T.E. Lawrence | autograph letter signed, to James Louis Garvin, 1934

T.E. Lawrence

Autograph letter signed ("TE Shaw" and "TES"), to James Louis Garvin, editor of The Observer,

writing with lively outrage having "been stung to horror by an article in the Observer today" on the subject of contemporary poetry, in which the author ("...some hoary old toad immured deep in a rotting tree...") confessed ignorance of Cecil Day Lewis, and conjecturing that the writer, Basil de Selincourt, was a cricket correspondent on secondment ("...Put him back into flannels, please QUICK..."), 4 pages, quarto, 13 Birmingham Street, Southampton, 15 July 1934, minor dust staining

"...Ignorance about the vasty past is inevitable, excusable, praiseworthy almost: but to make a fool of oneself about the poets of the yesterday through which one has supposed 'lived' -- Pshaw and Tush to him. Dead for a ducat..."

T.E. LAWRENCE ON THE POETRY OF THE THIRTIES. Basil de Selincourt was a respected literary journalist and author of several books on nineteenth-century poets. His ignorance of Cecil Day-Lewis's work is surprising, given that by 1934 the young poet had a high profile in literary circles as one of the young generation of poets - satirised as the MacSpaunday group - who combined experimentalism with left-wing activism. 

PROVENANCE:

Roy Davids; his sale, Part II, Bonhams, March 29, 2011, lot 147