Lytle said to me when I was last in Cleveland, “What does it all amount to if you aren’t happy?” And I never yet have spent a happy day cooped up in an office having to calculate everything I said to please or flatter people that I seldom respected. I wish you would write me something about yourself these days. Let’s not argue any more. 222: TO OTTO H. KAHN _Brooklyn, N.Y._ _December 3, 1925_ Dear Mr. Kahn: Yesterday I telephoned Mr. Sharpp, your secretary, to request an interview with you regarding some temporary assistance which I felt you might possibly care to render me under the pressure of my present circumstances. Mr. Sharpp advised that I write you first, explaining the exigencies of the situation and the application I wished to make. I shall try to be as definite and as brief as possible. My first collected poems are about to be published (probably next spring) with a Foreword by Eugene O’Neill. Although my poems have appeared from time to time in various magazines such as _The Dial_ and _The Little Review_, I am not yet well enough known to reap any substantial benefits from what I have written. I am twenty-six years of age, and for the last seven years I have been entirely dependent on my efforts as an advertising copywriter for my living. What real writing I have done has had to be accomplished after office hours and sometimes at the risk of losing my position. Last June, as a result of ill health and nervous exhaustion, I had to resign my position with Sweet’s Catalogue, regardless of my dependence on my salary there, and live in the country until my health recovered. For the past eight weeks I have been back in New York, endeavoring by every means to secure work again as a copywriter. As I have been unfortunate in not finding any openings I have recently attempted to get any other kind of work available, but as I find myself now completely without funds, my circumstances seem to be rather acute. One of my friends has suggested that you might be sufficiently interested in the creation of an indigenous American poetry to possibly assist me at this time. As I have never before asked for such assistance I run the risk of writing you quite presumptuously, and I certainly wish to beg your pardon if my letter seems so. Besides the poems collected into my forthcoming volume I have partially written a long poem, the conception of which has been in my mind for some years. I have had to work at it very intermittently, between night and morning, and while shorter efforts can be more successfully completed under such crippling circumstances, a larger conception such as this poem, _The Bridge_, aiming as it does to enunciate a new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our America, requires a more steady application and less interruption than my circumstances have yet granted me to give to it.