It's a strange world made up of disappointments for the most part. I keep writing largely because I get a satisfaction from it which can't be duplica… - William Carlos Williams

Mother, who was known among her intimates as a medium, suddenly said to my father, looking right and left at Ed and me, “So these are the boys. How they have grown. Come here, my dears,” she said to us, reaching out her hands, “and let me see you!” This to her own children whom she had been caring for all day. Pop, who was accustomed to such occasions, told us gently, bewildered as we must have been, to do as we were bid — to go to Mother, which we did, one on either side. She put her hands on each of our heads and patted us with smiles of approval and loving affection. “How well they look. I am so happy.” At this Pop said to her, to his own wife, “Who is this we have the pleasure of talking to?” “Don’t you know me?” Mother answered. “Why I’m Lou Paine.

When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them — without distortion which would mar their exact significances — into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

Dear Mama: The reason I didn’t write last Sunday was because I was out of town. My friend Pound invited me to spend Saturday and Sunday with him … His parents are very nice people and have always been exceptionally kind to me. Mrs. Pound had prepared a fine meal … After supper Pound and I went to his room where we had a long talk on subjects that I love yet have not time to study and which he is making a life work of. That is literature, and the drama and the classics, also a little philosophy. He, Pound, is a fine fellow; he is the essence of optimism and has a cast-iron faith that is something to admire. If he ever does get blue nobody knows it, so he is just the man for me. But not one person in a thousand likes him, and a great many people detest him and why? Because he is so darned full of conceits and affectation. He is really a brilliant talker and thinker but delights in making himself just exactly what he is not: a laughing boor. His friends must be all patience in order to find him out and even then you must not let him know it, for he will immediately put on some artificial mood and be really unbearable. It is too bad, for he loves to be liked, yet there is some quality in him which makes him too proud to try to please people. I am sure his only fault is an exaggeration of a trait that in itself is good and in every way admirable. He is afraid of being taken in if he trusts his really tender heart to mercies of a cruel crowd and so keeps it hidden and trusts no one.