shall try to get the Penguin book in May. There seems to have been a
poetry explosion, and the resulting poeticised particles are too small
for me to handle mentally with any satisfaction. Sometimes I seem to
hover on the edge of a meaning to these minutiae of sensibility, but
¤nally it eludes me. Perhaps it is a private world that I am not supposed
to enter. A pity, because beauty does not lose by being shared.And there follows the famous anecdote about Joyce’s reprimand to his aunt
upon her failure to respond to the gift of Ulysses.
Raworth’s father is thus nothing if not learned, and the letter contains an
almost unbearable mix of affection and alienation, of pride in Tommy’s ac-
complishments offset by an inability to understand what those accomplish-
ments might be. Father and son obviously see each other infrequently; later
in the letter the father notes, “We scarcely recognised you from the photo-
graph on the back of the book.” Moreover, from the covering letter written
on the packing cardboard (which was almost thrown out) to the poems
themselves, perceived by the father as so many “poeticised particles” or “mi-
nutiae of sensibility,” Tom’s writing clearly eludes the older man’s grasp.
But this is not the familiar cliché of bourgeois father unable to under-
stand artist son. On the contrary, this father alludes not only to Joyce’s Ulysses
but also to Plato and to Plotinus in the Stephen McKenna translation much
touted by Yeats, and he intriguingly tells Tom: “I must have been thinking
about your poems when I went to bed last night, because I dreamed that you
had exploded Bridges’ ‘London Snow’ and I was trying to reconstruct it from
the particles.” He seems to understand only too well that his son’s poetry
represents some sort of “explosion” of the literary convention represented by
Bridges’s poetry.
In his autobiographical essay for the Gale Contemporary Authors series,
Raworth has commented on the pathos of his father’s life.^5 A very bookish
boy, the accidental death of his own father, a dockworker, forced him to leave
school at fourteen and go to work. After various clerkships, Thomas Alfred
Raworth became an editorial assistant on the Jesuit magazine The Month,
where, as Raworth put it in a letter to me, “his reading was catholic to start
and Catholic to ¤nish”:
After he died, I found things like the early Criterion appearances of
sections of Finnegans Wake bound up.... Stein, the Imagists, all were
there... then masses of theology, lives of the Saints. Inside a copy
of the Knox translation of the Bible I found a letter to him from Knox
thanking him for the list of typographical and other errors in his ver-
sion he’d detected and listed. He could write equally well with either236 Chapter 12