CONTENTS

Foreword by John Ashbery

Editor’s Preface

FICTION

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

The World is a Wedding

POETRY

from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

The Ballad of the Children of the Czar

In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave

The Beautiful American Word, Sure

Far Rockaway

Someone Is Harshly Coughing as Before

Tired and Unhappy, You Think of Houses

A Young Child and His Pregnant Mother

Sonnet: O City, City

The Ballet of the Fifth Year

Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day

Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers

I Am to My Own Heart Merely a Serf

The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me

A Dog Named Ego, the Snowflakes as Kisses

from Genesis: Book I

Editor’s note

Selections

from Vaudeville for a Princess

True Recognition Often Is Refused

Starlight like Intuition Pierced the Twelve

He Heard the Newsboys Shouting “Europe! Europe!”

Such Answers Are Cold Comfort to The Dead

from Summer Knowledge

Summer Knowledge

“I Am Cherry Alive,” the Little Girl Sang

Baudelaire

Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon along the Seine

Once and for All

from Narcissus: The Mind Is an Ancient and Famous Capital

from Last & Lost Poems

This Is a Poem I Wrote at Night, before the Dawn

America, America!

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Poem

Philology Recapitulates Ontology, Poetry Is Ontology

What Curious Dresses All Men Wear

The Poet

UNPUBLISHED POEMS

Editor’s note

A Poem For Gertrude’s Birthday

Doggerel Beneath the Skin

VERSE DRAMA

Dr. Bergen’s Belief

Shendandoah

CRITICISM

The Isolation of Modern Poetry

The Vocation of the Poet in the Modern World

from T. S. Eliot: A Critical Study

Editor’s note

The Reason for Writing this Book

Draft of the Introduction

LETTERS

Ezra Pound (1938)

Ezra Pound (1939)

James Laughlin (1941)

James Laughlin (1942)

James Laughlin (1943?)

Gertrude Buckman (1943?)

William Carlos Williams (1946)

James Laughlin (1947)

James Laughlin (1951)

James Laughlin (1958)

Roy P. Basler (1958)

Dwight Macdonald (1958)

Mrs. Odell (1964)