The House by the River

Suspense! Radio's outstanding theatre of frills brings you an hour. A full 60 minutes of suspense. Tonight, starring Mr. John McIntyre in a play entitled The House by the River by AP Herbert, directed by Anton M. Leader and produced by Robert Montgomery.

Mr. Montgomery. True wit is nature to advantage dressed. What oft was thought but near so well expressed. Alexander Pope was speaking about poetry when he said that. And most of us, when we think about poetry, think of it in much the same way, as beauty, caught and held captive in a skein of words, as something soft and lovely, and without violence.

But that's not always true. Portrait can be violent and hard and dark, with tales of terror and horror. The popular idea that a poet is always a soft and fragile fellow is also untrue. Poetry grows from the stuff of life, and the poet is heir to all the ills of other men.

He is a frequent walker upon the dark paths of life, as well as in the sunlit fields. And finally it's not true either that a poet worth that name must live in a lonely garret in obscure poverty, sleeping on the stacks of his unread rhymes.

Some poets find fame and fortune early, and live richly in comfort and adulation. In fact, that's the kind of a poet we have in our story tonight. Stephen Burns, who at 35, was already being compared with Keats and Shelley, who had in a few slender volumes made himself the voice and the conscience of all England.

His home, standing on the bank of the Thames, was known to a million Englishmen, as the house by the river. Here he lived in peace and contentment with his wife, Marjorie, and his brother, John, a civil servant in London. Here on the breast of the great sluggish river, he lived and studied and worked until the evening of June 15th last summer. Marjorie was out