SOURCE: An introduction in Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody, edited by Daniel Gregory Mason, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913, pp. v-xxviii.

In the following essay, Mason discusses what Moody's letters reveal about his personality and development as an artist.

“He liberates the imagination with his prose,” wrote one of Moody's friends when the project of collecting some of the letters was being discussed, “as effectively as he does with his poetry. And then besides there is the luminous personality which emerges from every folded sheet, looking out with large veiled eyes.” The comment happily describes the double interest of these letters [in Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody]. They are, first of all, literature, and may be read, by those who know nothing of the personality of their author, for their purely literary charm, their power to “liberate the imagination.” They carry, like his poetry, for such a reader...