I have another note of rejection for you. It is from * * *. Knowing
that you will not bank on what he says about the Metropolitan, I
enclose it. I've acted on his advising and sent the poem. It is about
time for it to come back. Then I shall try the other magazines until
the list is exhausted.
Did I return your Jinks verses? I know I read them and meant to send
them back, but my correspondence and my papers are in such hopeless
disorder that I'm all at sea on these matters. For aught I know I may
have elaborately "answered" the letter that I think myself to be
answering now. I liked the verses very temperately, not madly.
Of course you are right about the magazine editors not knowing poetry
when they see it. But who does? I have not known more than a
half-dozen persons in America that did, and none of them edited a
magazine.
* * * * *
No, I did not write the "Urus-Agricola-Acetes stuff," though it was
written _for_ me and, I believe, at my suggestion. The author was
"Jimmy" Bowman, of whose death I wrote a sonnet which is in Black
Beetles. He and I used to have a lot of fun devising literary
mischiefs, fighting sham battles with each other and so forth. He was
a clever chap and a good judge of whiskey.
Yes, in The Cynic's Dictionary I did "jump from A to M." I had
previously done the stuff in various papers as far as M, then lost the
beginning. So in resuming I re-did that part (quite differently, of
course) in order to have the thing complete if I should want to make a
book of it. I guess the Examiner isn't running much of it, nor much of
anything of mine.
* * * * *