Letter from Laura Jackson to Edward Mendelson, 1970-06-20

"I'll go to the matter of the Survey of Modernist Poetry, on which you touched, of which you asked, in your letter. This book, the fact of this book, has been much in my consciousness in recent time. From 1939-1940 forward I was occupied with taking my thought further (and by then I had taken it much further than where it was at the time-of the writing of that book); and I had no practical attention to past work."

....

"The origin of the book is as follows. In 1925, I found myself at a turning where active preoccupation with the historical fact of poetry was joined to active preoccupation with writing poems;..."