Poets pretend to ignore their critics with lordly dandyism. In truth, I've constantly learnt from hostile critics and am grateful to them for my most valuable revisions and deletions. Intelligent hostile criticism is all the more important to me, indeed indispensable, in view of my inability to discriminate between my worse and better poems. I agree with Professor D. C. Allen's strictures:

"This deliberate effort to ruin a poem by what seems
a consciously chosen unpoetic word or phrase is
Viereck's main weakness as a poet. As there are scars
that disfigure individual poems, so there are poems
that disfigure the collection. I wish they had never
been written or, having been written, destroyed. One
can hope that the next collection will be smaller and
more selective."

In turn, some of my non-hostile critics have succeeded in explicitly and consciously summarizing those of my working principles which...