To Francis Gardner Clough
Rome. November 4, 1945
Dear Mr. Clough:
Poetry of the reflective moralising kind practised by your namesake,1 by you, and by me is out of fashion among poets, and those who like it like it only for the sentiment it expresses; but that might have been as well expressed in prose. For that reason I long ago gave up trying to versify. I was twenty when I wrote the sonnet you mention. The one of yours that you enclose is recent, and I suspect you are not very young. Of course I sympathise, but—
At the same time as your letter I have received a booklet by a young Argentinian, in Spanish and bad English, who is a poet but writes without meter or rhyme, and says he is full of “adolescents” (sic) coursing through his body; that he kisses the barks of old trees, as he used to kiss the stones, but ends by kissing warm flesh.—Such is the poetry of today. Morituri vos salutamus.
Yours very truly,
G Santayana
1. Arthur Hugh Clough.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Seven, 1941-1947. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Unknown