The greater part of this book will appear controversial, but any critic who expects me to argue on what I have written, is begged kindly to excuse me; my garrison is withdrawn without a shot fired and his artillery may blow the fortress to pieces at leisure. These notebook reflections are only offered as being based on the rules which regulate my own work at the moment, for many of which I claim no universal application and have promised no lasting regard. They have been suggested from time to time mostly by particular problems in the writing of my last two volumes of poetry. Hesitating to formulate at present a comprehensive water-tight philosophy of poetry, I have dispensed with a continuous argument, and so the sections either stand independently or are intended to get their force by suggestive neighbourliness rather than by logical catenation. The names of the glass houses in which my name as an authority on poetry lodges at present, are to be found on a back page.

It is a heartbreaking task to reconcile literary and scientific interests in the same book. Literary enthusiasts seem to regard poetry as something miraculous, something which it is almost blasphemous to analyse, witness the outcry against R. L. Stevenson when he merely underlined examples of Shakespeare’s wonderful dexterity in the manipulation of consonants; most scientists on the other hand, being either benevolently contemptuous of poetry, or if interested, insensitive to the emotional quality of words and their associative subtleties, themselves use words as weights and counters rather than as chemicals powerful in combination and have written, if at all, so boorishly about poetry that the breach has been actually widened. If any false scientific assumptions or any bad literary blunders I have made, be held up for popular execration, these may yet act as decoys to the truth which I am anxious to buy even at the price of a snubbing; and where in many cases no trouble has apparently been taken to check over-statements, there is this excuse to offer, that when putting a cat among pigeons it is always advisable to make it as large a cat as possible.

R. G.

Islip,
Oxford.