To Mr. Rubin
C/o Brown Shipley & Co, 123
Pall Mall, London
Paris. July 10, 1928
Dear Mr Rubin,
Thank you for this new batch of sonnets. I have just been reading hard words written by Mr Ezra Pound on the subject of the Sonnets, in The Dial for this month: but I see that some of you rebel against the tyranny of tradition, and don’t always have ten syllables to your lines. You are all much impressed, like Homer, with the instability of earthly things, with dead leaves, and with “dark halls”; these things are impressive and have impressed everybody; so that I am driven back to my feeling about antecedent rightness in your poetic flights, with subsequent inadequacy; because unless you can say these things better than Homer & Co people will prefer to read about them in them rather than in you. I see a marked improvement in the richness of your own (Rubin’s) vocabulary: also evidence that you have been reading
Shakespeare’s sonnets. Words, words, words are the foundation of everything–in literature. If you feel the force of each word, and its penumbra of associations, the rest will take care of itself, and if ever you have anything to say, it will say itself for you magnificently.
Yours sincerely,
GSantayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Four, 1928–1932. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin