Word: bret
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...Significance. Under and over the chatter of the busy nation, behind business-noise and play-noise, are heard the real voices of the continent? Frost and Robinson in New England, Sandburg and Lindsay in the Midwest. The Far West has been silent since Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, John Muir. Now Jeffers is heard, unmistakably powerful, individual, a true racial poet chanting on his high Pacific headland...
...iron hand of mob psychology how can the college of today foster genius, cherish the artist, inspire the idealist? Mr. Henry Rood, writing in the February Scribner's, would like to know. And he would like to know, too, what place the modern college would find for Emerson, Poe, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and their great contemporaries. Being a shrewd observer Mr. Rood answers his last question as every thoughtful undergraduate could answer it: the college would first force these men "to wear hats and caps of the same style, suits and overcoats of the same cut, collars, ties, hosiery...
Again the United States stands almost convicted of being the country par excellence in which native poets and story-tellers are allowed to sink into unmerited eclipse. By his well-tempered eulogy J. P. Collins, writing in the London Nineteenth Century, shames Bret Harte's countrymen, and typifies the mre appreciative and more sustained consideration which American writers seem to find only abroad...
...early enthusiasm which greeted Harte's vigorous stories of the West has been replaced by no less immoderate scorn of their crude scenes and rough action. Abroad it is otherwise., "Even his detractors," writes Mr. Collins, "set Bret Harte in the same constellation with Poe and De Maupassant; and better balanced judges may look in vain for his superior in fire, originality, characterization, and range of power...
...American culture is hybrid, he caught the vigor and rude strength of life in newly settled California. His clear, pointed style has swept the ceremonious diction of the Victorian writers from American fiction; and above all, he express that gaiety and resilience which are the distinguishing American characteristics. Bret Harte is the prophet of humor and humanity, but like most prophets he is honored everywhere but in his own land...