[Anthony] Powell's Pall Mall prose, meticulous concurrence with the conservative, and pained recoil from the irreverent lower-class energies of Wells, Twain and their like [in his Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers, 1946–1989] put him at the opposite extreme as a critic to Craig Raine. Where Powell exudes commendation for the genteel, Raine cordially abominates it. One of his most elegantly edged pieces in Haydn and the Valve Trumpet slices into the petrified propriety and frigid diction of Augustan poetry to expose stultified responses.

The imitative and remote from life regularly incur cutting comment. An elevated 18th-century poem about a washerwoman's day—"At length bright Sol illuminates the skies, / And summons drowsy mortals to arise"—is brought crashing down to earth with the remark "Perhaps she 'did' for Mr. Pope". Grandiose abstractions, generalities and standardized utterance—from neoclassical periphrases to the jargon of contemporary literary theory—are seen as the enemies of art and the imagination.

What characterize the authors Raine writes most admiringly and admirably about—Dickens, Joyce, Bellow, Larkin—are a converse fascination with concrete, indeed earthy, detail, and a tellingly individual voice. Idiosyncrasy enthralls him. "All great poetry", he contends, "is written in dialect": by which he means it has a distinctively personal timbre and idiom.

Poets who parrot others' effects are deftly winged with high-calibre bursts of critical marksmanship. At the other extreme, Raine has an especial flair for illuminating the techniques by which gifted writers revitalize cliché. Behind a scene in which a shamed V. S. Naipaul character looks into a mirror and sees nothing there, lies the phrase "to lose face", he shrewdly points out. The gaps between the ill-fitting clothes Dickens's Miss Tox wears manifest her inability "to make ends meet".

Such insights into the way a lurking lively image can be conjured out from a seemingly inert phrase vivify Raine's pages. Alert to the inventive, he is also keenly attentive, sensitive even to how an over-dramatic exclamation mark "quivers like a javelin on the page". In particular, he is acutely attuned to give-away tremors of affectation: Geoffrey Hill's use of "the Yeatsian 'but' for 'only' … like the sob in a pub tenor's top note", arty syntax that leaves him feeling "Inversion on the scale of these poems the reader admires not".

Bogus afflatus is pin-pointed and punctured. Pomposity and stiltedness are nimbly mocked. Raine's distaste for the decorous frequently expresses itself in cheeky, clever puns: noting how books about Johnson re-cycle the same stories, he quips that there's "a limit to how often it is possible to turn Johnson's choler". Homely images sometimes supply satiric sparkle; a horse in one of Henri Rousseau's less successful paintings bares teeth "fresh from a tumbler of Steradent". Among the authors under review, there's even room for Barbara Cartland who makes a memorable appearance "in the pink, nay, the cerise of health".

Given Raine's antipathy to the orotund, it's surprising to find him as appreciative as he is of Arnold and Eliot (quotations from whom almost oversaturate some essays). Even more curious is his dislike of Wilfred Owen who, he claims, "associates poetry with the merely poetic" and is "insensitive to the possibilities of understatement". Taking "Dulce Et Decorum Est" as an example of this, Raine writes off its lines "bitter as the cud / Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues" as "the rhetoric of Speakers' Corner". In fact, they contain instances of the quiet effects he thinks absent from the poem. Subliminally pervading Owen's lines is the folk-tale motif of liars being punished by sores on their tongues. In the horribly inverted world of war, his poem intimates, the opposite occurs: it's not the liars—pro-war propagandists—who now get sores on their tongues; it's the young men who, heeding them, end up on the Western Front in a gas attack whose noxious fumes hideously blister their "innocent" tongues.

Raine's inadvertence to Owen's subtle puns, muted wordplay and use of deliberate dissonance to echo the discords of war is highly uncharacteristic, though. What makes his criticism both exhilarating and engrossing is that it is almost always stirringly alive to the procedures and possibilities of creativity.