Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot (Sundquist, 518)
Transcript:
April 7, 1926.
Miss Annie F. Jenkins,
745 South 22nd Street,
Philadelphia, Pa.
My dear Miss Jenkins:
Yeats starts where Emerson left off. Emerson said:
If eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its only excuse for being.
Yeats would go farther, and maintained that beauty had certain rights whether there were any eyes to see it or not. That art doesn’t reflect the beautiful things in nature. It doesn’t care anything about nature. It doesn’t even have to be beautiful. It simply has to be.
With best regards.
Very sincerely yours,
[no signature]
WEBD/DW
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Annie F. Jenkins, April 7, 1926. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b034-i026.