley Has a Go at a Latin Poem
• The Last Days of Old Poets
• Byron’s Problem
• Ecossaise
• Snow White
• Girl Squash
• Freud
• Sailing to Byzantium
• A Patient of Dr Rycroft’s
• Sonnet: The Scene at 29 Ratcliffe Highway in 1811
• Loving Unsuitable People
• The Premature Coronation
• The Peter Reading Poem
• Beginning of a Ballad: At the Literary Party
• The Rivals
• Show Ban for Peke Breeder’s Contempt
• An Arundel Tomb Revisited
• The War Song of Lewis Carroll
• Only the Long Bones
• ‘Entrance and Exit Wounds Are Silvered Clean’
• Blake in England 1988
• 22 West Cromwell Road
• American Presidents (Calypso Style)
• Sea Song
• A Little Loyal Ode to the Queen Mother on her 90th Birthday
• Marty South’s Letter to Edred Fitzpiers
• The Thomas Hardy Blues
• The Tart of the Lower Sixth
• The Influence of D. H. Lawrence on the Language of Gardeners and Gamekeepers in the Thirties
• About the Author
• Copyright