What, therefore, about the books themselves? Here comes my catalogue.
Under the heading of Poetry I should place the follow- ing eleven books as indispensable for any person who wishes to know what, during these atrocious years, our older and our younger poets have been about. T. S. Eliot : Four Quartettes (Faber and Faber). Edith Sitwell: Green Song (Macmillan). Louis MacNeice: Springboard (Faber and Faber). Sidney Keyes: Collected Poems (Routledge). Alun Lewis : Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets (Allen and Unwin). Dylan Thomas: Deaths and Entrances (this book, which is certain to be interesting, will be published by Dent early next year). W. H. Auden : For the Time Being and Another Time (Faber and Faber). Kathleen Raine Stone and Flower (Ivor Nicholson and Watson). Edwin Muir The Narrow Place (Faber and Faber). William Empson: The Gathering Storm (Faber and Faber). Martyn Skinner: Letters from Malaya (Putnam). This catalogue, it will be observed, is not a catalogue raisonne, but there are certain comments which might be made. Mr. E:iot's poetry is always important, not merely because of the immense influence it has exercised, but because of its intrinsic sincerity and worth. Most critics are agreed that in Green Song Miss Sitwell has been able to express the maturity of her very remarkable gifts. And Sidney Keyes, who was mortally wounded on Longstop Hill, was a boy of astonishing precocity who was able, even before reaching manhood. to fulfil his renown. I hesitate to provide my ex-prisoner with a list of fiction. On the one hand, I am not a reader of fiction, and my opinion would be of slight value. On the other, he can obtain information in casual conversation with his friends. I should sug- gest only that, of the novelists of the post-Isherwood vintage, Mr. Philip Toynbee appears to possess the greatest promise. * * * *
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