Various

“ Friedrich Nietzsche summoned men out and away from this herd. Friedrich Nietzsche warned men of the broad way and guided their minds to the solitary paths which are difficult and perilous indeed, but along which the true life is to be lived. These small paths, these are the paths of the creative: “Where man becomes a new force, and a new law, a wheel rolling of itself, and a first mover!” There every force of his being becomes a living creative force. No thought is repeated, no feeling, no decision, is a copy of something which was before. ”

“ When no one is watching, children creep back to it to play with the fairies and to listen to the angels’ footsteps. As the road of their journey lengthens, they return more rarely. Remembering less and less, they build themselves cities of imperative endeavor. But at night the wood comes marching to their walls, tall trees moving silently as clouds and little trees treading softly. The green host halts and calls—in the voice of memory, poetry, religion, legend, or, as the Greeks put it, in the faint pipes and stampeding feet of Pan. ”

“ Here, surely, is an American poet who speaks in eternal terms of the new inspiration; one who was sane and blazing at the same time; one who in order to be modern did not need to use a poor imitation of Whitman, screech of boiler factories and exalt a somewhat doubtful brand of democracy; one who was uncompromisingly radical without being feverish; above all, one who succeeded in writing the most beautiful verse without going to London to do it. When one is oppressed with the doubt of American possibilities it is a renewal of faith to turn to him. If Whitman is of our soil, Moody is no less so ”

“ Latterly two voices have come to me, one affirming that I was right in my prejudice that all durable verse should have content as well as form, should have meaning as well as sound—though in closest union with the sound,—that, in short, the poet should be a thinker as well as a craftsman; an emotional thinker, of course, if that term be permitted, but not a mere clairaudient wielder of words. And then I heard a voice which bid me forget all that and list to
Long breaths, in a green and yellow din. ”

“ The soul of the artist must not be hampered by unnecessary constraints. The old fixed verse-forms—such as the sonnet, blank verse, and all the other familiar metres—were exactly as cramping to the free creating spirit of the poet as the peculiar spaces and arches of the Sistine Chapel were to the designing instinct of Michael Angelo. Lamentable misfortune! that his Sibyls had to occupy those awkward corners. How much would they not have gained in grandeur could they have had all outdoors to expand in!
All outdoors is just what vers libre affords the poet of today. ”

“ The clamping of the inevitable strait-jacket, rhymed verse, upon the shrinking form of poetry has been the pastime of centuries. Those who would free poetry from the outworn metal bands and let her stretch her cramped limbs are labeled decadent, slothful, and futile. How easy it is to paste disagreeable labels upon the things one happens to dislike.
I admit that poetry freed from the bonds she has so long worn may become vulgar and over-demonstrative. A convict who has just been released from a penitentiary is perhaps inclined to caper down the road, and split the air with good red shouts. ”

“ Nietzsche made it the special business of his life to dam back this current in the affairs of our modern world. To him, the preaching of the equality of all men was the most dangerous lie of the last century. Therefore, he preached the inequality of all men; required of men that they should not be ironed out to the same smoothness, that they should not all be hand and glove with each other, but on the contrary, that they should be aware of their manifold inequalities, keep their distances, and that thus great and small might be clear as to their real differences. ”

“ The Germans grew proud of their folk schools, where every one could learn to read and write, if nothing more. But Nietzsche raged: “Everybody can learn to read and write today, which in the long run ruins not only the writing, but the thinking as well!” The Germans founded libraries, built reading halls, and art institutes, that the spiritual treasures of humanity might be as widely available as possible. But Nietzsche scoffed: “Once there was the Spirit of God, now—through its introduction into the masses it has become Pöbel, the vulgar plebeian mob!” ”

“ How he longs for the irresponsible days when he was loved or ignored for his own sake! Now he is forever imprisoned in marble busts and tortured in Histories of English Literature. There is no more tragic fate in the annals of imagination. Terrible is the vengeance taken by institutional culture on those who are great enough to command its admiration.
Therefore, a genius who has not been tagged unduly by the pundits inspires me with a profound delicacy, in a sense akin to the reverence for a beautiful child. Here is a virtue which the world needs. ”

“ Poets can undoubtedly rise to great heights, in spite of the fact that they must replace stronger words with weaker ones, because “passion” does not rhyme with “above,” but “love” does. But how much higher could they rise if they were free? I do not say that to eliminate rhyme, meter, and rhythm is to make the way absolutely clear. The Poet must still be a Poet to climb. Nor do I say that if the Poet finds that rhyme, rhythm, and meter happen almost to fit his poetic thoughts, he must not use them. ”

“ In spite of injurious puritan traditions there is something inalienably American and truly great about old New England. It is the same unafraid stoutness of heart that is at the bottom of Moody’s personality. It gives him power; it gives him unconscious dignity.
Yet Moody was indeed a rebel against the religious and social muddle in which he found himself. Something red and pagan poured into his veins the instinct of defiance to a jealous god and to pale customs. The best of the Greek was his; instinctively he turned at last to Greek drama for his form and to Greek mythology for his figures. ”

“ The flabby weight of our emotions is being reduced and hardened: we have sweated away a great many sick fancies and superfluous notions. The severe pressure of training for war induces in us a love of reason, a taste for hard thinking and exactitude and a capacity for discipline.
The art of war is fortunately an art that allows itself to be definitely judged. Either you win your battles or you lose them. It is of no use to say that Warmser was a great general whose subtle and esoteric methods of making war have never been appreciated by a numskulled public. ”

“ The tragedy of Alexander Berkman is common to all of us, transplanted wild flowers. It is the tragedy of getting the surrogate for the real thing. Berkman and the Girl passionately kissing the allegorical figure of the Social Revolution—isn’t this the symbol of the empty grey life in this normal land? What do you offer the seeking, striving, courageous souls but surrogates, substitutes? Your radicals—they are nauseating! They chatter about Nietzsche and Stirner and Whitman, wave the red flag and scream about individual freedom ”

“ There is, therefore, something of Pöbel in all of us, whether we control others or are controlled by others. To form out of Pöbel strong and free personalities of our very own,—as a cell is formed from the precellular stuff of life, as the flowers and fruit of a tree are elaborated from the sap and substance at their disposal,—this is the first and best service we can render society. ”

“ We may learn how to reach our ends by taking thought and by cherishing ideas instead of plunging on in a sublimely obstinate and indisciplined muddle. As for our war-poetry—I must end where I began—it is merely a sloughing of the old skin, a last discharge of the old disease.
New York Letter George Soule
Nature flowers in the spring, man in the fall. With the first of November comes a bewilderment of elections, concerts, books, plays, new magazines, bombs, exhibitions, and all the other things that seem to have blossomed so futilely year after year. ”

“ Thus I pondered as I entered the twenty-seventh exhibition of American Oil Paintings and Sculpture at the Chicago Art Institute. Wandering from canvas to canvas, from one prize-winner to another, I felt all my hope for a miracle vanish. They are so real, so true to life, so bereft of imagination, that one wonders why anybody ever took the trouble to paint them. ”

“ The rare versatility of an author who can transfer to paper his impressions of atmosphere as well in charcoal sketch as in charmingly told description has made this book an inspiration to the lover of Dickens and to the lover of London. The dusty old haunts of dusty old people, hid forever but for Dickens, are visited again and found little changed. Where modern things have crept in they are noticed with quick observation, keen humor, and that sympathy with the human which the author shares with the great Dickens himself. ”

“ It is indeed this mystic richness, these depths below depths, that make a large part of Moody’s individual fascination. He rarely has the limpid clarity or the soaring simplicity which make the popular lyricist such as Shelley. There is too much grasp of the mind in his work for the large public; only those who have in some degree discovered the beauty of the wide ranges can feel at home in him. ”

“ If one could only find all those whom the man himself would have selected as friends and whisper the right word in their ears! But, after all, we must speak in public, remembering that even misunderstanding is the birthright of the genius. It is better that power should be expressed in devious and unforeseen channels than not at all.
A flippant friend once told me that he had never had the courage to read William Vaughn Moody because the poet had such a dark brown name. ”

“ Not liberty, equality, fraternity, but the Eigenheit, the peculiarity, the uniqueness, the own-ness of the human personality, the right of man to his Eigenheit, the pleasure in its unfolding and formation—this was to be the watchword of the new culture.
This was what Nietzsche required. He based his requirement upon the fact that every man is an unrepeatable miracle. He never was before, he never will be again, except in his own self. This fact is almost self-evident. It must be kept in mind especially when we place a man into relation with his surroundings. ”

“ And wherever it is felt it is a liberating force, a force that ruthlessly shatters the outworn conventions of the art in which it operates, that tears away the tinsel trappings and bids art and beauty spring forth clean and untrammeled, to forge for themselves new forms that shall be fitting for the urge of today. ”

“ A red brick walk of the New England type leads up to it, and great trees stand like sentinels at the back. On a winter night, when the red walk and the terrace are covered with soft snow, when the little cedar trees massed around the entrance sparkle with icy frost, when the warm light from the windows touches the whiteness with an amethyst radiance—well, it’s the kind of house that all good dreamers sometimes have the reward of dreaming about. ”

“ But, for all that, he would sin against life, he would commit spiritual suicide, were he to use this systematic power of thought to overpaint gray in gray the variegated world with its colorful magnificence, to make everything in his own world so similar, so uniform and so unicolored, everything that was divinely destined and created for an existence of its own. From everything that was repeated or duplicated in the world would ascend an accusation to God in whose life all human life was rooted. ”

“ We who would thus be only a repetition of another would have the feeling that we were so much too much, that we were superfluous in the world! For the proof that we are not superfluous in life is to be found in the fact that no one else can be put into our place, can be confounded with us, that there is a gap in life, in the heart, into which no one else can fit, and that if ever another does occupy our place in life, the gap abides, surviving as the only trace of our existence in the human heart, corresponding to our image and our nature. ”

“ Rhythm, cosmic picturings, the homely metaphors of the dusty road, all combine to place us in an attitude toward, to give us a feeling for, reality, which is different from, and nobler than, those of the man who has either never read this poem, never read the same message in other poetic language, or—what is more to the point—never managed to get for himself the same experience which dictated that poem. ”

“ Rhymed verse mutilates and cramps poetry. It is impossible for even the greatest poet completely to rise above its limitations. He may succeed in a measure, but that is due to his strength and not to the useless fetters he wears. But, say the defenders of the fetters, rhyme and meter are excellent disciplines. Does Poetry or does the Poet need to be disciplined? Are they cringing slaves who cannot be trusted to walk alone and unbound? ”

“ But the feeling, even with the minimum capital of life, which yet we may call our own—the feeling that one makes a necessary, organic, irreplaceable contribution to the possessions of humanity, this is life indeed; who has this life, and keeps it alive, knows more joy and bliss than any other heaven can guarantee.
A life of one’s own that shall yet serve the life of all—there is the consummation devoutly to be wished! In these days we hear much about decadence and the decadent. ”