“The essay was impelled by Clare's anxiety that his poems were slipping out if fashion.”

Clare's 'Popularity in Authorship (1824)

Paris Review interview (1996)

“Oh. Well, that was marvelous.”
Source: The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), p. 419

Pt. II, sec. 4, "The Ideal Writer"
The Philosophy of Style (1852)
Context: The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.

Source: 1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 5: "The Romantic Reaction"

"Ghosts, Fantasies, and Hope," Dissent (Fall 2005)
Context: Today, anxiety is a first principle of social life, and the right knows how to exploit it. Capital foments the insecurity that impels people to submit to its demands. And yet there are more Americans than ever before who have tasted certain kinds of social freedoms and, whether they admit it or not, don’t want to give them up or deny them to others. From Bill Clinton’s impeachment to the Terri Schiavo case, the public has resisted the right wing’s efforts to close the deal on the culture. Not coincidentally, the cultural debates, however attenuated, still conjure the ghosts of utopia by raising issues of personal autonomy, power, and the right to enjoy rather than slog through life. In telling contrast, the contemporary left has not posed class questions in these terms; on the contrary, it has ceded the language of freedom and pleasure, "opportunity" and "ownership," to the libertarian right.

1950-07-06
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Source: Cosmopolis

Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)