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I was going to post this yesterday after my first post but I had problems logging on again.
I'm also underwhelmed by the sparse thematic material in the grid. There's half an author (I don't what happened to his other half), a title, a role to be highlighted that's incidental to the literary theme, and a vital feature that results from a letter change, that's just four features in a 13x13 grid. Surely a thematic puzzle should have at least seven features in the grid, or at least something more complex; in this case most of the features of the poem are in the extra letters from wordplay - the balance seems wrong to me. And in what way is the final entry for 1d an "essential feature of the poem"?

Sorry, Tut, but I just didn't find the treatment very interesting.

Re the title of the puzzle: is "earthquakes" HEART, another of the non-vital items? A bit silly if so!

That's how I interpreted it. Hope and love seem to have been ignored, or are they there in some form?

Really struggling with this one. Got the complete message with guesses for some. Could someone explain 27a, 39a and 3d. Also struggling with 6a, 6d, 11, 8 and 9. Some very difficult clues and wicked extra letters but a very enjoyable workout so far, barring the headache I now have.

I've been underwhelmed as well. Apart from the points made by others I would say that some of the clues aren't very precise, e.g. in 19 surely 'words' is an inaccurate description which could easily have been changed to 'data'.

I can't parse the wordplay 'before shifting round' in 42, despite knowing that it must be VEER in LA...N(E) with N subtracted.

ionacarr, before refers to the archaic laveer and shifting round is given under the nounal def of veer in Chambers.
Curate's egg of a puzzle. Not enchanted by the break with convention in so many of the clues where half of the abbreviation (eg N in Nova Scotia) becomes the extra letter.

Ionacarr, if you're beating to windward, the only way you can make progress is with very precisely trimmed sail, ie close-hauled. You're right with the wordplay. I also thought that the use of 'lots of words' in 19 was a little arcane. Not only does the solver need to cater for an abbreviation of gigabyte, but also some knowledge of data representation. I was struggling to remember exactly what a 'word' was. I think, for a standard IBM system (assembler, fortran, cobol, DB2 etc) it was 2 bytes. A byte was a halfword, which isn't even in my Chambers...

xij : 27 vir for man as puer for boy; 39 Ennis is in Co Clare; 3 Rant can also mean a lively tune; 6D Lanza was a tenor; 1A Play around TEN C;
8 Linsey is a cloth; 9 Apostasy, with A PO replaced by (s)ec.

Sorry, not concentrating properly. I meant the TR of 3 or EP of 20 as examples.

And as I was dropping off to sleep, I thought, surely the old mainframe addressing was 32-bit, making 4 bytes a 'word', and 2 bytes a 'half-word.'

I've effectively finished the puzzle but I can't work out the intermediate solution at 6ac.

L-C-LE surly points me to the thematic element.. so which are the two letters that need to change?

Please put me out of my misery!

Thanks