To Robert Traill Spence Lowell Jr.
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 29, 1948
Although we are “friends” you are still shy, on account of my venerable age to tell me where I go wrong: but not all modern young talent has such scruples. A young Russian, become a Canadian, came to see me the other day in an open brown flannel shirt, round goggles, and dirty yellow hair brushed back from a forehead already very high and like Josiah Royce’s: and he began by demanding what I recognized for my principle in ethics. While I hemmed and hawed, his eye caught, some three yards off the title “Lord Weary’s Castle” on the narrow back of your book, which was laying in a heap of others on the table. And he relieved me by asking if I read that. I pleaded guilty, and told him why I was especially interested in it, and mentioned that you had sent me three more of your poems. He asked to see them, and I showed them to him, where I kept them under the flap in the paper cover of your book. He immediately seized them, and without asking permission or excusing himself, began to read them one after the other to himself, without once lifting his eyes from the pages as he passed from one to the other, and leaving me to wait, as if I didn’t exist. When he finished the third, very quickly, he murmured, “Yes. That’s all right.” I said I admired the intensity of his attention, and his speed in reading. “Yes,” said he, “I can read 600 words a minuit, and I always read poetry fast once, to see if it is right; if the end picks up the beginning. Then I study it in detail.” But he didn’t proceed to put your poems in his pocket for that purpose but put them back quite accurately in their places, and said he was a Neo-Kantian, that everything was a part of everything else, that this could be proved, and that he had found some difficulty in interviewing Croce. And before he went he offered to leave me a copy of a list of some fifty men of science that he meant to visit before returning to Canada, which list I declined with thanks.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA