I was really delighted to get your letter just when I did--and that's no you-know-what. I had just begun to toy with the idea of writing you a bitter--well, fairly bitter--letter of chiding, something to the effect of: don't throw me off like you'd push away a cocker spaniel puppy, even when the latter does wet on your trouser leg or worse.As you can see, I am cheating and writing you this while at work. I just finished writing several letters, in French, to the Universit_ de Paris (Sorbonne) concerning some interlibrary research projects we are doing here. One of them concerned a subject on Nigeria, and so I had to compile a bibliography in Nigerian, or rather in Yoruba and Iwe Itan. Quite a job, let me tell you. I have before me a slim volume entitled A Short Yoruba Grammar, by J.A.

de Gaye, F.L.S., F.E.S, Inspector of Schools, Nigeria. This grammar is in French and since I am not used to using a French typewriter (which I had to use for my letters--this gets more and more involved, no?) I had to retype most of my correspondence. All in all, a lousy, confused tri-lingual day.

Which is why I am now relaxing and doing something I want to do: write you.A.E. Housman once wrote that he could tell when a line of poetry was great, because when he read it he felt a prickling up and down his spine. I don't think enough of him to attach any great significance to the statement--to be sure, he is a "good" poet, or is he? yes, he is--but I have a similar automatic response to very good poetry. It's the same feeling as the one I get when I am just beginning to get aroused sexually: a sort of sick feeling of turbulence in my abdomen, a pressure that has to expand somewhere. When I am getting hot over a woman it travels south, natch; when it is poetry it goes up and I have to say the poem out loud and announce to the air its excellence. Well, your Requiem for the Original Sin did this to me.

I know it's good because of its tension, its spring, the way it draws on your mind and eye in one rush, the way it reverberates after I have read it. The image is so good: it appeals to the conscious and subconscious awareness. It is expressive and yet economical; filtered and cerebrated and yet pure. In short, it excites me, and I think it is splendid. I admire its precision, and yet will ask one rhetorical question: on re-reading it, do you think it too explicit'.