Enclosure – Rough draft of letter to Louis MacNeice from RG
Page from Robert Graves diary manuscript. The diary includes 1,546 pages with 117 enclosures: letters, clippings, photographs post cards, notes, games.
- In Collection:
- 1 page : 12 x 19.5 cm or smaller
- The diary is written on quarto sheets, folded horizontally to form octavo booklets, one recto page devoted to each day.
- Robert Graves Diary, 1935-1939
- Accession Number: 1969-003, Item: Gr-1-1402
- Special Collection finding aid: https://uvic2.coppul.archivematica.org/robert-graves-collection
- Robert Graves Diary project URL: http://graves.uvic.ca/diary_1938-12-20_enc.html
- July 19, 2002
- Enclosure – Rough draft of letter to Louis MacNeice from RG Dear Mr. MacNeice, Your review in the Listener : parts of it coherent, parts incoherent. I feel that their professed concern with exclusively 'poetic meaning' is, on analysis, a self-deception. Either you feel it is so, or else you have analyzed it as so: but make up your mind. If analysis, the process should be demonstrated; if mere feeling, then do some thinking to test it. What meaning would you have for a poem but poetic meaning? Political? Literary? Economic? What other meaning would you profess as a poet even if unable to keep your poems as clean (in the agricultural sense) as you would wish? Do you trust Science as supplying meaning to a poem where poetic meaning is absent (you rate me for mistrusting science)? Yes, I have a horror of Otherness: as opposed to Intrinsicality. As a poet you too should have this horror: then your poems might be frightened into some centrality. The schizophreniac schizophrenic imagines that he is torn into two or more selves: but to see the present drawing away as a separate world from the temporarily co-existent past is not schizophrenia but critical observation. Your second sentence does not make sense: a carelessness of proof correcting, I think. I do not write like a metaphysician; and are not metaphysics impure? The history of metaphysicians is very impure. The notion of poems as parthenogenetic is at least preferable to that of poems born in sodomy, as is the case of some of your contemporaries' work; but I do not see that the sexual metaphor holds. Nor did I ever advocate 'purity' of poetry in the sense you suggest: I imagine that this is an invention designed to excuse the pleasantly disordered 'very-human' [figure – handwritten cross] life that you live yourself. It is true that poetry seems to me no longer poetry in a present real sense that is mere descriptive or evocative of physical affect; but all words have a physical history which cannot be denied. The choice is not between poems written in vacus and poems written in fucus , but between poems written in relation that carry their own world with them with faith in poetry and poems that are patched out of old worlds. written with faith or faithfulness in other things. What surprises me about The view of Laura Riding's poems, which you seem to share with Julian Symonds and one or two others that it is the Times Lit. Supp. and W.H. Auden as rarefied in the and metaphysical sense is a that you do not seem to have read them is surprising one to me. as blind as ungrateful. You might be Are you sure that It is almost as if you do not meant someone else — 'Æ' Russell or someone Santayanaor the like — for nothing rarified metaphysical language is the avoidance of meaning by constan pulling piling the weight of responsibility for significance on the broad shoulders etc etc
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