'Marry, they that delight in poesy itself should seek to know what they do, and how they do; and especially look themselves in an unflattering glass of reason, if they be inclinable unto it. For poesy must not be drawn by the ears: it must be gently led, or rather it must lead - which was partly the cause that made the ancient-learned affirm it was a divine gift, and no human skill: since all other knowledges lie ready for any that hath strength of wit.'¹ The tracing of continuities, which the editorial of PNR 100 declares as one of the aims of the anthology which celebrates the magazine's century, sits well with the quarter centenary of the publication in 1595 of Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poetry: and what Sidney wrote there chimes well enough with his descendants as represented in A Calendar of Modem Poetry.

But nowadays, when it comes to poems, the business of how, that most individual of matters, is often debased by the kind of question sometimes asked by interviewers not about literary method or preference but daily routines, as if there were some formulaic system or series of rites which, once learned, would inevitably bring about the required results. Writers are, of course, no freer than anyone else of work habits which can range from the practical to the obsessive to the downright superstitious: from Wordsworth testing metrical feet with his own, to Simenon working with his quiver of finely sharpened ...