“I think with you that poetry should be definite thought and clear expressions, however subtle; I don’t think there should be any vagueness at all, but a sense of something hidden and felt to be there. Now, when my things fail to be clear, I am sure it is because of the luckless choice of a word or the failure to introduce a word that would flash my idea plain, as it is to my own mind. I believe my Amazon poem to be my best poem. If there is any difficulty, it must be in words here and there, the changing or elimination of which may make the poem clear. It has taken me about a year to write; for I have changed and rechanged it and thought hard over that poem, and striven to get that sense of inexorableness the human (or unhuman) side of this war has. It even penetrates behind human life; for the ‘Amazon’ who speaks in the second half of the poem is imagined to be without her lover yet, while all her sisters have theirs, the released spirits of the slain earth-men; her lover yet remains to be released.” _To Miss Seaton (1916)._ “Many thanks for book and chocolate. Both are being devoured with equal pleasure. I can’t get quite the delight in Whitman as from one poem of his I know—‘Captain, my Captain.’ I admire the vigour and independence of his mind, but his diction is so diffused. Emerson and not Whitman is America’s poet. You will persist in refusing to see my side of our little debate on criticism. Everybody has agreed with you about the faults, and the reason is obvious; the faults are so glaring that nobody can fail to see them. But how many have seen the beauties? And it is here more than the other that the true critic shows himself. And I absolutely disagree that it is blindness or carelessness; it is the brain succumbing to the herculean attempt to enrich the world of ideas.” _To Laurence Binyon (1916)._