anything more than a meretricious substitute for psychological sincerity in defining the range of an artist’s subject matter and psychic explorations. Still less should it be brought forward unless there is enough physical evidence in the artist’s work to warrant curiosity in this respect on the part of the reader. Your difficulties are extra, I realize, in writing about me at all. They are bound to be thus extra because of the (so far as the reader goes) “impurities” of our previous literary arguments, intimacies of statement, semi-statements, etc., which are not always reflected in a man’s work, after all. But your preoccupations on the one hand with a terminology which I have not attempted and your praise on the other hand of my actual (physical) representation of the incarnate _evidence_ of the very knowledge, the very _wisdom_ which you feel me to be only conjecturally sure of--makes me guilty of really wronging you, perhaps, but drives me to the platitude that “truth has no name.” Her latest one, of course, is “relativity.” Apropos of all this the letter by Nichols in _The New Criterion_ will interest you when you read it; there are interesting quotations from Goethe, Santayana, Russell, etc. And I am enclosing a hasty bundle of notes written at O’Neill’s request for what angles they might suggest to him in writing a foreword for my book. (This, I hope, may be returned.) Allen tells me that he has just mailed his note on me--for possible use in _The New Masses_. I told him to do this, not remembering definitely what you had told me about it before. It can do no harm anyway. I’m enclosing copies of the poems which Potamkin had intended using. It certainly was very kind of you to have suggested these matters to the _Masses_ editor. Do let me hear from you soon. PS--Needless to say, the notes for O’Neill contain repetitious matter for you, and certain accents were especially made against biases and critical deficiencies which I felt [might] lead to unwarranted assumptions, misplaced praises, etc., on his part. But the definitions of the “logic of metaphor,” “dynamics of inferential mention,” etc., I think are quite exact.[45] 235: TO OTTO H. KAHN _Patterson, New York_ _March 18, 1926_ Dear Mr. Kahn: You were so kind as to express a desire to know from time to time how _The Bridge_ was progressing, so I’m flashing in a signal from the foremast, as it were. Right now I’m supposed to be Don Cristobal Colon returning from “Cathay,” first voyage. For mid-ocean is where the poem begins. It concludes at midnight--at the center of Brooklyn Bridge. Strangely enough that final section of the poem has been the first to be completed,--yet there’s a logic to it, after all; it is the mystic consummation toward which all the other sections of the poem converge. Their contents are implicit in its summary.