Jon Silkin

May I make one reservation with respect to Vikram Seth’s lucid and interesting essay on his poetry (LRB, 29 September), with its persuasive apologia for regular form and rhyme? In his useful discussion of the first four lines of Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ he rightly says that the fourth version he quotes is ‘less dense, less compressed than the third draft’ and concludes: ‘ “Load...