The outspoken critic on his new history of poetry, the relevance of authors’ private lives, and why he won’t be going to see the latest film version of Emma

The critic John Carey, 85, is emeritus Merton professor of English literature at Oxford University, where he taught for more than 40 years. He has written books about John Milton and John Donne as well as polemics against elitism in culture including What Good Are the Arts? (2005) His memoir The Unexpected Professor was an unexpected bestseller. His new book is A Little History of Poetry.

I imagine you’ve read just about everything, but were there poets you read for the first time for this book?

Oh yeah. Quite a lot. There were several I had meant to read and never got around to. Petrarch for example – though I have to say that he was a major disappointment. Also, I hadn’t read Pushkin, or Goethe really. Rilke, the German poet, I had just about touched on, I thought was wonderful. Baffling, but wonderful.

Are your language skills good enough to read closely in other languages?

My French is all right, and I have a bit of German, but otherwise I was having to read in the best translations. By which I mean the ones that read best as English poetry.

The original EH Gombrich A Little History of the World in this series of books was written for the young daughter of a friend of his. Did you have a particular reader in mind for your history?

It was explained to me I should keep teenage readers in mind, and that suited me fine. It meant I could leave out any boring theory and technical terms, and put in plenty of anecdotes to bring the poets to life.

The way literature is taught in schools neglects this kind of historical sweep. We seem to like our literature to be “relevant”…

I think that’s right. I haven’t seen the new film of Emma, and I won’t – because everything I have read about it praises it for being “so contemporary”. If I am reading something or watching something about the past I don’t want it to be contemporary. I want to be able to imagine what it was like to live in that past. To turn everything into a version of our own world seems to me a total waste of time.

Have you written any poetry over the years?

When I was at school in my young teens I fancied myself as a poet. I actually sent off poems to the Listener. They were terrible, obviously. There was a bloke in my class at grammar school, Dennis Keene, who later became a published poet. I remember we were asked to write a poem about the atomic bomb. Dennis began with the line: “Who took the sun and hung it in the trees?” I thought I could never write a line as good as that, so at that point I gave up.

No teacher said anything at school that made me want to learn what they knew about, but poetry I found to be incredibly supportive

You have met and studied plenty of writers over the years. Do you think the life ever lives up to the work?

Not often. The only writer I think of in that way is Chekhov, who was also a doctor, of course. I remember reading how when he was dying, the nervous young doctor attending him asked: should he get another cylinder of oxygen? Chekhov said: “No, I think you would be better getting a bottle of champagne.” I love that. But it is rare. I just reviewed that new book on George Orwell about how dreadfully he treated his wife. He was not only unfaithful but when she was terminally ill and they had just adopted a child, he went off to be a foreign correspondent for the Observer. She died not long after he left. Unbelievably uncaring.

Do you think we should take that into account when we read Orwell?

I don’t personally think so. Orwell himself argued that you can be a great artist and a disgusting human being. And I think that is right. Though if it gets into the writing, you can’t ignore it. If you read Dante, for example, his depiction of hell suggests an obsessive interest in cruelty and torture. I don’t see how you can read that and simply admire the lovely poetry. It is a bit like saying the gas chambers were terribly well designed.

If you are ever called on to recite something after dinner, Oxford dons’ karaoke, what would you choose?

It would be the end of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, beginning: “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!”

I remember a teacher once suggesting to me that studying poetry at university was like “coming to terms with death, parts one and two”. Do you find solace in it?

Oh yeah. Always have done. My family was odd because I had a brother who was mentally retarded and we never saw anyone as a result – we were very enclosed. And no teacher said anything at school that made me want to learn what they knew about, but poetry I found to be incredibly supportive. I am a little ashamed to admit that early on that meant GK Chesterton, the battle poem, Lepanto. Another thing, a poetic novel, was Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, which I read over and over. That was before I discovered Williamson was a fascist.

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What books are by your bed?

I read on Kindle in bed, so I have a few on the go. I am reading Kate Atkinson, the third of her Jackson Brodie novels - I think she is a brilliant satirist of our times. Also, The Death Maze by Arianna Franklin, about a woman detective in the reign of Henry II. And then a book called Travellers in the Third Reich, which is ordinary people’s impressions of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Which poet do you return to most often – who is your desert island poet?

I think Philip Larkin, who I knew a little. If you take Church Going, for example, has anyone ever written anything better about what happens when religion has gone? A tremendously important subject. “Gravitating … to this ground … If only that so many dead lie round”. I admire Auden, of course, and Ted Hughes. But it would be Larkin for me.

• A Little History of Poetry by John Carey is published by Yale (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15