To the Editor of Blackfriars.

Sir,—I must resolutely disregard the red herrings drawn across my path by the correspondents who give such a sinister reading of my notice of Roy Campbell’s Flowering Rifle. I criticised the book only on literary grounds, and mentioned that works like Auden’s Spain and Spender’s Vienna were also poor art because of their excessive political preoccupations; and because I reject inferior Leftist art along with Rightist work, I apparently suggest that the Rightist writer is Leftist. A re

markable piece of reasoning to come from a great theological college.

It is precisely on literary grounds that the critics neglect to base their criticism. The book is lyrical invective at best, and in trying to make an epic of it, the poet has executed a mechanical exercise, which oftenest sounds like a brass band at its brassiest repeating ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ ad nauseam. The language of the less prosy parts is worn-out ‘poetical’ currency like ‘golden,’ ‘scarlet,’ ‘silver,’ ‘storm-red,’ while often the faded literary metaphors of ‘rhyme,’ etc., are used to jolt the poem into life. The author himself says the poem is not meant to emulate people like Claudel, and we can easily agree when we read such bathos as :

—the capitals being used to galvanise the cliche into some shadow of life. But above all, the epic lacks the structure of an epic, and is largely a broken record of literary quarrels.