Box 1

Scope and Contents "...I am moved to present again the principle of my rejection of the planned Seminar on Robert Graves at year's end under auspices of the Modern Library Association as having anything to do with me of an order I can respect, and as itself deeply committed to disrespect of me in its appointing for its subject of discussion 'The Influence of Laura Riding on RObert Graves.' After my explanation, which covers my feeling that participation in this meeting by persons having some work-oriented...

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"I forget to tell you that my last letter to The Denver Quarterly in an article (mailed there subsequent) to Mr. Ford's, of my contributions in The Seizin Press, as to the Autumn 1973 issue-"

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"Serious students of poetry can consider themselves lucky in having made available to them an important and authentic account of a perennial problem: the borderline between poetry and silence. In The Telling..."

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"I have just received a letter dated June 28 from Burton Feldman stating that you are concerned about the disposition of the materials that went into establishing final text for your important article in the Denver Quarterly. Unfortunately, Mr. Feldman never received my letter of May 3, acknowledging with great thanks his gift of these materials..."

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"I thank you for your account of the presentation to you by Mr. Feldman of the manuscript material about which a three-way agreement had been arrived at. The description of your handling of the material corresponds with your previous assurances to me as to this matter:..."

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"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...

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"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."

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"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."