T. E. Lawrence Correspondence – Page 618

are clean and legible. However they yet have to be read no inattentive slow!y, almost word for word. Type has grown so instructive paragraph, at once. That is all right, for things currently written like the poems of S.S.; but these chiselled in verses of S.S. deserve to be read almost as minutely as they were made. What an iconic stillness there is about him. America, man! He has progressed from flesh to .... (a for the Old Counter Attack) to bronze. As for the Old Huntsman, it is difficult for me often to trace the connection between that early man and S.S. now. At Heytesbury he showed me the first published poems, the critic verses; they seemed an age away. One of the good things about S.S. is that he changes freely and completely. What a careless rag-bag of a letter. All it need have been was a note on the Gooden title piece. As I have told you, I think it plainly yet precisely lovely. The price of the book worries me not. Two guineas is so small, as yet, even brought myself to order a copy. S.S. is one of the few poets that keep step with their generation and I would have him generally read. Tim and Yeats and Lew Lewis -- Doris, it would not matter if Moses and Numbers were cost pounds and pounds. Can you contemplate a plain edition afterwards, which I can send to my friends? Enough of S.S. I feel always like an intruder in his company. I would like him to do just what he liked. A(townyin. is nearly over it; so nearly that the depression is advancing. In a few weeks he will be mono-famous again, and he is worrying because he cannot inspire his father's confidence (among the patients, I mean) and so when the old man dies the practice will go smash; and then what of the children? Not to mention himself and Dora? I am beginning to praise his poems now, to check his tendency to lose heart over them. I wish you could send him some medical (or surgical) hope. Poor B.A. is neither east nor west, and is not rigged for the open sea. An awful letter -- but I have enjoyed the proof title for months, and kept on saying that I must write to you. Hence this overdo... ... -- too late Yours T B S.