published in New York. The version for the song did not exhaust it
in my mind and so I took it up every now & then for 4 or 5 years
and finally completed it. A very lovely little girl who was
visiting my wife helped me to decide whether I should write in one
verse "a flimsy shift" or "a filmy shift" or other versions, and
her opinion on "flimsy" decided me. She is the only person that
ever had anything to do with it--_as far as I know_! What hypnotic
influences were at work or what astral minds may have intervened, I
know not. But I have always thought I did it all. It was not much
to do, except for a certain 17th Century verbiage and grisly humor.

I am glad you still believe I wouldn't steal anybody else's brains
any more than I would his money. Waller wrote splendid singing
music to it which Eugene Cowles used to bellow beautifully.

With best love, as always,
Y. E. A.

[9] See letter to "The New York Times Book Review".

[10] Reproduced in facsimile.

That this narrative may be complete, the articles and comment that appeared
in _The New York Times Book Review_ are reproduced, together with a letter
to the editor written by the author of this volume, which, neither
acknowledged nor published by him, obtained wide circulation through _The
Scoop_,[11] a magazine issued every Saturday by The Press Club of Chicago.
It was quite characteristic of Allison to decline the very urgent requests
of many friends to jump into the arena and make a claim for that which is
his own creation and in coming to a negative decision, his reasons are
probably best expressed in a letter to Henry A. Sampson, who himself writes
poetry:

Yours of the 5th containing wormwood from the _N. Y. Times_ (and
being the 11th copy received from loving friends) is here.

Jealous! Jealous! Just the acute development on your part of the
ordinary professional jealousy. Merely because I have at last found
my place amongst those solitary and dazzling poets, Homer and
Shakespeare, who, also, it has been proved, did not write their own
stuff, but found it all in folk lore and copied it down.

Well, damn me, I can't help my own genius and do not care for its
products because I can always make more, and I compose these things
for my own satisfaction.

I, with Shakespeare