ABSTRACT

When Auden’s ‘The Witnesses’ appeared with poems by other poets in the ‘Listener’s’ poetry supplement, Sir John Reith, Director-General of the BBC, catechized the editor Janet Adam Smith on the supplement, and especially on ‘The Witnesses’. ‘The D.-G. wanted to know why there was so much that seemed odd, uncouth, “modernist”, about our poems,’ she recalled. ‘He was not choleric … but puzzled’ (T.S. Eliot and the ‘Listener’, ‘Listener’, lxxiii, 21 January 1965, p. 105). T.S. Eliot was accordingly asked to deliver a verdict on the new poetry.