Dear Gorham: --/--/ I’ve been having a wonderful time diving into Ben Jonson, so you see I haven’t been so far off, after all. After one has read _Bartholomew Fair_ it isn’t so hard to see where Synge got his start,--a start toward a husky folk-element in the drama. I can see myself from now rapidly joining Josephson in a kind of Elizabethan fanaticism. You have doubtless known my long-standing friendship with Donne, Webster, and Marlowe. Now I have another Mermaid “conjugal” to strengthen the tie. The fact is, I can find nothing in modern work to come up to the verbal richness, irony and emotion of these folks, and I would like to let them influence me as much as they can in the interpretation of modern moods,--somewhat as Eliot has so beautifully done. There are parts of his “Gerontion” that you can find almost bodily in Webster and Jonson. Certain Elizabethans and Laforgue have played a tremendous part in Eliot’s work, and you catch hints of his great study of these writers in his _Sacred Grove_. I don’t want to imitate Eliot, of course,--but I have come to the stage now where I want to carefully choose my most congenial influences and, in a way, “cultivate” their influence. I can say with J[osephson] that the problem of form becomes harder and harder for me every day. I am not at all satisfied with anything I have thus far done, mere shadowings, and too slight to satisfy me. I have never, so far, been able to present a vital, living and tangible,--a positive emotion to my satisfaction. For as soon as I attempt such an act I either grow obvious or ordinary, and abandon the thing at the second line. Oh! it is hard! One must be drenched in words, literally soaked with them to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. When they come, as they did in “Pastorale” (thin, but rather good), they come as things in themselves; it is a matter of felicitous juggling!; and no amount of will or emotion can help the thing a bit. So you see I believe with Sommer that the “Ding an Sich” method is ultimately the only satisfactory creative principle to follow. But I also find that J[osephson] stirred up a hornet’s nest in me this summer with his words about getting away from current formulae, from Heine to Wallace Stevens, by experimentation in original models, etc., and my reaction to this stimulation is to work away from the current impressionism as much as possible. I mean such “impressionism” as the Cocteau poem (trans.) in _The Little Review_, which you have probably seen. Dada (maybe I am wrong, but you will correct me) is nothing more to me than the dying agonies of this movement, maladie moderne. I may be even carried back into “rime and rhythm” before I get through, provided I can carry these encumbrances as deftly and un-selfconsciously as, say, Edward Thomas sometimes did. I grow to like my “Black Tambourine” more, for this reason, than before.