Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

W.J.Turner was not, Clive James notwithstanding, entirely a one-hit wonder. There are a great many of his poems that are worth re-discovering, all of which are forgotten by the general public. For a start I would suggest reading his New Poems, which contains some of his most fluid and unpretentious lyrics. He wrote copiously, and his mind was quite singular in its modernity. He has been a casualty of history. Not a one-trick pony, but a profound and forgotten thinker, whose poetry—while it could contain all the faults James mentions—at times rises to be, as Stephen Spender wrote in 1973, “really inspired.”