I must thank Dr Wellek for bringing fundamental criticism to my work, and above all for raising in so complete a way an issue that a reviewer or two had more or less vaguely touched on — an issue of which no one can have been more conscious than myself who had seen the recognition of it as an essential constituent of what I naturally (whatever the quality of my performance) hoped for: an appreciation of my undertaking. Dr Wellek points out, justly, that in my dealings with English poetry I have made a number of assumptions that I neither defend nor even state: "I could wish", he says, "that you had made your assumptions more explicitly and defended them systematically." …