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It was the home of the Ferrols of Stephen French Whitman's "Predestined," one of the books of real power that appear from time to time, to be strangely neglected, and through that neglect to tempt the discriminating reader to contempt for the literary judgment of his age.
Because of Whitman's glorification of pride, egoism, brawn, self-reliance, it is charged that the noble, the cultured, the self-denying, have no place in his system. What place have they in the antique bards? in Homer, in Job, in Isaiah, in Dante?
I recall one day, when the subject of Walt Whitman's poetry was introduced, Dr. Holmes said he abhorred playing the critic, partly because he was not a good reader, had read too cursorily and carelessly; but he thought the right thing had not been said about Walt Whitman. "His books sell largely, and there is a large audience of friends in Washington who praise and listen.
It seemed that I knew it all, before, as I did, because, in my own way, I had thought out the problem of the growth of the varying forms of animal life, exactly to the Darwinian conclusion. Whitman's Leaves of Grass became my Bible. It was at this time that I made the harrowing discovery that I had been working evil on myself ... through an advertisement of a quack in a daily paper.
I come next to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading.
"A common wave of thought and joy, lifting mankind again," is to make us forget the old distinction between the individual and the social group. We are all to be the sons of the morning. We must not pause to analyze or to illustrate these two theories. Carlyle's theory seems to me to be outworn, and Whitman's theory is premature.
They sat in the Park. They kept on looking at the clock-tower. At the bookseller's in the Market-place she bought a second-hand copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.... A black-grey drive between bushes of smutty laurel and arbutus. A black-grey house of big cut stones that stuck out. Gables and bow windows with sharp freestone facings that stuck out.
One of Whitman's remarks upon this head is worth quotation, as he is there perfectly successful, and does precisely what he designs to do throughout: Takes ordinary and even commonplace circumstances; throws them out, by a happy turn of thinking, into significance and something like beauty; and tacks a hopeful moral lesson to the end.
Amy Lowell a patrician a radical her education her years of preparation vigour and versatility definitions of free verse and of poetry Whitman's influence the imagists Patterns her first book her rapid improvement sword blades her gift in narrative polyphonic prose Anna Hempstead Branch her dramatic power domestic poems tranquil meditation an orthodox poet Edgar Lee Masters his education Greek inspiration a lawyer Reedy's Mirror the Anthology power of the past mental vigour similarity and variety irony and sarcasm passion for truth accentuation of ugliness analysis a masterpiece of cynicism an ideal side the dramatic monologue defects and limitations Louis Untermeyer his youth the question of beauty three characteristics a gust of life Still Life old maids burlesques and parodies the newspaper humourists F. P. A. his two books his influence on English composition.
Trees are rooted men and men are walking trees. The tree absorbs its earth materials through the minute hairs on its rootlets, called fibrillæ, and the animal body absorbs its nutriment through analogous organs in the intestines, called lacteals. Whitman's expression "the slumbering and liquid trees" often comes to my mind.
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