Recently, I was wandering around some of the less travelled corners of Tuscany with a copy of Goethe’s Italian Journey when I found myself struck, powerfully and without precedent, by something Goethe had written.   But I have to touch first upon W. H. Auden, the great English poet, who, for reasons not explained anywhere…

I get tingly with anticipation when I’m about to meet a new poet. I don’t mean the poet in person; I mean meeting the poems of someone whose work had been unknown to me. And so it was when I opened the new selection of poems by Dunstan Thompson, Here at Last is Love, just…