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: 29 DEC 1917

Recipient: Marsh, E.M. (1872-1953)

Location: 3 Garr. Batt. RWF Kinmel Park

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December 29, 1917

3rd GB RWFus

Kimmel Park

Rhyl, N. Wales

My dear Eddie

I wonder what you've thought of my silence? I am awfully sorry but there has been a good reason. I've been busy arranging wedlock, with Nancy Nicholson, daughter of William Nicholson the painter, and the date fixed is January 23rd, unless my long delayed move for Egypt intervenes; I think the church is St James's, Piccadilly. Will send you a formal invitation. Have been also very busy with Fairies and Fusiliers which has been as favourably reviewed as I hoped, and also for the last two months, nearly, have been in charge of a detachment of 600 fusiliers and 80 officers up here, when the rest of my battalion suddenly moved off to Ireland.

Many thanks for Georgian Poetry. It's a great success I think, and the selections, especially from the new arrivals, admirable. The critics, as usual, have exercised their stupid wits on it and made fools of themselves, especially that ass Shanks in the New Statesman. Still, I don't suppose you mind: sufficient is it to know yourself as the Father of modern English Poetry with fillets and palm leaves and a grateful flock of poetry lovers at your knees. Eddie, I am just beginning to feel that I know what I'm getting at and in this next year of 1918, if I'm spared, I hope to satisfy the expectations you've had of me since I was a sixteen-year-older at Charterhouse, by doing some work of really lasting value.

George Mallory, as my oldest surviving friend who first introduced me to mountains and, through you, to modern poetry, my two greatest interests next to Nancy and my Regiment, is going to be my best man on the 23rd.

Sassons is amazingly well again and now he's passed for France again, quite happy. I have a new poet for you, just discovered, one Wilfred Owen: this is a real find not a sudden lo here! or lo there! which unearths an Edward Eastaway or a Vernede, but the real thing; when we've educated him a trifle more. R.N., S.S. and myself are doing it.

Best love

Robert