The Strength of Poetry

James Fenton is one of the country's most acclaimed poets and author of The Memory of War and Children in Exile (1983) and the Whitbread Prize winning Out of Danger (1994). Formerly a critic for New Statesman and The Times, and for many years a far east correspondent for The Independent, Fenton succeeded Seamus Heaney as the Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1994. His lectures, delivered between 1994 and 1999, include discussions of such luminaries as Larkin, Eliot, Heaney, Yeats, Auden, and Hughes.