Volume 27, Number 6 · April 17, 1980
The Elusiveness of a Life
By Richard S. Kennedy
In response to Poet's Gallery
(February 7, 1980)
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
