1925

Here is what John Galen Howard has to say about the WARS:

"I marvel at the staying power with which you maintain the terrific pace and standard you set in Glass and the Friends. There is every sort of greatness in the poem. First of all — to an architect — is its structural quality; rarest, perhaps, of all poetic gifts, and one of your own most inestimable possessions. It showed clearly in Glass and the Friends, but their material was more ready to the hand. In the Wars, I take it, the material was more recalcitrant, less promising for purposes of poetic unity, compactness, structure. I wondered, in advance, how you were to attain these, considering the vastness of the field, the extent of time, the apparently detached, episodic, and even chaotic stuff you had to deal with. But you have found the way to bring all together, to coordinate the phases of the theme, and to build up a pregnant and compelling whole. Greater even than its predecessors is this work, as structure. And in all other ways it is as great as they. It could scarcely be greater. The technical perfection and limpidity of the verse, the power of the individual lines, the loveliness of the pictures, the beauty and aptness of the figures, the convincingness of the character-drawing, the humor, the movement, the splendor and the truth - which of these should I place first? None of them can be surpassed."

I you find any hints in this that might be useful in your own article, you'll make the most of them, naturally. You would have emphasized structure anyway.


*J.N.
I'm delighted to know that you are planning to re-write Man + Poet. Perhaps by that time we can line up Macmillans, all depends on how the three volumes go - Wars, Poetic Values + Collected Poems
Did you send stuff on monument to Macmillans? They would give [it out?] to press.