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: 06 NOV 1941

Recipient: Lewis, Alun (1915-1944)

Location: Galmpton, Devon

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6 November 1941

Dear Alun Lewis:

Thank you for writing. If you care to send me your book when it comes out I'll send you my new poems which are being published soon by Hogarth Press along with some by Norman Cameron and Alan Hodge. I am sorry about the mistake: that is the sort of thing that happens when Spenders and people take liberties with one's work.

About the 'isolation' of the poet. There was the Goethe—Byron, etc., Romantic isolation, taken into aesthetic delicacy by the late Victorians: of course there was a reaction to that, which became more and more violent until the poets became guilty of having any sensibilities at all and felt that they must learn from the simple pick and shovel man. That was silly. I hope that when you say you know where you stand in politics that does not mean that. To feel cosmic loneliness I think means merely that one is short of friends who also think cosmically. Since you are a poet I assume that you use the word 'cosmically' literally, the cosmos being the poetic ordering of mere mass; my conviction is that a poet who takes his function seriously and continuously rejects from his life and works everything disorderly finds the friends he needs. About Yeats — You decently admit your immaturity (to be precious is to be ashamed of immaturity, so unless you have included very early work in your book I don't expect to find it precious) and please don't think me impelled by any unworthy motive when I suggest that to admire Yeats as strongly as you do may be a sign of immaturity. Test him again, by all the maturest tests you know, and see whether his glamour is really the reflection of poetic fire and not a piece of post-druidic magic, cast by a little man, over young minds.

To turn to a happier subject. You are very lucky in the SWB. I was once attached, with my command of 200 RW Fusiliers, to an SWB* battalion near Rhyl and have always thought kindly of . them; and I knew their regular battalion in the 1st Division in 1915.

Let the élite of letters travel 'First'. They will be with the Generals and Black Market Bosses and why not? (Did you ever ride on a locomotive? I did once: it was grand!)

Good luck

Robert Graves

If you are ever down this way . . .

* 'The 24th' have some very nice unusual battle honours — so far as I remember Rorke's Drift, Kian-Chow, and the Maori War of 1860 or so — the Maoris had a charming respect for them as enemy—-friends. See also my Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth for their part in the American War of Independence.