The unconditonal: a letter to Simon Jarvis

Of all the letters I might be fortunate enough hardly to know how to begin, I can’t presently imagine one more fortunate and formidable than this letter. I’m sitting in my new home in a cold morning spent warming up for the task, but how to do that, Mozart’s vesperae solennes de confessore in the front room not yet quite an inner lounge, some frantic and newly bewildered recourse to Whitman (more about this later), last night having lived through The Unconditional to its breathtaking and unended last page. There is so much more to say even of what I do know about this poem than I can think myself yet capable of saying, and infinitely more besides; this will be only my first attempt, and I make it in the passionate hope that it will throw me still further and more tightly into the knot of my desire to speak it. Anyone who will know your poem will know that it could never permit anything less to be asked of him by it.