POST-VICTORIAN POETRY
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR] SIR,—We all know that in these democratic, money-grubbing days poets are nearly as common as house-flies and just about as important, but when your reviewer of my Post-Victorian Poetry intimates that I have been kind to too many, and com- plains that "highly original writers like Mr. Frederic Prokosch are summarily disposed of in an undiscerning paragraph, despite the extended treatment given to others" I would ask why I should not be generous rather than mean, and why I should devote a whole chapter to Prokosch as I have done to
Masefield, Bridges, Flecker, and Eliot ; or a half or large-part chapter to him as I have done to Yeats, /E, De la Mare, Austin Clarke, Sassoon, Watson, Newbolt, Davies, Gibson, Chesterton, Blunden, Roy Campbell, Humbert Wolfe, Squire and half a dozen others. Up to the time of my book going to press Prokosch had published only one small volume of verse in this country, and more a thing of rich promise than fulfilment (as I have pointed out). Moreover, as I have also pointed out, the book is about established reputations and poets who swam into the eye of the public before 1930 rather than newcomers—concerning most of whom it is impossible as yet to write with any confidence. Nearly the whole of the Spectator review seems to me to have beeh written in malicious blindness, and ends up with a sentence, the like of which, I dare not, before God, write of the work of any poet or critic with even a minor right to acknowledgment : "One must regret seeing so much industry expended in the production of something which is neither useful nor a pleasure to read."
Is that the way to write of a book which is the fruit of fifteen years of criticism in the Press, and forty years of reading ? Moreover, it is completely out of line with all your contempor- aries who have already written about the book, including The Times Literary Supplement, which said : "Until he has to confront this revolution (i.e., the post-Eliot revolution) his book is an extremely useful history of all the poetical move- ments of this century and of the very end of the last" and "his cricitism . . . is expert and scholarly."—Yours faithfully,
22 Batchwood View, St. Albans. HERBERT E. PALMER.
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