I find it difficult, for instance, to write a play because the basic conflicts of conventional drama have ceased to interest me. My own emotions are too elusive and too complex to be capable of expression or understanding beyond where I have gone. If I lived in Europe, if mine were the freedom of Wedekind and the audience that hails him and goads him, I might still go on. But I realize that I am too far ahead of the pageant of American life to go one step further. I have reached an Ultima Thule. Seated by the roadside, I shall wait for America to catch up, dividing my time, perchance, between love and the ticker.
America forces its poets to deny poetry or leave the country! Henry James chose exile, J. Pierpont Morgan diverted his imaginative powers into the channels of high finance. Stedman, attempting a compromise, was distinctly minor both as a banker and as a poet. George Santayana fled to the cloister of his own mind, Poe to drink, Markham to book reviews. Roosevelt, the most poetical personality of the modern world, turned to politics, Whitman to sociology, Moody to melodrama, Woodberry and Van Dyke to the schoolroom, while the tentacles of the Standard Oil encircled the poet's soul of J. I. C. Clarke. Huneker's muse abandoned inspiration for criticism. The newspaper swallowed Bert Taylor and William Marion Reedy, while Michael Monahan harks to seductive voices not Pierian. But the torch of our lyric fire still burns and will continue to burn when it has passed from my hands into those of a younger poet.