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: 26 FEB 1951

Recipient: Reeves, James (1909-1978)

Location: Canellun

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To James Reeves

26 February 1951

Dearest James:

I read Mulcaster Marleet in a favourable moment, convalescent from flu, still in a warm bed with plenty of orange juice around. It's hard to criticize because I don't know the problems of school plays, and because I knew the originals both of the Bacon play and of the Man on London Bridge; also because in restoring the original text of The Nazarene Gospel I have to be frightfully careful to keep to pure Elizabethan English and your, perhaps necessary, compromise between Tudor and neo-Tudor often jerks at my conscience. But they seem to be actable and certainly are pleasant and thank you very much.

We have all had flu now and feel awful, and though the sun is hot the wind is cold and treacherous.

I have got off the page proofs of my Poems and Satires but they'll not be out for another couple of months I think; so if you like to use the poem that naughty Martin has been sitting on so long, the one about the New Queen, do. I forget (I forget everything) if I told you that I thought Quarto was up to expectations; a very much higher technical standard these days than when we were young — especially than when I was young.

So glad you appreciate my remarks on Keats. As for yours — I think one gets cross with Keats because he might have been so much better, with a little less Gothic vulgarity and Cockney ambition and Della Cruscan flabbiness. But he was so much better than any of his contemporaries except Coleridge, and I don't think you're fair about the 'unravished bride of quietness' — though it's not a very good phrase I admit — he means that the urn was put under the earth to be the bride of quietness, and even the mattocks of the peasants who discovered it haven't broken the damned thing, and it has actually survived the voyage and the customs. 'Two faousand years old, coo!' Cockney Keats breathed reverently. 'Bride of quietness, eh? Werry good phrase, Severn, old cock!'

Love from all

Robert