It’s like he saw it coming. “The Numbers,” the first poem in the vast first volume of the Poems of J.H. Prynne, opens:

The whole thing it is, the difficult

matter: to shrink the confines

down.

Prynne died in April, aged 89. Now we can see the whole thing, the size and scope of what he made. It’s not an easy thing to see. The various obituaries—he got a page in most of the reputable British papers—each shrank him down in their own way; all of them, though, made much of his “difficult / matter.” An “erudite and ‘difficult’ poet who became a cult figure to some readers and many Cambridge undergraduates, but made others flinch,” averred the Telegraph . Note the scare quotes: Part of what makes difficulty difficult is not quite knowing how to talk about it. (Note also the faint raised eyebrow of “undergraduates.”)

To be fair, if any poetry counts as difficult, it’s Prynne’s.…