stormTo Reginald Chauncey Robbins
75 Monmouth Street
Brookline, Massachusett. September 15, 1906

Dear Robbins,
On getting back to this country I find your “Poems of Personality” with your kind note of Dec. 8. The other books had reached me in due season in various parts of the world, but without your address, so that I believe I have never thanked you for them. The “Love Poems” I read through, many parts more than once, and found them full of experience; and, what is perhaps less germane to poetry but very appealing to me, full of learning and of historical imagination. . . .

You are, in your poetry, one of those volcanic minds that overwhelm me a little with the rumblings, smoke, and precipitancy of their effusions. It is not always easy for me to translate such hints and indirections, and such unexplained fervours, into the plain prose that is all I can understand.
Nevertheless, I feel the presence in your poetry of something that inspires respect—experience, depth, heroism, readiness to face reality, whatever it may turn out to be. It is largely fed, and greatly pregnant. If it lacks articulation, after the manner that I am in the habit of looking to, that is perhaps because it has a great future, because it announces ways of feeling and acting which are only now dawning on the world.
I am very much flattered by your desire that I should not be altogether a stranger to your view of life.
With many thanks for all three volumes I am
Sincerely yours,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA