Lot 74D email save

Hayward (John, literary scholar, 1905-65)

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4pp., 8vo, Cheyne Walk, 23rd August - 24th October 1957, discussing Harmsworth's poem Birth of Aphrodite and T.S. Eliot's response to it, "I'm sorry to say that my opinion, for what it is worth, of your BIRTH OF APHRODITE is unfavourable. It may be that you have been sustained all this time by Eliot's good opinion - an opinion which I would find completely baffling if I didn't know from experience how much easier it is to push a MS back to the author with a word of praise & a recommendation to try it on old so & so! Your poem seems to me to be merely a literary exercise in the rhetorical mode on a highly romantic theme, but written in an outworn poetical convention and diction which lapses at times into Tennysonian pastiche", and a further reply discussing Eliot's opinion, "I must assure you that I had no intention (as I have no right) to impute to Eliot a lack of integrity. Having known his views on poetry throughout a close association of more than thirty years and bearing in mind the kind of poetry - his own and that of other poets - he was publishing a quarter of a century ago, I was at a loss to understand how he could have 'thought well' of your poem", folds(3)

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