PROSE OR POETRY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 83, 24 January 1941, Page 4

PROSE OR POETRY

Sir,-If it did nothing else my Listener review of Anton Vogt’s collection of verse "Anti All That" provoked Llewellyn Etherington of Auckland to a heartfelt bah. I am not going to enter into a long argument with Mr. Etherington (although the subject is well worth arguing) for the simple reason that first, he has obviously not read " Anti All That," and second, he knows little or nothing of the development of modern verse. I would only suggest to Mr. Etherington that he find out something about it, and I would recommend two books-Edmund Wilson’s " Axel’s Castle" and Elizabeth Drew’s "New Directions in Modern Verse." Then he should take a course of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Archibald MacLeish, Stephen Vincent Benet, Carl Sandburg, and a few others. Especially would I recommend E. E. Cummings, because Cummings, I feel sure, would give Mr. Etherington an attack of apoplexy. For not only does Cummings refuse to split up his verse into regular lines and make them jingle (heinous offence) but he also forgets capital letters at the beginning of his lines, and is apt to dash off provocative little statements like the following: Picasso you give us Things which bulge. All this has little to do with "Anti All That," most of which I still claim is strong and indivi-dualistic-and occasionally "complex." But Mr. Etherington had better read it before he says any more.-J.G.M. (Wellington).