HWL's Comment

Date of writing: 1979

Comment: Yes, she is in nymphomania in the bodily sense of the word: she is in raging, in uncontainable sexual desire. There must be something special about the lesbian indulgence that can bring such uproar about. Perhaps it is this: this love for Kate brought out a psychic nymphomania for Kate’s personality, her spirit, her lifephilosophy also. And this alignment is, perhaps, what we call: “love”; recognition of self in another person that causes us to feel: “thou art I”, “thou art the human being with whom I want to share myself, my life”. It is love that says so, and in her greatest love poem, written in this very period, she comes out stating plainly what the deprivation of this love means: “I cannot live with you it would be life!” We are entering now the crisis period of her great infatuation. One by one the coming poem illuminate aspects of sickness of the soul that is engulfing her. Of the 20 in Packet 8 there are only five that I can take under discussion, but every one of the other fifteen makes disclosures which, if we don’t try to understand them, will leave gaps in our understanding of the total impact of the psychosis which came over her. In a way I am glad that I can confine myself to the 450 poems of the nineties editions. I will try to make typewritten analyses of them all, even though I intend to use only between 200 and 300 of them for publication. I know that the poems of the “Single Hound” 1910 publication have now also come into the public domain, but I will not take them into my final effort. It is simply too much for my remaining force. I do not mean the quantitative “too much”, the great numbers, but rather the qualitative one of bringing them to faultless analysis in their symbolic content and then to the psychological and philosophic understanding of what they portended in the development of her life and fate. I must bring the nineties work to a conclusion, so that it can eventually be published as my one finished work about her. Once that is achieved, I may try to work on the rest to the best of my ability and leave whatever I dig up for others to finish it.

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