[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Whether or not poetry is "good" is a difficult decision to make, and not one that I should like to have thrust upon me, since art is such a thoroughly subjective subject. If you happened to be asked to compare, for example, John Keats and Sylvia Plath it might prove difficult enough to decide which of their very different styles made for better poetry and there'd be a lot of disagreement whichever you backed. To choose between accomplished and famous poets is to face the choice of Paris.

If, however, on the one hand we have a man famous for being a brilliant poet, such as W.B. Yeats, and on the other we have a man associated in the popular mind (if the term isn't overly oxymoronic) with real-ale bibbing Dungeons and Dragons players (I can be counted in both groups, feeling neither pride nor shame in the fact although both are considered laughable in a "real" world dominated by boy-bands, McDonald's and soap operas) and in the academic world for his scholarship, then one may claim that the poetry of the one is better than that of the other with relative impunity, provided that one has sufficient store of comic verse by one's literary victim from which to draw examples of his "serious" work (I notice that no poetry by Yeats was offered for comparison: I'm given to wonder whether the author had actually read any).

The sort of person who would put forward such an argument, "proving" his great erudition and literary discernment in the most crassly facile manner possible, is also the sort of person I should expect to want to denigrate a highly-cultivated, polyglot Oxford professor, who could support his own rather eccentric views with reference to a gigantic body of knowledge in at least eight languages, one of whose works is also an acknowledged twentieth-century classic. Tolkien's shoes are too big for such a one not to try and shrink them, and how better to do so than to call a famous philologist a bad poet? I might as well call Pepys a bad novelist, or Shakespeare a bad historian.
I doubt whether anyone would have dared to publish such egregious drivel if Tolkien were alive, although the man himself (if he bothered to reply at all) would probably have said in his usual self-deprecating and ironic style that he never claimed to be a great poet, only a humble student of the art fortunate enough to have achieved the publication of some of his work. Perhaps he would even assume satirically that the critic possessed more experience of polishing verse for publication than his poor self.
This is not to say that the argument presented in the article is invalid, only that the mode of presentation is clumsy and academically unsound: the sort of thing that a professor will tear to shreds in a couple of sentences before saying "I agree with your conclusion", as those graduates among us will no doubt remember. As for the other intentions of the piece, I think the Barrow Wight's letter covers it. The poor recipient of that letter, with his petty-minded desire to attack anything greater than himself (he's more material for this than most people) is clearly well suited to writing short reviews of reprinted books, which are ignored unless he courts attention by hurling insults at household names. Books worth reading will have been reviewed properly by several people with opinions that matter by the time the second edition emerges, let alone by the time they've been in print for nearly fifty years.

I say pity the popinjay and put him out of memory: it's been long enough, considering the dates of these posts.

[ February 19, 2003: Message edited by: Squatter of Amon Rudh ]