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THE FEATHER BED
BY ROBERT GRAVES
With a cover design by WILLIAM NICHOLSON
PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY
LEONARD & VIRGINIA WOOLF
AT THE HOGARTH PRESS
HOGARTH HOUSE RICHMOND
1923
INTRODUCTORY LETTER
INTRODUCTORY LETTER
TO
JOHN RANSOME, THE AMERICAN POET.
My dear Ransome,
Will you accept the dedication of this poem whichseems naturally yours? It was more than a year writingwithout losing much of the excitement of the originalscheme, but when on the cooling of inspiration constructionalflaws appeared, these proved to be beyondhelp of riveting and surface tinkering, so the editionis small and very few review copies will go out. Stillthe poem is a necessary signpost to those friends ofmine who have found the change between the twohalves of my recent collection of lyrics, Whipperginny,inexplicably abrupt: and though dissatisfiedI am not ashamed. It would be as well, from otherconsiderations altogether, not to let the honestburghers of Nashville, Tenn., already scandalizedby your Poems about God, see a copy of the Feather-bed:but if this should happen and they demand anexplanation, tell them that I have no anticonstitutionalintentions. Explain that it is a study of a fatiguedmind in a fatigued body and under the stressof an abnormal conflict, that they can read it, if they will,as a cautionary tale after the style of John Bunyan’sunregenerate Mr Badman, only that Badman was unregenerate(wasn’t he?) to the last, while I leave myyoung man in the throes of nightmare. Assure themthat neither does the author nor in a more normal moodwould the hero of the poem himself imagine convent[6]life to be what it here seems to be; but that the staggeringrebuff to the young man’s typical bullying attitudein love leads him to invent this monstrous libel incompensation; which libel is merely flattery to his ownwounded pride.
The psychological interest of the piece for me, now Ihave finished, is in the way that the logical argument brokenby circlings of associative thought, all however relevantto the emotional disturbance, is continually beingcaught up again with an effort by the drowsy intellect.When at last the sour grapes idea, with its accompanyingfantastics, has determined a reasonable and apparentlyfinal decision of rupture both with the girl her