This page makes use of an innovation of mine called 'dual-purpose text.' Click anywhere in the text below (not in the white space around the text) to get to the top of the page very quickly and easily - there's no need to find a separate top button or to scroll. The page on Web design describes this innovation and others, including 'the rail,' which can also be used to reach top of page.

The pages in this site which are concerned with poetry and literary theory are on the left side of the site map. You can move from page to page by clicking on the right-facing arrow on each page. I give brief information about the main innovations in poetic technique in the Glosssary of Literary Linkage Terms (which is distinct from the General Glossary of this site.) It provides links to the pages which describe the techniques more fully and which provide illustrations.

Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote that 'form in the novel has to move to stay alive.' This is surely true of the novel, and equally true of poetry. I make the point that the artist should 'transform form.' I stress the exhilarating variety of forms available to the poet and the need for a wide variety of forms - free verse as well as strict forms of many different kinds, forms from the past which are still useful and completely new forms. I emphasize form here, but not at the expense of content. As regards content, a significant number of my own poems are concerned with war and conflict, the First and Second World Wars and the conflict in Northern Ireland when the troubles were at their height. As we look back on the twentieth century, a century of unprecedented horrors, I think that this preoccupation can be seen as not at all misplaced or excessive, but the subject matter of poetry is vast - I emphasize range and variety. Most of the poems I've written are not included in this site and the poems I have included are far from being fully representative of my work. I've written many poems which are not dark in tone but which are relaxed and informal, and a number of humorous poems. (Two of these have been accepted for print publication by the magazine of humorous verse, 'Krax.')

My approach is in part systematic and rigorous, but I see no contradiction between system and rigour on the one hand and on the other, passion, compassion, activism, humour, an intense concern for the health of language and the vitality of culture, a whole range of other concerns.

I believe that Linkage Theory offers a good basis for modern poetry - for both writing poetry and its analysis. Of all the creative writers of the past, it may be that Proust comes nearest to anticipating this theory, or the need for this theory. Andre Maurois writes of Proust that he had "many of the virtues of a scientist - accuracy in observation, honesty in dealing with facts, and a determination to discover the nature of certain general laws. For all his mysticism he was a positivist. Of all the many 'persons' who made up his individual self, the one that, in his opinion, clung most tenaciously to life was a certain philosopher 'who is never happy except when he has discovered the common qualities that bind together two works, two sensations, and two beings.' " ('The Quest for Proust.')

The celebrated moment when the taste of cake and tea summon up the world of childhood can be seen as an instance of the linkage brought about by memory, the linkage between the present and the past, which can be brought back to vivid life by a taste, a smell or an object. This overwhelmingly important theme makes 'positivist' not the best word to use of Proust - nor is Linkage Theory positivist. What is common to the Proustian view and Linkage Theory is the emphasis upon structure and form, and at the same time the freedom of art, the freedom of the human mind, to transcend structure and the flow of time.

The great design of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is a notable example of the power of linkages to create a massive work of literary architecture. As Andre Maurois writes, "The reader...who, having worked through the whole novel, is struck by the secret symmetry of the composition, by the multiplicity of the details that balance one another from wing to wing of the structure, by the toothing stones set in position from the first moment that the work was begun, and designed to carry vaulting still to come, must be filled with wonder that Proust could envisage the whole gigantic edifice so completely."

Poetry cannot achieve the massive effects of this novel, or of many much shorter novels, but, as Wordsworth pointed out, scale is all. The hills of the Lake District are inferior to the massive mountains of the Alps in height, but not in beauty or significance. ('Guide to the Lakes.')

The theories which make up present-day Literary Theory are wonderfully interesting and useful, but what they don't achieve, generally, is broad explanatory power, something which is very desirable in a theory. By using Linkage Theory, I'd claim, we make use of a theory which is genuinely 'generalisable.'