Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Sir,

As I had expected, Mr. Peter Russell chose to justify his remarks rather than recant. I find he is still obsessed with the poem, The Critic, which is only one of the fifty or so in my book, Wind on the Heath.

Of course, we are all entitled to our own opinions, and by a coincidence, Mr. Herbert Palmer’s letter in the same issue is very enlightening on that subject. But is it not a fact that brick-bats hurled at unoffending and helpless victims often have an uncomfortable habit of returning as boomerangs? The gift of courtesy is quite another matter. I am not a professional critic, but I am a severe critic of my own poems and never allow one to appear in print unless I consider it perfect in workmanship. The actual poem—its inspiration, its elusiveness suddenly caught and changed into comprehensible language, its message—cannot be discussed in a short letter. As a friend of mine said recently, “Harsh raucous voices are now shouting down the sweet singers, whose sensitivity is attuned to the deeper vibrations of the universe".

The slovenliness, absence of style, lack of meaning and flagrant flouting (or ignorance) of the elementary rules of grammar and prosody shown in many of the published present-day poems is deplorable.

I am proud to claim a famous eighteenth-century poet and critic as an ancestor, and I feel I share his meticulous insistence on “pure poetry".

Mr. Russell and I would undoubtedly give entirely different definitions of the word “poetry”. Shall we leave it at that?

I remain, etc.,                                    

EDITHA M. KELLY.