Columbia University
in the City of New York

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
AND
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

HAMILTON HALL

December 4, 1939.

Dear Mr. Brooks:

It is of course flattering and delightful that you should
like some of my poems well enough to want to publish them. The
grounds for your choice seem fairly clear to me in most cases, the
preference of "Secento" to "Apocalypse" being the only thing that
puzzles me. But probably my feeling in this is autobiographical
rather than critical.

I am sending along a few other poems, with rather mixed
feelings. These, with the exception of "The Horn's High Brass",
were written before I submitted the original ten to you, and were
held back by me as inferior, or, in one case ("Others Have Had
Their Hour") as too personal to be likely to interest strangers.
I regret not having more to show you, but I am not a very pro-
lific writer--that is, I discard or leave unfinished many more poems
than I carry through. Also, my choice is limited by the fact that
I consider only those poems written within the last ten months or
so (as all of these have been) worthy of attention.

It is not surprising that you should know nothing about me:
there is very little to know. I am at present an instructor in Eng-
lish in Columbia University, where I took an A.B. in 1933 and an
A.M. this year. Four of the intervening years (1934-1938) I spent
abroad, studying at Cambridge University (Clare College), and tra-
velling fairly widely on the continent during the six free months
each year. I took an Honours B.A. there, and will soon have my M.A.
I published some poems in the "Cambridge Review" while in England, but
it really would be kinder to pass these over in silence. This will
be my first publication in a public magazine--also, incidentally, it
is the first time I have submitted poems anywhere. If a "find" at
all, I am yours: you are at the moment the member of select audience
of less than a dozen people--two of these are Delmore Schwartz and
Mark Van Doren, the latter of whom suggested that I submit my poems
for publication. My age--if this is at all important--is 25.

The bareness of the facts to be summarized makes the last para-
graph quite blunt. May I end, then, with an expression of my grati-
tude for the attention you have paid to these poems, and the care with
which you have obviously read them.