SOURCE: "The Fruits of Industry," in The Eclipse of the Intellectual, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, Funk & Wagnalls, 1956, pp. 3-19.

In the following excerpt, Zolla provides a chronology of literary responses to the Industrial Revolution, ranging from Blake to Melville.

When we heard talk about the Encyclopedists or opened a volume of their enormous work, we felt we were making our way among the innumerable spools and looms of a huge factory, and before all that clatter and loud rolling of wheels, before that mechanism which disorients the eye and the sensibility, before the incomprehensibility of a plant which has so many diverse ramifications, contemplating everything that is required to make a piece of cloth, we felt that the very suit we wore was spoiled.

Goethe, Poetry and Truth

One of the commonplaces which plague us is the statement: "Industry and technique can of course be harmful to the...