Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But more than this there are many articles that are wholly cut from a cloth of gold. Many of the finest of these gems of pure literature were omitted from the early and incomplete book-publication of Brann, for the compilers who made that hasty and inadequate selection were too close to the bitterness of his death to see this other Brann.
Genius he is, this only Brann we have; genius audacious, defiant, and sublime; whose stature, though his feet be on the flat of the Brazos bottom, towers effulgent over those effigies placed on pedestals by orthodox popularity, and sickly lighted by professorial praise.
Colossal, crude, terrible and sublime, Brann opened the ears of the people by the mighty power of his untamed language, by the smashing fury of his wrath of words. From the point of disadvantage of the little country town lost in the immensity of the Texas prairie, Brann saw the world, and saw it with the blazing eye of righteous wrath.
Suddenly Brann gave a shrill yell and stood up in his sleigh. The gallant little bay broke and fell behind; Brann gave a loud laugh; the blacks trotted on, their splendid pace unchanged. "Let the sorrel out!" yelled somebody. "Let him loose!" yelled Troutt on the corner, quivering with excitement. "Let him go!" Albert remembered what the fellow had said; he let the reins loose.
Of all these things, great and small, he wrote with equal fervor, equal venom and equal power. To-day the war is fought, the Czar is dead, free silver is forgotten and the local animosities that Brann brewed in his own State live only in the memories of a few old men.
Where other writers waste half their energies in deciding what may be written, Brann gave his full energy to writing what he thought. Whereas in all things else he matched and equaled others, in this one fact of absolute audacity and complete freedom from fear, he outmatched all and so closed the pedants' mouths of praise.
They are used by the parvenues and heartily despised by the very people whom they so obsequiously serve. . . . MR. BRANN: You state in a recent issue of the ICONOCLAST that McKinley's popular plurality "represents the votes of niggers and the scavangers of Europe's back alleys." I denounce that statement as a falsehood. The votes of native-born Americans elected Mr. McKinley.
Lastly, consider Brann the teller of stories for laughter and for tears. Some of these tales are allegories as universal to the life of man as "Pilgrim's Progress."
Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin, shouted Brann and died shouting, while the well-fed and fatted sat on the lid to keep it down. But we who have lived to see the lid blown off Russia and feel the growl and grumble of the bowels of all the earth need not overstrain our ears to hear Brann laughing now in that good Baptist Hell to which a bullet in the back gave him the passport.
If you wish merely to learn to appreciate literature so that you may nod approval in polite society when an accredited writer's name is mentioned, go to college and listen to the lectures of literary Ph. D.'s. But if you want to learn to write, take your Bible, your Shakespeare and your Brann and hie you to your garret, there to read, reread, study, memorize, and imitate if you can.
Word Of The Day