The following letter of Dylan Thomas is addressed to Marguerite Caetani, the editor of the legendary magazine Botteghe Oscure. Dylan Thomas needs no introduction, but a brief description of his remarkable patroness seems in order.

Ezra Pound was obsessed with language. Quotations from seventeen languages, from hieroglyphics to the dialect of the Na-Khi tribe of China are scattered through the Cantos. Two cantos were written completely in Italian: numbers 72 and 73. It is not perfect Italian, though Pound had lived in Italy, off and on, for thirty years when he wrote the poems in Rapallo in 1944 toward the end of the war. There are minute errors of syntax and a few slight slips in verbal tone. But Pound’s ear was so keen, the finest of his generation according to Yeats, it was nearly impossible for him to write a line that was not melodic.

  When asked in his 1958 Paris Review interview with George Plimpton about choosing titles, Hemingway said, “I make a list of titles after I’ve finished the story or the book — sometimes as many as one hundred. Then I start eliminating them, sometimes all of them.” Three years later he struggled with the list you see below—possible titles for a book about his early Paris days, a book which he said probably should not be published because of potential libel suits. 

My father had a black Remington portable. He hit the keys so ardently that he wore their letters off. He ’d sit at that machine and smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and make the most ferocious sound, not like a typewriter at all, more like a machine gun.

Italo Calvino and I shared the same landscape: the Italian Riviera from Genoa to Menton, on the French border. We shared the rocks falling sheerly to the sea, hills covered with pine and olive trees, winter clumps

I do not know if you intend to pay any attention to unsolicited contributions to New Directions, but I think the enclosed pieces are the kind of work you want for your anthology. If I am wrong, forgive me,

Two of my teachers were Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters. From the 1930s into the 1960s, Mac Leish’s poetic reputation flourished, but by the time he died in 1982, in his ninetieth year, the literary stock market had devalued him. On the other hand, Yvor Winters’s poems were never popular. His eccentric and belligerent criticism drew attention away from his poems, which were sparse, spare and sometimes beautiful. 

It would be neat to claim I played Billy Jester, but in fact I was just a forest ranger, Hank, in the chorus, Jester’s sidekick. I brought to my part a decent baritone voice

Why should that city, defenseless and pure as the wedding necklace of a forgotten tribe, keep offering itself to me? Like blue and red brown seeds beaded