CULTURE: Resurrecting an English eccentric; Stratford Poetry Festival Shakespeare Institute, Stratford Upon Avon.

Byline: Richard Edmonds

Gabriel Woolf's fascinating and well-researched programme on the English eccentric Walter Savage Landor resurrected a poet whose fame rests mainly today on his obscure poem Gebir -an Arabian Nights fantasy much admired by Shelley.

The poem was seasoned by Landor's extreme passion for the French Revolution and a young Welsh girl Nancy Jones who became his mistress in the early 19th century at Llanthony Priory in the Golden Valley.

Mr Woolf and Rosalind Shanks gave us kaleidoscopic images of this extraordinary man who once wrote: 'Poetry is my amusement, prose my business' -no doubt evidenced by the 25 volume sets of his writings which these days lie on book sellers' shelves unopened and gathering dust.

Landor roamed Europe as Byron and William Beckford had done earlier, leaving England as they did when the clouds of disgrace shut out the light. But Landor was kicked out of Italy on several occasions so his life was nothing if not unsettled.

At one point he took a house in Bath, 'where there are more nightingales than in Shiraz'. He could be found roaming the city with his beloved dog on his head in a seriously battered gaberdine overcoat.

Usually in a dispute with somebody he took up causes and dropped them again when they had served their purpose and after their obligatory letter to The Times had been despatched.

This funny and poignant evening was not without its dull moments and parts of Landor's oewvre defied even Mr Woolf's beguiling reading skills. But Landor's prose dialogues have always been acknowledged (there are actually 200 of them) and we were given the imaginary one between old Bossuet, Louis XIV's Confessor and the King's Mistress, who proved too flighty for any help that God may have had in mind.

Kateriana Fenech sang Italian airs very loudly -perhaps too loudly -accompanied very discreetly on the harp by Rowena Bass.