For most of his writing life Clive James was a much better poetry critic than he was a poet. Though he was wrong about Hardy, whose work he undervalued, he was particularly strong on twentieth-century poets, including W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Richard Wilbur and Philip Larkin, and he had an eye for newer talent (such as Stephen Edgar) others tended to miss before James spotted it. As a poet, though, he was for many years lost “through comfort” (to quote MacNeice on minor poets)—the comfort occasioned by celebrity and his remarkable achievements as a critic, memoirist and television…