Box 1

Scope and Contents "...However, once Keats had declared "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty", seeming to affirm an indissoluble unity, it was inevitable that sooner or later there would appear a poet who, having believed in Keat's assurance, would find that it didn't square with experience, and would be honest enough to say so. Laura Riding was that poet. She let it be known, in the years after her Collected Poems of 1938, that on these grounds she had abandoned poetry as inadequate to her ambitions and her...

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"I write in correction of some mistaken features of the review published in your February 9th issue of two publications of mine of recent time. The review ('An Ambition Beyond Poetry') shows a tempering of private annoyance to a public-minded desire to be just. There is an edginess suggestive of one himself a poet, and an ambitious one. But the general trend is towards conciliatoriness."

Scope and Contents "I have been moved by Miss Ruth Padel's review, in your issue of December 26, 1975 of Robert Graves' Collected Poems 1975 to offer as ballas for the balloon-like still-higher lift that Miss Padel endeavors to give what to calling 'Graves criticism' with her particular formula of super-heated veneration, two related articles of critical principle. The first goes: for criticism, there must be knowledge of the nature of a work to a degree of intimateness with its make-up productive of reliable...

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"I have been moved by Miss Ruth Padel's review, in your issue of December 26, 1975, of Robert Graves' Collected Poems 1975, to offer as ballast for the balloon-like still-higher lift that Miss Padel endeavors to give what is called 'Graves criticism' with her particular formula of super-heated veneration, two related articles of principle."

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"As to manuscript material pertaining to me, my work, in the posession of Miss Susan Morris:"

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"I write to express disagreement with the denunciation of Peter Levi's use of 'of' in a poem of a book of poems of Fr Levi's reviewed in your issue of July 23 by Mr. D. M. Thomas."

Scope and Contents "I have seen a review in your issue of November 19th of Published In Paris by Hugh Ford, of the sub-title 'American and Britain Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris, 1920-1939'. Reviews of this book in its American edition did not fail to note the prescence in the book of a long article on the Seizin Press of Laura Riding and Robert Graves - an odd feature in a book of this title, and an odd use of an article with which I helped Mr. Ford extensively, on the understanding that it was to...