SOURCE: “A Dedicated Man,” in The Private Reader: Selected Articles & Reviews, Kraus Reprint Co., 1968, pp. 225-28.

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...