William Plomer Research Articles

To the Expanding Community of Melville Readers

To the Expanding Community of Melville Readers Maki Sadahiro Following John Bryant’s reading of passages from his Melville biography and the lively responses and interactions of the Melvilleans in attendance, the exhibition hall had mostly emptied out. Bryant’s voice, passionately recreating and reliving Melville’s life, had seemed to fill the space, and Melville’s energy was in the air, magnified by the artworks inspired by Click for larger view View full resolution Maki Sadahiro. Photo courtesy of Maki Sadahiro. [End Page 95] and responding to his literary works. Enshrined at the center of the exhibition room was Jos Sances’s 14-foot x 51-foot scratchboard drawing mural Or, The Whale, inspired by Moby-Dick and C. L. R. James’s interpretation of the novel. Peter Martin’s Call Me Ahab series of black-and-white photographs taken with an iPhone camera portrayed Captain Ahab as a sexy, nude young man with a harpoon, casting his melancholy eye on the viewer. Ishmael was also there with his face hidden behind a whale’s skull mask. Embracing him was Queequeg (Peter Martin & David Rosenthal, Altered Visions). On the other side of the room, Matthew Cumbie and Tom Truss’s ReWritten, in which Melville’s writing of Mobyo-Dick is contextualized in the author’s affectionate interactions with Hawthorne, was being broadcast. I attended the exhibition with a fellow Melvillean from Korea, Misook Lee, and could not help feeling haunted by the artistic renderings of Melville’s spirit featured at the event. I watched and recorded Lee’s dance performances, which both responded to and interacted with the artworks at the exhibition. At first I was mostly an observer, standing still to capture the performance in the frame of my iPhone screen, but as I followed Lee moving in front of the whale mural, from its head to tail, I gradually realized that my own body was beginning to move as well, as if we were dancing collaboratively. It is not an overstatement to say that it was simultaneously a transcorporeal experience and a transtemporal one because our dancing traced Sances’s historical vignettes of US capitalism, which were depicted within the space of the whale’s body. The whale motivated us to recapture history—from the massacre of the Pequot Indians to mining, the Civil Rights Movement, and ecological destruction such as water pollution and climate change—and made us ponder all the associated violence, injury, and suffering. While recording the dance, I immersed myself in “Melville’s Energies,” the aptly evoked title of the Thirteenth International Melville Society Conference in Paris. At this conference in Paris, I felt more Melville energy and saw his works generate more new thought and artworks than at any Melville conference I had participated in since the one held in Jerusalem in 2009. I arrived in Paris ready to read a paper on Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation of Melville’s Billy Budd and Melville’s attitude toward “postcolonial” American literature, which inspired the opera production team. That team included Britten, E. M. Forster, and William Plomer, who together created a “British” opera from within the strong influence of continental music traditions. The transhistorical, transnational, and transcorporeal relationships between scholars and artists at the exhibition impressed me deeply and motivated me to look further into the diverse and multilayered interpretive community of Melville. [End Page 96] Click for larger view View full resolution Matthew Cumbie and Tom Truss perform a scene from ReWritten during the “ReWritten: Exploring Melville Through Dance, Performance, and Experiments in Pedagogy” session, June 29, 2022. Photo credit Alan Van Brackel. For me, a decisive culmination point at the conference, in which an organic interpretive community had taken shape, occurred during the session “ReWritten: Exploring Melville through Dance, Performance, and Experiments in Pedagogy,” which explored the aesthetics manifested through bodies in motion. The panel consisted of Brian Yothers, a Melville scholar, Katherine Stubbs, a Hawthorne scholar, and dance professionals Matthew Cumbie and Tom Truss, who examined Melville’s engagement with the dancing body and the process of translating literary texts into somatic performances. Yothers traced Melville’s interest in dance throughout his career, from Typee to Moby-Dick...

Near Symmetries: The Transnational Modernism of Edward Wolfe and William Plomer

Focusing on the transnational lives of William Plomer (1903–1973) and the artist Edward Wolfe (1897–1982), this paper considers the formative influences of their South African heritage on their creative development, as well as the impact of European modernism on their work. In particular, a connection is made between Wolfe’s immersion in modernism and the Bloomsbury Group, and his subsequent influence on the writing of Plomer’s controversial novel, Turbott Wolfe (1926), including its suppressed homoerotic elements. Finally, the paper argues that Turbott Wolfe is shaped both by Plomer’s liminal position within South Africa’s segregationist colonial culture, as well as by his exposure to a metropolitan modernity marked by waning confidence in the teleology of empire.

A ‘School' Person in a ‘Red' Blanket: The Case of SEK Mqhayi

The article considers the scope and purpose of the project, “Translating (South) African Literatures”, in relation to the early twentieth-century Xhosa writer, SEK Mqhayi, two of whose works have been translated into English in the project. Turning to the several prompts to reflection offered by the project, I evaluate Mqhayi's contribution to an ‘expanded' South African literary history. As does the project, my argument requires a return to the archive, in this case of Mqhayi's dual commitment to both Xhosa custom (‘Red') and colonial-Christian modernisation (‘School'). A brief comparison of Mqhayi's plain voice of ethical justice and, in the mid-1920s, the experimental modernism of his contemporary, William Plomer, raises the issue of an appropriate aesthetic in an expanded literary history, while I conclude with a key consideration in any translation project: the need for a ‘usable’ theory and practice of translation.

Literary Britten: Words and Music in Benjamin Britten's Vocal Works ed. by Kate Kennedy

Reviewed by: Literary Britten: Words and Music in Benjamin Britten's Vocal Works ed. by Kate Kennedy Kevin Salfen Literary Britten: Words and Music in Benjamin Britten's Vocal Works. Edited by Kate Kennedy. (Aldeburgh Studies in Music, no. 13.) Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2018. [xx, 405 p. ISBN 9781783272853 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781787442566 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, music examples, list of contributors, bibliography, index. In her brief introduction to Literary Britten—a collection of eighteen essays by prominent Britten scholars as well as academics whose careers have not been devoted to the erstwhile Baron of Aldeburgh—Kate Kennedy explains that "this book has chosen to move away from the theoretical debates concerning the relationship between words and music" (p. 5) and that it hangs together as "a snapshot of the lively diversity of current thinking on Britten" (p. 7). It may also point to a chameleonic quality in the composer, some capacity of his work to permit starkly contrasting views. Kennedy describes Britten as "one of the most literary composers" (p. 8), although what evidence supports this comparative assertion, echoed in the blurb on the back cover, never makes an appearance. More literary than who? we are left to wonder. And why does it matter if Britten wins this contest? Does being "most literary" make him top boy or enough of a brainbox to boost his canonical status, to give him a slab in the Westminster of the imagination? These are lines of thinking that the volume's editor and writers generally do not pick up: to explore what being "literary" meant in and beyond Britten's creative life and evolving circle of collaborators, and [End Page 123] what significance that should have for a twenty-first-century academic readership. Throughout the volume, the editor has used a light hand, letting writers be who they will be, which is why the argument for a "literary Britten" can never coalesce. Nominally divided into two major sections—"Perspectives" and "Studies," with one focused on broad issues and the other on specific works—"slippage" between these modes abounds, which further blurs the book's overarching focus. The architecture merely provides a place to put things, and so, as with many essay collections trailing the composer's centenary in 2013, Literary Britten's success depends not on the structure of the volume or on its editor but on the writer of each chapter. The first goes to Mervyn Cooke, who summarizes Britten's relationships with his librettists, observing along the way that Britten initially worked with fiercely independent ones (W. H. Auden, Montagu Slater, E. M. Forster) and gradually shifted to ones who were more "practical"—malleable, one might say (Myfanwy Piper, William Plomer). Although there is little new information here, Cooke's narrative has authority and serves as an effective entrée to the field because of his special place in the history of Britten studies. In "Britten, Auden and the 1930s," John Fuller draws on a lifelong history of reading and listening to give a rich sense of Auden's significance for the composer, though the finest quality of the chapter might be that it embodies an erudition and facility with unexpected connections that approximate Auden's, a kind of anachronistic example of what being "literary" might look like in Britten and Auden's circle of the 1930s. The third chapter marks a noticeable shift toward smaller claims, smaller gains. Nicholas Clark, as librarian with the Britten–Pears Foundation and series editor for Aldeburgh Studies in Music, has, like Cooke, earned a broad brush, and he does make some expansive claims: he proposes a view of evil in the operas Turn of the Screw and Owen Wingrave to compare with Henry James's "vision of evil," a distillation aided by consideration of James's oneact play "The Saloon." Clark also suggests an important point about "being literary": it permits, perhaps demands, the fruitful interplay of texts, which in turn necessitates that the scholar do more than say "x short story begat y opera." When we consider such textcomplexes, we begin to piece together the rich life of the mind that a volume called Literary Britten might have aspired to depict. Kate...

The Hot Sun and the Mad Moon: Hiroshima in South African Literature

In 1926 a new shipping route was established between Durban and Osaka, on which Laurens van der Post and William Plomer, fresh from their collaboration as writers for the literary magazine Voorslag, embarked as privileged passengers. The opportunity to reside in Japan would exercise a profound influence over the literary output of both figures, though in considerably different ways. This article revisits the 1926 sojourn in Japan as a formative moment in the lives of two South African writers that would subsequently be reformed, and to some extent deformed in their writings following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945. Though the sojourn itself deserves restitution to the annals of South African literary history, its true value, the author argues, does not lie in enlarging our understanding of literary trends associated with the interwar years so much as isolating the specific challenges and transmutations those self-same trends underwent in the aftermath of the atomic holocaust. As each writer struggled to reformulate his subjectivity, a prophetic mode of writing became increasingly central as a framing device by which Hiroshima could be “contained” and “approached” from afar. The events of 1926, along with van der Post's experience of imprisonment under the Japanese during the war years, were mobilized in the authorial imagination to serve that purpose.

Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching by Carrie J. Preston

Reviewed by: Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching by Carrie J. Preston Alex Rogals Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, And Journeys in Teaching. By Carrie J. Preston. Modernist Latitudes series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016; pp. 352. Redefining the act of submission is at the heart of Carrie Preston’s Learning to Kneel. Positing that “submission is a crucial aspect of our lives and desires” (205), she criticizes the contemporary Western notion that assumes that “submission to an authority and tradition would always be dehumanizing and oppressive”—an assumption that she herself admits to once having held (21). Focusing on the traditional Japanese performing art noh, Preston argues that its submissive learning model is essential to interpreting the work of notable figures in twentieth-century modernism, in both the West and Japan. Drawing from her personal experiences as a teacher and an amateur noh student, Preston provocatively unpacks the act of submission and explores its fertile role within political, social, and religious contexts. Her accessible memoir-style introduction presents the way that noh is typically taught, focusing on the student’s—in this case Preston’s—goal to copy her master by observing her master demonstrate speech and/or movement and then attempting to recreate it exactly. She acknowledges her own initial prejudices against this system of learning—prejudices she ascribes to her Western tendency to position individual agency as paramount in the creation of art. That there is something to be learned from submitting to the methods of a master is not a revolutionary notion, particularly when it comes to Japan’s traditional performing arts. However, Preston builds on this observation to argue that submission (be it within a performance context or otherwise) should not be unequivocally equated to a lack of agency; it is often a conscious choice made by a willing participant. From this vantage point, Preston engages modernism, a movement that arguably sought to subvert tradition, by illustrating how it actually benefited from its encounters with noh. She explores the work of early Euro-American modernists like Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, because they drew inspiration from noh and collaborated with Japanese artists to create intercultural translations and stage productions. While Preston acknowledges some common criticisms of these artists—misinterpretation, cultural thievery, fascist political agendas—she argues that “our limited visions of theatrical and intercultural transmission” (93) have placed too much focus on artistic product. This misplaced focus has obscured the processes by which these modernists submitted to noh as artistic authority in order to create cross-cultural collaborations. Preston asks that we focus on the “intimacy of translation,” in contrast to “moralistic evaluations of fidelity or deceit” (39), in order to understand how Pound and Yeats sought respite from realism’s grip on theatre by submitting to noh’s alternative theatrical methods to find inspiration. Preston’s desire to consider process over product leads her to challenge “our shallow conceptions of failure and success” (22). She argues that previous judgments of Pound’s and Yeats’s work, which have simplistically labeled these efforts “failed noh,” have incorrectly assumed that these artists aimed to produce something culturally “authentic.” Contending that this scholarship has ignored how submission has been a tool for innovation, she reveals how both Pound and Yeats grew artistically by submitting to noh techniques and intercultural learning. In chapter 5 Preston returns to this argument to explore Benjamin Britten and William Plomer’s “noh-derived church parable” Curlew River (1964) through its instances of religious- and artistic-submission processes (204). She also provides an intriguing defense of Samuel Beckett’s notoriously controlling directing style by considering how his 1976 production of Footfalls/Pas (1976) demonstrates the artistic merits of submission. If “authenticity” is the guiding factor by which such Western artists have been unfairly judged, Preston also suggests that such biases have tainted the way in which scholarship has understood experiments in Japanese modernism as well. Her third chapter examines the life and work of forgotten transnational dancer Itō Michio, who was Yeats’s main collaborator in his one-act play At Hawk’s Well, which was loosely based on the noh play Hagoromo. Itō’s performance of “noh...

Modernizing the Mikado: Japan, Japanism and the Limitations of the Avant-garde

Modernizing the Mikado: Japan, Japanism and the Limitations of the Avant-garde

Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson, eds. Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers, and Reception.

Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson, eds. Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers, and Reception.

TEPEDELENLİ ALİ PAŞA BİYOGRAFİLERİ ÜZERİNE

This paper aims to determine the common and different aspects in the works by comparing and contrasting the Ottoman statesman Pasha of portraits in Yanya Sultan by South African author William Plomer, in The Lion of Janina and the last days of the Janissaries by Slovakian author Maurus Jokai and in Ali Pasha of Tepelena by French author Alexandre Dumas with the monograph Ali Pasha of and his property by Albanian historian and author Entela Muco. Moreover, we will analyze how different authors from four different countries deal with and refer to the same topic. Thus, findings and descriptions on Albania and the Balkans will be compared with each other. We will analyze the perspectives of English, Slovak, French and Albanian authors during on the Eastern world and its people and institutions in a comparative way. While the first three authors depict Pasa from an outside point of wiew, the last author mentions his country and a historical figure from his own country from a historian perspective. We will have reviews on all of the works and on the presence of Orientalist elements. Through the four works examined, we will attempt to draw an objective Tepedelenli Pasa portrait. In this respect, we will discuss the intersection points of the biography of Pasha of Tepelena, a historical figure, with his real life.

“A Spirit that Nursed a Grievance:” William Plomer’s “The Child of Queen Victoria”

When William Plomer’s The Child of Queen Victoria and Other Stories was published by Jonathan Cape in 1933, his literary reputation was well established: he was the author of two novels, two volumes of short fiction, and three collections of poetry. In addition, he was widely regarded in British literary circles as a significant talent. Edward Garnett, for example, the reader for Cape and the first person in publishing to recognise the talents of Lawrence and Conrad, wrote in a report on The Child of Queen Victoria and Other Stories that “Plomer is certainly the most original and keenest mind of the younger generation” (quoted in Alexander 1990, 192). In short, at the time of writing this story Plomer was operating within a milieu dramatically different from the geographical and artistic isolation in which, aged only nineteen, he had written Turbott Wolfe (1925), the novel on which his South African literary reputation rests. Yet one of the many fascinations of “The Child of Queen Victoria” is that it entails a fairly exact reprise, in the realist mode, of the central thematic strand of his first novel: interracial sex or ‘miscegenation.’ A question immediately arises: what motivated the return to this vexed thematic, and what did Plomer seek to accomplish in this second attempt that, we must assume, he was not able to accomplish in the first?

Alias Robert Pagan: William Plomer and the Promotion of South African Writing

The purpose of this article is twofold: to examine a neglected aspect of the otherwise well-documented career of William Plomer (1903-73), and then to draw attention to his role as a backstage negotiator on behalf of our literary figures, in Britain as well as in his country of birth, South Africa. Both these sides of his otherwise well-publicised activities involved a contrastingly humble, off-the-record quality, which we would call anonymous and unsigned, so that it is unsurprising if they have been overlooked by the fine chroniclers of his rich life and abundant works.

Towards a Mechanics of Voice for Plomer and Britten's 'Gloriana'

Critical writing on Gloriana , Benjamin Britten's opera for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II with a libretto by William Plomer, has typically focused on issues tied to its premiere and subsequent reception and, less frequently, on how the opera represents Britten's concerns, his 'voice'. This essay considers two ways that Britten might be said to project his 'voice' in the opera: 'textural emphasis', the highlighting and obscuring of lines from the libretto, and 'instrumental commentary', orchestral interpolations not suggested in the libretto. Both techniques point to Britten's retention of words in a musical environment that seems to undermine them, an arrangement that allows for the perception of internal authorial dissent. By exploring a number of specific moments of disagreement between words and music in Gloriana , a pattern of compositional approaches emerges, and it becomes possible to propose a mechanics of how voice is produced in the opera.

History of Ichnology: The Reverend William Buckland (1784–1856) and the Fugitive Poets

William Buckland not only was an eccentric scientist liked by virtually all his peers, but in the early 1800s he was also one of the foremost authorities on geology. Buckland's vivid sense of humor and the fact that he enjoyed working on rather strange subjects, such as coprolites, rain drop impressions, cave paleontology, and fossil footsteps, provoked a great deal of light-hearted jesting from both his friends and his students. A collection of humorous poems and caricatures were produced to pay homage to the “Geologic Wizard.” Among these fugitive poets and artists were Buckland's good friends Phillip Duncan, Philip Shuttleworth, Henry De la Beche, Richard Whately, William Conybeare, and Thomas Sopwith. Buckland was still the subject of humorous verse well into the 1950s by the contemporary South African poet William Plomer.

Miscegenation, Desire and Rape: The Shifting Ground of Disgrace

Summary I discuss three novels that draw on different forms of sexual contact across the colour line, namely Turbott Wolfe by William Plomer ([1926]1976), Alan Paton's (1953) Too Late the Phalarope and Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999). These novels respectively explore miscegenation, interracial sex, and interracial rape. What unites these narratives is their anatomisation of the response in white society to such sexual encounter, crucially indicting sexual contact as a social trope that defines relationships of power. Despite its recurrence, the trope is nonetheless responsive to societal change. An obvious and yet significant difference is that in the postapartheid society represented in Disgrace, interracial sex is not forbidden. I argue that the convention of interracial sexual contact within white South African writing is structured around the signifier “transgression”, and that J.M. Coetzee retains this signifier as a point of reference within the trope, by shifting its overt content from interracial desire to interracial rape. I further consider the formal duplicity of Disgrace, whereby racialised discourse embedded in the realist facet of the narrative is not erased or subsumed by its metafictional properties.

"And so to Athens": William Plomer in "The Land of Love"

William Plomer was a poet and novelist who grew up in South Africa, but found an outlet for his identity crisis in Greece of the 1930s where he went on to look for idealized Greek beauty, only to find it debased when impinged upon by individuals from "ostensibly more sophisticated levels of civilization." In his poems and short stories about Greece, Plomer combined homosexual themes and an ironical look at history's essential heroes and was in constant dialogue with Constantine P. Cavafy's poetics. In contrast to idealized imaginings of the country as the place of intellectual rebirth and uninhibited physical pleasure, Plomer's Greece was one of cultural plurality-images of Apollonian eternal beauty, folk songs inspired by the Greek War of Independence, and aesthetic poses celebrating homoeroticism mingled with the dreaded face of modernization blending with the ruins of ancient Greece.

The Weeping Mothers in Sumidagawa, Curlew River , and Medieval European Religious Plays

One of the happiest and the most creative meetings of East and West came about a work by the British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-76). During a short stay of twelve days Japan, he saw two performances of the Japanese medieval Noh play Sumidagawa, and eight years later he completed his opera Curlew River, which was based upon this Noh play. In November 1955, he and the tenor Peter Pears along with their patrons, Prince Ludwig of Hesse and Rhine and his wife Margaret, left England on a world concert tour. On 8 February 1955 they arrived Tokyo, and three days later they attended a performance of Sumidagawa (Sumida River), Juro Motomasa's fifteenth-century drama, at the Suidobashi Noh Theater Tokyo. The performance was being staged by the Umetani Group of the Kanze School with Takeshi Umewaka playing the leading role. The day was to be remembered as one of the most significant of the entire tour. Before leaving for Japan, Britten had been advised advance by William Plomer, who was to become the librettist of Curlew River, that he should make a point of seeing a Noh play. Plomer, having spent three years Japan his early twenties and being well versed many aspects of Japanese culture, was certain that Britten would be inspired by a strange dramatic experience such as this even though the composer knew little about the genre and did not understand the language at all. It is useful to see how Plomer described his own experiences of the Noh theater his autobiography: And what was Noh play? To this the European brought that total ignorance which, its way, made him specifically impressionable. One did not understand the archaic language, the completely strange chanting; one knew nothing of the symbolism, and the briefly outlined plot was so steeped the mysteries of antiquity, of a remote and venerable culture, of esoteric Buddhism, that one had to rely on little but the evidence of one's senses to perceive the great beauty and refinement and agelessness of a wholly nonpopular tradition and convention, which, present-day jargon, would perhaps be sneered at as elitist--whatever that may mean. Perhaps, for those who use such a term, the best is too good. (1) As Plomer had hoped, Britten was deeply impressed by the performance of Sumidagawa and wanted to see it again. This occurred on 19 February just before he left Japan for Hong Kong. As soon as he came back to England, he told Plomer in a quiet voice but with ... a distinctive firmness that he wished to compose an English version of the Noh play that he had seen. (2) The composer was haunted by the memory of this extraordinary theatrical experience for many years. He wrote: The whole occasion made a tremendous impression upon me: the simple, touching story, the economy of style, the intense slowness of the action, the marvelous skill and control of the performers, the beautiful costumes, the mixture of chanting, speech, singing which, with the three instruments, made up the strange music--it all offered a totally new operatic experience. There was no conductor--the instrumentalists sat on the stage, as did the chorus, and the chief characters made their entrance down a long ramp. The lighting was strictly non-theatrical. The cast was all male, the one female character wearing an exquisite mask made no attempt to hide the male jowl beneath it. (3) Integral to the plot of Sumidagawa is the Sumida River (the name is derived from Sumi, corner, and da, rice field), from which this Noh play took its name, which runs through the Kanto Plain and enters the sea Tokyo Bay. (4) On an evening one spring, the Ferryman of this river is about to row across. The Traveler approaches him and asks for a place the boat. Shortly thereafter a distraught woman, a noble lady from Miyako (present-day Kyoto, the western part of Japan, and earlier times its capital) arrives. …

François le Vaillant and the myth of the noble savage

ABSTRACT Inheriting a dualistic value system, Europeans often perceived the people they encountered on their voyages of exploration in terms of Manichean polarities of good and evil. Thus, the concepts of the noble and ignoble savage were born. Stereotypes of the ignoble savage dominated writing about southern Africa for much of the colonial period and even later. However, the French explorer and disciple of Rousseau, François le Vaillant, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century temporarily overturned the dominant notion by depicting black subjects beyond the colonial borders as being inherently noble, despite some contradictions in his work. Others, such as the liberal-minded Thomas Pringle, followed his example of portraying indigenous inhabitants positively, but by the 1840s the tradition had largely died out owing to ideological pressures required to justify increased imperial domination of the subcontinent. Only with the revival of Liberalism by writers such as William Plomer in the 1920s, did the enlightened legacy of le Vaillant again begin to assume an important role in South African literature.

That "Ugly Word": Miscegenation and the Novel in Preapartheid South Africa

This essay outlines the part played by miscegenation (crossracial sex) in the elaboration of racial identity in South Africa before 1948. It explores representations of miscegenation, and links between miscegenation and "racechange", in South African English novels of this period, including Perceval Gibbon's Souls in Bondage and Margaret Harding, William Plomer's Turbott Wolfe, Peter Abrahams's The Path of Thunder, and particularly Sarah Gertrude Millin's God's Stepchildren. It reads these novels as developing a stock theme in South African literature, and as exemplary of the interplay between history, ethics, and aesthetics in the genre of the novel.

'Now with my hand I cover Africa': a love-poem sent by Stephen Spender to William Plomer

'Now with my hand I cover Africa': a love-poem sent by Stephen Spender to William Plomer

A LITERARY GHOST: WILLIAM PLOMER'S PROPOSED BIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT OF E. M. FORSTER

Journal Article A LITERARY GHOST: WILLIAM PLOMER'S PROPOSED BIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT OF E. M. FORSTER Get access A. D. BURNETT A. D. BURNETT Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XLVII, Issue 185, February 1996, Pages 53–58, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XLVII.185.53 Published: 01 February 1996