Poetry
A Magazine of Verse

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE

232 EAST ERIE STREET • CHICAGO

July 22, 1943

Dear Mr. Williams:

I was glad to see "Axioms" and appreciate
your sending it, and have been duly pondering
its interesting assertions. I wish it had
come a little sooner though, as I hate to run
anything two months after that which provoked
it— though sometimes of course that is
unavoidable. Today, with printers' and binders'
slowness due to help shortage, we have to
keep shooting everything to them as fast as
we can.

I'm glad the prose commentaries got you heard
from again. I was particularly interested in
your paragraph about them controversy between
the Church and naturalism. What you say is
quite true, that the Catholic Church should
not be regarded as representing Christianity,
certainly not religion, as a whole. And yet,
in the conversions of the intellectuals to
which I referred, it is always the Catholic
Church to which they turn, nein? Perhaps
it is true that "it is no controversy at all",
and yet there must be some essential opposition
for the two camps are always coming to grips
on questions that are central to one's
orientation, to society if not to the universe
itself. And the Catholic Church is perhaps
more vigorous than any other institution in
condemning naturalism, and laying to its door

Editors: PETER DE VRIES, MARION STROBEL • Associate Editors: KATINKA LOESER, MARGEDANT PETERS • Business Manager: GERALDINE

UDELL • Advisory Committee: GEORGE DILLON, JESSICA NELSON NORTH, EUNICE TIETJENS, LEW SARETT • Associate Committee:

ROBERT MORSS LOVETT, PERCY H. BOYNTON, THORNTON WILDER • Eastern Business Representative: AMY BONNER