Thanks Marcia. Yes in fact Read was a close friend before
and through Eliot's conversion. Read was probably Eliot's source
for material to do with Thomism. I was trying to help a student,
but I relly blew it because I had the wrong spelling and the wrong
first name.

After a chat, I got the student interested in Eliot and Stravinsky
which is a much more relevant (in terms of experimental art) avenue
to pursue. E. wrote about S. and S. wrote about E., and S. has a
good biographical pool to draw on.

Cheers,
Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: Marcia Karp [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 1:59 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Reid publisher


Peter Montgomery wrote:

> Not sure if that'sthe same person. Could be.
> The person I ant was the object of some pretty vicious
> satire by Percy Wyndham Lewis, with the result that
> Reid/Read managed to get him blacklised from publishing
> and delberately promoted the career of D.B.Wyndham Lewis
> as a way of obscuring him even further.

Dear Peter,
    You didn't say that connections with Eliot and Herbert Read (if he's
your man) are important to you, but here's one, anyway.
    Reads _English Prose Style_ was reviewed in the September 13, 1928
_Times Literary Supplement_. The reviewer had de-lineated Coriolanus speech
to Aufidius in Act IV, Scene V of Shakespeare's play, then observed that it
was better prose than North's translation of Plutarch. Eliot responded with
a letter. The quotation may be familiar to some. The italics are his:

     I make precisely the opposite observation. The prose of North is
     fine prose, the verse of Shakespeare is great poetry. And printed
     as prose, the verse of Shakespeare seems to me to be bad prose.
     As prose, it is difficult to grasp; as prose, it is badly
     constructed. North's I find much superior -- as prose.
     What I think your reviewer, like many other people, has overlooked
     is this: that verse, whatever else it may or may not be, is itself
     a system of punctuation; the usual marks of _punctuation_
     themselves are differently employed. If your reviewer were right,
     the method ought to be reversible; so that some passages of great
     prose could be converted into fine verse; and I do not believe he
     can find an example. [September 27, 1928, _TLS_, 687.]

Marcia