"If Impressionism ends the apprenticeship of painting, ends the oral story from each teacher preparing the painter for his fate in his schooling, forcing each painter to confront and build a world picture on his or her own . . . has the lack of being fabled, as was the tradition for poets, worked so well in our American culture? There was a time when the playwright apprenticed as a poet before writing plays. Tolstoy’s plays are a stitch, to me far more satisfying than his prose. So, funny, a little known fact. I suggest from my hallowed imagination, could it be that Moses became Socrates, then St. James, before he was Tolstoy?"

                       Peter Kidd, from the Afterword