Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 2, 2025
Walt Whitman's position we have quoted, and after him came a number of American writers, assigning a football physique to their heroes. With the recent revival of interest in Whitman, the brawny bard has again come into favor in certain quarters. Joyce Kilmer, as has been noted, was his strongest advocate, inveighing against weakly verse-writers,
Woods boasted that she was a terror to Indians, she had been very apprehensive of danger since the Whitman colony massacre. She talked bravely and acted bravely according to her view of moral courage, but with a fearful heart. She dreaded the approaching Potlatch, and the frenzy that calls for dark deeds if the dance of the evil spirits should conclude the approaching feast.
This last is undoubtedly the most notable contribution that has yet been made, or is likely very soon to be made, to the Whitman literature. Mr. Symonds declares that "Leaves of Grass," which he first read at the age of twenty-five, influenced him more than any other book has done, except the Bible, more than Plato, more than Goethe.
I do not limit myself in this statement to the professed "nature writers" of whom we have bred far more than any other race with which I am familiar. In the list which I shall not attempt of the greatest American writers, one cannot fail to include Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Cooper, Lowell, and Whitman. And every one of these men was vitally concerned with nature, and some were obsessed by it.
They recognized in him not only "the most successful and original wag of his day," but also a rare genius who shared with Walt Whitman "the honour of being the most strictly American writer of what is called American literature." We read in a review of 'A Tramp Abroad', published in The Athenaeum in 1880: "Mark Twain is American pure and simple.
It was Whitman who brought home to the Nation the value of Oregon by a spectacular ride from ocean to ocean; it was Sutter who led the way for an American invasion of California, and who gave impetus to that invasion by the discovery of gold; and it was Frémont who led the revolution there against the Mexicans, and who secured the country's independence.
One is not surprised when he finds that John Brown was one of Thoreau's heroes; he was a sort of John Brown himself in another sphere; but one is surprised when one finds him so heartily approving of Walt Whitman and traveling to Brooklyn to look upon him and hear his voice. He recognized at once the tremendous significance of Whitman and the power of his poetry.
Hence, a new difficulty for Whitman's scrupulous and argumentative poet: he must do more than waken up the sleepers to his words; he must persuade them to look over the book and at life with their own eyes. This side of truth is very present to Whitman; it is this that he means when he tells us that "To glance with an eye confounds the learning of all times." But he is not unready.
But Whitman had a passion for his native soil; he was hypnotized by the word America; he spent much of his mature life in brooding over the question, "What, after all, is an American, and what should an American poet be in our age of science and democracy?" It is true that he was as untypical as Poe of the average citizen of "these states." His personality is unique.
The woods possessed the same charm for him as for Wordsworth or Whitman. With the latter especially he seems to have much in common. While a child, he absented himself frequently from the narrow and noisy heder, and spent the day in the quiet of the neighboring woods. When he grew up, he accepted the menial position of a school usher.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking