To Jose Rodriguez Feo Hartford, Conn January 26, 1945
Dear Mr. Rodriquez-Feo, I put off replying to your letter of January 23d until after the arrival of the watercolors. They came on the coldest day of one of our coldest winters, and they looked unhappy in the gloomy light of that particular day. However, the picture of the pineapples, which I put in my bedroom, is now quite the master of that scene, and is as bright and cheerful a thing as there is in the house. The other one, the figure, I shall have to take to New York to have framed the next time I go down. They are both a great deal more Cuban than you are likely to realize so that, in addition to one's sense of a new and fresh artist, there is the sense of an unfamiliar place. I say unfamiliar, even though I have been to Havana twice, but the stranger in Havana probably gets very little of Cuba. On my first trip, about 25 years ago I should say, I went down alone and spent the greater part of a week there. Then, about five years later, my wife and I stopped there for about a day on the way to California by way of the Canal. When I was there alone, on my first trip, I walked round the town a great deal and concluded by wanting in the wildest way to study Spanish, which I really began. Then I used to buy bundles of *El Sol* of Madrid and do my studying by looking these over. Little by little it got away from me. For many years since then I have gone to Key West and stayed a few weeks every winter at the Casa Marina. Of course, this has not been possible these last two or three years, because that hotel has been in the hands of the Government and, since it is the only decent place there, I have not gone at all. About Winters' Anatomy: Although I have a copy of the book I haven't read it and, in particular, have not read a line of his essay on my own poetry. This is out of pure virtue, because I think it disturbs one to read either praise or blame. There is something about poets, and probably about all writers, painters, musicians, etc., that makes them exceedingly eager for notice, which is a way of saying for praise. Moreover, they are easily and violently disturbed by the opposite; they will pay a degree of attention to hostile comment. Among other men not of their sort, as, for example, businessmen, politicians, etc., having to deal with the same sort of thing, it would not receive a moment's attention. But, since criticism is disturbing, whether it is favorable or unfavorable, I don't read it except occasionally, in the case of a man about whose judgment no question exists. I cannot say that this is true of Winters. Blackmur is immeasurably superior to him. I don't mean to say that he is any more intelligent, or any more sensitive, but he is more sensible, less eccentric. There is, however, a serious defect in Blackmur, you haven't the faintest idea what he has been talking about. Either he has too many ideas or too few; it is hard to say which. How many ideas are there in currency that can be said to be purely Blackmurean ideas? Most critics very soon become identified with a group of principles or, say, a group of ideas; I cannot say that Blackmur is identified with anything. And the truth is that I don't know of any good solid book on modern poetry. Morton Dauwen Zabel is a man of extraordinary intelligence, but it is hard to say to what he is primarily devoted. I think he is equally interested in both poetry and religion, and that creates a difficulty, because it inclines him to adopt some comparison with religion as the final test of poetry. However, I like Mr. Zabel more than these remarks might suggest. The major men, about whom you ask, are neither exponents of humanism nor Nietzschean shadows. I confess that I don't want to limit myself as to my objective, so that in *Notes Towards A Supreme Fiction* and elsewhere I have at least trifled with the idea of some arbitrary object of belief: some artificial subject for poetry, a source of poetry. The major men are part of the entourage of that artificial object. All the interest that you feel in occasional frivolities I seem to experience in sounds, and many lines exist because I enjoy their clickety-clack in contrast with the more decorous pom-pom-pom that people expect. Your mention of Alfonso Reyes is just the sort of allusion that makes me wish with all the excitement of a real wish that I knew Spanish better than I do. One grows tired of the familiar figures and to be able to find a fresh mind in a Mexican critic, or in the many writers in South America, and elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking countries, for which one would feel an instinctive respect would be a real excitement. It is, however, too late for me to attempt to become really familiar with another language. I am sending you a copy of *Ideas of Order*. This I had not been intending to send until I could also send you a copy of *The Man With The Blue Guitar*. As Yet I have not been able to procure a copy of *The Man With The Blue Guitar*, which will follow. Yours very truly, Wallace Stevens
