H.E. Bates Companion

A mere paragraph, possibly solicited by the volume compiler, in which Bates writes: "The older I get the less I like poetry. I do not say I dislike poetry. Only that the older I get the less I like it, and the more I find that music takes its place. It becomes clearer to me that the composer begins where the poet ends. Keats soars heavenward, but Schubert has already gone beyond him into some celestial stratosphere." A second passage by Bates in the volume, called "Exhilarating," is an excerpt from an article of 1937; it is likely that this passage is also an excerpt from a longer essay. In Spice of Life (London:, compiled by J. Thurston Thrower, 1950, p. 89)