
All ab't the same with me—I took dinner with the Scovel family Sunday & a ride with my old nag & rig in the afternoon—So you see I have not utterly stopt stopped moving—but I feel exceeding heavy & lethargic & stir only with great effort.
—I send you Kennedy's note rec'd to-day—Have you seen his pamphlet-essay on poetry?—A dark persistently rainy warm day here.
W W
I get a few good letters on my little essay on the poets. Burroughs thinks the old poetical forms all sound & good & likely to last. So does Stedman. he says he is "a universalist in art."—which I do not like. We are not to be universalists in painting & sculpture are we (I guess not) & revive the idiotic sculptures of India, Aegypt & Palenque, or the old wood paintings of the Pre-Giottesque painters? Things grow obsolete—worn out. Yet Stedman welcomes heartily, he says, the idea of a new & grander style in poetry. But I'm sure
I don't know why I dwell on him: A lady had his volume here in the house yesterday, & I re-read part of what he says on you. It seems to me not only insulting but terribly small & boomerangish in its tendency, self-condemning, utterly inadequate, not touching the real heart of the matter at all—a dwarf walking round a giant, a pigmy measuring a god.
Knortz sent 2 of the pamphlets to Germany. Bucke took 10.
I have been advertizing it—(ever since it was out—) in Critic & Index, & one is to appear in the Lit. World.
I hope you are not feeling badly this rather unhealthy weather. I receive & read with gratitude all the clippings you send me. Am hard at work on a Ruskin anthology for Pirate Alden, & feel rather knavish over the job.
Aff. W. S. Kennedy