[In the following essay, which was originally published in 1935, Van Doren discusses the relation of Moody's letters to his poetry, judging the letters superior.]

As editor of these letters [Letters to Harriet] Mr. MacKaye makes them tell a story which they were not written to tell, and which, in so far as they do tell it, is a less interesting story than Mr. MacKaye believes. It is the story of several persons who during the first decade of the present century set out self-consciously to produce an American poetic drama: to arrive at “Stratford and Weimar by route of Medicine Hat and Kalamazoo.” They were in the habit of referring to themselves as “our little group,” to their activity as a “crusade,” and to their organization as a “phalanx.” One of them wrote to Mr. MacKaye in 1905 begging him to “tell me of things dramatic and poetic, and what you are doing, and what I ought to be doing, and what hope—or fear—there is for all of us who are growing pale and thin watching for signs of American drama.” And Moody himself wrote to Mr. MacKaye in 1904: “I am heart and soul dedicated to the conviction that modern life can be presented on the stage in the poetic mediums, and adequately presented only in that way.” The failure of the story to be interesting now is not at all because we have ceased to consider the possibilities of poetic drama; indeed, such possibilities are the theme of a lively criticism at the moment, both in England and in America. Rather it is because these people worked in a hopelessly literary way, “dedicating” themselves in phrases and attitudes that could never have had anything to do with a living theater, and hating commercialism with the kind of holy air which results in the composition not of better plays but merely of different ones.

At any rate the story gets told in the voluminous introduction, conclusion, and notes to this book; and Mr. MacKaye does contrive to leave on record a good deal of information which historians will enjoy concerning the dramatic careers of Moody and himself, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Josephine Preston Peabody, and Ridgely Torrence. Nor is the story entirely irrelevant to one theme which Moody pursues throughout his letters to the woman, Mrs. Harriet Brainard, who became his wife a year before he died in 1910. This is the theme of his dedication to the poetic art. For he thought of himself first and last as a poetic artist, and his letters to his best friend are full of reports on the progress he is making, on the state of his mind and imagination at given moments, and on the processes which he discovers taking place inside his heart and soul. These reports, made by an intelligent and honest man, are nevertheless unconvincing. I fancy that if we had only them to go by we should know that Moody had not been a first-rate poet, as in fact he was not. His poems say so no less clearly than these introspective passages wherein he somehow never quite strikes a plausible balance between self-consciousness and its opposite. He knows both too little and too much about the mind of the poet; too little, or he could say more, and too much, or he would say less. He manages in the same breath to be modest and embarrassing, and to be tragic without realizing it. For it is surely tragic that intelligence, integrity, and a great personal decency should not be enough to make a poet out of a man who wants very badly to be one. God knows what is needed in addition, but whatever it is Moody did not have it.

In his poems, that is. He has it in these letters, which are not only his best work but among the best things of their kind. The truth comes out clearly enough in a comparison between the following lines of prose, written to Mrs. Brainard from Crete in 1902, and the poem called “The Second Coming,” written in New York two years later:

The sailors were lying about asleep in the fierce sun—except one, who had heaved his boat on her side and was calking her. By him stood a man dressed in a long dark robe of coarse stuff, bareheaded, talking earnestly to the stooping sailor. I took him for a Greek priest, by reason of his long hair and spiritual profile. There was something in the spare frame of the man, the slight stoop of the shoulders, and the calm intensity of the attitude, which made my heart stop beating. Presently he turned to look at me, and it was indeed He. This has happened to me twice now—once before at Sorrento seven years ago.

Moody seems not to have understood that this was the poem, and that the 120 lines which he lavished on the incident were doomed to mediocrity for the simple reason that the incident had been closed, both in his mind and in the words which already contained it. But no such comparison is needed to establish our point. The genius which is lacking in the poems is abundantly present in the letters, where a high seriousness lies down naturally with the most charming, the most unsubduable wit; where rhetoric is always correcting itself with warm-hearted humor and an eye to human detail; and where a sustained note of worship—literally worship—for Mrs. Brainard is never marred by failure to remember that she too is capable of comedy, that she is, indeed, “my gay and disquieting and ever incalculable companion, upon whose shifting moods I have learned to build from hour to hour my house of life.” As a collection of letters the book is brilliant; as a love story it brings home to us one of the most honorable and amusing of American men.