I am just as glad for you that you didn’t start your magazine,--and with the same considerations in mind that you gave as your reasons against it. Italy will do you infinitely more good,--why waste your good money on what is, after all, an indifferent public. It is bad enough to waste brains and time--but not money!!! I haven’t seen _Contact_ yet, but will try to get ’round to send for a copy soon. Williams has a very fine poem in the last _Poetry_ and also there is a beauty by Padraic Colum. By the way, I hope you saw Colum’s write-up of Ezra Pound’s _Instigations_ in a not very recent _New Republic_. It was the best appreciation of Pound on his own grounds that I’ve ever read. Your last letter, although very brief and fragmentary, did bring a whiff from you of revived sensibilities. N.Y. does that to one always after any period of provincial stiffness. What are you writing now? Of course I shall send you whatever I do,--but the waiting is longer, by far, for me than for you. I’m caught dead tight in a new affair de coeur that at least keeps me stirred up in some ways. I don’t know how much blood I pay for these predicaments,--but I seem to live more during them than otherwise. They give the ego a rest. I may sound like an utter profligate,--but there is much sincerity, too painfully much, for me to laugh. 57: TO MATTHEW JOSEPHSON _Cleveland, O._ _1/14/21_ Dear Matty: --/--/ What you say about the Akron suite is very true. I have only one point of disagreement with you,--crudeness of form. This was deliberate, and you have got to convince me that such a treatment of such a mood and subject is inconsistent before we can pick asphodels together again on the slopes of Parnassus. By the way,--do you care for my “Garden Abstract” in its final form in _The L.R._? I think that the version I sent you was an earlier and poorer experiment. I must bestir myself soon and write something new. My main difficulty is at present a kind of critical structure that won’t permit me the expression of the old asininities, _and_ (as you say) the poverty of society in these “provinces.” Your suggestion about the trade paper work is alluring. However, I am bound not to break away from my father’s concern until spring, when there may be a little striving and stirring up of the dust,--I hope.