Introduction

Thomas Moult McKellan (the last name was dropped in 1936), born in Derbyshire, was a poet, critic, editor and novelist, and one of the Georgian poets. He became well known for his annual anthologies, Best Poems of the Year, published between 1922 and 1943, and comprised of popular verse selections taken from periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. Voices, the short-lived magazine he founded in January 1919 to promote young writers (it folded in the autumn of 1921), featured Sherwood Anderson, A. E. Coppard, Louis Golding, F. V. Branford and Neville Cardus. For ten years, from 1952 to 1962, he was president of the Poetry Society and chairman of the editorial board of Poetry Review.

In 1911, Thomas married Bessie Boltiansky, a Russian Jew from Elizabethgrad, who had moved to England in 1901. Just before the outbreak of World War Two, the family moved to the USA, possibly because of Bessie’s Jewish ancestry, arriving in New York on 4 June 1939. Twenty-two days later, however, on 26 June 1939, Thomas sailed back to England on his own. Bessie and their daughter Joy moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Bessie gave lectures at the university and to local organisations. In 1942, she gave a lecture on KM, in which she claimed a personal friendship with the author. In 1945, all three family members, Thomas, Bessie and Joy, were reunited in Denver, Colorado, although the reunion was short-lived. Thomas returned to England and never saw Bessie again; in 1946, their daughter Joy also moved back to England. Bessie became a US citizen in 1950 and died in America in 1974.

Thomas first came to the attention of JMM and KM when he contributed to Rhythm, and subsequently the Athenaeum. JMM had written to KM about Thomas on 9 October 1919, stating how he ‘lunched with Tom Moult to-day. He’s nice, but extraordinarily childish. His conceit of his own work is quite staggering. I couldn’t get out of asking him and Bessie to dinner on Wednesday.’ In fact, thereafter the Moults seemed to become regular visitors to the Murrys’ Hampstead home in KM’s absence. On another occasion (1 April 1920), JMM wrote: ‘The Moults came round in the evening; your ears ought to have tingled at their admiration of your writing.