SCOTTISH POETRY
SIR,—Regarding the Scottish anthology, Honour'd Shade, your reviewer, Mr. David Craig, cannot get away with it as easily as all that.
We'll leave the question of a 'personal voice' only making itself felt 'from somewhere else,' which 1 accept as 'Pax!', `Barla-fummil I' or 'No case.' But `poetry is now a backwater; the mainstream is fiction' is more important because more general.
Sir, I must confess I am a bit dull; the old nut is not so resilient as it was. Would you kindly ask Mr. Craig to explain why on earth he asks you to consider 'the past century's achievement' in fiction, in order to bolster his contention that 'it is not at all surprising . . . that a new collection of poems [todayl] should be rather trifling'? Baffling!
He asks you to consider—for some mad old reason —a number of nineteenth-century novelists (main- stream) and suggests that the contemporary (back- water) poetic types look pretty small beer beside them. He names nineteen. Here are nineteen back- water poets of the past century : Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, Whit- man, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Corbiere, Leopardi, Ibsen, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Mickiewicz, Heine, Hoelderlin. Some backwater! And has the first half of this century done so badly when we can mention such hasbeens as Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Apollinaire, Eluard, Blok, Mayakovsky, Esenin, Pasternak. Rilke, Brecht, Lorca, Auden, McDiar- mid, Maclean, D. Thomas?
Mr. Tom Scott is right : Mr. Craig just happens to prefer novels to poetry. In which case, sir, surely he would be more usefully employed reviewing the titanic mainstream masterpieces of Braine, Wain, Amis, Wilson and Snow than the 'trifling' futilities of Scottish (or presumably any other) modern poetry. Don't you think? God wot!—Yours faithfully,
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