ABSTRACT
Ford Madox Ford’s reputation as a major novelist is secure. His poetry, however, has been rather neglected. The studied nonchalance of Ford’s statements about writing poetry probably contributed to this neglect. The revisions contained in Ford’s manuscripts and typescripts, however, suggest that what he published was not at all careless but the result of meticulous labour and an acute sensitivity to what is ‘good, bad or indifferent’.The Questions at the Well: With Sundry Other Verses for Notes of Music was published under the pseudonym Fenil Haig and dedicated to Ford’s soon-to-be wife, Elsie Martindale. Throughout his poetry career, Ford was drawn to verse dialogue and verse/song drama. Paul Skinner has noted that Ford’s early work: is strongly marked by a sense of place: its context was overwhelmingly rural for a decade from the mid-1890s. The collection also contains Ford’s important preface, a version of which was published in Poetry as ‘Impressionism—Some Speculations’.
