As my dearest dream is
for an internationality of poems and poets binding the lands of the
earth closer than all treaties and diplomacy--as the purpose beneath
the rest in my book is such hearty comradeship, for individuals to
begin with, and for all the nations of the earth as a result--how
happy I should be to get the hearing and emotional contact of the
great Russian peoples.
To whom, now and here, (addressing you for Russia and Russians and
empowering you, should you see fit, to print the present letter, in
your book, as a preface,) I waft affectionate salutation from these
shores, in America's name.
W. W.
NOTES LEFT OVER
NATIONALITY--(AND YET) It is more and more clear to me that the main
sustenance for highest separate personality, these States, is to come
from that general sustenance of the aggregate, (as air, earth, rains,
give sustenance to a tree)--and that such personality, by democratic
standards, will only be fully coherent, grand and free, through the
cohesion, grandeur and freedom of the common aggregate, the Union.
Thus the existence of the true American continental solidarity of the
future, depending on myriads of superb, large-sized, emotional and
physically perfect individualities, of one sex just as much as the
other, the supply of such individualities, in my opinion, wholly
depends on a compacted imperial ensemble. The theory and practice of
both sovereignties, contradictory as they are, are necessary. As the
centripetal law were fatal alone, or the centrifugal law deadly and
destructive alone, but together forming the law of eternal kosmical
action, evolution, preservation, and life--so, by itself alone, the
fullness of individuality, even the sanest, would surely destroy
itself.
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