Dear Mr Warren:

I want to thank you for your letters telling me of your interesting project, "The Southern Review." Your initial list of contributors is impressive--and the magazine itself should gain the attention of an intelligent reading public.

I am sorry I have no verse to send you at this moment. I had just completed "Chorus For Survival" in January of this year and in it is included the best of my poetry written during a two year period. At present much of my time is taken up with a series of lectures that I am giving at Sarah Lawrence College. However, at this term's end, in June, I shall time to collect whatever verse I have in mind, prepare it for publication and write new poems. At that time I plan to write a few essays, and among them is a study of Edgar Poe. Would you be interested in a Poe essay? No one in our generation has done an intelligent revaluation of his poetry, and The Southern Review is the very place, I think, where such an essay would be appropriate. Will you let me know if my idea seems feasible?

Thank you again.

3932 44th St
Long Island City
N.Y.

Dear Mr Warren:

You may use my name in a list of future contributors
to The Southern Review.

essay

I have not yet started work on the Poe, but I
found time to complete a short piece on Churton Collins. Collins
may seem well out of range in contemporary criticism, but I think
not. Surely he, more than any other late Victorian, prepared an
entrance for Pound in London, which possibly accounts for Eliot's
(shall I say "instinctive"?) mention of him in the Cyril Tourneur.
In talking to Eliot I spoke of Collins and Eliot replied that
though he knew little about him, he had a debt of gratitude to
anyone who had attacked Gosse. As a matter of fact I think it
likely that Collins's brief "life" of Dryden gave Eliot "back-
ground" for his own essay on Dryden--and the Van Doren Dryden
merely recites (not too intelligently) the research that had
gone into Collins's work.

It is because I believe Collins deserves more
than a footnote that I have revived him here. Gosse's method
of reply to Collins was nothing short of deliberated murder
(a trick in literary politics that is by no means obsolete)
and I feel that something should be done toward restoring
Collins's reputation. Perhaps this essay doesn't fit your
plans for The Southern Review, but there is I think sufficient
critical issue
interest in the ## it contains to stimulate further inquiry.
Anyway I am enclosing it.