Hemingway and Roethke
To the Editor:
Hemingway said, “. . . but nobody is going to get me into the ring with the Count [Tolstoy] . . .,” the very opposite of what Alfred Kazin [“Drink & the American Writer,” March] said he said: “Hemingway said that he could beat Tolstoy. . . .”
Herbert Ruhm
New York City
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To the Editor:
A few remarks by Alfred Kazin will not mar the poems of Theodore Roethke any more than initials scratched on a pillar will mar the pillar. Who, that looked, could miss the depth, the passions of the flesh and spirit that rose to poetry? And who would deny him the meadow mouse and the lizard? The poems were often easier to love than the man, and he will not be easily dismissed.
James Cole
Laramie, Wyoming
