In response to:

Poet's Gallery from the February 7, 1980 issue

To the Editors:

Helen Vendler, in her mean-spirited review of my biography of E.E. Cummings, Dreams in the Mirror, and Marjorie Perloff’s Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, declared at the outset that “The only form inherently more unsatisfying than literary biography is its macro-form, literary history” (NYR, February 7). To give these books to a reviewer with such notions is like feeding a donkey strawberries, as they used to say in the English music halls—or, more to the point, casting Perloffs before swine.

Richard S. Kennedy

Temple University

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

This Issue

April 17, 1980