Why is there more craving than there is in a mountain.... Why is there so much useless suffering. Why is there.
Do you not feel the deep melancholy underlying these incongruities? I could quote places that would bring you into a totally different mood, most hilarious at times. These “exaggerated cranberries,” to paraphrase an expression of one of my incurable colleagues, should be chanted to the music of another great iconoclast, Schoenberg. But I observe an indulgent sneer on your face. Of course, I am an Incurable—Adieu!
Ibn Gabirol.
[1] Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein [Claire Marie, New York].
[2] The Art of Spiritual Harmony, by W. Kandinsky [Houghton Mifflin, Boston].
London Letter
E. Buxton Shanks
London, Sept. 11, 1914.
We are all soldiers now and literature, for the time, has disappeared. The publishing business is at a standstill, reviews are cutting down their size, and all the best poets are sedulously learning to form fours in the squares of London. It is, by itself, a remarkable thing, which will have an effect on all of us when the war stops and we begin to write again. To leave your pens and paper, to know that you have before you in the day, not an endless struggle with rhythm, rhyme, and editors, but a few hours’ drilling that is laborious and terminable—it is a rousing experience for a poet, mentally as well as physically.