Features October 1985
A profound simplicity: the poetry of Andrew Young
On Andrew Young’s poems.
Andrew Young, at once the most accessible and secretive of modern poets, was born at Elgin in Scotland on April 29, 1885. The appearance of The Poetical Works of Andrew Young, edited by the poet’s daughter Alison Young and her husband Edward Lowbury, is an apt celebration of his centenary year.[1] The collection is a model of painstaking accuracy and thoughtful arrangement and supersedes the Complete Poems of 1974. Not only have the editors ordered the poems into a more cohesive and logical pattern, but they include work not to be found in earlier versions of Young’s collected poems. It seems unlikely that they have missed anything of even minor importance.
Tennyson was still at work when Young was born. As a student Young was to mourn the death of Swinburne; and he was an exact contemporary of D. H....
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