October26, 1985

Dear Peter:

I am tardy here, but that was beyobd my help. The most difficult impediment was the sudden hospitalization of Eleaner's sister with pneumonia - not the best ailment for a lady with oxygen for emphazima. She has recovered enough to go home.

How for the book, I have been reading it - first for the compelling interest that it evokes, and later more slowly, and carefully, piece by piece. Not as a whole, but piece by piece. I came away with the conviction that the author is indeed a writer, a real one for there is great vividness abd movement here.

Now I must say that I am not sure that the writer has written poems - in any final sense. I do not mean the degree of goodness or badness here, unit by unit. Prose in a narrative can be compelling, vivid, evocative, etc. It can underline the facts of narrative or scebe, can make the inner meaning available, can be essential to the final, most significant, meaning of the whole. But prose works bu diffusion, I might hazard.

Poetry does not. Not characteristically, though sometimes, especially in long narrative of sramatic pieces, In poetry - in the sense of the shorter forms anyway - we did not observe the diffusion, but by the focus and embodiment od meaning. No, at the best it becomes meaning, at least the dramatization of meaning as abstractly conceived.

In poetry the reader (and of course the writer may be said to embody, physically, the meaning the drama, for any poem, or almost any poem, can be thought of as a drama, however remote). There is the muscular play, usually unconscious and however incipient, the string sense of actual articulation (even when the poem is read silently, vowel play felt, pquse and thrust, pace, and God knows what else. The first example to pop into my mind is from Antony and Cleopatra, one line, after Actiumx, Antony speaking:

Unarm, Eros; the long day's task is done,

What I said here may be paraphrased:

Discard your weapon, Eros; we've had a tough day