Norman Holmes Pearson

20 November 1940

Dear Wms:

How could I be anything but proud and pleased at yr
inscription in _In the Money_. If burbling with delight goes with
a fountain of courage then I'm yr man.

I picked up the package with _Poems_ in it, yesterday,
and am, with the Library, increasingly your debtor. The books
now rests in the Yale Collection of American Literature, safe
for (or from) posterity. I'll admit that it's quite a group of
poems. I doubt if any reformer worked quite so cleanly against
himself before. One of these poems read against one of your
laters gives a general survey of American poetry as well as your
particular one. It's somewhat like early Yeats versus revised
Yeats. Anyhow, my great thanks for what is a damned generous act
on your part, and one for which I am most grateful. God knows
how, without your help, either Yale's exhibition or collection of
your work could have been complete. I'll send off the ten bucks
to the Dorothy Parker fund with great pleasure. It's one of the
few funds to which it's a pleasure to give.

These are my halcyon days, and your benefactions ride
happily along on my good humor. My engagement is about to be
announced; and although I can't be married until spring, when I
finish up my graduate work at Yale, I already feel very much the
family man, very smug, very cock-o'-the-walk, very kitten with
tongue in a bowl of cream. Not only am I getting a very swell
gal, but two sweet little girls, of six and nine, thrown in for
God's good measure. It's one of these times when you walk into
an open door and find yourself quite unexpectedly at home. God,
it's good! I write myself all kinds of variously prefixed thalamia,
and feel myself to be as poem-worthy as an asphodel or a bit of
green glass in a courtyard.

Next summer, when we're settled and I'm staid, you and yr
Floss must weekend with us.

Did you, by the by, catch a glimpse of the interview with
Vincent Millay that was in last Saturday's N.Y. Post? It is one of
the classics of our time — an example of the horrors of delayed meno-
pause. If you haven't seen it, let me send you one of the extra
copies I bought. These things must not perish from the earth.

147 Cottage Street
New Haven, Connecticut.

Norman Holmes Pearson

2 April 1947

Dear Bill:

Herewith, for your information.

I do urge you strongly not to arrange the poems in
a selection of this sort under separate headings of the books
in which they first appeared. It looks scrappy, and is scrappy.
How much better, for example, even to be a little coy, and begin,
say, with Danse Russe and end with Writer's Prologue. After all,
yours has always been —thank God for it — personal poetry. The
metrics and the figures have come out of your own sensibility
in terms of your own voice. "The individual voice" is perhaps
the greatest achievement of a poet, and I bless you for that
achievement.

Nor should a volume of selected poems necessarily rep-
resent every aspect of your work. You should pick and chose among
the nominations in terms of the unity of the final selection. I
have simply given Laughlin a list of poems which I liked. I would
not necessarily include all of them in the volume if I were serving
as more than a member of the electoral college. What I can say is
that all of these are good. There are others that are good too,
and if I were making my choice tomorrow mebbe my list would be
different.

I hope it helps. It was a great experience to go through
the poems again. Salud!

April 1, 1947

Mr. James Laughlin
New Directions Press
500 Fifth Avenue
New York 18, New York

Dear J:

I was delighted to hear from you in your letter of the
twentieth and to learn that you are putting out a new selection
of Bill Williams' poems as one of The New Classics Series. I
had sent you a note at Christmas, after my return from the war,
but apparently your minions did not forward it to you at your
ski lodge.

Since 40 is a good round number, I have chosen the attached
group from his poems for your use in making up the new volume.
I have not included anything from his very early poems, nor
do I know the uncollected poems published in magazines since
the beginning of the war. No doubt there will be some of those
which you will wish to include. I do urge you in making up
your final table of contents not to order them simply accord-
ing to the volumes in which they appear. Bill ought to be
able, with your help, to give this book a character of its
own and not simply to be the useless scrap-book which "Selected's"
usually are.

NHP:KY
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