and again.

"For Bayley, Barthes's confident insistence that 'the fact can only exist linguistically, as a term of discourse' is a sign of madness from the one theorist he regards as even half-way sane. He might have quoted T. E. Hulme in rebuttal: 'Philosophy is about people in clothes, not about the soul of man'. Bayley is good about people in clothes. Wordsworth's poems 'are like one's parents' clothes - always out of fashion'. But our critic, an accomplished poet himself when he was young, has the tools of technical analysis to tell you why Wordsworth will always be current, and why Tennyson deservedly became 'a pop star, one of the most successful and famous ever'. Bayley can tell whether his subject poets have the palpable earth for a launch-pad when they lift off higher realms. That useful emphasis runs out of road only when he gets to John Ashbery. According to his own principles, Bayley ought to be powerfully delighted by the later Ashbery's unflagging determination to blend all of America's vernacular tones into 'the natural voice of the contingent present', a nice way of describing a slow avalanche of verbal hamburger. [...] Finally Bayley believes that all writing should aim to be remembered."

- Clive Bell, "A Fabulous Marketplace:
Who Says that Book Reviews Should Never be Collected in a Book?"
The Times Literary Supplement, 27 May 2005.
Review of John Bayley, The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature.