Autograph letter signed : Wantage, to Siegfried Sassoon, 1952 April 19.

Thanking him for his signed copy of "Emblems of Experience;" saying "It is so nice to find you, here in a later volume, an even finer poet than in those early volumes which I possess. I have now read through your poems twice, out loud to myself, which is the best test. The words roll out full of sound & depth like they do in my beloved Tennyson. And the melancholy in every poem of yours, I welcome so very warmly. It is like the melancholy of Hood, that constant sense of Eternity;" saying that the poems he likes best are his "Prayer to Time", "Old Fashioned Weather", A Fallodon Memory" and "Cleaning the Candelabrum" but adding that the one he likes "best of all is "The Messenger". I understand it particularly because at the moment my mother is dying in a Nursing Home in Bath with her faculties gradually going & clinging as hard as she can to the threads of reason & memory left to her. I thank you very deeply for these poems. They are an experience rare today. I do think poetry is looking up (despite the affronts of know-all reviewers who write anonymous attacks on all they understand & only praise the obscure while missing the good in the clear);" expressing his hope that he can come to see him in Heytsbury and they might tour Upton Lovell & call on Sidney Mavor ('Jenny' Mavor, Wilde's & Alfred Taylor's friend), aged 83, if he is still alive. I don't blame you a bit for publishing your poems privately & beautifully. That is just what you ought to do. I hope eventually all good poets will. But one needs the cash to do it."