POET PEDDLES VERSE

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXVI, Issue 111, 23 April 1936, Page 7

POET PEDDLES VERSE

N.Z. Man in England (From Our Special Correspondent). (By Air Mail). LONDON, March 28. A man walked into Haywards Heath (Sussex) police station and asked for a licence—to peddle poems. He was Geoffrey Follett, a New Zealander. With his bag stuffed with his own rhyme-sheets (to be sold at 6d each) he set out on his long trek to the West Country. He visited authors, politicians, clergy and ordinary folk. At some homes he was welcomed, at others snubbed! He was received at the homes of Lloyd George, Ethel M. Dell, Hilaire Belloc, Warwick Deeping and other famous people. When he called on G. K. Chesterton he felt “like a small boy wheedling sixpence out of a benevolent uncle.” Cosmo Hamilton, brother of Sir Philip Gibbs, asked him: “Who do you imagine reads poetry these days?” The pedlar-poet, in his book “Song of 6d,” published this week, says that he replied that if poets called at houses as butchers and bakers call, people might regard poetry like a loaf—as a necessity.