Words mean things, sir,” one of my old First Sergeants liked to say. This was his plea for carefully considered speech; he believed that words had great power and that a man was responsible for what he said. Craig Raine, in his new book on poetry, My Grandmother’s Glass Eye, makes the same case. “The first task we require of poetry,” he writes, “is to mean something” (his italics).

Here one is reminded of Matthew Arnold’s dictum that poetry should be concerned with “high seriousness” (we know Raine is a fan—a quotation of Arnold’s appears on the last page of every issue of Raine’s magazine, Areté). One also thinks of Saint Paul’s observation that “when I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” Maturity brings with it a new language, a language of seriousness and complexity. Is this the meaning Raine is after?

Certainly he expects great things from poetry. Raine says that it “puts the world in italics,” it “teaches the language to sing.” When constructed properly, verse sustains tremendous weight. Like a Roman victory column, a poem is there before the reader, intricate, enticing, monumental. It commands attention and rewards close inspection. Ted Hughes’s “New Year Exhilaration” is one such poem for Raine. Hughes describes the newness of an early January day through weather and landscape,