3 THE MALL PARKHILL ROAD LONDON NW3

GULLIVER 4538

17.4.35

Dear Mr Brooks,

Thank you for your letter of the 1st. I think the best I can do is to send you the page proofs of a pamphlet I am publishing shortly, and give you permission to cut an article out of it for your new review. If you take from the beginning to page 16 where marked in red, it would make a short article which might be called "Art and the Revolutionary Attitude". It would be better if you could carry on to page 23, and include the last paragraph on pp.29-30. That would make a much better statement of the question; the title I have suggested might still stand,

I hope you will be able to carry out your promise of payment, to send this article because I had intended to the *Yale Review*, from whom I should have received a fee. But I think the subject-matter is more suitable to a youthful project like yours.

I am sorry I have no poetry on hand: it has all been gathered up for the collected edition which Harcourt Brace are just bringing out in your country.

I should be glad if you would let me know soon whether you intend to use this essay.

Cleanth Brooks, Jr.
The Southern Quarterly

GULLIVER 4538

30.5.35

Dear Mr Brooks,

Thank you very much for your letter of the 11th.
I agree with your proposals as to the cutting of the essay,
and I will see what I can do about substituting literature
for painting. This may not always be possible, because the
development of modern painting is so much clearer than that
of literature. But I will see what I can do.

GULLIVER 4538

9.6.35

Dear Mr Brooks,

I have not found it possible to make extensive alterations to my essay, but I have inserted a paragraph connecting up the argument with literature and hope you will find that this makes it more generally intelligible. Incidentally the paragraph explains why I feel it necessary to retain the illustrations from the art of painting.

GULLIVER 4538

30.11.55

Dear Mr Brooks,

I duly received the cheque for my article, for which many thanks. My own contribution apart, may I congratulate you on this autumn number! I like especially the serious way in which you treat poetry, and I am immensely struck by John Peale Bishop's poems; he is a new discovery for me. I appreciated Howard Baker's criticism of my own poems; it is the first time, I believe, that anyone has attempted to relate my poetry to my critical theories, and that is a compliment I value very much. There is only one point in his article which cries out for contradiction - that on p.390 where he asks: "if judgment is innate, why is not a youthful work of art as great as a mature one?" But that is precisely what, so often, it is. Is not "The Prelude" a greater work than the mature "Excursion"?

I am sending you for consideration an essay on Shelley which I have just written. It will be published here for the first time in a volume of essays to be issued sometime in January next. No arrangements have been made so far for the publication of the volume in America. As you will see, it is much too long as it stands for magazine publication. But I would make two alternative suggestions. You could try to print the essay as a whole excluding those passages

which I have put between blue-pencil brackets. This reduces
the bulk by about one third. Or you could take sections
III and IV and publish them without any deletions under
some such title as "The Psychological Analysis of a Poet".
On the whole, I think the second alternative is the best
one, though it involves a good deal of quotation from
original sources.

In any case, I hope you will give the essay your
careful consideration, because I think it is the best
illustration I have yet given of the psychological
method in criticism, and I should be very happy to see
its appearance in such a sympathetic journal as "The
Southern Review".