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Sir,

I trust you will allow me to comment briefly on Mr. William Kean Seymour’s notice of my introduction to Dr. Sitwell’s Facade, and Other Poems. He concentrates entirely on some preliminary remarks of mine about the Victorian poets. Now, I am not quite so stupid as to suggest that Tennyson, Browning, etc., wrote nothing of value and if I were writing at length about them, I should seek to distinguish their many virtues from their vices or weaknesses. But what I am saying in my Introduction is something different—that after Keats and Shelley there is a confused period (brought to its head perhaps by Beddoes and Alexander Smith) in which the potentialities of our great Romantic Movement are grasped at but finally let slip. The following poets, from Tennyson to (say) de la Mare, write many charming or even powerful poems, which our language will not easily let die; but they have ceased to grapple with the innermost struggle of man, the deepest levels of the human condition.

This is what I call the betrayal of Romanticism; and I fail to see how anyone who has truly apprehended the great struggle and resolution of poetic and human elements in our poets from Blake and Coleridge to Shelley and Keats, could fail to grasp what is meant by my generalisations. One has again only to glance at the French development from Baudelaire into Rimbaud, Verhaeren, Apollinaire, Tzara and Eluard, to realise that these poets are carrying on with that fundamental struggle of integration in a way qualitatively different from anything of the post-1850 poets in Britain—until we come to Yeats and Dr. Sitwell.

Hence what seems a paradox to Mr. Seymour, that Dr. Sitwell’s understanding of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, is one aspect of her rediscovery of the true English tradition; for those poets carry on integrally and richly from the bases of Blake, Coleridge, and the others. I do not speak of direct influences, though Baudelaire drew importantly on English romanticism, mainly through Poe (and various lesser writers), but of a fullness and directness of relation to the total historical process, the vast convulsion of human change which began in European society during the eighteenth century, centred at first in England and finding its first basic expression through Thomson, Savage, Young, Smart and Macpherson.

My call for a revaluation of the Victorians, for an understanding of their “betrayal” of the creative struggle of Romanticism (which passes into Symbolism), was not then meant as a simple rejection. Rather it was meant as the essential first step to the rediscovery of something vital in our national tradition which was obscured and killed-off by the post-1850 development—something of which Dickens was the last great exponent. After having made the crucial step of breaking from the falsification, one can then afford to return to the Tennysons, etc. and appreciate what is good in their work.

I am sorry that Mr. Seymour dealt only with my preliminaries, which I am aware are easily misunderstood; for it was in the concrete application of those comments to Dr. Sitwell’s poetry and its great contribution that my point could have been grasped. I think that in a magazine such as The Poetry Review a discussion of my remarks on what Dr. Sitwell has achieved in rhythm and in image would be more relevant than the citation of parodies, even if they were better than that given.

I remain, etc.,                           

JACK LINDSAY.