XXX 500 W 122 St NYC April 21/50

Dr. Williams

THANKS

for reading (as I write
the radio is tuned) last night
from your work (by some accident to
station something-or-other)

At coffee afterwards
everybody said (from Paterson NJ)
you put yourself into it

the wind fire water, and you
let go for the time being the (they've just played)

metrics and idea (a song:)
But
you must have felt hurried and distracted

And but
you were making poetry oral again

--my ears are out of practice (chuck that in)
--what he needs is a portable harp (to prove)

--'taint easy
(We need a language)

Nevertheless (a good time was had)
you added a dimension to (anyhow, Mr.P)

Paterson

258 West 22 Street
New York 11, N.Y.

Thursday, July 21, 1955

Dear William Carlos Williams,

That was a thrilling letter you wrote
on the book Europe, one that I cannot soon forget. It makes me
think the book may have something of what I thought it had when I
finished the polishing and sent it to England to print. So far
a few people have been very enthusiastic for it, two of them poets
and one a publisher in Toronto; the rest are luke warm comments
with silly criticisms. If it isn't full of metrics and inversions
they think it's prose, as the review which will appear in Origin
says. Also, most people like to show their critical faculties by
damning some one part of the book: but I find no consistency, some of
them praise most what the others damn completely. Your own reaction
to the France section was at least a genuine response; that's the
hard part to get over, but it is the rock of the poem, and once
over that into Spain -- "Yes, you should come south..." -- I think
the reader should go right on emotionally into Greece.

The first part sets up the theme of the sea, the end is a vision,
"thinking the thoughts of Plato, of Solon, and the perfect republic."
The one that took my head off writing is just that one on the
Acropolis, and it is in the structure of it, the peak of the book.
I really think the book wrote itself, had its own energy and form.

I hope your health is recovering and that you
can think back with joy to the great things you have written. I teach
the stuff, so I should know. It's a wonderful job to give the
students that kind of thing. I wish I knew more to do it better.

I am here in NYC for the summer with my wife
Stephanie. If you are well enough to receive pilgrims for a
half-hour visit, we'd ride in there some afternoon or morning
with the Morris car that took us about Europe. Canadian
writers are having a Conference (paid by Rockefeller) at Kingston,
Ontario, next weekend, but in two weeks' time I'll be back; so
perhaps them. But not unless you say so, and would like to
talk about poets in Canada and about our own poetry.

781 Beatty Avenue
Montreal 19, Canada

Dec. 4, 1958

Dear Dr. Williams,

Sorry, sorry to hear of your second stroke.

I do hope you'll pull out of that. My aunt (very old) was completely immobile two years ago when it hit her, and now she 'hops around like a two-year old' (to quote Chaplin's Limelight: I'm walking, Calvero...). I knew of course of your first one, and was glad, as everyone was, to see you coming along. Do it again now, poetry, we poets, need you.

For sudden contrast, my wife Stephanie has brought forth a boy, born on Oct. 11, so that, with teaching, editing Delta, and walking the baby half the night, I haven't had time to respond at once to your letter. It was one of those good letters that forever keep the postman a man of wonderful promise: the letter we wait for.

The "Note on Metrics" seems to have struck a responsive chord in many places, though of course the ideas in it are familiar enough-- maybe old hat toy ou, what you've always been preaching, and for me what I now take to be obvious, the ABC of method. However, the young need it all over again, and the snobs who have slid back into the axle-deep ruts of quatrain & metre will have to get it right in the pants to be pulled out of there. I know that I am bored beforehand by any poem cast in regular lines: an interesting disposition on the page attracts me. Anything