cottagers, the most respected man in Islip. XXX My parents were most disappointed when I failed to sit for my Oxford finals. But through the kindness of Sir Walter Raleigh, the head of the English School, I was excused finals as I had been excused everything else, and allowed to proceed to the later degree of Bachelor of Letters. Instead of estimating, at the examiners’ request, the effect of the influence of Dryden on pastoral poets of the early eighteenth century, or tracing the development of the sub-plot in Elizabethan comedies between the years 1583 and 1594, I was allowed to offer a written thesis on a subject of my own choice. Sir Walter Raleigh was a good friend to me. He agreed to be my tutor on condition that he should not be expected to tutor me. He liked my poetry, and suggested that we should only meet as friends. He was engaged at the time on the official history of the war in the air and found it necessary to have practical flying experience for the task. The R.A.F. took him up as often as he needed. It was on a flight out East that he got typhoid fever and died. I was so saddened by his death that it was some time before I thought again about my thesis, and I did not apply for another tutor. The subject I had offered was _The Illogical Element in English Poetry_. I had already written a prose book, _On English Poetry_, a series of ‘workshop notes’ about the writing of poetry. It contained much trivial but also much practical material, and emphasized the impossibility of writing poetry of ‘universal appeal.’ I regarded poetry as, first, a personal cathartic for the poet suffering from some inner conflict, and then as a cathartic for readers in a similar conflict. I made a tentative connection between poetry and dream in the light of the dream-psychology in which I was then interested as a means of curing myself.