"To declare for a doctrine so remote as anarchism at this stage of history will be regarded by some critic as a sign of intellectual bankruptcy; by other a sort of treason, a desertion of the democratic front at the most acute moment of its crisis by all still as merely poetic nonsense. For myself, it is not only a return to Proudhon, Tolstoy, and Kropotkin, who were the predilections of my youth, but a mature realization of their essential rightness, and a realization, moreover, of the necessity, or the probity, of an intellectual confining himself to essentials."
[ . . .]
"I speak of doctrine, but there is nothing I so instinctively avoid as a static system of ideas. I realize that form, pattern, and order are essential aspects of existence; but in themselves, they are the attributes of Death. To make life, to insure progress, to create interest and vividness, it is necessary to break form, to distort pattern, to change the nature of our civilization. In order to create, it is necessary to destroy; and in the agent of destruction is the poet. I believe that the poet is necessarily an anarchist, and that he must oppose all organized conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherent from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future. This tract is a personal confession of Faith."
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