LETTERS Uncooked poems
Sir: Elizabeth Jennings, admirable poet, asks why so many poets 'who showed quite extraordinary promise' when young have `yet seldom published a single book of poems' later (Books, 17 August).
An historian who is also a poet, observ- ing the contemporary scene, can tell her that this is in part due to the attitude of the literary journals, editors and media-men, in discouraging any verse that is not in the contemporary formless idiom. Miss Jen- nings puts her fingers on it when she refers to this stuff with its arbitrary line-endings and no cadence'.
Kingsley Amis summed it up: it is 'not verse in any sense of the word that makes sense'. Myself, I sometimes find that is the material for poetry, but not the thing itself: It is simply raw meat uncooked, undigested and indigestible. As Miss Jennings sug- gests, it is not even vers libre.
I am all in favour of vers libre when appropriate to the subject, but should be more impressed if these writers, so much encouraged by the media, ever showed that they were capable also of writing in regular form and rhyme, with cadence and scansion.
A. L. Rowse Trenarren House, St Austell, Cornwall
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