PALMER (HERBERT, poet) GOOD LONG AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED ('Herbert Palmer') ABOUT MODERN POETRY, to Derek Stanford, castigating Dylan Thomas, by whom he considers Stanford has been 'caught out' ('...I think he is a kind of pea-soup of bad originality, flatness, sham, opportunism, perversity and insensitivity. Not really as a poet at all, in most of his verse. He and Graham and the early Auden are my overpowering horrors...'), commenting on 'the worst howler' in Colin Wilson's book ('...a priceless diamond of silliness, inaccuracy and blindness - beats every passage written about anyone, Saint, God, or Devil, during this New Age of Darkness...'), naming the three poems of his own in the third series of Poems of Today ('...an anthology which seems specially devoted to the Modernist New Voices, far too much space devoted to the Three Blind Mice - Day Lewis, Auden and Spender - but strange to say none at all to Eliot, from whom they sprang...'), complaining that he had fallen foul of both the Georgians and the Modernists, praising Stanford's article on the Angry Young Men ('...I was dumbfounded. A Ghost. I was moved by the article...'), and inviting him and Muriel [Spark] to come to visit ('...Still are left half a bottle of burgundy, half of sherry, half of bordeaux, half of old port, half of white wine and some schnapps - three of them unopened...'), 4 pages, quarto, slightly worn, top half of the last page a little stained, mark from a paper-clip, 22 Batchwood View, St. Albany, Tuesday, no date; together with a subsequent autograph letter signed, refusing to be shaken from his view of Dylan Thomas ('...On the same lines I can prove that Hitler was a servant of the most High God and a great loss to Europe...'), mentioning their visit, and commenting on Irish journals, including the Dublin Magazine and its editor ('...He was an intimate friend of AE but quarrelled with Yeats...'), 2 pages, small quarto, same address, 'Friday'

With the letters are typescripts of both parts of Derek Stanford's article 'Herbert Palmer, A Blake of Modern Methodism' (8 pages, quarto) and part of a printed copy of his article 'Herbert Palmer: Portrait and Appreciation' (6 pages, octavo)

£220