“For this very reason I detest Eliot (personally) and fear his verse. He is as contagious in his measures as jazz, in fact to me, he is a kind of jazz. I think he realizes that himself and so has gone over into the Parsifal music of his present phase. He doesn’t know how to write any more since he is so badly based in his conception of what verse is. He simply doesn’t know and Aiken is not much different. They are thinking of something very dead and likely to be smelly very soon — one of the first things that is done at an autopsy is to measure and weigh the corpse."— letter to R.P. Blackmur, November 11, 1940
