|
|
|
|
|
Mary Webb. “In April.” “5. Grove Cottages / The Grove / Hampstead” on verso in black ink. Typescript poem, one leaf, 8¾″ x 7″, white wove paper. Thirty-three lines. “Mary Webb.” is written in black ink at the bottom of the poem. On the verso is also written: “Mary Webb,” and below is (crossed out) 46 B Leinster Square / Bayswater. Mary Webb was a nature poet, not merely descriptive but visionary. This poem, with fine detail drawn from close observation, is a celebration of spring, the season in which Webb was born and her favorite time of year. Matthew Arnold, while professor of poetry at Oxford, gave four lectures later published as Celtic Literature (1891). He describes the temperament of the Celt: “His sensibility gives him a peculiarly near and intimate feeling of nature and the life of nature; here, too, he seems in a special way attracted by the secret before him, the secret of natural beauty and natural magic, and to be close to it, to half-divine it. In the productions of the Celtic genius, nothing, perhaps, is so interesting as the evidences of this power.”