The predominance of Yeats in this volume deserves some explanation. In 1943 the English Club was visited by Vernon Watkins, then stationed at an Air Force camp nearby; impassioned and imperative, he swamped us with Yeats until, despite the fact that he had not nearly come to the end of his typescript, the chairman had forcibly to apply the closure. As a final gesture Vernon distributed the volumes he had been quoting from among those of us who were nearest to him, and disappeared, exalted, into the black-out. I had been tremendously impressed by the evening and in the following weeks made it my business to collect his books up again – many of them were limited Cuala Press editions, and later Yeats was scarce at that time – and take them to him at Bradwell, where he was staying with some people called Blackburn who kept a goat. This time Vernon read me Lorca.

As a result I spent the next three years trying to write like Yeats, not because I liked his personality or understood his ideas but out of infatuation with his music (to use the word I think Vernon used). In fairness to myself it must be admitted that it is a particularly potent music, pervasive as garlic, and has ruined many a better talent. Others found it boring. I remember Bruce Montgomery snapping, as I droned for the third or fourth time that evening When such as I cast off remorse, So great a sweetness flows into the breast …, ‘It’s not his job to cast off remorse, but to earn forgiveness.’ But then Bruce had known Charles Williams. Every night after supper before opening my large dark green manuscript book I used to limber up by turning the pages of the 1933 plum-coloured Macmillan edition, which stopped at ‘Words for Music Perhaps’, and which meant in fact that I never absorbed the harsher last poems. This may be discernible in what I wrote.

When reaction came, it was undramatic, complete and permanent. In early 1946 I had some new digs in which the bedroom faced east, so that the sun woke me inconveniently early. I used to read. One book I had at my bedside was the little blue Chosen Poems of Thomas Hardy: Hardy I knew as a novelist, but as regards his verse I shared Lytton Strachey’s verdict that ‘the gloom is not even relieved by a little elegance of diction’. This opinion did not last long; if I were asked to date its disappearance, I should guess it was the morning I first read ‘Thoughts of Phena At News of Her Death’. Many years later, Vernon surprised me by saying that Dylan Thomas had admired Hardy above all poets of this century. ‘He thought Yeats was the greatest by miles’, he said. ‘But Hardy was his favourite.’

iii

‘F/Sgt. Watkins, V’ was the book’s kindest and almost only critic. Writing from the Sergeants’ Mess, he was generously encouraging (did I recall his Yeats anecdote: ‘Always I encourage, always’?), reserving for only one or two pieces his sharpest term of condemnation, ‘not a final statement’. ‘Yesterday’, he added, ‘I destroyed about two thousand poems that mean nothing to me now.’ Despite this hint, although with considerable hesitation, the book is now republished, as there seems to be still some demand for it. I have corrected two misprints and one solecism. As a coda I have added a poem, written a year or so later, which, though not noticeably better than the rest, shows the Celtic fever abated and the patient sleeping soundly.