Introduction (1935) to Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley (1936)

Abstract

Some months ago, when recovering in bed from a long illness, I read many anthologies, skipping every name known to me, discovering poetry written since I read everybody, being young. It was perhaps my illness that made me hard to please, for almost all seemed clay-cold, clay-heavy; I thought at my worst moments, ‘I have read too much abstract philosophy; I can no longer understand the poetry of other men.’ Then, in an anthology edited by Sir John Squire, I found poems signed Dorothy Wellesley.¹ Though she is well known among the younger poets and critics, I had never heard of her. My eyes filled with tears. I read in excitement that was the more delightful because it showed I had not lost my understanding of poetry. I had opened the book in the middle of a poem called ‘Walled Garden’:

Blue lilies, sprung† between three oceans, said: ‘Grinding, and half atilt The light-swung boulders rock upon the veldt: We bloom † by lions dead Of old age in the wild.’†²