Looking at the collection today, it seems amazing that anyone should have offered to publish it without a cheque in advance and a certain amount of bullying. This, however, was not how I saw it at the time. As February turned to March, and March to April, my anticipation of the promised six copies curdled through exasperation to fury and finally to indifference; my astonishment to find now, on looking up the records, that in fact they arrived almost exactly nine months after despatch of typescript (on 31st July 1945) shows how completely I subsequently came to believe my own fantasy of eighteen months or even two years. I inspected them sulkily.

It may not have been the best introduction to publication: my Oxford friend, Bruce Montgomery, was writing Edmund Crispin novels for Gollancz, while Routledge had taken up Keyes and Heath-Stubbs. Still, I was on the same list as Dylan Thomas, Roy Fuller, Nicholas Moore and other luminaries, and the book was nicely enough produced, with hardly any misprints; above all, it was indubitably there, an ambition tangibly satisfied. Yet was it? Then, as now, I could never contemplate it without a twinge, faint or powerful, of shame compounded with disappointment. Some of this was caused by the contents but not all: I felt in some ways cheated. I can’t exactly say how. It was a pity they had ever mentioned February.

ii

Looking back, I find in the poems not one abandoned self but several – the ex-schoolboy, for whom Auden was the only alternative to ‘old-fashioned’ poetry; the undergraduate, whose work a friend affably characterized as ‘Dylan Thomas, but you’ve a sentimentality that’s all your own’; and the immediately post-Oxford self, isolated in Shropshire with a complete Yeats stolen from the local girls’ school. This search for a style was merely one aspect of a general immaturity. It might be pleaded that the war years were a bad time to start writing poetry, but in fact the principal poets of the day – Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Betjeman – were all speaking out loud and clear, and there was no reason to become entangled in the undergrowth of Poetry Quarterly and Poetry London except by a failure of judgment. Nor were my contemporaries similarly afflicted. I remember looking through an issue of The Cherwell, one day in Blackwell’s, and coming across John Heath-Stubbs’s ‘Leporello’: I was profoundly bewildered. I had never heard of Leporello, and what sort of poetry was this – who was he copying? And his friend Sidney Keyes was no more comforting: he could talk to history as some people talk to porters, and the mention of names like Schiller and Rilke and Gilles de Retz made me wish I were reading something more demanding than English Language and Literature. He had most remarkable brown and piercing eyes: I met him one day in Turl Street, when there was snow on the ground, and he was wearing a Russian-style fur hat. He stopped, so I suppose we must have known each other to talk to – that is, if we had had anything to say. As far as I remember, we hadn’t.