Now, as to your other questions. I’ll take them in order. 1. What has contemporary poetry already accomplished? Answer--All that poetry can be expected to do is to give pleasure of a noble sort to its readers, leading them to the contemplation of that Beauty which neither words nor sculptures nor pigments can do more than faintly reflect, and to express the mental and spiritual tendencies of the people of the lands and times in which it is written. I have very little chance to read contemporary poetry out here, but I hope it is reflecting the virtues which are blossoming on the blood-soaked soil of this land--courage, and self-abnegation, and love, and faith--this last not faith in some abstract goodness, but faith in God and His Son and the Holy Ghost, and in the Church which God Himself founded and still rules. France has turned to her ancient Faith with more passionate devotion than she has shown for centuries. I believe that America is learning the same lesson from the war, and is cleansing herself of cynicism and pessimism and materialism and the lust for novelty which has hampered our national development. I hope that our poets already see this tendency and rejoice in it--if they do not they are unworthy of their craft. 2. What is American poetry’s influence to-day? Answer--This question I am ill-prepared to answer, but I would venture to surmise that the extravagances and decadence of the so-called “renascence of poetry” during the last five years--a renascence distinguished by the celebration of the queer and the nasty instead of the beautiful--have made the poet seem as silly a figure to the contemporary American as he seemed to the Englishman of the eighteen-nineties, when the “æsthetic movement” was at its foolish height. 3. What of American poetry’s future? Answer--To predict anything of American poetry’s future requires a knowledge of America’s future, and I am not a student of political economy. But this much I will tell you--when we soldiers get back to our homes and have the leisure to read poetry, we won’t read the works of Amy Lowell and Edgar Lee Masters. We’ll read poetry, if there is any for us to read, and I hope there will be. I believe there will. Sincerely yours, JOYCE KILMER. * * * * * _To Thomas Walsh_ Headquarters Co., 165th Infantry, A. E. F., France. April. Dear Tom: