March 29, 1941

Mr. Richard Eberhart
St. Mark's School
Southborough, Mass.

Dear Eberhart:

I am sure that to you Warren and I must seem to
be carrying on a rather aimless flirtation with
you about your work. There is so much in it that
we like and yet we are always sending back some-
thing with a qualification. Please be patient
with us. We are really interested and we are
trying to be honest. Your essay on Empson is
another instance, I'm afraid. We are interested
in Empson and interested in much that you have
to say about him, but we are not sure that this
is the essay. In part, our difficulty is with
the tone which seems too personal for anything
of this type--or to put it otherwise, the personal
tone dffesome parts of the essay doesn't seem to
jibe with the tone of other parts. If Ransom does
not take if and if you care to let us have another
shot at it, we should be delighted to look at it
again in a reworked version.

With best wishes,

The Cambridge School,
Kendal Green, Mass.

October 21, 1941

Dear Mr. Warren:

I am happy to have your letter of Oct. 14. I am really more grateful
than you might realize that you have taken three poems. May I also thank
you for the return of other MSS. Instead of immediately sending you
further short pieces to 'fill out a group' I am enclosing Act I of a
verse drama on the ways. I hope you will agree that it is the best
work I have done for a long time, and that you will want to print this
as a section in itself, with the three poems making up a fair body of
work. I am enormously enthused about the play, which unfolds - but as
ever, the Muses give their goods stubbornly, one must wait for the
witching hour.

On Aug. 29 I got married, which is my news, plus a new job in 'prog-
ressive' education, so please use the above address. The Oxford Press NY
was to have had their Amer. ed. of SONG AND IDEA out by November, but
it looks very much as if the sheets were sunk on the way over as they
have not arrived yet. Maybe the book won't appear until early in the new
year.

Did you enjoy your year at Iowa? I wrote A. Warren and others trying
to get a post there, but to no avail. How did you like it there?

If your recent work I have much enjoyed 'Crime', which moved me.
('at the violet', a touch of utter deftness). In the oaks poem 'We
live in time so little time / And we learn all so painfully' spoke
directly to me, whereas the formality of the last line checked that
powerful directness: I wished 3 and 4 had been, for me, so good. In the
Picnic poem one line has stuck in my head, 'To mock Time's marvelling
after-spies', with some kind of reminiscence, but not actually, of
Hardy, while the last line of that poem in its last two words was
unconvincing, somehow. But Crime cuts down to where I feel.

I believe somebody is giving us a subscription for a present; please
find out when mine was out and send from there - I seem to have missed
a number or more, but have files back for years. Regards to Brooks; tell
him I am using his analyses of the Waste Land and Ash Wednesday here,
as well as quite extensively your U P.

December 31, 1941

Dear Mr. Warren:

Enclosed are some poems to 'fill out a group' from the three you have taken. I have not had word from you in answer to my letter of Oct. 21 encl:ensing passages from a verse play which I hope you will use in addition to the three poems you have selected. I trust you will let me know at once your determination in regard to the play lines. But should you not wish to present those, I am sending some work I herewith which I do not believe you have seen, from which you may find something you like.

I am sure I could get permission for the publishing of A World-View, if you want it. It appeared in a non copyright college magazine.

Imalso send a page of prose some time ago about meeting Yeats in Dublin once. Did this get lost in the shuffle? Please return it if you did not use it.

Book news: SONG AND IDEA, Chatto, was to have appeared last month in NY from Oxford, but the sheets were sunk on the way over. Latest report is that Chatto has send a second set of sheets, now probably en route, which, if it arrives, will conduct the book into print probably by late spring. (The best review thus far was in Scrutiny, Dec. 1940, by W H Mellers). You should notice that both "In the night when destruction shall shake the world" and "I walked out to the Graveyard to see the dead" are from Song and Idea, but your third poem, The Extreme Water, has not as yet been published. You could note further that "I walked out --" is one of the poems spoken by me for the Harvard Vocarium records on one of the two disks I made for them.

Enclosures:

A World-View (pamphlet)
Nonino Dialectic
Kafka's America
The Dream
The Instrument
Baudelaire - Rimbaud
Limitations of the world

The Lyric Absolute
To H.E.B.
Stripoff --
Rumination
I will not dare
In view of McGillicuddy's Reeks

January 21, 1942

Dear Mr. Warren:

I have yours of Jan. 15. Please note the above address, as you
sent your letter to my old address. Yesterday I posted you a note
asking whether you were taking any of the verse play I sent you
quite some time ago.

The folding up of the SR is a gloomy outlook; I deeply hope you
can find means against it. Yet that may be a sentimental outlook.
The SR has undoubtedly been the best literary journal in the country
for a long course already; you both deserve the profoundest thanks
for your efforts to make it and keep it so. I mention sentimentality,
because we may count ourselves lucky if we get through this war
with our lives. Schwartz told me of the folding process; I only
yesterday received the Yeats number, which looks like long looks.
I am sorry you did not print my reminiscence of an evening with the
massive gentleman; you might send the Mss. back if it is lying around.

What crazy times: I think of my own obliqueness - barely creeping
into your magazine as the curtain goes down. I think of the irony
of H. Long his thoughtless gold applied to literary excellence he
could not have imagined. I think (and Jay is a friend) of the irony
of reputations made on the arbitrary choice of a rich man, of N D
backed by the Pittsburgh mills grinding out metal and lives oblivious
to the 'Poets of the Month.'

I am glad you like 'Song.' My copy for you personally. Jim
Angleton has taken it for the next FURIOSO. If you do have more
room in Spring, or are to continue, I am anxious that you look
carefully at the verse play text. But I send back some of these you
have sent me back, just in case. Others, since I sent them, have
gone to the grist of print - O. Wms took Kafka's America and The Dream
for his new New Poems 1941. I dislike to print a poem until some
years has gone over it; but even that may not be a sure way. There
is no sure way. Lucky to find any way at all.

I hardly think it possible for Song and Idea to appear in NY
before your Spring issue; if there is any danger, I'll certainly let
you know. You could mention the book, and its history, in your
contributor's column, if you wish, I should think. If this fails, I
have already been approached for 'Selected Poems' or some such; maybe
one should be selected while possible, but I don't enthuse over the
notion. Poetry is excavation of the deepest recesses; the danger is
always to not reach them, or to print too much, or to become bes-
tablished'. But not exfoliating is a devitalization. What a murky
business - and hardly a dollar in it. I hope you will get your $7
book redone so people can afford it. But to wait long, long, may
be to be best rewarded. How I would like to see your verse play: the
type begins to interest me thoroughly.

If you should ever come up this way be sure to let me know. I
have no idea what M day in Feb. will do to me, but being 37 and now
wived I suppose I won't have to bayonet anybody. At present I am an
Air Raid Warden in Weston.

Best to you and Brooks,

June 25, 1942

Dear Mr. Brooks, Mr. Warren, or Other:

Today I received a missile in the form of a carbon of some verne
lines which I requested to be sent back months ago. Why this mat-
terial should be sent airmail without any note enclosed is beyond
me. inasmuch as I have been for some time looking for proof on
the three poems of mine you have for inclusion in your final
issue, which I thought would have been out by this time.

Please send proof on those poems airmail at once if you intend
to use them, and thanks for the odd return of fore-bemoaned copy,

Richard Eberhart

# The Human Being

## I

Fingers are largely filibusters, fictive flukes.
Forever fashions. Nero nearly burned his;
When very infantile, they are more frore.
La Fontaine fabled his. Fond embalmers.
They are the end results of fever's factions,
The end-all; fair beyond them air, forever.
They fence in fictions; are fenced with; offend
If you intrude. Or, can flesh-pain efface,
Fobs of conduct and flood carriers of hope.
Jesus had them. His fell, like flowers aflame.
The fervid, the fond, the feverous, and offenders
Have flame fingers, facts forced from Fateland.
Too few filaments they are, and feathery and foamy,
They pray and work for our fulfillment.

## II

Eyes are spies they eye the sky. Fly,
Eyes, in possibility; and high, not cry.
Who says an eye can die? Not I.
I have seen them, I have said, in the daisies.
Suppose them terms of godliness, nigh.
Though double-stringed, and though the soul shy,
To God they go in single archery.
Or are the boy's chief book, a man's warm dread;
Hatred's context's whistling thistles' try,
To love's alchemy the many-mingling dye,
And are again the send of wisdom's head.
Word far from eyes! world unbecome eyes!
Sense-organs of my new mythology.
The die of truth. (They die of truth). Eye, I.

## III

Ears are enterers of music's clearing.
Queer and dear they ache for beauty sheer,
They fear the world, they silence near (hear)
Testing (allwhere, theewhere, here) Truth.
They the lusèous caves of murmurous noon.
In them the summer comes, and preens; greens
Melodious seem. They farm earth's tremble-teem;
Vale-voles of a violin evening.
Hear nor Fear nor affront nor Tear nor friend.
Hear nor men nor weird; nor faction hear.
But harmony acquire, acquiring, it-aspire
Godhead clear, in the perfection of the ear.
Be the bier and meant death of music,
Be resurrected contemplation's meter.

(luscious)

RE 2

## IV

Kinaesthesia keeps a friend in feet
In the toeing of round sand of Atlantis.
Seas flukes. They flesh the soul to the mountain;
The fullest stillest heart beyond thought they fit;
They are within a flame fleck of flight.
Yet force physical force that keeps man man,
Upright equilibriators. Feet of fresh risibilities,
In the rivers of old rituals, risen to stand
On land, for foliating, prayerful hands;
From non-fanatic and faultless torso's focus.
Fallopian tubes to baby-bouncing action,
Steam-engine-pistons to the hundred yard dash,
Flutes of fawns before some final fashion,
The rocks of Buddha first, the rocks of Buddha last.

## V

Mouth can music a manmocked world and work
A world open. Meandering breath,
Speak silence, Ilaria del Caretto jewelled;
That I mount nude mysteries the same.
Mound of death tooth-crossed, O multitudinous
Thy mansions of verisimilitude.
Motion in the moving of the living verb.
Crux, and crust-last mean. Can work the cold.
Though wisdom stammer its murmur, though genius whirl,
And ruin sweep its swift prophetic bayonets,
Awake! mouth makes magnificent pain,
Christ's mouth when He died, the mouth of all.
Sic ego componi versus in ossa velim
Will Fearing win at the New Kid picnic?
win

Richard Eberhart

SONG

There is a place in stoical Autumn, a glass
Where you look out on the world's case
As if you knew all;
There, the sticks are tall,
You know nothing but a geometric defacement.

And there was that terror in the streets of Paris,
Excess, assault upon danger,
And passionate anger
Of a drunken perfection: nights garish, fleet,
The whirl of the world's old mad caress.

Winter people go into their holes to think,
The snow on the summit, the chill in the chink,
Most you command life then,
There is peace to count ten,
Nothing rages, strong seems the weak link.

Or eerie in Ireland I heard tell a tale,
They cut a hole, they nailed with one nail
His guts to a tree,
I heard, but did not see
His revolutionary march, his revolutionary wail.

Spring is a convention; all is toys and poison.
It is almost the most subtle poison.
The blood like a mill,
Love arises willy-nilly,
Man is never of just what is going on.

Who has not seen them oft amid the skies
What Spaniard not, steely hornets,
Luck under dark, lust after Lorca,
Song being song, its victorious crises
Alone atone for his world-filch in a trice.

Equipoise in summer is a misnomer,
That great magical bloom
Forces the mind to a tomb
To atone for its most irreverent blunder,
Blossom is to blame for man being a gonner.

Name another hero now, name scores, or name
John Cornford: are the dead the same?
Do the spiritual winds presage
Hierarchical messages,
Is there a special mark in us for a special aim?