John Drinkwater Critical Essay | Interview by John Drinkwater with Cyril Clemens

Interview by John Drinkwater with Cyril Clemens

SOURCE: An interview in The Sewanee Review, Vol. XL, No. 4, Autumn, 1932, pp. 442-45.

In the following interview, Drinkwater discusses his life and literary career.

In the Highlands, on the outskirts of London, but a few doors from a house once inhabited by Coleridge, lives John Drinkwater, who cordially welcomed me one autumn afternoon. The poet is a stalwart Englishman, some six feet tall and correspondingly broad, and the possessor of fine, penetrating, gray eyes, heavy black hair, and a complexion inclined to be ruddy.

The poet led the way into his study, a glorious room where a log fire was brightly burning at one end, and, opposite, was an enormous window commanding a view of a flower garden of surpassing charm. A table littered with manuscripts stood before the fire, at which the poet had evidently been working recently. Around about were countless books, and various gifts from...
(read more)