George Watson (1) (1927–2013)

I have really enjoyed this book. There are a sufficiency of plums ('They do not contribute: they interrupt' ... 'dogmatism based on the uncertainty of its dogmas') and, what matters much more, the solid cake in between is nutritious. I am glad [the author doesn't] over-rate Dryden. [He] diagnose[s] Lamb exactly right. And [his] severities about Arnold and Leavis are just, besides being much better bred than A's own superciliousness or L's yahoo howls.

I don't think Wordsworth really held the theory of metre [he is blamed] for on p. 116. The sentence about 'superadding' the 'charm' of verse is introduced by the words 'Now supposing for a moment'. i.e. even if metre were merely something added (like jam on bread and butter) why should I not use it? He supposes, positionis causa, a concession he refuses actually to make. His real theory of metre (to my mind the best, perhaps the only valuable, part of the Preface) follows in the next two paragraphs and begins appropriately with the word 'But' ('But various causes...')

On p. 202 where it appears...as if W.P. Ker had been a Christian? Was he? I never heard of, nor remotely suspected, it. Even I, by the way, wrote nearly the whole of the Allegory book while I was still an agnostic.

There is one passage (p. 29) that completely defeated me. What is snobbish about finding Laodamia [one of Wordsworth's poems] 'not wholly free' from artificiality? ...I don't mean that I disagree... (which is what people sometimes mean, when they say they don't understand). I mean that I am baffled...

But it's a good book.
- from a 12 May 1962 letter to the author, in The collected letters of C.S. Lewis, volume III… (mehr)