Word: pessimists
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Poet Jeffers is more than a pessimist; he is a writer of tragedies. The two long poems in this book, Dear Judas and The Loving Shepherdess, are different statements of the same idea: "You see men walking and they seem to be free but look at their faces, they're caught." The first poem is Jeffers' version of the Passion Play, with Judas cast in a major role. The second tells the story of Clare Walker, leading her dwindling flock of sheep along the California coast toward the day when her baby will be born and she will die. Says...
...contrast between the features of "Princess Lilybet" which adorns this week's issue of TIME and the usual selection for the outside page is hopefully encouraging. I had about concluded that your art editor was a hopeless, bilious pessimist, for however passable the originals of his selections may have looked in the flesh, when the lineaments were transferred to the cover they generally resembled a gnome, gargoyle or anthropoid...
...years. But by that time another human group will be unwittingly generating a new civilization to flourish and sink in its own long turn. Herein lies the refutation of the charge of pessimism applied to Spengler by lesser minds. Regarding civilizations as organisms, he is no more the pessimist than any man who recognizes the transient nature of all organic life...
...intelligent pessimist, seeking omens and portents of business depression, will allow himself to glance at the recent history of U. S. mail order houses. Balance sheets of Sears Roebuck and of Montgomery Ward are the particular pride of bulls, the dull despair of bears. In 1921, Year of Deflation, Sears Roebuck admitted an operating loss of $16,435,468. And Montgomery Ward showed a loss of $9,887,396. But in 1922, both companies declared net profits of about $5,000,000. By 1927, Montgomery Ward could show profits of $13,127,431, and Sears Roebuck nearly twice as much...
...states more succinctly, more bitterly the angry, scornful, rebellion with which he regarded the dismal riddle of existence. The terse wrinkled lines of his poetry are like those of his small face in their expression of quiet pessimism, of a thoughtful, stoic sorrow. His "Epitaph on a Pessimist'' is a flippant quatrain: I'm Smith of Stoke, aged sixty-odd, I've lived without a dame From youth-time on; and would to God My dad had done the same...