Heart's gate : letters between Marsden Hartley & Horace Traubel, 1906-1915

William Innes Homer

These letters between Hartley and Traubel during the period 1906-1915 come from the age of Whitman's beloved comrades, the socialist pan-sexuality of Edward Carpenter, the high-mindedness of C.R. Ashbee's rural arts-and-crafts guilds, the 'romance' of Grieg, Victor Herbert, and Delius. It is still the Sentimental Epoch and the style of letters is extravagant. We see Marsden Hartley very early in his great and difficult passage as an artist in an America where men's feelings were inarticulate and often furtive.