The Night's Cold Book

Considered by many to be Thomas McGrath’s magnum opus, Letter to an Imaginary Friend is a long poem that blends McGrath’s autobiography with an overarching mythology of America. Begun in 1954 in the shadow of his blacklisting, the first sections of the poem appeared in Coastlines and in a Swallow edition of Part I in 1962. Over the course of thirty years, McGrath’s poem grew in its scope and stylistic innovation, eventually sprawling to four parts and spanning more than 400 pages in a definitive edition published by Copper Canyon Press in 1997.

Letter has drawn favorable comparisons to the work of Whitman for its attempts to create a uniquely American epic. It manages to express the voices of the working class and individuals from all walks of life, deploying varying free verse forms, equal parts mysticism and irreverent humor, complex allusions, obscure vernacular, unapologetic radicalism, clever neologisms, biting social commentary, flashbacks and flashforwards, sober historical reflection, and the fleeting hope for a better future.

When the first two parts of Letter were published by Swallow Press in 1970, critics lauded the book, some bemoaning the fact that it failed to gain traction for a National Book Award. Here is a sampling of some of the critical praise it elicited in 1971 and 1972.

”The project is astonishing, and I find it hard to believe so little attention has been drawn to it…McGrath’s letter is an incessant, grieving lyric, obsessive and polemical, euphoric and bereaved. The long six-stress line he has chosen acts as an incantation..." – James Atlas, Poetry

“Pain, love, frustration, joy, anger and nostalgia blend in the changing moods and settings of this amazing work, and from the strong , masterful handling of language there emerges the figure of the man himself, living intensely the life of his time both in his art and outside as well.” – Ralph J. Mills, Jr., Sunday Chicago Sun-Times

“[A]n eloquent, powerful and moving statement of McGrath’s time and ours.” – College English Association

"[R]efreshing and epic of tone is his by-way-of-becoming-classic incantation, 'Blessed, blessed,' in Section XII, part 4. If you can read it without frisson taking charge of you, without gooseflesh, maybe there’s something wrong with you….[this section is] one of the high-points of contemporary American poetry, 64 lines of it. That alone makes the outsized, wide-margined, physically gorgeous book worth reading. But there is more, McGrath’s plenty. In a way, the whole world is in this book, simply because one man, Thomas McGrath, has honestly got himself down in his own true rhythms.” – R.P. Dicky, Western American Literature

“There is a Bunyan-sized quality about the book – its length, the vigor and vividness of the infinitely varied sections, the kaleidoscopic picture it gives of mid-century America and one man’s response to the spectacle. Both as poetry and as social history, it invites fascinated browsing, and then sustained reading.” – Choice