Word: grasse
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WALT WHITMAN was an American genius. He brought originality to an imitative literature, cutting and hewing poems out of the city streets and country ponds of a vast America. "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem," he said in the 1855 preface to his masterwork, Leaves of Grass. Never before had an American writer captured this relationship between the word and the state, the poem and the nation. Emerson wrote Whitman a few weeks after the publication of Leaves of Grass, saying he found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed...
...nation that ached for its own literature, Whitman contributed a poetic miracle, though not everyone at the time embraced him or his work with the same adulation as the well-established Emerson. In fact, many dismissed Leaves of Grass as an immoral book. Whitman himself never seemed entirely satisfied with the controversial collection, which he said allowed him to sound his "barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world...
...recede from the question of Whitman's sexuality. With the tools of the psychohistorian, the author recognizes the significance of Whitman's search for his sexual identity. Still, he doesn't overemphasize this side of the poet. While Kaplan unobtrusively reminds us that the "I" of Leaves of Grass is almost as often as woman as a man, on the other hand, he later analyzes Whitman's masterpiece in more universal terms. Kaplan sees the centerpiece of Whitman's life as both a "Whitman at his best, and when he is at his awful worst--windy, repetitious, self imitative...
WITH SUCH dexterity and literary aplomb, the author justifies another Whitman biography. Though the first was written in 1850, even before Leaves of Grass, and many have followed, Kaplan's biography creates the density of Whitman's life in contemporary terms and with the aid of new materials--previoulsy unavailable private papers of Whitman and his friends--available to him. At a time when America questions whether or not it is still the light of the world, it refreshes and reassures to discover a man who did beleive in the President as a redeemer, and democracy as a catalyst...
...Maxwell House coffee, Birds Eye frozen foods and JellO. (Asks an outraged General Foods executive: "How can anyone consider Jell-O un-American?") In Dayton, the Belmont Church of Christ sent in 200 cards and passed out more than 800 to people in the com munity. "This is a grass-roots type of thing, and it is spreading like a fire," claims Morris Thurman, minister of the College Church of Christ in Oklahoma City. "We do not want to hurt these companies, but we do not want to buy the products of people who are undermining the moral fiber...