Dear Gorham: --/--/ Excuse my apparent evasion of your request for an explanation about “Black Tambourine.” The Word “midkingdom” is perhaps the key word to what ideas there are in it. The poem is a description and bundle of insinuations, suggestions bearing on the Negro’s place somewhere between man and beast. That is why Aesop is brought in, etc.,--the popular conception of Negro romance, the tambourine on the wall. The value of the poem is only, to me, in what a painter would call its “tactile” quality,--an entirely aesthetic feature. A propagandist for either side of the Negro question could find anything he wanted to in it. My only declaration in it is that I find the Negro (in the popular mind) sentimentally or brutally “placed” in this midkingdom, etc. Tell me if I have made it plain or not to you. 67: TO GORHAM MUNSON _Cleveland_, _June 12th ’21_ Dear Gorham: --/--/ Sommer said you had something in a very recent _Freeman_ which I’ve been trying to get, but guess I’m too late. Sometimes I get so exasperated with the “intellectual” attitudes of these papers like _The Freeman_, _New Rep._, _Nation_, etc., where everything is all jumbled together,--politics, literature, painting, birth control, etc., etc., etc., that I ignore them for a time and probably miss some good things. It’s the way they are served that I object to. I’m beginning to be somewhat pained by this “Intelligentsia” mood when it comes upon me. This probably indicates that I am not a very responsible individual--and truth is--I’m not. How tired I am of the perpetual ferment of _The New Rep_. Those fellows are playing a canster game nonsense. Does anything they ever say have any concrete effect? Old Washington goes on just the same on the old rotten paths. These gentlemen are merely clever at earning their livelihood in clean cuffs. But hear me rant on!!! I don’t care two-pence for the whole earth & heavens and least of all for politics. It’s only when the political gentlemen (Irish potatobeds) obstruct my view of my petunias and hollyhocks that I’m thus aroused,--and even that is a small complaint in the long list of larger ones I have. --/--/ No job in sight even now! I’m about convinced of the hopelessness of the advertising plan. Business gets worse and worse and they don’t have enough to do to keep a new man busy. Oh well!--I manage to get drunk once a week on delicious wine served out by a friend of mine here and I have an evening a week with Sommer when we do all kinds of stunts from Chopin Ballades and Heine lyrics to sparring with an old set of gloves I have. Wish I could think of something entertaining to write--but, at present I’m mostly trying to regain a mental and spiritual status that has been lost to me for over a year. What I want to do is gather up the threads again and go on, to put it stale-ly.