Will not return to the school in the fall, though expected to when she told them goodbye. Is going to New York to engage in work she enjoys even more than teaching. Wishes them well in their senior year. Willa Cather [Stout #112]
Hoped to see him, but understands he is away. Leaving for Canada in a few days. He understood what she was doing in the new book quite precisely. Interesting that he liked Bishop Laval best, as she does also, for his loyalty to French ways. Left it up to Knopf to decide about Book-of-the-Month Club, but he would not have allowed it if she had opposed. Wants to know when Mrs. Canby's book of verse is published. Since in California so much with her mother, loses touch with things in New York. Willa Cather [Stout #1060]
Has just found her book of verses [High Mowing, 1932] among a great many books that have come by mail. Likes them very much. Will be in town at the Grosvenor for about two weeks. Hopes they can talk. P.S.: Especially likes "Timid One" [a poem that expresses a wish for escape from being one's self ]. Willa Cather [Stout #1106]
Enjoyed his letter and is glad he wrote. Interesting that his mother owns High Mowing. Wrote much of the later part of My Ántonia in a tent at the bottom of the hill between there and Stony Brook Farm, when Mrs. Robinson owned the property. Was staying at the Shattuck Inn and would go up the road and through the hedge to the tent. Would go back to the inn at midday through the woods, where there was an abundance of lady's-slipper and Hookers' orchid. [Varieties of both lady's-slipper and wild orchid are marked in Cather's personal copy of Mathews's Field Book of American Wild Flowers at the HRC.] Once saw a fox. Glad he loves both High Mowing and the book that was partly written there. Has not gone to the inn much since the woods were damaged by a hurricane. Willa Cather [Stout #1632]
Wishes she could be in New York for the Poetry Society banquet, but cannot. Regrets missing the opportunity to meet him and Mrs. [Elinor Miriam White] Frost. Wonders if he ever chanced to meet Miss Jewett. Has often thought, if she had lived to see them, that Frost's books would have been a great encouragement to her in a world full of poets like Witter Bynner and Phoebe Snow. Unfortunately, Frost's fellows in the Poetry Society are so wound up in the ideal of "free verse" that they can't distinguish a line by him from one published in a rural newspaper. They don't even know enough to dislike Florence Earle Coates or Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Many of the so-called "poets" seem to be so just to make Miss Rittenhouse happy. Thankfully, the success of junk only damages things in the short term. Fears that if she ever attended a meeting of the Poetry Society she would be unable to suppress her opinions, and begs Frost to keep them private. Since poetry needs publicity as much as anything else, perhaps the Rittenhouse crowd will actually help Frost somewhat. Anyhow, more subtle methods can still succeed. Has shown many of his poems to others, including "The Mountain," "Mowing," "Going for Water," and "The Tuft of Flowers," and no one needs to have them explained, nor has anyone's sensibility been altered because, in Mr. Masters's words, "the hammock fell/ Into [sic] the dust with Milton's poems [sic]" [from Masters's poem "Many Soldiers" in Spoon River Anthology]. Not everyone believes that is symbolic! Willa S. Cather
