Letter from William Carlos Williams, Rutherford, New Jersey, to Richard Eberhart, 1949 June 8 : typescript signed.

Expressing "I suppose it is the times that make your poem inevitably ironical. I get a sense of an Eliot - but too obviously a deflated one, of a Pound - but not eager enough. Surely not a Stevens for Stevens is not enough a classicist; no, Stevens is not learned enough or sure enough of himself. The who is this man? An Eberhart? Perhaps. I'm most inclined to think it Alexander Pope on the verse of setting the Iliad into rhymed couplets. Horrible thought: Surely this isn't really Eberhart and can't be ..."; questioning how the person is who is built up to reflect upon their day and asks about Boyle's law; hoping Eberhart's poem has good lines which have "all the solidity of pebbles by the side of the sea"; saying that he has been reading some manuscript poems by a woman that he once wronged, but not disclosing what happened between them, and that he hopes she gets a book published, but doesn't want it dedicated to him, but rather to "A man of sense"; (in autograph postscript on verso) adding that he saw the Broque show and that it was very impressive and beautiful.