LLAREGGUB REVISITED
SIR,—Surely some sort of a limit has been reached when your reviewer can speak of Dylan Thomas as a man who 'had the misfortune to be a womaniser'? Is all personal responsibility for one's life now to be abrogated—or are only 'great' poets excused? Since the bulk of Dylan Thomas's poetry is pathological with the minimum of inward control (a fact which I should have thought fairly obvious), I do not see how it can be examined usefully without some reference to the pathology of the case.
I do not know Mr. Holbrook personally, but I have read his Llareggub Revisited, and I found it a perfectly fair criticism, based on root principles of poetic responsibility—in fact, an overdue act .of sanitation, I thought. The scandalised tone of your reviewer's notice (in line with many Leavis-Snow reactions) is a measure of the resistance to be en- countered when anybody dares attack a reputation which has received the 'build-up' from an influential literary elite of the day.
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