Letter of the Week

Every week, on this page, we will show a different letter from a selection of letters from Paul O'Prey's books on Robert Graves correspondence In Broken Images and Between Moon and Moon.

Date: 13 JUL 1943

Recipient: Hodge, Alan (1915-1979)

Location: Galmpton, Devon

* * *

13 July 1943

Dear Alan:

Thanks for long letter. I disagree with the critics about those historical chapters. They are short, but necessary to the argument, and it would have been awful to have to deal with E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and other contemporary giants and giantesses!

. . . .

I have been worried by thinking about poetry and finding that all the poems that one thinks of as most poetic in the romantic style are all intricately concerned with primitive moon-worship. This sounds crazy, and I fear for my sanity; but it is so. The old English ballads like Kemp Owyne, the Lykewake Dirge, are all composed with a sort of neurosis—compulsion for arranging things in 3s (although the stanza is a four line one) which is the chief characteristic of the Moon Goddess — Triple Goddess - ritual; and the 17th-century Loving Mad Tom poem, which is generally regarded as the most 'purely poetic' of all anonymous English ' compositions is a perfect compendium of Ashtaroth—Cybele— Hecate worship — not a single element omitted. Of course, Apollo originally pinched Parnassus and Pegasus from the Moon Goddess. And the Muse, whom poets habitually address, was the Moon originally in her Mouse aspect. The history of English poetry has been the modifying of the original moon-poetry, which is stressed, with sun-poetry (intellectual, Apollo poetry) which is measured in regular beats and metres. Let me ramble on for a bit more: I find that Shakespeare, almost habitually, though using a five foot line only uses three interest-centres' or operative words in any line; the rest is syntax or words of no particular accentuation — Chaucer seems to use four as habitually. Chaucer was very much an Apollonian: a very good poet too.

This may lead me anywhere and I am so anxious not to get dogmatic or psychological. But I find myself making the Bards into Moon-men and the minstrels into Sun-men.

Help!

Love

Robert

I have just heard from Cape that TROYS has sold 2000 out of 2800 copies, and wants to know by how much it should be cut down to form a concise edition, there being no paper for more copies of the full edition.