I have discovered that the thrill of first love passes! It even becomes the backbone of a sordid sort of religion if not assisted in passing. I knew a man who kept a candle burning before a girl’s portrait day and night for a year—then jilted her, pawned her off on a friend. I have been reasonably frank about my erotics with my wife. I have never or seldom said, my dear I love you, when I would rather say: My dear, I wish you were in Tierra del Fuego. I have discovered by scrupulous attention to this detail and by certain allied experiments that we can continue from time to time to elaborate relationships quite equal in quality, if not greatly superior, to that surrounding our wedding. In fact, the best we have enjoyed of love together has come after the most thorough destruction or harvesting of that which has gone before. Periods of barrenness have intervened, periods comparable to the prison music in Fidelio or to any of Beethoven’s pianissimo transition passages. It is at these times our formal relations have teetered on the edge of a debacle to be followed, as our imaginations have permitted, by a new growth of passionate attachment dissimilar in every member to that which has gone before. It is in the continual and violent refreshing of the idea that love and good writing have their security. * * * * * Alfred Kreymborg is primarily a musician, at best an innovator of musical phrase: We have no dishes to eat our meals from. We have no dishes to eat our meals from because we have no dishes to eat our meals from … We need no dishes to eat our meals from, we have fingers to eat our meals from. Kreymborg’s idea of poetry is a transforming music that has much to do with tawdry things. Few people know how to read Kreymborg. There is no modern poet who suffers more from a bastard sentimental appreciation. It is hard to get his things from the page. I have heard him say he has often thought in despair of marking his verse into measures as music is marked. Oh, well— The man has a bare irony, the gift of rhythm and Others. I smile to think of Alfred stealing the stamps from the envelopes sent for return of MSS. to the Others office! The best thing that could happen for the good of poetry in the United States today would be for someone to give Alfred Kreymborg a hundred thousand dollars. In his mind there is the determination for freedom brought into relief by a crabbedness of temper that makes him peculiarly able to value what is being done here. Whether he is bull enough for the work I am not certain, but that he can find his way that I know. * * * * *