Published by Blackwell's viii+52pp
edited by Harold Acton, Peter Quennell
no preface

Acton's "Memoirs of an Aesthete" record that he looked at OP 1923's verse and found it "almost as lifeless as that of the Georgian Poetry gang ... short-lists of uncouth bird's names set to rhyme or ale-house glee songs composed clandestinely by temperance workers". Nevertheless he sought to recruit his senior, the more orthodox Peter Quennell, as his co-editor, partly from admiration and partly because Quennell was thought Oxford's best young poet and thus could not be omitted. "Strenuous perseverance" was required, "for the mere idea of connecting his name with the effusions of undergraduates made him shudder to the marrow... The new school [i.e. post-Eliot], which had all my sympathy, was as distasteful to him as the Georgians were to me. He was constantly threatening to resign... Fortunately Peter's attention became distracted by an affair of gallantry before we went to press"-i.e. he was expelled from the University for a term when caught having a sexual relationship with a woman in Maidenhead, an affair Quennell describes rather movingly in his memoirs "The Marble Foot"-"and this enabled me [Acton] to smuggle a few more poems past the barrier." Thus by accident Acton and Quennell secured the approval of reviewers, pleased that "they have not taken the icing off the top of the cake; they have given us a complete cross-section of it" (Cherwell).

Contents

Harold Acton: Lament for Adonis; Words; Trépak;

H. S. Barnes: In Church;

T. O. Beachcraft: The Lapidary; The Shower;

Geoffrey Curtis: Stoop, and keep close the moment;

C. I. Frazer: War;

Graham Greene: Paint and Wood; Childishness;

Michael Hankinson: No wanton loveliness...;

Desmond Harmsworth: Day; Smoke goeth up; The Leaves;

Dorothy Alexander Heinlein: Elegy;

Brian Howard: Scenic Railway; Panorama seen by the young American woman sleeping;

E. T. Jones: To the Monks of a Monastery in Italy;

John Linnell: Spring Solitude; Sonnets;

Joseph Gordon Macleod: Spring;

D. S. Maw: In Dismal Winter; My Room-the Desk and Chair;

Franklin McDuffee: Song; This Hour;

Peter Quennell: Leviathan; Meander I; Meander II;

R. Robinson: Such and Such; The Uses of Poetry; A Man would Rejoice...;

A. L. Rowse: The Shadow on the Glass;

Eric Schroeder: Condensation of an Opera;

Royall Snow: The Adventurer;

James Sutherland: Mot Quad, Oxford;