“Of mixed ancestry, I felt from earliest childhood that America was the only home I could ever call my own. I felt that it was expressly founded for me, personally, and that it must be my first business in life to possess it; that only by making it my own from the beginning to my own day, in detail, should I ever have a basis for knowing where I stood."—Poet William Carlos William, in a July 22, 1939 letter to fellow poet Horace Gregory, explaining how he came to write his history In the American Grain, in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, edited by John C. Thirlwall (1957)
No comments:
Post a Comment