—ex-student slates

Dear Sir,—May I take the liberty of proffering an ex-student's very can did opinion on the verse that has recently been making its appearance in Salient.

Possibly my intellectual powers have deteriorated since college days and I may lack an appreciation of budding genius, but I believe that among all the incomprehensible jargon I have ever had the misfortune to read, some of the execrable attempts published recently more than hold their own. Admittedly obscurity in poetry is the order of the day and poetic surrealism is considered brilliant by many. But may I suggest that in the opinion of those lovers of poetry whose less brilliant intellects dare to criticise and fail to appreciate the subtleties of these master minds, to class this sort of drivel as poetry is positively fantastic.

Granted that there is the type of person (not uncommon among University students) who will laud this type of bilge to the skies because they consider it advanced and so on, there yet remain a considerable number of more honest readers (who would feel no shame in being classed as reactionaries) to whom poetry means something more than a meaningless conglomeration of words, incomprehensible to any but the mind that strung them together.

But perhaps, after all, I have been a little arbitrary. Perhaps your contributors of verse write with their tongue in their cheek and trust to the credulity of a few unthinking students who have not yet learned to distinguish the chaff from the wheat—I am, etc.,