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“... of the usual morose adolescent parables and things like that. The first issue had a foreword by John Wain, the novelist, who had just appeared then and was very famous. I wrote to him to ask if there was some message he could send to youthful aspirants and he did. It was rather good, about half a page, which ended: ‘and, if all this fails, back to ...”

“... from babyhood through convent to civil rights marches. The unfamiliar words are few (wheen, wain, sheoghe – the last, ‘changeling’, beautifully applied to the narrator’s father on his release from a long jail sentence), so that by the end the phonetic oddities are scarcely noticeable. This might not have pleased MacDiarmid, who would have wanted ...”

“... letter he says that silent reading lacks an ‘emotional charge’, and this explains ‘Amis and Wain and the rest’. Hughes feels alienated from and hostile to the Movement poets: his exulting whap beats against their rational and ironic forms which are unable to address the original chaos he delights in. In the same way he tells Plath that Robert Graves ...”