To the Editors:

I hope that I am not too late in responding to Marya Zaturenska’s wild claim in Robert Phillips’s “Visiting the Gregorys” (September 1990) that the anthology The Golden Journey: Poems for Young People, which Louise Bogan and I edited, was copied from The Crystal Cabinet, edited by the Gregorys. From the beginning of our col laboration, Louise Bogan and I decided that we would not under any circumstances follow the practice of other anthologists and use the selec tions in other anthologies but would go directly to the books of the poets who interested us. The Crystal Cabinet was never mentioned and I doubt that Louise Bogan had ever seen it. The two col lections that we both admired, but which we did not consult at the time, were Come Hither of Walter de la Mare and The Cherry Tree of Geoffrey Grigson.

William Jay Smith
Paris, France

Robert Phillips replies:

William Jay Smith misinterprets Marya Zaturen ska’s remark. When she stated in conversation to me that she felt the Smith-Bogan anthology, The Golden Journey, was an “imitation” of The Crystal Cabinet, edited by herself and Horace Gregory, she did not mean Smith and Bogan had plundered their anthology for poems. She simply meant that The Crystal Cabinetappeared in 1962 as “An In vitation to Poetry” (its subtitle) for young readers, and was illustrated with woodcuts; The Golden Journey appeared three years later, in 1965, sub titled