John Wellborn Root: A Study of his Life and Work

by Harriet Monroe

... VI LIFE AND THOUGHT T was in the spring of 1882 that we began to be intimate with John Root. At that time he was re-awakening to the joy of life. . He had accepted engrossing work two years before as a refuge from sorrow, and this had restored the sanity of his temper, his sensitive consciousness of the beauty of the world. He was of a genus rare in the West at that time, one which until then we had scarcely encountered. To call it the artistic type would be hackneyed and not fairly descriptive, for this phrase has come to "imply a complete give-and-take of emotion and expression in a nature which has no reserves. I would describe him rather, without reference to types, as a creature devoted to beauty by every instinct of his soul, one whose imagination instinctively rounded out the rhythms and unities of this inscrutable world of sense and spirit. Thus he was hospitable to the music of life and impermeable to its dissonance. Pain and evil he apprehended philosophically from afar -- a basic undersong in the universal paean; but their notes were not strident to his consciousness -- they did not reach him as discord. Perhaps the special quality of the man is best described by the word musical. He was deeply, instinctively musical. All nature, all life he apprehended as harmony -- harmonies of line, of color, of sound, of spirit. And underlying this sensuous consciousness in his mind lay that intuition of mathematical law which is the basis of all harmony. His sense of law was inherent in his sense of beauty, and it was in the symmetrical union of these two -- the mathematical and the artistic apprehension -- that his genius for architecture lay. For architecture, for music also; and most of all, for life. Life is the highest art, and he...

291 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1896

About the author

Harriet Monroe (December 23, 1860 – September 26, 1936) was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet, and patron of the arts. She was the founding publisher and long-time editor of Poetry magazine, first published in 1912. As a supporter of the poets Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Max Michelson and others, Monroe played an important role in the development of modern poetry. Her correspondence with early twentieth century poets provides a wealth of information on their thoughts and motives.