I am pleased that such a small piece has evoked some distinguished attention. I must reply to all, or to none.

I am most grateful for Richard Wilbur’s warm, solidly gracious account, with whose considerations I am much in agreement, not the least with those on the place of the academic community, of which I am now and again a member. I have often defended the university as being as much a part of the “real” world as any other, once concluding: “Fashionably considered, the university is not a part of going ‘life’ at all . . . but I find it impossible to exclude at least from tentative reality any place where so many people are.”[1] Since the narrator in “The long, shining table” was visiting universities, I took as implicit the importance of the university’s function to writers. While I do find that function “at a certain remove,” I also find Mr. Wilbur’s remarks most valuable.

If after reading “The long, shining table” William Barrett is still “confused” as to whether I might hanker for a “corporate” existence as a writer, I cannot hope to reassure him otherwise here. Certainly he does confuse those difficulties and prides of American writers characterized by me as “lone” in relation to their country with what he instructs is the essential “loneliness” of the writer confronted with “the blank page.” Confronting that page, with all literature and all writers at one’s back, is where I feel least lonely of