Word: arvin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Shoe had with her children can be vividly illustrated by the statement that she had as many struggling brats as Walt Whitman had unruly ideas. The analogy becomes quite compelling after one has read this discussion of the politico-social ideas of Walt Whitman, in which Mr. Arvin makes it quite clear that the poet's mind was filled by the most numerous and most contradictory feelings on almost every conceivable subject. Mr. Arvin, who graduated from Harvard in 1921, although he does display an admirable understanding of Whitman's social ideology, makes a confused subject even more bewildering...
WHITMAN-Newton Arvin-Macmillan...
...Newton Arvin's biography of Whitman, however, belongs with the best of the books about his poetry. The first clear exposition of his political beliefs, it establishes his relevancy to the present so convincingly that few readers are likely to question it. Brief and compact, with subtle critical formulations worked unobtrusively into its smooth and scholarly prose, it places Whitman's poems in relation to the life of his time-not only to radicalism, the Abolitionists, the Utopian socialists, the Jacksonian Democrats, the youthful robber barons, the trade unions, but to the educators and scientists whose work Whitman...
That Whitman was a democrat everybody knows. But nobody has shown as clearly as Mr. Arvin what Whitman's democracy meant: stump speeches for the luckless Martin Van Buren, support for Tyler the Whig when Tyler took up Andrew Jackson's old fight against the United States Bank, disgust with party politics during the Democratic sellout before the Civil War, and always "strong images of a democratic and equal life-of 'ordinary' men and women working, building, making things, growing things, sailing ships, fighting battles, eating and drinking, singing, marching." Whitman was no Utopian socialist, says...
...working out exactly what he was, Mr. Arvin formulates a credo for democrats which is affirmative without being sentimental, sums it up best in Whitman's own language: "We've got a hell of a lot to learn yet, before we're a real democracy: we've gone beyond all the others, very far beyond some, but we're far from having yet achieved our dream. . . . We'll get there in the end: God knows we're not there...