he will sport with
Amaryllis in the shade or forsake her to write his own _Areopagitica_.
Intellectual integrity expresses itself in the tune as well as argument,
in choice of words--words honest and precise--as well as in ideas, in
fidelity to human nature and the flowers of the fields as well as to
principles, in facts reported more than in deductions proposed. Though a
writer write on something as innocuous as the white snails that crawl
up broomweed stalks and that roadrunners carry to certain rocks to
crack and eat, his intellectual integrity, if he has it, will infuse the
subject.

Nothing is too trivial for art, but good art treats nothing in a trivial
way. Nothing is too provincial for the regional writer, but he cannot
be provincial-minded toward it. Being provincial-minded may make him a
typical provincial; it will prevent him from being a representative
or skilful interpreter. Horace Greeley said that when the rules of the
English language got in his way, they did not stand a chance. We may be
sure that if by violating the rules of syntax Horace Greeley sometimes
added forcefulness to his editorials, he violated them deliberately and
not in ignorance. Luminosity is not stumbled into. The richly savored
and deliciously unlettered speech of Thomas Hardy's rustics was the
creation of a master architect who had looked out over the ranges of
fated mankind and looked also into hell. Thomas Hardy's ashes were
placed in Westminster Abbey, but his heart, in accordance with a
provision of his will, was buried in the churchyard of his own village.

I have never tried to define regionalism. Its blanket has been put
over a great deal of worthless writing. Robert Frost has approached a
satisfying conception. "The land is always in my bones," he said--the
land of rock fences. But, "I am not a regionalist. I am a realmist. I
write about realms of democracy and realms of the spirit." Those realms
include The Woodpile, The Grindstone, Blueberries, Birches, and many
other features of the land North of Boston.

To an extent, any writer anywhere must make his own world, no matter
whether in fiction or nonfiction, prose or poetry. He must make
something out of his subject. What he makes depends upon his creative
power, integrated with a sense of form. The popular restriction of
creative writing to fiction and verse is illogical. Carl Sandburg's life
of Lincoln is immeasurably more creative in form and substance than his
fancif