Letter from Walter de la Mare, "The Old Park", to Siegfried Sassoon, 1951 June 30 : autograph manuscript signed with initials.

Praising Sassoon's poetry and commenting on imagination and the nature of poetry; apologizing for not commenting on his poems much sooner but explaining he was ill but that he will be returning to T[aplow] the next day; adding "If only I could be expecting you the following afternoon I'd try to listen; & when not so doing, to refrain from talking too much & too fast...May[be] they'll have to provide me with a sound-proof hearse etc, if that's to come about;" telling him which poems he especially liked including "The Present Writer, Befriending Star, A Dream, Associates [minus 'an ageing mind' Minds don't], Wren & Man, A Proprietor, Cleaning the Candelabrum [Here I watched you at it, & did really listen]. A Falloden Memory : - ['Absorbed in some Wordsworthian slow self-communing' - he told me himself that could he have chosen just such a life would have been his heart's desire. Yes & the poems themselves are {illegible} of such self-communing; & T.H. isn't very far away. Then, Acceptance, Early March [specially those last six lines], Solitudes at Sixty. There's nothing new in the notion that the secret & mystery of poetry is the communion (a) between the inward self of the writer, & (b) the communion between (a) & the inward self of the reader or sharer. The imagination & the heart alone can find the inward language for this. Clumsily & inadequately put, but you'll know what I mean. And you'll now how blessed an experience sharing these poems has been. Prince of them all, I think - & I can see royal preening in joy & astonishment on it in some Elizabethan Miscellany in the old days of my anthologizing - in "A Prayer to Time" - one of the very best things you've ever done;" adding that he will be back at Taplow the next day and saying how ill his son Richard continues to be; concluding, "My own minor trouble is increasing stupidity - I feel mouldier than a mouldwarp, & am longing to be a little busier than is possible here. And so much of what is needed [e.g. regular 3-days a week ink-help is available only there]. But no more of this : it's creeping into Z-flat minor!" adding, in a postscript, "After it's being shut up in a cupboard for some years, wax & all, I set to cleaning my candelabrum by boiling it & its parts in an enamelled bowl. It took me far longer afterwards to de-fat & de-verdigris the bowl!"