And his solitary talent was gifted to the slickest profiteer; with him, it increases in interest a thousand-fold every year: it's sinful to fear for one's talent when that talent is something to fear He was good at endings Margaret Drabble. A year or so ago, he began writing poetry again, citing George Herbert: "And now in age I bud again, / After so many deaths I live and write / And relish versing". The most remarkable of these last poems, to me, is the painful and poignant "Capital", on the theme of the enigmatic parable of the talents (Matthew xxv, 14-30), a characteristically lucid but disturbing performance, which ends: But the man with the single talent, who had hidden it deep beneath a talentless demeanor (but surely he was no thief?) was cast into outer darkness where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth. His poem " Venice and the Looking Glass" describes a visitor who was content to "grin like a dog and run about that city": and so, we may suppose, was he.
Why did he not publish more? He was modest and wry, but he knew that his work was good, and he had well- informed admirers He did not like to press and push. He would bring his students over for a summer course in Europe, show them what the bombs and the British had done to Southampton, then take them on to Venice, where he would lead them more or less blindfold down little alleys until they reached the edge of the Piazza San Marco, forbidding them to look up until they could see it dramatically revealed in all its glory. William Dunlop was devoted to opera, and spoke about it with an erudite enthusiasm that lit up his face with a smile of extraordinarily gentle and pure delight His other aesthetic addiction was to Venice. By this time he had three grown children of his own: the title poem is a wry acknowledgement of a parent's impossible desire to persuade his offspring to share his passions.
There was a long and Bohemian farewell dinner in Soho at which Roethke benignly presided. William didn't vanish: he reappeared regularly and loyally, over the years, with bottles of wine, for more long Bohemian evenings. He published, occasionally, in Encounter, the London Magazine, the TLS, the New Statesman, but the slim volume we were all expecting did not materialise until many years later, in 1997, when Rose Alley Press in Seattle produced Caruso for the Children, & Other Poems. It wasn't an easy time for university writing: in the Leavisite atmosphere, our sharpened critical faculties far outstripped our creative confidence. He graduated in 1960, and shortly left England for a larger and freer world. William as an undergraduate was also committed to an ongoing love of football and opera, but it was as poet, editor of Granta, fellow lecture-absconder and alphabetical neighbour that I came to know him: as Drabble and Dunlop we sat next to one another for our university exams, and he frequently complained that I demoralised him by writing too fast I read his early poems with admiration.