SOURCE: Carnell, Simon. “A Protestant Imagination.” New Statesman and Society 5, no. 189 (14 February 1992): 38.

In the following review, Carnell commends Paulin's insightful critical readings in Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State.

Raymond Williams once remarked of the poetry criticism of fellow-Marxist Christopher Caudwell, that it was not specific enough to be wrong. It has long been the fate of even good critics committed, like Tom Paulin, to a social reading of poetic texts to be suspected of something like the investigation of intricate machinery with a mallet. Surely, the argument runs, in poetry, if nowhere else, there survives a “private lyric space”; a home to unique “moments of voiced immortality”, where the “spirit speaks clearly and completely”.

These quotations come, in fact, not from some fundamental adversary of the “social readings” of poetry in Paulin's remarkable new book, [Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State,] but from his treatment of Christina...