[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] Sin,—It was amusing to
read Mr. W.J. Turner's protest against your criticism of The afford Book of Modern Verse. Of course, one realises that a two-column opening review in your Christ- mas Number, by such a distinguished critic as Mr. John Hayward, is insufficient attention to pay to an anthology in which Mr. Turner shares pride of place with Miss Edith Sitwell. But I confess I was surprised at the line of Mr. Turner's attack. He seems to have been particularly annoyed by your reviewer's suggestion that the anthology should more properly have been called Mr. Yeats's Book of Modern Terse. Yet only a short while ago Mr. Turner himself was waxing eloquent, in another periodical, on the subject of anthologists who presume to claim that their selections bear sonic relation to an accepted standard of merit. Mr. Turner pooh-poohed the existence of any such standard and insisted that anthologies merely reflect the personal taste of their compilers. Why then does he object to the suggestion that the Oxford Book really only reflects Mr. Yeats's peculiar predilections ? The explanation, it seems, is that whereas Mr. Yeats admires Mr. Turner's verse, neither of the antholo- gists whose selections Mr. Turner pronounced as purely per- sonal thought his work worth including. Moreover, whether or not an admiration for Mr. Turner be accepted as the criterion of an anthology's authoritativeness, is Mr. Turner himself quite the person from whom the observation should have come ?—Yours faithfully,
Previous page
