Max Eastman

“ And life is what I love. And though I love life for all men and women, and so inevitably [Pg 14] stand in the ranks of revolution against the cruel system of these times, I love it also for myself. And its essence—the essence of life—is variety and specific depth. It can not be found in monotonous consecration to a general principle. Therefore I have feared and avoided this consecration, which earnest friends for some reason always expect me to exemplify, and my poetry has never entered even so deeply as it might into those tempests of social change that are coloring our thoughts today. ”

“ I plead with the American newspapers to be a little less contemptuous of them, and I ask a question: I say, "I wonder if the number is few to whom this high resolve was the distinction of our American idealism"—the resolve to recognize independence in the individual, and I say, "Perhaps there are enough of us, if we make ourselves heard in voice and letter, to modify this ritual of contempt in the daily press, and induce the American Government to undertake the imprisonment of heroic young men with a certain sorrowful dignity that will be new in the world." ”

“ I simply say that if a government avails itself of this right of wartime censorship, in order to suppress and whip into the jails as criminals the candid and sincere spokesmen of a political minority which is opposed to its policies, then that government is violating not only the principles of the United States Constitution, but the spirit and the principles of free government as they have existed in the earth from the beginning. ”

“ I have found that rather in individual experience and in those moments of energetic idleness when the life of universal nature seemed to come to its bloom of realization in my consciousness. Life is older than liberty. It is greater than revolution. ”

“ Men that have stood like mountains in the flood
Of change that runs like ruin through the earth,
When murder seems the purpose of all birth,
When food is fire, and harvest-treasure blood,
Men that like fixed eternal stars have stood,
Their faith clear-shining sadly, and their mind
Unmaddened with the madness of their king,
They are the godlike, the the great and good. ”

“ It is their pleasing duty to free us of the delusion, which we have fondly cherished, that we are the subjects of a mild, free, and limited Government, and to demonstrate, and to demonstrate by a regular chain of premises and conclusions, that Government possesses over us a power more tyrannical, more arbitrary, more dangerous, more allied to blood and murder, more full of every form of mischief, more productive of every sort and degree of misery than has been exercised by any civilized Government, with one single exception, in modern times. ”

“ Poetry that has life for its subject, and untempered reality, is rather expected to manifest that irregular flow and exuberance of material over structure with which Walt Whitman challenged the world. In America at least the freedom and poignant candor of strong art is associated with the tradition that he founded, and little is granted to that other tradition which finds its original in Edgar Allan Poe. There existed in Europe, however, a succession of poets whose eyes turned back in admiration to Poe, and they were the poets of reality and those who touched the mood of social revolt. ”

“ It is a faith which possesses more adherents all over the surface of the earth who acknowledge its name and subscribe to its principles, than any other faith ever had, except those private and mysterious ones that we call religious. It is either the most beautiful and courageous mistake that hundreds of millions of mankind ever made, or else it is really the truth that will lead us out of our misery, and anxiety, and poverty, and war, and strife and hatred between classes, into a free and happy world. ”

“ Whether the reason lies in its intrinsic nature, or in the tradition that surrounds it, is not easy to tell. A sonnet is almost exactly square, and yet it has a division sufficiently off the centre to make its squareness admirable instead of tiresome; and perhaps this simple trait, together with its closely woven structure of rhyme, is what gives it the quiet assurance it has—the tranquil rightness of a thing of nature or natural convenience. I feel towards an excellent sonnet as I imagine an eager horse may feel towards a good measure tightly filled up with golden grain. ”

“ They loved perfection devoutly, as it will rarely be loved, but they too, with their gift of delicate freedom in kinship with nature, were at play. And in Japan even today—surviving from that time—there is a form of poetry that is objective and childlike, a making of toys, or of exquisite metrical gems of imaginative realization, and this is the only poetry in the world that is truly popular, and is loved and cultivated by a whole nation. ”

“ That is all there is to Socialism, except this—we know just as well as you know that it would not be practical to expect the rich people, the capitalists, those who benefit by the present system of politics and industry, to be the ones who are going to want to change it. We know perfectly well that the people who are going to want to change it are the poorer people—the working people—the small farmers—the small business men, who are not very sure of their jobs, and who are immediately under the domination of somebody, and do not feel very free. ”

“ Prose is the refinement. Prose is the sophisticated and studio accomplishment—a thing that vast numbers of people have not the fineness of endowment or cultivation either to write or read. Prose is a civilized sublimation of poetry, in which the original healthy intoxicant note of the tom-tom is so laid over with fine traceries of related sound, that it can no longer be identified at all except by the analytical eye of science.
Walt Whitman was not really playful and childlike enough to go back to nature. His poetry was less primitive and savage, than it was superhuman and sublime. ”

“ I am older than Jack Reed, and I think I was sobered a good deal more quickly than some of the editors of the Masses to a realization of the fact that the United States had really got into a world war, and could not get out except by carrying it forward in a diplomatic and military way to some sort of conclusion. But at the time when most of these articles were published, none of us, and not half of the American people, had taken into their breasts the full sense and tragic significance of the fact that we are in this war, and that thousands of our friends are going to die. ”

“ He seems, without losing that large grace of freedom from the pose and elegance of words in a book, which was his most original gift to the world, to possess himself of the mood that is truly primitive, and social, and intelligible to the hearts of simple people—the mood that loves with a curious wonder the poised and perfect existence of a thing. ”

“ And they have had a belief that the working classes, just as they would be personally interested in making the world more democratic, would also be personally interested in preventing war. It is a fact well known to history that most wars—not all of them, but most wars—have been wars over thinly disguised conflicts of business or commercial interests. Most wars have been wars about wealth. And the Socialists have believed that the working people, since they really do not have any wealth to go to war about, would be the ones to prevent war. ”

“ Any one who has ever written love-letters—which are a kind of aboriginal [Pg 27] free-verse—knows what they are. And yet I believe it is obvious, if not demonstrable, that most of them are too individual to be communicated even to a lover. Human nature is too various for it to be true that the same hesitations, the same quickenings and slowings of the flow of ideas, flutterings of the breath or pulse, will reproduce themselves in another upon the perception of the same visible symbols. ”

“ I want you to exercise a very judicial poise and restraint in a few minutes, when the District Attorney gets up and begins to attack us, and tries to paint us as a red and bloody bunch of "Bolsheviki," who are trying to introduce anarchy and overthrow civilization, and who have not any respect for the institutions of popular government, and when he says that we have been calling American soldiers and sailors "blackguards," which is absolutely false, and all the other things it is necessary for him to say. ”

“ The awakener is science—empirical science turning its brave eyes upon man, its maker, to reveal the origin and destroy the excessive pretensions of his thoughts. And so once again the sanity of the world has been saved—or so at least it seems to one whose intellectual home is in these ages of sacred doubt. ”

“ Who shall describe to you the distress and anguish which they will spread over those hills and valleys, where men have heretofore been accustomed to labor, and to rest in security and happiness. Anticipate the scene, sir, when the class shall assemble to stand its draft, and to throw the dice of blood. What a group of wives and mothers and sisters, of helpless age and helpless infancy, shall gather round the theatre of this horrible lottery, as if the stroke of death were to fall from heaven before their eyes on a father, a brother, a son or a husband. ”

“ Poetry only naïvely acknowledges this ecstatic monotony that lives in the heart of all rhythm, brings it out into the light, and there openly weaves upon it the patterns of melodic sound. Poetry is thus the more natural, and both historically and psychologically, the more primitive of the two arts. It is the more simple. Meter, and even rhyme, which is but a colored, light drum-beat, accentuating the meter, are not "ornaments" or "refinements" of something else which may be called "rhythmical speech." ”

“ But in this country—in America—so remote as it was from the passions of contact in battle, so remote from the danger of invasion, so free to take the course of peace-maker if it chose, it seemed to the Socialist Party that there was very little reason, and no reason at all, why as men and women of integrity and courage they should not keep their pledge. ”

“ We seek among all our experiences for some absolute and steadfast value by which, or toward which, we may guide ourselves, but there is no absolute value except life itself, the having of experiences. And among all our opinions we seek for an objective and eternal truth, but [Pg 98] nothing is eternally true except the variety of opinions. Intermittently throughout the whole history of western, and I suppose of eastern thought, this mood has arisen. It was the mood of Protagoras, and of that Protagorean vein in Plato which is the height of ancient wisdom. ”

“ And I predict that the acts and enactments—the laws and the interpretations of law, which this government has created, which are in violation of this right of the minority to express its public opposition—those acts and enactments will die, and they will die soon, and they will die whether this war continues or not. ”

“ And when we have arrived at a mood that is really and childly natural—a mood that will play, even with aspiration, and will spontaneously make out of interesting materials "things" to play with, and when in that mood we give our interest to the materials of reality in our own time, then perhaps we shall find that we have arrived also at a poetry that belongs to the people. ”