Two Packets of Poetry and a Prose Cutting Two slim packets of poetry have been put in my hands by a friend - one in typescript, the other in print - both re-comended with warm admiration; while a prose cutting from The Times Literary Supplement has been given me with disgust and disapproval. The printed booklet is entitled "Magnificat" and its writer is S.I.M., a woman. It makes pleasant reading. The general poetic atmosphere is good - the sentiment in which the verse lives and moves is touched with the mystery of life's birth and growth and of the one Force variously creative everywhere. I think it is this general atmosphere, this prevailing sentime

-07_A Poet's Sincerity.htm A Poet's Sincerity "All writing of poetry," says AE, "should be preceded by a passionate desire for truth and when the poet is writing he should continually ask himself, 'Do I really believe this? Is this truly what I feel?'" AE was himself a poet — but I am afraid his dictum must not be taken at its face-value. We must not ignore the fact that a dramatist can be a poet. A dramatist speaks through a multitude of characters. No doubt, he often packs them with responses he has personally made to the world, yet nowhere does he write an accurate story of his own attitudes, and he writes great poetry through his villains no less than his heroes. Surely he cannot be be

A Book of Love A friend of mine put Havelock Ellis's autobiography into my hands and asked me to read it and pay a tribute to its author. My friend is right in assuming that a tribute is deserved by Havelock Ellis. Perhaps the best tribute is to utter the paradox that the passing of Havelock Ellis leaves no gap in the world. It is the life either frustrated or cut short before fulfilling itself that leaves a gap. What is here left behind is a sense of rich plenitude - an achievement splendid in its calm completeness. Yes, the two characteristics of this man as embodied in his work were an unassuming poise and a thoroughgoing wide-sweeping efficiency. That combination gave him a str

-20_Time's Gap.htm Time's Gap Who could have believed that from Edith Sitwell of the rather equivocal fame of self-consciously clever and deliberately perverse effusions like Jane, Jane! tall as a crane, The light comes creating down the lane, one would get the magnificent lines: That old rag-picker blown along the street Was once great Venus. But now Age unkind Has shrunken her so feeble and so small - Weak as a babe. And she who gave the Lion's kiss Has now all Time's gap for her piteous mouth. Aeschylus might have had a hand in them - Aeschylus of the grandiose and compact audacities. Marlowe might have moulded them - Marlowe with his sublime violence. Here is not

Yeats and Shaw Yeats once wrote to Dorothy Wellesley: "Shaw has written a long, rambling, vegetarian, sexless letter, disturbed by my causing 'bad blood' between the nations." It is curious to find any act of the most efficient fighter of our day described thus. The very efficiency of Shaw's fighting seems to have misled Yeats. Measured against Shaw, Yeats on the war-path can be nothing but frustrated rage, a weakling with a sword in his hand but unable to wield it; he can only scowl and spit. Shaw is like a fencing expert, parrying blows and dealing death-wounds with such smooth ease, such effortlessness, such absence of violent waste that he appears to many eyes "vegetarian"

Science and Poetry Have you read I. A. Richards's Science and Poetry? If you have not, you have missed a very sharp and well-phrased formulation, within a brief compass, of both the value and defect the poetic expression and poetic response in life have for a scientific-minded literary critic. Richards has a genuine concern for the general health and balance of human nature. He makes no denial of the richness poetry brings us. A most apt remark of his runs: "To live reasonably is not to live by reason alone - the mistake is easy and, if carried far, disastrous — but to live in a way of which reason, a clear full sense of the whole situation, would approve." And a clear full sen

The Process of Great Poetry No lover of poetry but feels during its spell over him that he is granted the contact of a deeper and higher state of consciousness than the ordinary. Poetry at such moments is not a mere conspiracy by Dante and Shakespeare and Tagore to crown colourful invention king of our hearts: no doubt, we recognise that its primary work is to bring delight by vision and emotion and not offer demonstrable or verifiable truth, but the delight breathes a superhuman air and is no outcome of transfigured fantasy. Why then should we later look upon these moments with diffidence in their revelatory touch on our being? At times poets themselves shirk in retro

-005_Chapter 004 (Page 166-Page 220).htm From Kathleen Raine We live in a very mysterious world, in which thoughts are realities that communicate in ways other than print. Of course any dream contains many elements but I have no doubt that there was indeed some meeting between us in yours. I enclose the book review in last week's TLS which as you see is extremely hostile and malicious (besides being a typical example of the decline in values in this country over the last years) and I was very distressed about it - more than I at my age should have been, but I had hoped that a review in the TLS might have made our work in Temenos better known to more people who might share our concern to restore true val

-007_Chapter 006 (Page 269-Page 291).htm From Kathleen Raine I have received and read your Blake's Tyger with delight. I must, I think, concede you the victory - your laying out of the whole map of Blake's inner world and its dynamics in the context of Milton's poem does convince. Whether when Blake wrote The Tyger he himself as yet saw that whole universe as a whole scarcely matters, since it was already implicit, as the oak within the acorn. You have woven every symbolic term into the complete pattern. Perhaps in the Milton chapter I was tempted to think that you had done little more than show that Blake uses a Miltonic vocabulary, that all those grand Miltonic words in The Tyger are simply that - a M

-002_Chapter 001 (Page 1-Page 70).htm From Kathleen Raine What a surprise and a pleasure to hear from you again after all these years, and I certainly thought the publication of our correspondence had been long forgotten. I look forward to re-reading your own letters but did quickly run through my side of the correspondence to see whether what I had then written was too foolish or far from what I now feel about these things.I found that on the whole I do think as I did, only with perhaps greater pessimism about the future of all the world and English as the world]-language not of Shakespeare and Wordsworth but of the television commercial. The vocabulary now in use in this country is I know