The tragic quandary (or _agon_) of the modern world derives from the paradoxes that an inadequate system of rationality forces on the living consciousness. I am not opposing any new synthesis of reasonable laws which might provide a consistent philosophical and moral program for our epoch. Neither, on the other hand, am I attempting through poetry to delineate any such system. If this “knowledge,” as you call it, were so sufficiently organized as to dominate the limitations of my personal experience (consciousness) then I would probably find myself automatically writing under its “classic” power of dictation, and under that circumstance might be incidentally as philosophically “contained” as you might wish me to be. That would mean “serenity” to you because the abstract basis of my work would have been familiarized to you before you read a word of the poetry. But my poetry, even then,--in so far as it was truly poetic,--would avoid the employment of abstract tags, formulations of experience in factual terms, etc.,--it would necessarily express its concepts in the more direct terms of physical-psychic experience. If not, it must by so much lose its impact and become simply categorical. I think it must be due to some such misapprehensions of my poetic purpose in writing that leads you to several rather contradictory judgments which in one sentence are laudatory and in other contexts which you give them,--put me to blush for mental attitudes implied on my part. For instance, after having granted me all the praise you do earlier in your essay for “storming heaven” as it were, how can you later refer to that same faculty of verbal synchronization as to picture me as “waiting for another ecstasy”--and then “slumping”--rather as a baker would refer to a loaf in his oven. Granted your admiration for the “yeastiness” of some of my effusions, you should (in simple justice to your reader and your argument) here also afford the physical evidence (actual quotation or logical proof) of the “slump,” the unleavened failure. There really are plenty of lines in this respect which could be used for illustration. What I’m objecting to is contained in my suspicion that you have allowed too many extra-literary impressions of me to enter your essay, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The same is true of your reference to the “psychological _gaming_” (Verlaine) which puts the slur of superficiality and vulgarity on the very aspects of my work which you have previously been at pains to praise.--And all because you arbitrarily propose a goal for me which I have no idea of nor interest in following. Either you find my work poetic or not, but if you propose for it such ends as poetry organically escapes, it seems to me, as Allen said, that you as a critic of literature are working into a confusion of categories. Certainly this charge of alternate “gutter sniping” and “angel kissing” is no longer