Green poetry
Sir: On tucking into the recently published Selected Literary Criticism of Louis Mac- Neice, praised for his 'filial piety' in P.J. Kavanagh's Life and Letters (9 May), I find MacNeice himself appreciating the same quality in Dylan Thomas. The refrain of Fern Hill (which my review of the Liver- pool poets (Books 6 June) quoted Vernon Watkins as objecting to because he thought it 'Joyce's ghost walking') turns out to have stemmed from a more immediate exemp- lar: MacNeice tells me that the answer to critics who approach Thomas's works 'as if they were the hard-born offspring of esoteric "influences" is that he had, among other things, a father who spontaneously uttered such phrases as "happy as the grass is green".'
Michael Horovitz,
Piedmont Bisley, Gloucestershire
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