“Let some of your rules as to form go, and sing.”

Preference for music and singing over strict construction · Letter to Alfred Gordon

• Form
• Music
• Poetry

“Emotions with a foreknowledge of impermanence, a daring mind with only the tongue as outlet, a greed for experience plus a slavery to convention — what the deuce are you to make of that? As a man, you could go ahead and stir things up fine.”

On the constraints of gender upon appetite for life and speech · Letter to Helen Coleman, 29 December 1919

• Experience
• Freedom
• Gender

“Poetry is all very well. But when you are reduced to seventeen cents and some stamps.”

Comic collision of lyric vocation and cash shortage · Letter to Helen Coleman, 7 December 1908

• Money
• Poetry
• Poverty