KIDNAPPING BLAKE
SIR,—Mr. Robson, by venturing to criticise Miss Raine's conception of literary scholarship, has
provoked a number of attacks. And yet, to the passionate eye, both the conception and its defensive polemic seem curiously simple-minded.
Mr. Robson's point, if he will allow me to state it ,very baldly; is that the subject-matter of literature is human life, and that if a poet has anything signifi- cant to say to his fellow human beings, they can be trusted to see the significance of it for themselves, without the aid of commentators who heap up moun- tains of arcane knowledge, In fact, the more this apparatus is assembled, the more the ordinary reader, for whom the poetry was written in the first place, will tend to keep his distance. Hence the metaphor of 'kidnapping.'
Is Mr. Robson really 'presumptuous,' and all the rest of it, just for making this common-sense point? Isn't it, in fact, obvious that if a poet can't be shown to be important without bringing in all this lumber, then he isn't important?—Yours faithfully,
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