Scannell (Vernon, poet and author, 1922-2007)

Scannell (Vernon, poet and author, 1922-2007) Large archive of letters and articles sent to Alan Benson,

Autograph Letters signed, "I've just finished my review of Chitty's Newbolt biography for the 'Yorkshire Post'. It's an extraordinary tale", 1997; "The talk about Bob Dylan being as 'relevant' as Keats or Shakespeare has been going on for a long time. Christopher Ricks, in his critical book The Force of Poetry, mounts an ingenious but to me entirely unconvincing defence of Dylan lyrics as poetry. I think it is all part of the post-modern deconstructionist rubbish that tries to maintain that there is no quantifiable qualitative difference between one 'text' & another, between, for example, a Shakespeare sonnet and puncture-repair instructions", 1998 etc.; autograph manuscript & typescript poems (many typescript drafts with autograph corrections), including: Changing Roles, Sheltered Life, The Long Honeymoon, Small Expectations, Night Visitor, Aubade, Poet Tree, On the Run, Lost Properties, Gunpowder Plot, A Bereavement (unpublished); Rough Boys, A Binyon Opinion, Silence, Famous Guest, Growing Pains, A New Pair of Shoes, The Patriotic Musicologist Thinks, Old Wounds, A Modern Pastoral, The Lamb, In a Cold Climate, Snow Joke, Night on the Oncology Ward autograph manuscript & typescript short stories: Feminine Endings, 1998; Lady Lazarus, n.d. etc.; autograph manuscript reviews, obituaries & other material, including: The Testament of Spencer/The Patient by George Macbeth; Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years; Article on Laurie Lee for "The Guardian", 1998; Authors Take Sides on the Falklands, "I am entirely opposed to our Government's response to the Argentine annexation of the Falklands..." BBC Radio 3 A Closer Look: Andrew Marvell, typescript, n.d. etc.; books, mostly modern first editions, including: The Fight, 1953; The Face of the Enemy, 1961; The Dividing Night, 1962; The Big Time, 1965; Ring of Truth, 1983; States of Undress, The Starwheel Press, 1984; Extra Time, Charingworth, The Evergreen Press, 2003 etc.; manuscripts and typescripts, many poems in both autograph manuscript drafts and final typescripts, many signed, ephemera, photographs (numerous portraits of Scannell taken in May 1998 by Alan Benson), audio tapes (talks, poetry readings etc.), newspaper cuttings etc., 1997-2005(qty)

***A detailed insight into Scannell's work. "... what I believe is the true nature of poetry. It is not to talk about one's ideas of what the world should be like - i.e. politics - but to convey those ideas through physical things." - Vernon Scannell. Photocopy of letter to Lucy Edge. Vernon Scannell on Laurie Lee. "Simon Courtauld in an article in the current Spectator on the poet and author Laurie Lee claims, with some justification, that Lee in his third autobiographical prose book, A Moment of War (1991), describes adventures during the Spanish Civil War that he could not have experienced and events at which he could not have been present. It is perhaps a pity that his lie has been uncovered, but in the end the best of the poems in The Bloom of Candles (1947) and My Many Coated Man (1955) and the rhapsodic account of a prelapsarian rural existence in Cider With Rosie will survive unblemished." - Vernon Scannell. Article for The Guardian, 1998. "Dennis Enright wrote yesterday & said he thought I should be Poet Laureate. That's Ivy, Dennis & my very well read friend John Coggrave who have voted for me." Alan Benson is a longtime admirer of Vernon Scannell's work. In the 1980s Benson made contact with Scannell and a friendship was struck that endured until Scannell's death in 2007. In the 1990s, after Scannell complained of having to type his poems on a tired and rickety typewriter, Alan Benson offered himself as his amanuensis. Scannell would send manuscript drafts of his poems and reviews to Benson who would type them up on a word processor and return them by post. First drafts, worksheets, articles from broadsheets and countless letters, many with Scannell's views on literature and politics flooded in. This collection is the fruit of that collaboration. .