BENNETT ON T.S. ELIOT IN 1929

BENNETT (ARNOLD, 1867-1931, novelist, dramatist and essayist) AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT ABOUT MUNRO'S 'TWENTIETH CENTURY POETRY', headed 'Books & Persons', signed at the head, heavily revised by Arnold, 2 closely written pages in Arnold's minute script, quarto, London, 6 December 1929

Arnold Bennett attributes the lack of public interest in modern poetry at the time to the fact that it is too revolutionary ('...The British public is not partial to revolutions...'). He finds praise for Munro's preface, but while accepting that Housman and T.S. Eliot are and will continue to be the chief influences on younger poets he thinks that their influence is bad ('...I don't know how many times I have read his celebrated poem "The Waste Land", at the mention of which every younger poem bows the head in awe, and I simply cannot see its beauty...'). He reports a conversation he once had with Eliot about whether the explanatory notes to the poem were not a pulling of the public leg ('...He seriously assured me that they were not. I bowed the head...'). Of the seventy-seven poets represented in the anthology, Bennett identifies Robert Graves as the best living poet and disagrees with Munro's decision to exclude Kipling entirely ('...He may have written a lot of spurious and tendencious eloquence but I shall hold to the opinion that he is one of the fathers of modern poetry...'). He concludes that Twentieth Century Poetry, for which Munro read 600 volumes, 'is the best anthology of the moderns that I have seen' and could advance the cause of poetry.

The anthology was in fact highly successful and sold an average of a thousand copies a week for a while. It was reprinted nine times. (Joy Grant, Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop, 1967).

Arnold Bennett's long-running series of 'Books and Persons' first in The New Age and then in the Evening Standard were enormously influential - Hugh Walpole said that 'Bennett was the only man in my literary lifetime who could really make the fortune of a new book in a night.' The articles were generally considered the best thing of their kind in the journalism of the period. He was paid £300 a month for them which he judged made them the highest paid book articles in the world. The last thing Bennett wrote before his death was an article for the 'Books and Persons' series. (Reginald Pound, Arnold Bennett, 1952).

£850