2 Oct. 41

Dear Robert Penn Warren,

I betcha you wont like these poems.
It requires a lot of guts to turn this kind of trick in these
latter days of Belmore Schwartz.

For epigraph, instead of the Maximian,
they might well bear:

There was an Old Man who said, "Hush,
I think there's a bird in this Bush."
When They said, "Is it small?"
He Replied, "Not at all,
It is four times the size of the bush."

and/or, (as Ezra says):

...it is possible to see how a passage deliberately stereotyped
in a certain measure, yet with a slight but precise mixture of per-
ception, may at once define a traditional concept and the relation-
ship of that concept to a personal perception, in fact the
entire relationship of personal to traditional feeling- and the
perception of such a relationship is in itself and as a whole a
profoundly personal or original perception- in a manner more
successful than any other conceivable; this procedure however,
presupposes a theme, a sense of history, or tradition, and a
recognition of the poetic art as a technique of judgment, and it
necessitates incidentally a masterly understanding and control of
meter.
(AYW on EA Poe)

(Arthur would quarrel about what I call meter. but that is
life.)

Besides these I havent much but some translations from
Late Latin and the Greek Anthology. And with them some epitaphs
and epigrams and brief elegies by me. I will send them later.

Dont keep these forever. This is a much bigger investment
of mss. than I usually make, but I specially fancy myself in the
Southern Review.

When are you coming to Cal.?