Autobiographers From The United States

"I should strive (on reading a book of poetry) to evoke the a soul out of this piece of inanimate matter,a something characteristic and structural inherent in this organic form which is friendly to me and responds to my mood."

"To begin with, the basis of English poetry is rhythm, or, as some would prefer to call it, cadence. This rhythm is obtained by mingling stressed and unstressed syllables."

"It is time to create something new. It is time to strip poetry of meaningless tatters of form, and to clothe her in new, suitable garments."

"Imagism was not Symbolism, but it proceeds from it"

"It is America's opportunity to lay the foundations for a new flowering of English verse, and to lay them as broad as they are strong."

"Nor must we forget the liberating force which sprang from the art of Isadora Duncan, whose heroic practice has done more than any precepts of philosophy to widen our ideas as to the intellectual and spiritual possibilities of the dance."

"Whenever you feel the evil influence of the middle class muddling your soul, you'll say these two words and you'll be a free spirit again: "Isadora Duncan.""

"The wind? I am the wind. The sea and the moon? I am the sea and the moon. Tears, pain, love, bird-flights? I am all of them. I dance what I am. Sin, prayer, flight, the light that never was on land or sea? I dance what I am. Roses, lovers, money, children, came to her in her life dance from California to Russia. When her dancing days were not yet over but almost come to an end, she died in a swift ride with a flame red scarf enwrapping her neck tighter and tighter."

"She was a flame sheath of flesh made for dancing. She believed she ran into storm, rain, sun and became part of them and they were afterward woven in her dances."

"Isadora Duncan! … I feel that she dances a symbol of human, animal happiness as it should be, free from the unnatural trammels. Her great big thighs, her small head, her full solid loins, belly — clean, all clean — she dances away civilization's tainted brain vapors, wholly human and holy — part of God."

"When she read my first book Visions and Revisions, she sent me so many red roses that they filled the little flat, but I was too nervous to go and see her. She has been one of the most thrilling sensations — but that is a wretched word to express it — of my whole existence. She has danced for me alone — with a beauty that makes the most beautiful young girls' dancing seem mere child's play. It was as though Demeter herself, the mater dolorosa of the ancient earth, rose and danced. Well, she has gone — and I enclose to you the red rose she gave to me as she went."

"Here was a great woman; a magnificent, generous, gallant, reckless, fated fool of a woman. There was never a place for her in the ranks of the terrible, slow army of the cautious. She ran ahead, where there were no paths."

"She suggested that the sculptor might probe the Greek spirit by studying modern dance. Antoine Bourdelle agreed. Capturing Duncan's appeal for a generation of sculptors, he likened the dancer to an "antique marble throbbing with eternity," who infused with life a classical sporty all but snuffed out by stale academicism."

"Poetry personified. She is not the Tenth Muse but all Nine Muses in one — and painting and sculpture as well."

"Isadora Duncan has not dealt with the dance intellectually, nor spiritually — but personally. The Age saw to that!"

"Perhaps the greatest personality who has ever devoted herself to developing the art of the dance … Her interests ranged over a wide field of activities. There was a time when she wished to initiate a reform of human life in its least details of costume, of hygiene, of morals. But gradually she came to concentrate her interest upon the dance. For her the dance is not merely the art which permits the spirit to express itself in movement; it is the base of a whole conception of life, a life flexible, harmonious, natural. In the development of the dance she found herself confronted by the dilemma which has just been alluded to. On the one hand was the limited technique of the ballet, on the other the unnatural contortions of the eccentric school. To return to the unconscious gesture of the people — that is to say, the crude, stereotyped gestures of the street — offered no way of escape. She found the solution in a return to the natural gesture of human life as represented in Greek art."

"Her dances were hymns to freedom — of sensibility, of passion, of the transcendentally convinced and convincing Emersonian soul … Today it is hard to picture convincing interpretations of Joy, Hope, Immortality, the Soul. But at the turn of the century an American girl, incarnating these and more, coincided with historical promise."

""Come away! Her dancing says. Come out into the splendid perilous world! Come up on the mountain-top where the great wind blows! Learn to be young always! Learn to be incessantly renewed! Learn to live in the intemperate careless land of song and rhythm and rapture! Say farewell to the world you know and join the passionate spirits of the world’s history! Storm through into your dreams! Give yourself up to the frenzy that is in the heart of life, and never look back, and never regret! You shall become sweet and mad as a lover …"

"This great artist is no longer in our world. The sun has set: the cycle is finished. In her art and in her life Isadora Duncan seemed to be an incarnation of all the energies of Nature."

"In those moments where beauty and emotion fuse and climax, something of the immortal floats about the dancer; she wanders in a divine ray, in a mist where all works of art circle in unison with her."

"The revival of the dance is significant of the abiding, though much forgotten, need of the world for its arts, and a proof of the strange immortality of the arts themselves. A few years ago several great dancers came to summon the world, who must have prepared through long periods separately and without a common plan; yet with the effectiveness of premeditated simultaneity they appeared, as it were in a company. And the response of a world still hungering, somewhat dimly, for the arts, was the welcome we give to an advent long desired. Fortunate were those whose introduction to this momentous movement came by way of the greatest of its exponents, Isadora Duncan. It was one of the great hours, of which we have but three or four in a lifetime, when we first saw her. In that hour we sensed the manifold meanings and implications of the dance; its ecstasies, inspirations, and healing beneficences, and its possibly unimaginable importance to the modern world."

"I have the right to choose the father of my own children," she declared, and then wrote to George Bernard Shaw: "Will you be the father of my next child? A combination of my beauty and your brains would startle the world," but he replied: "I must decline your offer with thanks, for the child might have my beauty and your brains."

"I shall never forget the first time I saw her come on to an empty platform to dance. … She came through some little curtains which were not much taller than herself — she came through and walked down to where a musician, his back to us, was seated at a large piano — he had just finished playing a short prelude by Chopin when in she came, and in some five or six steps was standing at the piano, quite still — you might have counted five or eight, and then there sounded the voice of Chopin in a second prelude or etude — it was played through gently and came to an end — she had not moved at all. Then one step back or sideways, and the music began again as she went moving on before, or after it. Only just moving — not pirouetting or doing any of the things which a Taglioni or a Fanny Elssler would have certainly done. She was speaking her own language, not echoing any ballet master, and so she came to move as no one had ever seen anyone move before. The dance ended, she again stood quite still. No bowing, no smiling — nothing at all. Then again the music is off, and she runs from it — it runs after her — for she has gone ahead of it. How is it that we know she is speaking her own language? We know it, for we see her head, her hands, gently active, as are her feet, her whole person. And if she is speaking, what is it she is saying? No one would ever be able to report truly, yet no one present had a moment's doubt. Only this can we say — that she was telling to the air the very things we long to hear; and now we heard them, and this sent us all into an unusual state of joy, and I sat still and speechless."

"It was never easy to coax Isadora Duncan into a photographer's studio. Like a wild and wise animal, she fled from those who sought to capture the essence of her — which was motion — by making her stand still."

"Isadora Duncan's arms were not clichéd ketchup buddhas like those we're used to seein' in Hollywood & Co., but real floral contaminations, devils in the raw whose blood had sublimely turned to nitroglycerin, or some other "secret" substance even more deadly & dangerous than fire & poison, at the exact moment she discovered the dance."

"The harmony of music exists equally with the harmony of movement in nature. Man has not invented the harmony of music. It is one of the underlying principles of life. Neither could the harmony of movement be invented: it is essential to draw one’s conception of it from Nature herself, and to see the rhythm of human movement from the rhythm of water in motion, from the blowing of the winds on the world, in all the earth’s movements, in the motions of animals, fish, birds, reptiles, and even in primitive man, whose body still moved in harmony with nature…..All the movements of the earth follow the lines of wave motion. Both sound and light travel in waves. The motion of water, winds, trees and plants progresses in waves. The flight of a bird and the movements of all animals follow lines like undulating waves. If then one seeks a point of physical beginning for the movement of the human body, there is a clue in the undulating motion of the wave."

"All my muses in the theatre are movements seized during Isadora's flight; she was my principal source."

"The most interesting women in modern European history appear in the ranks of radical political movements. It is difficult to find conservative or traditional counterparts equal to Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg. Even Isadora Duncan, creator of modern dance, flirted with communism. More thoughtful and articulate and certainly as politically active as any of these women is the lesser known Spanish anarchist, Federica Montseny. On asking what attracted these women to radical politics, one discovers in each a commitment to feminism. No person, not even Emma Goldman, explored this necessary relationship between feminist and socialist principles more provocatively than did Federica Montseny."

"The dancing of Isadora Duncan is great symbolic art; now, when perhaps we have seen it for the last time, we must unhesitatingly re-affirm our conviction that it is one of the superlative artistic expressions of eternal spiritual glories. Her endowment is no mere talent for the consummation of exterior beauties; it is genius. She is a seer and a prophet, fulfilled of understanding and wisdom. The deep disease of the soul, its wasting, anemic illness since it ate of the weeds of prudery and went wandering on the hard roads of materialism, is known to her, and she has a great pity; and with devoted effort, through consecrating trials of toil and rejection, she has fitted herself to be a physician of the spirit. She brings us pure wine from an ancient vineyard, and she will not mingle with it any sharp strange bitters to sting our jaded taste. In her manner is nothing either of decadence nor of gigantic, splendid but agonising dramaturgy. She is of the company of those who have held to the slender infragible thread of the eternal tradition of beauty. And coming so, she startles our spiritual memories from a sleep of centuries. What glorious things she makes the soul remember! Once we were young, and the leaping blades of our desire striking the granite facts of life lit lively fires of wonder. We were simple, so that when the moving beauty of nature and the joy of each other's company stirred us to ecstasies, we sought free and natural expression; we danced — we danced as the movements of waves and branches, and as the exquisite beauties of our own bodies suggested. Such memories she evokes by her subtle gestures and movements, which are as the dancing of a leaf over the ground, as the drifting of mist over the still surface of a lake at dawn. The morning of time dawns upon our spirits again, and once more we have a sense that hears the gods. Watching her we see the soul of man moving in the dance of destiny; dreaming, hoping, aspiring, questioning; thrilling with desire and joy and melancholy, crushed, purged and raised again; the spirit of man enduring its trials and triumphing in the great adventure. This is the interpretation of life by the intuitive wisdom of genius, which is feeling confirmed by thought, and which understands that the ultimate of human apprehension is a mysticism impossible of interpretation save in symbolic art."

"Love is not the sacred thing that poets talk about … Love is an illusion; it is the world's greatest mistake. I ought to know for I've been loved as no other woman of my time has been loved. Men have threatened suicide, they have taken poison, they have fought duels for me. All kinds have come to me — geniuses, poets, millionaires, artists, musicians — but now there is not one to whom I have appealed for the loan of £25 who have responded. There is love for you!"

"I could have played the part of Saint Joan. I ought to have played it. I have the ample figure, the hardy physique of a farm-servant. Joan was a buxom creature. Yet she is always played by thin little actresses."

"I could not adopt him so I married him. You know how wonderful he is, like all Russians. He starts reciting verse at two o'clock in the morning."

"I have closely studied the figured documents of all ages and of all the great masters, but I have never seen in them any representations of human beings walking on the extremity of the toes or raising the leg higher than the head. These ugly and false positions in no way express that state of unconscious Dionysiac delirium which is necessary to the dancer. Moreover movèments, just like harmonies in music, are not invented; they are discovered."

"To seek in nature the fairest forms and to find the movement which expresses the soul of these forms — this is the art of the dancer. It is from nature alone that the dancer must draw his inspirations, in the same manner as the sculptor, with whom he has so many affinities. Rodin has said: "To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which they have interpreted nature." Rodin is right; and in my art I have by no means copied, as has been supposed, the figures of Greek vases, friezes and paintings. From them I have learned to regard nature, and when certain of my movements recall the gestures that are seen in works of art, it is only because, like them, they are drawn from the grand natural source. My inspiration has been drawn from trees, from waves, from clouds, from the sympathies that exist between passion and the storm, between gentleness and the soft breeze, and the like, and I always endeavour to put into my movements a little of that divine continuity which gives to the whole of nature its beauty and its life."

"Bernard Shaw says that as long as men torture and slay animals and eat their flesh we shall have war. I think all sane, thinking people must be of his opinion. The children of my school were all vegetarians, and grew strong and beautiful on a vegetable and fruit diet. Sometimes during the war when I heard the cries of the wounded I thought of the cries of the animals in the slaughterhouse, and I felt that, as we torture these poor defenceless creatures, so the gods torture us. Who loves this horrible thing called war? Probably the meat-eaters, having killed, feel the need to kill—kill birds, animals—the tender stricken deer—hunt foxes. The butcher with his bloody apron incites bloodshed, murder. Why not? From cutting the throat of a young calf to cutting the throat of our brothers and sisters is but a step. While we are ourselves the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal conditions on the earth?"

"The movement of the waves, of winds, of the earth is ever in the same lasting harmony. We do not stand on the beach and inquire of the ocean what was its movement of the past and what will be its movement of the future. We realize that the movement peculiar to its nature is eternal to its nature. The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body."

"And here I want to avoid a misunderstanding that might easily arise. From what I have said you might conclude that my intention is to return to the dances of the old Greeks, or that I think that the dance of the future will be a revival of the antique dances or even of those of the primitive tribes. No, the dance of the future will be a new movement, a consequence of the entire evolution which mankind has passed through. To return to the dances of the Greeks would be as impossible as it is unnecessary. We are not Greeks and therefore cannot dance Greek dances."

"But the dance of the future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, is mere merchandise."

"In my lifetime I have murdered 22 human beings. I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies Larcenys, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. for all of these things I am not the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don’t believe in Man, God nor devil. I hate the whole damed human race including myself. [sic]"

"So if I succeed in my effort at suicide tonight then this will sure be the last I’ll ever say or write on this earth. The choice is mine and I fully realize just what I am doing. I would like to have it known just why I do this. I had no choice about coming into this world and nearly all of my 38 years in it I have had very little to say or do about how I should live my life. People have driven me into doing everything I have ever done. Now the time has come when I refuse to be driven any further. Tonight I die and tomorrow I go to the grave farther than that no man can drive me I am sure glad to leave this lousy world and the lousier people that live in it. But of all the lousy people in this world I believe that I am the lousiest of them all. Today I am dirty but tomorrow I’ll be just DIRT. [sic]"

"I have no desire whatever to reform myself. My only desire is to reform other people who try to reform me. and I believe that the only way to reform people is to kill em. My motto is, Rob em all, Rape em all and Kill em all. I am very truly yours signed Cooper John II Carl Panzram [sic]"

"hurry up and bring on your electric chair I want to leave here and take a nose-dive into the next world just to see if that one is as lousy as is this ball of mud and meanness. I am sorry for only two things. These two things are I am sorry that I have mistreated some few animals in my life-time and I am sorry that I am unable to murder the whole damed human race. [sic]"

"I am 36 years old and I have been a criminal all of my life. I have 11 felony convictions against me. I have served 20 years of my life in Jails, Reform Schools and prisons. I know why I am a criminal. Others may have different theories as to my life but I have no theory about it. I know the facts. If any man ever was a habitual criminal. I am one. In my lifetime I have broken every law that was ever made by both Man and God. If either had made more, I should cheerfully have broken them also. The mere fact that I have done these things is quite sufficient for the average person. Very few peopel ever consider it worth while to wonder why I am what I am and do what I do. All that they think it is necessary to do is to catch me, try me convict me and send me to prison for a few years, make life miserable for me while in prison and then turn me loose again. That is the system that is in practice today in this country. The consequences are that such that any one and every one can see. crime and lots of it. Those who are sincere in thier desire to put down crime, are to be pitied for all of thier efforts which accomplish so little in the desired direction. They are the ones who are decieved by thier own ignorance and by the trickery and greed of others who profit the most by crime. [sic]"

"If you or any one else will take the trouble and have the inteligence and paitince to follow and examine every one of my crimes and actions you will find that I have consistently followed one idea thru all my life. I preyed upon the weak the harmless or unsuspecting. Those I have harmed were all either weaklings either mentaly or phisicaly. Those who were strong in either mind or body I first lied to and led into a trap where they were either asleep or drunk or helpless in some way. I always had all the best of it, because I knew ahead of time just what to expect and the others did not. I therefore was strong in my knolledge and stronger in body than those preyed upon. This lesson I was taught by others. Might makes right. [sic]"

"I hope they all go out like Kilkenny cats..."

"You know that I spent several years in one of those places [reform school] when I was a boy and the so called Training that I recieved while there is mainly the cause of my being the degenerate beast that I am today. I have thought about that system of Training young boys for all of my life and I know that the whole system is wrong. That system of beating goodness, religion and Jesus into boys in the 99 times out of 100 has the direct opposite effect of taking all of the goodness, kindness and love out of them and then replacing those with hate, envy deciete, tyrany and every other kind of meaness there is. [sic]"

"Panzram later claimed that while he had been a rotten yegg before imprisonment at the military pen any shred of goodness left in him was smashed out during his Leavenworth Military prision stint 1908-1910."

"After serving about 2 years there I was pronounced by the parole board to be a nice, clean boy of good morals, as pure as lily and a credit to those in authority in the istatution where I had been sent to be reformed. Yes sure I was reformed all right, damn good and reformed too. When I got out of there I knew all about Jesus and the bible so much so that I knew it was all a lot of hot air. But that wasn’t all I knew. I had been taught by christians how to be a hypocrite and I had learned more about stealing, lying, hating, burning and killing. I had learned that a boys penis could be use for something besides to urinate with and that a rectum could be use for other purposes than crepitating. Oh yes I had learned a hell of a lot, from my expert instructors furnished to me free of charge by society in general and the state of Minnesota in particular. From the treatment I received while there and the lessons I learned from it, I had fully desided when I left there just how I would live my life. I made up my mind that I would rob, burn, destroy and kill every where I went and everybody I could as long as I lived. That’s the way I was reformed in the Minnesota State Training School. Thats the reasons why. [sic]"

"These two experiences taught me several lessons. Lesson that I have never forgotten. I did not want to learn these lessons but I found out that it isn’t what one wants in this world that one gets. Force and might makes right. Perhaps things shouldn’t be that way but thats the way they are. I learned to look with suspicion and hatred on everybody. As the years went on that idea persisted in my mind above all others. I figured that if I was strong enough and clever enough to impose my will on others, I was right. I still believe that to this day. Another lesson I learned at that time was that there were a lot of very nice things in this world. Among them were Whisky and Sodomy. But it depended on who and how they were used. I have used plenty of both since then but I have recieved more pleasure of them since; than I did those first times. Those were the days when I was learning the lessons that life teaches us all and they made me what I am today. [sic]"

"On one hand, because of Nagaland’s instability, very few foreigners were granted government permission to visit the area. On the other hand, Nagaland was home to one of the largest concentrations of Christians in India; at the time of our visit, more than half the population of 500,000 were Christians, almost all living in villages. November 1972 marked the hundredth anniversary of the coming of Baptist missionaries to Nagaland, and we were invited to Kohima as part of that celebration."