Autograph letter signed ("Dylan Thomas"), to Guy Hartcup, thanking him for his poetry but taking him for task for stating that he closely follows the techniques of Auden and Spender, leading into to a passionately argued defence of Auden's qualities as a poet, so lacking in his imitators, and a damning contrast between Auden and Spender ("...Why should it be necessary to study modern poetry and literary criticism before actually writing modern poetry? And why should the New Era be a 'solution of our problems' when the only problems that should actually concern one, as a poet, are practical ones? I believe the only technique to be followed closely is one's own, which should have sprung naturally out of the body of tradition: to follow the technique of one contemporary or group of contemporaries is imitation..."); regarding Auden he declares that his followers "have, I think, taken to mind only his most insignificant mannerisms and omitted to realise that what, eventually, makes their verse so inferior to his is their lack of his craftsmanship, his wit, irony, & religious imagination" adding for good measure that "Just to take a handful of mechanical terms, some topical references, and a few examples of photographic journalism, to shove them down on paper formlessly and unmethodically, and to add at the end a couple of revolutionary slogans and a vague but pious message of hope, is not, I think, by any means an advisable method of trying to write a poem"; as regards any similarity between Auden and Spender, Thomas declares: "I see none but the very slightest resemblance between the poetical techniques of Auden and Spender. Auden is a splendid craftsman, fluent in all traditional forms, and a literary experimenter on the only possible basis of experimentation: traditional knowledge, conventional verbal ability, and a desire to make a fuller & an easier, not a more difficult or clique-ish, formal method of creative communication. Spender on the other hand has devised his technique from Rupert Brooke, memories of Whitman, & the more diffuse Georgian lyric-writers to whom he reacted, unsuccessfully, when in the process of being expensively miseducated"; devoting a large part of the remainder of the letter to a coruscating attack on the pernicious influence of modern literary criticism which is "little better than the Book Society system" in that "it selects, for you, certain poets by whom it is advisable to be influenced, and its valuation of the work of a contemporary depends, greatly, on how far he has taken their opinions and agreed with their selections, and how competently he has performed a task whose incentive was critical and not imaginative", 3 pages, one or two small ink-smudges and very light dust-staining, small 4to, Blashford, Ringwood, Hampshire, 6 February 1938