Box 1

Scope and Contents

"At least two things rise up to engage my thought, from what you present in your letter, besides the question that you put to me, and I am giving them priority of attention in this my reply because, in their bearing on research in which a connection between my poetic work and the poetic work of Mr. Auden is pointed to, they have more importance than the source of my quotation in the preface of my Collected Poems. First, as to your words on 'the relation' of my poetry and W.H. Auden's."

Scope and Contents "Supposed I clear the list of the matter of Mr. K.C. Gay first? There was a german person by name Karl Goldschmidt who worked secretarially for myself and Mr. Robert Graves in the mid-thirties, and into 1937, and 38, by my memory. There was no other secretarial assistant to me in that period."...."To go next to this to-me queer matter of my reference to Mr. Auden in my preface to my Collected Poems, and your researches anent it. Why have you been on the trail of...

Scope and Contents "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...

Scope and Contents

"I had better complete my attention, for you, to the matter of The Survey of Modernist Poetry. There has appeared a faint possibility of my being able to have it printed with a preface by me - a thing I desire but also greatly ahrink from, hardly perceiving now the time, the energy, can be found for the writing of it (it would be no light task for me)....I have located in my papers a copy of what I put on record with the book in 1964, for preservation at Cornell."

Scope and Contents

"It seems to me that you are conronted in the case of Auden with the necessity of a distinction between the problem of understanding the way in which a poet comes to write in the ways he or she does and the severe responsibility of differentiation between the poet's ways of writing that are of the poet's nature and the ways that are grafte dupon - not the nature, you can't graft upon a nature - but the posture the poet assumes before the public."

Scope and Contents "It pleases me that you have interest in what I have conveyed to you in one way and another, of my thinking. As to agreement and disagreement: I think that, where some perception is had of the general character and implicit intent of my thinking, the problem of agree-disagree-ment dissolves, since it is as a whole, in its entire tenor, that what I have to say or tell matters, or not for people. My judgement of Mr. Auden, for instance, is not a separate a literary, opinion, but an incident...

Scope and Contents

"...For you do two things in your letter that call for immediate protest from me. In the case of the first, you do me an injustice, attributing to me a position I have not in any letter presented myself as being in, towards you or anyone else. I know something about having erroneous notions about oneself held by others; such notions do a spreading injury to truth, about whomever they are held."

Scope and Contents

"If a person were to accept all that I have said on the failure of poetry he could not without butchering the content of what I said bring into argument a concept of poetry as an operation to approach without high expectations. You must go elsewhere with such argument. Find someone who has not approached poetry with high expectations of it (per its own inherent promise as what has long been with us), and you need not argue at all; that person would have no thought of renouncing poetry."