Poets on the Air The excellent Third Programme series of
Canterbury Tales adaptations (by Mr. Nevill Coghill, Mr. Stephen Potter producing) continues and flourishes. In general principle a good many of us like our poets where we first found them—in a book. We do not want them " presented " to us, and we can reproduce their melodies for ourselves in our own heads. (Hence there was—I report an individual taste—not much profit for me last week in the "dramatic reading" of Atalanta in Calydon.) But a lazy man has some diffi- culty with Chaucer ; he tires at him, just as he tires after listening to two acts of Phedre in French. (Or to five minutes of Auden's The Sea and the Mirror on the Third Programme last week.) Your really lazy man, therefore, is not put off by any reflection that this series is Chaucer without Tears. It is excellently done, and he is grateful for getting at the gold without doing the digging.
LIONEL HALE.
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