Queer crazy stuff, every line of it, but fascinating too—in a way. One got into a new world with new values, which after all is I suppose what poetry is all about. There was the world of fact—we all know or think we know—the world of flat buildings and middle-western farms with wire fences about the fields and fordson tractors running up and down, and towns with high schools and advertising billboards, and everything that makes up life—or that we think makes up life. There was this world, we all walk about in, and then there was this other world, that I have come to think of as Wilson’s world—a dim place to me at least—of far-away near places—things taking new and strange shapes, the insides of people coming out, the eyes seeing new things, the fingers feeling new and strange things. It was a place of walls mainly. I got hold of the whole lot of Wilson’s verse by a piece of luck. It happened that I was the first newspaper man who got into the place on the night when the woman’s body was found, and there was all his stuff, carefully written out in a sort of child’s copy book, and two or three stupid policemen standing about. I just shoved the book under my coat, when they weren’t looking, and later, during Wilson’s trial, we published some of the more intelligible ones in the paper. It made pretty good newspaper stuff—the poet who killed his mistress, “He did not wear his purple coat, For blood and wine are red”— and all that. Chicago loved it. To get back to the poetry itself for a moment. I just wanted to explain that all through the book there ran this notion, that men had erected walls about themselves and that all men were perhaps destined to stand forever behind the walls—on which they constantly beat with their fists, or with whatever tools they could get hold of. Wanted to break through to something, you understand. One couldn’t quite make out whether there was just one great wall or many little individual walls. Sometimes Wilson put it one way, sometimes another. Men had themselves built the walls and now stood behind them, knowing dimly that beyond the walls there was warmth, light, air, beauty, life in fact—while at the same time, and because of a kind of madness in themselves, the walls were constantly being built higher and stronger. The notion gives you the fantods a little, doesn’t it? Anyway it does me. And then there was that notion about deep wells, men everywhere constantly digging and digging themselves down deeper and deeper into deep wells. They not wanting to do it, you understand, and no one wanting them to do it, but all the time the thing going on just the same, that is to say the wells getting constantly deeper and deeper, and the voices growing dimmer and dimmer in the distance—and again the light and the warmth of life going away and going away, because of a kind of blind refusal of people to try to understand each other, I suppose.