25 SEPTEMBER 1964, Page 13

SIR.—Mr. John Tripp, in the Spectator of September 11, seems

depressed by the evidence that Dylan Thomas constructed poems by putting down the rhymes first and then backing into them. One is driven to wonder how common a poetical practice this is. Mr. Leonard Woolf, in the third volume of his autobiography, Beginning Again, tells of Rupert Brooke doing the same thing. Brooke was sitting in Firle Park with Virginia Woolf. Mr. Woolf says: 'He began to write a poem, his method being to put the last word of each line of rhyming quatrains down the sheet of paper and then complete the lines and so the poem.' Perhaps poetry has always been a curi- ous mixture of inspiration and fraudulence.