After 5 days, return to
WILLIAM C. WILLIAMS, M. D.,
9 Ridge Road,
RUTHERFORD, N. J.

Tuesday

Damn it all Viola :

You're right and so am I. You're right there
is no poetry lifting its head with the warmth and sheer
life in it which MAKES poetry, from your point of view and
from everybody's point of view. All that is written now is
half starved, bloodless - Poetry must have the arena to
itself, it must claim the arena and fill it - as Virgil has
intimated - before it can be acclaimed as poetry. So too a half
starved lump of filth picked up near the northern wall of
China must be fed, bathed, taught and generally blown upon by
human breaths before it can be recognised to be the person of
the lost emperor.

But that is no reason why men should not know
that lost emperors exist even though starved and spat on etc.
That is no reason why someone more keenly awake to what he is
looking for than someone who doesn't know a starving emperor when
he sees one shouldn't speak the truth.

I say that the work of the modern devotees of
the art of verse are true followers of the muse even when they
are coldest and most starved.

All the gush and sentiment in the world will not
take the place of accurate observation. When a boy who will be
the true and recognised poet of 1938 has read SOME of the best
and coldest verse produced today he will be in exactly the
position he should be in to produce GREAT poetry in the usual
sense, even in the true sense if you will. He will have the
bones of his art AT THE START. He may then go on and build his
pink and velvet flesh into those bones; Without structure
there can be no champions. I believe that had the goddamned
Victorians not tried to fill their jars with nectar before the
jars themselves were completed they would have saved the world
fifty or sixty years of **** garbage carrying. They've nearly
all got to be fired out of the house before we can BEGIN in
English at any rate.

Pound is no damn fool when he calls on us to
witness the French. He doesn't tell us to IMITATE them he says
OBSERVE them then go about your own business with what love
and gentleness etc. there is left in you when the world has
given away the fur scarf you should have had to the janitress.

Yet you are right and Virgil is right. I agree
with you both and I like you immensely and maybe if you love me
enough I may impregnate you --- **** ## with a poem
some day . . And you me. I make a date with you, huh ?

Farewell, your poem says to me what you want
it to say and it is a good poem and I may use it in my sheet
(not sheets) but it lacks structure. We'll see.

After 5 days. return to
WM. C. WILLIAMS, M. D.,
9 Ridge Road,
RUTHERFORD, N. J.

Viola 8. Jordan
tenefly
new Jersey