“Most beautiful voice of the 20th century?” Pshaw. The man was a poseur

and a bore. Listen to that “beautiful voice”:

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidaon–O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih.

I submit to you, Rick, that this is a pile of doggy poop. If the guy wants

MY attention, he should write in English.

And to call this quack the “most beautiful voice” of a century that he

shared with, at least in part, Auden, Betjeman, Hilaire Belloc, Elizabeth

Bishop, Rupert Brooke, G.K. Chesterton (“‘Free verse’? You may as well call

sleeping in a ditch ‘free architecture’…”), Walter de la Mare, Frost,

Graves, Hardy, Housman, Kipling for heaven’s sake!, Larkin, John Masefield,

MacLeish, MacNeice, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Edward Thomas, Yeats,…

Pull yourself together, man.