So you who are readers should encourage American poets to strive to become very simple, very humble. Your poet must put the fervor of his life into his work, giving you his emotions before the world, the evil with the good, not thinking whether he is a good man or a bad man, or whether he is teaching you. A poet does not know whether he is a good man. If he is a good man, he probably thinks he is a bad man. Poetry that is naturally simple, that might exist as the simplest prose, should have instantaneousness of effect, provided it finds the right audience. You may have to wait years for that audience, but when it is found that instantaneousness of effect is produced.... We rebelled against rhetoric, and now there is a group of younger poets who dare to call us rhetorical. When I returned to London from Ireland, I had a young man go over all my work with me to eliminate the abstract. This was an American poet, Ezra Pound. Much of his work is experimental; his work will come slowly, he will make many an experiment before he comes into his own. I should like to read to you two poems of permanent value, _The Ballad of the Goodly Fere_ and _The Return_. This last is, I think, the most beautiful poem that has been written in the free form, one of the few in which I find real organic rhythm. A great many poets use _vers libre_ because they think it is easier to write than rhymed verse, but it is much more difficult. The whole movement of poetry is toward pictures, sensuous images, away from rhetoric, from the abstract, toward humility. But I fear I am now becoming rhetorical. I have been driven into Irish public life--how can I avoid rhetoric? Letters to The Little Review What an insouciant little pagan paper you flourish before our bewildered eyes! Please accept the congratulations of a stranger. But you must not scoff at age, little bright eyes, for some day you, too, will know age; and you should not jeer at robustness of form, slim one, for the time may come when you, too, will find the burdens of flesh upon you. Above all, do not proclaim too loudly the substitution of Nietzsche for Jesus of the Little Town in the niche of your invisible temple, for when you are broken and forgotten there is no comfort in the Overman. One thing more: Restraint is sometimes better than expression. One who has learned this lesson cannot refrain from saying this apropos of the first paragraphs in the criticism of _The Dark Flower_. Do not give folk a chance to misunderstand you. Being a woman, you have to pay too high a price for moments of high intellectual orgy. Forgive all this and go on valiantly. SADE IVERSON. Chicago.