a very few hundred a year from royalties and anthology
rights. This shows how unpopular poetry has become. Tennyson was able to build himself a country house at Aldworth in Surrey out of the proceeds of poetry and to live like the peer he was created. I imagine that today Masefield alone sells in really big numbers. Probably this is partly because he gets given away as school prizes. There is one English poet who has published no more than about twenty .poems in a slim volume years ago with Macmillan, but whose work is probably better known in this country than that of any other living poet. Every reader of this paragraph will be able, to quote a line or twO from him, whether from The Bull,; ' The Song of Honour,' or "Twould ring the bells of Heaven or' Time, you old gipsy man' or Eve with her basket was. He is Ralph Hodgsorftnd he left these shores many years ago to live in a village in Ohio, where, 1 believe, he breeds bulldogs, I once met him in London with that great journalist and bibliophile, the late R iehard Jennings. All I can remember is that the poet had huge eyes, was clean-shaveni and kept producing from his pockets different little clay pipes which he puffed at once or twice and put away, again. Who's Who gives four uninformative lines about him and no date of birth, He must be the least known well-known English poet.
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