Box 1

Scope and Contents

"This correspondence to Cohen, Editor in Chief of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, begins discussion of the publication from her Collected Poems (1938) a selection, with a preface by Riding setting forth her current ideas about poetry."

....

"Cohen had Riding's preface read by Stanley Burnshaw, a writer who served as advistor, and he recommended rejection of the preface in harsh personal terms."

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"I, as you see, am still in New Mexico (I told of planning to go there for a month or so in the letter I sent to Mallorca)."

....

"I have not yet gone to work on the drafting of new prefatory material for a republishing of my Poems, but I have all the necessary material with me--and have been doing some new writing on the matter of poetry, which makes more to draw from."

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"...to provide you with information about the possibilities of new unpublished work of mine, that might be of interest to you and your editorial associates, and to give you my views on the matter of the republication of earlier work of mine."

Scope and Contents "I owe it to Mr. Burnshaw, I feel, in the circumstances of my having had to speak with severe openness to him, that he should know whatever I might have further to say on his part in the dealings with me to you."....."It may be helpful to mutual understanding for me to tell you that I have no personally adverse feeling towards you or Mr. Burnshaw on yours or his viewing my presented preface for a possible reissue of my Poems with disfavor in that connection."...

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"Your letter to which I am here replying occasions for me but two references to matter contained in my letter of yesterday. 1) You make no mention of the typescript-text of the preface I submitted."

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"2) Perhaps what I wrote yesterday on the matter of a preface by myself as distnguished from a prefatory note will clarify my attitude to an introduction by some person (other than myself) better than anything previously written by me:..."

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"I write so from a sense of duty...; and duty to all others--no one ought to let another who has behaved with the sly arrogance with which you have behaved to me go forth again to other human encounters without attempting to impress upon him that the inner springs of his behavior are not totally invisible..."

...

"And so you make an ignorant mess of my preface. I'll tip you off as to just how badly you can mess it up."

Scope and Contents "I owe it to you, because of how I have felt about you, to tell you that you have hurt me by how you have treated me. (Not angered me, as Mr. Burnshaw has angered me.)"...."I think you owe me, at the least, some apologies. First ought to come one for making no response to my two requests of my letter of February 14th, and obliging me to write to you in reiteration of them. Second, for making no response to the second of my reiterated requests.".......

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"I regard Mr. Burnshaw's sending the letter to you to return to me as identical in quality with other pettily devious behavior-manifestations of his I have had to witness, having an edge that he mistakenly thinks to be ironical."

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"This is the question of your part in the dealings that have been going on between the firm of Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., and myself. Your letter of February fourth confirms for me a strong sense I early had, after your active participation in these dealings, of the possibility of there having come to figure in them quite inappropriate literarily personalistic slants of attitude towards me."

Scope and Contents From the Collection:

Correspondence and manuscripts of the American poet. Handwritten and carbon copy typescripts.