I like to think of the Greeks as setting out for the colonies in Sicily and the Italian Peninsula. The Greek temperament lent itself to a certain symmetrical sculptural phase and to a fat poetical balance of line that produced important work but I like better the Greeks setting their backs to Athens. The ferment was always richer in Rome, the dispersive explosion was always nearer, the influence carried further and remained hot longer. Hellenism, especially the modern sort, is too staid, too chilly, too little fecundative to impregnate my world. Hilda Doolittle before she began to write poetry or at least before she began to show it to anyone would say: “You’re not satisfied with me, are you Billy? There’s something lacking, isn’t there?” When I was with her my feet always seemed to be sticking to the ground while she would be walking on the tips of the grass stems. Ten years later as assistant editor of the Egoist she refers to my long poem, March, which thanks to her own and her husband’s friendly attentions finally appeared there in a purified form: _14 Aug. 1916_ Dear Bill:— I trust you will not hate me for wanting to delete from your poem all the flippancies. The reason I want to do this is that the beautiful lines are so very beautiful—so in the tone and spirit of your _Postlude_—(which to me stands, a Nike, supreme among your poems). I think there is _real_ beauty—and real beauty is a rare and sacred thing in this generation—in all the pyramid, Ashur-ban-i-pal bits and in the Fiesole and in the wind at the very last. I don’t know what you think but I consider this business of writing a very sacred thing!—I think you have the “spark”—am sure of it, and when you speak _direct_ are a poet. I feel in the hey-ding-ding touch running through your poem a derivitive tendency which, to me, is not _you_—-not your very self. It is as if you were _ashamed_ of your Spirit, ashamed of your inspiration!—as if you mocked at your own song. It’s very well to _mock_ at yourself—it is a spiritual sin to mock at your inspiration— _Hilda._ Oh well, all this might be very disquieting were it not that “sacred” has lately been discovered to apply to a point of arrest where stabilization has gone on past the time. There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.