Dear John:

Quoting writers’ one-shots on other writers is not particularly edifying. Nabokov was a great writer of strong and often peculiar opinions. Not unlike Glenn Gould in music, whose view of Mozart I quoted. For every indisputably great artist you can find some other great artist in his own art who disliked him. Tolstoy in his old age disliked Shakespeare.

We could also trade quotations back and forth ad futilitem. You have picked the climax of a poem which has had ten pages to build to that burst of fireworks–rather like setting a needle onto the last measures of Beethoven’s Ninth and asking if it isn’t a little loud.

I don’t expect to undo a settled dislike: de gustibus. But for other Cornerites who may be unsettled in their minds, I would suggest reading aloud the opening stanza of The Wasteland; the short poem Marina; the opening stanza of Little Gidding (Four Quartets). Note in the last the short vowels, especially the “i”s, and the “s”s, and see if they don’t suggest ice and cold.

Cornerites might also re-read Jeff Hart’s review of John Simon’s latest collection of essays in which Jeff takes up John’s view that the greatest Englihs-language poet of the twentieth century was Robert Graves.