SOURCE: A review of By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember, in Observer, September 28, 1997, p. 17.

[In the following review, McGough complains that Hughes's By Heart lacks a contemporary feel.]

The only poetry that mattered to me when I was at school was the stuff that we recited in class, and if heroism and self-sacrifice were involved then so much the better. I charged with the Light Brigade and helped bury Sir John Moore at Corunna: our voices were the thumping hooves, the doleful beat of the drum.

My interest in poetry stemmed not from the English Literature department but from Elocution and Drama. There seemed to me to be two kinds of poetry—the poetry of Shush and the poetry of Share. The first was reverential and lived in libraries where a diet of dust and silence ensured long, somnambulant lives. Teachers of English Literature were at ease with annotated...